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Bi-Weekly Discussion - Russiagate or A New Red Scare?

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Brian B.
Bi-Weekly Discussion - Russiagate or A New Red Scare?

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We're currently hosting our discussions at Café Walnut, not too far from our summer We're currently hosting our discussions at Café Walnut, not too far from our summer meeting spot in Washington Square Park. The cafe is near the corner of 7th & Walnut in Olde City. The cafe's entrance is below street level down some stairs, which can be confusing if it's your first time. Our group meets in the large room upstairs.

Since we're using the cafe's space, they ask that each person attending the meetup at least purchase a drink or snack. Please don't bring any food or drinks from outside. If you're hungry enough to eat a meal, they have more substantial fare such as salads, soups & sandwiches which are pretty good and their prices are reasonable.

The café is fairly easy to get to if you're using public transit. With SEPTA, take the Market-Frankford Line & get off at the 5th Street Station (corner of 5th & Market), and walk 2 blocks south on 5th and then turn right on Walnut Street and walk 1 block west. With PATCO, just get off at the 9th-10th & Locust stop and walk 3 blocks east. For those who are driving, parking in the neighborhood can be tough to find. If you can't find a spot on the street, I'd suggest parking in the Washington Square parking deck at 249 S 6th Street which is just a half block away.

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WAS THE 2016 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION RIGGED?

PART 2 - IS "RUSSIAGATE" REAL OR IS THIS A "NEW RED SCARE"?

INTRODUCTION:

In our previous discussion, we addressed several allegations about whether or not the U.S. presidential election of 2016 was somehow rigged at the domestic level. To review what we covered, check out the discussion outline:
https://www.meetup.com/Philly-Skeptics/events/247744073/

We'll now turn to address allegations that Russia interfered in the 2016 election in a variety of ways, specifically: (1) hacking & leaking the DNC emails, (2) spreading propaganda & "fake news" on social media, (3) hacking into voter rolls & perhaps even voting machines, (4) colluding with the Trump campaign to defeat Clinton

This is yet another meetup where we're addressing a political science topic that can superficially seem related to conspiracy theories but is actually more nuanced & plausible. The first time we did this was our discussion back in September on the "Deep State". Check out the first section of the outline for that meetup, where we covered two useful sets of conceptual tools -- Michael Shermer's "Conspiracy Detector Kit" and Carl Sagan's "Baloney Detection Kit":
https://www.meetup.com/Philly-Skeptics/events/240273022/

Along with using the critical thinking skills recommended by Shermer & Sagan, we also want to try to assign "prior probabilities" to some of these scenarios based on what we already know about elections from political science research. Regarding the idea that the leaked DNC emails or "fake news" on social media tipped the election, we might initially assign low probability to the idea that leaks & fake news can exert a large influence on voter opinions in light of political science research that shows entire campaigns seem to have a negligible effect on election outcomes. This seems to be double true in a highly polarized electorate with very few undecided voters or "true independents" who will swing vote. For more on the political science research that support this, see Section II of this previous discussion outline:
https://www.meetup.com/Philadelphia-Political-Agnostics/events/xvbrznyxdbxb/

Also, we have to keep in mind the observation of political scientists that the primary victory of Trump was surprising because it violated the "party decides" theory, but the closeness of the general election was consistent with the fundamentals. Voting patterns didn't change drastically between 2012 & 2016 and the margin of victory was very small -- about 80,000 votes across 3 swing states (Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin) that tipped for Trump.

As political scientist Jacob Levy explained:
"An 80,000 vote margin in a 137 million vote election, about .05%, is susceptible of almost endless plausible explanations. The number of different factors that might well have moved that many votes is very large. So there are a lot of different true but-for explanations: but for Clinton’s failure to campaign in Wisconsin, but for the Comey letter, but for stricter voter ID laws and reductions in the numbers of polling places, but for Jill Stein, and so on, ad infinitum. A Democratic party strategist has good reason to take lots of them very seriously. But anyone trying to generalize about popular beliefs or the electorate’s mood should be very wary of any of them. Grabbing a plausibly-true but-for explanation of 80,000 votes, as if it says something big and true about the whole electorate, will over-explain the outcome. "
https://niskanencenter.org/blog/defense-liberty-cant-without-identity-politics/

(For those of you who listened to the recent Sam Harris podcast with Niall Ferguson, they discussed this problem of Hillary Clinton's election loss being "overdetermined" by a variety of causes, each of which might've been sufficient to tip the election to Trump.)

That said, it does look like political scientists are concerned about foreign influence on the 2016 election. I found a poll of over 1,500 American political scientists -- the Bright Line Watch survey -- taken in Feb. 2017 in which they were asked a variety of questions about what they think is "important or essential to democracy" and whether or not "the U.S. mostly or fully meets this standard". As you can see, about 82% of political scientists think "no foreign electoral influence" is important or essential, but only 42% of them think the U.S. "fully or mostly meets" this criteria. Another 20% or so say the US "partly meets" it and about 8% say they're not sure, leaving 30% that say the US does not even partly meet the criteria of "no foreign influence". Unfortunately, we can't tell from the survey what specific types of influence they're concerned with, nor can we tell whether it's primarily Russia they're worried about.
http://brightlinewatch.org/results-from-the-bright-line-watch-u-s-democracy-survey/

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DIRECTIONS ON HOW TO PREPARE FOR OUR DISCUSSION:

The videos you see linked below are intended to give you a basic overview of the scholarly debates surrounding these issues. As usual, I certainly don't expect you to read all the articles prior to attending our discussion. The easiest way to prepare for our discussion is to just watch the videos linked first under each topic, which should take about 35 minutes total to get through. The articles marked with asterisks are just there to supply additional details. You can browse and look at whichever ones you want, but don't worry - we'll cover the stuff you missed in our discussion.

