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Foolishness of Vanity

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.”

….

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.

….

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.

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