That's a great deflection, but it's not in the same sphere as the fear of the newly found fears of election interference that is driving people to become anti-free speech. That is directly coming from Russia and China.

Snowden and Assange are quite different, though I am also not opposed to whistle blowers, if it isn't reckless and endanger lives (such as giving up troop positions, etc.)

> it's not in the same sphere as the fear of the newly found fears of election interference that is driving people to become anti-free speech.

I grew up in a latin-american country, US interference in elections was a given, not a suspiction, a fact, million of dollars poured by the NED and the CIA, which proportionally meant a huge fraction of the electoral budget in the country and yet people still went to vote. Now I need to feel worried about the end of the civilization as we know it because the russians bought 500k or so of facebook ads and have bot farms? Go to reddit, specifically to r/politics and you will see there the blue wave doing the same, but there is not outcry. Hillary lost, because she was a lousy candidate and because of the EC system, luckily for Vladimir he also got what the wanted, but not because of the genius of his intelligence services.

I don't deny any of that, and I don't think Hillary lost because of Russia. I don't even think that was their goal at all. The entire goal is to establish distrust in American institutions among the populace, which includes the 1A. That was my entire point.

I understand your point , but surely you would agree that A) Any Russian disruption is dwarfed by the inside dynamics in the country. B) Many people in power use the Russian-scare to promote a narrative that may help them to maintain or obtain power. This is nothing new. McCarthy did the same.