In the aftermath of the November 8 US presidential election, sections of the Democratic Party, the intelligence services and the media have intensified unsubstantiated pre-election claims that the Russian government hacked into Democratic Party email servers to undermine the campaign of Hillary Clinton.
The immediate purpose was to distract from the content of the leaked emails, which exposed a conspiracy by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee to undermine her challenger in the primaries, Bernie Sanders.
With Trump’s victory, it has become the focus for a ferocious struggle within the ruling elite over foreign policy centred on the issue of what order the US should first aggressively escalate its diplomatic, economic and military offensive—against Russia or China. More fundamentally, its aim is to brand anyone raising questions about foreign policy as the “dupe” of a foreign power and to justify further sweeping censorship, above all against social media.