It’s not often that ideas in evolutionary theory become directly applicable to politics, but now we have a case of plagiarized errors in the Trump campaign. “Plagiarized errors” is the idea that the propagation of mistakes is often more revealing of the history of a lineage than the functional parts of an organism. The example often give is of how we can catch students cheating on a test: if two students turn in an exam with identical correct answers, it could just mean they both studied very hard and mastered the material well; if they have identical wrong answers, right down to the spelling mistakes, that tells you that someone has been slavishly copying someone else. For more examples of how the concept is actually used, check out Plagiarized Errors and Molecular Genetics by Edward Max.
The nice thing about the plagiarized error concept is that it allows one to trace the history of the error. In the recent debate, Trump made an unusual error of attribution — he quoted Kurt Eichenwald (incorrectly, as it turns out, ignoring his conclusion) and claimed that it was a quote from Sydney Blumenthal. It was an odd combination of specific errors, and that makes one wonder where Trump could have gotten the same set of mistakes. It turns out that there is only one other media source that makes the same combination of errors, misattributing Eichenwald’s words to Blumenthal, and distorting the meaning of the piece in the same strange way, and that tells us exactly what source Trump plagiarized.
It came from “Sputnik, the Russian online news and radio service established by the government controlled news agency, Rossiya Segodnya“. Russian propaganda sources are feeding misinformation to the Trump campaign.
As Eichenwald explains the distortions and errors in the Russian piece:
The Russians were quoting two sentences from a 10,000 word piece I wrote for Newsweek, which Blumenthal had emailed to Podesta. There was no mistaking that Blumenthal was citing Newsweek—the magazine’s name and citations for photographs appeared throughout the attached article. The Russians had carefully selected the “of course” paragraph, which mentions there were legitimate points of criticism regarding Clinton and Benghazi, all of which had been acknowledged in nine reports about the terror attack and by the former Secretary of State herself. But that was hardly the point of the story, “Benghazi Biopsy: A Comprehensive Guide to One of America’s Worst Political Outrages.” The piece is about the obscene politicization of the assault that killed four Americans, and the article slammed the Republican Benghazi committee which was engaged in a political show trial disguised as a Congressional investigation—the tenth inquiry into the tragedy.
And then, to his surprise, Trump makes exactly the same set of mistakes.
At a rally in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, Trump spoke while holding a document in his hand. He told the assembled crowd that it was an email from Blumenthal, whom he called “sleazy Sidney.”
“This just came out a little while ago,’’ Trump said. “I have to tell you this.” And then he read the words from my article.
“He’s now admitting they could have done something about Benghazi,’’ Trump said, dropping the document to the floor. “This just came out a little while ago.”
Further, Trump did this on the same day that the Sputnik article emerged — it wasn’t as if this lie had time to percolate out into right wing media. The Trump campaign is being fed stories by the Russian media, or at the most benign, is reading Russian propaganda looking for dirt to dish on Clinton.
This is not funny. It is terrifying. The Russians engage in a sloppy disinformation effort and, before the day is out, the Republican nominee for president is standing on a stage reciting the manufactured story as truth. How did this happen? Who in the Trump campaign was feeding him falsehoods straight from the Kremlin? (The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment).
This is just weird. The Republicans, of Red Scare fame, with anti-Communist hatred imbedded deep in the brains, are now fielding a presidential candidate who admires Vladimir Putin and who glibly recites Russian propaganda as fact. And we don’t just have a Manchurian candidate, we have a Manchurian electorate that sees no problem with this.
The sad thing is that we have great difficulty getting the concept of plagiarized errors in evolution through to creationists, so I suspect the fanatical followers of Donald Trump won’t be able to comprehend the application of the concept to political propaganda, either.
I love the concept of plagiarized errors, and especially love seeing it applied to writing. Identifying forgeries and tracking down misinformation using the fraudster’s own lack of knowledge on the subject their scamming with. There’s just something poetic about the fraudster getting exposed by their own ignorance.
If anyone wants to get into the details, I did a pretty deep dive early this morning. It’s tough to definitively conclude Trump and that website used the same source, but it’s also difficult to explain by other means.
Does anyone have a link to the original article?
Damn that was fast. Thanks.
To be fair, Putin is an autocrat who panders to the Orthodox Church in Russia. No wonder quite a few American Conservatives like and admire him; they love authoritarian leaders and big, intrusive government of the right kind. The Red Scare meanwhile was more about Socialism and Communism, not exactly things Putin or the current Russian government overall represents.
In fact Republican wingnuts have long had an affinity for Putin. Sarah Palin was a big admirer, you will recall. He isn’t a communist, he’s a crony capitalist dictator. So he’s actually a good role model as far a they’re concerned.
@5 & 6
The surprising bit is that the Republicans can differentiate between modern Russia and the USSR. These are the same people who claim that the Republicans are the party that ended slavery so they can’t be racist, no nevermind to the fact that they are the party of racist dickwaffles now.
re 5:
oh I get it. The “red scare” was to maintain authoritarianism, as communism was trying to give ownership of the industries to the workers, away from the CEOs. So communism bad, while totalitarianism is status quo. I guess that’s fit with the hierarchy structure of religions of which US is so fond.
