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More and more people are becoming aware of and concerned about the level of political dialogue going on right now. We’ve gotten to a point where I’m seeing almost no intelligent debate about any serious issue. Russiagate now consumes such a massive amount of our collective energy, it feels we’ve become nearly incapable of discussing anything else. Even worse, Russiagate has morphed into a creepy D.C. establishment religion where merely demanding evidence for the wild claims being made gets you labeled a traitor or Putin agent. Ironically, average Americans don’t care about the issue.

When Gallup recently asked Americans what the most important (non-economic) problem facing the country today is, the amount of people saying Russia was so low they couldn’t even attribute a number to it.

Think about that. We’re being divided into two camps of increasingly insane and angry people because of hysteria surrounding an issue nobody even cares about. As usual, we can thank mass media for turning this topic into its singular obsession as well as promoting an environment of cultural insanity and stupidity.

As a result, people aren’t having intelligent conversations with one another. They’re just yelling at each other. The dialogue feels more like a political hunger games where people see everything as a linguistic competition of kill or be killed. Language itself has become debased as individuals try to one up each other with name calling and hyperbole. Demonizing and dehumanizing the other side appears to be the primary goal, which will only lead to a very bad place if we don’t take a collective deep breath.

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

Lunatic Politics (Part 1) – Russiagate is a Religion

July 18, 2018

Lunatic Politics (Part 1) – Russiagate is a Religion

As the Snowden documents and David Sanger’s great new book and other books make plain, and as U.S. officials are wont to brag, the U.S. intelligence services break into computers and computer networks abroad at an astounding rate, certainly on a greater scale than any other intelligence service in the world. Every one of these intrusions in another country violates that country’s criminal laws prohibiting unauthorized computer access and damage, no less than the Russian violations of U.S. laws outlined in Mueller’s indictment…

It is no response to say that the United States doesn’t meddle in foreign elections, because it has in the past—at least as recently as Bill Clinton’s intervention in the Russian presidential election of 1996 and possibly as recently as the Hillary Clinton State Department’s alleged intervention in Russia’s 2011 legislative elections. And during the Cold War the United States intervened in numerous foreign elections, more than twice as often as the Soviet Union. Intelligence history expert Loch Johnson told Scott Shane that the 2016 Russia electoral interference is “the cyber-age version of standard United States practice for decades, whenever American officials were worried about a foreign vote.” The CIA’s former chief of Russia operations, Steven L. Hall, told Shane: “If you ask an intelligence officer, did the Russians break the rules or do something bizarre, the answer is no, not at all.” Hall added that “the United States ‘absolutely’ has carried out such election influence operations historically, and I hope we keep doing it.”

Lawfare: Uncomfortable Questions in the Wake of Russia Indictment 2.0 and Trump’s Press Conference With Putin

Nothing gets the phony “Resistance,” corporate media and neocons more hysterical than when Trump isn’t belligerent enough while meeting with foreign leaders abroad. While the pearl clutching was intense during the North Korea summit, the reoccurring, systematic outrage spectacle was taken to entirely new levels of stupidity and hyperbole during yesterday’s meeting with Putin in Finland.

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

Five Things That Would Make The CIA/CNN Russia Narrative More Believable

July 16, 2018

Five Things That Would Make The CIA/CNN Russia Narrative More Believable

As we just discussed, some major news stories have recently dropped about what a horrible horrifying menace the Russian Federation is to the world, and as always I have nothing to offer the breathless pundits on CNN and MSNBC but my completely unsatisfied skepticism. My skepticism of the official Russia narrative remains so completely unsatisfied that if mainstream media were my husband I would already be cheating on it with my yoga instructor.

I do not believe the establishment Russia narrative. I do not believe that Donald Trump colluded with the Russian government to rig the 2016 election. I do not believe the Russian government did any election rigging for Trump to collude with. This is not because I believe Vladimir Putin is some kind of blueberry-picking girl scout, and it certainly isn’t because I think the Russian government is unwilling or incapable of meddling in the affairs of other nations to some extent when it suits them. It is simply because I am aware that the US intelligence community lies constantly as a matter of policy, and because I understand how the burden of proof works.

