That's not a conspiracy theory, both in that it actually happened, and it's not even that unusual for governments to mess with foreign elections if they feel they can get away with it.
I'm inclined to believe Trump is simply stupid and admires Putin as the kind of strongman he desperately wanted to be, but he certainly stoked the theories with his own behavior.
One is the fact that every country interferes with the elections of every other country. The other is that the fsb was so wildly successful at it they changed the result of the 2016 election.
The two have nothing to do with each other and mentioning the first when I'm talking about the second is deeply disingenuous.
You can argue about how effective you think those campaigns were in their influence but you're just trying to muddy the conversation if you are trying to make them out to be equivalently valid or equivalently ridiculous.
Conversely, we know that the russians ran bot farms and did various other unscrupulous activities during the election. Yet nobody involved with Trump was implicated in what the Russians did. The evidence was well vetted and there was a through investigation on the subject matter, further, the Steele Dossier was proven to be a hit piece. This has been extracted to Trump is a KGB agent or under the influence and direct control of the Kremlin. Yet both are not on the equivalent on the conspiracy theory scale?
Please don't try to construe that as somehow me proclaiming my admiration for Trump. Sure Donald was friends with him, and most certainly he lied about his affiliation with him and distanced himself from him, but that is not the focus of my post.
My focus was to highlight the rabid denialism that is rampant on both sides and both sides thinking they are the norm and the other guys are the extremist.
Thank you.
That Russia interfered in US elections has nothing to do with how successful Russia was in interfering with US elections, huh? Amazing logic there.
Those two things aren't equivalent, but the former is a component of the latter. Pretending that they're unrelated is bizarre.
> The other is that the fsb was so wildly successful at it they changes the result of the 2016 election.
I mean, we know that Russia pushed Trump hard. Probably it wasn't enough to sway the election, but it's more than a little disingenuous to pretend that this is equivalent to "Hillary has a satanic pedophile ring" or "Bill Gates is injecting tracker 5G vaccines into people", where they're completely fabricated.
The Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee characterized this as "The Russian government directed extensive activity, beginning in at least 2014 and carrying into at least 2017, against U.S. election infrastructure at the state and local level."
That was unusual. "Every country interferes with the elections of every other country" is disingenuous. And thinking maybe that there's more that might have happened there that went undiscovered is not even close to the same level as thinking that Wayfair is facilitating child trafficking.
I do think the rise of social media has opened up the ability for foreign countries to influence people's beliefs regarding an election, much more than they could in the past (although it's not a new phenomenon and the US is guilty of it as well).
But I also think the 2020 election also helped prove that it's not just foreign influence that can make people vote for someone like Trump, they're perfectly capable of coming to that conclusion on their own. There wasn't just social media influencing this time, they could see with their own eyes what Trump was doing the past four years, not just speculation, and still decided they wanted to support him.
For me, (B) is significant regardless of whether the interference was impactful — and bringing up (B) in response to (A) does not seem disingenuous.
> The other is that the fsb was so wildly successful at it they changes the result of the 2016 election.
Do you have examples of people believing this?