Will The Señor Trumpanzee #CocaineConvention Manage To Generate A Reverse Bounce?

I'm still hoping lots and lots of people watch the Republican #CocaineConvention. That's because I think it will turn off independent voters and may even persuade some mainstream-- as in non-fascist-- Republicans to stay home on November 3rd. Unfortunately, according to Nielsen, just 15.9 million people watched, a 28% drop from 2016. The first night of the Democratic Convention last week, drew 18.7 million viewers, also a 28% drop from 2016.

The former chief of staff of Trump's Department of Homeland Security, Miles Taylor, joined Rick Wilson and Molly Jong-Fast on a Daily Beast podcast to continue his fun new job of denouncing and exposing Trump. "You thought what happened on screen on night one of the convention was crazy? It’s nothing compared to Trump behind the scenes, where national security officials couldn’t get through a meeting 'without him doing 20 tangents, becoming irascible, turning red in the face, demanding a diet Coke, spewing spit,' Taylor explained. 'Literally out of goddamn nowhere, he'd be like, You know, who’s just my favorite guy? The MyPillow guy. Do any of you have those pillows? When it came to the issue of the border wall, Trump would be dreaming up 'sickenin' medieval plots 'to pierce the flesh' of migrants, rip all the families apart, 'maim,' and gas them. 'This was a man with no humanity whatsoever,' Taylor says. 'He says, we got to do this, this, this, and this, all of which are probably impossible, illegal unethical,' Taylor recalls, but he was writing them down as the president spoke. 'And he looks over me and he goes, you fucking taken notes?'"



That leaves some people wondering if the Republican Party will survive Trumpism and some wondering if the party needs to be burned down to the ground an started all over again-- something many progressives also wonder about the Democratic Party. "Conservative intellectuals," wrote Jonathan Chait, "have spent most of the past four decades claiming-- especially during periods of Republican ascent-- to be winning the 'war of ideas.' Hardly any of them bother to make such a boast now. Now that the Republican convention has given itself over to four straight nights starring Donald Trump-- also featuring other unaccomplished members of his family along with some teens who were victimized by social media for wearing Trump gear-- and abandoned its platform altogether for the platform equivalent of a MAGA hat, all the fun has been drained out of the exercise.

In place of the usual gloating, the right has been engaged in a furious intramural debate over whether to burn down the Republican Party in the wake of Trump’s expected (but hardly assured) defeat. Advocates for burning it down include Max Boot, George Will, Stuart Stevens, Charlie Sykes, Mona Charen, and Jonathan V. Last. Critics include David French, Rich Lowry, and Peggy Noonan. Somewhat in the middle lie Ross Douthat, David Brooks,  Jonah Goldberg, Ramesh Ponnuru, and Kevin D. Williamson. In yesterday’s New York Times, former George W. Bush adviser Peter Wehner treats the burning as a (metaphorical) given and urges, “Any attempt to rescue conservatism from the ashes, then, has to begin with the defeat of Donald Trump in November.”

All parties to the dispute agree that Trump is deeply unfit for the presidency. They disagree about how broadly to define the moral and practical implications of that fact.

The anti-burners take a narrow view. The problem, as they see it, is Trump, and therefore his departure solves it. And it is certainly true that the current president has unique liabilities that no other Republican leader who succeeds him will share. However awful the next Republican leader may be, he or she will probably not use the office for personal profit, will tell lies numbering in fewer than five figures, will listen to their advisers, will spend the bulk of their waking hours working rather than obsessively watching television, and will be trained as a public servant rather than as a professional swindler and money launderer.

If Republicans’ goal is to replace Trump with a normal, noncriminal politician, they can achieve it without any systemic change. Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, or possibly even one of the Trump children would be capable of showing up every day, doing eight hours or so of actual work a day, and staffing the administration with people who do not secretly believe their boss is deranged.





