What Was Russiagate All About?

As Monk would say, here's what happened.  (Disclaimer:  Only the intelligence community knows what really happened, and they're not saying, or at least not giving the whole story.)

Why was a special counsel appointed to investigate allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia?  And why were these baseless allegations taken so seriously by the mainstream press and Democratic politicians?  Why did the press, as well as Mueller himself, fail to acknowledge that the whole story was fabricated?

My view is that:

1. The intelligence community, and especially the neo-conservatives aligned with Israel against Russia, are actively fighting against Russia. 
2. Part of the standard operating procedure in this new Cold War is to proactively thwart Russian attempts to co-opt U.S. politicians.  The intelligence community did just this with regard to Trump-Russia.*
3. The Clinton wing of the Democratic party sides with the neo-conservatives in the intelligence community in this new Cold War.
4. The Clinton campaign had a lot of money to spend in the election and, naturally, spent some of it on opposition research.
5. Opposition research money was spent with like-minded intelligence types, employing anti-Russian propaganda.
6. Clinton and the Democrats were huge favorites to win (re)election in 2016.
7. Intelligence types such as Christopher Steele were glad to take Clinton's money in exchange for dubious reports tying Trump to Putin.  This would hurt Putin and Trump, and they would never be called to account after Clinton won the election and the narrative moved on.
8. Honest intelligence employees, with genuine concerns about Trump's fitness for the presidency, learned of the stories connecting Trump and Putin.  These employees followed through to investigate the collusion stories emanating from the proactive anti-collusion forays and the paid opposition research.
9. Shockingly, Trump won the 2016 election.
10. The Trump-Putin collusion stories had enough momentum by the time of the election that the narrative could not be easily shut down following the election.
11. Clinton Democrats, with their dislike of Russia and Trump, angrily latched onto the narrative as an excuse for their failure.
12. Centrist Republicans, with their dislike of Russia and Trump, tolerated the narrative as an opportunity to advance their hawkish foreign policy and return to the political status quo.
13. Trump fanned the flames with his inflammatory and careless style.
14. The false intelligence underlying the central investigation dribbled out over the course of several years.  Intelligence operations are by nature secretive and at times duplicitous.  Thus, it was not immediately obvious that the underlying accusations were bogus.
15. Some intelligence figures, mainly British, continued to push the false narrative given their primary objective of demonizing Russia and their complicity in the deception.
16. Some media figures continued to swallow bogus intelligence "leaks" demonizing Russia and Trump.
17. Mueller, Barr, Pelosi, and others in positions of responsibility are caught between a rock and a hard place.  It can be political suicide to fight the intelligence community.   On the other hand, the collusion allegations are unsupported.  Thus, we have a lack of leadership and clarity regarding Russiagate -- a vacuum of honesty and accountability.

In sum, this started as a proactive intelligence operation, bordering on entrapment, to thwart any Russian attempts to co-opt Trump.*  This was amplified by paid opposition "research" conducted by people loosely associated with the intelligence community (e.g. former MI-6 officer Christopher Steele).  The operation spun out of control as the FBI took the matter seriously while politicians and the media followed suit.   The fire couldn't easily be extinguished and ran its course over several years, dominating the media and national discourse,  The end result is deeply unsatisfying to all concerned.

The Clinton Democrats didn't intentionally frame Trump.  But neither did they back down when their opposition research spun out of control.  The intelligence community didn't drive Trump from the presidency, but they didn't set the record straight regarding their framing of Trump-Putin.  The mainstream media hopped on board the collusion train, naively or corruptly accepting selected intelligence "leaks" as fact, whipping up Democratic hysteria and furthering the country's descent into chaos.  This was driven by the profit motive, Democratic tribalism, and anti-populist (anti-Trump and, to a lesser extent, anti-Sanders) sentiment.

Deep State Sightings

The Deep State is that portion of the world's power structure that is normally hidden from view.  This includes government intelligence agencies along with some organized crime and business associations.

By definition, the Deep State is imperceptible to the average citizen.  Thus, if you read mainstream news publications and watch mainstream television news, many news events will not make sense.  Here are some examples:

• Great recession of 2008 and ensuing bank bailouts.
• Skripal incident.
• Jeffrey Epstein affair.
• Mueller report.
• War in Syria.
• Threats against Venezuela and Iran.
• Migration from Central America to United States.
• The "debt ceiling".
• The Kennedy assassination.
• J Edgar Hoover's FBI.
• Iran-Contra.
• The Marc Rich pardon.

From this list, we see that military and economic issues are central to the mechanics of power that are kept secret.  Militarily, each country has an incentive to put its own behavior in the best light.  Economically, the rich seek to justify the way things work.

With the advent of the Internet, it has become easier to put the pieces together regarding the Deep State.  For example, although the mainstream media does not report on the Deep State machinations underlying Russiagate and the Mueller Report, some underlying events and the deception used to hide such events can be pieced together by a layman observing affairs from the comfort of his home office.  In a similar vein, the proliferation of cameras and ability to share video makes events such as the coup attempt in Venezuela more easily evaluated.

Technology is a 2-way street however, and the Deep State is attempting to keep the lid on.  While the mainstream media dismisses in-depth analyses as conspiracy theories, the Deep State monitors and discredits said theories.  Evidence can be removed from the Internet, and evidence can be altered or manufactured.  

Still, much can be learned by looking beneath the surface and considering motivations.  The health of our world depends upon it, in my opinion.

 

The Great Hack - Politics, Technology, and Dirty Tricks

I haven't seen the movie, but I did read several reviews, so I have an idea of what it's about.

