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 must be exploited in the middle of an info marketing campaign in/for america.”
The identical doc is stuffed with racist and conspiratorial claims together with that Republicans are “victims of discrimination of individuals of colour.” It provides that white center class persons are being discriminated towards with excessive inflation and rising costs, whereas “unemployed folks of colour find yourself being privileged teams of the inhabitants.”
And the objective 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 overtly admits that “not one of the vital American politicians could be thought-about pro-Russian or pro-Putin,” and so relatively than focus its efforts on attempting to persuade those that Russia is nice, the plan referred to as for selling the concept the US must be focusing its assets much less on Ukraine and extra on home points, resembling rising inflation and excessive gasoline costs.
“It is sensible for Russia to place a most effort to make sure that the Republican Occasion’s perspective (firstly, the opinion of Trump supporters) wins over the US public opinion,” the Good Previous USA Venture planning doc reads. “This consists of provisions on peace in Ukraine in alternate for territories, the necessity to deal with the issues of the US economic system, returning troops residence from all around the world, and so on.”
In addition to getting Trump elected, the marketing campaign’s secondary objectives included growing the proportion of Individuals who consider the US is doing an excessive amount of to help Ukraine to 51 %, and lowering the proportion of Individuals who’ve confidence in President Joe Biden right down to 29 %.
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 avid gamers, customers of Reddit and picture boards, resembling 4chan.”
The doc describes this class of avid gamers and chat room customers because the “spine of the right-wing traits within the US phase of the Web.” In current months, the Trump marketing campaign has embraced most of the most influential figures within these communities, together with many who share deeply misogynistic rhetoric on a regular basis.
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, stunning ladies and so on,” in line with the paperwork) as a way 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 identify 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.”