However, the pro-burners believe the Trump experience has exposed some deeper rot... If you take the broader view of the party’s problem, you quickly realize the problem is not just Trump himself but a party that would not merely cooperate with but actually idolize a grotesquely bigoted authoritarian. Once Trump disappears, Fox News will begin pummeling the next Democratic president with absurd lies and then building a new cult of personality around the next Republican who emerges as a leader, and that leader will pursue a more competent version of an essentially similar program: upper-class tax cuts, allowing business to self-regulate, ignoring large swaths of scientific expertise, and entrenching minority rule.

And if any Republicans wish to alter their fate from that trajectory, the solution is both simpler and more radical than anything they have acknowledged: They must sever the party from the ideological movement that has controlled it for a generation and driven it into its present dysfunctional state.

To the modern ear, the very idea of a Republican Party that operates independently of the conservative movement sounds preposterous, even oxymoronic. The movement’s association with the GOP is now so deep that almost everybody uses the terms Republican and conservative synonymously. But it was only about 60 years ago that the two had very different meanings.

A right-of-center leader in Britain, France, Germany, or Japan would not deny the need to do anything about climate change, oppose universal health insurance, or insist cutting taxes on the rich will pay for itself. For a period of time, the Republican Party seemed to be following the same course as right-of-center parties in other industrialized democracies today. Dwight Eisenhower accepted the contours and legitimacy of the New Deal while fighting many of the particulars. The conservative movement’s purpose was to oppose and reverse Eisenhower’s political vision for the Republican Party.

As detailed by books like Rule and Ruin, by Geoffrey Kabaservice, or Before the Storm, by Rick Perlstein, the conservative movement was once a minority faction within the GOP. It regarded the party’s leadership with about as much hostility as the Democratic Socialists of America today view the likes of Barack Obama and Joe Biden-- lesser evils at best, outright traitors at worst.

The movement loathed Republican leaders for having accepted as a settled fact Franklin Roosevelt’s extension of the welfare and regulatory states-- Barry Goldwater excoriated Eisenhower’s “dime-store New Deal”-- and Harry Truman’s Cold War containment. It demanded an apocalyptic confrontation that would roll back big government at home and communism abroad.

Modern conservatives have created a mythical story of how they took over the party, sustained through endless repetition. The myth holds that they gained control of the party because they were thoughtful and responsible. William F. Buckley, their intellectual leader, “expelled the Birchers”-- the far-right, conspiratorial John Birch Society-- and thus, having purged the movement of its kooks, prepared it for governance.

The truth is very nearly the opposite. A former Buckley colleague, Alvin Felzenberg, has detailed that Buckley tread very carefully with the Birchers. Grasping that the movement was far too important to the right to alienate, he tried to placate its leader, Joseph Welch, ultimately breaking with him while still endorsing the John Birch Society itself.

This small and seemingly esoteric point of historical interpretation is the root of the intellectual right’s systemic inability to face up to its problems. Conservatives have treated Buckley’s gentle and very partial break with the leader of the Birchers as his central legacy while dismissing many of his other positions as unimportant details. But those “details” are, in fact, the conservative movement’s DNA.

Buckley and the conservative movement defended Joe McCarthy, whose depiction of a vast secret Communist conspiracy and demands for aggressive rollback of existing communism closely tracked their own beliefs. They supported racial apartheid, first in the American South and then, after it was defeated there, in South Africa. They were supportive of right-wing authoritarianism both abroad and at home. Conservatives were skeptical of Richard Nixon because of his moderate policy agenda, but they closed ranks with him over Watergate. Nixon’s pragmatism repelled the right, but his authoritarianism attracted conservatives to him.

Center-right parties abroad are able to defeat left-wing appeals by co-opting popular elements. American conservatism is too rigid to do that. It regards democracy itself as a form of oppression-- a system that enables the majority to oppress the wealthy minority by redistributing income via the ballot box. One of the predictable features of any American debate over tax levels is that conservative politicians or business leaders will compare the latest Democratic plan to something out of Hitler’s Germany.

