I have no doubt that the Russians pulled some hijinx on social media to give the State Department a taste of their own medicine after 2012, but the Dems really ran with that shit and turned it into "anything which challenges the status quo is a Russian attack on our sovereignty and you're guilty of treason for agreeing with any of it." Besides, it completely misses the point that every political entity spreads propaganda and that US social media was explicitly designed to disseminate propaganda and remains firmly in the grasp of US national security interests.

The whole thing was an exercise in consolidating the institutional media's control over public discourse and it could not have worked any better.

I have talked to enough libs who readily acknowledged the atrocities the US has done but they will never be able to get out of the “we’re still the good guys” ideology.

Yea this is my dad to a T. I can get him to agree, baseline, that the USA has committed terrible atrocities, but he still thinks we're good people.

I have heard, and I wish I could find the interview, that when neolib economists analyzed the 2008 crisis they came up with the analysis that although it was a bad thing to happen and could've destroyed capitalistm - it was completely unavoidable because the policies that led to it were the right thing to do. Total idealism, actually not even idealism, anti-materialism.