Conservatives prefer to “follow the pack”. Very much like herd style thinking: where independent rule-breakers and freestylers, are the singletons likely to be picked-off by the predators lurking around the herd. Best when the herd is led and not left to randomly wander around by group movement. So the leader can bring the herd to where the foliage is and away from barren desert.
It’s been a staple of palaeography since the 19th century – working out which manuscripts of an ancient or medieval text must have been copied from which earlier ones from which transcription errors they preserve. With certain scholastic translations from Greek or Arabic into Latin you can even work out which Greek or Arabic manuscript tradition the translator must have used because early scholastic translators tended to be as literal and preserve as much of the original’s style and layout as possible, even if it did violence to the resulting Latin version. You often get mistakes in the Greek turned into incoherent Latin, and it’s worse with Arabic because the languages are much less similar.
Yeah, Saganite has it @5: they didn’t like the collectivist ideals of Communism, but now that Putin’s Russia has ditched all that to become a straight-up kleptocratic autocracy, they love it. It doesn’t hurt that Putin is such a manly man too…
The Putin-worship doesn’t surprise me. What puzzles me is why conservatives saw Soviet Russia as communist. Was it, really? Or was it just authoritarian assholes using “communism” as the religion and excuse to do what they were going to do anyway? Just like our oligarchs use “capitalism” as the religion, and crony capitalism as the reality.
I could be wrong. I often am.
@10 Dunc
That is also a valid description of the Soviet Union (despite being socialistic, it was still most definitely kleptocratic, autocratic and totalitarian).
I love how you weaved evolution into this story.
I’m wondering now if this is what Roger Stone thought was such a bombshell last week when he tweeted “Wednesday@HillaryClinton is done. #Wikileaks.” When I saw the sloppiness of Wikileaks’ presentation of the DNC emails, I began to suspect that they might not have quite the treasure trove they’d thought they did. Of course, they could well have something yet. But much of it seems to be of this sort: in order to be really damning, it has to be (ignorantly, incompetently, or intentionally) misrepresented.
I don’t see the problem. We’ve always been friends with
EurasiaRussia.@davidnangle #11
The conservatives didn’t really see Soviet Russia as “communist” in so much as the actual meaning of the term. They saw it as a convenient boogeyman to hold over people’s heads to scare them into voting conservative, and since the Soviets used the word Communist, so did the conservatives who were using them as an excuse. It’s part of the reason why we now have Republican idiots calling people “communist nazi muslim terrorists”… they don’t realise that most of those terms are mutually exclusive, because in their minds the terms have no meaning, outside of “word I call people I don’t like”.
@12, =8)-DX
Yes, but they professed the ideals of communism, just as the USA professes the ideals of liberty and free-market capitalism, despite doing a remarkably shitty job of living up to them. Putin hasn’t really changed the essential nature of the country, he’s just ditched the pretence. (Much like Trump and the GOP…)
Now, obviously, hardly anybody in the USSR believed a word of it, but they provided a useful foil for their counterparts in the US, who could pretend to believe it so that they could denounce it as evil.
I did a quick update of my blog post, and it’s worth mentioning here: Even if Trump’s team did get their information off that tweet, that doesn’t take Russian interference off the table.
We’ve known since December 2015 that some twitter accounts used to push Russian propaganda have also been tweeting about Donald Trump. Given Trump’s love of the platform, it’s almost certain he’s seen or even shared some of those tweets. It’s also suspicious that both the tweet and the Russian article were taken down at roughly the same time; Jon Passantino claims that tweet was quite popular, so even if whoever was behind it cared about factual accuracy (they don’t) there’d be strong incentive to keep it up.
It’s a lot of circumstantial evidence (here’s a counter-theory: Trump’s team correctly sourced things, but on the podium Trump went “nah too complicated” and decided to misattribute), but it’s uncomfortably compelling.
If the Holy Spirit tells you it’s true then what difference does the source make?
An “innocent” way to spread this: Google news alerts would spit this up. Then trump repeats it that very evening after a staffer writes it in his notes, not bothering to check the story for veracity since why bother with truth?
About the WikiLeaks connection: Did WikiLeaks post the actual email from Blumenthal to Podesta with the quote from Eichenwald correctly attributed, or had the hacked email already been doctored with the erroneous attribution?
Also, I have read more than a few reports that that the DNC email hackers are thought to be Russians, possibly even government agents, making WikiLeaks little more than a conduit for Russian political manipulation in this instance. If that’s the case, it calls into question any revelations derived from the leaked emails.
Eichenwald reports in the linked story that he concluded his previous article with:
– but that hardly counts as news to the Kremlin, or anybody else who recalls, say, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, or 1980’s Iranian hostage tarfu, or the 1960 saga of Quemoy and Matsu.
Pierce — I believe Eichenwald’s article points out other examples of using Congress hearings as a political weapon against opponents, such as the McCarthy hearings in the 50s.
The former. It was the entire Eichenwald article, with the source clearly attributed. (Assuming it hasn’t been updated from an earlier version, but as far as I know it hasn’t.)