Conservatives famously created a vast network of think tanks, media, and activist institutions, which they used to slowly take over the GOP. The takeover took decades to complete. Even by the time of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, conservatives only had a large foothold but had to share power with Establishmentarians. And so, while Reagan would sometimes follow the conservative line, at other times his moderate advisers would steer him toward course corrections. Reagan repeatedly violated conservative orthodoxy by supporting a series of tax hikes, cap-and-trade environmental regulations, a tax reform that raised effective rates on the rich, liberalized immigration, and détente with the Soviets.

Conservatives were able to swallow their anger over these betrayals because, at the time, Reagan offered them the closest opening to real power they had enjoyed since the Hoover administration. But as they consolidated their party takeover, they would eventually demand far more complete fealty. Even the pragmatism permitted under Reagan would become unacceptable.

The key break point in the history of the party came under George H.W. Bush. In 1990, Bush cut a deal with congressional Democrats to reduce the deficit. In return for (rather deep) spending cuts, Democrats prevailed on Bush to accept a small increase in the top income-tax rate. Conservative Republicans led by Newt Gingrich revolted against Bush and later credited their opposition with causing his defeat. After the Gingrich revolt-- which later styled itself as a “Republican revolution” against Bill Clinton-- conservatives drove out Bush’s remaining moderate advisers and consolidated full right-wing control over the party.

It would be an overstatement to paint Trump as representing nothing but the triumph of the conservative movement. In his personal defects, Trump is indeed sui generis. But the broad outlines of his agenda and his style do closely follow the trajectory of the American right: racism, authoritarianism, and disdain for expertise. The movement attracts disordered personalities like McCarthy, Sarah Palin, and Trump and paranoid cults like the John Birch Society and QAnon.

Above all, Trump follows the American right’s Manichaean approach to political conflict. Every new extension of government, however limited or necessary, is a secret plot to extend government control over every aspect of American life. Conservatives met both Clinton and Obama’s agenda with absolute hysteria, whipping themselves into a terror that rendered them unable to negotiate.

The right has thought this way all along. Reagan, in his ’60s-era incarnation as conservative insurgent spokesman, warned that unless Medicare was stopped, “You and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.” Conservatives are usually unable to roll back existing government programs and instead treat every new proposed extension as the final stand for freedom against socialist tyranny.

...[T]he American conservative movement lacks the analytic tools to acknowledge what acceptable social programs look like. An inability to distinguish reasonable, well-designed government programs that address real market failures from Soviet-style oppression is a congenital defect in conservative thought.

The most libertarian-minded conservatives laugh bitterly at the idea that the modern party reflects their ideology. In a sense, they are right: The last two Republican presidents both attempted to roll back a major entitlement (Bush sought to privatize Social Security, Trump to repeal Obamacare) and were defeated and instead presided over an expanded government. But they have also clung as tightly as ever to the actual governing priorities of the movement’s power centers: low taxes for the rich, placing business lobbyists in charge of federal regulations, and appointing jurists who believe in rolling back the regulatory state. For all his supposed populism, Trump’s plan to revive the economy is just more tax cuts.

Trumpism is a natural by-product of the dissonance between the conservative movement’s ambitions and the limitations of democratic politics. Totalitarian plots lie around every corner: the New Deal, the civil-rights movement, peaceniks, the Clintons, Obamacare, and Black Lives Matter. Every policy matter, from Bill Clinton’s modest aim of reducing the deficit to Obama’s goal of a national version of Romneycare, becomes a culture war. Since the right is unable to engage with any of these issues in a practical manner, conservative politics is forced to operate entirely on a symbolic level.

Because the stakes of even the most mundane policy disagreement are existential, and because the right keeps losing, there is no release for the tension that keeps building. All the accumulated terror is simply off-loaded from the last Armageddon to the next. Trump is not even pretending to have a positive second-term program. His only goal is to stop the next Democratic administration because the next liberal program is always the one that will usher in the final triumph of socialism.

