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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsCould the Russkies have been behind Brexit, too?
Not only was Orange Julius Caesar constantly invoking Brexit at his cringe-inducing rallies, that would dovetail neatly with the Kremlin's apparent goal of destabilizing Western democracies.
bettyellen
(47,209 posts)Fear of immigrants that they did here in all cases
Thinkingabout
(30,058 posts)Lithos
(26,403 posts)I do not think they "hacked" the election like they did in the US. Though I would not be surprised if they threw some money towards the Alt-Right in the UK and also contributed some work in the Social Media towards shaping the various memes going around.
L-
GP6971
(31,163 posts)I would say yes. In this new world, anything is possible.
Initech
(100,079 posts)gulliver
(13,181 posts)That pushed Brexit across the line. Then Brexit and the refugee crisis helped Trump.
Igel
(35,317 posts)The EU and Europe have to be weakened. That's the goal. There's a claim that bringing the West down isn't the goal, since, well, the Russians consider themselves superior and all that. It's a case of arguing from a misperceived premise as to what they actually think, when what they think and plan is obvious from what they say and do. Aristotelian to the core, it prefers sophistry to reality, our perceptions of what they think to what they say they think.
One needs a special kind of arrogance for that type of reasoning with the goal of denying reality. But I digress ...
Helping the flow of immigrants/refugees helps that goal in various ways. Brexit is one. Supporting xenophobic parties in Central Europe is another. Creating social disruption and increasing expenses is another.
And, as with the media "leaks" in the US, Putin got a heckuva lot of help from those who think him their enemy. All the blather about how these were refugees, several years after leaving the war zone; how they were Syrians, when most weren't; how they were families, when the early waves were mostly male; how they were educated and middle-class, when the vast majority weren't. It was mixed, but the preponderance went one way in reality and the other way in the way the media wanted to show them. It was important for personal and political reasons, in some cases for reasons of religion or empathy (for some, not for others) to mischaracterize them--fake news, in other words--to accomplish the ends.
In a few cases the falseness of earlier reporting and the denial that it was biased was noted without comment--"unlike before, now most of the refugees are women and children, the men having gone ahead to prepare for their arrival." But if the men went ahead without the women and children ...? Yeah.
BlueMTexpat
(15,369 posts)But the British media were almost as complicit in the Brexit outcome as our own with Trump. And the "Remain" politicians never really fought as hard as they could have.
But the same kind of stupidity as we had in the US Presidential Election was also prevalent in the UK. Too many traditional Labour voters used Brexit as a referendum on Jeremy Corbyn, who apparently is not personally popular.
MADem
(135,425 posts)There are factions that believe they had much to do with the current regime in Turkey and the PI, as well.
All these assholes taking charge in countries that historically weren't quite so assholish is suspicious.
I think they also worked their asses off to install Le Pen in France, and they damn near did that.
NB--RT is a SHIT SOURCE, a harbor for the ALT RIGHT, but it's got video of Pootie laughing about this very thing:
https://www.rt.com/politics/371479-putin-early-election-comments/