Hidden Forces Behind Fascist Movements Here and Abroad

by Brian T. Lynch, MSW

Sweeden's war on global fascism is our war too. Some of you might dismiss me as a conspiracy nut when I write that Russians and our own right-wing media are attacking us every day. The article linked to here from the NY Times is illuminating on this subject and supports my observations. And yes... Russia really IS waging a vigorous global war on all Western nations. Donald Trump really IS enabling foreign attacks on U.S. citizens to further his own white nationalist goals.

The Russian goal is to destabilize Western democracies and turn them into fascist-crony capitalist states where super-billionaires like Putin, the richest man who ever lived, can make more money, control more people and destroy more lives for his personal pleasure. This isn't too far from President Trump's own desires.  It is perhaps why he holds Vladimir Putin in such high regard.

Destroying pluralism, establishing global white supremacy, and making the world safe for crony capitalism is also Steve Bannon's vision. He readily admits in his interviews that he wants to break us down so he can remake the world according to his liking. His ideas are aligned with the visions of many on the far right, including rogue billionaires such as Robert Mercer and the Kock brothers. And their visions are aligned with many of Senate and Congressional Republicans who want to control our country.

And so it is that the interests of the political far-right, Vladimir Putin's Russia, rogue international billionaires, and now wealthy totalitarian states like Saudi Arabia, have all converged. The separate interest groups may not be directly coordinating with each other, but they are aligned and working in tandem. The forces arrayed against us are both domestic and foreign, both civilian and military. The methods of attack are the used of wealth and power to take economic controls over national economies and public media domination to conduct military-grade psychological warfare augmented by high-tech, mind-altering media propaganda techniques. We are clearly under attack yet most of us refuse to admit it.

For many who have fallen victim to these attacks, to admit you have been attacked is to admit you have been gullible, vulnerable, and manipulated. It means admitting your ideas might not be entirely your own, that others may have been controlling how you feel about think. Who has the courage to admit to all that?

There are things we can do to take back and hold onto our heritage, our narrative, and our democracy, but first, we have to open our eyes to the global assault we are under. We have to look past partisan politics which is tossed like sand in our eyes so we don't see the big picture. We have to see ultra-partisan citizens as damaged victims in this global war and find ways to reach them. We have to unify and rally ourselves. We have to reject leaders who think we are still operating on the old political paradigms. But it must start by recognizing that we are at war. 

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Picture Credit: NY Times:https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/10/world/europe/sweden-immigration-nationalism.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

Micro-targeting: How Personal Data Stolen From Facebook Helped Elect Donald Trump

by Brian T. Lynch, MSW

In the spirit of "past as prologue", I offer this brief review of how the newest high-tech cyberwarfare techniques were successfully used by the Trump campaign in 2016 to win the electoral contest despite nearly three million fewer popular votes.

Imagine a world in which corporations, political organizations, billionaires, and hostile governments had the computing power, data storage capacity, personal information about you (think Facebook), and sophisticated computer algorithms to accurately predict your behavior. What if they could predict the behavior of every adult in the United States? Then imagine they could find you on social media by filtering the entire US adult population according to the specific personality characteristics they compiled on everyone. And after identifying you by your personality, imagine that they could flood your personal media accounts with specific messages and images designed to trigger your emotions, alter your opinions, or fundamentally change your social outlook without you catching on that this is happening to you.

This science-fiction horror scenario, reminiscent of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers movie years ago, isn’t science fiction. It is the real world in which we live today.

What the above scenario describes is “micro-targeting.” It is just one of the latest high-tech propaganda weapons manipulating our personal information against us. It was first unleashed in this country by Cambridge Analytica during the 2016 Presidential election campaign, but it was previously used by them in Great Britain during the Brexit campaign. It has also been used in numerous other foreign countries during their elections. It is a certainty that micro-targeting will play a much bigger role in the 2020 election cycle.

Cambridge Analytica was a British political consulting firm that combined data mining, data brokerage, and data analysis with strategic communication during the electoral processes here and abroad. Public scrutiny that followed them after their schemes were later uncovered force the company out of business, but their successful application of micro-targeting and other sophisticated propaganda tools triggered an arms race among big businesses and powerful interest groups to master these new technologies and apply them for both competitive advantages and political control.

There is a 2019 documentary currently available on Netflix that chronicles the story of Cambridge Analytica and how our personal data is being stolen from us and used against us. It’s called “The Great Hack,” and everyone should see it after reading this. There are also many other articles now about micro-targeting and other propaganda technologies being adopted by corporations and political consulting companies. My limited purpose here is to give a concrete example of how micro-targeting was used in the 2016 Presidential campaign.

In 2016 Cambridge Analytica stole the personal data of 50 million US Facebook users to create their giant database. They fed this data into very sophisticated AI-enhanced algorithms (mathematical computer programs) to create very accurate “biopsychosocial” personality profiles on every person from whom personal data was stolen. From these profiles, they were able to accurately identify adults in the United States who either didn’t have strong political opinions or were otherwise susceptible to having their minds changed. They called these people the “persuadables,” and there were many of them all across the country. In fact, there were too many to directly target each of them, but this isn’t necessary. We don’t elect presidents by the popular vote, but by electoral votes from individual states.