The most likely near-term outcome for a post-Trump GOP would look something like this: The party reconstitutes itself in opposition to everything the next Democratic president proposes, “rediscovers” its existential terror of deficit spending, throws itself into vote suppression and minority rule, and eventually returns to power for another round of upper-class tax cuts and a large-scale managerial debacle. I suspect many of the Republicans who privately or publicly loathe Trump would be satisfied with such an outcome.

This is so incredibly illegal; not even consiglieri William Barr could explain this away:





This morning, Bernie reminded his followers that, alas-- and despite the hysterical carryings on at the #CocaineConvention-- Biden is no socialist and he and Kamala will not be carrying out the his or AOC's or Ilhan Omar's agenda. "If only that were true," wrote Bernie wistfully. "But while they scream 'socialist' as an epithet in their videos and from the stage, what everyone needs to know is that Trump and the Republican Party just LOVE socialism-- a corporate socialism for the rich and the powerful. And let's be clear. Their brand of socialism has resulted in more income and wealth inequality than at any time since the 1920s, with three multi-billionaires now owning more wealth than the bottom half of our nation. Their socialism has allowed, during this pandemic, the very, very rich to become much richer while tens of millions of workers have lost their jobs, their health care and face eviction. While Trump denounces socialism let us never forget the $885 million in government subsidies and tax breaks the Trump family received for a real estate empire built on racial discrimination. But Trump is not alone."

The high priest of unfettered capitalism, Trump’s National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow, spoke in a video last night.

And who could ever forget when Larry was on television begging for the largest federal bailout in American history for his friends on Wall Street-- some $700 billion from the Treasury and trillions in support from the Federal Reserve-- after their greed, recklessness and illegal behavior created the worst financial disaster since the Great Depression.

But it is not just Trump and Larry Kudlow.

If you are a fossil fuel company, whose carbon emissions are destroying the planet, you get billions in government subsidies including special tax breaks, royalty relief, funding for research and development and numerous tax loopholes.

If you are a pharmaceutical company, you make huge profits on patent rights for medicines that were developed with taxpayer-funded research.

If you are a monopoly like Amazon, owned by the wealthiest person in America, you get hundreds of millions of dollars in economic incentives from taxpayers to build warehouses and you end up paying not one penny in federal income taxes.

If you are the Walton family, the wealthiest family in America, you get massive government subsidies because your low-wage workers are forced to rely on food stamps, Medicaid and public housing in order to survive-- all paid for by taxpayers.

This is what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. meant when he said that “This country has socialism for the rich, and rugged individualism for the poor.”

And that is the difference between Donald Trump and us.

Trump believes in corporate socialism for the rich and powerful.

We believe in a democratic socialism that works for the working families of this country. We believe that in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, economic rights are human rights.

So yes, progressives and even moderate Democrats will face attacks from people who attempt to use the word "socialism" as a slur.

There is nothing new of that.

Like President Harry Truman said, "Socialism is the epithet they have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last 20 years... Socialism is what they called Social Security … Socialism is their name for almost anything that helps all the people."

Our job in this moment is to stay focused.

First priority: defeat Donald Trump, the most dangerous president in modern American history-- and defeat him badly.

Then on Day 1 of the Biden administration, we will mobilize the working families of this country to demand a government that represents all of us and not just the few. We will fight to ensure that every American has a right to a decent job that pays a living wage, to health care, to a complete education, to affordable housing, to a clean environment, and to a secure retirement-- and no more tax breaks for billionaires and large corporations.

...The one percent in this country may have enormous wealth and power, and they will use it to try and stop our agenda. But they are just the one percent. And if the 99 percent in this country stand together, defeat Trump, and go on to fight for the values we share, we can transform this country.

