Coverage of the 2016 elections and the ensuing Mueller investigation provided a showcase of American exceptionalism, writes Tom Engelhardt.
By Tom Engelhardt
TomDispatch.com
In this country, reactions to the Mueller report have been all-American beyond belief. Let’s face it, when it comes to election meddling, it’s been me, me, me, 24/7 here. Yes, in some fashion some set of Russians meddled in the last election campaign, whether it was, as Jared Kushner improbably claimed, “a couple of Facebook ads” or, as the Mueller report described it, “the Russian government interfer[ing]… in sweeping and systematic fashion.”
But let me mention just a few of the things that we didn’t learn from the Mueller report. We didn’t learn that Russian agents appeared at Republican Party headquarters in 2016 with millions of dollars in donations to influence the coming election. (Oops, my mistake! That was CIA agents in the Italian election of 1948!) We didn’t learn that a Russian intelligence agency in combination with Chinese intelligence, aided by a major Chinese oil company, overthrew an elected U.S. president and installed Donald Trump in the White House as their autocrat of choice. (Oops, my mistake again! That was the CIA, dispatched by an American president, and British intelligence, with the help of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, later BP. In 1953, they overthrew Mohammad Mossadegh, the elected prime minister of Iran, and installed the young Shah as an autocratic ruler, the very first — but hardly the last — time the CIA successfully ousted a foreign government.)
Cyber warfare operators at Maryland Air National Guard configure a threat intelligence feed, 2017. (U.S. Air Force/J.M. Eddins Jr.)
We didn’t learn that key advisers to Russian President Vladimir Putin were in close touch with rogue elements of the U.S. military preparing to stage a coup d’état in Washington, kill President Barack Obama in a direct assault on the White House, and put the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in office. (Sorry, again my slip-up and full apologies! That was President Richard Nixon’s adviser Henry Kissinger in contact with Chilean military officers who, on Sept. 11, 1973 — the first 9/11 — staged an armed uprising during which Salvador Allende, the democratically elected socialist president of that country, died and army commander-in-chief Augusto Pinochet took power.)
We didn’t learn that, at the behest of Vladimir Putin, Russian secret service agents engaged in a series of plots to poison or in some other fashion assassinate Barack Obama during his presidency and, in the end, had at least a modest hand in encouraging those who did kill him after he left office. (Oh, wait, I was confused on that one, too. I was actually thinking about the plots, as the 1960s began, to do in Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba.)
Nor, for that matter, did we learn that the Russian military launched a regime-change-style invasion of this country to unseat an American president and get rid of our weapons of mass destruction and then occupied the country for years after installing Donald Trump in power. (Sorry one more time! What I actually had in mind before I got so muddled up was the decision of the top officials of President George W. Bush’s administration, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, to launch a “regime-change” invasion of Iraq in 2003, based on fraudulent claims that Iraqi despot Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction, and install a government of their choice in Baghdad.)
No, none of that happened here. Still, even though most Americans might find it hard to believe, we weren’t exactly the first country to have an election meddled with by an intrusive foreign power with an agenda all its own! And really, my examples above just begin an endless list of events the Mueller report didn’t mention, ones that most Americans no longer know anything about or we wouldn’t have acted as if the Russian election intervention of 2016 stood essentially alone in history.
One-time home in St. Petersburg, Russia, of “online influencer” Internet Research Agency. (WikiMedia Commons)
I don’t, however, want that to sound like blame. After all, if you lived in the United States in these years and didn’t already know the secret history of American intervention and regime change across the globe from the end of World War II to the collapse of the Soviet Union, you could be forgiven for thinking that never had anyone done anything quite so dastardly as did the Putin regime in attempting to hack and alter the results of an American election. In the media, that Russian intervention has (with the rarest of exceptions) been covered as if it were an event unique in history. Admittedly, whatever the Russians did do in 2016 to lend a hand to Donald Trump, they didn’t plan a coup d’état; it wasn’t an assassination attempt; and it wasn’t, in the normal sense, what has come to be known as “regime change.”
World of Chaos Without End
Let’s start with one thing that should have been (but wasn’t) obvious since the first reports on Russian meddling in the election campaign of 2016 began to appear. Historically speaking, such a plan fits well with a classic Russian tradition. As scholar Dov Levin discovered in studying “partisan election interventions” from 1946 to 2000, the Russians — the Soviet Union until 1991 — engaged in a staggering 36 of them globally.
