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‘American pundits have gone from zero to 60 on this matter in no time at all – from ignoring the Facebook posts to outright hysteria over them.’
Pundits and Democrats ascribe to a handful of bargain-basement Russian trolls all manner of ability - including orchestrating a coup d'etat
The grand total for all political ad spending in the 2016 election cycle, according to Advertising Age, was
$9.8bn. The ads allegedly produced by inmates of a Russian troll farm, which have made up this week's ration of horror and panic in the halls of the American punditburo, cost about
$100,000 to place on Facebook.
A few months ago, when I first described those Russian ads in this space, I invited readers to laugh at them. They were "low-budget stuff, ugly, loud and stupid", I wrote. They interested me because they cast the paranoid right, instead of the left, as dupes of a foreign power. And yet, I wrote, the American commentariat had largely overlooked them.
Now that Robert Mueller's office has indicted the Russian actors who are allegedly behind the ads, however, all that has changed.
American pundits have gone from zero to 60 on this matter in no time at all - from ignoring the Facebook posts to outright hysteria over them.
What the Russian trolls allegedly did was "
an act of war ...
a sneak attack using 21st-century methods", wrote the columnist Karen Tumulty. "
Our democracy is in serious danger," declared America's star thought-leader Thomas Friedman on Sunday, raging against the weakling Trump for not getting tough with these trolls and their sponsors. "
Protecting our democracy obviously concerns Trump not at all," agreed columnist Eugene Robinson on Tuesday.
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