Bannon's Wall-- The Final Installation by Nancy Ohanian

The Pardonin' Prez

No, Trumpanzee isn't crazy for tossing out pardons like they were rolls of toilet paper in Puerto Rico. He's creating an environment for when he has to protect himself by pardoning Manafort, Michael Cohen, Flynn, Papadopoulos, Carter Page, Gorka, Kushner, Ivanka, Roger Stone, Wilbur Ross... the whole swampy regime. Don't be surprised if he winds up pardoning everyone who ever appeared on The Apprentice and when he runs out of them, Million Dollar Listing, Dancing With The Stars, Chopped and Shahs Of Sunset. Yesterday he commuted Alice Johnson's life sentence, the woman Kim Kardashian had met with him about in the White House last week. Axios reported that White House counsel Don McGahn is skeptical of the merits of pardoning Johnson.

CNN reports that Señor T told the White House staff to get him paperwork for dozens of people he can pardon. Trump wants to pardons lots and lots of people and get a reputation as the "Pardoning Prez." John Kelly, who is still Chief of Staff thinks this is a bad idea.

Last week, the President pardoned conservative author and filmmaker Dinesh D'Souza and told reporters he was considering pardoning Martha Stewart and commuting the sentence of former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich. He raised eyebrows on Monday when he stated his belief that he had the "absolute right" to pardon himself, but said he wouldn't do so because he had "done nothing wrong."

In light of his recent pardoning spree, several of the President's outside friends and allies have begun advocating for people they believe should also be forgiven.

Though past presidents have typically waited until the end of their term to pardon controversial figures, Trump has pardoned five people during his 17 months in office. Most are unexpected or benefit political supporters. In addition to D'Souza, who pleaded guilty to violating federal campaign finance laws in 2014, he has granted forgiveness to former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, Dick Cheney's former chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, former Navy sailor Kristian Saucier and the first black heavyweight boxing champion, Jack Johnson, thus far.

Who Trump pardons has oftentimes come as a jolt to his own staff, and on some occasions, the person being pardoned.

"I have never met President Trump in my life," D'Souza told CNN Tuesday. "I have spoken to him once before on the telephone, but I have never met him. The time I talked to him about my pardon was only the second time I've spoken to him, ever."

When ABC News reported in April that the President was poised to pardon Libby, it was not just a surprise to his friends and family, but him as well, according to a source familiar with the pardon. Bill Jeffress, his primary trial lawyer, said he learned about the pardon from media reports.

Trump has not followed the typical procedure for granting pardons, often choosing instead to bypass the Justice Department's Office of the Pardon Attorney while wielding his constitutional power.

The office recently informed 180 petitioners that they would not be granted clemency at this time, a White House official confirmed to CNN, but the administration has said it will continue to review pardons and make decisions on a rolling basis. There are currently 2,108 petitions for pardons, according to the Office of the Pardon Attorney.

The office had made clear in its guidelines that a pardon does not establish innocence.

"A presidential pardon is ordinarily a sign of forgiveness. A pardon is not a sign of vindication and does not connote or establish innocence. For that reason, when considering the merits of a pardon petition, pardon officials take into account the petitioner's acceptance of responsibility, remorse and atonement for the offense," according to the written instructions.

Critics have raised the question of whether Trump is sending a signal to his former allies and aides who are facing criminal charges in special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation with his robust use of his pardoning power.

But when he was asked in April whether he would consider a pardon for Michael Cohen, his longtime lawyer who is now under federal investigation for possible bank fraud, wire fraud and campaign finance violations, Trump snapped a two-word response: "Stupid question."

No one has ever thought of Trump as a pardoning kind of guy before and people in New York remember him for his vicious reaction to the Central Park 5. "Members of the Central Park Five say they no longer expect President Donald Trump to apologize more than a decade after they were exonerated by DNA evidence in the 1989 rape and assault of a jogger in New York’s Central Park. The five men, who were in their teens at the time of the crime, have been speaking out after Trump called for 'due process' last weekend after two White House aides resigned on accusations of abuse from their ex-wives. 'I can’t count on an apology from a person who doesn’t even know what it is to apologize,' said Yusef Salaam-- who was wrongfully convicted and jailed for five years-- of Trump’s defense of his staff during an appearance."

