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Now that everything we once thought impossible has become real, it’s only fitting that everything seemingly over and done with would begin anew. Which brings us to Russia’s plot to subvert Western democracy.

This is an instance in which what could never happen collides with what has happened before; that is, one would think such a plot absurd by virtue of it having been tried long ago. Even the word “plot” is laughable, it’s so retrograde.

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And yet.

If someone were to ask you to imagine a contemporary scenario so elaborate, so insidious, so diabolical, as to justify the use of a phrase best suited to a Red Menace warning that interrupts your regularly scheduled programming in 1962, any hypothetical you dreamt up could hardly be more preposterous than what we know to be true:

• Vladimir Putin personally orders the hacking of a major American political party, and the Russian military passes the goods on to a skinny radical hiding out at the Ecuadorian embassy in London during a presidential campaign that culminates in the least Kremlin-friendly candidate losing the electoral college, according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence;