How Big Data and Russian Spies Rigged Our Election (With Republican Help)

These new revelations about Kushner and Don Jr. and Manafort meeting with a Russian lawyer and (now reported) a guy from Russian intelligence begins to answer the questions raised tentatively back in March and April and May: how did the Russians know how and where to tailor and target their disinformation campaign against Hillary Clinton?

Article in Newsweek raising the question about Jared Kushner's involvement in the weaponization of the Russian propaganda.

Similar article in The Guardian

Analysis from TechCrunch

Another prescient article from TIME magazine

Like the legendary double play infield of a century ago, we need to see how the process went so devastatingly from Mercer (for the big data used for targeting the Russian disinformation) to Bannon (Mercer’s guy who ran Breitbart––a key disinformation supermarket–– and then ran the Trump campaign and now runs the White House) and Kushner (who was Trump’s deputy for handling the technology of gaming our democracy) and finally to the Republican operatives in swing states who put the Russian bots and the propaganda to work. In baseball this is admired as an art form, but deployed in an election it becomes a conspiracy, a conspiracy with a foreign power, a conspiracy with a foreign enemy.

This McClatchy article back in March examined how neatly the operations of fake news site InfoWars and propaganda site Breitbart and the Russian propaganda networks were coordinated to elect Donald Trump and block the election of Hillary Clinton. With the reins being handled at the top of the Trump campaign. And it appears, the Trump campaign being managed from the Kremlin and from a secretive big-data company called Cambridge Analytica, owned by billionaire Robert Mercer. This Atlantic article outlines Mercer's "big plans" for America.

Mercer is the evil genius who steered the UK out of Europe. How he did it there may help us see how it was done here. Article on Mercer's Brexit hijack from The Guardian.

It has been Mercer’s genius to persuade large sophisticated populations to ignore facts and logic and instead accept and obey the subliminal messages Mercer’s big data machinery puts into their brains. This article, originally published in Das Magazin from Zurich, explains how the Mercer Mindfuck works.

The Trump phenomenon is about mind control on a national scale. It’s hard for citizens of advanced western nations to comprehend this. It’s the sort of mindfucking Orwell warned about. The mass hypnotism used in communist countries. Think North Korea and now try to picture Americans engaging in these mass choreographed rallies worshipping the Dear Leader––only now the Dear Leader is an orange faced senior citizen with delusions of mastery. The mastery isn’t Trump’s, and it isn’t Kushner’s either. It’s Mercer’s and Bannon’s genius––and Rupert Murdoch’s for that matter. And the late Roger Ailes' who dreamed up the idea of a GOP propaganda television network back in the Nixon White House. The Russians have been playing a long game but it never worked until they found eager accomplices running one of America’s major political parties. And the party apparatus showed equal eagerness to follow and obey. They are still obeying their foreign masters.

Voter Fraud Is Another Trump Lie

"A study of 2,068 alleged election-fraud cases in 50 states between 2000 and 2012 found the level of fraud was infinitesimal compared with the 146 million voters registered over the 12-year period. The analysis found only 10 cases of voter impersonation, the only kind of fraud that could be prevented by voter ID at the polls."

From NBCNews

But if you are going to look, [President] Trump, why not start at home:

Tiffany Trump is one of these voters registered in two states

President Trump's top advisor white supremacist Steve Bannon is another

Cases like Ms Trump's and Steve Bannon's are the rationalization for the massive Interstate Crosscheck the scheme for purging legal voters from the rolls deployed nationwide by Trump supporter Chris Kobach.

Were Bannon and Trump reported to the states by Interstate Crosscheck?

So, an infinitesimal problem. The source of Trump’s anecdotal evidence was a friend of his, a German national, who tried to vote in Florida and was rejected. Trump’s friend complained to him that lots of people were voting who obviously should not have been…according to a foreigner who attempted to commit voter fraud, presumably on behalf of Trump.

Trump does not explain how Bernhard Langer could have seen 3-5 million allegedly illegal voters in this one precinct in Florida.

The Langer anecdote story from CNBC

Here is a fact check from the very middle of the road USAToday

The Apocalypse––brought to you by Russia and the Republican Party

30 million Americans lost their healthcare in the middle of the night. Cause of death: Republicans. Charlie Pierce explains what happened.