This article adds some perspective. The problem, and I agree here, is that Eichenwald oversold the story in his series of tweets about it, minimizing some relevant details. The original Sputnik piece was pulled down pretty quickly (which suggests error rather than deliberate intent to deceive), but it was “out there” long enough to receive wide interest. It made it to some conspiracy sites, which Trump and his campaign would have been aware of directly or via the alt-Right network. So no direct link needed. Regardless, the whole episode, which forms part of a pattern, is disturbing at a number of levels.
I’m not sure what you’re arguing here. He wasn’t talking about the Russians in the original article, but about Islamist terrorists and how they’re getting the message that they can destabilize US politics by exploiting the Republican thirst for witchhunts.
@ 5, 6, 10,
Exactly! Conservatives both in the US, but also plenty in Europe (shudder) just LOVE Russia now they’re a bunch of RWNJs instead of (from their perspective) LWNJs. Wasn’t it Rush Limbaugh or another of the prominent shock jocks who said “Russia does a lot of things right/better”? They see modern Russia as the ideal to aspire to: ruled by a Strong, Manly Leader who isn’t afraid to bomb the shit out of Muslims, brutalizes the LBGTQ community, bends the media to his will and who permits a state church, it’s the right-winger’s wet dream.
There has been much gnashing of teeth and future war novels/video games about a political/military alliance between Russia and China over the last decade (and only stoked up by the emergence of the real-life Shanghai Cooperation Organization), but to many observers it was clear long ago the greatest threat comes from within America, with the Right all too eager to ally to Putin themselves and to turn the US into Russia Junior.
robro:
Yes, and it becomes a problem for the Clinton campaign with regard to verifying or denying the authenticity of the documents, because no one knows if any of the thousands out there or yet to be revealed have been manipulated. If the source is “corrupt,” there’s no guarantee that some haven’t.
I think WikiLeaks generally just dumps huge volumes of documents that it receives (often without any heed to those who might be harmed or endangered, which is unconscionable), without themselves performing any alterations. But whoever runs their Twitter feed isn’t above misrepresenting the documents even as they link to them. I don’t know if they’re dull-witted or malicious, but it doesn’t help their reputation as a credible source, especially since we don’t know what if anything they’re not sharing.
SC @ #27
That much has been apparent for a while, but what struck me about this episode is that they don’t care about the source they’re dumping or the credibility of the material. It would not be difficult for a malicious provocateur to hack-and-redact before releasing something. Simple heuristics and simplistic NLP would make it easy for a small team to identify a handful of emails, for example, in which to plant something. Given the attention WikiLeaks gets, the crowd-source analysis would find the juicy bits quickly.
Salty Current @24:
It’s not as simple as that. Here’s the timeline I’ve been able to piece together:
11:28 AM ET: A Twitter user tweets the passage Donald Trump would later read, and appears to attribute it to Blumenthal. No mention is made of which email they quoted from, though.
3:19 ET: The Truth Division repeats the quote and Blumenthal’s name, but makes it clear Blumenthal is quoting an article and not saying those words himself.
6PM ET: Trump’s rally starts.
6:23:12 ET: Sputnik posts their article.
7:41 ET: Trump walks onstage.
7:55 ET: He reads that quote and attributes it to Blumenthal. He also waves the paper at the crowd, which allows you to see that he knows which email it came from.
[unknown]: Sputnik deletes the article.
[unknown]: That tweet is deleted.
Eichenwald did a search, and only found an obscure Turkish site which linked to the Sputnik article. I did my own search, and found nothing that isn’t listed above. So where did Trump get his information from? If it was that tweet, his team must have done some additional research and tracked down the email; but if they took even a cursory glance at it, they’d realize the quote was misattributed. Maybe he picked it up on a closed board like 4Chan which wouldn’t show with Google searches, but Trump explicitly said this story “just came in” and suggested it would go big. From a source no-one can Google?
It’s no smoking gun, but suspicious as hell.
I’m confused. According to your timeline, the Sputnik article was up for over an hour before Trump went onstage. Why couldn’t he have gotten it from that? Was it not actually online? What am I missing?
Yes, that’s what I was saying.
Salty Current @30:
It was also posted twenty minutes after the rally was scheduled to start, and this one was only ten minutes behind schedule. So if Sputnik’s the source, someone on Trump’s team had to be scanning the ‘net while the rally was under way, find the article, copy-paste the key portions into another document with the font size increased, hand that to Trump, and have Trump go “hey, I can work this into my speech”… all within an hour twenty minutes. The timing is very tight.
I find reading Sputnik News can be a useful balance to US-slanted views.
The knee-jerk, “Russian propaganda sources”, comment is interesting.
Malcolm Nance has been talking about this “Black Propaganda” potential for a while. Of course, he’s in the disinformation business himself, so everything he says should be analyzed with that in mind; but the possibility is certainly real. My point in the second paragraph of #27 above was that I haven’t seen any evidence that WL is doing any manipulation themselves but that they’re prone to misrepresent even “innocent” authentic material, adding yet another layer of potential truth-twisting.
And on top of that, the media fall over themselves to offer up the alleged bombshells with as little skepticism as possible, as is happening today with the DOJ-collusion claims. So the documents themselves could potentially be altered or even created by Russian intelligence (and possibly, but doubtfully, by WL), WL can selectively publish what they receive, WL can spin real or manipulated documents via Twitter or interviews, various rightwing outfits can also spin the materials, and the media can pass on the spin in their reporting.
