The Rise of Weaponized Flak in the New Media Era. Brian Michael Goss
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made good on its promise for impact through timing. It released a tranche of GRU-stolen materials three days before the Democratic Party convention in July 2016. The timing furnished enough news cycles before the convention to provoke internal dissension and the resignation of the party’s chairperson—and generally conjured rainclouds of distraction over Clinton’s formal nomination as the first woman standard-bearer for a major U.S. party. The revelations from the vast trove of stolen materials were damp squibs, what I will later conceptualize as faux (or phantom) flak. However, within the regime of faux flak, the mere suggestion that “something bad” was in the lode of documents was in itself enough to nourish finger-wagging flak-memes about wrongdoing.
Stone Cold Flak
Mueller (2018) focuses on GRU’s processes of hacking material later used for flak purposes. Mueller’s subsequent indictment in January 2019, United States of America versus Roger Jason Stone, Jr. (2019) sheds further light on the GRU’s development of flak narratives against Clinton to be channeled to the U.S. public.
Mueller assesses Stone as implicated in an effort to obtain and then disseminate “emails damaging to the Clinton campaign” (Mueller, 2019, p. 2). Toward this end, Stone was in contact with “a senior, Trump campaign official,” among other interlocutors, discussing the timing and likely influence of the document dumps while he also coordinated with WikiLeaks (2019, p. 3). “Impact [of the document dumps] planned to be very damaging,” the indictment’s “Person 1” (Jerome Corsi) explains to Stone as the clandestine flak campaign played out in summer 2016. Person 1 further elaborates the flak campaign talking points to Stone: “Would not hurt to start suggesting HRC [Hillary Rodham Clinton] old, memory bad, has stroke—neither he nor she well […] setting stage for [Clinton] Foundation debacle” (quoted in Mueller, 2019, pp. 4–5).
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In these flak meme rehearsals, Clinton is not simply wrong on some or even most all issues—but is broadly unfit for office due to physical and moral decrepitude. Stone and his interlocutors eagerly anticipated “October Surprise” weaponized flak memes to blow up in Clinton’s face in the endgame of the election and sink the Democrats’ campaign. In the event, no full-blown scandals arose from the dissemination of the Clinton campaigns’ hacked emails. However, that is not the standard that flak merchants need to meet. The news itself of 50,000 documents released to the public (too much material for anyone to read in short order) is in and of itself taken as casting suspicion on the victim, regardless of whether the emails reveal anything beyond office bitching and operational details. The very fact of hacks and subsequent leaks also lent themselves to residual flak “fringe benefits.” That is, news narratives projected Clinton’s campaign as a loose or sinking ship, on the defensive, needing to raise its voice over the din about emails in the effort to get its message out.
Impacts: Flak Delivers More Than Pizza
One revelation in the hacked emails concerned a pizza restaurant that Clinton campaign chair John Podesta frequented. This explosive discovery prompted the meme that the—non-existent—basement of the pizza establishment was the site of a child pornography ring. Among other clues, “child porn” and “cheese pizza” share the acronym “CP” (the phrase “one could not make these things up” comes to mind here). In short order, the pizza restaurant was stormed by an armed gunman, thankfully without fatalities, as flak to murder an election campaign almost spiraled into murdering people (Pilkington, 2019).
Pizza aside, Kathleen Hall Jamieson (2018) analyzes the 2016 election at book length in Cyberwar; a volume that she pointedly titled in order to emphasize the stakes. In Jamieson’s appraisal, Russia’s interventions in the 2016 election far exceed anodyne characterizations such as meddling—and they were likely decisive to the electoral outcome. As in her analysis of 1988, Jamieson does not employ the term flak in her discussion. However, her analysis squares with a flak-based understanding of the campaign to slime Clinton with delegitimizing memes and to prop up Trump.
