I bet most people still believe there is evidence that Putin influenced Trump's election

and aimed to divide and destabilise the US?

The absolute irony of accusing Russia of interfering in US elections when for decades the CIA has interfered in Russian elections and politics. They even tried using Navalny to remove Putin from office!

In fact it was shady mutineer and now dead Prigozhin who was supposedly behind the Internet Research Group (which funds a variety of American groups, such as Black Matters, and which appears to have been set up to take the heat from Americans for interfering in Brexit). There was never any evidence of ‘Russian intelligence-linked trolls in St Petersburg’ nor any evidence of a connection to anyone in the Russian government.

It was shown in Nature Communications in January 2023 that the 50 trolls organised by Prigozhin, who boasted ‘We did it only because the U.S. boorishly interfered in Russian elections in 1996, 2000, 2008, and 2012’ had no effect on the 2016 election whatsoever.

There was also no evidence, only deliberate rumours, of Russians hacking emails. However, there was evidence of involvement of a ‘Ukrainian cybersecurity firm called Crowdstrike, which was working under contract with the Democratic National Committee. The company’s founder and CTO, Dmitri Alperovitch, was (and is) a rabid anti-Putin political operative who also serves as a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council, NATO’s official think tank’. The ‘fake news’ led to the US media talking about Putin as an enemy from 2016 onwards. Alperovitch later admitted under oath that he had no evidence of Russian involvement in email hacking; but by then it was too late.

Russiagate is being used to call for greater censorship of social media on the grounds that anyone questioning the government narrative, on Ukraine for example, is being controlled by malevolent or ‘dubious’ foreign agents.

This baseless accusation of foreign government interference allegedly to destabilise the US is being used as an excuse to censor or shadow ban social media accounts that the US or Israel don’t like, such as the anti-genocide pro-Palestinian rapper Lowkey.

Accusations of collaboration, funding and influence are now being used against any independent journalist, such as the Grayzone, if they have ever worked with anyone in Russia, Iran or China, in order to censor and smear them if they have the nerve to criticise the US narrative or to call out US politicians.

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