Not much different to the democrats after the last election and Russia. Turns out everyone reaches for conspiracies when they would rather not change their world view.
It is true that immediately after the election, there was a "Russia hacked the election" narrative that many partisans were latching on to to explain an unexpected Trump victory.
I think the primary distinction is that democratic politicians and "thought-leaders" (or wtv term is better suited for influential partisans) quickly dismissed the fact that the actual democratic institutions were compromised (that is to say, the integrity of the vote was compromised, or that ballots didn't represent vote intention), but rather the claim quite quickly became that an influence campaign was supported by foreign powers, and the Trump campaign was happy to profit from it, if not colluding with said nation-state actors.
So, you're entirely correct that we have a tendency to seek out the narrative that best affirms our priors, but whether that tendency is legitimised depends on our institutions and the people we put in places of authority.
I agree the Russia thing was way overplayed (even though Russia did run a propaganda campaign, which all evidence does point to, actual American people were still voting for Trump). I don't think it really holds a candle to the batshit craziness of QAnon though.
Not my president people are everybit as unhinged as qanon people. They unironically said Trump was a kgb asset who Putin was controlling.
Again, if we found out that some Democrat staffer had stuffed a ballot for their guy it wouldn't mean that the vicotry for Biden was fraudulent. It would mean that one single operative committed fraud and probably had no wider impact.
I'd even go as far as saying that it would be far more dangerous than the fsb posting memes.
Do you know the QAnon stuff? It's on a different scale, more in-line with scientology:
> QAnon's adherents, while seeing Trump as a flawed Christian, also view him as a messiah sent by God.
> there is a worldwide cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles who rule the world, essentially, and they control everything
> Followers of QAnon also believe that there is an imminent event known as "The Storm", when thousands of members of the cabal will be arrested and possibly sent to Guantanamo Bay prison or to face military tribunals, and the U.S. military will brutally take over the country.[3] The result will be salvation and utopia on earth.
In comparison to believing that a business man with multiple accusations of corruptions and financial crime, might be collaborating with Russia for his personal gain?
There is, of course, actual smoke on the Russia issue.
- It's unambiguously true that Russia helped Trump get elected in 2016. Even the Republican Senate acknowledges this.
- Trump's campaign had various (documented) unsavoury links with Russia.
- Mueller didn't clear Trump of collusion with Russia, and indeed stated that the (clear) obstruction prevented a full investigation of the topic.
- Trump himself has been extraordinarily soft on Russia, while burning relationships with traditional allies.
- Trump is also pretty effusive in his praise of Putin - dictator of a geopolitical enemy and all-round bad dude.
None of this is speculative - it's all backed up by the facts. This is not to say that Trump is a KGB asset, but it's not hard to see why people might see indications in that direction and take it a step too far. Honestly my personal view is it's highly unlikely - if he was a Russian asset it's likely our intelligence agencies would have known in advance and done something about it. Personally my view is simply that Trump wishes to be an autocrat, and admires other autocrats.
The Q stuff, the Bill Gates microchip stuff, on the other hand, is just completely out of left field.
I'm sure you can point to individual wackos but what is there that has the same scale and impact as Qanon? It's a very unique thing, and it's almost exclusively affecting conservatives.
Russia gate, if anything its even more unhinged because it was on national news instead of blogs. It is one of those things that even a year later everyone involved is keeping really quiet about given how embarrassing it is to have believed it.
I'm not sure what exactly you're talking about. It's now well established that Russia did interfere in the elections with the goal to promote a Trump victory. The only thing not conclusive was active and intentful collaboration with Russia from Trump. But it's very normal to want to open an investigation into Russia's meddling.
> Mueller concluded that Russian interference was "sweeping and systematic" and "violated U.S. criminal law", and he indicted twenty-six Russian citizens and three Russian organizations. The investigation also led to indictments and convictions of Trump campaign officials and associated Americans
> The Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee submitted the first in their five-volume 1,313-page report in July 2019 in which they concluded that the January 2017 intelligence community assessment alleging Russian interference was "coherent and well-constructed".
> The Russian government interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election with the goals of harming the campaign of Hillary Clinton, boosting the candidacy of Donald Trump, and increasing political and social discord in the United States. According to U.S. intelligence agencies, the operation was ordered directly by Russian President Vladimir Putin
> Several individuals connected to Russia contacted various Trump campaign associates, offering business opportunities to the Trump Organization and proferring damaging information on Clinton.
Here's the thing, I don't even know what to make of it. Sure, Trump didn't seek.out Russian help actively or ask them to do any of this, but Russia still interfered in a way to promote his election. Now hard to say how much that helped him win, but it's hard to standby and think... Ya I guess this is fine? Shouldn't we do something to stop this from happening again? And why didn't Trump do anything about it? Shouldn't he say something like ... Well I believe I would have won even without their help, but this is unacceptable and we need to put in place measures to make sure Russia and other foreign powers can no longer meddle in US elections?
That's not a conspiracy theory, both in that it actually happened, and it's not even that unusual for governments to mess with foreign elections if they feel they can get away with it.
There is a theory that Trump conspired with Russia. That is a conspiracy theory. There is evidence that Russia wanted Trump to win and they helped him do that. There is no evidence that Trump conspired with Russia. Those two are different things, yet many still believe that Trump conspired with Russia.
During his 2016 campaign, Trump asked Russia to release Hillary Clinton's emails. As president, he met with Putin in secrecy with no other officials present and went as far as destroying the interpreter's notes. These are a few prominent examples of his utterly bizarre behavior towards Russia.
I'm inclined to believe Trump is simply stupid and admires Putin as the kind of strongman he desperately wanted to be, but he certainly stoked the theories with his own behavior.
