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 midst of an data 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 shade.” It provides that white center class persons are being discriminated towards with excessive inflation and rising costs, whereas “unemployed individuals of shade find yourself being privileged teams of the inhabitants.”
And the aim of the marketing campaign, from the start, was crystal clear: “To safe victory for [Donald Trump],” Gambashidze wrote within the Good Outdated USA Venture planning doc.
The ‘Good Outdated USA’ plan brazenly admits that “not one of the important American politicians may be thought-about pro-Russian or pro-Putin,” and so fairly than focus its efforts on making an attempt to persuade folks that Russia is nice, the plan known as for selling the concept the US ought to be focusing its sources much less on Ukraine and extra on home points, similar to rising inflation and excessive fuel costs.
“It is sensible for Russia to place a most effort to make sure that the Republican Social gathering’s viewpoint (in the beginning, the opinion of Trump supporters) wins over the US public opinion,” the Good Outdated USA Venture planning doc reads. “This contains provisions on peace in Ukraine in alternate for territories, the necessity to concentrate on the issues of the US economic system, returning troops house from all around 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 assist Ukraine to 51 p.c, and decreasing the proportion of People who’ve confidence in President Joe Biden all the way 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 “group of American players, customers of Reddit and picture boards, similar to 4chan.”
The doc describes this class of players and chat room customers because the “spine of the right-wing tendencies within the US section of the Web.” In latest 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 known 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 forth,” in keeping with the paperwork) with the intention 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 group 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.”