Samantha Vinograd, a former senior national security advisor under President Obama, intoned Monday on CNN that in light of the previous week’s indictment of 13 Russian trolls, “We are under live attack and we’re doing nothing.”
Now, we know about these semi-hapless Russian trolls because Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein on Friday announced they had been indicted for “conspiracy to defraud the United States” over their meddling in the 2016 presidential election. Solemnly stating they’d committed “information warfare” against America, Rosenstein’s statement and the actual indictment made it apparent that the 2016 Russian effort was very limited in size and scope, with roughly 80 Russians in total, who together had managed to spend several million dollars.
Rosenstein’s announcement, with its pointed use of “unwitting” to describe any interaction with the Russians, was yet another nail driven in the coffin of the Trump-Russia collusion fairytale.
If one were taking the Democrats and their allies in press at their word for the the last 14 months you would have thought there was collusion at the very highest levels of the Trump campaign and a literal invasion of Russians meddling with the American elections: “The Russians are coming, the Russians are coming! We’re under live attack!” Amazingly the Russian footprint was so small in 2016 that were it not for the “helpful” screaming of bloody murder by those hoping to distract from Democrat malfeasance, we’d likely never even have known about it.
The Russian “information warfare” as it pertained to Facebook ads was a whopping total of $46,000 before Election Day 2016. That included targeted buys of $300 in Pennsylvania and $832 in Michigan—or basically what a B-evel actor would spend on a promoted post for a day.
Some of the Russians’ ads were so bad they got a total of 14 clicks. With the Clinton and Trump campaigns spending $81 million combined on Facebook ads, and the total expenditures in the 2016 election between presidential and congressional campaigns coming to almost $6.5 billion, we’re somehow expected to believe that this is really warfare? It’s like the Russians threw a pebble into the great monetary ocean of the U.S. elections and the Left and mainstream media screamed that it caused a tsunami.
Considering the numbers involved, it’s a question whether Vladimir Putin should be proud or ashamed: proud that his measly investment paid off in spinning up a media frenzy or ashamed at the measly spend of the “awesome and terrible” Russian “empire” being exposed; warfare seems like such a grandiose term for what actually happened.
Real information warfare is when a British national by the name of Christopher Steele, with his former press buddies at Fusion GPS, manipulate a compliant media to create false narratives that no doubt created billions of earned media coverage across the American airwaves. With whispers and rumormongering, Steele and Fusion GPS were able to feed into anti-Trump biases at major newspapers and cable channels and then, with the complicity of senior level management at the FBI, have the fake dossier used as evidence to support a FISA warrant.
While it’s lovely that 13 Russians have been indicted, never to be able to return to the United States, inquiring minds nevertheless want to know: if they were indicted for “conspiracy to defraud the United States,” why isn’t Christopher Steele being indicted as well?
It’s clear from the Grassley-Graham memo that Steele likely lied to the FBI, but it is also clear is that Steele helped destabilize American democracy, with the help of the mainstream media. But of course we can’t have Steele indicted because that would imply that the ones who ultimately funded him, the DNC and Hillary Clinton campaign, are also guilty by extension for the role they played.
The insanity in all of this is that while Democrats and the Left and mainstream media have been fixated on Russia, they’ve been missing what the real warfare story is: a Chinese army of 100,000 trained cyber warfare hackers who launched, according to NSA estimates, 30,000 cyber attacks on the United States in 2015 alone. This army of hackers, a division of the People’s Liberation Army, have increased their capabilities since 2015 and are still launching daily attacks on America. Yet the Chinese threat doesn’t fit the media narrative so, of course, nobody is really discussing it.
While the Trump Russia collusion fairytale is dying an inglorious death every day with new indictments of bit players for process crimes, there’s little doubt the Left and the media will never stop trying to undermine and destroy Trump. The entire Russia narrative in reality has little to do with the real threats to America’s national security. But it’s been a useful tool for #TheResistance to use to attack Trump, the country and the facts be damned.
What is troubling is that our biased and blinkered media are so determined to drive this narrative and this agenda, that they are actually becoming the darkness in which democracy may die.