I get the feeling such rumours are just the other face of the same kind of blind Nationalism as the MAGAts exhibit - the latter group is all about how America is a great country whilst the group spreading the “it’s all due to Foreign interference” rumours are really just denying that the huge problems in America are mainly the fault of Americans.
Both are just spewing self-serving nationalism in the same direction: that Americans are good and it’s foreigners who are bad.
It’s generally a good idea to be skeptical of “explanations” which make the people giving them indirectly it look better, either by claiming than the group they’re in is better than the rest or by exhonerating the group they’re in as the cause of the problems that group is having.
You put it better than I myself had formulated it in my head yet, why I am weary of those rumours. I find similar arguments here in Europe, where our fascist movements, which are without a doubt supported by Russia, are then sometimes reduced to being some sort of wholly foreign influence, instead of admitting that Russia is stoking flames in embers that had always been part of us and the problems we face.
The fields which are being harvested by both external adversaries and power hungry ethics-free insiders were plowed, fertilized and sowed by 4 decades of exposure to the style of disinformation favored by Neoliberalism whilst the consequences of its policies were getting more and more felt by the average person, IMHO.
When your belt keeps tightening, what you can buy with the income from working keeps being less and less and life feels more and more like swimming against the tide, all the while the authoritative figures of old (mainly the Press and mainstream party politicians) keep telling you that things are getting better (“the GDP is growing!”), eventually people lose trust in said authoritative figures and those with a similar style of discourse, which opens the door to non-mainstream political voices with a different style of discourse (including populists), and very wealthy people aren’t going to be funding Leftwing parties whose ideas are not shaped by Neoliberalism, to fill the political gap opened by the general loss of trust on the mainstream, they’re going to be funding Rightwing voices who blame the powerless for the ills of the nation rather than those very wealthy people who have been pillaging it for decades.
I get the feeling such rumours are just the other face of the same kind of blind Nationalism as the MAGAts exhibit - the latter group is all about how America is a great country whilst the group spreading the “it’s all due to Foreign interference” rumours are really just denying that the huge problems in America are mainly the fault of Americans.
Both are just spewing self-serving nationalism in the same direction: that Americans are good and it’s foreigners who are bad.
It’s generally a good idea to be skeptical of “explanations” which make the people giving them indirectly it look better, either by claiming than the group they’re in is better than the rest or by exhonerating the group they’re in as the cause of the problems that group is having.
You put it better than I myself had formulated it in my head yet, why I am weary of those rumours. I find similar arguments here in Europe, where our fascist movements, which are without a doubt supported by Russia, are then sometimes reduced to being some sort of wholly foreign influence, instead of admitting that Russia is stoking flames in embers that had always been part of us and the problems we face.
The fields which are being harvested by both external adversaries and power hungry ethics-free insiders were plowed, fertilized and sowed by 4 decades of exposure to the style of disinformation favored by Neoliberalism whilst the consequences of its policies were getting more and more felt by the average person, IMHO.
When your belt keeps tightening, what you can buy with the income from working keeps being less and less and life feels more and more like swimming against the tide, all the while the authoritative figures of old (mainly the Press and mainstream party politicians) keep telling you that things are getting better (“the GDP is growing!”), eventually people lose trust in said authoritative figures and those with a similar style of discourse, which opens the door to non-mainstream political voices with a different style of discourse (including populists), and very wealthy people aren’t going to be funding Leftwing parties whose ideas are not shaped by Neoliberalism, to fill the political gap opened by the general loss of trust on the mainstream, they’re going to be funding Rightwing voices who blame the powerless for the ills of the nation rather than those very wealthy people who have been pillaging it for decades.