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1988/2016: from pac and flak to hack and flak

Introduction: Remembering 1988

The year 1988 witnessed two events of considerable interest to the study of flak as a sociopolitical force.

The first event was the publication of Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent in which the authors introduced their propaganda model. In presenting their structuralist account of the behavior of news media in the contemporaneous United States, Herman and Chomsky’s objective was to illuminate “a propaganda system at work where the media are private and formal censorship is absent” (1988, p. 1); a system far more supple and decentered than the then-terminally ill Soviet system. Herman and Chomsky were interested in how a force that steers the conduct of news workers is exerted without evident force for having been embedded within a framework of robust formal freedoms.

In explaining the paradox, Herman and Chomsky (1988) posit five systemic filters that condition the performance of news workers and the resultant news narratives. In their account, the filters behave in concert to palpably but un-coercively bring news into alignment with powerful (capitalist, nationalist) interests. Herman and Chomsky characterize news as filtered from the ←3 | 4→start through oligopolistic ownership patterns. Thereafter, news is conditioned by commercial imperatives (transacting the delivery of an audience to advertisers in exchange for revenue), sourcing patterns (massively tilted toward elite information brokers) and unswerving ideological opposition to the communist Other (recall that this was 1988!). These constraints play out within a news milieu structured by professional procedures that shunt reporting toward prevailing consensus and its circumscribed controversies. With the filters deeply insinuated into the news media industry and internalized by news workers, journalism is generally, if imperfectly, textured by the status quo.

Alongside these four filters, Herman and Chomsky also propose one more filter that limits the autonomy of news organizations: flak. In contrast with the first four filters, Herman and Chomsky’s “classic” version of flak construes it as a set of disciplinary mechanisms exerted from outside news organizations. In their characterization, flak consists of “negative responses to a media statement or program” (1988, p. 16). Flak goes into motion when the other filters, in effect, slip-up and ideologically wayward reporting is broadcast or published. Vintage 1988 flak could be mobilized through “letters, telegrams, phone calls, petitions, lawsuits, speeches and bills before Congress, and other modes of complaint, threat, and punitive action” (1988, p. 16). Herman and Chomsky stress the gravity of flak: if “produced on a large scale, or by individuals or groups with substantial resources, it can be both uncomfortable and costly,” with the professional and personal implications that follow. Efforts to discipline news media with flak may—or may not—be immediately successful, but news organizations need to be mindful of the costs of disapprobation or harassment. That said, at least in their “Introduction,” Herman and Chomsky (1988) devote relatively little attention to flak.

Today, as in 1988, flak can be understood as ideologically purposeful, enacted with the objective of delegitimizing, disabling or dismantling the careers and activities of its targets. In this volume, I will further posit flak as having slipped the propaganda model leash to become a significant force in its own right. In this view, the practices of flak have claimed a more central place in contemporary sociopolitical processes, far beyond disciplinary mechanisms directed against news media. Contemporary flak arguably works through media far more massively than against it.

Since the publication of Manufacturing Consent in 1988, the advent of new media platforms has altered news in ways that are being debated even as they unfold (Curran, Fenton & Freedman, 2016; Fenton, 2010; Morozov, 2011; Peters & Broersma, 2013). On one hand, the new media era has facilitated ←4 | 5→notable improvements in the news environment. The new media order has loosened the demands of the simplistic objectivity doctrine and, for many platforms, enabled a measure of independence from media conglomerates. At the same time, the seemingly filter-less new media environment has been conducive to the growth of flak campaigns. New media has smoothed the way toward proliferation of flak-dedicated channels, specialized in the production of ideologically-driven harassment against individuals, organizations, and political causes.

Accuracy in Media (AIM, founded 1969) presented Herman and Chomsky’s lead example of flak when they introduced the propaganda model. In AIM’s appraisal, then and now, mainstream news media channels are not sufficiently monochrome, self-censorious and Pravda-like in enforcing a right-wing line. While AIM continues its dreary brand of antagonism (Goss, 2009), it is now more of a relic in what has become a crowded flak industry. To take a couple of examples of newer flak players, the Heartland Institute (founded 1984) and Project Veritas (founded 2009) are themselves media presences through their products and (niche as well as mainstream) media appearances. The remit of the flak new-wavers extends beyond ostensible media critique to produce ideologically radioactive flak against the usual litany of targets: “liberals,” universities, climate science, marginal populations, and effective State regulatory intervention in the economy.

