Given that most people have already taken a position on the topic, it seems a bit late in the day to be pointing this out, but there is now clear evidence to suggest that the ‘Russia hacked our election’ claim is not only entirely false. But the people who made the claim in the first place – members of the US intelligence, political and corporate establishment (as well as other ideologues) – were and are themselves the creators of the only “Russian troll” social media accounts that have actually been shown to have done any ‘hacking’.

A December 19th 2018 NY Times article reveals that a group of “Democratic tech experts” decided to use “similarly deceptive tactics” (as those imputed to Russian trolls) in the Alabama Senate race contested by Roy Moore in December 2017. An internal report on what is called the ‘Alabama effort’, obtained by The Times, says explicitly that it “experimented with many of the tactics now understood to have influenced the 2016 elections.” The project’s operators created a Facebook page on which they posed as conservative Alabamians, using it to try to divide Republicans and even to endorse a write-in candidate to draw votes from Mr. Moore. And how was the division sown?

“We orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet,” the report says.

⋮

What is clear at this point is that, as soon as Trump was elected president (if not before), a cabal of former and serving intelligence and government operatives, along with some ideologically-possessed dupes like Jonathon Morgan, decided to launch a campaign to undermine Trump’s election win by smearing him as Russia agent (the now infamous Clinton/Steele Dossier) and accusing Russia of ‘subverting American democracy’ directly by both hacking the DNC emails and running a social media disinformation campaign on social media.

Over the two years since Trump’s election, the campaign has been expanded to include efforts to do precisely what the Washington establishment falsely accuses Russian of doing: subverting American democracy. It seems reasonable at this point to suggest that this was the plan all along. After all, increasing control over the thoughts and beliefs of the US population has always been the ‘bread and butter’ of the US ‘deep state’.

At the end of last month, someone working on the ASD’s ‘Alabama project’ leaked a copy of the project’s after-action report. It details that ASD:

• Used a strategy to “radicalize Democrats, suppress persuadable Republicans and faction moderate Republicans”, the operation sought to “move 50,000 votes”. That’s more than double the winning margin of 22,819 votes of Roy Moore’s opponent, Doug Jones.
• Over a 5-month period, the operation used a carefully crafted strategy including deploying non-attributable memes “targeting white, African-American and women voters”
• Targeted 650,000 Alabama voters with a combination of persona accounts, astroturfing, automated social media amplification and targeted advertising.
• Manufactured approximately 45,000 twitter followers, 350,000 retweets, 370,000 tweet favorites, 6,000 FB comments, 10,000 FB reactions, 300,000 Imgur upvotes and 10,000 Reddit upvotes.
• The report concludes: “In spite of its impact in the press and in voting outcomes, not a single story about our activities appeared in the any press outlet, including far-right internet conspiracy sites like infowars and Breitbart, prone to speculation about liberal interference in Republican politics.”

The project’s ‘Strategic Overview‘ states:

Our strategy was anchored on 3 goals:

• Enrage and energize Democrats using targeted messaging to likely voters in left-leaning districts across Alabama. Make sure they believe a victory in Alabama is possible.
• Suppress die-hard Republicans using relentless memes intended to provoke disgust and apathy coupled with targeted promotion of stories claiming a safe Republican victory. Either way, encourage them not to vote.
• Divide or persuade moderate Republicans by tackling Roy Moore’s extremism head on and promoting write-in candidates as principled alternative candidates

The report concludes with this:

Our sustained targeting of these likely voters had enormous effect on R[epublican] turnout in these countries. The R[epublican] depression in these countries was measurably higher compared to the rest of the State.