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The Russians had help.
Just who is it that hacked the election of 2016?
It It is clear that, in 2016, the Russians intruded on the US in order to influence the Presidential election. What is less clear is the extent to which this involved anything new or represents a successful ‘hacking’ of the electorate.
After all, how do you hack an electorate that has already hacked itself?
What we know about the efforts of the Russians in 2016 is that they unleashed a tsunami of provably untrue stories, an amen chorus of fake social media identities and then, apparently, committed wholesale burglary of emails, first from the DNC and then from John Podesta. All this together, and in concert, leading to the slow burn reveal of innuendo, aspersions and outright lies inexorably making their way to the mainstream. But this drawn out and tenuous reveal came to nothing: the stories were debunked then, and are now known to be part of a larger, concerted effort that is almost comical in its distance from reality; fake identities had been identified and culled; the emails revealed nothing of import and, in fact, their content is largely forgotten. Anybody having paid for such a reveal ought to feel defrauded since, in fact, nothing was revealed. How does something, on the surface so manifestly a failure, in appearance at least, lead to so fantastic a success?
