We are not going to talk about Russians trying to use Black Organisations to create chaos?

[Soundbwoy]

A website hosted by Russia’s “troll farm” in St. Petersburg attempted to push an African-American boycott of Christmas with articles and a line of typo-ridden merchandise last year.

BlackMattersUS, which independent Russian media outlet RBC identified as one of the most influential websites and troll accounts operated out of the Kremlin-backed Internet Research Agency, pushed T-shirts imploring its users to “Say no! To ho-ho-ho,” alongside a picture of a candy cane.

As representatives from Facebook, Twitter, and Google this week are set to testify before Senate and House Committees on Russian interference in the 2016 election, BlackMattersUS’ tone-deaf efforts to launch a boycott while posing as African-Americans shows the lengths the troll farm would go to try—and sometimes fail—to sow racial discord in the U.S.

The shirts are often nonsensical and filled with phrases that don’t make sense. One shirt, sold by the U.S. shirt printing company Represent on BlackMattersUS’ custom Christmas-themed store, reads “Dear Cops, Don’t Shoot—SUCK.” The phrase encompasses two candy canes and a Christmas ornament.

A sweatshirt sold by BlackMattersUS’ holiday store “Boycott Christmas,” says “Black don’t need white X-Mas,” and is still available for $39.95.

Another shirt that reads “Black Power” underneath an illustration of gingerbread cookies is still live at the custom address represent.com/black-power.


Other shirts had a message that conflicted with its central theme, like a shirt that simply reads “Thug Life” over three Christmas trees and handguns. “How about this cute t-shirt for Christmas?” the
the shirt’s description reads.
Represent, which is based in Los Angeles, did not respond to a request for comment.

BlackMattersUS shut down last week and was replaced with a notice that a Reddit Ask Me Anything session “with Russian trolls” is “coming soon.” The Q-and-A is scheduled for Friday, according to Reddit’s Ask Me Anything subreddit calendar.

An unnamed person emailing from BlackMattersUS’ domain name emailed The Daily Beast last week to encourage journalists to participate in the Reddit thread, but did not respond to a request for comment on its Christmas boycott.

Before the site was replaced by a Reddit Q-and-A advertisement, BlackMattersUS purported to be a “nonprofit news outlet” featuring writers like “Crystal Johnson” who had been “with Black Matters since October 2014,” even though the site was created in 2015. The site said “Crystal Johnson” interned at Atlanta’s WEYI, but the station never employed someone by that name, according to ThinkProgress.

Five days before Christmas last year, BlackMattersUS wrote a story titled “Reasons to Boycott Christmas” that was largely plagiarized from a blog at the “Nation of Islam Research Group,” but used several different opportunities to link out to BlackMattersUS’ online store.
The post cites several historical examples, but does not include the 1963 civil rights protest of Christmas in Greenville, North Carolina, where African-American residents boycotted the purchase of Christmas gifts after local businesses refused to hire black employees.

The post also claims that “The Bible outlaws XMas,” and tells African-Americans to boycott the holiday because "you can't afford it."

The Internet Research Agency used Kremlin funding to impersonate African-American, American-Muslim, and LGBTQ groups on Facebook, Twitter, and other parts of the social web. The groups gained hundreds of thousands of followers, and sometimes used them to push Kremlin talking points or to push real-life protests in the United States.

Some Kremlin troll accounts, like the Twitter account Ten_GOP, which claimed to be run by Tennessee Republicans, looked considerably more authentic than the BlackMattersUS’ poorly copy-edited merchandise. That account was retweeted by Donald Trump Jr., Trump campaign adviser Kellyanne Conway, and Trump campaign digital director Brad Parscale just days before the election.

Right-wing media outlets like Fox News have pushed the narrative of a “War on Christmas” for years, claiming that Starbucks cups that don’t explicitly say “Merry Christmas” represent “the latest battleground in a cultural war over Christmas.”

The Kremlin troll accounts frequently took advantage of those already existing right-wing talking points, but were only sometimes successful.

“In a normal influence campaign, you do these things called ‘audience analysis’ and ‘product testing’ to see what works before you put it out there. They didn’t. They try everything, then go with what works,” former FBI counterterrorism agent and Russian cyber warfare expert Clint Watts, told The Daily Beast last month.

“They skipped the product testing phase. They didn’t do it. And they also don’t care.”

If you don't want to read watch the whole video


I wonder how many pro blacks brehs got manipulated into this and if this relates to Micah Johnson somehow

 

[WaveCapsByOscorp™]

I think it has been but under the whole umbrella of russia meddling with the 2016 election. I know I’ve commented on here about it in another thread. I believe someone started talking about how Russian dummy corps brought and created ads that went out around the time attention to police aggression towards black Americans was high. They linked it or made it look like it was BLM related and didn’t directly come out and say they didn’t support government, it was more divisive in the sense that it wouldn’t tell you straight out but have you conclude or draw conclusions.

But that’s another interesting article posted, about them coming up with anti Xmas messages. I think it’s all a ploy though. The debate, the worry. People just need to educate themselves

 

[ColiBomaye]

The Russians' idea of "Black X-Mas Only" is a handgun and a stack of money in a stocking

 

[The Amerikkkan Idol]

This is all BS cooked up by racist CACs.

They've always accused Civil Rights Orgs of being "Russian puppets", including MLK, Rosa Parks, The Black Panthers, and everybody else

Don't let these neo-cons on the left and the right use the whole "russian propaganda" angle to try to deny Black people our rights

Lee Sustar looks at the impact of the 1950s era of reaction on the Black struggle.

August 17, 2012

BY MOST accounts, the civil rights movement began in 1954, created by the U.S. Supreme Court decision that outlawed racial segregation in the public schools.