In the effort to thoroughly characterize flak and draw attention to its techniques and impact, I am not positing flak as “the clue that solves all crimes.” As I have previously argued (Goss, 2013), the propaganda model’s amalgam of concentrated ownership patterns, rampant commercialism, elite sourcing and dichotomized narrative forms (Us/Them) continue to shape the news. I also acknowledge that flak presents a relatively limited—but influential and growing—place within the sociopolitical arena. However, flak’s impact is likely misunderstood in large part because flak campaigns are rarely identified as such. Flak’s impact can be observed, even as flak itself remains largely unmentioned and shrouded in shadows. To my knowledge, there are no previous book-length treatments of flak as political harassment. To begin to remedy this previous lack of scrutiny, I will now drill down further into defining the contours of flak.

Beyond Bullshit: Defining the Term

As Terry Eagleton (1991) points out, ideology can be considered in at least some situations as a normatively neutral term, as everyone carries ideologies ←5 | 6→just as everyone hosts bacteria. To characterize something as flak is, as I am defining it, never neutral and always a criticism in the first instance. Flak is (pick one or more) weaponized, instrumentalized, contrived, spoofed, counterfeit, simulated—or, in Harry Frankfort’s terms, encrusted with bullshit that even the cynical flak merchant may not even believe (2005).

What more specifically is flak? In the brutal concision of a few words, I define it as centered on tactics and strategies toward political harassment. Flak is enacted by powerful entities—or backed by powerful players in the wings—toward consequential sociopolitical objectives. It is distinct from good faith criticism (of a speech, of a bill) as well as from indiscriminant trolling against whomever is convenient. In this view, flak is a multidimensional form of weaponized political activity intended to attract notice, while it impedes or abolishes the effectiveness of its targets. Flak strategies and tactics toward these ends are not simply expressions of personal antipathy, but are driven by purposeful, ideologically-defined goals with tangible impact in the sociopolitical domain. Campaigns of astringent disparagement and delegitimation are perhaps the most straightforward tactics toward disabling a target’s (or targets’) effectiveness. These campaigns often aggressively kick-off by asserting the target to be, irreducibly and in essence, a problem (i.e., problematizing) or even criminal. It follows that the conduct of flak is regularly tendentious as well as contentious, and is often brazen about making moves (claims, actions) far outside of proportion or basis in evidence.¹

As for power that I have characterized as nourishing flak, it can assume distinctly different forms with their associated modalities. Power can be analyzed in terms of its coercive, economic, political, and symbolic dimensions (Flew, 2007, pp. 4–8). While coercive power is not directly in play in this discussion, I posit flak as imbued with power’s palpable economic, political, and symbolic dimensions. These dimensions can be converted into each other and then back again in an almost infinite loop. A tycoon or an industry consortium can exert economic power to fund “think tanks” or flak mills ostensibly characterized by intellectual rigor and authority. In turn, think tank symbolic power can be marshaled to reinforce the funders’ bottom-line and economic power. Politicians can, for their part, rally to the think tank flak campaigns with slogans and bills (symbolic and political power). At the same time, flak memes can be peppered over the symbolic realm of discourse in media—and reinforce the same array of economic and political powers; and so on, ad infinitum.

In this view, power is not inert, nor is it simply some discrete force that one person exercises, cudgel-like, to make another person do something; the ←6 | 7→internalization of multidimensional power relations penetrate far deeper into a person’s subjectivity and partly constitute him or her as, for example, a member of a socioeconomic class. While attentive to political and economic forms of power in the backstory of flak campaigns, I will largely focus on the symbolic dimensions of flak by analyzing flak discourses.

About those discourses: I am dwelling in the opening pages of this volume on flak’s origins in the propaganda model to emphasize that my arguments are in no measure nostalgic for the late twentieth model of U.S. journalism. In terms compatible with the propaganda model, researchers have demonstrated that U.S. news media was failing to educate the public on high-consequence issues to a shocking extent during the era of professionalized, objective journalism; high-consequence issues that include, for example, the 1991 assault on Iraq (Clark, 1992; MacArthur, 1993) and the subsequent sanctions regime against Iraqi civilians during the 1990s (Gordon, 1999; Goss, 2002).

In this view, the RAND Corporation’ recently minted concept of “truth decay” contributes a clever name to current scholarship on news (Kavanaugh & Rich, 2018). However, the truth decay analysis does not extend far enough in making its critique of what has been and what is wrong with news. To some extent, truth decay seeks to contain a contemporary crisis of authority and reassert “official” parameters of truth. In this manner, RAND’s formulation of truth decay implies a nostalgic desire to re-enthrone the status quo antebellum of ostensibly “trusted” twentieth-century news; an outcome that is neither possible, nor desirable. A flak-grounded analysis harbors no nostalgia for the U.S. news model of the twentieth century that, metaphorically speaking, outfitted systemically skewed news in a “reassuring” suit-and-tie.

Having situated flak with respect to its eruption beyond its conceptual origins in the propaganda model, I will step back to examine what another series of events in 1988 augured for a future of heightened flak. I will then trace the path of flak’s development to the new media era in 2016. The upshot of this discussion is to look in some detail at how flak, past and present, behaves in vivo, before fashioning a more systematic theoretical mapping of flak in Chapter 2.

