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Why Partisans Can't Counter Disinformation

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This is not meant as a personal insult of Hillary Clinton, but I want to bring this to everyone's attention, because I think it's a good learning opportunity...

https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton/status/1390318313155219461?s=20

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A few points here, for clarity.

The U.S. intelligence community and federal law enforcement have taken great pains to educate the general public about information warfare.

One point they have consistently made is this:

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Russia's primary goal has been to create chaos in the U.S., promoting polarization and destroying Americans' faith in our democratic institutions.

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So, to be clear, Russia preferred Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton, because Russia felt, for various reasons, that Trump would be much more apt to create chaos than Hillary Clinton.

He didn't disappoint.

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We, the general public, do not know the full extent of Donald Trump's relationship with Russia, but I will point out that Trump's connections with the Solntsevskaya Bratva (Russian mob) were outlined over 20 years ago in Robert Friedman's "Red Mafiya".

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For those moderately familiar with contemporary Russian history, you know that the collapse of the Soviet Union coincided with the meteoric rise of Russian organized crime, which already had found a home in the under Communist rule.

The takeaway here being that there's

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very little separating Russian organized crime and the Russian intelligence services.

It is, at the very least, a symbiotic relationship.

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I'll get back to these points soon.

So let's take a closer look at how, exactly, Russia attacks us with Disinformation.

They attack both sides. Left vs. Right.

In fact, not just left and right...they pit both sides of every divisive argument against each other.

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For reference, see the criminal complaint against Elena Khusyaynova:

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5009827-Khusyaynova-Complaint.html#document/p1

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By fueling the fires of discontent on both sides, the Russians (and also, you will note, China, Iran, Cuba, Hezbollah, etc) achieve not only their objectives of chaos, but also spreading Disinformation on both sides of every fight.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.arabnews.com/node/1826731/amp

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So, just as Republicans have been poisoned into believing that Democrats are Communists, Democrats have been poisoned into believing that Republicans are Fascists and racists.

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Additionally, rather than discuss issues such as Subversion and Infiltratration, we have been encouraged to take this information war and redirect the focus into partisan tit for tats.

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And the real problem here, is that because of this highly-charged partisan environment, we never really discussed the *actual* issues.

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For example, the Disinformation that targeted the Right-wing was that the Mueller investigation was a "withhunt" by the Deep State.



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Similarly, the Left-wing was targeted with Disinformation that suggested that Trump was a neo-Nazi and authoritarian...an effective distraction from Trump's Russian mob connections, of which there are many.

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In truth, Trump was a deeply incompetent president and a grifter (see: The Border Wall).

Years from now, we will still be uncovering mountains of tax dollars that grifted or stolen outright by bad actors associated with the Trump administration.

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What people did not understand was that narratives like "kids in cages", organizations like BLM, etc, were information ops targeting the Left-wing just as much as Proud Boys and 3 percenters targeted the Right-wing.

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But there is only one way to see this bigger picture.

One must exorcize the demons of partisanship in order to see this larger dynamic.

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