Global Research

If there was a Fake News of the Year Award, This New York Times article would be in the Top 5 category for running one of the worst stories and may I add, a conspiracy theory for 2018. On December 17th, The New York Times published an article titled ‘Russian 2016 Influence Operation Targeted African-Americans on Social Media’ has to be one of the most absurd pieces I’ve read this year.  Newsflash, you don’t need Russians or the Chinese or anyone else who is not on America’s good side to tell African-Americans what are the true colors of the Democratic party. Throughout their history, the Democratic party’s relationship with the African-American community even under America’s first African-American President, Barack Obama, (his mother Ann Dunham was white) has been catastrophic. The policies put forth by the Democratic Party (the Republicans can also share the blame as they have continued those same policies) has destroyed the African-American community.

Screengrab from The New York Times

It is also a fact that the U.S. holds the title for having one of the largest prison populations on the planet filled with mostly young African-American and Latino men. Former U.S. President and a life-long Democrat Bill Clinton imposed tough drug laws that effected young black men at unprecedented levels. Michelle Alexander’s ‘The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness’ wrote about Bill Clinton’s federal “Three Strikes and you’re Out” law’ and the impact it had on the African-American community:

To the contrary, in 1992, presidential candidate Bill Clinton vowed that he would never permit any Republican to be perceived as tougher on crime than he. True to his word, just weeks before the critical New Hampshire primary, Clinton chose to fl y home to Arkansas to oversee the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a mentally impaired black man who had so little conception of what was about to happen to him that he asked for the dessert from his last meal to be saved for him until the morning. After the execution, Clinton remarked, “I can be nicked a lot, but no one can say I’m soft on crime.” 

Once elected, Clinton endorsed the idea of a federal “three strikes and you’re out” law, which he advocated in his 1994 State of the Union address to enthusiastic applause on both sides of the aisle. The $30 billion crime bill sent to President Clinton in August 1994 was hailed as a victory for the Democrats, who “were able to wrest the crime issue from the Republicans and make it their own.” The bill created dozens of new federal capital crimes, mandated life sentences for some three-time offenders, and authorized more than $16 billion for state prison grants and expansion of state and local police forces. Far from resisting the emergence of the new caste system, Clinton escalated the drug war beyond what conservatives had imagined possible a decade earlier. As the Justice Policy Institute has observed, “the Clinton Administration’s ‘tough on crime’ policies resulted in the largest increases in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history.”

Did President Obama’s Economic Model Help the African-American Community?

In a 2015 article written by Lauren Victoria Burke published by Black Press USA ‘Is Black America Better Off Under Obama?’ quoted what Obama said on December 19th, 2014 to Urban Radio Networks White House Correspondent April Ryan “Like the rest of America, Black America, in the aggregate, is better off now than it was when I came into office,” Burke response was “What planet African Americans are doing “better off” on is unknown. What is known is that President Obama is about to leave office with African Americans in their worst economic situation since Ronald Reagan. A look at every key stat as President Obama starts his sixth year in office illustrates that.” Burke described what some of the facts were in regards to the African-American community under Obama:

Unemployment. The average Black unemployment under President Bush was 10 percent. The average under President Obama after six years is 14 percent. Black unemployment, “has always been double” [that of Whites] but it hasn’t always been 14 percent. The administration was silent when Black unemployment hit 16 percent – a 27-year high – in late 2011. 

Poverty. The percentage of Blacks in poverty in 2009 was 25 percent; it is now 27 percent. The issue of poverty is rarely mentioned by the president or any members of his cabinet. Currently, more than 45 million people – 1 in 7 Americans – live below the poverty line. 