To understand how micro-targeting works, it is helpful to review how state election systems works. Every state divides its electorate into scores of smaller voting precincts or polling districts, each with a long public record of how precincts voted in the past. Presidential campaigns conduct extensive polling in every state district where their candidate has a historical possibility of winning. After analyzing the polling data in conjunction with historical voting trends, they are able to identify the voting precincts that they need to win in order to win the state’s electoral votes. Campaigns use this information to determine where to campaign, where to spend money on ads and where to build strong get-out-the-vote efforts.

Cambridge Analytica went further. They identified and targeted all the persuadables in every swing precinct in four swing states, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Florida. Then they used social media networks and their knowledge of the personality profiles of each targeted person to bombard them with images and content designed specifically to get them to either vote for Donald Trump (and other Republican candidates down-ballot) or to feel so dispirited that they didn’t vote at all.

For the sake of argument, let’s assume there was a total of 24 swing precincts targeted in these four swing states. The number was probably more. Each precinct contained around 20,000 persuadable voters, according to the documentary report. That means at least 480,000 individuals were targeted by a personal media blitz to either vote for Donald Trump or be dissuaded from voting for Hillary Clinton. That’s just 480,000 voters out of 130 million.

An analysis of the 2016 election found that the results came down to the winners of the six swing states. Hillary Clinton won two of those states. Donald Trump won four of them, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Florida, the same states targeted by Cambridge Analytica.

According to an analysis by the Washington Post:

 “Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania account for 46 electoral votes. If Clinton had won these states, she could have sealed the presidency with 274 total electoral votes… This election was effectively decided by 107,000 people in these three states. Trump won the popular vote there by that combined amount. That amounts to 0.09 percent of all votes cast in this election.”

Donald Trump unexpectedly won Michigan by a narrow margin of 0.23%. This stands as the narrowest margin of victory in Michigan's presidential election history. He unexpectedly won Wisconsin by a narrow margin of just 0.77 percent, becoming the first Republican candidate to win in Wisconsin since Ronald Reagan in 1984. Trump won Pennsylvania by 44,292 votes out of more than six million votes cast, a difference of 0.72 percent and the narrowest margin in a presidential election for that state in 176 years. Trump did better in Florida where he won a plurality with 1.2 percent of the vote.

So, did Cambridge Analytica play a key role in Donald Trump’s electoral victory? It seems conceivable, but they weren’t alone. Russian cyberattacks on our election also played a significant role in helping to defeat Hillary Clinton.

Did the Robert Mueller investigation cover micro-targeting of voters during the 2016 campaign? No. This election activity was not directly linked to Russian interference and so it was outside the scope of his investigation, although there is some evidence of a nexus between Russia and Cambridge Analytica involving the Brexit campaign. Also, Robert Mueller was not charged with investigating the actual impact of Russian interference in our election results. No one is investigating that issue. It is possible that the stealing of personal Facebook data was referred out elsewhere for criminal investigation, but we don’t know.

What we do know is that the American public is compromised by the massive collection and misuse of our personal data. We are vulnerable to psychosocial based manipulations that alter our behavior without our being aware that it is happening to us. We know that micro-targeting is now a major tool in corporate marketing, which may explain why the personal data collection and analysis industry has surpassed the oil industry as the most profitable business sector on earth. And we know that little is being done to protect our privacy rights, or our elections from weaponized propaganda, or to educate the public about the threats to which we are exposed every day. And we can all be very sure micro-targeting will be a prominent factor in the next election and every future election to come.



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Image credit: https://thehumornation.com/know-facebook-addiction/

A War of Perceptions

by Brian T. Lynch, MSW

[Bloggers note, 12/25/17: The latest perception bending attacks are coming from GOP members of Congress who are using documents from their House investigations and secret meetings to destroy the credibility of the FBI and the Mueller investigation. They are both using, and being influenced by right wing media outlets, some of which are Russian based fronts. You have to wonder if they are themselves compromised by intelligence collected on them from the hacked RNC documents, etc.  Why else would they be acting so contrary to their better instincts?] 

We are at war, but it isn't a kinetic war where things explode. It's a perceptual war that uses our advanced social medium platforms and weaponized psycho-social messaging against us. It radically "emotionalizes" every issue or belief system that naturally exists in our socially diverse, pluralistic society. Every difference is ripped open into an emotional divide until we can't discuss it without rancor. Friends and relatives whose company we once enjoyed we now avoid because conversations with them have become so contentious on the facts and crippled with emotions. 

We are in a global information war against democratic societies. It attacks our trust in self-government. It undermines our faith in civil institutions and the free press. It divides us, polarizes us, confuses us and eventually turns us against our neighbors. It eats away at the values, morals and principles that unit people. It fills us with mistrust, greed, envy and hate. We are led to see the world in stark contrast and black or white thinking.

When we are disunited and weak, when we are unable to govern ourselves and events spiral out of control, we will welcome the social order that the wealthy and powerful tyrants of our day want to impose. 

I know this sounds bleak and a little crazy, even to me, but we have entered into an age were the powerful elites who own or control the means of mass communications can modify and manipulate mass perceptions if we let them. 

We must hold fast to our love for humanity. We must trust in our shared values, heal our divisions, restore civility, take back control of our public discourse and re-balance public actions to better serve the greater good for all. Where we are estranged from friend and family over political or social issues, we must overcome our divisions so we can face the enemies that seek to divide us.