At this time, I see no reason to espouse any belief system which embraces as true the assertion that Russia meddled in the 2016 elections in any meaningful way, or that it presents a unique and urgent threat to the world which must be aggressively dealt with. But all the establishment mouthpieces tell me that I must necessarily embrace these assertions as known, irrefutable fact. Here are five things that would have to change in order for that to happen:

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

ABC News Anchor Leaves Because of Fake News

July 4, 2018

ABC News Anchor Leaves Because of Fake News

One of the prominent faces of ABC news has been Brian Ross, one of their star investigative correspondents. He has been forced to resign because he embarrassed the network late last year when he did an on-air report suggesting former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn had been toldby President Donald Trump to make contact with Russian officials during the 2016 campaign for president. Ross and Rhonda Schwartz, who was the chief investigative producer for Ross’ team, has had to step down when that report proved to be false.

FAKE NEWS has been building because there have been no checks and balance. I have had my encounters over the years that will make your head spin. I was flying to Australia to give a public conference there and a journalist, who was obviously a socialist and President Reagan-hater calling it “trickle-down” economics, ran a full-page story on me and said I was the author of just about everything and Reagan did everything I instructed so I was an evil capitalist and nobody should go listen to me. When I landed, the staff informed me about the article. I called the journalist who never bothered to interview me that I was only called in for that dog & pony show to launch G5 and that I disagreed with that policy. As for “trickle-down” supply-side economics, I told him that was Arthur Laffer – not me. Of course, there was never a retraction. I went to a cocktail party and someone called me a liar. His interpretation of that article was that I had worked in the White House as the Chief Economic Advisor. When I denied that, I was a liar because I was “embarrassed” to admit I worked for Reagan. That was just one of many encounters I had with FAKE NEWS.

Many Trump Supporters Now Cheering For The Deep State Over WikiLeaks And Iran

June 30, 2018

Many Trump Supporters Now Cheering For The Deep State Over WikiLeaks And Iran

I just want to briefly document some of the ways I’m seeing the 2015/2016 anti-establishment sentiment of Trump’s base being hijacked and re-routed into supporting some highly conspicuous pro-establishment interests this year.

In 2016 and 2017, much of the anti-establishment sentiment on what passes for America’s political “left” today was co-opted and re-routed into supporting longstanding establishment agendas against WikiLeaks, Russia, and Syria. I watched many Bernie Sanders supporters I’d fought alongside in 2015 and 2016 succumb one by one to the establishment Russiagate mind virus; it felt like watching a zombie apocalypse unfold, infection by infection.

Fearmongering about Trump was used to herd people who support peace into cheering for ancient neoconservative agendas against Russia, making everyone terrified of a country they’d previously never thought much about using still-unproven and plot hole-riddled claims about hacking and election meddling. This in turn was used to create narratives about “Russian propaganda”, which was used to poison the well against anyone who questioned the warmongering establishment Syria narrative. It was also used to turn people against WikiLeaks who had supported it since its publications about Bush administration war crimes, and in the case of Berners even during the 2016 DNC/Podesta email drops.

In exactly the same way, I’ve been watching a lot of Trump supporters herded into supporting longtime neoconservative agendas they would surely have claimed to oppose in 2016. Because of the establishment psyop known as “QAnon” and Trump’s near-total abandonment of the anti-interventionist platform he campaigned on, a good chunk of Trump’s base who in 2016 would never have been on board with attacks on WikiLeaks or another regime change agenda in the Middle East are now fully on board with both of those things.

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

How Humanity Could Become Impossible To Propagandize

June 6, 2018

How Humanity Could Become Impossible To Propagandize

I’ve been writing a lot about how the ability to control public narratives is the only real power in this world, and how the need of the ruling elites to wield that power explains everything from the feigned panic about “Russian propaganda” to Wikipedia’s bizarre editing policies to why Joy Reid still has a job. In my opinion it is impossible to overemphasize the impact that narrative and the myriad agendas to control it has on human life. Indeed, if a critical mass of individuals experienced a deep enough insight into the nature of mental narrative, all of our challenges as a species could be resolved very easily.

A search for the word “narrative” on the WikiLeaks website turns up tens of thousands of results. This is because the manipulators who work for the institutions that tend to have documents leaked to that outlet are well aware that the actual raw information about a government, a political campaign, event, etc. have far less impact on the way the public thinks about them than the sparkly, simplified, tweet-sized stories (narratives) that get circulated about those things on a large scale.

For example, if you ask an American political pundit about the president’s dealings with North Korea, you will likely be told that Trump is either a brilliant strategist who is almost single-handedly bringing peace to the Korean Peninsula or an incompetent imbecile who is getting “played” by Pyongyang, depending on which side of the partisan divide that pundit is loyal to. Both sides have access to the same information, but they are advancing wildly different narratives about it, because each side has an agenda that they know will be advanced if their narrative becomes dominant. In reality, neither narrative has much to do with what has actually been going on in the Korean negotiations, but that’s another story.