The Black/White Wealth Gap. The wealth gap between Blacks and Whites in America is at a 24-year high. A December study by PEW Research Center revealed the average White household is worth $141,900, and the average Black household is worth $11,000. From 2010 to 2013, the median income for Black households plunged 9 percent

Adding to Burke’s analysis is the study of the black child poverty rate in the U.S. compared to other groups. The Pew Research study released on July 14th, 2015 ‘Black child poverty rate holds steady, even as other groups see declines’suggested that children living in poverty across the U.S. declined as the economy improved. However, the poverty rate for black children did not change that much:

The share of American children living in poverty has declined slightly since 2010 as the nation’s economy has improved. But the poverty rate has changed little for black children, the group most likely to be living in poverty, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of Census Bureau data 

The study said that the child poverty rate for all other groups decreased while black children poverty rate did not change at all:

Overall, 20% of children in the U.S., or 14.7 million, lived in poverty in 2013 – down from 22%, or 16.3 million, in 2010. (Poverty in 2013 was defined as living in a household with an annual income below $23,624 for a family of four with two related children.) During this period, the poverty rate declined for Hispanic, white and Asian children. Among black children, however, the rate held steady at about 38%. Black children were almost four times as likely as white or Asian children to be living in poverty in 2013, and significantly more likely than Hispanic children

These are some of the facts that faced the African-American community under Obama. The majority of African-Americans I personally know in New York City don’t like the Republicans and I can assure you, they don’t like the Democrats that much either. With an increase of poverty and unemployment rates plus police shootings of young black men (many were unarmed individuals) across the United States under Obama, maybe that’s’ why many black people did not vote in the 2016 election for Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party.

In another report by Pew Research ‘Black Voter Turnout fell in 2016, even as a record number of Americans cast ballots’ said that although more than 137 million people voted in the 2016 elections, Black voter turnout decreased according to the report:

The black voter turnout rate declined for the first time in 20 years in a presidential election, falling to 59.6% in 2016 after reaching a record-high 66.6% in 2012. The 7-percentage-point decline from the previous presidential election is the largest on record for blacks. (It’s also the largest percentage-point decline among any racial or ethnic group since white voter turnout dropped from 70.2% in 1992 to 60.7% in 1996.) The number of black voters also declined, falling by about 765,000 to 16.4 million in 2016, representing a sharp reversal from 2012. With Barack Obama on the ballot that year, the black voter turnout rate surpassed that of whites for the first time. Among whites, the 65.3% turnout rate in 2016 represented a slight increase from 64.1% in 2012

So the low black voter turnout rate in the 2016 U.S. Presidential elections should not surprise anyone given the fact that their living standards have either remained the same or have gotten worst under the Obama administration. But The New York Times claims that the Russians influenced African-Americans through Instagram according to a joint investigation with New Knowledge, a Texas based cybersecurity company along with researchers from Columbia University and Canfield Research LLC:

“The Russian influence campaign on social media in the 2016 election made an extraordinary effort to target African-Americans, used an array of tactics to try to suppress turnout among Democratic voters and unleashed a blizzard of activity on Instagram that rivaled or exceeded its posts on Facebook, according to a report produced for the Senate Intelligence Committee”

The report adds new details to the portrait that has emerged over the last two years of the energy and imagination of the Russian effort to sway American opinion and divide the country, which the authors said continues to this day.

“Active and ongoing interference operations remain on several platforms,” says the report, produced by New Knowledge, a cybersecurity company based in Austin, Tex., along with researchers at Columbia University and Canfield Research LLC. One continuing Russian campaign, for instance, seeks to influence opinion on Syria by promoting Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president and a Russian ally in the brutal conflict there

The report suggests that the Russians took advantage of African-Americans who had an interest regarding “black history, the Black Panther Party and Malcolm X”:

But the New Knowledge report gives particular attention to the Russians’ focus on African-Americans, which is evident to anyone who examines collections of their memes and messages.

“The most prolific I.R.A. efforts on Facebook and Instagram specifically targeted black American communities and appear to have been focused on developing black audiences and recruiting black Americans as assets,” the report says. Using Gmail accounts with American-sounding names, the Russians recruited and sometimes paid unwitting American activists of all races to stage rallies and spread content, but there was a disproportionate pursuit of African-Americans, it concludes.

