Spies trying to recruit another nation’s spies? I’m shocked. Shocked I tell you. This is some pretty weak sauce from the Kremlin. I think the only intended audience is domestic.
80% of their anti-Americanism is for domestic consumption. The rest is exported to the democracies they’re trying to undermine, including ours.
There appears to be a strain of thought at work in Russia, of which Putin himself is the leading exponent, that it wasn’t the repression and decade after decade of intellectual fraud and compounding economic stupidity that caused the collapse of the USSR, but, rather the loss of America as a unifying external threat.
It’s all about the MRGA. Not to be confused with Mar-a-Lago, of course. Except when it’s the same thing.
Off topic:
A little levity that I stumbled across…
I found a VHS tape at the junk store that just had the label "A surprise!"
— foone (@Foone) March 25, 2018
I thought I'd check it out, since I have a VCR & TV hooked up after all.
Just... Just watch. pic.twitter.com/Rj1n5aUVB2
If you unpack this, for a moment, something interesting appears. Even Putin agrees that it’s plausible a russian diplomat would rather betray their country than return to it from abroad even temporarily.