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

The One Question We Should All Be Asking About Establishment Russia Hysteria

June 3, 2018

The One Question We Should All Be Asking About Establishment Russia Hysteria

Babchenko was dead, to begin with. There was no doubt whatever about that. News reports had been aired, mournful obituaries published, outraged tweets cursing Moscow flew hither and thither. Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman condemned “the Russian totalitarian machine” for assassinating a journalist simply because of his “honesty and principled stance”. UK Foreign Minister Boris Johnson proclaimed that he was “Appalled to see another vocal Russian journalist, Arkady Babchenko, murdered.”

Not a soul questioned it: old Babchenko was as dead as a door-nail.

And then, like the ghost of an old business partner announcing three Christmas visitations, there he was. Everyone knew that Babchenko was dead. They didn’t suspect it, they weren’t relatively confident about it. They knew it.

And it was all fake.

This article makes a hugely important point: had Babchenko decided to stay “dead” and gone into hiding, his death would have been taken as unquestionable fact by unquestioning press & politicians, and anyone doubting it labeled a crazy conspiracy theorist.https://off-guardian.org/2018/05/31/what-if-babchenko-had-decided-to-stay-dead/ …

9:55 AM – Jun 1, 2018

What if Babchenko had decided to stay “dead”?

What if Arkady hadn’t turned up, looking sheepish at that presser? What if he hadn’t turned up ever? What if he’d decided he couldn’t face the humiliation, or what if his SBU handlers decided…

off-guardian.org

The main purpose of this article is to draw attention to an important op-ed by an Off-Guardian editorwhich asks us to consider a hugely significant hypothetical question: what if Babchenko had, for whatever reason, remained “dead”? What if, instead of appearing at a press conference the day after his faked assassination publicly apologizing to his poor traumatized wife, the controversial Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko had put on a wig, obtained some fake papers, and started a new life in Hawaii? What would have happened then?

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

Yes, Virginia, There is a Deep State

May 22, 2018

Yes, Virginia, There is a Deep State

Since the “Russiagate” probe began, US president Donald Trump and his supporters have used lots of bandwidth raging against what they refer to as the “Deep State.” Does the Deep State exist? If so, what is it, and are its forces arrayed specifically against Donald Trump and his administration?

Yes, the Deep State exists — probably more so at one end of its numerous definitions and less so at the other, but to some degree at both ends.

At the seemingly more benign end, the Deep State is simply what one might think of as the “permanent government” — the army of bureaucrats and functionaries whose careers span multiple administrations. Like all career employees of large organizations as groups, they tend to fear and resist change, and their sheer mass has an inertial effect. They energetically do things the old way and drag their feet on new things.

At the end dismissed by mainstream commentators as “conspiracy theory,” the Deep State is an invisible second government which acts in a coordinated manner to protect its prerogatives and advance its interests and favored policies versus changes supposedly demanded by “the people” via their elected representatives in Congress and the presidency. The premier example of this view is the claim that John F. Kennedy was assassinated by the CIA and the military industrial complex because (in one version) he was about to get the US out of Vietnam.

If that end of the spectrum sounds crazy to you, consider:

Former FBI attorney Lisa Page and former FBI deputy counterintelligence chief Peter Strzok, while working on a pre-election investigation into alleged collusion between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and the Russian government, exchanged text messages with incendiary content such as “there’s no way [Trump] gets elected — but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk.”

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

Fuck You, Actually.

April 29, 2018

Fuck You, Actually.

For months leftist analysts have been warning that the increasingly hysterical anti-Russia narratives being aggressively promoted by the western media would eventually be used to target the political left. Those warnings went largely unheeded in the United States where the Russiagate narrative was being ostensibly used to undermine the Trump administration, and the McCarthyite feeding frenzies which have become normalized for American audiences have now metastasized across the pond to the UK.

As a result, the Poms have now quickly found themselves in a political environment where anyone who remembers the Blair government’s lies about Iraq is smeared as a “useful idiot”, a private British citizen can be falsely labeled a Kremlin bot by a mainstream publication without retraction or apology, and a BBC reporter can admonish a veteran military analyst for giving a truthful analysis about the alleged Douma chemical attacks on the grounds that it could hurt the “information war” against Russia.

And now, in what is undeniably a whole new level of Russophobic shrillness, Russia is being blamed for the gains made last year by Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party.