1988: Duke of Hazard

The 1988 U.S. presidential election furnished a high-profile rehearsal for new logics of political discourse in which flak would become increasingly prevalent; a glimpse of an internet-memed future still to come.

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In the summer of 1988, Michael S. Dukakis, Massachusetts governor and Democratic nominee for the U.S. presidency, appeared well-positioned to challenge for the White House. His standing in polls against sitting Vice-President George H.W. Bush was high with a steep 17-point advantage with voters by late July (DeCosta-Klipa, 2016). It may not be surprising that a decisive margin of voters pivoted to quasi-incumbent in Bush as summer gave way to autumn. However, the manner in which 1988’s electoral turnaround played out is of interest. Specifically, the case of William Horton presents a keynote flak discourse that delivered for Bush against Dukakis. Kathleen Jamieson Hall’s account of the 1988 election posits it as unusual to that moment in modern campaigning for its bare-knuckle qualities (1992). With the benefit of decades of hindsight, I suggest that the 1988 campaign can be construed as the missing-link to contemporary, flak-saturated politics.

The main blows at Dukakis’ campaign concerned the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’ prison furlough program. In the fall of 1988, the public was led to believe that the program was a shocking aberration, designed by the apparently depraved governor himself. In fact, Massachusetts’ furlough program originated with Francis W. Sargent, Dukakis’ Republican predecessor as governor (Jamieson, 1992, p. 20). Television ads about the furloughs conveyed flak memes with 30-second gut-punch force. “By juxtaposing words and pictures” in an audiovisual slight-of-hand, one TV ad primed the false inference that 268 first degree murderers had jumped furloughs in Massachusetts (Jamieson, 1992, p. 19). Another ad focused on the case of William Horton and implied that he was a poster-boy for the Dukakis-orchestrated mayhem supposedly unleashed during his governorship in Massachusetts (1975–1979, 1983–1991). The ad described Horton’s furlough activities as “kidnaping,” “stabbing” and “raping” (quoted in Jamieson, 1992, p. 17). In turn, the eruption of a new form of weaponized discourse wrong-footed Dukakis’ campaign. The campaign initially ignored the ads as beneath contempt. By the time Dukakis pivoted to response, the flak toxins had circulated widely and the ads were recognized by a majority of voters who saw and recalled them (Jamieson, 1992, p. 36).

It is also important to notice that the ads were not the direct products of the Bush campaign. As Jamieson details, the ads originated with Bush-allied political action committees (PACs). Bush’s campaign was thusly insulated from backlash if the ads were judged to have breached the perimeter of good taste and/or honesty. There were further unstated but visceral aspects to the Horton case as well. To wit, Horton is African-American, his victims ←8 | 9→Euro-Americans, with all of the baggage that these optics have long mobilized in the US.

Once the inflammatory ads were in circulation, it became fair game to comment on and elaborate their content—as Bush obligingly did for the New York Times (Jamieson, 1992, p. 22). Even reporting that was critical of the ads fell into the sticky trap of reanimating their premises about Horton’s menace and proximity to Dukakis’ putatively skewed vision of law-and-order. In 1988, ads from PACs were the figurative crash-test dummies for flak memes that could jar public opinion—while simultaneously furnishing the beneficiaries of those memes with some distance from them. Distance, in turn, removed hints of grubby self-interest and provided cover should the delegitimizing flak discourse generate backlash.

Thirty years after Bush-Dukakis, what entities serve the flak purpose of injecting flak memes into wider public discourse? The answer is as large as the internet. YouTube or ostensible transparency, document-dump web sites can be conscripted to flak discourses and carry their flak memes far and wide—even all the way into mainstream media. Mark Turnbull, a managing director of Cambridge Analytica (CA), explained the logic while the now defunct company was practicing its dark political arts:

We just put information into the bloodstream to the internet and then watch it grow, give it a little push every now and again over time to watch it take shape. And so this stuff infiltrates the online community and expands but with no branding—so it’s unattributable, untrackable. (quoted in Dallison, 2018, para. 13)

Following coverage of CA’s previously secret methods—tenaciously pursued in the United Kingdom by The Guardian’s Carole Cadwalladr in the face of flak (Guardian News and Media Press Office, 2018)—the firm claimed insolvency. However, strategically (and clandestinely) injecting flak toxins into the political bloodstream is a practice that did not originate, nor will it end, with CA—although the firm added a data-driven thrust to these practices.

Fact-Checking the Flak

Returning to Dukakis-Bush 1988, one may ask what was wrong with the Horton ads. After all, it is a fact that Horton skipped the furlough from a Massachusetts prison, went AWOL to Maryland, slashed a man and raped his finance while holding them captive for hours; heinous crimes, by any standard.