One of my interests these days is ethical discourse.  With our new tools, including the Internet and social media, we're able to learn much more than was possible in previous generations.  Much of the knowledge available online is uncontroversial and seems useful without harmful side effects.  Wikipedia fits in this category for the most part.  With regard to political and moral issues, however, the Internet and social media are breeding grounds for toxic rage.  

Cambridge Analytica was basically a political advertising business that crossed some legal and ethical lines and has consequently been shut down.  Here's Owen Gleiberman in Variety: 

It’s true that Trump and Cambridge Analytica committed a more serious ethical breach by using a deceptive app to mine data without users’ consent. Yet there has been an ongoing debate about this, as conservatives claim (with some justification) that the media has employed a double standard. What seems inarguable is that much of the data mined and analyzed by Cambridge Analytica was, in fact, public. After all, social media is about declaring who you are in a public forum. Gathering that data, and forming profiles out of it, isn’t illegal.  

“The Great Hack” captures how voters were targeted as potential consumers whose tastes in “products” (i.e., candidates) could be manipulated by what we once called advertising, and what we now think of as propaganda. The movie is netted with questions like “How did the dream of the connected world tear us apart?” and “Who was feeding us fear, and how?”

My take is that people are not easily as propagandized as portrayed in The Great Hack.  From Micah Sifry at The Nation:

Unfortunately, the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal also has renewed a very old and disabling fable embraced by many well-meaning people on the left, which is that Americans (and others overseas) keep voting for right-wing authoritarians because they are being manipulated by the media.  I’m old enough to remember the 1980s, when progressives sought to explain Ronald Reagan’s popularity by emphasizing the biases of mainstream media.    

My opinion is that a typical person forms political opinions gradually, over the course of a lifetime.  Politically advertising historically tries to whip up anger in order to motivate people to vote a certain way.  This has been exacerbated in recent years by the social media campaigns of Democrats and Republicans (and many other groups).  My advice is to avoid being swept up in the rage; or at least to reserve rage for where it is truly deserved.

Looking forward to 2020, I recommend that we consider Getting to Yes.  The successful campaign will be the one that includes the most voters.  In 2016, the Democrats were divided between the Hillary and Bernie camps.  If that continues, the Dems are likely to lose to Trump.  The Democratic candidate who seems most likely to bridge that divide is Elizabeth Warren.  

As with all the presidential contenders, outrage is part of the Warren spiel. In her case, the outrage is focused on the way our country is dominated and run by those with extreme wealth.  I don't agree with this entirely, but think it is preferable to outrage against racists, for example.  The term racist is thrown about loosely with the intent of inducing rage.  I would reserve the rage for systemic forms of oppression that overlap with racism, but are not identical -- U.S. foreign policy in Latin America, for example.  The point is that we should pick our battles thoughtfully so as to include the majority in a sane and compassionate alternative to Trump and McConnell.  

As with self-driving cars, the level of artificial intelligence purported in The Great Hack is overstated, in my opinion.  Quoting again from Sifry's review of The Great Hack in The Nation:

Kaiser first worked in politics as an intern on the 2008 Barack Obama campaign, helping its social media team, but The Great Hack implies that she ran his whole Facebook operation. She is not the first person to pump a small role in that campaign into a career-making calling card; Cambridge Analytica is not the first political technology vendor to make big, unproven claims about its abilities. But we live in the age of silicon snake oil. There are millions of dollars to be made selling gullible investors and clients on mumbo-jumbo. Full disclosure: I got to see Kaiser pitch Cambridge Analytica’s wares at close quarters, back in 2015, when the company was briefly a member of the civic tech center I help run in New York City, Civic Hall. I was not impressed.

Evidently, neither was Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign, which paid CA millions of dollars during the Republican primaries. The Great Hack gives CA credit for his victory in the Iowa caucuses—and then makes no mention of what happened soon afterward: The Cruz campaign stopped using its data. Chris Wilson, the campaign’s director of research, analytics, and digital strategy, discovered that more than half the voters CA identified as Cruz supporters in Oklahoma backed other candidates. Regarding the so-called merits of psychographic targeting, Wilson told me CA “market[ed] their usage more aggressively than others and made unsubstantiated campaigns regarding its effectiveness.” On Twitter he called Kaiser a fantasist in 2016 for her claim that the Cruz campaign was planning to use “psy-ops” to manipulate delegates attending the Republican National Convention.

The closer one looks at Kaiser’s claims, the more they dissolve into a young staffer believing the hype that her company’s higher-ups asked her to sell. It’s not for nothing that political scientist Dave Karpf, who has written two books on the use of data in modern campaigns, calls Cambridge Analytica “the Theranos of political data.” Eight GOP political consultants told Ad Age’s Kate Kaye that the company was “all hat and no cattle.”

Political dirty tricks are nothing new, and we have to be vigilant.  For example, Al Sharpton was paid by Roger Stone and the Republicans to discredit Howard Dean in 2004:

While Bush forces like the Club for Growth were buying ads in Iowa assailing then front-runner Howard Dean, Sharpton took center stage at a debate confronting Dean about the absence of blacks in his Vermont cabinet. Stone told the Times that he “helped set the tone and direction” of the Dean attacks, while Charles Halloran, the Sharpton campaign manager installed by Stone, supplied the research. While other Democratic opponents were also attacking Dean, none did it on the advice of a consultant who’s worked in every GOP presidential campaign since his involvement in the Watergate scandals of 1972, including all of the Bush family campaigns.   

We need to focus on working with others to make the world a better place.  Technology is often a double edged sword which can blind us to basics.