There are two things that people who do not want Trump to have ever been a president mix up and pretend are equivalent.
One is the fact that every country interferes with the elections of every other country. The other is that the fsb was so wildly successful at it they changed the result of the 2016 election.
The two have nothing to do with each other and mentioning the first when I'm talking about the second is deeply disingenuous.
Stop trying to both sides the idea there is a pedophile ring of shadowy Democrats that actually control the government and the fact that Russia interfered and ran misinformation campaigns to influence the election.
You can argue about how effective you think those campaigns were in their influence but you're just trying to muddy the conversation if you are trying to make them out to be equivalently valid or equivalently ridiculous.
Well let's think this out for a minute, a extremely well connected liberal billionaire with a island was found out to be a pedofile and peddeling underage women to politicians. So much so that while it has not been proven their is a mountain of evidence that the British Crown was a solicitor. This has been extracted to a global cabal of pedofiles.
Conversely, we know that the russians ran bot farms and did various other unscrupulous activities during the election. Yet nobody involved with Trump was implicated in what the Russians did. The evidence was well vetted and there was a through investigation on the subject matter, further, the Steele Dossier was proven to be a hit piece. This has been extracted to Trump is a KGB agent or under the influence and direct control of the Kremlin. Yet both are not on the equivalent on the conspiracy theory scale?
Not sure what you are asking, but my point was both sides are just as willing to extract truth into the realm of conspiracy.
Please don't try to construe that as somehow me proclaiming my admiration for Trump. Sure Donald was friends with him, and most certainly he lied about his affiliation with him and distanced himself from him, but that is not the focus of my post.
My focus was to highlight the rabid denialism that is rampant on both sides and both sides thinking they are the norm and the other guys are the extremist.
> The two have nothing to do with each other and mentioning the first when I'm talking about the second is deeply disingenuous.
That Russia interfered in US elections has nothing to do with how successful Russia was in interfering with US elections, huh? Amazing logic there.
Those two things aren't equivalent, but the former is a component of the latter. Pretending that they're unrelated is bizarre.
> The other is that the fsb was so wildly successful at it they changes the result of the 2016 election.
I mean, we know that Russia pushed Trump hard. Probably it wasn't enough to sway the election, but it's more than a little disingenuous to pretend that this is equivalent to "Hillary has a satanic pedophile ring" or "Bill Gates is injecting tracker 5G vaccines into people", where they're completely fabricated.
I think you can make a pretty strong claim that without the email leaks, Hillary would have won. Thus making Russia hacks and leaks of her emails directly responsible for the push to presidency.
And here we are. Four years later, a victory and still knee deep in conspiracy land why the loss was a fluke caused by evil doers against the righteous and noble Hilary.
You're projecting quite a lot here. There is a large number of Americans who obviously support Trump, you most likely, and about 47% of them it seems in fact. That said, the prior elections were really close, with Trump even losing the popular vote, so it's really no stretch to think that it didn't take much to tip the scales one way or another, no conspiracy here, just elementary observation.
Russia hacked Democratic email accounts and trickled them out to WikiLeaks. They set up troll farms to promote pro-Trump narratives.
The Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee characterized this as "The Russian government directed extensive activity, beginning in at least 2014 and carrying into at least 2017, against U.S. election infrastructure at the state and local level."
That was unusual. "Every country interferes with the elections of every other country" is disingenuous. And thinking maybe that there's more that might have happened there that went undiscovered is not even close to the same level as thinking that Wayfair is facilitating child trafficking.
I think people wanted it to be true because they didn't want to believe a man like Trump could be elected President of the United States normally.
I do think the rise of social media has opened up the ability for foreign countries to influence people's beliefs regarding an election, much more than they could in the past (although it's not a new phenomenon and the US is guilty of it as well).
But I also think the 2020 election also helped prove that it's not just foreign influence that can make people vote for someone like Trump, they're perfectly capable of coming to that conclusion on their own. There wasn't just social media influencing this time, they could see with their own eyes what Trump was doing the past four years, not just speculation, and still decided they wanted to support him.
The FBI, CIA, and republican-led Senate Committee on Intelligence have all produced extensive volumes of documentation of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
If you're referring specifically to accusations of collusion between Trump and Russia, the core accusation was that he and his administration were playing the role of the useful idiot, being plied and influenced by Russia to the detriment of American interests.
The idea that he was intentionally working with Russia in a direct manner may has always been a misleading straw man.
The whole Russia thing went deep into conspiracy theory territory even before the 2016 election. The part that astounded me was the conspiracy theory about Trump being in secret communication with a Russian bank (and, for some reason, a US healthcare provider) via DNS. It was rejected by multiple outlets before a partisan rag ran with it, and made no sense on multiple levels - we were supposed to believe Trump got some subcountractors of subcontractors who he had no reason to trust to set up a communication channel so poor he'd need another, better communication channel just to agree what the messages meant, giving them the ability to blow the whole scheme and tying those communications to himself for no reason in the process, and they somehow went along with it and kept their mouths shut, and that this made more sense than email servers doing DNS lookups as the result of having received ordinary marketing emails for Trump hotels like you'd pretty much expect them to do.
And yet, this didn't stop the Clinton campaign demanding the FBI investigate it from her official Twitter account, and that demand going viral. Not only that, when the New York Times pushed back against this nuttery in the weakest way possible by reporting that the FBI had looked at the claims and concluded all the evidence pointed to it being the result of ordinary junk emails, their reader's editor pushed back, there was a boycott, and they eventually admitted it was a mistake and they wouldn't do it again. People are probably still holding this against the New York Times even now, and the theory got resurrected later by publications which should know better.
