this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
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Politics
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I don't know for sure who is and isn't a "Russian asset" for any given definition of "Russian asset."
I mean, there was this, but she assures us that it meant nothing.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/06/jill-stein-says-nothing-happened-at-her-dinner-with-putin/
But in any case, the third party candidacy of the Green Party was absolutely a tool for Russia in 2016 to peel off potential Democratic voters to elect Trump, and I would expect the same games to be played this year. Specifically the Russian troll army, the Internet Research Agency, created faux Black voices on social media platforms and, after accumulating sufficient followers to have a large platform, attempted to convince Black voters to either not vote at all or vote third party.
Look, I love pretty much everything Cornell West stands for, but this seems like an incredibly unwise move, to put the best possible face on it.
OK, so you want to have your cake an eat it by implicitly accusing her while saying you just don't know.
Anyway, I think you're giving the American voters too much credit if you think they couldn't elect Trump without Russia's help. You're also vastly overstating the size and influence of the Internet Research Agency. If it truly was a Russian attempt to influence US politics, it was a deeply unserious one.
The 20216 election was incredibly close. It doesn't take much to influence the final result with narrow margins, especially when considering our archaic voting system which significantly over-represents less populated areas (i.e. changing a few hundred votes in one district can be more influential than another district with 10x as many voters if all of those voters are more politically consistent).
There were plenty of other factors that may have pushed Trump over the line, and most of them come down to Hillary being a bad candidate.