"radicalizing Democrats with a Russian bot scandal"

As Russia’s online election machinations came to light last year, a group of Democratic tech experts decided to try out similarly deceptive tactics in the fiercely contested Alabama Senate race, according to people familiar with the effort and a report on its results.

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Mr. Watson never spoke with the page’s author or authors by phone, and they declined a request for meeting. But he did notice something unusual: his Twitter followers suddenly ballooned from about 100 to about 10,000. The Facebook page’s operators asked Mr. Watson whether he trusted anyone to set up a super PAC that could receive funding and offered advice on how to sharpen his appeal to disenchanted Republican voters.

Shortly before the election, the page sent him a message, wishing him luck.

The report does not say whether the project purchased the Russian bot Twitter accounts that suddenly began to follow Mr. Moore. But it takes credit for “radicalizing Democrats with a Russian bot scandal” and points to stories on the phenomenon in the mainstream media. “Roy Moore flooded with fake Russian Twitter followers,” reported The New York Post.

It’s funny in it’s own way, and done against a thuggish caveman’s caveman of a politician, but let’s be clear about the risks involved. It normalizes that it’s OK to spread the Russia! BS, and the truth of the matter can be damned if it’s against the enemy.

Right now both Jill Stein and Bernie Sanders are in the cross hairs of those who see them as enemies, and legitimate targets for themselves, the good guys.

And they have their allies in the media, like at the WaPo, who’ll write dozens of prominent negative articles about Sanders one day, and then maybe write one low key retraction long after the damage has been done.

“They threw chairs!”

“They demanded English be spoken!”

“Bernie is a tool of Putin!”

“Jill Stein cozied up to Putin!”

But anyway, yadda, yadda, yadda, the story here is that Democratic operatives were cool with “radicalizing Democrats with a Russian bot scandal”.

Because they have no sense of any risk being involved with having the electorate seeing Russia as an enemy willing to destroy this mainstay of our Republic, our elections.

It’s all fun and games until diplomacy gets reduced to shots being fired.