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To begin, contra the implications of the ad, “first degree murderers” were not eligible for furlough in Massachusetts. Moreover, jumping furlough was defined as being more than four hours late returning to prison—a rare event that occurred in 0.0036–percent of cases. Horton presented the sole instance (and not one of 268) of someone committing further serious crimes on furlough out of 76,455 furloughs in Massachusetts during three-term governor Dukakis’ administration (Jamieson, 1992, p. 20).

The rationale of the furlough program was that prisoners who have limited release into the community prior to the end of their sentence are less likely to re-offend. If keeping people out of jail is the objective—as it should be, given the social and financial costs of incarceration—then there are empirically-backed logics for furloughs. These logics were also widely accepted by the 1980s. Jamieson observes that during the Reagan-Bush era, a similar furlough system was in place in the federal prison system—and Horton would have been eligible for a federal furlough at the time. Most U.S. states had similar furlough programs, including California during Reagan’s governorship decades earlier. Yet, through the ideological alchemy of flak discourse, the Horton case was not a horrific instance that could regrettably have happened anywhere—but the efflux of the peculiar social laboratory convened in elitist Massachusetts by Harvard geek cum madman Dukakis.

To summarize, the 1988 flak discourse did not merely criticize, but crafted baldly misleading memes toward the strategic end of disabling Dukakis’ campaign. Moreover, as it circulates, flak generates an aura of truth via sheer repetition, challenging the truth to catch up with its hoary discourse. As for Dukakis, he was sufficiently delegitimized by the 1988 campaign that he not only lost the election despite his summer lead in polls; he never ran for office again and was effectively retired from politics at age 57.

Audience Effects

In explaining the impact of the ads, Jamieson suggests that audiences to politics are often semi-distracted, observing from the corners of their eyes, scavenging fragments of discourse from the all-enveloping media environment. Moreover, information is not received in straightforward ways by audiences. Information is sculpted and reshaped while jostled within memory—not “filed away,” then immaculately retrieved from a filing cabinet in the mind (Loftus & Loftus, 1980). Moreover, during electoral campaigns, information is collated through one’s pre-standing sociopolitical beliefs and is more likely to be ←10 | 11→accepted if it is compatible with those beliefs (Flynn, Nyhan, & Reifler, 2017; Lazarsfeld, Berelson, & Gaudet, 1969, pp. 87–93).

Jamieson documents how these audience effects played out in 1988 via focus group data:

1: “We should ship all our criminals to the college liberals in College Station [Texas].”

2: “Or Austin. Crime’s not statistics, honey.”

4: Dukakis supporter (37-year old male): “But Bush’s guy killed a pregnant woman, a halfway house, a parole place. That’s no different from Dukakis, Massachusetts.”

1: “That’s not his [Bush’s] fault.” (Jamieson, 1992, p. 32)

And that is that: in indignant language, Dukakis is symbiotically tied to Horton. Bush is, by assertion, remote from the federal furlough machine and thus exonerated. In this case, flak memes around Dukakis may have stuck more readily for their repetition across media channels during the fall of 1988—as well as for their tightly tailored fit with decades of right-wing discourse about “law-and-order.” It is an issue on which Republicans took ownership through aggressive repetition during the Nixon era—even as officials of Nixon’s government were ushered into prison. Massachusetts/Dukakisista policies on furloughs were unremarkable by national standards, but readily articulated to long-standing flak discourses of the right vis-à-vis crime.

Nineteen eighty-eight’s election witnessed startling memes, indirectly sourced through PACs then picked up by more mainstream media platforms; memes that were dishonest and played upon the audience’s vulnerabilities as concerns keeping facts straight in a media-saturated world. All of this was further complicated by audience members’ pre-standing ideologies. In each of these respects, the 1988 election’s flak campaign anticipated the state of play for contemporary flak. Nonetheless, the practices of flak are not static—and there are indeed striking contemporary imprimaturs on it in a new media environment.

The Twenty-First Century’s Planet of Flak

The 1988 campaign can be regarded in retrospect as a dress rehearsal for flak campaigns to come. A brief and necessarily partial look at the 2016 U.S. presidential election illuminates characteristics of the new flak order. Most obviously, the practices of flak have intensified since 1988. During the 2016 electoral debates, for example, Trump’s talking points consists of rote concatenation of already established flak memes toward Hillary Clinton—in contrast ←11 | 12→with Bush in 1988 who ran on rarefied rhetoric and largely left the flak to subordinates and PAC players. Moreover, flak has been fully intertwined with the ongoing “communications revolution” of new media platforms. Along with its quantity and higher profile, flak is also more globalized at present than in 1988 in ways that will quickly become apparent.

