>The top level of the Soviet diplomatic service arranged his 1987 Moscow visit. With assistance from the KGB. It took place while Kryuchkov was seeking to improve the KGB's operational techniques in one particular and sensitive area. The spy chief wanted KGB staff abroad to recruit more Americans... https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/11/19/trump-fir...
Which doesn't prove Trump did bad stuff but does kind of show the KGB were trying.
Why would the CIA let him become president if they actually had something on him? Why would they let Gabbard (also called a "Russian asset") become DNI if they had something on her?
I.e. belonging to one of the few major UK news outlets not directly controlled by a billionaire...?
Yes, in Russia it happened largely in the same way, and it started much earlier than in 2011 (in 2012 we already had literal Putin cultists marching down the streets). Some people blamed an external enemy for their troubles (both troubles and the enemy were usually imaginary, with the enemy usually being the US), others who rejected the idea blamed the other half and generally had their heads in the sand, but neither wanted to admit their issues or do anything substantial, leaving the Kremlin do what they wanted to do.
This is something that is unique to the administration and those who deeply agree with what it’s done.
Not that it matters… clearly people don’t care enough to vote for it. My heart goes out to the people of Ukraine.
0: https://thehill.com/policy/international/5153611-quinnipiac-...
I see plenty of people in social media (enough to be convinced that they aren't all bots) who appear to believe that continuing to support Ukraine with aid would bankrupt the US, would be equivalent in effect to fighting Iraq or Vietnam again, would lead to WW III, and so on and so forth. The conspiracy theories about Ukraine's leadership are elaborate as well. I imagine almost all these people would tell you they don't like Putin.
Out of that 81%, how many believe in appeasing Putin to "Avoid world war III" despite their animus? Too many, IMO, and Putin doesn't care for how the American populace feel about him personally, as long as he can achieve his foreign policy goals without hindrance from American bombs, intelligence or funding, which has become the status quo as of yesterday.
As someone who lives in the EU and has the same kind of relatives, what I find frustrating is how little actual engagement with the Russian narratives there is from official sides. There is presented "evidence" for US influence in Ukraine long before the war, like the Victoria Nuland video, yet there seems to be no attempts at debunking those arguments, short of a catch-all labeling of all of it as disinformation (which, I can testify from personal experience, does absolutely nothing to dissuade people who already believe it).
The Selinskyji/Trump spat felt like an extreme version of this, where Selinskyji essentially argued with the Western/Ukrainian narrative of the war and Trump argued with the Russian narrative.
The strategy of "ignore the Russian narrative and hope not many people will latch on to it" evidently failed, so I think if we want to have a hope of solving this conflict and countering Trump (and maybe get back the parts of the population that follow the narrative), we at least have to engage with it and provide counterarguments.
Is it not just that media is more fragmented and we've underfunded the fact providing media since?
I'd assume that by the time a disclaimer is written up, submitted, and accepted according to whatever the criteria is, the original un-disclaimered message has been received and digested by its target audience.
1. Viral tweets have a longer-than-average time window between the time they start to go viral and the time the median viewer sees them, so a community note can get there before the median viewer. 2. Users who interacted with a tweet before it got a community note will get a notification when the community note is added. 3. Community note writers can leave a note on a piece of media. If a tweet with a video gets a community note, and that note is about the video rather than about the tweet, that note will show on all other tweets that show that video.
Source: this excellent interview with the Community Notes team (https://asteriskmag.com/issues/08/the-making-of-community-no...), in the section that starts with "Asterisk: Another thing I wanted to talk about is speed". Really that whole interview is great, highlights how deliberate and thoughtful the Community Notes team was regarding everything about the feature. Which is, I think, why community notes have succeeded where a lot of previous fact-checking attempts have failed.
https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2025/2/21/musk-vows-to-fix...
“Never argue with an idiot. They will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.”
I swear to god, there is no talking with these people. It's like any argument you make slides right off their reality distortion field.
Which is to say Ukrainian narrative is hard to embrace unless someone is already energized by a need for justice to nations, which might not be certain segment of America.
And don’t think it will be last one Russia started.
To oppose that isn't warmongering.
It really makes me wonder what kind of moral background is required to find supporting subservience through disgusting remarks less despicable than a hypocritical-or-not supporting of a hopeless fight. Like genuinely, how does one get to that point?
Although to be honest with you, the pushback using this argument doesn't seem nearly thought through enough for this. Instead, it's a mere spasmic reaction where people found a catchy clapback to the peace quote, and then end-of-proof right there. Great job indeed...
Im glad tbe adults are in charge.
I don't think anyone does that.
Zelensky is invited here and shows incredible restraint and decorum only to be shouted down and vilified. Meanwhile, Netanyahu comes over here and CHASTISES Congress for not delivering weapons FAST ENOUGH. This after we've propped up Israel's apartheid regime and filled warehouses with weapons for decades.
There absolutely is and you are the victim of it.
Yep, the best propaganda is one you don't even think of as propaganda. It's just the truth.
