Documents show campaign organizers targeted existing divisions within American society, using racist stereotypes and far-right conspiracies to attack supporters of former President Donald Trump.
“They are afraid of losing the American way of life and the ‘American dream,'” Gambashidze writes in a document outlining his “guerrilla media” plan. “It is these feelings that should be exploited in the course of an information campaign in/for the United States.”
The same document is full of racist and conspiratorial claims, including that Republicans are “victims of discrimination against people of color.” It adds that middle-class white people are being discriminated against with high inflation and rising prices, while “unemployed people of color end up being privileged groups of the population.”
And the goal of the campaign, from the beginning, was crystal clear: “To ensure (Donald Trump’s) victory,” Gambashidze wrote in the Good Old USA Project’s planning document.
The “Good Old USA” plan openly admits that “none of the major American politicians can be considered pro-Russian or pro-Putin,” and so instead of focusing its efforts on trying to convince people that Russia is great, the plan called for promoting the idea that the United States should focus its resources less on Ukraine and more on domestic issues, such as rising inflation and high gasoline prices.
“It is logical for Russia to do its utmost to ensure that the Republican Party’s point of view (primarily the opinion of Trump supporters) prevails over American public opinion,” reads the Good Old USA Project’s planning document. “This includes provisions on peace in Ukraine in exchange for territories, the need to focus on the problems of the American economy, the return of troops home from around the world, etc.”
In addition to getting Trump elected, secondary campaign goals included increasing the percentage of Americans who believe the United States is doing too much to help Ukraine to 51 percent, and reducing the percentage of Americans who trust President Joe Biden to 29 percent.
The plan lists a variety of audiences the campaign wants to specifically target, including residents of swing states, Jewish Americans, “American citizens of Hispanic descent,” and the “American gaming community, Reddit users, and image boards like 4chan.”
The document describes this category of gamers and chat room users as the “backbone of right-wing tendencies in the American segment of the Internet.” In recent months, the Trump campaign has enlisted many of the most influential figures in these communities, including many who regularly share deeply misogynistic rhetoric.
To spread its narrative, the plan called for creating YouTube channels that would share pro-Trump content as well as other viral videos (“music, humor, pretty girls, etc.,” according to the documents) to appear at the top of search results for “US elections.”
Meanwhile, Gambashidze and his colleagues used Facebook, Twitter and Reddit to create community groups for Trump supporters, and one of them, the sample name, was “Alabama for Great America.” The document also reveals that the Russians planned to use Reddit as a vector to spread their propaganda, as it is a platform “free from democratic censorship.”