Stir up fears of the loss of white supremacy

Spencer Ackerman wrote Russia Is Exploiting American White Supremacy Over and Over Again for the Daily Beast. Ackerman shows a few examples of the way Russian troll farms used social media to sow discord before the 2016 election and since then. It was rather simple and quite effective – stir up fears of the loss of white supremacy. And the targets don’t need to be avowed White Supremacists. The targets could even be progressives who may not be as blind to race as they say they are.

Some excerpts from the article:

The cynical brilliance of Vladimir Putin’s propaganda campaign is that it exploited America’s foundational commitment to white supremacy. The term itself is so raw and so hideous that it inspires an allergy to its usage within mainstream political discourse. But no other term—racism, white privilege, etc.—better captures the dynamic at issue. White supremacy is exactly what it says on the label: a social structure by which whites, a pseudoscientific grouping with a definition that changes over time as is convenient, dominate America’s complex and often informal hierarchies of power.

American history is many things, but among them is a catalog recording the mutating shape of a white power structure and how that structure responds to various challenges to its existence. Amongst white supremacy’s greatest contemporary triumphs is its portrayal of racism as individual prejudice rather than maintenance of the social order. Our schools teach children that racism is about hatred, and hatred is disreputable—not that racism is about power, with hatred merely one downstream effect amongst many. … Putin's trolls wisely selected a fuel source that white Americans of all political stripes, consciously or not, ensure is inexhaustible.

With every tweet, Facebook post, YouTube video and Tumblr page, Russia showed that it understands America with a depth that prompts much of white America to avert its eyes. Russian propaganda expertly grasped that even the most meager challenges to white supremacy prompt a politically powerful and useful white resistance, and that this dynamic is a persistent feature of American life. All Russia—or any foreign power, or no foreign power at all—needs to do is breathe on the embers until they ignite. White supremacy murders millions of people, steals their wealth to distribute it up the social ladder, and denies untold millions their true human potential. America does this to itself, and left undisturbed, will continue doing it. Russia’s only unique contribution in 2016, and beyond, was to underscore the threat white supremacy poses to U.S. national security.

University of Washington researchers Ahmer Arif, Leo G. Stewart and Kate Starbird studied what the trolls did. They wrote a paper about their findings and will present it at an academic conference in November.

“What really struck me in studying the activities of these accounts up close, was the level of knowledge they demonstrated of American culture,” Arif told The Daily Beast.
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[This Russian campaign] inflames a sense of grievance amongst a white overclass which fears the collapse of its social, political and economic supremacy. It inflates even the most modest challenge to that supremacy as an attack on its fundamental way of life, essentializing entire national histories to nothing more than white prerogatives. This is how immigration becomes perceived as an invasion, Black Lives Matter becomes a “domestic terror outfit,” and the poor white masses feel besieged into silence before crying out for a champion to make them feel great again.
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White supremacy must be destroyed because it is a socially permissible murderer and thief. Whatever else Russia achieved in 2016, it demonstrated that despite a generation of grueling foreign war, white supremacy is the only true existential threat America faces.