If, however, you jumped to the conclusion that such an impressive cumulative figure gave the Russians the world’s record for election meddling, think again. In fact, it left them languishing in a distant second place when it came to interfering in other countries’ elections over more than four decades. The United States took the crown with, by Levin’s count, a distinctly imperial 81 interventions! (USA! USA!)
Put another way, the two Cold War superpowers together meddled in approximately “one of every nine competitive elections” in that era in at least 60 countries covering every part of the planet but Oceania. Moreover, only seven of them were in the same election in the same country at the same time.
Lindsey O’Rourke. (Twitter)
And elections are but one part of a story of meddling on a scale that has been historically remarkable. In her book “Covert Regime Change,” Lindsey O’Rourke notes that between 1947 and 1989, a span of nine Cold War-era American administrations, the least number of “U.S.-backed regime-change attempts” per president was three (Gerald Ford’s administration), the most 30 (Dwight D. Eisenhower’s). Harry Truman’s administration came in second with 21, Lyndon Johnson’s third with 19, Ronald Reagan’s fourth with 16, John F. Kennedy’s fifth with 15, and Richard Nixon’s sixth with 10.
And keep in mind that, while such numbers remain unprecedented, despite a number of short-term successes from Iran to Guatemala, this was not generally a notable achievement record of remaking the world in the image Washington desired. Many of those regime-change attempts, especially against countries in the Soviet bloc, failed dismally. Others created chaos or regimes that not only did their citizens little good but didn’t end up doing much for Washington either. Still, that didn’t stop one administration after another from trying, which is why the numbers remain mind-boggling.
And then the Soviet Union imploded and there was but a “sole” superpower left on Planet Earth. Its leaders had no doubt that its ultimate moment had come and it was to be no less than “the end of history!” The planet was obviously Washington’s for the taking. No more need for subterfuge, subtle election meddling, secret support for dissidents, or even covert regime change, not when the only opposition to an American planet was a few weak “rogue states” (think: the “axis of evil,” also known as Iran, Iraq, and North Korea), a desperately weakened and impoverished but still nuclear-armed Russia, and a modestly rising future power in Asia.
And then, of course, came 9/11, that staggering act of blowback — in part from one of the great “successes” of CIA covert action in the Cold War, the decisive defeat of the Red Army in Afghanistan thanks to the funding and arming of a set of extremist Islamist militants, a war in which a young Saudi named Osama bin Laden gained a certain modest reputation. On that day in 2001, the last superpower, the one exceptional nation, became the planet’s greatest victim and all hell was let loose (just as bin Laden hoped it would be).
Highway sign outside NYC on Sept. 11, 2001. (Paul Morse/George W. Bush Presidential Library)
In response, in a world without other superpowers, the country with, as one president proudly put it, “the finest fighting force that the world has ever known” no longer needed to meddle secretly (or at least in a fashion that allowed for “plausible deniability”). With the invasion of Afghanistan that October, open regime change became the order of the day. Iraq would come in 2003, Libya in 2011. The U.S. Air Force and the CIA’s drones would bomb and missile at least seven countries across the Greater Middle East and North Africa repeatedly in the years to come, helping reduce great cities to rubble, uprooting and displacing massive numbers of people, creating failed states galore, and setting in motion forces that, from Pakistan to Syria, Yemen to Niger, would in turn unsettle a significant part of the planet.
And, of course, it would all prove to be a militarized failure of the first order. And yet, with a potential new conflict ramping up in Iran and the U.S. still fighting in Afghanistan almost 18 years later, America’s wars show little sign of winding down. Only recently, for instance, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff assured a group of senators that the American military would “need to maintain a counterterrorism presence as long as an insurgency continues in Afghanistan,” which should be considered the very definition of a forever war. Think of it as a world of chaos without end and now consider again that Russian meddling in an American election.
