Just as revolting is seeing previously trusted conservative sites and TV hosts defending Russia and tarring Ukraine. Children act like that when adults apply reverse psychology. What's their excuse? I'm not naming names because I'd like to believe they are acting in good faith and are simply misguided by crafty spinners.
Reading Russian and Ukrainian sources in the original, I know exactly who in this war is spinning lies and who is fighting for truth and freedom. Believe me, not every enemy of the liberal media is our ally or deserves sympathy. Sometimes the enemy of our enemy is an even bigger enemy.
I'm familiar with Russian propaganda well enough to recognize a scripted narrative. Some conservative hosts may not praise Putin's ideas directly, but they favor guests and authors who deliver the influence operation script, blaming the victims and diminishing their suffering. This looks just as bad as pointing a camera at the scene of a violent rape while mocking the victim's screaming, making fun of her clothes, saying that she deserves it, and suggesting that she stop faking pain and enjoy the inevitable.
With the media presenting such irreconcilable viewpoints, American consumers of news have split in two warring factions. But the accusations and arguments with which they hit each other over the head are false on either side.
False argument #1: Anyone who supports Ukraine wants American soldiers to die in foreign lands or is clamoring for WW3.
I support Ukraine but I never called for Americans to risk their lives in Ukraine. There are many ways of supporting an ally without sending an army. The three weeks of fighting have shown Ukraine is quite capable of defending itself, given enough guns and ammo.
False argument #2: Anyone who questions the Democrats' motives as related to this war is a Putin troll and a traitor.
I'll be the first to point out that Biden and the rest of the Obama team had turned Ukraine into a feeding trough with their corrupt schemes. But that has little to do with Putin's paranoia and his megalomaniacal motives to invade Ukraine and the rest of the former Soviet territories, redefining established borders, encouraging other known bad actors, and setting a precedent that may indeed start WW3.
It's time we asked, cui bono? Who benefits from a divided America fighting over Putin's Russia? The answer is Putin's Russia.
Russian influence operations, or "active measures," have been targeting the U.S. for decades, aiming to demoralize Americans and make them hate one another. Judging by the state of affairs today, Russian operations have been quite effective.
The KGB was dissolved in the early 1990s, followed by a short respite. Then Putin, a former KGB colonel, restarted the influence game and enhanced it with digital gadgets. This time, in addition to the traditional leftist radicals, he started targeting conservatives as potential agents of influence.
Russian propaganda is deeply embedded and is sophisticated enough to appear as honest opinions of concerned citizens. But what often betrays it is the narcissistic desire of making everything about Russia.
We are either fuming over Russian election interference, or over Russia setting up fake BLM pages on Facebook, or we are being dragged into sympathizing with Russia over its bogus fears of NATO expansion, its "national interests," its "religiosity and spirituality," and so on. In the Soviet days of communist propaganda, any American influencer could get away with it by claiming he was simply a selfless Marxist. But today, when Russia's ideology is chauvinistic nationalism, it's a bit odd for a regular American to be simply a selfless defender of Russia's national interests.
While Russia's defenders point out the existence of Ukrainian nationalism, they somehow neglect to mention the unhinged Russian nationalism. The two are not equal. The nationalism of a dominant ethnicity in an empire which aims to subjugate other ethnicities as inferior to the main one, is called chauvinism or supremacism. The nationalism of a smaller ethnicity trying to free its neck from under its "big brother's" boot is called a movement for dignity, freedom, and independence — something American conservatives have always identified with.
Contrary to what a section of conservative media claims, Putin is not a Christian knight in shining armor fighting the New World Order. He has his own New World Order in mind, which is spiritually closer to Mordor. One look at Russian society today with its brutal suppression of dissent, government corruption, and state-sponsored brainwashing should give an idea of what he has in store for the rest of the conquered world.
Russia may have different faces at different times, but the one we are staring at today -- obsessed with the cult of Putin and conspiracy theories -- is not Lara from Doctor Zhivago, who never existed, but a manipulative drama queen dragging others into its alcohol-fueled problems and then using the suckers as tools to achieve its soulless goals.
Americans shouldn't be codependent in this abusive behavior.
A top-level Russian propagandist once bragged that if his agency's methods of psychological manipulation were open and legal, they could easily get a Nobel for inventing it. If I were to guess, at least one of those methods rely in part on the Drama Triangle principle.