This is not a new sentiment and it caused by Russian social media propaganda: https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4473508,00.html. I cite Chomsky less these days than I used to, but I recall back when I was a Gore-supporting Democrat and we were mocking “Team America: World Police” he was seen as pretty respectable. Is he Russian propaganda?
Seriously? The current president is even more on-board than the previous ones with using Israel as a U.S. proxy. Just because he's also in bed with Putin doesn't mean he opposes American imperialism.
So where did he get that from?
Trump overthrew the Bush dynasty by eviscerating Jeb over the Iraq War: https://youtu.be/H4ThZcq1oJQ?si=Y3nWQeiui8KJhj8b. Now, neocons want to chalk that up as bad execution of an otherwise sound ideology. But you don’t think that Trump’s supporters could genuinely disagree with that assessment—think that the underlying problem is that america is too willing to intervene militarily in places that don’t directly affect the U.S.? You think that view is driven by Russian propaganda?
The way I see it, Ukraine is the test case for the foreign policy populist Democrats have long supported. The Cold War is over. The likelihood that Putin will invade Germany or France next is low. Regional wars are just that, and we should let them play out without getting involved.
Otherwise you’re still subscribing to Reaganite neoconservatism—you’re just quibbling about the details of whether to involve the american military empire in any particular skirmish.
You wouldn't appease a dictator who imprisoned and killed his opposition.
And Putin wouldn't attack openly, nowadays you attack per online sabotage, something the US will see rising, or won't see because Trump suspended the cyber operations.
Strangely enough he has no problem sending money to Israel after Hamas attacked them, despite the Israel army is much more powerful than the Hamas.
So Trump has no problem being involved in wars he knows his supported side will win or has already won.
Trump gos for the easy wins, he is a low-hanging fruit harvester.
Same with DOGE. Firing people doesn't reduce bureaucracy, changing laws and regulations does. But that's not what they do.
BTW people said the same about the likelihood of Putin attacking Ukraine, or about the likelihood of Ukraine withstanding the attack more than weeks. Seems like likelihood is a bad measure for reality.
And pissing of your allies and victim blaming the president of an invaded country is bad politics, unless you are the villain.
Very much so.
https://www.businessinsider.com/gary-cohn-stole-documents-of...
> According to the Washington Examiner, McMaster said on Tuesday that Gary Cohn, Trump's former top economic adviser, did steal documents off the president's desk to prevent Trump from pulling the US out of key trade deals.
> Cohn told colleagues at the time that the theft was necessary and that Trump would forget about the idea, according to the book, released earlier this month. Woodward reported that Cohn also snatched a document that would have pulled the US out of the North American Free Trade Agreement from the president's desk.
He has a long history of parroting the last thing someone said to him.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2017/04/14/want-chan...
Also is anyone seriously suggested France or Germany would be next? Wouldn't it be more like Poland? And your perspective reeks of the weeks prior to the Ukraine invasion, where so many swore Russia would never do it, it was just Biden-antagonism. And this isn't me being pro Biden. These are just facts.
Many people seem to take it as axiomatic that the U.S. has an obligation to use force to maintain pre-existing borders. And we simply don’t agree with you about that. The standard for me is whether it’s going to significantly affect the daily life of someone in Iowa.
So maybe I’d care if anyone was seriously saying France and Germany could fall to Russia. But short of that?
So now Trump can say: Look, if you have 57% approval rating, why do you shun elections?
So a lie to "prove" another lie? Is he's going to show us exactly how he's "shunning elections"?
its hard to care for other people when your basic needs is not fullfill
You need unions and Universal Healthcare like the rest of the developed world to fix those problems.
Since they are so much better at everything. No point in getting the morons in the USA involved in anything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...
It's all about the willingness to regulate healthcare to benefit the general population.
There are concentric circles of giving a fuck: first in the center is yourself, then your family, then your friends, then your community, then your city, then your country, then other countries on the planet.
It's impossible to get people to care about the outermost circle when their inner circles are not satisfied, so they won't be happy to see their elected officials being generous to foreigners with their own tax money.
Which shows this isn't actually about the cost.
If this had anything to do with money and caring about domestic spending first, then you'd see aid to Israel cut off as well. Funny how that's not happening.
Yeah, why is that?
Hard to imagine why you get labelled antisemitic
And it’s not lost on me that both Starmer and Macron represent a minority of the electorate in their respective countries—having won due to a deeply fractured electorate.
Unfortunately typical that we just get ignored here in the eastern flank. One can only hope that we weren't mentioned because it's obvious that we'd back these operations, since an ascended Russia is an existential threat to everyone here, but alas.
Of course there are ideas like the one from President Stubb, wherein any peace treaty could be dive such that a future attack on Ukraine by Russia world mean Ukraine's automatic ascension to NATO (and/or the EU, depending on just how far America is willing to backstab its allies) and basically having the organisation(s) guarantee Ukraine's independence. Although that would require taking northern and eastern Europeans seriously, and I'm somehow not convinced of that happening.
But yeah, hopefully they get the peacekeepers at the very least.