This is a followup to SC’s comment 34. It is also cross posted in the Moments of Political Madness thread.
Malcolm Nance talked with Rachel Maddow about how Russian leaders have manipulated Donald Trump and his aides. Nance has a new book out: “The Plot to Hack America: how Putin’s cyberspies and Wikileaks tried to steal the 2016 election.”
I don’t always agree with Nance, nor do I always like his analysis of national security issues, but in this case I think he is spot on.
The interview is quite good. The video is about 4 minutes long. It includes Nance’s debunking of a claim Trump made during the debate that no one knows if it was the Russians doing the hacking. Very clear debunking.
Link
After reading Glenn Greenwald’s take on the story, I don’t find the Russians-feeding-Trump narrative quite so clear cut.
https://theintercept.com/2016/10/11/in-the-democratic-echo-chamber-inconvenient-truths-are-recast-as-putin-plots/
I’m not sure how relevant that is.
Hm. But Trump’s team (especially the extended Breitbart/alt-Right circle) includes a number of people who probably have Sputnik in their feeds. They could have noticed the article when it was published and printed the relevant text in a few minutes, thinking it would be a blockbuster for Trump to brandish at the rally. Is your suggestion that it’s more likely that the Trump campaign got the misinformation earlier, through more direct channels? It’s certainly possible, but I don’t know if it’s more plausible than someone in his orbit having read the Sputnik piece.
jkrideau:
I’ve linked to it here. But it is Russian propaganda. Being propaganda doesn’t necessarily make it false. (In fact, they removed this demonstrably false story quickly when they saw it was in error.)
Analysis of Trump’s use of Russian propaganda, from Josh Marshall:
Link
Much more comforting.
I like the Intercept, but in the last several months they’ve started to remind me a bit of French Communists in the 1950s. Everything remotely connected to US liberalism is inherently tainted.
This, as a generalization, is seriously overstated.
Even if people believe WL doesn’t alter or knowingly publish fake or manipulated documents, there’s no guarantee they can’t be fooled, especially given the probable source (and their lack of concern about said source). Second, for the reason I described above, their credibility isn’t great right now.
This is the problem I described above. If they acknowledge that one is authentic, that’s understood as a blanket acceptance of the authenticity of all of the thousands of documents in full, including those that haven’t yet been published. Clinton didn’t confirm “their” authenticity, but one segment of one speech quoted in one email.
I’m sure that’s what the Clinton campaign wants. On the other hand, a healthy skepticism is certainly warranted in reading and evaluating the documents. (The Intercept has tweeted some really minor bits as though they had great and readily discernible significance.)
Wow.
According to HJHornbeck’s timeline above, this isn’t accurate.
Eichenwald didn’t claim anything different in his article.
This is hyperbolic, but essentially true.
I don’t think this is “worse.” The problem was the series of promotional tweets rather than the article itself.
This is true.
Good lord, calm down already.
SC … @ # 25: … Islamist terrorists … getting the message that they can destabilize US politics by exploiting the Republican thirst for witchhunts.
My point: everybody has known that since Osama bin Laden was three years old.
Eichenwald, as you note repeatedly above, overhypes the significance of his report.
And another thing about the Intercept: they seem to treat the probability that Russian intelligence hacked into US party and governmental organizations in order to gain information to use to destabilize US politics and international coalitions and possibly to help elect a fascist to the US presidency as a marginal issue. If they’re claiming that Russian intelligence isn’t behind the hacks and has no ties to or influence over Trump’s campaign, I could respect that, even if I think it unlikely. But if they’re agreeing that it’s probable that Russian intelligence is behind the hacks and is influencing the Trump campaign and then pretending that’s not important, that’s quite bizarre.
I didn’t understand your reference to the Kremlin specifically in that context.
Salty Current @37:
It is, and when you combine it with Trump’s reliance on Russian funds, and those fund’s connections to Putin, plus some of his campaign team having ties to Russia, the idea seems pretty plausible. “More plausible” is a value judgement, though.
Siobhan @39:
Exactly, in some ways this is a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose situation. If Eichenwald is jumping at shadows, then all we can say is that Russia is indirectly influencing the US election by seeding social media and letting the Trump campaign blast it far and wide. Trump indirectly benefits, as his Russian investments are resistant to any dip in US markets. If Eichenwald is right, then Russia is directly influencing the US election by seeding social media and feeding the Trump campaign with false propaganda. Trump directly benefits, through his financial ties to Russia and Putin in particular.
Either of those cases are newsworthy, and both are getting increased airplay because of Eichenwald’s story.
This seems to be a theme. I’ve skimmed a Washington Post article critical of Eichenwald, and it too doesn’t get the timeline right. His critics are proposing the meme was floating around in alt-right circles for a while; in reality, neither I nor Eichenwald can find evidence for that. The more you look at the details, the more plausible Eichenwald’s interpretation gets.
with the image of the Donald standing before a crowd waving a piece of paper while making accusations I have to make this observation.