Jamieson argues that Russia’s covert activities in the run-up to the election were not necessarily designed to change votes from “blue” to “red”; a tall order, as it implicates changing minds and even subjectivities to switch party allegiances in a narrow timeframe. Instead, demobilizing core Democratic ←16 | 17→constituencies from voting was a reachable goal in a flak framework—and one less vote for a candidate amounts to the same in the final electoral tally as one more vote in the other candidate’s column. Votes could be siphoned off by raising doubts about Clinton among wavering voters who leaned Democrat with whom Clinton’s campaign was assaying to close the deal in the campaign endgame. Targeted flak in these cases could crucially drain motivation to vote, or nudge voters away from Clinton toward a third-party candidate. Moreover, social media data exhaust was sufficient to identify voters with a wavering profile.
Jamieson argues that the U.S. media system unwittingly channeled the Kremlin’s flak campaign that denigrated Clinton and put wind under the wings of Trump’s often faltering campaign. This was in part due to the U.S. media’s fixation on melodramatically narrating elections through the lens of which side is apparently winning or losing the momentum game. By contrast with the United States in 2016, Jamieson observes that Russian interventions (for Marine Le Pen, against Emmanuel Macron) fell flat in France’s 2017 election. French journalists largely ignored hacked information, rather than copiously laundering it into the news hole, as they instead tracked issues.
Jamieson (2018) cites examples of memes drawn from the hacked material that were insinuated into the 2016 election discourse during candidate debates witnessed by 60–70 million viewers. In one of several such moments during the debates, Clinton was asserted to advocate for “open borders,” based on the hacked materials; in the hacked source material, she was referring to an energy grid in South America. Clinton’s comments were subsequently, selectively and disingenuously, cut-and-pasted into the debate to signify purported retreat from any form of border control around the United States. The meme was purportedly grounded in Clinton’s unguarded words and authentic views—rather than a disingenuous flak-glossed version of them—that also chimed with Trumpian border fetishism. In turn, the meme also resonated with the decades-long construction of Clinton as two-faced and harboring hidden agendas. By contrast, Trump gained a boost in the agora of personality perceptions when unashamed boorishness was conflated with authenticity.
Jane Mayer reports that more front-page New York Times space was devoted to Clinton’s emails during a week in October when undecided voters were making up their minds than was devoted to both candidates’ policy packages during months of campaign coverage; the emails had, in turn, become a flak shorthand code for “something amiss” with Clinton. Mainstream news narrative constructions that seek two-sides-of-every-issue “symmetry” further ←17 | 18→enabled flak—to Kremlin specifications, laundered through WikiLeaks, and favorable to Trump’s interests. In particular, Trump was on the ropes on 7 October as the Director of National Intelligence announced an assessment of Russian interference in the U.S. election. Hours later, Trump’s audio-recorded enthusiasms for assaulting women by genital grab was published. A flak response to these well-grounded narratives was swift: thirty minutes after the genital grab recording’s release, WikiLeaks shifted the narrative arc of the news by publishing purloined emails from Podesta’s account. The stories about the two campaigns were, in turn, treated as symmetrical in their suggestions of wrongdoing—and the sensation of private emails, with the promise of scandal somewhere within them, blunted the body blows to Trump’s campaign with a flak deus-ex-machina.
On the basis of her study, Jamieson concludes that it is “‘likely’” that Russia’s flak-oriented interventions to problematize and delegitimize one candidate flipped the result of the 2016 U.S. presidential election (quoted in Mayer, 2018, para. 9). James Clapper, the US’ Director of National Intelligence in 2016, similarly posits that “it stretches credulity to think the Russians didn’t turn the election outcome” (quoted in Mayer, 2018, para. 3). The George W. Bush-era director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Michael Hayden, appraised the Russian intervention as “the most successful covert influence operation in history” (quoted in Mayer, 2018, para. 47). And flak was written into the Russian intervention’s genetic makeup. At the same time, it should not be forgotten that Trump claimed 60-million