Exceptional Meddling
By the way, whatever the Russians did in 2016 (or may do in the future to American or other elections) is deplorable and should be denounced, no matter how slapdash it might have been. After all, as Dov Levin discovered, it doesn’t necessarily take much to affect the result of an election in another country. Here’s his conclusion for election meddling in the Cold War era:
Dov H. Levin. (Twitter)
“I find that an electoral intervention in favor of one of the sides contesting [an] election has a statistically significant effect, increasing its vote share by about 3%. Such an effect can have major ‘real life’ implications. For example, such a swing in the vote share from the winner to the loser in the 14 U.S. presidential elections occurring since 1960 would have been sufficient to change the identity of the winner in seven of these elections.”
As we all know, a 3 percentage-point shift in the 2016 election in several states would have made a staggering difference. After all, as The Washington Post reported, in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton by “0.2, 0.7, and 0.8 percentage points, respectively — and by 10,704, 46,765, and 22,177 votes. Those three wins gave him 46 electoral votes; if Clinton had done one point better in each state, she’d have won the electoral vote, too.”
So, the issue isn’t faintly whether Russian electoral meddling was despicable or not. The issue is that it’s been covered here, like so much else has in this century, as yet another case of American exceptionalism (but never narcissism). As on 9/11 — forget that first 9/11 in Chile — we eternally stand alone in our experiences because, by definition, we are the special ones, the ones who matter.
In the case of election meddling, however, this country just joined a moiling crowd of the interfered with — and largely by us. It was a classic case of getting a taste of one’s own medicine and not liking it one bit. It should have taught us a lesson about our own global behavior since World War II. Instead, it’s simply continued us on a path of exceptional meddling that will prove someday to have been one of the great follies in history.
Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of a history of the Cold War, “The End of Victory Culture.” He runs TomDispatch.com and is a fellow of the Type Media Center. His sixth and latest book is “A Nation Unmade by War” (Dispatch Books).
The author asserts that the USSR meddled in 36 elections between 1945-11991. There is a link to an article abstract however, the article itself does not appear for critical analysis. So the best he can do is cite 36 elections meddled by an entity that no longer exists since the past 28 years, and conflates that with no evidence since that time by Russia, and no credible evidence in 2016. So why even bring up Russian meddling, compared to US meddling? Well here is an example: the major media gave Trump billions of free airtime in their slavish coverage of him. A Google executive testified before Congress that Russia spent $4600 in Google ads. So Russia’s $4600 was what turned the election to Trump, not CBS/NBC/ etc giving him a couple of Billion. That seems to be what he is saying.
No Tom, Russia did not ‘meddle’ in the 2016 election. It’s painful to realize that it is ALL a lie, but there it is. The ‘evidence’ is such evident garbage it absolutely proves the opposite, since if that is all they can come up with, it’s clear there was nothing, nothing at all.
Good people………
Unless digitally hacked I just cant believe Russian influence was able to sway any portion of the electorate. In fact I would argue James Comey standing up shortly before election day and announcing they were reopening the investigation of Hillary Clinton emails had the greatest impact.
Call me naive and lacking understanding, but in my thinking I can see that as a far more plausible explanation.
I just can’t percieve anyone thinking ” I was going to vote for Hillary Clinton, but I changed my mind and I will now vote for this crass, loud mouthed pu$$y grabber”
Just my opinion, but when you look at how Republicans came in with staggering gains among the national electorate after Obama left office the country was already deeply divided.
https://www.quorum.us/data-driven-insights/under-obama-democrats-suffer-largest-loss-in-power-since-eisenhower/291/
And sadly continues to grow even more so with each and every passing week.
https://reason.com/2019/05/18/rep-justin-amash-says-trump-has-engaged-in-impeachable-conduct/
http://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/05/amash-impeachment/589783
Republicans Are Denouncing Justin Amash’s Call to Impeach Trump …
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/05/justin-amash-impeach-trump/
Trump’s loyalists are gunning for Justin Amash after impeachment claim
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-justin-amash-impeachment-republicans-2019-5
A GOP congressman suggested Trump could be impeached, and now top … Justin Amash, a Republican lawmaker from Michigan, said President Trump ‘Has Engaged in Impeachable …
https://reason.com/…/rep-justin-amash-says-trump-has-engaged-in-impeachable-conduct/
A Republican Congressman’s Case for Impeaching Trump
Representative Justin Amash is the first member of the House GOP to call for the constitutional remedy for high crimes and misdemeanors.
