Is Spike Lee proud of himself? Is the "Rev." Al Sharpton? How about Jesse Jackson? Or Maxine Waters? Or most certainly Barack Obama? Black Lives Matter, too. All of the long lists of race hustlers who have reaped points and  profited handsomely from whipping up charges of racism for their own political gain, no matter what the actual situation have a new 'achievement' to point to:

Russian trolls, understanding them well, and beating them at their own game.

Which brings us back to those who are anti-race hustlers, Kanye West and Candace Owens.

The two of them were blasted for refusing to toe the party line on race and leftwingery, which as a matter of fact, also made them immune to the siren calls of Russia's trolls.

Unlike all the race hustlers out there who opened the gate. A Democratic House Intelligence Committee report of all 3,517 or so ads put out by Russian troll farms in the run-up to the 2016 election shows an amazing partiality, not to Trump, or the issues that drive Trump's voters, but to identity-politics issues, with more than half of those falling into the identity politics category, with a quarter of the total focused on racially charged crime and policing issues. That's the word from a USA Today analysis of the entire pile.

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.

So the Russian trolls calculated that those who were obsesssed with such issues were also the most easily manipulated, even with false claims. What's more, whipping up such issues was most likely, in their minds, to produce what they really wanted - real chaos, such as that created by riots.

It was done coldly, calculatedly, and dispassionately by actual Russians abroad, with no skin in the game, no sympathy one way or another, all because they could see who was easiest to dupe with false claims. That fulfilled their mission to disrupt and divide and chaoticize, and sure enough, they made the progress they wanted to make.

Why did this happen? Because the ground was prepared by these race-hustling black and other identity-oriented leaders, making the Russian mission easy as pie. That's because the trolls calculated that this was where the most easily duped audience was, and therefore, the place where they could make the biggest impact. They knew people would buy these phony ads, lock, stock and barrel, because obviously, they saw how Sharpton and others made it so easy.

It shows that those fooled by this propaganda aren't just the classic useful idiots of Vladimir Lenin's original statement (a reference to suck-up lefties), it's now the crowds being whipped up by the phony Russian ads, designed to push all the right buttons. They're a new kind of dupe.

What this proves is one important thing: That the efforts of Kanye West and Candace Owens to break free of the leftwing plantation, which constantly whips up racism under every rock, is more significant, more courageous, and more constructive than first appearance. Fact is, Owens with her sharp sense of reason, Kanye with his incredible reach throughout the black and millennial community, have slayed a lot of Russian trolls with their messaging. Both are absolute poison to Russian trolls. By their refusal to be duped, they've shown they're nobody's dupes and Russian trolls can't view them as rich fertile material to exploit for Russia's political gain, the way they can using and imitating guys like Sharpton.

This makes what they have done an actual act of patriotism, given that it has broken the grip trolls have on the black and other identity-politics communities. They crushed the Russian onslaught on the cyber front.

President Trump would be absolutely justified in giving them a presidential medal of honor for that act of patriotism alone.

Image credit: Gage Skidmore, Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons SA 3.0