Russian government agents' little white slip is showing
by digby
This whole thing is pretty absurd but It's indicative of the global white supremacist movement:
We’re not saying that Russia helped make #Blexit trend, but Twitter accounts with a history of pushing Kremlin fake news are playing a disproportionate role in amplifying the call for African-American voters to hop on the Trump Train.
Blexit, the brainchild of right-wing personality Candace Owens, is a nascent movement meant to urge black voters to leave the Democratic Party.
Owens, the communications director for campus conservative group Turning Point USA, announced the campaign last Saturday at a Turning Point conference in Washington. But while Blexit is less than a week old, it’s already been beset with controversies. Owens initially claimed that rapper Kanye West, who praised her politics earlier this year on Twitter, designed Blexit’s “X” logo and the 90’s-style colors of its merchandise. But West claimed in a series of tweets Tuesday that he had nothing to do with Blexit, distancing himself from Owens and her group. Owens eventually apologized to West, but insisted that Blexit will continue.
Additionally, a pre-existing organization also called Blexit is threatening to sue over Owens’ use of the name. (Owens didn’t respond to a request for comment for this story)
Despite the hiccups, the torrent of tweets pushing the Blexit hashtag on Twitter gives the impression that African-Americans are rejecting the Democratic party in droves. Over 15 hours ending Friday afternoon, the Daily Beast captured more than 250,000 tweets amplifying the Blexit movement.
“40,000, or 16 percent, of the Blexit tweets we collected came from accounts that previously pushed Kremlin propaganda.”
There’s no easy way to tell how many of those tweets are swelling from Blexit’s target demographic rather than already-committed GOP supporters. But by cross-referencing the tweets with data The Daily Beast collected during previous tweet storms, we can tell a little about what the putative Blexiters supported in the past.
It turns out that approximately 40,000, or 16 percent, of the Blexit tweets we collected came from accounts that previously pushed Kremlin propaganda in one of two key Russian disinformation campaigns: one attempting to exonerate the Syrian government in a deadly chemical weapons attack, another targeting last year’s presidential election in France in support of a failed 11th-hour intervention by Russia’s GRU, its military intelligence agency.
Russian government agents really seem to think a key to influencing American elections is to dupe black people. They played this card heavily in 2016 too.
This just shows how racist they are and it goes a long way toward explaining why they love Trump so much. They are surprisingly good at understanding American social fault lines in some ways. But they are on the wrong track with this. There is no way that Afican Americns are going to be duped by this nonsense, particularly when they can see with their own eyes that right now, in states around the country, the Republicans are doing everything in their power to stop them from voting! They're not blind!
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