I think what they are saying is a common sentiment among people who don't belong in any of the major political camps. It's a common experience to take heat from all sides because, surprisingly, neither "side" in politics is perfect nor particularly virtuous.

If only his ideology was "Republican America bad, Democrat America good", then he would not be aligned with foreign influence and wouldn't be spreading propaganda.

It's probably Twitter. There are people I know IRL who are completely different on that platform, it's unbelievably toxic.

That’s my impression, too. Not hardcore MAGA so much as falling into the addiction of thinking he was smarter than “the establishment” about everything and taking contrarian stances to show they couldn’t boss him around. Twitter’s algorithm was like a drug for those guys because they’d give a radioactive hot take and get a bazillion notification pings.

This was my experience too. So many 'voices' just turned into grifters and self promoters. Garland, Mensch, etc.

I would direct you to George Kennan[1] and his 1997 NYT article where he said, among other things:

"... expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era. Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking ..."

Is it your position that he was paid for, or in some way disingenuously held, this view ?

I don't have strong opinions on this topic but I note with interest that there seem to be contrary viewpoints that aren't not puppets/trolls.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_F._Kennan

HN is one massive echo chamber. Sorry to be the one to point it out to you. Why do you think HN has such a bad reputation for being smug corporate bootlickers?

The elitism and groupthink here is fucking wild.

Well… let’s be fair… outside of tech specific posts, this place is Reddit/r/poltics maybe the lite version. This is an echo chamber on at least a dozen major topics.

So was the programming compiler, not sure what that's supposed to tell us. Programming languages are violent?

And Tor was a US Navy project. What’s your point?

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Suffering from success.

Snowden is currently more or less trapped in Russia, and therefore unable to expose overreach of authoritarian governments without immediately fearing for his life.

The US has lots of issues but at least it doesn't toss you out a window when you cross Fearless Leader. Maybe you get ICE'd, but Russia's kill rate of people Putin doesn't like is 1000x Trump.