BUYING AN ELECTION
I don’t even know how you would explain to future generations what has taken place over the last decade. So much context is needed just to tease out the simplest bits. One of the threads I think of most, partly because it keeps reemerging, is the insistence that one, anyone, can just buy an election.
TRUMP
Just about everyone can recall that the losing side of the 2016 US presidential election, and all their surrogates and supporters, insisted (and still do to this day) that the results and thus the elected president were illegitimate. You’ll also recall that everyone was so certain of this and of the culpable parties that they launched an industrial-scale investigation into Russian meddling. Early on in the Meuller investigation, as it came to be known, there were leaks of various details of what was being investigated and also reports and disclosures from implicated social media companies. And, of course, with what was said to be a civilization deranging scandal, overflowing with libertine perversions of every flavour and scent, the media lapped it all up. In September of 2017, for example, it was reported that “Hundreds of fake Facebook accounts, probably run from Russia, spent about $100,000 on ads” to get Donald Trump elected in 2016. The “information operation” run by a St. Petersburg-based troll farm, we were told, used its dodgy social media accounts to purchase and run “some 3,000 ads between June 2015 and May 2017.”
