The documents show that the orchestrators of the campaign targeted existing divisions within US society, using racist stereotypes and far-right conspiracies to target supporters of former president Donald Trump.
”They are afraid of losing the American way of life and the ‘American dream,’” Gambashidze writes in one document outlining his “guerrilla media” plan. “It is these sentiments 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 of people of color.” It adds that white middle-class 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 secure victory for [Donald Trump],” Gambashidze wrote in the Good Old USA Project planning document.
The Good Old USA plan openly admits that “none of the significant American politicians can be considered pro-Russian or pro-Putin,” and so rather than focus its efforts on trying to convince people that Russia is great, the plan called for promoting the idea that the US should be focusing its resources less on Ukraine and more on domestic issues, such as rising inflation and high gas prices.
“It makes sense for Russia to put a maximum effort to ensure that the Republican Party’s point of view (first and foremost, the opinion of Trump supporters) wins over the US public opinion,” the Good Old USA Project planning document reads. “This includes provisions on peace in Ukraine in exchange for territories, the need to focus on the problems of the US economy, returning troops home from all over the world, etc.”
As well as getting Trump elected, the campaign’s secondary goals included increasing the percentage of Americans who believe the US is doing too much to aid Ukraine to 51 percent, and reducing the percentage of Americans who have confidence in President Joe Biden down to 29 percent.
The plan lists a variety of audiences the campaign specifically wants to target, including residents of swing states, American Jews, “US citizens of Hispanic descent,” and the “community of American gamers, users of Reddit and image boards, such as 4chan.”
The document describes this category of gamers and chatroom users as the “backbone of the right-wing trends in the US segment of the Internet.” In recent months, the Trump campaign has embraced many of the most influential figures within these communities, including many who share deeply misogynistic rhetoric on a regular basis.
To spread their narrative, the plan called for the creation of YouTube channels that shared pro-Trump content as well as other viral videos (“music, humor, beautiful girls etc,” according to the documents) in order 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 of Trump supporters, with one sample name given as “Alabama for America the Great.” The document also reveals that the Russians planned to use Reddit as a vector to disseminate their propaganda as it is a platform “free from democratic censorship.”