One of Trumps mentors and from the tenor and style of his political campaign I would have to say maybe his most important mentor was the Infamous Roy Cohn. He was the chief counsel to McCarthy for the infamous committee.
while the target is different the tactics are identical down to waving that piece of paper. The outrageous claims, the the doubling down, the barefaced lies, the deflections the no-apology, the swaggering bravado. the total disregard for the truth (who cares what the source is)
If his opponent had been Bernie the comparison would be even more clear you would have been able to find whole speeches in which very few words would have been needed to be changed to come spewing out of his mouth.
their ain’t no Soviet state nor any credible threat from any communists only the demon of radical Islam a much more difficult enemy to pin down to a place or an identity but fear and hate are the only tools he knows how to use.
uncle frogy
“Putin Doesn’t Need a Mole on the Trump Campaign When He Has the Internet”:
The evidence appears to me to strongly support the view that Putin has some influence directly within the Trump campaign and is using propaganda outlets to promote his agenda (both of which are underplayed in this article). But this particular episode can be plausibly explained without reference to a direct link. Even if Trump’s misinformation came from the Sputnik article rather than the earlier tweet (which it may have been trying to amplify without reading carefully enough), Sputnik is not a secret publication.
46 SC (Salty Current)
The evidence appears to me to strongly support the view that Putin has some influence directly within the Trump campaign
The evidence so far seems to indicate to me that Americans are xenophobic conspiracy theorists who will believe any story about the “evil” that is out to get them. I remember Granada and Iraq.
Trump, in his guise as a real estate mogul, may have looked like a good way for some Russian oligarchs to launder some money, (more fool them), but as a politician, he was probably considered as even more of a joke in Russia than he was in the USA or other parts of the Western world.
Can anyone really come up with a good suggestion of why Putin or the Russian Government would be doing any of this alleged idiocy. I mean the FSB is not the CIA with exploding cigars.
Putin and the rest of the Russian government are most likely holding their heads in despair and disbelief at the US Presidential race, as is most of the rest of the world. Why would they be stupid enough to get involved in a surreal circus by doing some gratuitous hacking? Let me repeat, they are not the CIA (nor Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney). There just is no upside to it for Russia.
Putin and the rest of his government probably view Clinton as a Cold War leftover who is damn dangerous but not completely unbalanced. I suspect they see Trump as a batshit-crazy, loose cannon who no one including Trump knows what he will do in the next 5 seconds.
My own guess is that Russia probably would prefer Clinton as the lesser of two evils and the one they know. She’s dangerous but not completely unhinged as far as most American politicians go in terms of international affairs.
One more parallel between Trump and Berlusoni.
Now I’m just waiting to come out that Trump went for the presidency to save his ass from legal problems.
Also, Putin is no communist, he’s just an authoritarian in bed with the rich and the powerful, right up the alley of the conservatives.
Further, I have to concede a point: I trust Clinton to rein in Russia’s genocide in Syria more, far more than Trump, so yes, despite being a warmongering monster, she might be better than Trump even on foreign policy.
I was wrong.
Sorry that should read ‘ the “evil” ” that is out to get them.’
jrkrideau — Except it’s not just American xenophobia and paranoia. European governments have been speculating about Russian money fueling right-wing activists and trying to disrupt European politics for some time. There was considerable speculation about Russian involvement in the troubles in the Ukraine a few years ago. I suspect there is similar paranoia and xenophobia inside Russia about European and American meddling in their politics.
Why would Putin, or rather the Russian “oligarchy” (i.e. the rich guys) do that? I suppose the same reason the American, European, and Asian oligarchies would: money, power, an edge in the negotiations, etc. I wouldn’t put it past them.
And sure, I remember Granada and Iraq. I also remember Crimea and Afghanistan. I remember Lebanon and Vietnam. I remember Ireland. I remember the American frontier…and so on.
Is it really happening or are we just being paranoid and manipulated by media empires? Almost certainly in some fashion. It’s difficult to know exactly whose. I err on the side of cautiously concerned rather than just dismissing the idea. The Great Game has been around for a long time, all sides are playing, the territory includes the whole earth now, and there are no players with integrity.
jrkrideau @47:
Sure!
Putin, an old-school KGB man, has long ago embarked on a project to Make Russia Great Again. Unfortunately, he and the rest of the government have to worry about the meddlesome United States, who might take offense to them “liberating” former territories like the Ukraine and Germany. So the obvious answer is to weaken the USA somehow.
The main theme of the pro-Russian twitter-sphere is that the election system and party elites are corrupt. Democracy is a sham, and it’s time someone came in and restored order. It’s fairly brilliant, actually; if Trump wins, they have a friendly face running their main rival. If Clinton wins, a decent subset of the electorate will scream “FRAUD!” Some gun-toting asshole may try for an assassination, throwing the country into chaos; or dissatisfaction with the major political parties might open a power vacuum that an authoritarian like Trump could fill.
Either way, Russian interests benefit, and without tossing a single bomb at US soil.