Deep-context accounts of the 2016 election have already arrived via journalism (Harding, 2017) and academic investigation (Snyder, 2018) that pull together a wider narrative than I am attempting here. For the eager student of contemporary flak, the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) on the 2016 election is an original source of interest. The report was released in January 2017, two months after the 2016 election and weeks before Trump’s team assumed office. The report collates the judgments of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and National Security Agency (NSA). I do not take it as my “job” to valorize the work of the alphabet-soup agencies as I work in the (more transparent, if disorderly) environment of a university—but am mindful of the agencies’ research acumen, their formidable tools and workforce. In this case, their work clearly previewed the more elaborate findings of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s full report in 2019.

ICA’s report opens with blunt statements about the stakes around its investigation:

Russian efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election represent the most recent expression of Moscow’s longstanding desire to undermine the U.S.-led liberal democratic order, but these activities demonstrated a significant escalation in directness, level of activity, and scope of effort compared to previous operations.

We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump. We have high confidence in these judgments. (original emphasis; Intelligence Community Assessment, 2017, p. ii)

These are bracing statements about the ambition of Russian activities and objectives. It bears further mention that Russia is not Canada; the MI6 intelligence service of the United States’ closest ally, the United Kingdom, recently “reclassified Russia as a ‘tier one’ threat, alongside Islamic terrorism” by 2017 (Edwards, 2017, para. 1).

The U.S. intelligence community’s account of Russian activity also squares with the characterization of flak discussed earlier. To wit, ICA appraises the ←12 | 13→Kremlin as undertaking a delegitimization effort in support of Russia’s strategic objectives—and its flak targets were not only personalized vis-à-vis Clinton, but ultimately directed at the bigger target of fundamental faith in the U.S. electoral system that makes the nation governable. ICA’s further maintains that Russia, a hostile foreign power, assessed that Trump’s ascendency was compatible with Russian interests. While Russian agents hacked material from “some Republican-affiliated targets,” ICA concludes that Russia exclusively weaponized stolen material against Democrats (2017, p. 3).²

Had Clinton prevailed in the November 2016 election, Russia was also prepared to pour high-octane fuel on any brushfires of discontent in the United States over the result. Russian intelligence had already prepared the #DemocracyRIP hashtag to look like the work of indignant Americans, for the purpose of mobilizing doubts about Clinton, in particular—and the probity of U.S. electoral results, in general (2017, p. 2). Toward these strategic ends, Russian intelligence endowed its activities with the façade of being organic, U.S. domestic opposition, and not the work of a hostile foreign government.

Alongside cyber operations to spearfish and penetrate the Clinton campaign’s computer networks, ICA reports that the Russian flak offensive featured more “above board” flak tactics. RT (formally called Russia Today) was the Kremlin-sponsored, English-language television network that answered the call (2017, pp. 6–12). RT went to the ramparts for Trump and against Clinton with repetition on flak memes about “her leaked emails […], poor physical and mental health, and ties to Islamic extremism” (2017, p. 4). RT’s most popular video, viewed more than nine million times, circulated under the flak claim, How 100-Percent of the Clintons’ Charity Went to … Themselves (2017, p. 4).³ RT ventured far beyond straightforward criticism of Clinton as claims were not only made in apparent bad faith but were loaded to delegitimize and even criminalize the target. Moreover, Russia’s campaigns were not rolled up after the election in 2016. ICA assess that Russia’s program of spearfishing U.S. government officials, thinks tanks and nongovernmental organizations continued, in the effort to gain advantages over the its foe, the United States (Intelligence Community Assessment, 2017, p. 5).

Mueller’s GRU(e)some Indictment

A year-and-a-half later in 2018, The United States of America versus Viktor Borisovich Netyksho, et al. presents further interesting reading for the student of flak around the 2016 election. A product of the Robert S. Mueller III special ←13 | 14→counsel investigation, the indictment provides operational detail about the activities flagged in the ICA’s report in 2017. Mueller (2018) mainly focuses on the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, known in the west by the acronym GRU; a notoriously severe outfit even by the standards of military intelligence. However, in this episode, GRU was more concerned with killing campaigns and reputations via flak than people.

According to Mueller’s indictment, GRU operatives hacked email accounts “of volunteers and employees of the U.S. presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton,” including her campaign chair John Podesta (2018, p. 2). Once email accounts were compromised, Russian military intelligence stole documents, logged keystrokes, and made screen shots of Clinton campaign workers’ computers. All of this was undertaken by a “tier one” threat, eager to weaponize the information it was gathering to flak against its disfavored candidate. Toward this strategic end, “By in or around June 2016,” Russia’s GRU had “gained access to approximately 33 DNC [Democratic Party National Committee] computers” (Mueller, 2018, p. 10).

