Official Russian Election Interference Thread

“The Psychology of Russiagate” (interview) [Glenn Greenwald, Jacobin]. “In general I think we under-appreciate the extent to which the Trump victory was a traumatizing and disorienting event for most people, in part because all of us were assured by data experts that the chances were overwhelmingly high that Clinton was going to win and Trump was going to lose. It’s also obvious that Trump, in terms of how he comports himself, is at odds with the way the American presidency has been constructed in terms of image, and the way Americans have been taught to think about their presidents. So those two factors combined to make this an extremely confusing, disorienting event that dislodged people from the certainty that they feel about how the world works and their ability to understand it. And when events like that happen, you crave an explanation that makes sense and that lets you feel like the world is safe and understandable again. And that’s what religions, for centuries, have most successfully exploited — the desire for a hard to understand complicated world that lacks explanations that are digestible … to provide those.”

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Exactly. It needs to make sense so people can understand the world they’re living in. We all need that, right? When we wake up in the morning, we have certainties about how the world works, I’m going to step onto the floor and the floor is going to support me and gravity is going to be in operation. So, that’s part of it — saying, “Oh, what happened here is Putin caused this to happen” gives people this kind of unifying theory to understand it.

Then there’s the scapegoating, factor — we’re all tempted to blame bad things always on other people because we evade responsibility ourselves. That’s a natural human tendency. So, if you’re a Democrat in particular, being able to say, “Oh, the reason we lost isn’t because we have fundamental flaws in our messaging or we’re totally corrupt, or we nominated a shitty candidate that everyone hated who nonetheless reflects the core values of our terrible party. It’s because Trump cheated and this autocratic villain manipulated everything.” It relieves Democrats from responsibility and guilt

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Newenglanddeac said:

Seriously that's some of the dumbest shit I've read in a while and we've all had to read a lot of dumb shit in the past 18 months.

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WakeandBake said:

Jesus just reading those clips was tedious. What a waste of writing

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Newenglanddeac said:

Seriously that's some of the dumbest shit I've read in a while and we've all had to read a lot of dumb shit in the past 18 months.

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“Midwestern Democrats Want The National Party To Stop The Trump-Russia Talk” [BuzzFeed]. “The Democratic National Committee’s drumbeat of messaging on Trump and his relationship with Russia is wearing thin with some Democrats in purple states — particularly in the Midwest, where people on the ground say voters are uninterested and even turned off by the issue. The suit exposes a gap, they say, between the party’s strategy nationally and what Midwest Democrats believe will win elections in their state. ‘The DNC is doing a good job of winning New York and California,’ said David Betras, the Democratic county party chair in Mahoning County, Ohio, home to Youngstown. ‘I’m not saying it’s not important — of course it’s important — but do they honestly think that people that were just laid off another shift at the car plant in my home county give a shit about Russia when they don’t have a frickin’ job?’ Trump and Russia, Betras said, is the ‘only piece they’ve been doing since 2016. [Trump] keeps talking about jobs and the economy, and we talk about Russia.'”

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