The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that Twitter had taken down dozens of accounts after they posted messages proclaiming their support as Black Americans for Trump and other Republicans that went viral.
Darren Linvill, lead researcher for the Clemson University Media Forensics Hub, told the Post he had found evidence of “foreign origins” of the alleged bot network, including Russian Cyrillic alphabet characters in online records of the accounts. The Cyrillic alphabet is, of course, not from Russia nor solely Russian, having been invented in the ninth century AD in then-Byzantine-controlled Bulgaria and being used today by some 50 different languages across Eurasia.
Eugene Puryear, host at Breakthrough News and author of "Shackled and Chained: Mass Incarceration in Capitalist America," and Jim Kavanagh, editor of The Polemicist, told Radio Sputnik’s Political Misfits on Thursday that blaming the diversity of political persuasions in the Black community on outside influence - and specifically on Russians - is an old trick designed to shepherd Black people into voting Democrat.
“It’s not surprising that we’ve seen consistently through the 2016 election through today a very particular focus around the issue of racism, because there’s a very particular need by the people who are pushing these narratives to prevent things from becoming ungovernable,” Puryear told hosts Michelle Witte and Bob Schlehuber.
He recalled that during the 2016 election season, one of the most direct accusations about “Russian bots” on social media was that they were “manipulating Black people … even though the actual impact of this was zero-to-infinitesimal, in terms of the actual reality, despite the fact that America has had 400 years of extreme anti-Black racism that no one needs to stoke or write a meme about” to arouse people’s anger against the US system.
“Political uprisings of Black people - whether it’s the Civil War, whether it’s Reconstruction, whether it’s Civil Rights, whether it’s right now - can shake the core of the US system and can awaken much broader mass movements of progressive people and have done so consistently across history,” Puryear told Sputnik.
“So I find it very convenient that the forces who are often being dinged at these protests by the Black liberation movement - the forces of ‘institutionalized racism,’ the security state in and of itself, and the politicians whose policies have been so devastating to the community - get behind one narrative that ‘well, they’re just being stoked by Russia.’”
“Anyone who knows anything about America - anything, I mean I’ve traveled the world and people who know very little know this, know that racism is endemic to this country. No internet activity, no malign foreign actor or whatever you want to call them, has to do anything - or even if they do do anything, will really make any big difference in that. These are internal domestic issues that are deeply rooted in history, culture, social realities, politics and economics, they aren’t going anywhere until they actually get solved,” Puryear said.
However, he noted that this narrative has an important effect: “it makes people fearful to come out and to join different things, because ‘well is this being manipulated by Russia, do I want to be a part of that?’ So it means the Black community, in and of itself, is faced with a serious choice that can result in political demobilization, and two, it allows people to question the legitimate claims being made by the people in these movements who don’t want to toe the line and have the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris Democratic Party line, because they can be easily dismissed as ‘well maybe they’re Russians, maybe they’re this, and even if they aren’t, they’re being manipulated by all these other things and they don’t really know what’s going on.’ I think that has a big impact on the discourse.”
This, Puryear said, flattens not only the discourse around racism, but also popular perceptions of the Black community, casting some 44 million people as politically homogeneous, all supporters of mainstream Democrats. For example, a Pew poll published last month found that Black support for Republicans has remained constant for the last 30 years, with between 10% and 11% of Black Americans registered as Republicans and identifying as conservative.
Kavanagh recalled that even Harris had repeated the line that “Black people were fooled by Russian disinformation,” saying in July 2019 that her own now-failed presidential bid was being targeted by Russian bots.
He also noted that Democrats opportunistically “divorce the issue of race from class,” such as when they wanted to shut down Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-VT) appeals to the multiracial working class, which they said were racist.
“When you look at every ethnic group in this country,” Kavanagh said, “every ethnic group is divided by class. In every ethnic group, 1-2% of the people have most of the wealth of that ethnic group, you know? So this is a way of diverting attention from class issues, which cut across racial and ethnic divides and are very important … They want you to focus on what they want you to focus on at the moment.”