MAY 19, 2019
(Excerpt)
On Saturday, Representative Justin Amash became the first Republican member of Congress to suggest that President Donald Trump should be impeached for his misdeeds, a stand that puts him at odds with the GOP and risks his future in the party.
For nine years, the libertarian-leaning Michigander has been an unusually principled and independent-minded pol, breaking partisan ranks whenever he felt the Constitution demanded it. He used Twitter to lay out his conclusions about Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report, Attorney General William Barr’s characterizations of that report, the portions that have not been released to the public, and his belief that many of his fellow lawmakers are not fully informed about the matter.
His principal conclusions:
1. Attorney General Barr has deliberately misrepresented Mueller’s report.
2. President Trump has engaged in impeachable conduct.
3. Partisanship has eroded our system of checks and balances.
4. Few members of Congress have read the report.
About those claims, he stressed, “I offer these conclusions only after having read Mueller’s redacted report carefully and completely, having read or watched pertinent statements and testimony, and having discussed this matter with my staff, who thoroughly reviewed materials and provided me with further analysis.”
He came away regarding Barr as a liar:
In comparing Barr’s principal conclusions, congressional testimony, and other statements to Mueller’s report, it is clear that Barr intended to mislead the public about Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s analysis and findings. Barr’s misrepresentations are significant but often subtle, frequently taking the form of sleight-of-hand qualifications or logical fallacies, which he hopes people will not notice.
Then he turned to the question of impeachment, fretting that failing to use it in the face of presidential misconduct would lead to more high crimes and misdemeanors:
Under our Constitution, the president “shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”
While “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” is not defined, the context implies conduct that violates the public trust. Contrary to Barr’s portrayal, Mueller’s report reveals that President Trump engaged in specific actions and a pattern of behavior that meet the threshold for impeachment. In fact, Mueller’s report identifies multiple examples of conduct satisfying all the elements of obstruction of justice, and undoubtedly any person who is not the president of the United States would be indicted based on such evidence.
continued…
http://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/05/amash-impeachment/589783
When was the last time a US election actually made life in the USA better for ordinary people? I can’t remember.
What is go.com? How is it relevant? What is the Disney channel which owns ABC and GMA spinning us on? The latest BS
https://abcnews.go.com/WNT/video/trump-defends-war-words-pelosi-made-horrible… But what is Go.com?
Go.com is the self proclaimed “top-level home on the Internet to the online properties of The Walt Disney Company”
Go.com is actually the new home of right wing propaganda. The Top level arm of the right wing movement that spins and controls the media and ignores real news in favor of some other news that the people who descend into fantasy over facts gobble up. The Walt Disney Company is at the forefront of the assault on intelligence and is the main creator of anti intellectualism “news” bringing pure bullshit to the forefront of their coverage of the news while ignoring important stories such as our need to have an actual functioning Constitution
Misinformation, propaganda, towing the party line of the republicans who are supporting Trump reaches a crescendo of silly people clapping and screaming over the most unimportant drivel that ABC has to offer. ABC is no better than Fox News. The major media corporations like ABC or Walt Disney or Go.com have all coalesced to defend Trump and in turn are coalesced into a monologue with one sided stories that they propagate in support of the right wing and conservatives which are nothing more than mouth organs for rich corporations like themselves ABC and Disney are in complete allegiance with the Stock Market investors who don’t give a damn about anything other than realizing their increases.
We are saturated every day with trivial nonsense about somebody who died on Mount Everest and some American Taliban terrorist who is getting out of jail or some cop that shot someone.
Ask Go.com the tipperest toppermost tip of the public face of the Walt Disney corporation what is Go.com? It claims it is the tip of the sharpened spear of the online Disney channel owned news that is trying its level best to become more right wing than Fox News NewsMax is also launching an ad blitz on ABC and CBS owned franchises promising to bring corporate news to a renewed level of right wing propaganda that makes Fox News seem like some liberal oasis infested with lackies that were kicked out their prime time hosts on Fox.
Not to worry dear listeners, Bill O’Reilly, and a whole host of exiled members of Fox News are the up and coming stars of NewsMax TV
Go.com is the top-level home on the Internet to the online properties of The Walt Disney Company.
