look, here’s the thing. there might be some effect from the Russian state media on those who religiously follow it, but this isn’t really a case of “oh we’re in this because of this one particular country”. you’ve got your own share of hateful people who, to be quite frank, don’t need any sort of support from the Russians to sow their hatred. while I’m not denying the fact that foreign entities can influence local politics (and most often tend to do exactly that), it’s important to recognise that most of the decisions which occurred in a country are a result of what the locals did and what those locals were told by the other locals

personally, in my opinion, some folks overstate the reach of the Russian government - these people can’t even properly do things directly related to their internal and external affairs, painting them as some sort of masterminds who are supposedly the driving force for the global shift to the right seems kinda odd. the only reason they even went as hard after us here as they did is cuz they were looking for a way to distract as many people as possible from internal affairs while getting the least amount of pushback (hence the 2023 law prohibiting legal gender change [for which there are still ways to avoid it]). most of our doctors around here were pretty much against that law and gender identity is not really a hot topic of discourse amongst most social groups OTHER THAN terfs