Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone has written perhaps the best summary of how absurd political discourse in the U.S. has become – as nonconforming opinions are now “blacklisted” over the manufactured specter of “red dawn” Putin puppets behind just about controversial topic.

“One of the first rules of a shunning campaign is that it doesn’t have to make sense,” Taibbi writes. “It just has to be what everyone’s saying. Since most Americans went to high school, we tend to be instinctively familiar with the concept.”

The crazy inverse logic of the new national blacklist was on full display after special prosecutor Robert Mueller indicted 13 Russian “troll farm” operatives in February. In the wake of this foreign meddling charge, CNN reporter Drew Griffin banged on the door of an elderly female Trump supporter named Florine Goldfarb and accused her of being a Russia-collaborator. –Rolling Stone

Goldfarb attended a pro-Trump rally allegedly promoted over Facebook by “Russian trolls,” despite no Russians having attended, nor any pro-Russia topics discussed. As Taibbi writes “They were plain, ordinary, Floridian Trump supporters – idiots, maybe, but not traitors.”

While CNN’s treatment of Goldfarb is a prime example of Russophobia in action, its nebulous underpinnings are perhaps the most frightening aspect of the propaganda campaign which has gone completely off the rails.

Since Trump’s election, we’ve been told Putin was all or partly behind the lot of it: the Catalan independence movement, the Sanders campaign, Brexit, Jill Stein’s Green Party run, Black Lives Matter, the resignations of intra-party Trump critics Bob Corker and Jeff Flake, Sean Hannity’s broadcasts, and, of course, the election of Trump himself.

We’ve jumped straight past debating the efficacy of democracy to just reflexively identifying most anti-establishment sentiment as illegitimate, treasonous, and foreign in nature. –Rolling Stone

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…