🇷🇺Kremlin influence over the Western left is vast, growing, + largely uncontested due a combination of paid shills + useful idiots who dominate the left media ecosystem. Shills include Ed Schulz, Thom Hartmann, Lee Camp, Naomi Klein... (thread)
... Chris Hedges, Max Blumenthal, Rania Khalek, Dan Cohen, Abby Martin, and a slew of minor D-list left celebs who are readily welcomed as "experts" by larger non-Russian platforms such as Democracy Now, The Nation, Huffingtonpost, The Intercept, The Young Turks, Verso Books, etc
RT and its Kremlin assets create a lot of the content and messaging that ends up being echoed by the likes of Jimmy Dore (TYT) and other ostensibly progressive fringe/conspiracy theorist types, "Sane Progressive" (a YouTuber). 
Then there's cases where Kremlin assets take advantage of leftist naïveté re: espionage and cynicism re: anything U.S. gov't institutions say like when Counterpunch published a semi-literate troll's ramblings b/c they echoed what the editors want to push. thedailybeast.com/report-kremlin…
It doesn't help that the leader of the Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn has links to Russian intel going back to the 1980s and that his advisers, Seamus Milne and Andrew Murray, are Stalin-Putin apologists. observer.com/2018/02/new-re…
The Nation's pro-Russia bias is mainly due to the fact that a soviet nostalgist and Bukharin biographer Stephen Cohen is married to the boss, Katrina vanden Heuvel.
Jacobin's pro-Russia bias is mainly due to the fact that the editor, Bhaskar Sunkara, is an opportunist who makes a living pandering to his conspiracist Bernie bro subscriber base and will never bite the hand that feeds him.
Important PS to this thread re: Tom Hartmann. He left RT in 2017. Now I wish I could edit my initial tweet @support @jack b/c the alternative -- deleting and re-writing it all -- is worse now that people have RT'd and fav'd stuff.
What happens when you tell a crackhead that crack is bad for them? 😄👇
The fact that so few voices within the progressive media ecosystem take Russian election interference seriously doesn't just reflect their weakness on defense, FP, and espionage, it also shows they don't really care that much about the integrity of the democratic process.
