• Deacon@lemmy.world
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    10 days ago

    To be clear, only one of the claims in the OP image are verified in this article; the claim that Donald Trump paid for this ad.

    The article doesn’t address how the timing of the ad relates to the timing of his trip to Russia, or who booked the trip, or whether InTourist is run by the KGB.

    Which is why I fucking hate this format of conveying “information”. This is right wing style info sharing and it’s gross.

    Maybe it’s all true. I want it to be, because President Taco is so clearly Putin’s creature that I yearn for a story to explain how it happened, or when, or why.

    But this image doesn’t do anything but force me to go try and verify these claims on my own.

    • TheLowestStone@lemmy.world
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      10 days ago

      The article doesn’t address how the timing of the ad relates to the timing of his trip to Russia

      Why would it? There’s no hard evidence. The whole point of the image is to show how suspicious the timing is. It would still be suspicious even without the KGB claim.

      who booked the trip

      We know who booked the trip because it is in The Art of the Deal.

      whether InTourist is run by the KG

      A former GRU spy and a historian say it was. I didn’t find anything to lead me to believe that it wasn’t but maybe I didn’t look hard enough. It also behaved in a manor consistent with my expectations of a KGB run tourist agency but that’s just vibes.

      this image doesn’t do anything but force me to go try and verify these claims on my own.

      Unfortunately, in this day and age you should be making an effort to verify everything before you believe it. How much of an effort is going to vary based on how important the thing is to you.

      Here’s a couple sources to get you started:

      https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/11/19/trump-first-moscow-trip-215842/

      https://web.archive.org/web/20190113232410/https://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4116&context=edissertations