What Happened
Oct. 3rd, 2017 08:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingIt took me a while to read Hillary Clinton's new book What Happened, partially because it was upsetting but also because I did my best to track down her sources to confirm information I hadn't already seen in multiple places before. People are Tumblr are reblogging posts saying it's a bad book, because lol Tumblr, but overall it's fairly inoffensive and uninteresting... until it gets really, really interesting.
The first 4/5 of the book goes more or less like this...
(1) Clinton appreciates and respects everyone who supported her, and all mistakes are her own.
(2) Clinton loves her friends and her family and her grandchildren.
(3) Clinton has a good track record of advancing social justice, as does the Clinton Foundation.
(4) The economic landscape of America has drastically changed since the 1980s, and we should adjust our expectations and policies accordingly if we want to help people.
None of this is new or particularly noteworthy, and I wouldn't be too terribly surprised if Clinton didn't actually write most of it herself.
In the last fifth of the book, however, the tone and writing style changes as Clinton gets extremely detail-oriented and policy wonky. She drops the authorial voice of a benevolent grandmother and becomes absolutely fierce, and this is when I stopped rolling my eyes and started to pay attention to "what happened," which Clinton argues is essentially this:
(1) We know that Russian governmental and paragovernmental organizations have been manipulating both mainstream media and grassroots online subcultures within Russia for as long as Putin has been in power. This is extremely well documented and not a secret to anyone.
(2) Putin, his backers, and his associates are heavily invested in expanding the geographic territory and the economic influence of the Russian state, and it is in their best interests to foster an executive administration in the United States that will relax sanctions against Russia and decline to interfere in Russia's military actions.
(3) Putin's people cultivated Trump and key members of his campaign staff personally and financially. This obviously isn't a secret now, but the crazy thing is that the Obama administration (and the State Department, and the CIA, and the FBI) had a wealth of concrete information about these connections as early as 2015.
(4) Very early in 2016 the Russian propaganda machine (for want of a better way to describe it; Clinton goes super into detail about what this interrelated set of structures is and how it works) began attempting to influence the same feedback loop between online subcultures and mainstream media in America as it already successfully had in Russia. We now have corroborating studies from multiple highly respected institutions inside and outside the United States demonstrating that almost a quarter of the anti-Clinton "discourse" on sites such as 4chan and Twitter was generated by accounts originating in Russia.
(5) This was accompanied by a steady drip of "scandals" regarding Clinton, which is why, for example, we kept hearing so much about her stupid emails even after she was exonerated for using a private server. The mainstream media, not wanting to alienate itself from the zeitgeist on social media, was pushed into creating a false equivalency between Trump and Clinton by "balancing" coverage on each candidate, which was why the very real and very scary things Trump either had done or was doing were given equal weight to, for example, the possibility that a carefully timed release of information on Wikileaks (which is little more than an arm of the Russian state at this point) might reveal something disparaging about Clinton.
(6) The super interesting thing to me personally is that Russian operatives were also highly active in encouraging disruption politics on the American political left. To give an example, pseudonymous Russian accounts would create groups supporting Bernie Sanders and Black Lives Matter on Facebook and fill them with anti-Clinton posts capitalizing on the same angry identity politics that characterized the alt right. The goal was to fragment the solidarity of special interest groups that would typically vote Democrat in order to reduce confidence in the Democratic candidate and thus discourage people from voting.
And it worked, apparently.
On one hand, this is terrifying. On the other hand, I now feel a bit more sane about my reaction to the radicalization of disruption politics in leftist spaces like Tumblr. Obviously I wouldn't be so strongly attracted to a character like Ganondorf if I didn't believe in the value and efficacy of disruption, but even I thought that people on Tumblr were being a little crazy about the extremist use of identity politics to attack proven and potential allies instead of directing their attention toward more appropriate targets. I think it's probably impossible to say how much of this radicalization was engineered and how much of it was organic, but in any case the damage has been done, and now we can only try to move forward with the most accurate knowledge we have.
