“Far right news sites entirely in Cyrillic script”

About two weeks ago, Mark Townsend wrote in The Guardian:

Another Briton said to have had an influential intervention in the US elections is 52-year-old Jim Dowson, a Scottish Calvinist who founded the far right, anti-Muslim party Britain First. Dowson, from a hub in Hungary, set up a network of US-focused websites and Facebook groups with the intention of promoting Trump and denigrating his rival during the US election.

It’s all somewhat hard to believe – a Scot intervening in a US election out of Hungary – but it’s also impossible to rule out. Why Hungary, though – for its Calvinism or its Orbanism?

A recent Dowson alliance involves Aleksandr Dugin, a facist [sic] with alleged links to the Kremlin and who is understood to be helping Dowson construct a new office in the Serb capital Belgrade that will promote far right news sites entirely in Cyrillic script.

It pleases me to see “alleged links to the Kremlin” rather than designations of Dugin as Putin’s spiritual guru and geopolitical brain. The rest is unintentionally amusing. “Fascist” misspelled as “facist” suggests, by accident of course, that Dugin is almost there but not quite: the F-word has to be shortened to apply. The “Cyrillic script” could be a trope for the languages using it, such as Serbian, Bulgarian and Russian. I suspect it was meant to be taken literally, akin to “far left news sites entirely in Latin script.”

The funny passages aside, the story of Dowson’s networking could be mostly true. Is there a way to gauge his impact on the American presidential election? What if it gets reliably measured one day and is found to be negligible?

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