The paperwork present that the orchestrators of the marketing campaign focused present 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 ought to be exploited in the middle of an data marketing campaign in/for the US.”
The identical doc is filled with racist and conspiratorial claims together with that Republicans are “victims of discrimination of individuals of colour.” It provides that white center class individuals are being discriminated in opposition to with excessive inflation and rising costs, whereas “unemployed individuals of colour 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 Venture planning doc.
The ‘Good Previous USA’ plan brazenly admits that “not one of the important American politicians could be thought-about pro-Russian or pro-Putin,” and so fairly than focus its efforts on attempting to persuade folks that Russia is nice, the plan referred to as for selling the concept that the US ought to be focusing its assets much less on Ukraine and extra on home points, akin to rising inflation and excessive gasoline costs.
“It is smart for Russia to place a most effort to make sure that the Republican Occasion’s perspective (before everything, the opinion of Trump supporters) wins over the US public opinion,” the Good Previous USA Venture planning doc reads. “This contains provisions on peace in Ukraine in change for territories, the necessity to give attention to the issues of the US financial system, returning troops dwelling from everywhere in the world, and so forth.”
In addition to getting Trump elected, the marketing campaign’s secondary objectives included growing the proportion of People who consider the US is doing an excessive amount of to help Ukraine to 51 p.c, and lowering the proportion of People who’ve confidence in President Joe Biden right down to 29 p.c.
The plan lists quite a lot of audiences the marketing campaign particularly needs to focus on, together with residents of swing states, American Jews, “US residents of Hispanic descent,” and the “neighborhood of American avid gamers, customers of Reddit and picture boards, akin to 4chan.”
The doc describes this class of avid gamers 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 lots 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 forth,” in response to the paperwork) with a view to seem on the prime 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.”
