General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: How many on the progressive wing of the Democratic party were duped by Putin?. [View all]Jim Lane
(11,175 posts)Although, as I said, I haven't paid much attention to this email thing, I did remember reading about that. What I haven't seen is any contention that the substance of any of the emails was false.
Now let's put this in the context of the question in your OP. We'll assume for the sake of the argument that "150,000 messages stolen from more than a dozen Democrats" (as per the article in The Hill that you linked) were stolen by the Russians and made public, that one of them was altered by the addition of a spurious "Confidential" tag "to spice it up for journalists" (as per the article in Salon that you linked), and that all of this was done at Putin's direction.
Is there one single solitary person, progressive or not, anywhere in the whole United States, who would have voted for Hillary Clinton otherwise, but who was swayed to voting Stein or staying home because there was a fake "Confidential" tag on one of those 150,000 emails? We can't know for certain but I'm gonna go with No.
Most of the people who expressed outrage at the emails were already pissed off and weren't voting for Clinton anyway. They merely seized on the emails, somewhat disingenuously, as a convenient basis for further criticism of a candidate and a party establishment that they already disliked. Of those (probably not many) who were genuinely swayed by the email releases, what got to them was the contents, i.e., the things that were actually written by, to, or about various officers of the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign.
As for your videos, thanks for taking the trouble to post them -- but I'm afraid I don't have 108 minutes of my life to devote to what I see as a tempest in a teapot. Perhaps you could just tell me what specific falsehood(s) Putin disseminated that a significant number of American progressives believed and acted in reliance on.