The other day, former President Jimmy Carter smacked a whole bunch of gobs with his assertion that Russian ratfcking pretty much had elected El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago and that, therefore, what we have on our hands is an illegitimate president* leading an illegitimate administration*. Carter is an international expert on rigged elections. He's also over 90 and ran out of fcks to give sometime during the administration of Daddy Bush.

Nevertheless, one former president saying this about a current president* is pretty much the definition of news. (It also raises the uncomfortable question of where in the hell is the most recent Democratic president in this fight.) Now, thanks to some folks at the University of Tennessee via The Conversation, Carter has some data behind him as well.

In a statistical analysis published in First Monday, my team and I tracked the activity of Russian social media trolls on Twitter in the run up to the 2016 election. We then compared the fluctuating popularity of this propaganda with that of the two presidential candidates: Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump. We found that exposure to Russian propaganda may have helped change American minds in favor of Republican candidate Trump.

Our results show that the weeks when Russian trolls were accumulating likes and retweets on Twitter, that activity reliably foreshadowed gains for Trump in the opinion polls. This finding survived a number of our additional checks, including accounting for the popularity of Trump’s own personal Twitter account. It turns out that the activity of Russian Twitter trolls was a better predictor of Donald Trump’s polling numbers than his own Twitter activity. Yet Hillary Clinton’s popularity was not affected. That is particularly surprising given that much of the Russian propaganda was designed to discredit her. ...

My research suggests that Russian trolls helped shift U.S public opinion in Trump’s favor in 2016. But was this enough to affect the outcome of the election? The answer is that we still don’t know. A closer look at the battleground states that were decided by handful of votes may give us an answer. But given that all Clinton needed to flip the election in her favor was an additional 75,000 votes in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, it is a prospect that should be taken seriously.

Relitigating the 2016 results serves no useful purpose except that of helping to make sure this doesn't happen again, especially considering that the Republicans in Congress and, Lord knows, the president*, don't care a damn about fair elections it as long as they win whatever elections there are.

President Carter speaks to the congregation at Maranatha Baptist Church before teaching Sunday school in his hometown of Plains, Georgia. NurPhoto Getty Images

Moreover, there's ample proof that conservative activists in this country are quite content to ally themselves with Russian ratfckers. Those same ratfckers, you may recall, played an integral role in creating one of the more effective actual hoaxes regarding the climate crisis—the ClimateGate "scandal." From Mother Jones:

Seven years earlier, Trump was riffing on a very different set of hacked emails. The real estate mogul had called into Fox News after a blizzard to declare that climate change was a hoax. Trump claimed that “one of the leaders of global warming” had recently admitted in a private email that years of scientific research were nothing but “a con.”

Trump was referring to the 2009 Climategate scandal, in which emails from climate scientists were hacked and disseminated across the internet. Climate change deniers claimed the messages showed scientists engaging in misconduct and fabricating a warming pattern that didn’t really exist. Multiple investigations ultimately exonerated the researchers, but not before a media firestorm undercut public confidence in the science—just as world leaders were meeting in Copenhagen, Denmark, to attempt to rein in greenhouse gas emissions.

None of this ratfcking works, of course, without the conservative media network in this country, and the respectable media's disinclination to accept that network for what it is: a massive propaganda infrastructure that will take information from anywhere to advance its agenda, whether or not that information is true. It's time to stop "covering the controversy." Assume what these people say is a lie and move along.

Respond to this post on the Esquire Politics Facebook page here.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io