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 dropping the American lifestyle and the ‘American dream,’” Gambashidze writes in a single doc outlining his “guerrilla 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 filled with racist and conspiratorial claims, together with that Republicans are “victims of discrimination of individuals of coloration.” It provides that white middle-class individuals are being discriminated in opposition to with excessive inflation and rising costs, whereas “unemployed folks of coloration 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campaign, from the start, was crystal clear: “To safe victory for [Donald Trump],” Gambashidze wrote within the Good Outdated USA Challenge planning doc.
The Good Outdated USA plan brazenly admits that “not one of the important American politicians could be thought-about pro-Russian or pro-Putin,” and so somewhat than focus its efforts on making an attempt to persuade those who Russia is nice, the plan referred to as for selling the concept that the US must be focusing its assets much less on Ukraine and extra on home points, equivalent to rising inflation and excessive gasoline costs.
“It is smart for Russia to place a most effort to make sure that the Republican Social gathering’s standpoint (at the start, the opinion of Trump supporters) wins over the US public opinion,” the Good Outdated USA Challenge planning doc reads. “This consists of provisions on peace in Ukraine in alternate for territories, the necessity to give attention to the issues of the US financial system, returning troops house from all around the world, and so on.”
In addition to getting Trump elected, the marketing campaign’s secondary targets included rising the proportion of Individuals who consider the US is doing an excessive amount of to help Ukraine to 51 %, and decreasing the proportion of Individuals who’ve confidence in President Joe Biden all the way down to 29 %.
The plan lists quite a lot 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, equivalent to 4chan.”
The doc describes this class of players and chatroom customers because the “spine of the right-wing traits within the US section of the Web.” In latest months, the Trump marketing campaign has embraced most of the most influential figures inside these communities, together with many who share deeply misogynistic rhetoric frequently.
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 women and so on,” based on the paperwork) in an effort 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.”