Disinformation, Russian Election Interference and . . . Alexander Hamilton?
"Hamilton 68," that is.
A reader writes in—I’ve always wanted to say that!—to note that last time, when I was reviewing the 1990’s-2020 political revivalism of Alexander Hamilton, which was topped off by “Hamilton: an American Musical,” and then the bizarre ubiquity of Hamilton in the Democratic Party oratory that came in the musical’s wake, I missed mentioning “Hamilton 68.”
That’s a weird, um, online tool, for lack of better word, which was launched in 2017 by the Alliance for Securing Democracy for the purpose, in their own words, of tracking “Russian influence operations on Twitter.” The self-description goes on:
By analyzing a dynamic list of more than 600 Twitter accounts linked, wittingly or unwittingly, to Russian influence activities online, the dashboard provided a window into Russian propaganda and disinformation efforts online. A little over a year later, in December 2018, ASD discontinued the dashboard as it shifted its approach to analyze the overt information space by tracking official and state-backed social media accounts from Russia, China and Iran.
The only reason I didn’t mention this thing in my last post is that I’d never heard of it.
Given the SEO attempt and sheer clickbait in this post’s title—editors, not writers, create headlines—it may disappoint some readers to learn that right around the time “Hamilton 68” launched, I began making a serious though by no means successful effort to mute the proliferating raft of 24/7 vacuous verbiage public discourse generated on TV and in social media, both by the Trumpists and their dear leader and by the liberal commentariat, newly branded #TheResistance. I thus managed to avoid having 24/7 anxiety over Russian election meddling, though I took it that such meddling existed. (I’d had my own run-ins with “RT America” long before Trump and 2016 came along.) So I’m not super-upset now if allegations of meddling have turned out to be exaggerated. Trump would have been just as manifestly unfit for office if he had no Russia connection at all.
This tude I have is purely practical. I gotta do what I gotta do, which in 2017, it turned out, was to stay as focused as possible, both on the longstanding homegrown issues that led to Trump’s election, among the other bad things they’ve led to, and on the related critique of the delusions inherent in liberal civics, which underpins my work as a student of and an entertainer on the American past. I can't be all over the place. I can't be freaking out about everything. Yet the prevailing discourse—preferring Putin and 1930’s Berlin to anything that’s gone on here—has been doing its level best to muddle my sacred purposes.
So if you think, after all the effort I’ve expended for like five years, trying to keep my head at least moderately free of what I experience as undue influence, during some serious nightmares for my country, and for the liberal worldview on which my whole thing depends, that I’m now about to jump into, for example, the recent alleged revelations known as “The Twitter Files,” where some debunking of “Hamilton 68” has been taking place, well, you’ve got another think coming is all. BAD HISTORY has no informed opinion on any of that stuff.
We don’t do journalism on journalism here. (Too bad for me: a lot of people really like it.)
And yet I am fascinated to encounter, also at this late date, the branding of “Hamilton 68,” which is also known as “The Hamilton 2.0 Dashboard.” (For those as blissfully in the dark as I was, I’ll link to it in “Further Reading.”) The climaxing Hamilton fanfic that pervaded liberal commentary and praxis in the late 2010’s and early ‘20’s gets driven to truly bizarre levels there.