fwiw i saw some good friends of mine with level headed lost their mind on facebook and go full insane pro-trump and they arent even american...
they fell in the conspiracy racket so imo the cambridge analytica must had some effect surely.

The Russian state can sanction or sponsor ad's thru various covert arms without them putting a big State seal on it and that is exactly what they were doing. In the same way the CIA would carry out such foreign country interference and does.

It is naive to not understand that connection. And the proof will be designed so at best you only get known operatives commonly used by the CIA or Russians. Again you should not expect a person wearing a badge.

You seem very naive about this.

as per my prior post you are either very naive or just a Russia shill or Trump shill.

Here are people who have far more access to data than you do, who not only have zero motive to find against Trump, but have motive to not find what they did.


These are called 'conclusions' and 'findings of fact', and not your speculation.

Senate panel finds Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. election


The Trump campaign’s interactions with Russian intelligence services during the 2016 presidential election posed a “grave” counterintelligence threat, a Senate panel concluded ...

The nearly 1,000-page report, the fifth and final one from the Republican-led Senate intelligence committee on the Russia investigation, details how Russia launched an aggressive effort to interfere in the election on Trump’s behalf. It says the Trump campaign chairman had regular contact with a Russian intelligence officer and says other Trump associates were eager to exploit the Kremlin’s aid, particularly by maximizing the impact of the disclosure of Democratic emails hacked by Russian intelligence officers.

The report is the culmination of a bipartisan probe that produced what the committee called “the most comprehensive description to date of Russia’s activities and the threat they posed.” The investigation spanned more than three years as the panel’s leaders said they wanted to thoroughly document the unprecedented attack on U.S. elections.

The findings, including unflinching characterizations of furtive interactions between Trump associates and Russian operatives, echo to a large degree those of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation...

...While Mueller’s was a criminal probe, the Senate investigation was a counterintelligence effort with the aim of ensuring that such interference wouldn’t happen again....

One reason conspiracy theories persist is that people assume that authorities or knowledgeable people wouldn't say anything that could be easily disproven. That's hardly ever a safe assumption. You should look at the actual ads, not just believe what Schiff says about them without verifying. I would ask you to find one of these Russian facebook ads which you think could send anyone into paroxysms and post it here or link to it. If you do so, you might want to check and make sure it's not something proven to have been created by an American consulting firm and represented as from Russia. There could be more ads in that category by this point than authentic Russian troll farm ads.

Even Nate Silver, sellout that he is, is too protective of his reputation to sign off on the idea that the ads had any impact. He said they likely had none whatsoever. There were about 3500 ads in total if you go back as far as the CT wants you to, and only about 100 of those made any mention of Trump or Hillary. Of the ads which weren't just semantically lost in translation, how many of them provided anything that wasn't disseminating from other, better funded sources? But hey, don't stop believing. It's how you win, at least up until total collapse.

Oh ya they could def. come from other sources for sure. At the time he was getting tons of them(he's a longtime straight r voter anyway too though so he was voting trump regardless)--hillary has a mysterious disease was one that stuck out to me as potentially russian. But there were others and tbh I don't even remember if that 1 was from fb specifically. Outside of that it lots of the usual baby-eating/serial killer/racist/satanic kinda stuff. It's not like I was sitting there at the time or later trying to source every one. It was more like--wow there is seriously a ton of zany stuff flying around--the idea that some was from russia really isn't a big a stretch when it comes to conspiracy stuff being spread here. They've already been in the mix for ages. My post was more about all of those kinda ads having the potential to get people worked up like crazy. If stuff like that can turn someone I've known since kindergarten into someone I don't even recognize that easily I don't have too tough a time believing it could do it to other people.

My take on it has basically been that--it's at least plausible to some degree/could've had some effect. In states where the winner is decided by a c-hair--having an extra c-hair helps.

