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22 Jan, 2019 18:50

‘Doing Putin’s work’? Kamala Harris fans already claim her Twitter critics are agents of Russia

‘Doing Putin’s work’? Kamala Harris fans already claim her Twitter critics are agents of Russia

California Senator Kamala Harris, who announced her 2020 bid for the presidency on Monday, was instantly pegged a frontrunner — a distinction which has prompted some to assume this will make her the target of “Russian bots.”

Proving that the ‘blame Russia’ reaction will still be alive and well going into the 2020 election, fans of Harris have already got to work on social media, disparaging her critics as idiots who are “doing Putin’s work.”

RT

According to some of Harris’ top Twitter defenders, it is apparently not possible to critique the former prosecutor without being a tool of the Kremlin, as evidenced by a deluge of tweets posted since her announcement warning that Moscow will target her in an effort to help current President Donald Trump win reelection in 2020.

The fact that two years of investigations have not yet produced any evidence that Trump “colluded” with Russia to win the last election does not seem to have factored into the decision to preemptively blame Russia for interfering with the next one.

One of the tweets claimed Russia would be working “overtime” to “take down” Harris, who has a “91%” approval rating — a figure which seems to have been plucked from a random Twitter poll conducted by a Harris supporter.

Responding to the tweets, some pointed out that rather than going after Republicans and conservatives, who are their ideological opposites, Harris’s fans seem particularly interested in accusing her critics on the left of being Russian bots or agents. This would seem to match a pattern from 2016, when Hillary Clinton supporters aimed to disparage progressives who supported the likes of Bernie Sanders or the Green Party’s Jill Stein as being Russian dupes.

One user pointed out that legitimate concerns over a candidate's background or policies can't be dismissed "simply because you think someone you dislike might agree.”

Luckily, not everyone on the left was buying the line that supporting Harris is a prerequisite for not being a Russian bot.

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