This has nothing to do with xenophobia or evil. Trump’s former campaign manager worked for pro-Putin interests doing this sort of thing; his campaign got involved with changing one part of the Republican platform, which pertained to Ukraine; Trump has consistently misrepresented Russia’s actions, and in the last debate took the perspective of Putin against his party and his own running mate;…
The desire to destabilize competitors and their alliances in the interest of gaining global power and resources is the best explanation. These are the same reasons the US government has long had for doing similar things. They engage in the same sorts of activities as the CIA, including spying, hacking, manipulating and undercutting (threatening, harassing,…) journalists, disinformation and PR campaigns, online propaganda, and interfering with politics and elections in other countries. A regular subject of my blog is how the CIA and other US agencies, and those of other countries including Israel and Saudi Arabia, do these things. It’s naive to think that Russia, led by an authoritarian former KGB foreign-intelligence officer, isn’t doing the same.
The hacking took place a while back. I’ve been saying for a while now that I think Putin, having considered Trump a useful idiot, has increasingly caught on to how nuts he is.
Hee – looks like we could have saved time by consolidating our responses.
F.O. @ #48
Neither were the Communists, at least not after about 1920.
Chris Hayes just talked to a NYT reporter who’s investigated Trump followers. Two observations:
First, and unrelated to this thread, the segment begins with an Iowa Pence rally at which a woman in the audience says that if Clinton is elected she will support a revolution. In the first days of the Tea Party, PZ posted about, or there was a discussion here about, people going into town hall meetings and insisting on the reciting of the pledge of allegiance or singing of the national anthem or whatever. (This was the era when Barney Frank had this classic response; I don’t know if the Kochs were behind these tactics.)
I said at the time that it looked a lot like incipient fascism. A guy who used to comment here thought that was an extreme comparison, but the town-hall videos sent chills up my spine. It seems like these events are in some sense bookends – beginning and result. But they’re not really bookends, in that the result isn’t actually a conclusion. As the reporter Hayes interviewed said, these people and attitudes, whose views are shared by many House Republicans, aren’t going away even in the event of a Clinton landslide.
Which brings me to the observation relevant to the thread. I said just above that “I think Putin, having considered Trump a useful idiot, has increasingly caught on to how nuts he is.” But this didn’t sit well with me. Putin, unlike Trump, is neither ignorant nor stupid. He could well have known all along how weak a candidate Trump would be, but counted on the social forces he’d rouse to destabilize US politics while helping along the organization and expansion of rightwing authoritarian movements in the US as has been happening in Europe. I think that’s probably more likely.
SC … @ # 43: I didn’t understand your reference to the Kremlin specifically in that context.
Chalk it up to my poor writing, then – I thought my “or anybody else who recalls, say, …” subclause @ # 21 would carry more weight than it did.
Btw, thanks for some insightful observations and useful links in this thread!
Don’t know if this is true, but according to a New Yorker article, Vladimir Putin has cancelled an appearance with Trump in Columbus, Ohio on Monday, and is withdrawing a promised half-million dollar donation from the campaign.
Putin Cancels Campaign Event With Trump
The reason: “As the father of two daughters, I cannot condone or defend Mr. Trump’s behavior.” *
* Personally I’m sick of men justifying their condemnation of Trump because of daughters, wives, or mothers. It’s indefensible regardless of your circumstances…period.
Ah, I see. Not poor writing – I thought you might be conflating the two articles.
Thanks!
robro @57:
It’s not, alas, the Borowitz Report is satire.
Wow. Trump is getting scarier by the minute.
A more broad note: isn’t it strange that people who despised communism a few decades ago because it was totalitarian, now happily cooperate with a new totalitarian leader, or even admire him? It happens among conservatives and liberals alike.
50 robro
European governments have been speculating about Russian money fueling right-wing activists
Duh, speculating is the key word. It’s easy to dream up some fantizy scenario to divert attention from some Gov’t screw-up
Actually, it is possible but I’d put it as not highly lightly in any serious way. I would have thought that compromising the occasional hard-line anti-Russian politician would make more sense.
There was considerable speculation about Russian involvement in the troubles in the Ukraine a few years ago.
Now this I’d tend to give more credence to, eastern Ukraine is quite “Russian” in ethnicity and culture, a main reason for the current (almost inactive?) separation war and the current Ukrainian Gov’t seem like a bunch of incompetent kleptomaniacs much like the last one, just a bit more Western oriented.
I suspect there is similar paranoia and xenophobia inside Russia about European and American meddling in their politics.
Seems more than likely especially if we look at the US record around the world. I’m not quite as convinced about the Europeans in the same way.
Russians seems as paranoid as Americans but perhaps with more reason. Anyone notice that NATO now includes the Baltic countries? From our position, it seem fairly reasonable given Stalin’s land grab but for some strange reason, Russia seems unhappy about NATO troops sitting on their border about 150 km from St. Petersburg.
Why would Putin, or rather the Russian “oligarchy” (i.e. the rich guys) do that? … I wouldn’t put it past them
I’d not sure this is a good basis for international policy although it seems that much of the USA is in agreement.
I remember the American frontier
You are much older than me!
I remember listening to the Granada invasion on radio and watching some of the Iraq fiasco on TV. I remember Vietnam and worrying that some American friends would get sent there after the Tet offensive. Vietnam is not history to me; it’s current affairs.
I remember Ireland.
So do I, and Americans (private) support for Irish terrorists.
Is it really happening or are we just being paranoid and manipulated by media empires?