View image on Twitter

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Tomorrow’s front page: Russians tried to swing election for Corbyn #tomorrowspapertoday

5:00 PM – Apr 28, 2018

According to a tweet from The Sunday Times, tomorrow’s headline will read, in all seriousness, “Exposed: Russians tried to swing election for Corbyn”. According to the text in the preview, the Times has allegedly found evidence that Russian bots have been retweeting publicly available posts supporting Labour and criticizing the Tories. Not creating fake news, not even circulating articles from RT or Sputnik, but retweeting conventional, publicly available political commentary.

This would be the same publisher, by the way, whose expertise on Russian Twitter “disinformation” recently led to a false allegation against an antiwar Finnish grandmother in an article about Kremlin trolls.

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

War Fever

April 21, 2018

War Fever

There is a fever that seizes this land from time to time and it is the fever of war, a condition that this time seems immune to all known cures, starting with reason, as Daniel Lazare explores.

What happens when an unthinkable war meets an unbeatable case of war fever? Thanks to Russia-gate, unsubstantiated reports about the use of poison gas in Syria, and a slew of similar factoids and pseudo-scandals, the world may soon find out.

In saner times, including during the Cold War at even its most heated, political leaders knew not to push a conflict with a rival nuclear power too far. After all, what was the point of getting into a fight in which everyone would lose?

Cooler heads thus prevailed in Washington while more excitable sorts were shipped off to where they could do no harm. This is what kept the peace during the U-2 affair, the Berlin Wall, and the Cuban missile crisis and what promised to continue doing so even after the advent of American “unipolarity” in 1989-92.

But that was then. Today, the question is no longer how to avoid a fight that can only lead to catastrophe, but how to avoid a showdown with a country that “in the past four years has annexed Crimea, intervened in eastern Ukraine, sought to influence the American election in 2016, allegedly poisoned a former Russian spy living in Britain and propped up the murderous government of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria,” to quote the bill of indictment in a recent front-page article in The New York Times.

Given that the list of alleged atrocities expands with virtually each passing week, the answer, increasingly, is: no way, no how. Since Russia is bent on spreading “conflict and discord” throughout the west – if only in the eyes of the U.S., that is – confrontation grows more and more likely.

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

All Russiagate Roads Lead To London As Evidence Emerges Of Joseph Mifsud’s Links To UK Intelligence

April 6, 2018

Over the last few months, Professor Joseph Mifsud has become a feather in the cap for those pushing the Trump-Russia narrative. He is characterized as a “Russian” intelligence asset in mainstream press, despite his declarations to the contrary. However, evidence has surfaced that suggests Mifsud was anything but a Russian spy, and may have actually worked for British intelligence. This new evidence culminates in the ground-breaking conclusion that the UK and its intelligence apparatus may be responsible for the invention of key pillars of the Trump-Russia scandal. If true, this would essentially turn the entire RussiaGate debacle on its head.

To give an idea of the scope of this report, a few central points showing the UK connections with the central pillars of the Trump-Russia claims are included here, in the order of discussion in this article:

Mifsud allegedly discussed that Russia has ‘dirt’ on Clinton in the form of ‘thousands of emails’ with George Papadopoulos in London in April 2016.
The following month, Papadopoulos spoke with Alexander Downer, Australia’s ambassador to the UK, about the alleged Russian dirt on Clinton while they were drinking at a swanky Kensington bar, according to The Times. In late July 2016, Downer shared his tip with Australian intelligence officials who forwarded it to the FBI.
Robert Goldstone, a key figure in the ‘Trump Tower’ part of the RussiaGate narrative, sent Donald Trump Jr. an email claiming Russia wanted to help the Trump campaign. He is a British music promoter.
Christopher Steele, ex-MI6, who worked as an MI6 agent in Moscow until 1993 and ran the Russia desk at MI6 HQ in London between 2006 and 2009. He produced the totally unsubstantiated ‘Steele Dossier’ of Trump-Russia allegations, with funding from the Clinton campaign and the DNC.

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

A Stalinist Purge In America?

March 8, 2018

A Stalinist Purge In America?

This year could turn out to be a defining year for the United States. It is clear that the US military/security complex and the Democratic Party aided by their media vassals intend to purge Donald Trump from the presidency. One of the open conspirators declared the other day that we have to get rid of Trump now before he wins re-election in a landslide.

It is now a known fact that Russiagate is a conspiracy of the military/security complex, Obama regime, Democratic National Committee, and presstitute media to destroy President Trump. However, the presstitutes never present this fact to the American public. Nevertheless, a majority of Americans do not believe the Democrats and the presstitutes that Trump conspired with Putin to steal the election.