My comment today on a YT video;
"Trump never apologizes or shows contrition (Roy Cohn's 'always deny' doctrine) as it shows weakness, similar to Putin perceiving appeasement as weakness. He then sets up a scenario (he called it "great television") where he expects Zelenskyy to apologize and say thankyou for the 100th time. He told Zelenskyy he had no cards, so apologizing or showing appreciation-on-demand (for nothing in exchange) would be submitting to being a loser in Trump's own mindset, which is the point of the whole fake deal on offer. No different to the "deal" he made with Afghan government for natural resources, before he sided with the Taliban to withdraw US troops in betrayal of that very agreement. When Zelenskyy pointed out that Putin can't be trusted for any ceasefire, Trump then raised his voice cos his own betrayals (nearly everyone who worked for him that wasn't paid, or went to prison by following instructions, or was summarily fired as per his catchphrase) are viewed as his favorite playing card."
Treachery has been his default modus operandi throughout his personal life (cheating and divorce) as well as in business and politics ("hang Mike Pence"). Reality TV then normalized it to the level of mass-entertainment as he suggested.
Yet MAGA types keep claiming that Donald Trump supposedly got an "overwhelming mandate" from the American people even though he got just under 50% of the popular vote.
That patronizing attitude you showed is exactly the one the Democrats had and is exactly what got Trump elected. Until their attitude changes they will keep losing votes out of sheer spite.
>they will keep losing votes out of sheer spite
Well, I guess that is the answer. You may not look good without a nose, but you sure taught your face a lesson.
The only savior of the poor and vulnerable would have been Bernie Sanders, that's why the democrats have avoided nominating him, because he's a man of the people, not the man of established corporate interests.
So given two bad options, the poor and working class have picked the candidate not insulting and patronizing them based on gender, race and identity politics, while also being able to form a coherent sentence[1]. Democrats are so high on their own self-righteous elitist farts, they still don't realize why the majority of people hate them.
This is purely about Trump helping Putin.
There is no trust between players in the axis of evil.
Khamenei studied as a student in USSR prior to the revolution. He is likely a Russian asset. Nothing else can explain the decisions of that "ayatollah". The other day an Isreali news site reported Iran is not on the list of invitees to the May 9 goose stepping show in Moscow. (Israel is invited). IRI got sanctioned for giving drones to RF and now Russia will get off the list while IRI sanctions remain. Russia supports UAE regarding their bs claims on 3 strategic micro-islands in the Persian Gulf. The fabled S-400 have never ever been offered to IRI, and IRI previously had to sue (yes) Russia to finally get the S-300s that they had long ago paid for, which then promptly got bombed by Israel. The list goes on and on ..
"Back to school now" for Ali Khamenei - I bet you didn't know this. In fact curious as to where you even get actual news about IRI if you don't speak Persian ...
Nevermind that the reason Ukraine can't defend itself is because the US guaranteed their security in exchange for them giving up their nukes. I mean, that was so 30 years ago.
Instead they send it to Ukraine on inflated price and all money goes to the US manufactures to make a modern weapons instead.
It’s now illegal to teach that perspective in Florida however as it falls under recent CRT laws and administrators are now fearful of any adjacent curriculum.
Regardless it’s really important to mention the Civil Rights movement now in the context of the Department of Education which was formed in part to enforce the Civil Rights Act (and later the Americans with Disabilities Act). Republicans are now tearing down the Department of Education. Effecting research and medical student loans TODAY (in my family) and much more TOMORROW.
The whole WireCard scandal there really opened my eyes.
That’s not to say that the KGB didn’t have some degree of influence on certain movements. But the overall picture that Bezmenov paints is laughably false with hindsight. The interview is from 1984, and I’m sure many in the KGB at that time really believed that their cunning plan to brainwash the West was working.
After the failure of world revolution only the subversion program remained. This was widely successful and is still ongoing.
Why would Russia push the 'false narrative' that they supported the anti nuclear power movement? They benefit enormously from replacing nuclear with their gas.
Nuclear disarmament is some miru mir thing.
Huh, so do they have an earthquake machine that caused Fukushima? Quick, someone tell that Jews-Space-Laser-Congresslady!
(Fukushima happened a few days before a German state election. Merkel, ever the opportunist and fearing a loss to the Green Party, finally said "We should accelerate the nuclear shutdown". The Greens won anyway).
I mean, they were caught meeting with a Russian spy in their campaign HQ, told us they got most of their money from Russia, and then told us for 10 years we were being crazy conspiracy theorists by claiming they were aligned with Russia. It's not a hard puzzle if you have the pieces.
So hearing today that "this is such a surprise" is especially frustrating, because this has been the topic of congressional reports written by Republican , impeachment trials, DOJ reports, reports from federal agencies, warnings from the FBI, CIA, and also international intelligence agencies. People like Christopher Steele correctly called this a decade ago and he was demonized. Australia brought it to the attention of the FBI.
Like... people knew this was happening, and warned, and not just nobodies like people on the Internet. What happened over the last 10 years is that Russia won the information war, and the general public decided to trust Russian state media over Democrats when it came to Trump's support of Russia. Which, I think at long last we can all admit this is the case without calling anyone a conspiracy theorist yeah?
What could he possible have done that would deter his followers at this point.