Both? The thing is that the alleged “Russian” hacking sounds like pure media hype combined with a few nutty conspiracy theorists who have missed the fact that the world has changed, that Russia is not the Soviet Union and who are mourning the loss of their convenient bogyman.
@ 51 Hj Hornbeck
Currently, the Russians are trying to increase their influence, …
Of course they are. They are a major world power with strategic interests. This does not explain why they would engage in jejune and very likely counterproductive activities like hacking the DNC? Again, they are not the CIA with poison milkshakes and exploding cigars. Why did a vision of Goucho Marx just flash before my eyes?
#55 SC (Salty Current)
Putin … but counted on the social forces he’d rouse to destabilize US politics while helping along the organization and expansion of rightwing authoritarian movements in the US …
WHAT?
Russia (Putin) would want the USA to descend into chaos and be taken over by a bunch of mad, right-wing authoritarians lead by an unstable/delusional demagogue? Let’s see, the last time something like that happened, the USSR lost about 30 million people. I’m sure Putin really wants to risk it. Sheesh.
jkrideau @61
It’s not much of a speculation, at least not locally – it’s a pretty established fact. There’s no fantasy scenario; there actually is Russian money pouring into local government (municipal) and parties (federal). And yes, those they support tend to be quite right-wing and conservative.
… But the most recent Russian incursion into Crimea, of course, is no reason for other small (and not so small) eastern European countries to worry for their own national integrity, esp. with the pro-Russian media available in some of the eastern provinces. Hm. Also those several thousand troops near the borders with the Baltics, plus Kaliningrad, and the regular incursion of Russian planes and ships into Baltic air- and seaspace.
As someone living in one of those Baltic countries that will be welcoming NATO forces (the Canadian-led contingent, I might happily add!) next year, I’m rather glad they’ll be here. They won’t make much of a difference, if Russia actually decides to invade, but still glad.
I’m not sure Putin cares, as long as he comes out on top.
Yup.
Hj Hornbeck — Thanks. I thought it might be, thus my lead in. Sometimes it’s difficult to tell in this crazy world.
jrkrideau —
“Duh, speculating is the key word.” Duh yourself. Why do you think I chose that word.
“You are much older than me!” Very possibly, I’m older than almost everyone I know, except my mother, aunt, and uncle. I am old enough that one of my grandfathers was a boy in the closing days of frontier settlement and had stories (probably fictions) about Jesse James. However, I believe we can “remember” or know about things without having to directly experience them on the radio or TV.
“Russians seem as paranoid as Americans but perhaps with more reason.” Absolutely. 20+ million dead because of the meddling of Germany would probably set any national psyche (if you believe in such) on edge. The meddling in Russian affairs by the British and French (e.g. Crimea), and later the US, is often lost on Americans. But of course, Russia has a long history of meddling in the affairs of its neighbors, too. Where and how did that get that big empire.
“Both? The thing is that the alleged “Russian” hacking sounds like pure media hype…” I think both. But “sounds like media hype” does not mean there isn’t some basis for the suspicion. I think the Russian government has the means and motivation for doing it, just as the US does (and has done), and many corporations.
I think Eichenwald should maybe take a few days off. He seems to be starting to unravel a little (which isn’t very surprising given this). This election is taking its toll on people.
As I said in my post, not taken over, but destabilized by their continuing presence and efforts to undermine democratic institutions and international alliances. And we’re talking about movements that are ideologically compatible with Putin, so it could be similar to how the Saudi Arabian regime has worked to foster Wahhabism around the world. That sounds like an ideal situation from Putin’s point of view.
I confess that I’m puzzled by your vehement resistance to the idea that Putin is seeking to interfere in US or European politics. No one here has suggested that Russia is unique in this regard.
@ 64SC (Salty Current)
I confess that I’m puzzled by your vehement resistance to the idea that Putin is seeking to interfere in US or European politics
You may have misunderstood me. I would not doubt that Putin “is seeking to interfere in US or European politics”, at least in terms of foreign policy. He is head of state of a major world power and part of Europe. It’s part of his job!
My objection is to the mindless attribution of the hacking of the DNC and other strange pronouncements of Russian villainy that just don’t make sense in the long term interests of Putin or Russia. I just cannot see any reason for Russia to be supporting Trump or Clinton. Both, though for different reasons, are bad bargains for Russia.
Why carry out some clownish hacking that if really proven could rebound badly on Russia for what at best would be minor effects—and that assumes that the Russians see Trump as preferable to Clinton.
Wild accusations of Russian involvement from conspiracy theorists, who are just plain nuts, and Democratic Party members in the heat of an admittedly mad election campaign do make a certain amount of twisted sense. Very stupid moves from Democrats are believable; politicians of all flavours and countries have been known to do dumb things in an election campaign. Talk to David Cameron.
Think of it as an electoral use of Occam’s Razor. Give me a good enough payoff for Russia and I “might” start to believe it.
For crying out loud – of course I wasn’t talking about overt foreign policy, as I spelled out very clearly above.
The Obama administration and US intelligence agencies issued a joint statement a few days ago about their firm conclusion that the Russian government was behind the hacks; yesterday, Obama promised proportional retaliation. Do they have their own agenda? Of course. Should we accept their claims unskeptically? Of course not. But that’s a little different from “wild accusations” from “conspiracy theorists.”