One question before us is: Will Mueller and the Democrats succeed in purging Donald Trump, as Joseph Stalin succeed in purging Lenin’s Bolsheviks, including Nikolai Bukharin, who Lenin called “the golden boy of the revolution,” or will the Democratic Party and the presstitutes discredit themselves such that the country moves far to the right.

Stalin didn’t need facts and could frame-up people at will as he had absolute power. In the US the presstitute media, like Stalin, does not concern itself with facts, but the presstitutes do not have absolute power. Indeed, few people trust the presstitutes, and even fewer trust Mueller.

Many are puzzled that President Trump has not moved against his enemies as they have no evidence for their charges. Indeed, Mueller’s indictments have nothing whatsoever to do with the Russiagate accusations. Why are not Mueller, Comey, Rosenstein, and all the rest indicted for their clear and obvious crimes?

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

Matt Taibbi Exposes The Sheer Absurdity Of The Ongoing Russian Witch Hunt

March 7, 2018

Matt Taibbi Exposes The Sheer Absurdity Of The Ongoing Russian Witch Hunt

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…

Is MSNBC Now the Most Dangerous Warmonger Network?

March 6, 2018

Is MSNBC Now the Most Dangerous Warmonger Network?

A recent study revealed that MSNBC’s coverage of ‘Russiagate’ vastly outweighs its coverage of other issues, such as the US-backed humanitarian crisis in Yemen, and the network’s refusal to correct the disparity could lead to dangerous conclusions, notes Norman Solomon.

The evidence is damning. And the silence underscores the arrogance.

The MSNBC logo (Wikipedia)

More than seven weeks after a devastating report from the media watch group FAIR, top executives and prime-time anchors at MSNBC still refuse to discuss how the network’s obsession with Russia has thrown minimal journalistic standards out the window.

FAIR’s study, “MSNBC Ignores Catastrophic U.S.-Backed War in Yemen,” documented a picture of extreme journalistic malfeasance at MSNBC:

— “An analysis by FAIR has found that the leading liberal cable network did not run a single segment devoted specifically to Yemen in the second half of 2017. And in these latter roughly six months of the year, MSNBC ran nearly 5,000 percent more segments that mentioned Russia than segments that mentioned Yemen.”

— “Moreover, in all of 2017, MSNBC only aired one broadcast on the U.S.-backed Saudi airstrikes that have killed thousands of Yemeni civilians. And it never mentioned the impoverished nation’s colossal cholera epidemic, which infected more than 1 million Yemenis in the largest outbreak in recorded history.”

— “All of this is despite the fact that the U.S. government has played a leading role in the 33-month war that has devastated Yemen, selling many billions of dollars of weapons to Saudi Arabia, refueling Saudi warplanes as they relentlessly bomb civilian areas and providing intelligence and military assistance to the Saudi air force.”

Meanwhile, MSNBC’s incessant “Russiagate” coverage has put the network at the media forefront of overheated hyperbole about the Kremlin. And continually piling up the dry tinder of hostility toward Russia boosts the odds of a cataclysmic blowup between the world’s two nuclear superpowers.

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

Stop Blaming Russian Bots For Everything

March 5, 2018

Stop Blaming Russian Bots For Everything

“I’m not convinced on this bot thing,” said one of the men behind the Russian bot thing.

By now you know the drill: massive news event happens, journalists scramble to figure out what’s going on, and within a couple hours the culprit is found — Russian bots.

Russian bots were blamed for driving attention to the Nunes memo, a Republican-authored document on the Trump-Russia probe. They were blamed for pushing for Roy Moore to win in Alabama’s special election. And here they are wading into the gun debate following the Parkland shooting. “[T]he messages from these automated accounts, or bots, were designed to widen the divide and make compromise even more difficult,” wrote the New York Times in a story following the shooting, citing little more than “Twitter accounts suspected of having links to Russia.”

This is, not to mince words, total bullshit.

The thing is, nearly every time you see a story blaming Russian bots for something, you can be pretty sure that the story can be traced back to a single source: the Hamilton 68 dashboard, founded by a group of respected researchers, including Clint Watts and JM Berger, and currently run under the auspices of the German Marshall Fund.

But even some of the people who popularized that metric now acknowledge it’s become totally overblown.

“I’m not convinced on this bot thing,” said Watts, the cofounder of a project that is widely cited as the main, if not only, source of information on Russian bots. He also called the narrative “overdone.”

The dashboard monitors 600 Twitter accounts “linked to Russian influence efforts online,” according to its own description, which means the accounts are not all directly traced back to Kremlin efforts, or even necessarily to Russia. “They are not all in Russia,” Watts said during a phone interview last week.

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

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