HomerianSymphony

I can't wait for Democrats to accuse one of their own of being a Russian asset.

In case it wasn't already obvious, there clearly isn't a single Arabic speaker on AOC's team.

"Nofal also revealed that after attending the BRICS summit, Palestinians plan to request official membership in the BRICS Association."

The mod of /c/politics has banned me and accused me of pushing Russian talking points. I want to present the comment that he removed and for which he banned me for so that people can see that was not the case.

For context, the mod said that "There’s good evidence that Russia was behind the pro-Brexit sentiment in the UK." He said that without Russian meddling, support for Brexit would not have gone anywhere because "Google searches showed the general public in the UK neither knew or cared what the EU or Brexit actually were."

He linked to an article showing that google searches for "What is Brexit" and "What is the EU?" spiked after the Brexit vote, and also linked to an article about a UK government report about possible Russian election interference in the Brexit vote.

If you live in the UK, you know that the general public did care about Brexit, and you know that the main drivers of support for Brexit were Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, and Rupert Murdoch.

I took issue with his claim that "the general public in the UK neither knew or cared what the EU or Brexit actually were", saying:

I'm sorry, but that is simply not true. It was a big deal. The turnout for the Brexit vote was 72%, which shows that interest in the vote was quite high. My British friends were certainly posting about it a lot on facebook. An MP was murdered over it.

And blaming Russia for the majority of the pro-Brexit sentiment is ludicrous. Boris Johnson ran bus ads saying that Brexit would allow 350 million pounds per week to go to the National Health Service. Nigel Farage was on TV all the time saying Brexit was necessary to secure Britain's borders. Rupert Murdoch's Sun newspaper was saying Brexit would mean Britons could have bendy bananas. I don't know how you look at all that and say that Russia must have been the main driver of pro-Brexit sentiment in some way that was barely noticed at the time.

The report you linked is speculating that Russia may have played a small role (along with many other things that may have played a role), and that role may have been a decisive factor because the vote was so close. That's not the same as saying that Brexit would have gone nowhere without Russia.

But yes, 28% of Britons did not vote in the referendum, which means 28% of Britons probably didn't know or care much about the EU or Brexit, and a lot of that 28% probably googled "what is Brexit?" the day after the referendum when people started to freak out about it passing.

Like many other people in this thread, you are vastly overestimating the influence that Russia has. Please stop using them as a scapegoat for everything that is going wrong with democracy in the West. I'm not saying this because I have a partisan interest in defending Russia. It's just unhelpful, makes no sense, and won't fix anything.

That is the entirety of what I said (and the modlog will confirm that). I did not deny that Russia interfered in the election! I don't think anything I said was a Russian talking point. I do not doubt anything in the UK government report about possible election interference from Russia. Russia may very well have tipped the scales and caused Brexit to happen when it otherwise wouldn't have happened. We'll probably never know.

But to say that pro-Brexit sentiment was almost entirely the product of Russian meddling is just a revisionist fantasy that goes against all reality. It was only 8 years ago. How can people be rewriting the story so soon?

I don't understand this urge to blame the failures of Western democracy (whether Trump or Brexit) on Russia when there are so many other very readily identifiable domestic culprits (including good ol' racism) that need to be addressed. What is happening?

As far as I know, she is the only Democrat challenging Joe Biden for the nomination.

This is peak "rich fucker tries to appear relateable".

Nobody's favourite meal is "sandwiches". He didn't even say a specific kind of sandwich, just sandwiches.

That’s weird. I thought they said it was because he had a cold.