Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America

by Christopher Wylie

In the year after Steve Bannon became vice president, Cambridge Analytica started deploying tactics that eerily foreshadowed what was still to come in the 2016 American presidential election. To get access to their opponent’s emails, Cambridge Analytica made use of hackers, some of whom may have been Russian, according to internal documents. The hacked emails CA procured were then used to undermine their opponent, including a concerted effort to leak rumors about the opposing candidate’s health. And this stolen kompromat was then combined with widespread online disinformation targeting social media networks. The overlap in events could be entirely coincidental, but many of the personnel who worked on Nigeria also worked on CA’s American operations.