In terms of the discussion format, my general idea is that we'll address the topics in the order presented here. I figure we'll spend about 30 minutes on each section.

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I. WHAT'S THE EVIDENCE THAT RUSSIA HACKED JOHN PODESTA'S EMAILS? WHAT'S THE EVIDENCE THAT RUSSIANS ALSO HACKED THE DNC SERVER & GAVE THEIR EMAILS TO WIKILEAKS? WHAT ABOUT BILL BINNEY'S ALLEGATIONS THAT THE HACK CAME FROM SOMEONE AT NSA, OR FORENSICATOR'S ANALYSIS THAT IT WAS A LEAK FROM A DNC INSIDER? DID THE RELEASE OF THE DNC EMAILS HURT CLINTON & TIP THE ELECTION TOWARDS TRUMP? IS THERE ANY EVIDENCE THE HACKERS ALTERED THE EMAILS? IF NOT, DID CLINTON DESERVE TO LOSE SUPPORT SINCE THE DNC SCHEMING REVEALED IN THE EMAILS WAS TRUE?

1a) VOA News w/ CrowdStrike's Dmitri Alperovitch, "How Do Experts Know Russians Hacked the Election?" (video - 2:35 min.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycjMZdSKjbw

1b) Kyle Kulinski: "[Forensicator] Analysis Concludes DNC Hack Was Inside Job, Not Russia" (video - 10:29 min, listen til 5:00)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvvCzOzRMwo

II. WHAT'S MORE IMPORTANT: THE TOTAL AMOUNT RUSSIA SPENT ON SOCIAL MEDIA PROPAGANDA ($46K ON FB)? THE TOTAL NUMBER OF AMERICANS "EXPOSED" TO RUSSIAN PROPAGANDA ON SOCIAL MEDIA (126-150M)? THE TOTAL THAT "LIKED" OR SHARED IT (3M ON FB GROUPS, 600K ON TWITTER)? THE "CLICK-THROUGH RATE" RELATIVE TO OTHER POSTS (5% VS 0.9% ON FB)? THE NUMBER OF FAKE EVENTS RUSSIAN TROLLS CREATED & NUMBER OF AMERICANS WHO RSVP'D TO THEM (129 FB EVENTS, 62.5K)? THE FRACTION OF THE TOTAL POLITICAL CONTENT ON SOCIAL MEDIA THIS PROPAGANDA COMPRISED (1% ON TWITTER)? IF THE "FAKE NEWS" ATTACKING HILLARY CLINTON WAS PRIMARILY CONSUMED BY PEOPLE WHO WERE ALREADY HOSTILE TO HER, COULD IT STILL SIGNIFICANTLY HURT HER SUPPORT AMONG SWING VOTERS OR DEMOCRATS?

2a) CNET, "Facebook, Google and Twitter explain Russia's influence on 2016 election" (video - 1:39 min.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FX9f_bfLh8

2b) Vox, "Fake news wasn’t the biggest media problem of 2016. It's nothing new, and it didn't swing the election." (video - 4:31 min.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdsj-PIqR0g

III. OF THE 21 (39?) STATES THAT HAD THEIR ELECTION SYSTEMS "TARGETED" BY RUSSIAN HACKERS, WHAT WAS THE RESULT? DO WE KNOW IF ANY VOTERS WERE REMOVED FROM THE ROLLS, AND IF SO HOW MANY? WHAT'S THE EVIDENCE THAT RUSSIA HACKED INTO U.S. VOTING MACHINES AND INFLATED THE VOTES FOR TRUMP? COULD THEY HAVE ALTERED ENOUGH VOTES TO TIP THE ELECTION, AND IF SO HOW WOULD WE TELL?

3a) WSJ, "The Hacking of Election 2016: Four Things to Know" (video - 3:06 min.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLH0fSEzQUg

3b) Pam Fessler, "If Voting Machines Were Hacked, Would Anyone Know?" (podcast - 3:53 min.)
https://www.npr.org/2017/06/14/532824432/if-voting-machines-were-hacked-would-anyone-know

IV. WHAT'S THE EVIDENCE THAT THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN COLLUDED WITH RUSSIAN AGENTS DURING THE 2016 ELECTION? WAS IT ILLEGAL FOR TRUMP TO PUBLICLY CALL FOR RUSSIA TO "FIND" HILLARY CLINTON'S MISSING EMAILS? DID MEMBERS OF THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN MERELY TALK WITH RUSSIAN AGENTS, OR DID THEY RECEIVE OPPOSITION RESEARCH ON CLINTON - AND WHAT'S THE LEGAL RAMIFICATIONS? WAS IT ILLEGAL FOR THE HILLARY CAMPAIGN TO PAY FUSION GPS FOR OPPOSITION RESEARCH ON TRUMP, CONSIDERING SOME INFO IN THE STEELE DOSSIER CAME FROM FOREIGNERS? WHEN WE SEE CHARTS LINKING MANY PEOPLE IN THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION TO RUSSIANS, HOW DO WE TELL IF THIS IS EVIDENCE OF A CRIMINAL CONSPIRACY OR NORMAL DIPLOMACY & CONVERGENCE OF INTERESTS?

4a) Ezra Klein @ Vox, "The latest revelation that ties the Trump campaign to Russia" (video - 4:18 min.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2crPDgnHeo

4b) Aaron Maté @ TheRealNews w/ Luke Harding, "Where's the 'Collusion'?" (video - 28:51 min, listen til 10:30)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ikf1uZli4g

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