Surprisingly, all of this sensationalism was, in fact, nonsense. As my colleague Alex Griswold noted, the study found a minuscule number of tweets that might have been authored by Russians, their bearlike natures determined by factors such as handles with numbers in them and the time of day tweets were sent. But don’t take Griswold’s word for it: The author of the study himself, perhaps taken by surprise, himself played down the results.

“I really tried to be very careful in how I framed this. There’s no evidence Russians did anything unusual or meaningful,” Morten Bay, now a researcher affiliated with Center for the Digital Future at the University of Southern Californiaa, told The Post’s Steven Zeitchik.

Nope: It’s the Russians.

The Russians, of course, are the villains of the moment. The Russians, naturally, are to blame for Donald Trump winning the presidency. It certainly couldn’t have been the fact that the opposition party nominated the second-least-popular candidate of all time to go up against him, the least-popular candidate of all time. It certainly couldn’t have been the bad campaign strategy or the lack of a real message or anything like that. Much more important were the efforts of a bunch of anonymous people tweeting away in some Siberian warehouse for eight hours at a whack.

I understand the appeal of the Russian Theory — I even think that there’s a kernel of merit to it, at least with regard to the hacking and leaking of John Podesta’s emails and the role that this played in shaping media narratives — given the horrendous state of our public discourse. But as Zeynep Tufekci noted in the New York Times, Russian meddling via social media is a symptom of what ails us, not the cause. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to look at the ways in which Twitter can distract us with triviality and Facebook can confuse us with viral lies and decide it’s worth spending a few bucks there to destabilize the world’s greatest nation. But I feel pretty confident in my belief that the number of votes changed by tweets from people with no avi, eight numbers in their handle and roughly 12 followers was, approximately, zero.

More troubling than the Russian Theory itself is the spread of the Russian Theory to explain away something as trivial as criticism of cultural objects. It couldn’t be that “The Last Jedi” alienated some longtime fans because director Rian Johnson wanted to “subvert expectations.” It couldn’t be that some audience members did not care for the sub-prequel CGI casino planet horse escape or the fact that the central conflict revolved around a low-speed chase in outer space or that it managed to do the one thing a Star Wars movie can never, ever do: bore audiences.

Nope: It’s the Russians.

The enlistment of Star Wars into our never-ending culture war is bad enough. But the need to create a scapegoat — to suggest that all criticism is leveled in bad faith or manipulated by malicious forces; to elevate every disagreement into an international incident; to bend to social media’s insistence that every little fight is the most important thing, ever, at least for the next five minutes, and those opposed to us are wicked — is deeply disturbing. Because it suggests that we are rapidly becoming unwilling to even listen to anyone who disagrees with us about something as trivial as a movie.