US Politics Mega-thread - Page 9989

AMY GOODMAN: On Thursday, I sat down with the prize-winning Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen, a longtime critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Her recent book, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, it won the National Book Award in 2017. Gessen recently wrote a piece for The New Yorker magazine headlined “The Fundamental Uncertainty of Mueller’s Russia Indictments.” I began there, asking her about these indictments.

MASHA GESSEN: So, you know, for somebody who actually has read the indictment in its entirety, and, actually, the Russian reporting that is almost entirely repeated in the indictment, it’s really hard to square that with the way that it’s been portrayed as, you know, a sophisticated, bold effort. I think H.R. McMaster is correct in saying, yes, there’s “incontrovertible” evidence of Russian meddling, but to call it bold, to call it sophisticated and to imply that we now know that it actually had an influence on the outcome of the election is absurd. It was not bold. It was not sophisticated. And it—we don’t know, and probably never will know, whether it had any impact.

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AMY GOODMAN: Let me ask you about what Charles Blow said in The New York Times. In a “piece”:”Attacking the Woke Black Vote,” headlined “Attacking the 'Woke' Black Vote,” Charles Blow writes, “One thing that’s clear to me following the special counsel’s indictment of 13 Russians and three companies for interfering with our election is that the black vote was specifically under attack, from sources foreign and domestic. And this attack appeared to be particularly focused on young black activist-minded voters passionate about social justice: The 'Woke' Vote. The tragic irony is that these young people, many of whom already felt like the American political system was failing them, were encouraged to lay down one of the most powerful political tools they have, thereby ensuring an amplification of their own oppressions.” And he’s saying they were encouraged basically not to vote. I mean, you have, for example, Blacktivist, which turns out to be, you know, a Russian troll, etc.

MASHA GESSEN: You know, I think this is tragic, because I think that instead of engaging with what actually happened in the 2016 election, among American citizens and American activists who were making real, tough decisions about whether to vote and how to vote, we’re now focusing on the Russians, right?

I mean, I remember listening to an interview with Michelle Alexander, the wonderful African-American activist, a few weeks before the election, and how painful it seemed for her to talk about the election and how she said that she was going to have a really difficult time voting for Hillary Clinton, and she wasn’t going to say unequivocally that she was going to vote for Hillary. And I was listening to that interview, and I thought, “Oh, my god, she is going to lose. She is so clearly going to lose, right?” And she was not going to lose because Russians were telling young African Americans to stay home. She [Hillary] was going to lose, in part, because there were very good reasons for young African Americans and old African Americans to stay home, because there was a very visceral memory of her position on prison reform and welfare reform and the incredibly racist rhetoric around her in the 1990s. And she hadn’t addressed it in any kind of convincing way. And to trivialize that tragic rift by saying that the Russians did it is just a huge disservice to our political conversation.

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MASHA GESSEN: So, I mean, the answer is we don’t know. We don’t know how significant it was. From the information that is publicly available right now, if you look at what they were doing, if you look at how effective what they were doing was—and what I mean is, you know, how effective in sort of social network metrics terms, right?—most of their posts and ads got fewer than average views, because they weren’t very good. They had a couple of runaway successes, but, basically, most of their money was wasted, by social network standards, right? We’re talking, according to the indictment, about a budget of a little over a million dollars a month, right? So, let’s say they did this for a year. They spent—let’s say, you know, they spent $15 million—in a campaign in which one side spent a billion dollars, right? What do we have to imagine to say, with the kind of certainty with which we’ve been saying it, that Russians swayed the election? I mean, granted, the election was won by 77,000 votes in three counties, and so anything, you know, the weather, could have swayed the election. But to point the blame at Russia specifically, I think, is misleading. And again, it just detracts from the conversation we should be having, which is about how Americans elected Trump.