The greatest instance of ‘blowback’ has to be giving Timothy Leary and other Beats LSD as an attempt to create mind-control drugs.
Instead they created the 60s and an epic 50 years of independent thought, human rights, environmentalism, and anti-militarism.
Amen to that, Brother! Born in 1945, that period, 1960 to 1975 was definitely my ‘coming of age’ awakening. …
A word of advise for everyone never believe the government directed media.
Aug 7, 2016 DARPA’s Cyber Grand Challenge: Expanded Highlights from the Final Event
On August 4, 2016, seven high-performance computers successfully played a game of Capture the Flag during the Final Event of DARPA’s Cyber Grand Challenge.
https://youtu.be/v5ghK6yUJv4
Winston Churchill once said “History is written by the Victors”? But thanks to the propaganda of American MSM & its American Empire of chaos, the woefully inept “Exceptional” Hegemon has inverted Churchill’s quote & adapted it to now read that “History is written by the Losers”? From Afghanistan to Syria, Vietnam to Venezuela, the Empire has really demonstrated that Losers really can be Winners, all you have to do is control the narrative using mass propaganda, blatant lies & misinformation to create & WRITE your own History based on this warped version of reality? And one thing that really stands out from this article? Blowback’s a bitch, such as with the attacks on 9/11, being are a direct result of American hubris & arrogance & not learning the lesson that those who fail to learn from History are doomed to repeat it!
I have little to add to the excellent overview of US meddling, although Oceania is sadly not an exception to the rule. The Australian constitutional coup of 1975 removed a socialist-leaning government which threatened an independent foreign policy and the closure of the Pine Gap spy base, and was overseen by a Governor General who had close ties to the CIA (perhaps an Aussie would like to elaborate on this).
The year before the similarly-minded PM of New Zealand, Norm Kirk, was struck down by a very convenient heart attack just 2 years into his first term. His party lost the next election which brought to power the fiercely pro-US Rob Muldoon. And I’m sure the US had a hand in the succession of coups in Fiji (although the last one has not worked out well for the US), the conflicts in PNG & the Solomons etc. Although not strictly ‘election meddling’ in all cases, the US has certainly sort to impose its agenda by nefarious means throughout the region.
But giving credence to the ‘hack’ and ‘alter the results’ drek (follow the links in the above piece if you want a laugh) just allows Russiagate partisans to dismiss this whole account as ‘whataboutism’. When we are told ‘the Russians hacked this or that’, all it means is that a certain piece of software, (which is available all over the dark net) was used that US intelligence has declared to be ‘linked to Russia’ (or they have straight out fabricated the intrusion).
The only cyber shenanigans with any substance is the notorious IRA, whose contradictory social media sock-puppets occasionally reached into the real world (arranging small demonstrations etc). Although this seems much more like an amatuerish attempt to build a CV in the ‘Cambridge Analytica’ style propaganda-for-hire business, rather than a sophisticated state-backed meddling attempt.
No concessions to the Russigate narrative should be made without evidence, whether in search of ‘balance’ or to sooth Liberal sensiblities.
The only REAL evidence of Russians influencing Elections is New Knowledge pretending to be Russians and interfering in the special Alabama Senate Election on behalf of Doug Jones against Roy Moore. While not a Moore fan, there have been no one sent to jail from New Knowledge, so that means interfering in American elections while pretending to be Russians is somehow acceptable. That seems New Knowledge’s business plan, receiving huge contracts from the government to ‘monitor Russian interference’ while pretending to be Russians. I have no doubt that the Alabama Senate race is the SECOND major Election where New Knowledge has interfered pretending to be Russians. Of course, the DNC’s “hacked” computers and servers (the evidence) has disappeared (a Clinton specialty), and the FBI and CIA couldn’t find truth (or a mole working with the Kremlin on spreading disinformation) if their lives depended on it.
What Russian interference? Madame Clinton made up the original lie and it turned into a massive chain letter that still won’t quit. Her husband Bill headed the administration that tried to scavenge the USSR when it collapsed, and Putin emerged to stop that.
