The paperwork present that the orchestrators of the marketing campaign focused current divisions inside US society, utilizing racist stereotypes and far-right conspiracies to focus on supporters of former President Donald Trump.
”They’re afraid of shedding the American lifestyle and the ‘American dream,’” Gambashidze writes in a single doc outlining his “guerilla media” plan. “It’s these sentiments that needs to be exploited in the midst of an info marketing campaign in/for the USA.”
The identical doc is filled with racist and conspiratorial claims together with that Republicans are “victims of discrimination of individuals of shade.” It provides that white center class persons are being discriminated towards with excessive inflation and rising costs, whereas “unemployed folks of shade find yourself being privileged teams of the inhabitants.”
And the purpose of the marketing campaign, from the start, was crystal clear: “To safe victory for [Donald Trump],” Gambashidze wrote within the Good Previous USA Mission planning doc.
The ‘Good Previous USA’ plan overtly admits that “not one of the vital American politicians could be thought-about pro-Russian or pro-Putin,” and so reasonably than focus its efforts on attempting to persuade people who Russia is nice, the plan referred to as for selling the concept the US needs to be focusing its assets much less on Ukraine and extra on home points, akin to rising inflation and excessive gasoline costs.
“It is sensible for Russia to place a most effort to make sure that the Republican Get together’s viewpoint (before everything, the opinion of Trump supporters) wins over the US public opinion,” the Good Previous USA Mission planning doc reads. “This contains provisions on peace in Ukraine in trade for territories, the necessity to concentrate on the issues of the US financial system, returning troops house from everywhere in the world, and so on.”
In addition to getting Trump elected, the marketing campaign’s secondary objectives included growing the proportion of Individuals who imagine the US is doing an excessive amount of to help Ukraine to 51 p.c, and lowering the proportion of Individuals who’ve confidence in President Joe Biden all the way down to 29 p.c.
The plan lists a wide range of audiences the marketing campaign particularly desires to focus on, together with residents of swing states, American Jews, “US residents of Hispanic descent,” and the “neighborhood of American players, customers of Reddit and picture boards, akin to 4chan.”
The doc describes this class of players and chat room customers because the “spine of the right-wing tendencies within the US section of the Web.” In current months, the Trump marketing campaign has embraced most of the most influential figures inside these communities, together with many who share deeply misogynistic rhetoric regularly.
To unfold their narrative, the plan referred to as for the creation of YouTube channels that shared pro-Trump content material in addition to different viral movies (“music, humor, lovely women and so on,” in line with the paperwork) with the intention to seem on the high of search outcomes for “US elections.”
In the meantime, Gambashidze and his colleagues used Fb, Twitter and Reddit to create neighborhood teams of Trump supporters, with one pattern title given as “Alabama for America the Nice.” The doc additionally reveals that the Russians deliberate to make use of Reddit as a vector to disseminate their propaganda as it’s a platform “free from democratic censorship.”