Why put millions of Americans in danger of financial collapse and death? Because Republicans worship at the altar of the Killer Business Model. People who are sick and in pain and afraid of dying will pay any price. This is a Killer Business Model.

From VOX: Analysis by several political experts leads to the conclusion that Comey screwed this election as much as Putin did.

"If it weren't for Comey, Hillary Clinton would have won the popular vote by about 6 points and the Electoral College by 70 or more. And that might have turned into control of the Senate as well, though that's a little more speculative."

Summary from MotherJones

Then there’s the report by a veteran from MI6 who believes Russia has been blackmailing the president elect...

The memo reported by CNN

The Russia expert cited by CNN is being backed up by other reliable sources. One cited in The Week

VOX does a good job of summarizing the story and what it could mean.

The response of Donald Trump is blunt and ugly: I won. You lost. Shut up. Fuck you all. (I’m paraphrasing.) Reported by New York Magazine.

When so many things go so wrong so quickly for all Americans the takeover by a foreign enemy story seems a lot more believable. And the Republican Congress seems in a hurry to make it all happen before we get wise.

From Rigging the Election to Rigging the Country

This election was full of disturbing anomalies and deviations that indicate it may well have been rigged to put Trump in the White House.

USAToday calls for an audit of how this election suddenly turned

Alternet calls for the same scrutiny of specific disturbing anomalies in key swing states

The Hill connects the dots between the election result and the Russians who steered that result

How to survive the new fascism.

A scholar who studies authoritarian governments has advice on how to survive the Trump regime

Some wise advice on the same topic from Juan Cole's Informed Comment

Survival tips from the New York Review of Books

VOX explains why fear is the correct reaction to a Trump presidency

Paul Ryan is out ahead of the Trump parade, eager to sell of our public systems to profiteers. Privatize Medicare? Anyone? If he gets this done he’ll probably ease it through by promising those who already have it that they can keep it. He’ll only screw everyone else. This is the GOP method, divide and conquer. We are all potential profit to these people.

Reported by New York Magazine

Privatizing America’s roads and bridges. A troll under every bridge. Which Trump friends would skim off the profits?

Reported by SLATE

Trump wants to muzzle all government employees. Is a loyalty oath next? Loyalty to him, of course. Which translates into loyalty to the man in Russia who pulls his strings.

Reported by The Hill

Trump pays off thousands of college students he defrauded but his fraudulent foundation is still under investigation

Reported in Newsweek

Trump family turning us into a tin pot oligarchy

Reported by FORTUNE magazine (which is no lefty rag)

Our new National Security Advisor is guided by his friendship with Putin. Why are Americans comfortable with this? Is the Republican team really the Russian team?

VOX reports on Trump's Russian minder (straight out of Dr. Strangelove)

But the scariest monster in the box is Steve Bannon. The white supremacist. The former Goldman Sachs dealmaker who’s made millions pitching paranoia to the right half of America.

“Darkness is good. Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power. It only helps us when they get it wrong. When they’re blind to who we are and what we’re doing.” ~Steve Bannon

The New York Daily News gives us the creepy gist of Bannon's cozy chat with Hollywood Reporter

And meanwhile the news media is busy normalizing the abnormal. Playing a game of "Let's Pretend" with the American people. Let's pretend everything is fine. Let's pretend that everything will be all right if we simply sit tight and let it unfold. Remember, Trump paid off those students he defrauded. Once he's president we cannot sue him. We can't sue Paul Ryan for stealing our Medicare and Social Security.

Did Russia Win The White House?

The American voters chose Hillary Clinton by more than a million and a half votes and the margin is growing as absentee votes are counted. The ongoing updated vote tally is shown here.

But Russia and the Russian spy agencies and the Russian dictator Vladimir Putin wanted Trump and it looks like they got what they wanted.

Esquire's very readable and credible political reporter Charlie Pierce reports on the Russian connection here, and here.

The Hill newspaper reports on it here.

Mother Jones reports on it here.

The Russian government wanted someone weak, inexperienced, irrational, incompetent and vacillating and Americans who voted for Trump helped them achieve that.

