A Brief Thought: Clinton, Facebook & the Ridiculous Russiagate Redux

NinaIllingworth September 19, 2017November 17, 2022 2016 US Presidential Election, 2200 Facebook ads, A Brief Thought, blog, botnet, bots, Brock Trolls, Clinton Blame Tour, Clinton Book Tour, Clinton campaign, conspiracy theory, corporate media, Correct the Record, coup, David Brock, Democratic Party, Donald Trump, excuses, Facebook, fascism, Federal Election Commission, fundraising, Giant Russia Theory, Hillary Clinton, Imperialism, info graphics, John Podesta, liberalism empowers fascism, mainstream liberals, mainstream media, Media, media has the right to cover Clinton, Meme, neoliberal coup, neoliberal fever dream, neoliberalism, News, Nina Illingworth, no evidence, Op-Ed, Open Secrets, Politics, President Obama, pro-Clinton media, Rec Reads, Recommended Reading, rich people, Robby Mook, Russia, Russiagate, Russian trolls, Six Things I Think, social media, Socialism, swine emperor Trump, The Daily Beast, tiny reach, troll factory, Trump is a fascist, Twitter, US election integrity, US elections, Vladimir Putin, why Clinton lost the election

Editor’s note: for those of you who were looking forward to a post about how to share your freelance work here on ninaillingworth.com, please let me start by apologizing in advance. Unfortunately I’m not a lawyer and while I have a small fund set up to pay for articles and I’ve gathered together a small group of editors to help me choose which articles to post, I’m still struggling with the legal framework of the sharing arrangement I want to set up here. Ultimately my desire to allow creators to maintain control of their own work and resell or share their articles elsewhere is making it harder to work out the fine print here; I can’t just borrow a contract online and change the names around like one would normally do in this situation.

I am however back home from my little stay-cation playing video hockey this past weekend and today’s Brief Thoughts post marks a return to examining the cold war spy novel mainstream liberal elites in America simply will not allow to die; the conspiracy theory know as “Russiagate.” Hillary Clinton is taking names and selling books but why does the latest neoliberal excuse for her election loss seem so familiar?

Note: if you’re having trouble reading the above info-graphic, just right click on it and select “view this image” to pop out a larger version; I’m working on writing on shorter summations so that I can use larger text on the memes themselves but varying monitor sizes may still have trouble with this graphic – it should be great for sharing on forums and image chans however.

Sources:

Clinton: Facebook must ‘own up’ to its role in spreading fake news

Facebook has a long way to go: Clinton

Hillary Clinton Blames the Russians, Facebook & Fake News for Her Loss

Clinton won’t rule out questioning legitimacy of election

Clinton opens door to questioning legitimacy of 2016 election

Is ‘Russiagate’ Collapsing As A Political Strategy? – key paragraph here

Of Bernie Bros & Bolshevik Bot Networks

An Update On Information Operations On Facebook

Open Secrets 2016 Presidential Race Spending Page (declared FEC Data)

Donald Trump & Hillary Clinton’s final campaign spending revealed

Friends, at this point I have been writing about the neoliberal fever dream that is “Russiagate” for more than a year, despite knowing the whole thing was bullshit from the very moment elite corporate media “liberals” deployed it as a campaign attack against swine emperor Trump during the 2016 US presidential election. Furthermore, I have been actively trying to avoid discussing Hillary Clinton and the ongoing destructive effect she continues to have on American politics, even after her November election defeat and supposed retirement as a candidate for public office. If you want to know the truth, I’m a little bit too busy fighting the emergent rise of American fascism to really give a flying fuck why “Bad Grandma” is upset anymore.

Unfortunately however, Hillary’s revenge and blame tour has afforded pro-Clinton media and Democratic Party lackeys another opportunity to try and turn the disaster of “Russiagate” into a Pyrrhic victory. Even now a full ten months after the election, numerous supposedly credible news organizations have seized on a mere fifty thousand (often misreported as 100K) dollars worth of Facebook ads (many of which did not directly reference the 2016 US election) that may or may not have been purchased by people in Russia, as another method of reviving this conspiracy theory’s dead corpse to explain away Hillary Clinton’s election defeat – to a rodeo clown, reality TV fascist her own campaign purposely tried to elevate during the Republican primaries.

Although I largely addressed the numerous problems with the narrative that Russian operatives using targeted marketing swung the election against Clinton back when quasi-mainstream liberal media was tittering about social media bot networks (key paragraphs here) it does bear mentioning that this is essentially the same line of bullshit in a slightly different package; which is why less than impartial journalists on the fringes of Clinton World are desperately trying to revive the social media bot network conspiracy. The only difference this time is that instead of blaming preposterously insignificant news outlets like like RT News and TeleSur for “rigging” the election against Clinton, neoliberal media has made a mountain out of a molehill to attack Facebook because everyone in politics hates Mark Zuckerberg and it’s slightly harder to objectively prove how far 2,200 Facebook ads might’ve reached without the company’s internal marketing data. A reasonable person who read this “shocking” Daily Beast expose however might be inclined to acknowledge that Facebook posts which interest 48 people and persuade as many as four racists to attend a rally, probably didn’t derail a $6.6 billion US election.

Let’s get down to brass tacks here; Donald Trump is a Nazi-sympathizing, moronic crook who obstructed a federal investigation into his campaign by firing not one, but three separate government officials investigating him for one reason or another. When Robert Mueller’s investigation finally does catch up to Herr Donald, it’s going to be for typical rich pig crimes like money laundering and accepting bribes, possibly even from people in Russia; it has nothing to do with the KGB, “Soviet Yugoslavia” or Vladimir Putin’s supposed connection to the Black Lives Matter protests in Ferguson.

The simple truth is that if Hillary Clinton couldn’t beat Russian trolls who spent fifty grand on 2,200 Facebook ads despite a billion (or more) dollars worth of free media coverage and nearly eight hundred million in campaign funds, then she is what the left has always said she is – a pretty shitty candidate for President of the United States.