MrDollarBills wrote:Don't discount either how Putin has had a clear hand in elevating far right wing movements in Europe/UK/USA. Brexit/Trumpism had the GRU's fingerprints all over them. Even the antivax furor in the USA can directly be linked to Russian intelligence ops. Putin has played a long and dirty game to enrich himself and destabilize western nations.
For sure.
This is why I've been saying amongst friends the past few years that in real-world terms, we (and by extension the West) are in an active war with Russia, China, and even N.Korea to some degree. They are attacking us relentlessly via internet sabotage / IP theft, via internet false actors (both human & bot), via injecting money in to counter-security and treasonous activity taking place inside our borders, and who knows what else.
Not calling it a 'cold war' since that's kind of an antiqued term, but more of a
Stealth / Underground war.
Sometimes I wonder if Dems at the national level wouldn't be better off drawing attention to this on a regular basis, because 1) it's real & measurable and 2) exposes what absolute traitors the modern GOP have become, directly in bed with Putin as they increasingly are.
Prokorov wrote:It will be the downfall of western civilization as we have known it. They prey on our egos... they train us to make us think we are intelligent because we googled something. they have for years chipped away at our educaiton system.
Americans are arrogant, ignorant, lazy, and ready to blame anyone but themselves.
Very much this.
The more I learn about Nixon, the more I realise what a huge, dirty step he was towards destroying democracy and laying the groundwork for future destruction, which Reagan of course seized on like the nectar of life, expanding the whole fraud.
Meanwhile, what were Dems and centrists doing in the ~five decades this whole scam was going on? Mostly stuff like futiley (sp?) reaching across the aisle and gently mocking the Right's ridiculousness, hoping both things would lead to an overall correction in an appeal to reason and national conscience. Well, f-ck... how god-awful naive those ideas were.
Like you say, meanwhile most Americans didn't have much clue about the mechanics of how the country was gradually being destroyed, and incidentally learned to get comfortable sniffing the whole 'America is the greatest country on Earth' BS.
Yes, most Americans outside the extreme Right have only themselves to blame for this whole mess, except that it did happen by degree, and the slow scam was likely being conducted by the right's masters of manipulation, like on par with the cigarette and oil industries' best psychological war-masters. Using our own pettier interests against ourselves... that sort of thing.