Investigative journalists have also written about this. Here’s an article in the Guardian from last year, before the election started. Again, media often have their own agenda and have often been complicit with governments (wittingly or unwittingly), but the evidence they provide should be seriously considered. As I said above, these are things we know are done by the US government, the Israeli government,… Logically, it makes no sense to think that Russia, with a former KGB agent and FSB head at its helm, wouldn’t be engaging in the same sorts of tactics.
I think I did just above – the political destabilization and weakening of the US and international alliances competing with Russia for power, resources, and influence, in addition to the growth of ideologically friendly and therefore useful movements in other countries. I think that’s a good payoff. Naturally, there could be unintended consequences and blowback, but that’s true of any such scheme, and this is less risky and more suitable to the Russian government’s strengths and weaknesses than open military conflict.
OK, I think I’ve said what I wanted to say and I seem to be starting to repeat myself, so I’ll stop commenting. If you don’t think this is a reasonable motive, I don’t think I can convince you. If you think these actions are beneath someone with the sterling reputation of Vladimir Putin, I really don’t think I can convince you.
Why is Putin so upset about neighbor countries seeking contact with former enemies? After all, we’re former enemies. Cold War is over. Russia could join the NATO and the EU for all I care. It would benefit all countries. Then why isn’t this happening? Because Putin is a dictator and his ego is too big, that’s why.
Putin ally: vote for Trump or face nuclear wars
I probably shouldn’t be taking the time to type all this up, but DOG GAM is this story getting more intriguing.
First off, I’ve updated my blog post with a few new details. One is a fuller timeline of events, which is worth repeating here (albeit without the citing links). All times are EDT and on October 10th, unless stated otherwise:
Second, Kurt Eichenwald keeps editing his original story to add details. I recommend keeping an eye on it, as he handles the 11:28 AM tweet and adds some insider info.
In sum, it’s highly unlikely the Sputnik article mis-attributed the email by accident. They wanted to tie Blumenthal to the Benghazi “scandal,” and make it a meme passed around alt-right circles.
I thought that was the end of things. But, as luck would have it, I found an archive of the now-deleted Tweet and it raises even more questions. Have a boo, then come back here and read my observations.
….
….
Ready? What really stands out to me is that some Twitter users were quick to call out the fraud. At 2:41 PM, someone linked directly to the email. At 3:38, another user explicitly corrects the attribution. At 4:45, a third user links to the original Newsweek story that contains the quote. @republic2016 ignores all this and at 8:30 PM they link back to their 11:28 tweet. Only that specific tweet was deleted, the rest is still visible on Twitter.
Anyone who looked at that original tweet and hit the “page down” key would have seen those debunkings, with only a few seconds of effort. If this tweet is the source used by Trump, his team is either A) inhumanly incompetent, or B) knew they were pushing falsehoods.
Oh, and did anyone share the Business Insider article yet? No? I’ll handle it, then.
This is naive. The Cold War was never wholly about ideology: it was also about great power rivalries, which have existed ever since the modern states-system came into existence in the 16th century, and arguably long before that. In that context, Russia (the USSR was the 20th century version of the Russian Empire) suffered a serious but not catastrophic defeat by the USA and its allies in 1989-1991 and after, and Putin is attempting to recover some of the lost ground. Moreover, Russia has genuine grievances: it was in fact part of the settlement at the end of the Cold War – in particular, German reunification – that NATO would not be extended eastward beyond Germany. Even if you accept the NATO claims that there was no such promise (which I don’t), the NATO propaganda article I link to itself admits that:
Putin is an authoritarian Russian nationalist – of course he sees the expansion of NATO, particularly into former Russian territory in the Baltics – as threatening and insulting. That doesn’t justify Russian actions in Ukraine, Syria*, the Baltic region or elsewhere – but nor do the latter retrospectively justify NATO expansion.
*Just for information, on Tuesday I joined a protest at the Russian Consulate in Edinburgh against Russian bombing and starving of Aleppo, and other Russian actions in Syria. Not in respopnse to Boris Johnson’s call for demonstrations at the Russian Embassy, I should add, this was organised by Edinburgh Stop the War.
Call me naive, but being an authoritarian Russian nationalist is not an excuse for feeling threatened or insulted either. “NATO expansion” means countries wanting to join the NATO. It’s not that we’re invading them or something.
:)
rietplum@74,
So what? NATO is under no obligation to admit any country that wants to join, and was under an obligation not to expand eastwards. Doing so was bound to be perceived as hostile, not just by Putin, but by Russians in general, hence facilitating the rise of Putin, or some other Russian nationalist.
Hoooo boy. We know a number of Trump advisors have had ties to Russia: Paul Manafort groomed the pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovych after the latter lost control of the Ukraine presidency; Howard Lorber has significant financial investments in Russia; Boris Epshteyn had connections to financial elites in Russia as well as investments; and now we have Carter Page.
Page’s ties are so plausible that intelligence agencies are actively investigating him. I only learned about Carter Page a few days ago, when another blogger pointed to this article on Sputnik.
A Trump foreign policy advisor had an opinion piece printed on a Russian propaganda site. That is… slightly unsettling.
Slightly more unsettling in light of this.