I definitely dont want to belittle the importance of this kind of activity. But I very much want to shift the dialog about such machinations on the part of for

I definitely dont want to belittle the importance of this kind of activity. But I very much want to shift the dialog about such machinations on the part of foreign powers towards a conversation where we acknowledge or own systemic failures in democracy at home and our rampant interventionism abroad. I really only see the outcome of this outrage over foreign interference in our democracy resulting in a spectrum of terrible to shameful. In the terrible case, we are hyping up defensive nationalism and disregarding our own actions and history, which may very well lead to all kinds of barbaric, jingoistic policies moving forward. In the shameful case, we are taking advantage of these stories on foreign manipulation as a means to ignore what is wrong with our society, passing the blame solely onto a non american third party. In neither case are we reviewing our history as a nation. I fear we will ignore all the possible lessons we might learn from honestly reviewing the times where we have disenfranchised our own people, overthrew foreign governments for adhering to a different socio-economic ideology, or were so blinded by our own propaganda and fear that we were convinced of conveniently simple narratives about who was bad and who was good and who we had to kill and who had to do the killing. I feel like there is a common aphorism about how you need to fail 10 times to have a decent chance to succeed once. It seems like we have an opportunity to review our history at this moment. We didn't do any such examination after the fall of the USSR in the 90s. Nope, we were vindicated and there was no longer a reason to pen-test neoliberal-capitalism as either an economic system or a larger ideology. It took 2 inane wars, a massive recession, and the election of idiot-nationalist reality tv show star / shitty condo developer to provide us with an opportunity to introspect, and I'll be damned if I dont make the strongest appeal my young perspective can muster for us to do that introspection.