Yet the anticommunist witch-hunts of the previous years had an enormous negative impact on the struggle. This reality tends to be ignored by those who want to downplay the role of the left in the fight for Black rights--and because of the participation of many "liberal" civil rights leaders in the witch-hunt.

In the 1930s, two organizations had been in the forefront of the struggle for Black rights--the Communist Party (CP) and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). But after the U.S. entered the war, CIO leaders dropped the anti-racist battle for the sake of "unity" in the war effort.

Taking its cue from President Roosevelt's alliance with Stalin's Russia, the CP became the chief enforcer of such pro-war policies within the working-class movement--breaking strikes and attacking as "divisive" the NAACP's demands for nondiscriminatory hiring in defense industries.

Rather than press for Black jobs, the CP sought to muster Black organizations for the "defense of the democratic institutions of our country"--by supporting the war. The CP denounced the mild civil rights demands of A. Philip Randolph's planned 1941 March on Washington as "dangerous" and "belligerent." The party went so far as to accuse Black participants in the 1943 Harlem race riot of playing into the hands of the Nazis.

Such politics came back to haunt the CP after the war, when President Harry Truman launched a vicious anti-communist crusade as a means to justify an aggressive, anti-Russia policy abroad and attacks on militant workers at home. Although CP members played a leading role in the 1946 strike wave--the biggest in U.S. history--the CP's political support had declined dramatically.

By effectively siding with the bosses during the war, the CP was isolated from rank-and-file workers when CIO officials joined the witch-hunt. In the effort to strengthen their position within organized labor and gain influence in Truman's Democratic administration, the CIO ultimately expelled 11 member unions for alleged ties to the Communist Party, with relatively little opposition from most members.



THE HISTORY OF BLACK AMERICA
One of Socialist Worker's earliest features was a monthly series on the history of the African American struggle in the U.S., from slavery to the present day.
All articles in this series


Union support for Black struggles withered in the right-wing atmosphere. The expelled CP-influenced unions, such as the United Electrical Workers, the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers and the National Maritime Workers Union had outstanding records of organizing Black workers and support for civil rights issues. This point was not lost on racists, both in and out of the labor movement, who accused anyone opposed to Jim Crow segregation of being a "red."

CIO leaders such as Philip Murray and Walter Reuther sacrificed their "Operation Dixie" organizing drive in the South for the sake of unity around anti-communist politics. In practice, the CIO became indistinguishable from its openly racist rival, the American Federation of Labor.

The witch-hunts spread to established civil rights organizations, with NAACP and National Urban League leaders backing Truman in the 1948 elections in exchange for desegregation of the military and the president's support for civil rights legislation. Leaping at the chance to eliminate the CP's influence among Blacks, NAACP President Walter White took the opportunity to fire the organization's founder, W.E.B. DuBois, for his Marxist politics. In 1952, at the age of 82, DuBois was arrested on charges of being a "foreign agent."

In joining the witch-hunt, White and other middle-class Black leaders actually set back the civil rights movement. As supporters of Truman, these liberal Black leaders denounced presidential candidate Henry Wallace's pro-civil rights Progressive Party as a "Communist Party front."

Yet after Black votes gave him his thin margin of victory in the 1948 election, Truman went silent on civil rights. By the early 1950s, even liberal Black groups like the NAACP were denounced as subversive by Sen. Joe McCarthy's anti-communist campaigns. Libraries banned much pro-civil rights literature as well as left-wing materials.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

DESPITE HAVING grown to 450,000 members by 1946, the gains of the NAACP were outstripped by rising Black membership in organized labor. By 1955, Blacks numbered nearly 2 million organized workers--about 11 percent of the total.

The CP and the expelled CIO unions recognized the potential power of this growing Black working class. Driven from the mainstream labor movement, and with many of its leading members in jail, the CP reemphasized Black struggles--a last-ditch attempt to retain mass influence among workers.

In 1950, about 900 Black and white labor activists--including members both in and out of the AFL and the CIO--met in Chicago to convene what became the National Negro Labor Council (NNLC).

The NNLC's initial demands included a permanent federal fair employment practices clause and more Black union officials. The organization soon took up the fight against Jim Crow restrictions in the railroad union and led a successful boycott that forced New York City hotels to hire more Blacks.

The organization's biggest victory came in 1953 during the campaign to "let freedom crash the gates of the South" in Louisville, Ky. Along with the United Electrical Workers Union, the NNLC led a campaign that forced General Electric to hire Blacks as production workers rather than for janitors only.

Led by UAW Local 600 Recording Secretary William Hood, the NNLC sharply criticized UAW and CIO President Walter Reuther for his opposition to appointing a Black to the union's international executive board. (Reuther had rejected such proposals since 1943, calling them "racism in the reverse.") In response, Reuther labeled the NNLC as a "communist front," charging it with "dual unionism."

In 1952, Reuther fired four Local 600 officials, two of whom were Black. But the Dearborn, Mich., Ford local, with more Blacks than any other local union at that time, stood by Hood. Reuther was unable to remove him.

Despite its modest success, the NNLC voted to dissolve itself in 1955. Faced with government investigations, right-wing harassment and mounting financial pressure, the organization simply could not go on. At the same time, the CP was driven virtually underground.

By the mid-1950s, Black workers faced several bleak choices: support for the embattled Communist Party, whose commitment to Black struggle had never been consistent; following anti-communist union bureaucrats who promised to fight for Black rights, but delivered little; or joining with accommodationist Black middle-class leaders who placed their hopes in the racist Democratic Party.

Cut off from the tradition of militant struggle, a new generation of civil rights activists would be forced to rediscover radical politics on their own. But rediscover them, they did