BOT: A computer program that operates as an agent for a user or other program in order to simulate or influence human activity.

Internet Research Agency, Агентство интернет-исследований: A Russian company engaged in online influence operations on behalf of Russian business and political interests. It is linked to Russian oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin and based in Saint Petersburg, Russia.

---

The Internet Research Agency (IRA) is the real Russian collusion story beginning in 2016 until today.

On August 6th 2022 The Washington Standard reported:

After years of Russiagate conspiracy theories about how the Russians had somehow rigged the 2016 presidential election using Facebook ads, the Senate Intelligence report awkwardly revealed that the Russian operation had focused most of its attention on black nationalists.

The Senate report revealed that “most of the videos” put out by the Russian IRA troll factory on YouTube “pertained to police brutality and the activist efforts of the Black Lives Matter organization” and found that “no single group of Americans was targeted… more than African-Americans” around “race and related issues”.

But that was an understatement.

The Russians had created their own Black Lives Matter groups, activists and protests. It is still not fully clear where the dividing lines between black nationalists and Russian agents lie. And the media has consistently buried these revelations about the real Russian role in our politics to focus on the discredited smears targeting President Trump and his political allies.

And yet the true Russian agents were the black nationalists championed by the Left.

According to Wikipedia,

The agency has employed fake accounts registered on major social networking sites,^[3] discussion boards, online newspaper sites, and video hosting services to promote the Kremlin’s interests in domestic and foreign policy including Ukraine and the Middle East as well as attempting to influence the 2016 United States presidential election. More than 1,000 employees reportedly worked in a single building of the agency in 2015.

Social media is filled with fake accounts called BOTs, short for robot, that are used by individuals and nation states to influence social and political policies.

The Democrats—BLM—Russiagate

In an  October 8th, 2019 article titled Senate Intel Report Shows Russian Propaganda Was Not About 2016 Election Daniel Greenfield wrote.

This is volume 2 of the Senate Intel report on Russia’s propaganda activities targeting Americans, on the left and the right, with fake Facebook groups and social media accounts. Despite the media’s false claims, Vol. 2 makes it clear this was not about the election.

Analysis of the behavior of the IRA-associated social media accounts makes dear that while the Russian information warfare campaign exploited the context of the election and election-related issues in 2016, the preponderance of the operational focus, as reflected repeatedly in content, account names, and audiences targeted, was on sociapy divisive issues-such as race, immigration, and Second Amendment rights-in an attempt to pit Americans against one another and against their government. The Committee found that IRA influence operatives consistently used hot-button, societal divisions in the United States as fodder for the content they published through social media in order to stoke anger, provoke outrage and protest, push Americans further away from one another, and foment distrust in government institutions. The divisive 2016 U.S. presidential election was just an additional feature of a much more expansive,, target-rich landscape of potential ideological and societal sensitivities.

The IRA was Russia’s troll org.

Again, we already knew this. A previous report and this report already showed that most of the activities were targeted at black people. Facebook itself revealed that most of the ad buys were post-election. (And the media responded with furious threats and attacks on Facebook.)

The Committee found that no single group of Americans was targeted by IRA information operatives more than African-Americans. By far, race and related issues were the preferred target of the information warfare campaign designed to divide the country in 2016. Evidence of the IRA’s overwhelming operational emphasis on race is’ evident in the IRA’s Facebook advertisement content (over 66 percent contained a term related to race) and targeting (locational targeting was principally aimed at African Americans in key metropolitan areas with), its Face book pages (one of the IRA’s topperforming pages, “Blacktivist,” generated 11.2 million engagements with Facebook ‘ users), its Instagram content (five of the top 10 Instagram accounts were focused on African-American issues and audiences), its Twitter content (heavily focused on hotbutton issues with racial undertones, such as the NFL kneeling protests),

In other words, the Russkies were doing the same stuff they were doing during the Cold War.

According to the U.S. Senate intelligence report,

For decades, Soviet active measures pushed conspiratorial and disinformation narratives about the United States around the world. The KGB authored and published false stories and forged letters concerning the Kennedy assassination, including accounts suggesting CIA involvement in the killing. Martin Luther King, Jr. was the target of manufactured KGB narratives, as was Ronald Reagan. Russian intelligence officers planted anti-Reagan articles in Denmark, France, and India during his unsuccessful 1976 bid for the Republican presidential nomination.

A declassified U.S. State. Department document from 1981 outlines a series of realized Russian active measures operations, including the spread of falsehoods concerning U.S. complicity in the 1979 seizure of the Grand Mosque of Mecca and responsibility for the 1981 death of Panamanian General Omar Torrijos, as well as an elaborate deception involving multiple forgeries and false stories designed to undermine the Camp David peace process and to exacerbate tensions between the United States and Egypt. Among the most widely known and successful active measures operations conducted during the Cold War centered on a conspiracy that the AIDS virus was manufactured by the United States at a military facility at Fort Detrick in Maryland. This fictional account of the virus’ origin received considerable news coverage, both in the United States and in over forty non-Cold War aligned countries around the world. 49 (U) I

In a 1998 CNN interview, retired KGB Major General Oleg Kalugin described active measures as “the heart and soul of Soviet intelligence”: Not intelligence collection, but subversion; active measures to weaken the West, to drive wedges in the Western community alliances of all sorts, particularly NATO; to sow discord among allies, to weaken the. United States in the eyes of the people of Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and thus to prepare ground in case the war really occurs.

The Bottom Line

The Washington Standard asked,

The question is how much of the Black Lives Matter and Antifa violence came out of Moscow?

Much like the Soviet involvement in race riots and domestic terrorism by the black nationalist and anti-war Left during the Cold War, we will likely never get a full accounting of the impact.

And yet an important missing piece of Russiagate is that the Left was once again accusing conservatives of its own crimes. Right down to the Russian backing for its election interference.

The Russians weren’t elevating Trump and Republicans, they were backing the far Left.

Russia has historically been on the side of the Democrats and their splinter groups. The Russians have been targeting those who oppose socialism in all of its forms.

The whole Trump Russian Collusion narrative was trumped up, no pun intended.

Who benefited from this onslaught of Russia Myths—The Democrat Party and its candidates.

We have written about the Red—Green—Blue Alliance.

The Communists, Islamists and Democrats are all on the same political page.

America is not about Democrat vs. Republican, its all about Tyrants vs. Patriots.

The 2022 midterm elections are the tipping point. Do patriots take back the House and Senate? This is the fundamental question.

©Dr. Rich Swier. All rights reserved.