Bruh, I could look past this if the BJP was paying him
“President
Donald Trump’s nominee to be
FBI Director,
Kash Patel, was paid $25,000 by a Russian filmmaker with connections to the
Kremlin,
The Washington Post reports.”
What exactly is supposed to be the scandal here?
He received a payment for starring in a documentary by a Russian filmmaker "close to the Kremlin"? What is "close to the Kremlin" supposed to mean? Because it reads to me like, "Russian citizen who has relationships with people inside his own federal government." He happens to be a dual US-Russian citizen via Ukraine.
No, think about this. Read this paragraph.
"The Russian filmmaker’s previous projects include an influence campaign that was on the receiving end of money from a fund created by Russian President Vladimir Putin." A "fund created by Vladimir Putin"? He's the President of Russia. He creates thousands of funds. This would be like attempting to smear some Russian government official as a double agent, or whatever is being implied about Patel, because that person received money from a PBS/NPR documentary filmmaker for taking the time to be featured in a work produced (in whatever part) by that group. I thought that sort of compensation wasn't too uncommon in the documentary world.
This necro is typical of this thread writ large, and I would have understood the desperation for leftists to throw his Hail Mary back in September 2024, in the midst of the Biden mental health cover-up fiasco, but this is indicative of a state of weakness that I didn't think Democrats were in today.
It's not that I don't want our government seeking to undermine any attempts by Russia to influence our political discourse. Russia is our enemy, and will firmly remain an enemy as long as Putin is their head of state. But the thread was posted to this forum with a clear intent to vilify right-wing personalities "Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, Dave Rubin, Tucker Carlson" as some sort of Russian puppets on strings acting as the mouthpiece of the Russian government.
That isn't the real story at all. The story is that Putin's strategy shifted from 2016 and 2020 where Russia used social media bots to amplify any news or news opinions that favored Russia's perspective on international affairs, but usually outright fabricated propaganda, to instead covertly supply funding to American companies that disseminated the opinions of others-- opinions they never controlled-- to Americans as effectively as possible. Both strategies are the similar, but not quite the same, with the first being more sinister because it deliberately fed manufactured misinformation. Essentially they wanted to
amplify and spread news that favored Russian interests.
They didn't control the opinion of those right-wing personalities. They also didn't necessarily want to spread
every opinion or news piece those personalities produced-- only the ones favoring whatever opinion they wanted amplified.
It isn't clear to me what is so appalling about any of this. Counter the Russian schemes. Yes, please. Have a meltdown and point to right-wing personalities as puppets for being bullhorned by a foreign nation that prefers their political opinions? Please don't.