In line with a flak strategy, the stolen communications were subjected to “stage releases” for political impact at crucial intervals of the 2016 campaign. The objective was “to interfere” with the election—and to do so in ways that flaked Clinton to Trump’s advantage (Mueller, 2018, p. 2). Document dumps of the pilfered materials were made through “fictitious online persons”—Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks—in order to conceal Russia’s hand. Mueller’s indictment notes that GRU agents “created the online persona Guccifer 2.0” that was “falsely claimed to be a lone Romanian hacker” (2018, p. 14). DCLeaks, launched in June 2018, was proclaimed with similar speciousness to have been “started by a group of ‘American hacktivists’ when it was in fact started by the [GRU] Conspirators” (2018, p. 13). In both cases, the GRU fronts were designed to exude the “white hat” prestige of being concerned (h)ac(k)tivists. DCLeaks’ hashtag was subsequently used to organize flash mobs against Clinton as well as to post images from #BlacksAgainstHillary in an attempt to demobilize a core Democratic Party constituency.

GRU also employed these fronts to recruit other players to spread the hacked booty and damage Clinton’s campaign: “the Conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, transferred approximately 2.5 gigabytes of data stolen from the DNCC [Democratic Party National Congressional Committee] to a then-registered state lobbyist and online source of political news” (2018, p. 16). Through the Guccifer 2.0 persona, GRU shared its ill-begotten wares with ←14 | 15→two reporters and “a person who was in regular contact with senior members of the presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump” (2018, p. 16). The stolen booty was also shared with an organization named in the indictment as “Organization 1,” understood to be WikiLeaks. In turn, Mueller’s indictment cites communications between GRU/Guccifer 2.0 and WikiLeaks about how to make the pilfered material “have a much a higher impact” (2018, p. 18)—a central flak objective since flak, by definition, does not seek to “inform” but to delegitimize and disable.

WikiLeaks made good on its promise for impact through timing. It released a tranche of GRU-stolen materials three days before the Democratic Party convention in July 2016. The timing furnished enough news cycles before the convention to provoke internal dissension and the resignation of the party’s chairperson—and generally conjured rainclouds of distraction over Clinton’s formal nomination as the first woman standard-bearer for a major U.S. party. The revelations from the vast trove of stolen materials were damp squibs, what I will later conceptualize as faux (or phantom) flak. However, within the regime of faux flak, the mere suggestion that “something bad” was in the lode of documents was in itself enough to nourish finger-wagging flak-memes about wrongdoing.

Stone Cold Flak

Mueller (2018) focuses on GRU’s processes of hacking material later used for flak purposes. Mueller’s subsequent indictment in January 2019, United States of America versus Roger Jason Stone, Jr. (2019) sheds further light on the GRU’s development of flak narratives against Clinton to be channeled to the U.S. public.

Mueller assesses Stone as implicated in an effort to obtain and then disseminate “emails damaging to the Clinton campaign” (Mueller, 2019, p. 2). Toward this end, Stone was in contact with “a senior, Trump campaign official,” among other interlocutors, discussing the timing and likely influence of the document dumps while he also coordinated with WikiLeaks (2019, p. 3). “Impact [of the document dumps] planned to be very damaging,” the indictment’s “Person 1” (Jerome Corsi) explains to Stone as the clandestine flak campaign played out in summer 2016. Person 1 further elaborates the flak campaign talking points to Stone: “Would not hurt to start suggesting HRC [Hillary Rodham Clinton] old, memory bad, has stroke—neither he nor she well […] setting stage for [Clinton] Foundation debacle” (quoted in Mueller, 2019, pp. 4–5).

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In these flak meme rehearsals, Clinton is not simply wrong on some or even most all issues—but is broadly unfit for office due to physical and moral decrepitude. Stone and his interlocutors eagerly anticipated “October Surprise” weaponized flak memes to blow up in Clinton’s face in the endgame of the election and sink the Democrats’ campaign. In the event, no full-blown scandals arose from the dissemination of the Clinton campaigns’ hacked emails. However, that is not the standard that flak merchants need to meet. The news itself of 50,000 documents released to the public (too much material for anyone to read in short order) is in and of itself taken as casting suspicion on the victim, regardless of whether the emails reveal anything beyond office bitching and operational details. The very fact of hacks and subsequent leaks also lent themselves to residual flak “fringe benefits.” That is, news narratives projected Clinton’s campaign as a loose or sinking ship, on the defensive, needing to raise its voice over the din about emails in the effort to get its message out.

Impacts: Flak Delivers More Than Pizza

One revelation in the hacked emails concerned a pizza restaurant that Clinton campaign chair John Podesta frequented. This explosive discovery prompted the meme that the—non-existent—basement of the pizza establishment was the site of a child pornography ring. Among other clues, “child porn” and “cheese pizza” share the acronym “CP” (the phrase “one could not make these things up” comes to mind here). In short order, the pizza restaurant was stormed by an armed gunman, thankfully without fatalities, as flak to murder an election campaign almost spiraled into murdering people (Pilkington, 2019).

