For months we’ve been hearing that the Russian government meddled in last year’s presidential election to aid the candidacy of Donald Trump. And now news has emerged that part of that dastardly campaign was supporting … Black Lives Matter?
CNN had the exclusive
news Wednesday: “At least one of the Facebook ads bought by Russians during the 2016 presidential campaign referenced Black Lives Matter and was specifically targeted to reach audiences in Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore … The sources said it appears the ad was meant to appear both as supporting Black Lives Matter but also could be seen as portraying the group as threatening to some residents of Baltimore and Ferguson,” Dylan Byers’s report read.
The ads were apparently purchased by the Internet Research Agency, that per CNN, “U.S. military intelligence has described as ‘a state-funded organization that blogs and tweets on behalf of the Kremlin.’”
There are two ways to read this news. First, if one accepts that the Russians’ sole objective was to help Trump, then they appear to have determined that Black Lives Matter is a net electoral negative for the Democrats. There’s evidence that they’re right: BLM becomes less popular the more people hear about it. Back when the movement was still nascent, 43 percent supported it, 22 percent opposed it, and 30 percent had never heard of it,
found the Pew Research Center. Now that BLM has grown in prominence—in no small part because the Democratic party has tethered itself to it—fully 57 percent of Americans have a
negative view of the activist movement, which some have found
responsible for alarming increases in violent crime in cities where it is particularly active.
In other words, the Russians realized what the Democrats still haven’t: It’s electoral hemlock to associate themselves with BLM. (And by the way, given that Hillary Clinton was notoriously unappealing on the hustings, perhaps it would have been more efficient for the Russians to help Trump by donating directly to her campaign so she could have made more public appearances.) That portends badly for the Democrats going forward, as, if anything, they cling to BLM ever more tightly.
A different possibility is not that the Russians promoted BLM to hurt Clinton and help Trump, but instead to sow discord. That appears to be the favored reading of the establishment. Here’s more from CNN:
So Warner, who has been banging the drum about Russia’s attempts to aid Trump for months, all of a sudden has a different reading on the Kremlin’s behavior. For obvious political reasons, Warner can’t suggest that BLM hurts his party. So, now that we know they promoted both Republican and Democratic causes, the Russians merely wanted to create chaos, he suggests. (This would actually be in keeping with what we know about Russian meddling in other country’s elections.) But that seems to undermine the Russia-wanted-to-help-Trump narrative. Why would “chaos” necessarily improve the lot of the Republican candidate? Warner and his ilk don’t say.
