Monica Hesse observes that Maria Butina was the ultimate NRA Cool Girl:
Spend an hour or three scrolling through Butina’s prodigious social media presence, and certain themes emerge. Her Instagram is a series of strategic fitness selfies — a sculpted deltoid, a Lycra’d thigh — showcasing both strength and femininity. In photos snapped outside the gym, her hair is long and styled. She cooked homey-looking recipes: baked chicken, scrambled eggs. She shared spiritually tinged aphorisms: “Faith makes all things possible. Love makes them easy.” She posted dog-whistle appeals to lonely men: “I want to love someone whose heart has been broken, so that he knows exactly how it feels and won’t break mine.”
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The men who championed her were so pleased to meet a woman who fit an ideal mold, they never stopped to think that maybe she was an ideal mole.
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This is why the honeypot scheme continues to be a thing. Because it’s based on an ego-stroking fantasy, a form of currency that never goes out of style.
There one finds the truth of this, as Hesse observes: Butina was attractive to men in the ugly grip of a misperception, ‘an ego-stroking fantasy’ of their own overweening vanity. A reasonable man or woman, filled with good principles and a more realistic self-understanding, would have had no interest in this Russian operative, or any other.
It’s sad enough that these men thought Butina might have been genuinely infatuated with them; it’s far worse that they were overly infatuated with themselves.