The report says that while “other distinct ethnic and religious groups were the focus of one or two Facebook Pages or Instagram accounts, the black community was targeted extensively with dozens.” In some cases, Facebook ads were targeted at users who had shown interest in particular topics, including black history, the Black Panther Party and Malcolm X

Well there are many historical facts on what the Democratic party has done systematically to destroy the African-American community and many African-Americans understand this fact. Malcolm X understood what the Democratic Party was really about, read ‘What Did Malcolm X Really Think about the Democratic Party?’ which I wrote back in 2017. Let’s also take the history of abortions in the African-American community. For example, Eugenicist, a hero of the Democratic party (especially for Hillary Clinton) and founder of American Birth Control League which later would be renamed ‘Planned Parenthood’ Margaret Sanger (a Democratic Socialist) wrote a letter on December 10, 1939 to Dr. Clarence J. Gamble which she said “We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population…” Former Secretary of State and two time Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton accepted Planned Parenthood’s Margaret Sanger Award back in 2009 and praised the Eugenicist:

Now, I have to tell you that it was a great privilege when I was told that I would receive this award. I admire Margaret Sanger enormously, her courage, her tenacity, her vision … And when I think about what she did all those years ago in Brooklyn, taking on archetypes, taking on attitudes and accusations flowing from all directions, I am really in awe of her

This is just one part of Black history that adds insult to injury. An article by Walter B. Hoye III published on The Center for Urban Renewal and Education (CURE) titled ‘Abortion is the Single Negative Force on Black American Growth’explains how abortions have affected the African-American community:

Considering that the total current Black American population is about 42,000,000, the 20,350,000 Black American abortions are equal to 48.45% of the total Black American population. If not for abortion, the total Black American population would be approximately 62,350,000, or 48% greater than it is today.

This is based on an analysis of data from the U.S. Statistical Abstract for 2013 and the National Vital Statistics Report, Vol. 64, No. 1 dated January 15, 2015. This analysis was done recently by Dennis Howard, President of the Movement for a Better America who has written extensively on abortion demographics.

In 2015, there were an estimated 9,168,000 Black American women in their childbearing years between age 15 and 44 which make up around 14% of all women in that age group in the United States of America.

These women experienced:

Births: 621,679

Abortions: 423,000

Pregnancies: 1,044,679

Resulting in:

Abortions as a % of all pregnancies: 40.5%

Abortion rate per 1,000 women: 46.3

The high-rate of abortions among African-Americans introduced by the Democratic party is just another historical fact, but The New York Times says it’s Russian propaganda or what they call “Soviet Propaganda” that influenced African-Americans in the 2016 Presidential elections:

The report does not seek to explain the heavy focus on African-Americans. But the Internet Research Agency’s tactics echo Soviet propaganda efforts from decades ago that often highlighted racism and racial conflict in the United States, as well as recent Russian influence operations in other countries that sought to stir ethnic strife

The New York Times claims that the report by the Senate Intelligence community not only targets the Trump-Russia collusion theory, they also take a jab at Senator Bernie Sanders and the Green Party candidate, Jill Stein:

“While the right-wing pages promoted Mr. Trump’s candidacy, the left-wing pages scorned Mrs. Clinton while promoting Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate. The voter suppression effort was focused particularly on Sanders supporters and African-Americans, urging them to shun Mrs. Clinton in the general election and either vote for Ms. Stein or stay home.

Whether such efforts had a significant effect is difficult to judge. Black voter turnout declined in 2016 for the first time in 20 years in a presidential election, but it is impossible to determine whether that was the result of the Russian campaign”

The New York Times and the mainstream-media who work for the establishment in Washington, D.C. are becoming more ridicules, more conspiratorial by the day. Let’s be clear, the Democrats (and the Republican party in many cases) do not care about African-Americans or any other minority group including poor white communities. They just want your votes to stay in power.

Besides, according to people in the Democratic Party like Hillary Clinton who happened to praise former Ku Klux Klan leader Robert Byrd when he died in 2010 by saying “Today our country has lost a true American original, my friend and mentor Robert C. Byrd” she went on to say that “Senator Byrd was a man of surpassing eloquence and nobility. And I will remember him for many things, but most of all, for a heartfelt comment he made to me in the dark days following the attack on our country on 9/11.” Byrd’s legacy definitely rubbed off on Hillary Clinton because to her, all African-American’s look alike:

Hillary Clinton was trying to be funny by mocking the interviewer,  however, saying something like that is insulting to African-Americans even if it was only meant to be funny.  It is not.

The New York Times along with other mainstream-media outlets and the Democratic party are desperate to remove Trump from office and they are using any lie to do so.  Therefore, blaming Russia for everything is a joke, especially for those of us who know what the truth is.

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site: Silent Crow News.

Featured image is from SCN