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In reply to the discussion: "Don't despair until the end." "This is the end. Despair." [View all]Hortensis
(58,785 posts)Last edited Fri Feb 7, 2020, 12:27 PM - Edit history (1)
And then those still alive will live good or not depending on what we leave them.
Putin is sowing the chaos they've been working on all along and using our elections to defeat us. But subverting voters at least means voters still have power to choose. Russian intelligence operations are currently in high gear subverting voters on both sides, as they did in 2016. A large majority of Democrats said fuck-no to being Putin's bitches then, but Russia won that one because of voter ignorance and foolishness.
For the past year all polls showed that mainstream support for Putin's known candidate from 2016 had dropped significantly and stayed dropped. Given that more people had become aware, it's been a real shock to see that support suddenly explode and support for the redoubtable Democratic frontrunner, of the sort the Republicans and Russia must stop, seemingly collapse.
It's a wakeup call. Game's been on in secret for some time, but now we can see it. And we've seen these manipulations before, with dramatic shifts away from long patterns in polling and voter behavior. In 2016 the main noise was that 2 years of consistent previous polling across America must somehow have been wrong. No: just like all through 2019, the polling gave a true-enough picture.
What caused the changes we're seeing are aggressive timed hostile and no doubt campaign manipulations, mainly through social media and direct candidate-voter communications, but no doubt including other lines of attack also. And, btw, they don't have to be coordinated for Russian intelligence to know what to do. Sowing chaos. Iowa.
So, big attacks in this new Russia-U.S. war are coming in the primary this time, with more to come no doubt in the GE. And we're taking big hits. BUT, at least we know we still have the power of the vote, and while we do it's our nation to keep or lose.