calling people with positions you don’t agree with traitors is the most boringly unimaginative way to describe people you don’t like to those you think you do.

I’m not calling them traitors because I disagree with them. I’m calling them traitors because they’re god damned traitors. Do you not remember when Trump encouraged a bunch of his idiot followers to attempt to overthrow the sitting government on Jan 6th, 2021? It wasn’t that long ago. That’s treason. He is a traitor. Anybody who voted for a traitor is aiding and abetting the enemy, and is therefore also a traitor. The fact that we didn’t string him up immediately following that stunt is straight up appalling. The fact that we then allowed him the ability to run for president again is unconscionable.

The othering isn’t wrong, innately, but if your answer to the question ‘why are Americans becoming Nazis?’ is Russia, then you’ll never be able to fix the real reasons and stop the flow of fucking Nazis.

I think if you re-read what I wrote, you’ll see that I’m not just blaming Russia. I specifically mentioned home-grown racism as one of the driving factors. The nazis didn’t create American racism; American racism created the nazis. Hitler took great inspiration from our treatment of our indigenous population, our blatant antisemitism, and our oppression of black citizens. He modeled a lot of his policies on our behavior.

That being said, Russia is definitely to blame for quite a lot of the disinformation sphere in this country. It is a very well documented, and well financed operation designed to destabilize the country, and it has been wildly successful. I mean, hell, it’s partially responsible for 70+ million Americans becoming full-on traitors.