One of the most prominent Russian sponsors of this network is an ideologue and sociologist named Alexandr Dugin. He has made direct appeals to Americans to support Trump, even describing his views as a 'guideline'. Another site thought to be owned by "hipster Kremlin propagandist" Konstantin Rykov compiles stories about Trump under the URL "Trump 2016". By liberalism, Dugin doesn't mean US Democrats, he means the Western system of government that embraces democratic values. Credit:Arktos How can Russia do this? A flurry of online support for Trump, much of it loaded with racist, confrontational terms, has helped establish momentum for the billionaire online during the Republican primaries. While Trump led the polls from the beginning, the army of social media users (some anonymous, some not) have helped keep Trump's every statement trending on Twitter. Many of these tweeters, like racist extremist Richard Spencer, spout reliably pro-Russia and pro-Putin messages as well. Planners in Hillary's war room questioning how Trump has got so much free publicity should take note of this pro-Trump tweeter's description (who for the record doesn't appear pro-Putin) of how to game the medium: "Social media has become a source of news in and of itself for the very lazy journalism industry over the last few years. They skim what other people find interesting, put it into 300-700 words or less of boilerplate, and boom, content. Hundreds of millions of people rely on Facebook's trending column or their Twitter feeds for this kind of news, and some of that news itself is recursively drawn from those trend lists. Nothing has to even happen in the real world ... for us to become newsworthy anymore. We just meme things into reality."

No beginning, no end Make America Great Again - Russian style. Credit:"Trump 2016" Not only do things not have to happen, items that go viral can have no traceable starting point either. Racist, threatening, anti-Semitic tweets violate Twitter's terms of service and can be removed. But their memes and ideas and momentum live on well after the initial posts have been removed. So who cares when and where the ball got rolling? This is a tactic Dugin himself has used on another subject: Ukraine. He once posted a fake video about a boy who was crucified by pro-Western militants in the country. Dugin encouraged retaliation but then later deleted the video, wrote Andrey Tolstoy and Edmund McCaffray in World Affairs. "In particular, [Dugin] has exploited the mechanism of instantaneous publishing on the internet to retract or dissociate himself from controversial claims without harming their ability to propagate," they wrote, describing what others call a "social cyber attack". What effect is it having? The American Freedom Party supports white identity and, of course, Vladimir Putin Credit:American Freedom Party

Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, journalists, activists and the public have commented on the strange affinity between racist groups and Trump. Within the domain of US political reporting, this is explained as a surge of racists backing Trump. Looked at through the prism of international politics, though, the US is just another country in which Russia is building ties with fringe groups in an effort to sway the domestic political discussion and gain leverage. The use of "patriot" bloggers in an effort to change politics goes back nearly a decade, at least to 2007, when pro-Kremlin bloggers successfully overwhelmed news of an opposition rally in Russia simply by crowding out posts supporting the event with coverage of a smaller pro-Kremlin march. Pro-Kremlin forces also used bots on Twitter to do something similar during a contested parliamentary election in 2011. Lately, however, Russia's efforts have been international in nature, too: during the Scottish independence referendum in 2014, patriotic Russian trolls weighed in, trying to boost the chances of Scotland breaking away from Britain. In Europe, France's far-right National Front actually received a loan from Russia. Far-right Hungarian party Jobbik regularly promotes Russian views of regional politics. Even the left-leaning Spanish populist party Podemos is considered close to Russia. So are northern separatists in Italy, the Lega Nord. Many of the links are online. US-based George Washington University researcher on anti-government extremism J.J. MacNab tweeted: "The Russians are by far the largest agitator of right-wing, anti-government anger in the US. By a landslide." Why is Russia doing this? Decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, ideas of democracy, liberal freedom and limits on state power constitute (in the eyes of Dugin, Putin and their circle) an "information war" against Russia. For them, these Western ideas are part of the same plot that helped spur the so-called "colour revolutions" in Georgia in 2003 and Ukraine in 2004, rather than seeing them as events originating in those countries. In the eyes of Russia's leaders, Western-linked NGOs are part of this hostile activity. According to this vision, Russia is fighting fire with fire by launching its own 21st-century information war strategy against the West.