I'm Terrified

I'm terrified with the news delivered to Congress and to the Sanders campaign that Vladimir Putin is directing a concerted effort to engineer the 2020 Presidential election.

Basically, Putin wants Trump to win again.  He wants Bernie Sanders to win, I think, because he perceives Senator Sanders to be a weak candidate who would lose to Trump.

As in 2016, the strategy is to drop into the social media maelstrom, nuggets of disinformation, that are picked up and re-posted by those who are reading what reinforces their existing bias.  And the social media platforms are complicit as the "algorithm" sees what you "like" and feeds you more of the same.

I'm terrified that Putin and his minions are even smarter than we can imagine.

They're also more cynical than most Americans are.  Despite our current gloom and doom divisions, the idea of America has always been hopeful, believing in the best of people far more than their worst.  I think the Russians think that if they can just push our Democratic and Republican buttons, we can re-push the buttons in knee-jerk fashion, purely as a reflex without any conscious thought.

We don't seem to be very smart.  We've embraced social media wholeheartedly without exercising caution about its dark side, without realizing that it's not our old methods of exchanging ideas and positions.

I don't believe my Republican friends are natural liars anymore than I think Democrats are.  What they have in common is a desire to latch on to "news" items that comes across their news feeds that speak to their frequently unacknowledged biases. 

So if Vladimir or Donald post or tweet a lie, shame on them.  If we re-post the lie, shame on us.  We owe it to ourselves, our neighbors, and the ideal of our country to stop, think, and ask ourselves why it resonates with us.

What we can do is some good, old fashioned soul searching, what I learned in my Catholic upbringing as an examination of conscience.

Why do we feel the way we do?  If we don't spend some time in introspection, then Putin will make his choices our choices.

And he will have won.  Again.