On Wednesday, we started hearing about excerpts from Michael Wolff's behind the scene Trump tell all book, 'Fire and Fury.' The book is ripe with juicy nuggets! There's more evidence of Trump's illegal wrongdoing, with many in his Administration far more focused on not being in the room when laws were being broken, as opposed to stopping the illegal activity. There's also the ludicrous passages, such as Trump's four year old intolerant child behavior when he was being briefed on the Constitution, and Trump's 6:30 PM bedtime cheeseburgers (WTF!). Needless to say, it's a hoot!
By late Wednesday, I was experiencing a phenomenon which appears whenever Trump has bad or embarrassing news taking over the news cycle. My radio show social media pages become inundated with Trump supporters insisting I should either 1) stop talking about Trump in a negative light, 2) praise Trump as he's the greatest President ever, 3) I should be arrested or leave the country if I don't go along with the majority who love Trump (?!?), and 4) calls for more investigations into the 'clearly guilty' Hillary Clinton; the woman they feel is the pantsuit Pol Pot.
They come out of no where, in unison, most of the time starting with "I just happened to stumble upon your page," or "what in the world is this" (like they suddenly were transported to my social media). They have American sounding names, but there are signs a majority of them are not from the US. Their English is bad, far beyond the 'your/you're' and 'there/their/they're' mistakes. It's like reading a bad translation into English. In the past, their profile images were either generic pictures, or photos which make them look like a super model, but this time, I had a lot of images of older white 'Americans' with similar themes. If it were a 'male' commenter, they almost all had a photo of them in the woods, at a cabin or by a stream, with either a dog or an ATV (they gave up the ghost with the 8 ATV profile photos). The 'female' profile images were mostly an image of a smiling elderly woman, usually with a child, by a lake or a pool.
Looking deeper into their profiles, most of them have nothing to show; no tweets or Facebook posts. The friends/followers they have have all the same type of profile image, which is quite comical, like they're part of some AVT/cabin/child/water cult. Their timeline has a few stock images of a US soldier or an American flag, but that's pretty much it.
The main goal of these intruders is to frantically get me to change the conversation. I have tons of experience with this tactic from my radio show. Over the years, numerous Republicans have called up and brought in a topic from out of the blue, in an attempt to change the conversation, usually with a setup like "You guys talk about Trump's ineptitude, but why aren't we talking about crop prices?" What I get on social media is far more intense. I have to delete and block many of these people just to take my pages back.
This happened when the Inauguration attendance fiasco happened. It happened when James Comey was fired. It happened when Robert Mueller was appointed Special Counsel. It happened when Manafort and Papadopoulos were indicted. It happened when Flynn plead guilty, and it's happening now, when a damning book rich with Trump crimes and embarrassments is hitting the shelves.
CLEARLY the Russians are not done trying to influence the US public or our elections. I've adopted a policy: If the argument is reckless, designed to win you over by using the worst vitriol or the most intense emotions, I immediately delete it, regardless of what political ideology it seems to be coming from. If you apply that standard to not only Trump defenders, but to also people pretending to be from the American political left who still scream "Hillary Clinton is FAR worse than Trump," you start to see the level of effort that was put forward to steal the 2016 election, and you see the effort the Russians are still putting forward to control us today. Trust me, deleting these fake accounts is the correct course of action.
Then again, there are occasional posters who seem very legit. This time around, there's one woman who seems real, who has a normal Facebook profile and page, but insists Trump has 50% of the American people supporting him, and Hillary Clinton is truly evil. How she got caught up in the inertia of the rest of these clearly fake accounts, I'm not sure. For her own sake, I'm trying to talk her out of her Fox News fueled dementia. We have to come to grips with how much damage Fox News has actually done to the US, whether they're acting as individual provocateurs, or they're part of a larger game with Trump and the Russians, but I'll save that for another blog post. So far, I've not had much luck convincing her of the real world, partially because she gets emboldened by the fake Russian posters who validate her fears and desires.
This is the fight ahead of us. There's no value in arguing with people who's job is to get you to avoid talking about the important issues at hand. I've gotten to the point where if I have a question about legitimacy, I delete them immediately. It makes my life, and my social media pages, better. Might I be banning actual non Russians? Without a doubt, but I don't care. Ignorance does not make for a better conversation. If they want to blame someone for getting thrown off my page, they should talk to the comrade who is posting next to them.
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