As the Russian offensive into Ukraine grinds on with little progress being made, it's becoming increasingly obvious that Putin is little more than a regional despot. Over the years, he's been blown up into the Boogie Man by our media, but why? Russia itself is dying, it's economy is utterly reliant on a raw material it pumps out of the ground and it's not responsible for anything new and interesting in the world. It's a second-world dump.
How did we get so obsessed with the place? Allow me to posit that it's a lingering side-effect of Trump beating Hillary in 2016. Here's one of my favorite segments from a Tucker Carlson speech where he suggests that the Elites never got over Hillary's loss. Instead of self-reflection, they blamed everyone else. One of the villains of the piece, the biggest individual of all, was Putin.
Putin Mania hasn't ended yet. Like Global Warming Climate Change and racism, he's responsible for everything bad. My favorite trick of his is Russian Disinformation. Instead of owning up to the fact that our establishment organizations have all been lying to us for years about all kinds of things and have lost credibility, the reason people are reaching for conspiracy theories is Russian Disinformation.
When the conspiracy theories turn out to have been true, <cough cough> Ukrainian bio-weapons-research labs <cough cough>, they're passed over and a new Russian Disinformation campaign is discovered. Russian Disinformation is to our news media and authority figures like evil spirits were to medieval peasants. It's a catch-all phrase to cover every time the public blows off some pronouncement about SciENcE, the economicalism or hatefulnesses.
We're drowning in Putin Mania because the Elites can't admit that they've screwed the pooch over all kinds of things.
2 comments:
+1
I think it's also that everybody much over 30 remembers when the Soviet Union was the Big Bad, and finds it easy to believe that they still could be if they only put in the effort. And the government would dearly love to have a credible external enemy, because without one the natural tendency of the political parties is to turn and rend one another without regard to collateral damage.
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