“It’s screamingly obvious that America should not return to power a vulgar, lying, adjudicated rapist and convicted felon awaiting trial in three more-serious federal felony cases who, after nine years, has a secret ‘concept’ of a plan to improve health care, who publicly sides with Putin over the FBI, who won’t release his tax returns or medical records, who killed the immigration bill that would have fixed the border problem, and who sat watching TV for 187 minutes brushing off all pleas for help as his nation’s Capital was under attack.”

Take a deep breath. Andrew Tobias’ eloquence exhibited here is worth repeating, even if it is just a colorfully phrased laundry list of Trump’s myriad disqualifications.

This is our current context however, coming with reports once again, as per the last nine years, that Moscow is engaged in an active effort within the U.S. culture to skew the upcoming presidential election to favor Trump. If nothing else, if elected Trump will cause the U.S. to back away from Ukraine, ensuring a brutal Russian conquest and occupation there in advance of next steps against Western Europe.

The Microsoft Threat Analysis Center has confirmed an extensive Russian influence network, named Storm-1516 or CopyCop, spreading incredibly false claims through U.S. social media aimed at winning the coming election for Trump, and it includes pumping up third party candidate Jill Stein of the Green Party, who is effectively a Russian agent deployed to take votes away from the Democrats.

Russian and Iranian-sourced videos on U.S. social media platforms like Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter), racking up thousands of “shares,” has elicited comments like “This is the kind of stuff to start civil wars.” Yes, a U.S. domestic civil war is what the Kremlin and its oligarchic allies in the U.S. and elsewhere are aiming for, and it will be advanced regardless of who wins the presidential election next month.

Meanwhile, CNBC reports that gambling platforms that are sweeping the U.S. despite being proven to be detrimental to Americans’ health and financial well-being, have now become major electoral influencers. “It’s only natural that some of the piles of cash being pushed around the gambling internet would end up in wagers on political outcomes,” its report claims. “A new political betting platform is Polymarket, which allows users to place bets far in excess of an earlier $850 cap. All its bets are made with USDC, a cryptocurrency stablecoin.”

While U.S. intelligence experts agree that Russian, Iranian, Chinese and other autocratic, anti-democratic regimes and oligarchs in the world are committed to weakening the American democracy by “sowing division” here, there seems to be a failure to appreciate the level of epistemological sophistication behind that global effort, which is why we’re in the truly dire predicament we’re in.

That is, the effectiveness of these campaigns is rooted in a more advanced understanding of human nature than the two-dimensional view, the zero-sum approach of winners and losers currently dominating U.S. culture, recognizes.

All political polls and most campaign approaches are grounded in this fallacy of thinking, namely, a lowest-common-denominator approach to what a person is, either this or that, or undecided. In reality, the human mind operates on different levels, or frequencies, capable, on the one hand, of empathetic, nuanced reasonableness, or on the other hand, of debased, dumbed-down and crass prejudice. Most human beings are capable of accessing either aspect of their own selves.

In light of this, it is obvious what Russian and other modes of influence are targeting, and why the disgusting nature of Trump fits so well into that, being a champion of demeaning behaviors and thinking, the cruder the better, actually.

So it is not the fact that Trump is such a total pig that is our problem. To put it bluntly, it is the fact that we are.

Since 1998, on the United Nations’ Human Development Index, a composite measure of a nation’s achievements in health, knowledge and standard of living, the United States has dropped like a hot rock from first, which it held every year since this measuring began until 1998, to now 17th among nations.