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I can't help but find the timing of this to be extremely suspicious. A few weeks after the western IC warns Russia of a terror attack, a few days after it happens, practically at the same time as the Russian propaganda machine starts firing on all cylinders that we (NSFL links ahead) "beat the evil terrorists black and blue, barbecued their nuts and fed them their own ears and they confessed to being hired by evil satanic ukronazis", anti-Russian propaganda outlets start spinning tales about how the GRU with their secret spy shit ray guns are unquestionably to blame for melting the brains of US bureaucrats for the last ten years (despite the well known fact that said bureaucrats have no brains to melt - cue rimshot). I don't think anyone taking part in this whole cold war 2: electric boogaloo embroglio is even remotely credible, and I think it takes a lot more than a news theory to move the needle on public sentiment around Russia.
This is too zany, too spy-thriller, for the average person to care. I kinda doubt it was meant for us, i.e. normal(-ish) people with typical culture war axes to grind. Maybe it's a distraction to keep people from thinking too hard about the Crocus attack, maybe it's an influence op perpetrated on the western IC to build consensus about Russian foreign meddling, maybe it's a freak coincidence. The only culture war implications I can draw from this are increasing levels of paranoia in the US IC about the Russian Menace, continued wagon-circling about Ukraine policy, etc. That isn't terribly interesting to me, particularly because it isn't clear the manufactured consent is remotely in need of fortification in the US IC, so I don't have much else to say about it.
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