Sylwia 🏳️‍⚧️ :nyarch: on Nostr: nprofile1q…r8ndz ...

quoting nevent1q…077j

I don't know why some lefties find it hard to hold two thoughts at once. Trump is, at minimum, extremely susceptible to corrupt influence and has provably been influenced by the Russian government to some degree. "Russiagate" is like a real thing, I'm so confused as to why some people treat this as a Maddow pipe dream or something, actual investigations keep turning up all sorts of connections between Trumpworld and the Russian state. None of that is at odds with the fa t that Trump is fundamentally a creation of the failures of the American political system, of anti-democratic actions by Republican extremists set on building an autocracy for the past 70 years and of anti-democratic actions by a post-Carter Democratic party that was increasingly captive to the billionaires and has sought to replace many functions of democracy with technocratic private takeovers. The Russia government has powerful and sophisticated cyberwarfare capabilities, deals heavily in influence campaigns and other forms of meddling in opposition governments, and at times pretty brazenly carries out efforts to take advantage of corruption in the systems they want to influence. There's a weird kind of Yankee exceptionalism that poisons our brains sometimes that we think either the US can't possibly be influenced from without or alternatively that our systems of government can only possibly produce these outcomes from outside bad actors, and these are both incomplete.

Fascism has literally always been an internationalist project in which fascists ally and work to boost each others movements globally. Liberty anywhere is a threat to authoritarianism everywhere and they know it. They act to aid each other, to take advantage of each other, and to influence each other because that serves their goals and their particular movements. Netanyahu purposefully did everything possible with the genocide in Gaza to help Trump get elected, Putin has wielded influence campaigns to help Trump, etc. Is Trump literally beholden to the Russian government through blackmail or something? Honestly who knows, but he's clearly influenced and clearly benefits from Russian state help