Nearly three years after the 2016 election, Democrats are still trying to convince Americans that the presidential election was stolen by Russians who spent pennies creating silly memes on social media and staging protests, which were, by all accounts, attended en masse by well-meaning Americans.
There is no doubt former special counsel Robert Mueller was sincere Wednesday when he said in front of Congress that “the Russian government’s effort to interfere in our election is among the most serious” and that it “deserves the attention of every American.” He said that the attempt to influence the election was “sweeping and systematic in fashion.”
But let’s never forget that the phrase “effort to interfere” simply means that Russians tried to do something and we still, to this day, have no idea to what degree, if at all, it was successful.
To recap, what Russians did in 2016 was post messages on Facebook and Twitter about liberal causes such as the Black Lives Matter movement; they promoted staged protests that opposed the so-called alt-right; and they, perhaps most importantly, were involved in the WikiLeaks email dumps targeting the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta.
Regarding the emails, Democrats, with help from the national media, have done their damnedest in conflating those niggling items with the treasure chest that everyone, including every journalist in America, was actually after and yet never found: the 30,000 emails Clinton deleted and destroyed.
What President Trump supposedly called on Russia to retrieve were the Clinton emails that she sneakily erased from her private server, before having that server irreparably shattered. We didn’t get those. What we got were Podesta’s homemade recipes and some embarrassing missives from Donna Brazile that showed Clinton’s campaign and its allies really, really felt entitled to the Democratic nomination and the White House.
Everything else Russians did amounted to nothing more than holding up a mirror to America itself. They published notes on social media elevating divisive causes and rubbing raw sores, but none of them were created by Russians. They were already here.
Like one liberal activist told the Washington Post last year, “Russians might have been there, but Russians are not creating and invoking these feelings. These are real feelings, not Internet-created feelings.”
One meme during the 2016 election promoted by the Russian-backed account “Army of Jesus” depicted Jesus Christ arm wrestling Satan and was captioned, “Satan: If I win, Clinton wins! Jesus: Not if I can help it!”
Another ad said, “Stop Trump! Stop racism!”
And a third, personal favorite featured an illustration of then-Democratic candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., wearing only a Speedo and flexing for gay rights.
House Democrats are making a big ado about Trump campaign associates having been willing to take a look at any material Russians might have possessed that would have improved the president’s chances of winning. But, again, that’s not material that any American journalist wouldn’t have wanted to see.
True, Americans should care that a foreign country is attempting to put its finger on the scales.
But an attempt is not the same as changing the outcome. How effective do we think the silly Facebook memes really were?