Is Participating In A Plot To Undermine Democracy A Crime?

Today was the dual hearing on the unconstitutional nature of Joe Arpaio's pardon and on his own request to vacate his conviction. That's a little context for an understanding of what role Michael Dreeben is meant to play on Robert Mueller's team looking into Putin-Gate. Greg Farrell did the reporting for Bloomberg on how Mueller can tackle the expected preemptive pardons Trump is expected to start handing out to family members and regimistas. "Judging by his tweets," wrote Farrell, Señor Trumpanzee "could try to pardon people in his circle even before prosecutors charge anyone with a crime. Mueller’s all-star team of prosecutors, with expertise in money laundering and foreign bribery, has an answer to that. He’s Michael Dreeben, a bookish career government lawyer with more than 100 Supreme Court appearances under his belt."

Acting as Mueller’s top legal counsel, Dreeben has been researching past pardons and determining what, if any, limits exist, according to a person familiar with the matter. Dreeben’s broader brief is to make sure the special counsel’s prosecutorial moves are legally airtight. That could include anything from strategizing on novel interpretations of criminal law to making sure the recent search warrant on ex-campaign adviser Paul Manafort’s home would stand up to an appeal.

"He’s seen every criminal case of any consequence in the last 20 years," said Kathryn Ruemmler of Latham & Watkins LLP, who served as White House counsel under President Barack Obama. "If you wanted to do a no-knock warrant, he’d be a great guy to consult with to determine if you were exposing yourself.”

Dreeben, 62, built that expertise over three decades as an appeals lawyer at the Justice Department. As a deputy solicitor general, he’s pored over prosecutors’ moves in more than a thousand federal criminal prosecutions and defended many of them from challenges all they way to the nation’s highest court.

Dreeben has begun working on legal issues as a counselor to Mueller but is also retaining some of his solicitor general work for the sake of continuity, according to Peter Carr, a spokesman for the special counsel’s office. Carr declined to elaborate on Dreeben’s work with Mueller or make Dreeben available for comment.

Pre-emptive pardons are a distinct possibility now that current and former Trump advisers are under Mueller’s scrutiny. Trump himself has tweeted that everyone agrees the U.S. president has “complete power to pardon." Some of those kinds of executive moves have been well studied, including Gerald Ford’s swift pardon of Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton’s exoneration of fugitive financier Marc Rich. But the legal territory is largely uncharted over pardons of a president’s own campaign workers, family members or even himself-- and how prosecutors’ work would then be affected.

Meanwhile, Facebook said it estimates 10 million people saw ads it has discovered on its platform paid for by Russian entities, but warned that it may not have uncovered all malicious activity that attempted to interfere in the American political process,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

"The revelation from Facebook quantifies for the first time the spread of the known Russian activity since the social network said last month it had identified 470 ‘inauthentic’ Russian-backed accounts responsible for $100,000 in advertising spending. Facebook presented congressional investigators with data on 3,000 ads bought by the Russian actors before and after the U.S. presidential election.”

Maddow's show offers a wealth of information on Putin-Gate but I keep getting the feeling that she's some kind of Hearst-era yellow journalist hoping to keep turning out spectacular ratings-- she's #1-- by beating the drums of war against Russia. She seems to get overly carried away from time to time. So I was happy to see the Washington Post cover the Facebook episode this week as a business story, without all the frothing. Like this: "Russian operatives set up an array of misleading Web sites and social media pages to identify American voters susceptible to propaganda, then used a powerful Facebook tool to repeatedly send them messages designed to influence their political behavior, say people familiar with the investigation into foreign meddling in the U.S. election." The Facebook tool is called "Custom Audiences" and it can be used to efficiently send specific ads and messages to voters who visited sites the Russians set up to attract specific audiences, like, for example, racism, Islamaphobia and xenophobia. "People caught up in this web of tracking and disinformation would have had no indication that they had been singled out or that the ads came from Russians."