With perhaps some additional help from voter intimidation and voter suppression and election rigging.

David Pakman addresses vote anomalies in key swing states

Published on Nov 14, 2016
--According to exit polls conducted by Edison Research, Hillary Clinton won four key battleground states (NC, PA, WI and FL), but ultimately lost those states according to computerized vote counts

The data from TDMS Research

BBC journalist Greg Palast addresses these concerns more directly here

(This sounds like the kind of rhetoric Trump was shouting just before the election. But it isn’t rhetoric. It has to do not with predictive polling but with information collected as the vote was happening, which is less prone to deviations. The deviations are what alert the public to irregularities. That is what this information suggests may have happened.)

So there were a number of very disturbing forces pushing for a Trump victory.

Another mechanism that distorted this election was the way social media amplified and disseminated the lies being told. Because of the greater skepticism of progressive voters most of the fake stories that worked their way into this election were biased toward Trump.

The story from WIRED

Fake news sites sold more Americans on bogus negative stories about Hillary (I read one that reported that close associates said she emitted a sulphuric smell indicating she was in league with Satan. She does not, and she is not. People believe this crap because if it’s on the internets it must be true) and bogus positive stories about Trump (the one having the greatest effect may have been the one saying Pope Francis endorsed Trump, when in fact Pope Francis clearly and forcefully rebuked Trump and the hateful policies he calls for.)

Untrue stories and rumors are often in play during elections, but this year the untrue stories outplayed the true ones.

The story reported by Buzzfeed

(I realize Buzzfeed sounds a bit like a fake news source. This is actually a very well founded story.)

Trump benefited from the sad fact that many Americans base their most important decisions on feelings rather than facts. Which is ironic, because it wasn’t very long ago that Republicans were the party that prided itself on being rational and responsible. They derided liberals as being fact averse. That has flipped entirely.

Vox discusses the fact that conservatives believe the false stories far more than liberals do

One of the Big Lies cited in the Vox story was broadcast to the millions of gullible Trump supporters is now the top advisor in Trump’s White House, the notorious white supremacist Steve Bannon.

One of the fake news creators discussed his filthy profession with the Washington Post. He seems to be enjoying the damage as much as Putin is, while frantically denying any blame for the millions of people he lied into voting for Trump. He has a point: if you can persuade a stupid person to drink poison the joke is on them, right? Too late to apologize now.

The Oxford English Dictionary announces a Word of the Year each year. This year’s word is “post-truth”. We’ve reached a point when what is true doesn’t matter to millions of people. This should be troubling. This is one of the first corruptions that occurred during the Nazi era in Germany. Now I realize Donald Trump is not Hitler because Hitler was a vegetarian, but apart from his eating habits there are a disturbing number of close similarities, not just in what Trump promises to do but in the kinds of poisonous rhetoric he used to get people out to vote for him. The only real difference is that Trump shouted these things in English and not in German.

The true story about "post-truth" via the BBC

Nothing we can do, right? Too late now, right? Let’s all curl up in fetal positions underneath our beds, right? They won’t find us there...

Actually? Actually there is something that might prevent the inauguration of President Trump.

Something called the Electoral College. It’s the old device the slave states put in place to increase their influence in Congress by adding electoral power for people they owned as property.

But it was also put in place to keep power from being given to dangerous people who catered to the mob. Not the Mob, as in the Mafia. The mob as in the unwashed and volatile public. The ignorant folk who are easily fooled by fake stories about an honest candidate being dishonest and a dishonest candidate being truthful. The Electoral College was created to prevent people like Donald J. Trump (con man, fraudster, tax evader, sociopath, fascist, incompetent) from gaining power.

And to avoid that outcome we can still hope that enough of these carefully selected Electoral College Electors will refuse to ratify the presidency of Vladimir Putin’s favorite.

I am recommending that everyone who knows rational people in Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina, Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida or any state that swung or squeaked by for Trump to phone them and ask them to write sincere and respectful personal letters to the Electors in their state. Other letters can be written to respected Republicans who might have some influence, who those Electors might respect.