If Bernie Sanders had gone full conspiracy after losing the primaries and devoted his life to spreading nonsense about it like Trump has, he could have got some people to follow him. But it would have been really hard to make it a party defining issue, and not just because Trump has more influence among Republicans than Sanders does among Dems.

They are catastrophically stupid in large number. Also, their emotional intelligence is largely terrible. Bunch of petulant kindergarteners. No wonder they believe nonsense.

What is the evidence for what I put in bold? If you follow actual evidence, and not be simply led around by the assertions of proven liars, you are unlikely to fall into a conspiracy trap. Last I checked the government's official position is that there is no direct evidence of Russian state collaboration on the click bait. The explanation that by far best comports with the evidence is that some Russians were trying to make money with click bait and they saw that race and sex were topics Americans were likely to click on.

Those perpetuating the conspiracy theory that the Russian government was trying to get Trump elected by running these ads have maintained that the mechanism for getting people to vote for Trump was to stoke racial tensions in black people. This is ridiculous on the surface for several reasons. For one thing, stirring racial animus among black people would figure to only hurt Trump.

But the more profound idiocy of the claim, by far, is the idea of attributing racial tension to click bait on facebook when video of black people being murdered by he state is widely and frequently circulated, not to mention the economic state of the black people which is always disproportionately degraded whenever total inequality increases. To even suggest that the reason black people are upset is because of their simpleminded openness to those basic, sloppy Russian memes is a level of racism that was previously inconceivable. David Duke reads David Corn writing that and just mutters "king" while in total awe.

I mean, when your life philosophy has you at odds with doctors teachers, it's time to clean out the headgear

I don't know what "come to embrace conspiracy" means.

The CIA came up with the term "conspiracy theory" in the sixties I believe in order smear people who had suspicions about their nefarious activities.

It worked pretty well too.

I'm shocked to learn that someone believes an unfounded conspiracy theory about term "conspiracy theory."

https://theconversation.com/theres-a...res-why-132117

This is not really parody as it is just a true reflection of what the party is today and how they would expect Jesus to act or they would reject him too, for Trump.

I already posted one source of the evidence. The Senate report. Did you not read it?

If you are going to say the Senate report is wrong or those Republicans who lead it and wrote it are wrong, or not trustworthy I will need some evidence from you (not just statements) to demonstrate that.

"Totalitarianism is about the grip of the lie ... and it's emerging here ..." -- Jordan Peterson. And people say he never has any astute points or is just a talking head intellectual voice wannabe. He's that ... but a bit more.

Corn is trying to put a spin on recent history in order to give the Democrats some political advantage. He's not trying to give a real account of the Republican party and conspiracy theory. At least I wouldn't think he would fail so hard if that was what he was going for, even as dim as he is. The Democrats are obsessed with victory by a propaganda coup of negation, of defining the culture war in a way such that they win by default because the others are too dysfunctional to countenance, instead of winning by responding to preferences of their voting constituency. To that end, "come to embrace" according to Corn is specifically citing republican leadership as the problem. It's typical Democract elitist perspective, in keeping with this iteration of the Democratic party which treats the voting constituency as an object to be manipulated.

Corn is also coercing Republican racism and opposition to civil rights for blacks into conspiracy theory which, as morally repugnant as racism is, it's not fundamentally a conspiracy theory. He does this to tie in the conspiracy craziness to the wider culture war in which racism is already firmly established as a flash point.

In truth, as I pointed out in a previous post, the Republicans were founded on conspiracy theory and have been continually driven by them every since. There is no breaking point where the leadership of the party suddenly succumbed to the crazy mobs. But that picture doesn't as smoothly promote a political end, like saying "hey anyone sane in the Republican party get out now because it's getting nutty". And it's hard to get too much into how crazy Americans are and always have been without sounding crazy yourself.