In addition to Custom Audiences, Russian operatives used other Facebook tools to target groups by demographics, geography, gender and interests, according to the people familiar with the investigation. The Custom Audiences tool differs because it allows advertisers to feed into Facebook’s systems a specific list of users they want to target.

Oy

The conclusions of investigators fit those of several independent researchers, who say that the Russian disinformation campaign exploited the core advertising and tracking technologies that Silicon Valley has honed over a decade to serve corporate America-- and that are widely available, with few if any restrictions, to political actors in the United States and abroad.

“These are the same methods and sophisticated tools that the pharmaceutical companies were using, that big oil companies were using,” said Philip N. Howard of Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda Project. “This was regular ad technology that regular advertisers use.”

The revelation about the use of Facebook’s Custom Audiences tool, which has not been previously reported, adds to an emerging picture of a Russian effort to shape the U.S. election and sow division using tools built by American technology companies.

And it makes clear that Russians used Facebook to direct their influence campaigns to voters whom they had already tracked and to find new ones wherever they browsed the Internet-- even if they used multiple devices such as a smartphone for work or a tablet at home.

Targeted people might also have directed that same disinformation-- whether intentionally or not-- to people linked to them on social networks, such as their friends on Facebook.

“This means that any American who knowingly or unknowingly clicked on a Russian news site may have been targeted through Facebook’s advertising systems to become an agent of influence-- a potentially sympathetic American who could spread Russian propaganda with other Americans,” said Clinton Watts, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. “Every successful click gives them more data that they can use to retarget. It feeds on itself and it speeds up the influence dramatically.”

Jonathan Albright, research director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, who has studied the links among fake news, Russian propaganda sites and their relationship to Facebook and other social media platforms, said that hundreds of Russian sites were loaded up with ad tracking software, known as cookies, that would allow them to follow any visitor across the Web and onto Facebook.

The Custom Audiences tool enabled Russian advertisers to feed information from those cookies, which are long strings of numbers that advertisers collect, into Facebook’s systems, which could match them with the accounts of particular Facebook users.

The Facebook users were then shown ads featuring divisive topics that the Russians wanted to promote in their Facebook news feeds, which displayed the ads alongside messages from friends and family members.

This kind of weaponization of social media technology is especially effective against the 2-digit IQ population who have trouble with abstract thought and who make up the bulk of the Trump America First base. Those 300 ads that Facebook turned over to Congress-- likely a very small portion of what the Russians were up to-- were seen, according to Facebook, by around 10 million Facebook users. Trump lost the popular vote 65,853,516 to 62,984,825 and he unexpectedly won the key very targeted states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan by extremely narrow margins-- Wisconsin by 22,748 votes (0.76%), Pennsylvania by 44,292 votes (0.72%) and Michigan by 10,704 votes (0.23%), representing 46 electoral votes. Had the Russians not worked with Trump to steal those 3 states, Hillary would have won the presidency with 273 electoral votes to his 258. CNN reported this afternoon that 4 sources with direct knowledge of the situation agree that the Kremlin targeted Michigan and Wisconsin with their ad campaign.

Some of the Russian ads appeared highly sophisticated in their targeting of key demographic groups in areas of the states that turned out to be pivotal, two of the sources said. The ads employed a series of divisive messages aimed at breaking through the clutter of campaign ads online, including promoting anti-Muslim messages, sources said.

...As part of their investigations, both special counsel Robert Mueller and congressional committees are seeking to determine whether the Russians received any help from Trump associates in where to target the ads.

Between the Russians in the general election and Wasserman Schultz and her DNC team in the primaries, there were far too many ways for bad actors to use election fraud to undermine the system. Something's got to be done to protect democracy from these anti-social predators.