Every president since Truman has been a tool of a system whereas the tax payers pay trillions to create disruptions and chaos in order to rape nations of millions upon billions in expanded profit margins for the corporations as, oppose to just doing fair trade to gain it any other way. It’s piracy beyond the Elizabethan Exploration era by any rational standards. There’s a lot of truth to the saying ‘when all you got is a hammer then everything becomes a nail’ and that’s what we see in our nations DOD spending and execution. Sadly the USA while it had its might could have won the world’s favor if only the USA had showed more compassion and love to it’s fellow mankind…but love has nothing to do with it, does it?
Tnx CN4 running Tom Engelhardt & you TE 4 appearing… TOut is 1 of the good1’s…
…. 2mil+ nat majority nullified by 78m in3 locs … Imagine Dat!!! All cuz 200yrs ago our founding elites couldn’t bring themselves2 Trust Will of the Commons!!! STUNNING
A well-written article except that it conspicuously fails to mention the lack of evidence of any meddling in the 2016 US election by Russia, and implies that there was quite a lot. And as usual for Englehardt and his website, it fails to cite or publish any significant fraction of writers who are not Jewish. Such an oddity for so long, that I removed his website link. No such bias can be trusted.
The big flaw in your column is that there has been no credible evidence presented in three years that Russia meddled in the 2016 election. With no evidence of a crime, it’s a huge stretch to say it took place at all.
I agree…
& it’s Incomprehensible Blues fail2 accept Cost4 advancing Corp Candidate & getting caught pulling dirty trick against prog fave Bern… (Who BTW is Indep… Not Dem… ERGO we can Count on More of Same… I fear!)
Fact is Vote Count Irregularities (Redvoter Act 2003 & Diebold etc) Likelier Than Ruski- Gate 2 be Cause for “YerFired” win!
BTW… My comment above pays tribute 2 Dispatchin’Tom 4 reminder How Close!!!
Yes, I agree — I was kind of surprised to see this column in CN, where so much credible debunking of the ‘Russia-gate’ hysteria has taken place. And TE links to an article in ‘USA Today’(?) that contains so many of the questionable ‘facts’, like the 17 government agencies supposedly investigating & finding the Russians at fault. While I don’t doubt a few Russian profiteers tried to con a few people, the amount of Facebook ads was a minuscule $100k compared to Facebook’s 10’s of BILLIONS a year in ads. The 2 major political parties in the US also spend billions in the POTUS elections, and Hillary won the popular vote by ~3 million votes, so were the Russkies supposedly smarter than all the US political tacticians to somehow target the ‘totally contented’ rust-belt denizens and turn a minor amount against Hillary and tip the electoral college? Are Facebook users THAT naive & gullible? If so, those Nigerian princes must be REALLY rich by nose!!
(Last word in above was supposed to be ‘now’ — darn spell-check!)
It’s true that HRC won the popularity votes by 3M, but let’s put it in perspective.
About 2/3 of the US population lives along the coastlines:
h**ps://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/05/who-lives-in-border-patrols-100-mile-zone-probably-you-mapped/558275/
Generally, people along the shorelines are more liberal in their views than the rest of the country. Of course the mean numbers in counting votes will reflect that. The electoral college intended to balance that to allow all states to have a say in the outcome of the national elections. Disregarding the “deplorable” states had been one of the reasons, among others, why RHC lost these states.
The democrats couldn’t, and still haven’t, admit their mistakes in the 2016 election and created the Russia interference instead. This ongoing saga will have a negative effect in the 2020 election as well, especially seeing how DNC beating up its own presidential hopefuls and preparing to push its on final candidate.
Democrats would won if Democrats were sufficiently clever to make HRC drop from the race when it became clear that she has quite a bit smaller chances than Sanders, given that Russian modified the composition of fluoride in key Rust Belt states to convert innocent citizens into deplorables who ranked their choices “Sanders, Trump, but that witch — never” (disproportionally those who do not buy “Spring Water” to drink). Many of those would not tell Facebook from Farmer’s Almanac, but manipulating water supplies is a well known trick (watch Dr. Strangelove).
Most of the Rust belts farmers and the workers on these farms have well water. As such, I fail to see what fluoride has anything to do with it. Even in smaller towns and villages they have well water and septic tanks. Not to mention that the Russians would had to have access to both the fluoride and to the water supply system.
You’ve been watching too much movies and they are not documentaries…
Ergo Sum, you really need to adjust your farcical satire meter.