Next time you log in to your LinkedIn account for career advancement reasons, consider that its billionaire co-founder Reid Hoffman allegedly funded a false flag operation against Roy Moore in the Alabama special election that tried to tie the judge to Russian interference.
According to additional media reporting, the effort aimed at defeating Moore via Hoffman’s American Engagement Technologies umbrella organization was code-named Project Birmingham.
Like or hate the controversial GOP candidate who went on to narrowly lose to Democrat Doug Jones, it’s ironic that Russia-obsessed Democrats would apparently try to undermine and discredit the Moore campaign with faux Russian collusion.
Imitation Is the Sincerest Form of Fakery?
The New York Times broke the story but seemingly downplayed it as a minor secret experiment that imitated Russian tactics:
“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. The secret project, carried out on Facebook and Twitter, was likely too small to have a significant effect on the race, in which the Democratic candidate it was designed to help, Doug Jones, edged out the Republican, Roy S. Moore…
“An internal report on the Alabama effort, obtained by The New York Times, says explicitly that it ‘experimented with many of the tactics now understood to have influenced the 2016 elections.’
“The project’s operators created a Facebook page on which they posed as conservative Alabamians, using it to try to divide Republicans and even to endorse a write-in candidate to draw votes from Mr. Moore. It involved a scheme to link the Moore campaign to thousands of Russian accounts that suddenly began following the Republican candidate on Twitter, a development that drew national media attention. ‘We orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet,’ the report says. “
The situation even gets more absurd and bizarre in that “One participant in the Alabama project, Jonathon Morgan, is the chief executive of New Knowledge, a small cyber security firm that wrote a scathing account of Russia’s social media operations in the 2016 election that was released this week by the Senate Intelligence Committee.”
Credit to the Times, otherwise a newsletter for the progressive movement, to actually report on Democrat corruption for a change. This story once again underscores how the left actually does the very things, such as voter suppression, that it accuses the right of doing.
Before the Times gets too much credit, however, BuzzFeed is reporting that one of the journalists who published the revelations “spoke at an off-the-record meeting organized by the same group who ran the operation.”
Added BuzzFeed:
“A copy of a confidential report about the Alabama effort, obtained by BuzzFeed News, raises new questions about whether the project was — as the Times said — an ‘experiment,’ or whether it was a straightforward Democratic attempt to replicate the model of the Russian Internet Research Agency….During the meeting, [American Engagement Technologies official Mikey] Dickerson and Sara Hudson, a former Justice Department employee who now works for a company partly funded by Hoffman, detailed the results of their attempt to use social media and online ads to suppress Republican votes, ‘enrage’ Democratic voters to help with turnout, and execute a ‘false flag’ to hurt the campaign of Republican Roy Moore…”
Follow this link to what purports to be the Project Birmingham after-action report.
Reid Hoffman Apologizes
In an essay on Medium, the anti-Trump Hoffman claimed that his checkbook started getting involved in politics because of the “unique threats” resulting from the Donald Trump presidency.
The Silicon Valley venture capitalist went on to repudiate the Alabama false flag operation, adding that his team will engage in more due diligence for future political funding.
“I want to make it clear from the outset that I had never even heard of this project before reading about it in the Times’ coverage…Let me be absolutely clear: I do not. I categorically disavow the use of misinformation to sway an election…I would not have knowingly funded a project planning to use such tactics, and would have refused to invest in any organization that I knew might conduct such a project. Nevertheless, I do have an apology to make and have learned a lesson here…my politics team and I have already begun drafting new policies for how we vet potential investments and how we’ll maintain oversight of the organizations we support…”
According to CNET, Hoffman invested $750,000 in American Engagement Technologies, which int turn funneled some of that money to New Knowledge.
Hoffman’s Prior Political Projects
Make your own judgment as to whether the apology is sincere.
That notwithstanding, Hoffman has previously used his wealth to subsidize other forms of civic engagement, which some observers might deem gaslighting.
The Washington Free Beacon explains:
“A prominent ‘Republican’ women’s political action committee that regularly receives national media attention for its criticisms of President Donald Trump and the GOP is bankrolled by three liberal billionaire donors and activists, Federal Election Commission filings show.
“Republican Women for Progress, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit, was founded by Jennifer Lim and Meghan Milloy, both former employees of Republican organizations. The duo also previously founded Republican Women for Hillary and spoke at the Democratic National Convention in the past…
“The only donor to the women’s PAC following its launch was Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, who cut a $400,000 check to the PAC…”
Project Birmingham May Prompt Investigation
Steve Marshall, Alabama’s attorney general, has indicated that his office will look into “whether disinformation tactics deployed against Republican Roy Moore during last year’s special election violated state campaign laws,” The Mercury News reported earlier this week.
The likelihood is that the GOP will retake that seat in 2020, provided the party runs a solid candidate with no baggage. Memo to Republicans through the country: A little charisma never hurts, either.
As an aside, if you are a LinkedIn user, have you ever found found that connect requests are sometimes possibly initiated by algorithms or the equivalent rather than actual people?
