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[Vestal]

It's exactly proof of what I was alleging, in fact.

I honestly don't know if you have the mental capacity for tracing an argument through several hoops at once, and simply reply to the last thing said like an LLM struggling for context, so I'll try to simplify:

I said that the driving, extremely widespread conspiracy theory on the progressive side about Trump/Russia back in 2017 was essentially that Trump was installed as a Russian asset and controlled by them via some compromising blackmail (the "tape"). The second part of my argument is that this kind of wild conspiracy thinking is objectively insane, and psychologically disqualifying from participation in political life--and that it is exactly what we're seeing again now in the sudden obsessive theory that there is some smoking gun of Trump and pedophilia waiting to be uncovered, which will finally take him down just like that mythical secret sex tape was going to. And lastly, that this kind of thinking is exactly like QAnon. Unhinged conspiracy thinking is not isolated on one side of the aisle, and if anything has been much worse for the country on the progressive side due to always going much more mainstream (for example, people on major networks, like Rachel Maddow, falling fully for the most extreme delusions of it and broadcasting it every night, just as it graced pages of the most prestigious papers like NYT; whereas QAnon remained a fringe thing).

In that context, I quoted the NYT (and another source) because it is the most widely read source among left/progressives, and what you see in its pages is by far a better recording of mainstream progressive belief than anything else you can possibly find. And on those pages, the most illogical and magical-thinking versions of the Russian conspiracy were plainly printed, many times.

It illustrates that this was indeed what drove the Russian hysteria. And anecdotally, at least 80% of the progressive people in my orbit -- from extended family, neighbors, etc -- took the full belief during those years. Speak to any person over 50 in 2017 for that matter who votes democrat, and they'd tell you that Putin is controlling Trump like a puppet due to secret sex tapes, and that this is objectively true information about which they have absolutely zero doubt.

Trump did himself no favors looking like a limp dick next to Putin at their first summit. Everyone's take away was him defending Putin and siding with him over our own Intel on just obvious stuff. You compound that with how things unfolded around Wikileaks aka "buttery emails", Flynn getting fired, and Trump's general comments on Putin. All of that created a pretty strong public narrative without the need for much color or flare.

The media just rode the narrative he basically spoon-fed them.

 

[ResurrectedContrarian]

I think we should equally ignore Russia hysteria, Q-Anon, and Epstein truthers (on both political sides... and the left version of it, after all, was non-existent until Trump was back in power--then suddenly became a 24/7 obsession of figures in media and elsewhere who said zero about Epstein for several years).

And I think there is a psychotic inability to accept that Trump is just a fairly ordinary populist, if a bit personally gross (not pedo gross, but brash and ugly in his personal life), and a refusal to see that his politics is a legitimate version of right populism with plenty of reasonable supports. Even boogeymen like Project 2025 are just fairly straightforward think tank policy documents. All the hysteria is just that, an unnecessary psychological meltdown based on a refusal to recognize that right-populism is in fact a coherent and even dominant political philosophy at this moment in time, no matter how unappealing to many its current leader may be.