The narrative that Russia somehow subverted the US political system through hacking and trolling is ridiculous, journalist Aaron Mate told RT’s Lee Camp. Its adoption by the US left is what poses an actual threat to America.

Mate is one of a handful of US journalists who were highly skeptical about the entire Russiagate affair. He talked to Lee Camp on Redacted Tonight about why the conspiracy theory received so much media attention in the US and what came out of it.

“One outgrowth of this theory is that Russian troll farm workers managed to sow chaos in American society with juvenile Facebook ads that nobody saw,” he said. “Most of those ads were paid for after the election… And most of the ads had nothing to do with the election.”

The fact that we even talk about them is just a joke. And it shows that the real threat of the Russian disinformation here is not the Russian social media disinformation itself. It’s the American disinformation about Russian disinformation.

The narrative of a Trump-Russia conspiracy was pushed to explain away Trump’s win instead of getting to the bottom of why so many Americans voted for him and not Hillary Clinton, Mate believes. It did real damage to the cause of those who see Trump’s presidency as a disaster, because Russiagaters have hijacked this dissent and funneled it into waiting for Robert Mueller to expose a conspiracy that never existed, he said.

Watch the entire interview.

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