Maybe you don't remember, but we dove into the documents in the Riggie thread. I'm sorry you couldn't benefit from the free education I offered you in that thread. But you aren't special in your failings. Maybe the majority of people will never be able to distinguish assertion and carefully worded speculation from factual evidence. I'm on the other side of the spectrum. When I was in 2nd grade and the experiment step of the scientific method was explained to me I was like that's obvious I already thought of that, and I thought it was odd that it had to be spelled out. You, on the other hand, just believe what any politically motivated authority tells you as long as you perceive them to be the authority that some original authority, likely your parents, told you to follow. You seem to have no independent faculty with which to construct knowledge.

I don't think there is anything the Democratic party could tell you that you would not believe. It's more likely that we will be living under a theocratic totalitarian regime in our lifetimes than that there is anything you people who believe Russiagate would not swallow on command from the DNC.

This is a really good post that I don't fully understand right now. I am perplexed. It is pretty amazing how uniquely insane American Politics and the people who reside in this country are. I'm inclined to agree, although from its beginnings was the republican party not an anti slavery party? Was it a conspiratorial party then or did this start in the 30's?

I though it was more the tea party that was loaded with craziness and all .
Sadly they became at it seem the majority in the Republican Party .
Seem to me it start a bit before that idiotic Palin as vp …..

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-...-party-founded

The Republican Party was founded by people whose main goal was preventing slavery from spreading to new western territories (that would eventually become states).
However, that doesn't particularly determine if they were really anti-slavery, or they just didn't want the country to be controlled by plantation owners.


While Abraham Lincoln (the first Republican President) was certainly no fan of slavery, he just wanted save the union more than anything else.

https://www.loc.gov/resource/mal.4233400/?st=text

From a letter he wrote while President:

"If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that."

I think this is underselling Lincoln's view on slavery. He thought slavery was evil and had designs to end it. He and his party had plans to end it over time that did not include unilaterally abolishing it because they thought the federal government did not have the constitutional authority to do it in states that already had slavery. He also believed he was constitutionally bound to preserve the union, including slave states. In that context the above quote seems a lot less in contrast with his anti-slavery persona. When Lincoln believed he had the legal basis to unilaterally free slaves he did with the Emancipation Proclamation.

What I recall is you offering solely unsubstantiated opinion as a counter to an Official Senate Report, with factual findings that had the benefit of every Intelligence agency in Ame3rica as its source.

You rebuttal being the equivalent of 'oh ya, well I was hearing things...' and claiming that is enough to debunk the Senate Report when it is not.


And for the record the Senate Report was lead by a Republican and it was truly bipartisan. So your 'democrat' line needs to be shifted in a more Trumpderp way to RINO's or some such.

If you have any bonafides you want to submit as to why your opinion, is to be considered any type of counter to a factual Senate Investigative report, please submit them and will will consider but until then the only proof in evidence is the Senate Report findings which show demonstrably the Russian collusion.

I agree that Lincoln, along with most Republicans at the time, was very anti-slavery. But I don't know of any evidence that disproves the above claim that they mostly cared about making sure the southern plantation economy didn't grow to dominate the northern commercial economy. I imagine that both were important.

The Emancipation Proclamation didn't actually free any slaves and was really just a (very good) piece of public relations / propaganda.

Your history teachers did a poor job if that was what you were taught.

Care to show any evidence otherwise? I got the highest score (5) on my AP History test, the only one of my class who did, despite it already being a fairly exclusive school.
How did you do on your US History exams?

The EP stated "that all persons held as slaves" within the rebellious states "are, and henceforward shall be free." That is, it "freed" the slaves in those states which were not, at the time, under the control of the US government.

The EP did not even try to ban slavery in the states where slavery was legal but had not seceded (like my home state of Kentucky). It even exempted the parts of the Confederacy which had already come under northern control.

As Bubble_Balls stated above, Lincoln did not even believe he had the power to free the slaves on his own under the Constitution, so during Reconstruction the 13th Amendment was passed to change the Constitution to allow the government to officially free the slaves.

If you disagree, you may want to take it up with the US Archives, who actually hold the document, and give a correct interpretation of it on their website:

https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/fe...0be%20free.%22