I have spent the last few years thoroughly shocked at how much the American public, which until fairly recently unanimously and unambiguously portrayed Russia as "the bad guys," has become indifferent to Russia's influence in our country.
Obviously the reason this has become the case is that the propaganda machine turned it up to 11 on brown people in the middle East after 9/11. Every movie, tv show, and news agency overnight flipped a switch away from the Russians and onto Islamic terrorists. Why this meant that the American people basically forgot to keep hating Russia, I'll never really know.
But I can't help wondering if it wasn't a coordinated, intentional campaign by Russia to, as is always their goal, increase their geopolitical standing both economically and diplomatically. So this got me thinking about whether it could have been Russia behind the 9/11 attacks, because throughout the 1990s, Russia had been basically developing terrorism as a means to control their own population, as well as other countries' populations.
Indeed, it is mentioned explicitly in the Wikipedia page on the motives behind the 9/11 attacks that bin Laden's deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri may be a Russian asset, having allegedly been compromised during a trip to Russia in the late 90s before going back to Afganistan and joining bin Laden.
This gets a bit more interesting when you consider that American media reacted very predictably as the Bush administration immediately began to demonize middle Eastern terrorists. The 9/11 attacks effectively redirected the unified hatred of the American people for [insert bad guys here] from Russians to terrorists.
Which brings us back to the topic of whether high-ranking US government officials are compromised by, or at least influenced/supported by Russian interests. The actions of the Republican party since 2016 have been basically brazenly helping Russians, but when did that begin? I think it's worth pointing out that Bush was elected in 2000 under very similarly suspicious circumstances as Trump was in 2016, losing the popular vote but somehow winning the electoral vote, with lots of notable fuckery happening at the polls.
Which is not to say that Bush Jr was necessarily a Russian asset, but that he, too, reacted predictably to the 9/11 attacks. Many people argue that the Bush family grudge against Saddam Hussein due to the alleged assassination plan when Bush Sr was in Kuwait was the motivation behind the massive misinformation campaign with regard to WMDs in Iraq.
Assuming Russian intelligence acts in subtle ways to gently push their country up and pull the US down, this viewpoint validates the part of me that refuses to completely disbelieve the "9/11 was an inside job" people. They, along with everybody else, are looking for better reasons to explain the attack and the ensuing economic and political disaster of the Iraq war.