Pizza aside, Kathleen Hall Jamieson (2018) analyzes the 2016 election at book length in Cyberwar; a volume that she pointedly titled in order to emphasize the stakes. In Jamieson’s appraisal, Russia’s interventions in the 2016 election far exceed anodyne characterizations such as meddling—and they were likely decisive to the electoral outcome. As in her analysis of 1988, Jamieson does not employ the term flak in her discussion. However, her analysis squares with a flak-based understanding of the campaign to slime Clinton with delegitimizing memes and to prop up Trump.

Jamieson argues that Russia’s covert activities in the run-up to the election were not necessarily designed to change votes from “blue” to “red”; a tall order, as it implicates changing minds and even subjectivities to switch party allegiances in a narrow timeframe. Instead, demobilizing core Democratic ←16 | 17→constituencies from voting was a reachable goal in a flak framework—and one less vote for a candidate amounts to the same in the final electoral tally as one more vote in the other candidate’s column. Votes could be siphoned off by raising doubts about Clinton among wavering voters who leaned Democrat with whom Clinton’s campaign was assaying to close the deal in the campaign endgame. Targeted flak in these cases could crucially drain motivation to vote, or nudge voters away from Clinton toward a third-party candidate. Moreover, social media data exhaust was sufficient to identify voters with a wavering profile.

Jamieson argues that the U.S. media system unwittingly channeled the Kremlin’s flak campaign that denigrated Clinton and put wind under the wings of Trump’s often faltering campaign. This was in part due to the U.S. media’s fixation on melodramatically narrating elections through the lens of which side is apparently winning or losing the momentum game. By contrast with the United States in 2016, Jamieson observes that Russian interventions (for Marine Le Pen, against Emmanuel Macron) fell flat in France’s 2017 election. French journalists largely ignored hacked information, rather than copiously laundering it into the news hole, as they instead tracked issues.

Jamieson (2018) cites examples of memes drawn from the hacked material that were insinuated into the 2016 election discourse during candidate debates witnessed by 60–70 million viewers. In one of several such moments during the debates, Clinton was asserted to advocate for “open borders,” based on the hacked materials; in the hacked source material, she was referring to an energy grid in South America. Clinton’s comments were subsequently, selectively and disingenuously, cut-and-pasted into the debate to signify purported retreat from any form of border control around the United States. The meme was purportedly grounded in Clinton’s unguarded words and authentic views—rather than a disingenuous flak-glossed version of them—that also chimed with Trumpian border fetishism. In turn, the meme also resonated with the decades-long construction of Clinton as two-faced and harboring hidden agendas. By contrast, Trump gained a boost in the agora of personality perceptions when unashamed boorishness was conflated with authenticity.

Jane Mayer reports that more front-page New York Times space was devoted to Clinton’s emails during a week in October when undecided voters were making up their minds than was devoted to both candidates’ policy packages during months of campaign coverage; the emails had, in turn, become a flak shorthand code for “something amiss” with Clinton. Mainstream news narrative constructions that seek two-sides-of-every-issue “symmetry” further ←17 | 18→enabled flak—to Kremlin specifications, laundered through WikiLeaks, and favorable to Trump’s interests. In particular, Trump was on the ropes on 7 October as the Director of National Intelligence announced an assessment of Russian interference in the U.S. election. Hours later, Trump’s audio-recorded enthusiasms for assaulting women by genital grab was published. A flak response to these well-grounded narratives was swift: thirty minutes after the genital grab recording’s release, WikiLeaks shifted the narrative arc of the news by publishing purloined emails from Podesta’s account. The stories about the two campaigns were, in turn, treated as symmetrical in their suggestions of wrongdoing—and the sensation of private emails, with the promise of scandal somewhere within them, blunted the body blows to Trump’s campaign with a flak deus-ex-machina.

On the basis of her study, Jamieson concludes that it is “‘likely’” that Russia’s flak-oriented interventions to problematize and delegitimize one candidate flipped the result of the 2016 U.S. presidential election (quoted in Mayer, 2018, para. 9). James Clapper, the US’ Director of National Intelligence in 2016, similarly posits that “it stretches credulity to think the Russians didn’t turn the election outcome” (quoted in Mayer, 2018, para. 3). The George W. Bush-era director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Michael Hayden, appraised the Russian intervention as “the most successful covert influence operation in history” (quoted in Mayer, 2018, para. 47). And flak was written into the Russian intervention’s genetic makeup. At the same time, it should not be forgotten that Trump claimed 60-million votes; that is alarming in itself given the candidate’s policy package, record and conduct, although it likely would not have put him over the electoral hump without the flak enabled by the Kremlin’s helping hands.