As an aside, I found Clinton's descriptions of Putin to be quite intriguing. She dislikes Trump, as I assume most reasonable people do, but her frustration with him is abstract and intellectual. The animosity she expresses regarding Putin is really something special, thoughand fuck me but now I ship it.
The first 4/5 of the book goes more or less like this...
(1) Clinton appreciates and respects everyone who supported her, and all mistakes are her own.
(2) Clinton loves her friends and her family and her grandchildren.
(3) Clinton has a good track record of advancing social justice, as does the Clinton Foundation.
(4) The economic landscape of America has drastically changed since the 1980s, and we should adjust our expectations and policies accordingly if we want to help people.
None of this is new or particularly noteworthy, and I wouldn't be too terribly surprised if Clinton didn't actually write most of it herself.
In the last fifth of the book, however, the tone and writing style changes as Clinton gets extremely detail-oriented and policy wonky. She drops the authorial voice of a benevolent grandmother and becomes absolutely fierce, and this is when I stopped rolling my eyes and started to pay attention to "what happened," which Clinton argues is essentially this:
(1) We know that Russian governmental and paragovernmental organizations have been manipulating both mainstream media and grassroots online subcultures within Russia for as long as Putin has been in power. This is extremely well documented and not a secret to anyone.
(2) Putin, his backers, and his associates are heavily invested in expanding the geographic territory and the economic influence of the Russian state, and it is in their best interests to foster an executive administration in the United States that will relax sanctions against Russia and decline to interfere in Russia's military actions.
(3) Putin's people cultivated Trump and key members of his campaign staff personally and financially. This obviously isn't a secret now, but the crazy thing is that the Obama administration (and the State Department, and the CIA, and the FBI) had a wealth of concrete information about these connections as early as 2015.
(4) Very early in 2016 the Russian propaganda machine (for want of a better way to describe it; Clinton goes super into detail about what this interrelated set of structures is and how it works) began attempting to influence the same feedback loop between online subcultures and mainstream media in America as it already successfully had in Russia. We now have corroborating studies from multiple highly respected institutions inside and outside the United States demonstrating that almost a quarter of the anti-Clinton "discourse" on sites such as 4chan and Twitter was generated by accounts originating in Russia.
(5) This was accompanied by a steady drip of "scandals" regarding Clinton, which is why, for example, we kept hearing so much about her stupid emails even after she was exonerated for using a private server. The mainstream media, not wanting to alienate itself from the zeitgeist on social media, was pushed into creating a false equivalency between Trump and Clinton by "balancing" coverage on each candidate, which was why the very real and very scary things Trump either had done or was doing were given equal weight to, for example, the possibility that a carefully timed release of information on Wikileaks (which is little more than an arm of the Russian state at this point) might reveal something disparaging about Clinton.
(6) The super interesting thing to me personally is that Russian operatives were also highly active in encouraging disruption politics on the American political left. To give an example, pseudonymous Russian accounts would create groups supporting Bernie Sanders and Black Lives Matter on Facebook and fill them with anti-Clinton posts capitalizing on the same angry identity politics that characterized the alt right. The goal was to fragment the solidarity of special interest groups that would typically vote Democrat in order to reduce confidence in the Democratic candidate and thus discourage people from voting.
And it worked, apparently.
On one hand, this is terrifying. On the other hand, I now feel a bit more sane about my reaction to the radicalization of disruption politics in leftist spaces like Tumblr. Obviously I wouldn't be so strongly attracted to a character like Ganondorf if I didn't believe in the value and efficacy of disruption, but even I thought that people on Tumblr were being a little crazy about the extremist use of identity politics to attack proven and potential allies instead of directing their attention toward more appropriate targets. I think it's probably impossible to say how much of this radicalization was engineered and how much of it was organic, but in any case the damage has been done, and now we can only try to move forward with the most accurate knowledge we have.
As an aside, I found Clinton's descriptions of Putin to be quite intriguing. She dislikes Trump, as I assume most reasonable people do, but her frustration with him is abstract and intellectual. The animosity she expresses regarding Putin is really something special, though
