snip ...

MAGA is a foreign influence operation.

Not "incidental to MAGA," not touching it," not "nudging it," not "occasionally exploiting it." MAGA is a foreign influence operation, root and branch.

While pundits spent more time this weekend than anyone should on RFK Jr's uh erotic poetry to Olivia Nuzzi (and by that, I mean SWEET JESUS BLEACH IT FROM MY BRAIN), we learned foreign influence operations are at the tweeting, bleating heart of the MAGA moment.

MAGA is not just a political movement of goateed, 50-ish white dudes who all rock that same avatar of them copping what they imagine is an expression of manly vigor in the front seat of their behind-on-the-payments Ford F-350.

It's a delivery system.

snip ...

A supply chain for chaos that starts in Moscow and Tehran and Beijing, runs through bot farms in industrial parks outside St. Petersburg or the Pardis Technology Park north of Tehran, or some Nigerian click farm, or a Chinese-criminal-owned social media and tech scam prison in the wilds of Burma, bounces off a rage-merchant influencer "from Ohio" who has never set foot in America, and ends up in your pissed off MAGA uncle's Facebook feed as a "patriotic truth."

It's tempting to call MAGA the most gullible cohort of political suckers, mooks, rubes, and slowcoaches ever to blight this nation. I want to tell you I'm going to resist that temptation, but that would be as big a lie as the thousands of MAGA accounts with AI avatars who look and sound like American patriots, flooding social media platforms from their lairs abroad.