Read the important report here: “Texas media company hired by Trump created Kenyan president’s viral ‘anonymous’ attack campaign against rival, new investigation reveals“.
I am a native Texan myself, so I do not think that Texans are less likely to understand the moral, spiritual or foreign relations repercussions of aggressive tribalist propaganda on behalf of William Ruto and Uhuru Kenyatta than Americans in Idaho or Arkansas, say. The problem is that the operation seems to have been conducted by a United States-based firm, staffed by Americans, orchestrating a digitized propaganda campaign directed against both Kenyan voters and those Americans such as myself and other amateur or professional “Kenya watchers” or U.S. government personnel who would conduct internet activity touching on Kenya politics and government.
The firm in question, Harris Media, based on this report but also their associated social media, seems to have affinity for what I think of as the “White Right”–the National Front, AfD, UKIP, Roy Moore, etc., aside from Trump. I have noted the Uhuruto government courting these folks in the United States over the years — I won’t elaborate here but it has always troubled me as an American Southerner. Some of these people also use Christian symbolism as part of their personal branding which is that much more troubling for me.
Unfortunately the Americans involved as of this writing have not filed a Foreign Agent Registration Act registration and made the associated disclosures to the Justice Department and the American public.
The Privacy International report appears to to reveal that the American firm was an “agent for a foreign principle” in conducting a propaganda campaign for Kenyatta and Ruto’s re-election, in substantial part through generating fear and loathing of the opposition. I do know that some of my friends in Washington wrongly predicted violent behavior on the part of the opposition in the context of the botched August 8 election. Could they have been influenced by this propaganda campaign, and/or by others that have not yet been uncovered by outside investigation?
Between the alt right (“White Right”) and the Uhuruto American War On Terror crowd including serving and former US State Dept officials Kenya’s 2017 General Elections were subjected to unprecedented interference and malignant neglect.
Since late August 2016 and throughout the first six months of 2017 all of the risks to conducting fair, credible and free elections were identified and reported to the US Embassy, media houses, civil society organizations, foreign missions, multilateral agencies and foreign observers; it was business as usual all around even as the Harris and CA organizations were misshaping the social media environment,
$600 million and sixteen months later the botched elections resolved nothing and Kenya’s constitutional order is unravelling in plain sight. Meanwhile the malevolent influence of alt rightists not only from Texas but elsewhere in the West goes unchecked.
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