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Comment by jessaustin | Hacker News Reader

What dollar value do you assign to misinformation that undermined the national discourse around the 2016 U.S. election...

It has been priceless for "both" the "major" parties, that such a baseless falsehood as RussiaRussiaRussia has allowed them to avoid any scrutiny of how their chosen candidates could have been beaten by a reality-TV buffoon. After enough arm-twisting, FB finally allowed that, sure, whatever, Russia bought a couple thousand dollars worth of ads. Thanks Facebook!

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Baseless falsehood? I take it you haven’t read the Mueller Report or seen the indictments of Russian Nationals. Willful ignorance or intentional misinformation?

Some people commit crimes and go to jail, including Russian nationals who interfere with our elections. But let's be clear, a few thousand dollars of Facebook ads that read like they were created by high schoolers is not why a clown was elected. That's the lie, not that foreign actors tried to influence our election. Foreign actors trying to influence elections is the standard operating procedure for all the big players in the world.

The danger is that if people keep inflating this imaginary foreign bugaboo as the root cause for their perceived catastrophe, they will ignore the real reasons they lost the next time. Perhaps the second time around can break through their cognitive dissonance, but I fear it will just break sanity.

I'm confident he'll win again and worry there'll be riots in major cities. The front runner for the Democrats, Biden, doesn't even seem to be really campaigning. I think their strategy is "The less people see Biden the more they like him" so he has carefully been timid enough to stay out of the news. And Biden is definitely a back to former status quo candidate.

And I'm worried that if he loses, he won't accept the results of the election, and that many of his most rabid fans will follow him into the abyss. I'm worried that his jokes about staying President betray his actual desires, and that his lack of knowledge and respect for the Constitution and rule of law, or of norms of decency, alongside his narcissism and lack of inhibition, will cause him to do just that. I'm worried that this country has become two countries, and that Republicans would rather stick it to the libs than follow their own oft stated principle s. I worry that the talking heads self interest in stoking controversey and outrage puts ratings before truth, god, and country. I worry that no one wants to find the truth anymore,band that some believe that there is no truth, only power. I worry that each side no longer sees the other as friends, neighbours, allies, or even as Americans, perhaps not even fully human.

People have said the same thing about at least the two most recent previous presidents. There's zero chance of him not stepping down. Even if Trump were the type of person to try that, which he's not, in order for the type of coup you're talking about to work you have to have support of the military. Any attempt to do this would last all of about ten seconds.

I am aware that it is an American tradition to worry about Presidents defying their term limits, declaring national emergencies to seize power, and all that jazz. It's a tradition I approve of, especially given the increasing power of the executive branch, and Congress's weak-kneed approach to reigning that in.

That said, Trump's "jokes" about such things are not ordinary and are deeply inappropriate. Also his attempts to get the military and the police to show personal loyalty to him is also unusual, and deeply inappropriate. Even if, as you say, he couldn't pull it off even if he tried, that doesn't mean it is not setting bad precedent. Norms are much harder to build up than to tear down, and the rule of law as we know it cannot survive without them.

All major indications are that he was prepared to lose and concede the 2016 election. He didn't appear to have written an acceptance speech. He didn't have a cabinet picked out. He is rumored to have had a deal in the works to start his own cable channel, Trump TV. You don't do that stuff if you're planning on committing a coup to overthrow the country after losing an election. I remember the first six months. He was not behaving like a person who seriously thought he'd be running the country, legitimately or otherwise. There is no reasonable concern here. He's a reality TV personality and says a lot of stupid shit. I don't like him a president, but these hair on fire fears and conspiracy theories are baseless.

I'm not talking about 2016, and never have been talking about 2016. but it's pretty clear you are not actually responding to anything I've actually said, so no point in continuuing the conversation. probably no point to begin with, since when it comes to politics people's heads don't stay on straight.

but presidents saying "stupid shit" is not something I take lightly

I understand you're not talking about 2016. But the Trump that was totally ready to concede and not ever even become the President in 2016 is the same Trump running in 2020.

> whatever, Russia bought a couple thousand dollars worth of ads.

The Kremlin internet propaganda project had, at its peak, a budget of more than $1.25 million per month. It was doing a lot more than just buying adverts.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/02/mueller...

That's really peanuts though. If that was all they spent, then for less than the cost of one fighter jet, they destabilized the most powerful country in the world for three years, so far. That would be the most wildly successful propaganda campaign in history.

It is at least a glowing endorsement of the efficacy of a well-run Facebook properties ad campaign.

Google Adwords has much less ROI in this context.

That's just known expenditures by the Internet Research Agency, though. For a full accounting, you'd not only need to know if that was all the IRA spent, you'd also need to include, say... how much Russia spent on hacking into the DNC's emails, and into 39 states' election infrastructure[1]; how much value they extracted from the polling data Manafort sent their way[2]; etc.

And even with all costs taken into account, it took a perfect storm of factors outside their control for their actions to actually change the result. I doubt they even expected that outcome themselves.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-13/russian-b...

[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/03/mueller...

...perfect storm of factors outside their control...

This is what I was talking about above. Both Ds and Rs ran noxious morons, and they got beat by a different noxious moron. Both Ds and Rs ignored real things that real people care about, like fewer evil wars and more good jobs. Trump had some lip service on those topics, and that was enough.

Oh, also there was the fact that Trump was on every channel of TV news, all day every day for 1.5 years. That probably had something to do with it, and Russians had very little influence over that. Why has there been no great hue and cry about investigating MSNBC's and Fox's editorial and programming decisions? Why, indeed.

That article from over a year ago cites allegations, not evidence. Has anyone ITT taken a high school civics class?

I admit that some Dems have ridden too much on Russia as being the cause of their problems, but you are so widely off base to act like what Russia did was only purchase a few advertisements. I’d recommend reading the Mueller report like others have mentioned.

It has been decades since I trusted anyone in the Justice Department, or Mueller specifically. Did you know he testified before Congress that Saddam had WMDs? Did you know that wasn't true? Did Mueller ever come up on perjury charges? Did you know that they send people to prison for drug possession? What kind of evil bastard does that?

I read the damn report. There is a lot of innuendo and a lot of broad "we found" without much specifics but not anything Mueller ever plans to have to defend in court. If any of the "Russian hacking" crap had ever generated a court case, a federal judge would be present to ensure that claims are examined carefully. As it is, it's just a bunch of Crowdstrike/New Knowledge-style handwaving.

Not only that, he's doing nothing by the book and yet everything seems to be going extremely well for almost everyone. Every time both parties say he's crazy for doing something, it's fine. It's really put on the spotlight that either the office of the presidency doesn't matter at all, or all of their conventional wisdom was just wrong. Trade, economy, negotiation with dictators... All of it both parties have panicked about what he's doing and it's all either better than before or at least not worse.

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