Conclusion

Thus far, I have proceeded through paired case studies of flak in the electoral arena while flagging, on the fly, features of the flak regime. In the following chapter, I will extend the arc of this introduction by fleshing out flak in further detail, addressing its scope and sub-types while marking flak’s important differences from other concepts (scandal, activism). The upshot of these efforts will be to turn the scrutiny away from flak targets and toward flak merchants and practices, to pull flak out its shadowy origins.

At the same time, the focus in this volume may seem one-sided in suggesting that flak campaigns are associated with the political right. I acknowledge ←18 | 19→the association in this volume—but have no apology to make for it. That is, left-wing flak does exist. A figure such as Walter Palmer—notorious midwestern dentist and killer of Cecil the Lion in Zimbabwe—can be said to be a subject of left-leaning flak, on the assumption that animal rights is a more left-oriented issue. However, in gazing out onto the world, I am seeing one side of the political spectrum that is taking ownership over the practices of flak along with exhibiting undisguised contempt for fair play that puts political faction (and not country) first. Some of the discourses and actions that I have in mind include Senate Republicans’ refusal to honor lawful precedent in acting on presidential nomination for the Supreme Court in 2016 during Barack H. Obama’s last year on office (Faris, 2018).

The right has also become comfortable in routinely criminalizing its political opponents on flimsy, flak-driven grounds. In this vein, Michael Flynn, one of 2016’s leading campaign rally chanters of the “lock her [Clinton] up” flak mantra, has so far evaded prison time as a felon via plea bargaining. As a former Republican operative, Elise Jordan, observed with disgust, Republican candidates involved in close election races in 2018 lividly screamed fraud at their opponents. With the exception of Martha McSally during her narrow Senate loss in Arizona, Republicans succumbed to the flak reflex to criminalize their opponents when election results were tight, drawing as they did so upon flak tropes that I will elaborate in Chapter 5 (Jordan, 2018).

What I am calling right-wing does not implicate classically conservative traditionalists and communitarians who preserve the rhythms of life through slow, measured change; the kind of people who inhabit the idealized worlds of Norman Rockwell images, although Rockwell’s fictional people can have their real world concomitants. A figure such as John S. McCain III, Republican Party candidate for president in 2008, may fit this bill for his communitarian respect for the nation’s traditions; a flawed politician for whom I, for one, would not vote but who engendered respect even from ideological opponents for “conserving” the nation’s better political practices that include owning up to errors. By the end of his life, it is fair to assess that a conservative such as McCain was an awkward fit in an increasingly right-wing party.

The flak campaigns that I focus on in this book, in one way or another, all come back to a resolute right-wing concern with re-enthroning primitive, illiberal hierarchy. Right-wingers are not conservative, nor concerned with exalting community or gradual reform; explosive and destructive movement is their bag. The flak campaigns that I examine assay, for example, to de-tax and de-regulate capitalism to law-of-the jungle specifications that extend ←19 | 20→the continued authority of pollution industries. Flak is similarly deployed to broadly attack universities that are engines of positive innovations, such as scientific discoveries, as well as enabling social mobility for students. Right-wing flak is also mobilized to denigrate access to the franchise that gives voice via the vote to the masses; votes that are, in turn, a channel of political accountability to the wider public. By contrast, flak memes construct voting as a fount of criminality for the flak strategic objective of culling the voter rolls.

I focus on flak by the political right given that, on each of these significant issues, flak has found a far more comfortable home on that side of the political spectrum. In this view, flak has been weaponized for the rightist objective of sabotaging progress toward equality and reinvigorating hard-core, pre-liberal social stratification.

Notes

1.Flak typically does not engender illegal activity in the United States in large part because speech laws and their interpretation have tended toward a strong version of classical liberalism. Libel is, by design, exceedingly difficult to prove under US law (Campbell, 2003, pp. 545–549). Robust liberalism in speech rights readily enables flak campaigns that may paradoxically channel illiberal ideologies.

2.In my appraisal, the infinitely better candidate in 2016 faced extraordinary obstacles in having her campaign’s communications hacked then leaked. I posit that Clinton’s campaign nevertheless let the public down in failing to drive a stake into an opposing candidate unprecedented in lack of qualifications and fitness for office.

3.Despite extensive document dumps around the Clinton Foundation, it has not been shown to be athwart of any laws; not so the now defunct Trump Foundation and its carnival of vanity and corruption. New York’s Attorney General describes the state’s 2018 lawsuit against Trump Foundation as driven by “a shocking pattern of illegality […] including unlawful coordination with the Trump presidential campaign, repeated and willful self-dealing, and much more” (Letitia James New York Attorney General, 2018, para. 5).

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