One argument that might be persuasive is that Trump is erratic and irrational and likely to fail in a manner that will reflect very badly on the Republican Party. His errors and his poor judgment will be the party’s fault forever. The Republicans now own all three branches of government. They will own whatever unfolds whether they intended it or not.

Many conservatives have already disowned him. And are continuing to after the election.

The story from SLATE

Folks in the redder parts of the country tend to revere America’s military. You might inform these Republican in the Electoral College that our nation’s military rate climate change as one of the greatest security threats America faces today.

The story about the security threat from global warming via Scientific American

If Trump is inaugurated there are other things we’ll need to do. But let’s try to stop him before we get to that point.

How to Steal an Election

There's important new reporting on the bizarre, unexplained, last-minute 6.7 point shift from Kerry to Bush in 2004. It was a shift that directly contradicted the exit polling. It remains unexplained, and news media have religiously ignored the story. Why does it matter? Bush made Supreme Court appointments whose decisions handed vast powers to corporate campaign donors prior to the 2010 election that handed power back to the Republican Right Wing. Bush also ballooned his deficit and ran the economy into the ground by keeping his hands on the controls for four more years. At some point we need to stop trusting and begin examining. Reporters and news organizations need to report and analyze the information in front of us.

The elections in danger of being rigged or stolen are the close ones. The 2010 elections were close, but uniformly shifted rightward. This one-sided veering of elections dates to 2000. George Bush won his two elections very narrowly. As a Florida computer programmer explains in the testimony linked to below, it is the close elections that can be flipped without being questioned. The 2006 midterms and the 2008 election were not as close, and therefore were not affected.

This spring's election for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court was very close, and was narrowly won by the Democratic challenger over incumbent Republican David Prosser...until an election official in suburban Milwaukee, who happened to be a former aide to Prosser, an aide with a checkered history, who had been involved in cases of serious election discrepancies in the past, magically "found" additional votes on her personal computer that she had "forgotten" and had kept "safe" on her personal computer. Prosser was declared the winner, and a subsequent investigation was suppressed by the court on which Prosser now sat. With Prosser on the court, Republican governor Scott Walker was able to solidify his radical measures over the angry protests of citizens. Elections, even rigged ones, have consequences.

Again, it all goes back to 2000. The Republicans bragged about how they would handle the counting of votes.

In this short video a computer programmer testifies under oath to being asked by the Speaker of the Florida legislature to write a program to rig the Florida vote count in 2000. He also testifies to his certainty that there were sufficient anomalies in the 2004 count in Ohio that that vote count was also rigged.

Here is an interview with the Florida programmer.

In 2006 a Utah Republican election official said the Diebold election machines could not be trusted. As a result Diebold was able to get him removed from an office he'd held for 23 years.

Hacking Democracy is a documentary about how the 2000 and 2004 elections were stolen. This first of nine segments tells how Al Gore received MINUS 16,022 votes in Volusia County.

A description of what happened in Volusia County Florida in 2000. Reported in New Zealand, but not heard very widely in the U.S.

Mark Crispin Miller did some great reporting on the bizarre anomalies in the 2004 election. His articles appeared in Harper's.

The broader media ignored the story, preferring to keep the public placidly uninformed. Here is a lecture he delivered on the subject. Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. (Thank you YouTube.)

An interview with Mark Crispin Miller

A pretty fair summary of what happened in recent elections.

Another summary from the UK, explaining the various means of rigging American elections using the voting machinery.

A pretty fair analysis of how election fraud has unfolded in the U.S., not at the hands of individual voters (the target of Republicans trying to suppress the vote) but by the machinery and the officials handling the election.

Analysis from OpEd News in 2004. With many links to academic experts on the technology that was used to steal the 2004 election.

Here's a very chilling summary of the cataclysmic and strangely uninvestigated elections of 2000 and 2004.

To cap it all, there is the mysterious death of a conspirator, Michael Connell, who wanted to testify. Before he died, this IT expert for the Bush Cheney White House, gave a deposition describing what had occurred in Ohio in 2004 and his hand in it. A source said Connell's life had been threatened by Karl Rove.

These concerns seemed moot in 2008. They should worry us again. And it reads like a bestselling thriller.