Finally, some facts.

Over the past year, it has become increasingly apparent that the accusation of Trump-Russia collusion was simply the fantasy of the old-guard establishment parties, primarily of the left but to some degree of the right as well.

The corollary accusation that Russia interjected themselves into the election on behalf of Trump via Facebook and other social media looked equally dubious all along. The year has turned up little to support the conspiratorial accusations. The number of ads purchased were few, not seen by many, they were atomistic compared to the huge spending of the campaign and it was hard to tell how many people actually saw them at all. In addition, there has been nothing to suggest that anything happened out of the ordinary. Russia has always had a low level of interference in our campaigns as we do in theirs and in those of all allies and adversaries. The Russian involvement was, for example, far less intrusive than that of the former administration's involvement in Israeli elections, seeking to unseat an elected head of state.

But there has always been a mystery. What were these ads? What were their messages? Who saw them? How dissonant were they?

I don't think I ever saw any and I am probably in the top 5% of people by volume and diversity of media consumed. But then, if they were any good, I would think I hadn't seen them or been influenced by them.

The frustrating thing has been that the exact messages have been documented for a long time, they just weren't released. It has been very difficult to quantify and measure. But that has changed. From We read every one of the 3,517 Facebook ads bought by Russians. Here's what we found by Nick Penzenstadler, Brad Heath, and Jessica Guynn.

The roughly 3,500 Facebook ads were created by the Russian-based Internet Research Agency, which is at the center of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s February indictment of 13 Russians and three companies seeking to influence the election.

While some ads focused on topics as banal as business promotion or Pokémon, the company consistently promoted ads designed to inflame race-related tensions. Some dealt with race directly; others dealt with issues fraught with racial and religious baggage such as ads focused on protests over policing, the debate over a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico and relationships with the Muslim community.

The company continued to hammer racial themes even after the election.

Well no wonder they were hard to spot. Sounds like they mimicked the social justice media advocacy campaigns.

USA TODAY Network reporters reviewed each of the 3,517 ads, which were released to the public this week for the first time by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The analysis included not just the content of the ads, but also information that revealed the specific audience targeted, when the ad was posted, roughly how many views it received and how much the ad cost to post.

Among the findings:

Of the roughly 3,500 ads published this week, more than half — about 1,950 — made express references to race. Those accounted for 25 million ad impressions — a measure of how many times the spot was pulled from a server for transmission to a device.

At least 25% of the ads centered on issues involving crime and policing, often with a racial connotation. Separate ads, launched simultaneously, would stoke suspicion about how police treat black people in one ad, while another encouraged support for pro-police groups.

Divisive racial ad buys averaged about 44 per month from 2015 through the summer of 2016 before seeing a significant increase in the run-up to Election Day. Between September and November 2016, the number of race-related spots rose to 400. An additional 900 were posted after the November election through May 2017.

Only about 100 of the ads overtly mentioned support for Donald Trump or opposition to Hillary Clinton. A few dozen referenced questions about the U.S. election process and voting integrity, while a handful mentioned other candidates like Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz or Jeb Bush.

Yep, this looks like the a mainstream media themed ad campaign.

Click to enlarge.

So what happens if a covert but miniscule gramscian campaign from a foreign power seeks to disrupt our society and our elections by sowing group identity discord? And what happens if the ads are indistinguishable in content and purpose from those already generated among our ideological factions?