Reading the Russian Noise

We’re getting a lot of noise on Russia and the revelations on the Trump campaign’s connections. This type of noise is now the standard response in the new, complex, direct media world. We should understand this now but I’m constantly seeing articles by people who don’t yet have a solid grip on this reality. My concern is primarily here on Medium as I think this community remains one of the best paths to the new, direct media now evolving.

Let me try to quickly break this down both at the medium (both meanings of that word here) level and actual Russian involvement as we understand it at this point:

The media as message

Big media is no longer dominant. They are struggling to find their role in the new planetary society but they have lost credibility both by being owned and by abdicating on their responsibility to stand for objective truth. He said, she said is not truth. More importantly their time is over as the official moderators. Everyone is media now both as moderator and as source good or bad. This leads to tremendous amounts of noise in communications theory. Too much information that can’t be evaluated is noise. That’s where communities like Medium are growing. We are a large community of writers and readers focused not on politics or any one area but on the medium of online written communication. We are each part of several local neighborhoods of writers and readers with a constant eye on the far larger community.

The key is that we get to know a range of writers that we read and that we can evaluate. We may not agree completely or only on certain topics and our readers, few or many, are learning us too and the writers we trust enough to reference and recommend. This actually works. So the other kind of noise that is intentional becomes a little clearer. And that noise is the problem. I and writers that I’ve come to know become suspicious. We may pass on the suspicions and may finally question the real motivations of responses or writers. We may not always be correct but this is good.

The Russian Content

Noise on Russia is political and was suppressed in the last, disastrous election. It is now being used to generate noise to confuse and cloud a very complex set of interwoven patterns. That is my concern. So let’s look at the patterns in this mosaic.

Some writers are very vocal, here, on denouncing the attention on the Trump regime’s heavy connections to Russia. This is the deep end of the pool. The obvious positions are:

• Trump supporters (yes, they still exist in several forms) who usually simply say there is no evidence. Yes and no. That now plays on people who are easily fatigued by complexity or are true believers which means they are only placeholders and have nothing to contribute.
• Those that are favorably inclined to Russia historically or to Putin as a force working to influence Middle East policy or the previous states of the USER. Interesting. This also seems to include some traditional leftist groups who are just uncomfortable with today’s Russia being and enemy or something, also, with the complexity of this.
• Those that are focused on what is now identified as the Deep State representing the actual international corporatist, executive power structures. This is both valid if you want the problem to be specific to the US or suspicious because the deep state is international with different factions aligned with both old and new economics. I don’t think you can separate the deep state as it is defined for the US without looking at the international picture. My suspicious come from the pattern of anti- anti-Trump forces in the US. In short these act to protect the Trump regime that is a front for the corporatist oligarchy in the US by misdirecting/misdefining the deep state.
• Those that think the Russian focus is an attempt by the Democratic Party to avoid reform. This may well be true but I see the party system as now irrelevant. This seems to come from people who think the main problem was Hillary as candidate and internal corruption that also suppressed Sanders. Historically this is much like redesigning the Maginot Line after the Germans are in Paris. The real problem with this noise is that it assumes that a little work and another election and things will be normal again. I think that is a dangerous illusion.
• A position (I agree with based on actual investigations and logic) that Trump is seriously compromised by Russian financial groups and this allowed the placement of other, seriously, compromised individuals in his campaign or the activation previously identified useful individuals. Agents (rather a misnomer) are usually compromised on business decisions that makes them useful without raising any political issues. We are a long way from James Bond. The financial goals are to use Trump for money but politically to destroy US credibility internationally while creating political chaos internally. This would already be declared a success in intelligence terms. Nothin more needs to be done but leave Trump and his cohorts to continue the destruction. They are doing it for their own reasons. The best kind of agent.

The essential point here is that there are many more than two sides to this. Russian based involvement of online groups manipulating the US population was very real. Those groups are for hire by anyone with the money. Formal Russian action to tilts the US election? Of course, we both have been doing that for more than fifty years. Effective? Yes, but hard to say if it was critical but may well have been based on the Trump group’s direct targeting of Electoral College key states. Did Trump ask the Russians to do it? We will see but he is dumb enough to have done that and to have left a trail. If true this will be the smoking gun. But there is a lot more to this and Russia is only one of the players. In this Trump is a player that became very powerful but is still an idiot and therefore difficult to manage. He is surrounded by players for many different control groups all working for their faction. And he goes with the last one to talk to him the right way.

With all of the above it is obvious that the Russian connection is very complex and very important. It is also part of a much larger process so that the effort by anyone to make the Russian thing the only thing to look at is probably an effort to hide reality while denying that the Russian thing means anything is also an attempt to hide reality. The very messy international middle is where we all live now. As the US weakens it will increasingly difficult for the traditional US view as only the US matters will cause increasing confusion and very rude surprises for people.