McCarthyite Cavalcade of Cartoons

My adolescent niece recently received the following email from the microblogging site Tumblr:

Dear (name redacted by me):

As part of our commitment to transparency, we want you to know that we uncovered and terminated 84 accounts linked to Internet Research Agency or IRA (a group closely tied to the the Russian government) posing as members of the Tumblr community.

The IRA engages in electronic disinformation and propaganda campaigns around the world using phony social media accounts. When we uncovered these accounts, we notified law enforcement, terminated the accounts, and deleted their original posts.

While investigating their activity on Tumblr, we discovered that you either followed one of these accounts linked to the IRA, or liked or reblogged one of their posts:

• coldfirefan

You aren’t in trouble, and don’t need to take any action if you don’t want to. We deleted the accounts but decided to leave up any reblog chains so that you can curate your own Tumblr to reflect your own personal views and perspectives.

My nieces's first thought was, "Oh my god, I've been hacked and I have to change all 500 of my damned passwords again."

Her second thought was, "Oh my god, somebody hacked my account and stole my identity and filled my page with porn images and all my friends will think I'm a horrible person."

Her third thought: "What if maybe I really am in trouble, and Tumblr is bullshitting me by telling me I have nothing to worry about because I did something wrong even if I didn't do anything wrong! All I ever did on that site was post pictures of My Little Pony!"

But then the light bulb went off. My niece's final encouraging thought was, "Hey - wait a minute. Is this just another extension of people's paranoia about Russia that Aunt Karen was talking about at the dinner table?"

Bingo.  My niece, after several panic-stricken minutes, had finally used her rational brain and decided to ignore the propaganda and fear-mongering. She didn't even waste her time clicking on Tumblr. She will probably never click on Tumblr again. She's still dying to know just who "coldfirefan" really is, though, because she'd never heard that name and hadn't even realized she was stalking him, her or it, especially since she hadn't logged on to Tumblr in months. And she thinks it's pretty rotten that people are so biased against "Russians." After all, some of her (and my) ancestors and relatives are of Russian extraction.

But doesn't she worry, I asked, that Tumblr itself was and still is following her, seemingly aware of her every click and move in cyberspace?. She shrugged. Privacy is not her most pressing concern. She grew up on the Facebook ethos and the "sharing economy," after all. The stealing of her information and data by corporations interested only in making a profit doesn't seem to faze her in the least.

But hey, at least she cares about propaganda as much as she cares about her My Little Pony collection. All is not lost.

Looking over the email that Tumblr sent to her, and to who knows how many other (mainly very youthful) subscribers, I am not so sanguine. This media company's cloying implicit message, that "since you did nothing wrong yourself, you have nothing to worry about" is a chilling one, barely removed from "if you do nothing wrong, then you'll have nothing to worry about - because we're keeping an eye on you."

Meanwhile, the corporate media are praising Tumblr's belated "transparency" initiative. Wired, a part of the Clinton-friendly Conde Nast empire, applauds the platform for "finally breaking its long silence".

After months of silence, Tumblr Friday released a list of 84 usernames and their aliases that it says were connected to "state-sponsored disinformation and propaganda campaigns." It's the first time the company has publicly acknowledged what journalists and researchers have known now for months: Russian trolls also used Tumblr to spread their divisive memes and gifs, reportedly to the tune of hundreds of thousands of interactions.

Wired, which "outed" whistleblower Chelsea Manning by publishing email exchanges between her and the late Adrian Lamo, itself maintained a long year of silence over its role in exposing her. It seems that in Wired's world, transparency is the top priority only so long as it doesn't endanger the security of the US military establishment. And now we learn that Wired and other "researchers" had been monitoring Tumblr for months, and knew what Tumblr warned my niece about long before Tumblr was finally pressured into warning her and other spied-upon users. 

The Daily Beast, where Chelsea Clinton just happens to sit on the board, had also been complaining about Tumblr's tight lips, even after its journalists had taken screen shots of the site and collated the names of known Russian bots. Even so, Tumblr shockingly had rejected requests for comment not only from the Beast, but from the powerful Borg mind of CNN. And when Tumblr did comment, it was too frightfully generic.

Meanwhile, I wonder whether "coldfirefan" possibly used Pinkie Pie Pony to spread divisive messages about Morning Glory Pony, thereby convincing the snowy-white Bride Pony to listen to her husband and vote for Trump instead of for Hillary. Also too, could the male fans of My Little Pony, called "Bronies," really be nothing but a Trojan horse for hordes of Hillary-hating Bernie Bro straw-stallions? I guess we'll never know. But, as Wired continues,

Not surprisingly, the accounts often promoted each others' posts, in an apparently successful effort to expand their reach. They also mostly appear to have continued posting long after the election, a reminder that, as intelligence officials have repeatedly warned, Russia's efforts to subvert US democracy have continued unabated.

My niece is supposed to be all upset at the possibility that her My Little Pony pics may have been subverted, or even had their identities stolen. For all we know, there might be whole herds of little plastic Anna Karenina equines out there in Moscow and St. Petersburg. And that is a very scary thought, especially if they happen to live in the same playroom as Thomas the Tank Engine and his friends.

Seriously, though, the Russian movie version of My Little Pony is supposed to be every bit as cheesy as the hundred or so political Facebook ads planted by those 13 grossly underpaid Russian trolls from the IRA. The film is so subversively bad, in fact, that it's not even available on YouTube any more. It's impossible to find out if coldfirefan is listed on the credits.

Those irksome trolls not only interfered in our free and fixed oligarchic elections, their countrymen even meddled in our beloved cheesy all-American Little Ponies TV franchise, having the gall to dub the dialogue of the animated cartoons into Russian.

 No leaked dossier or Congressional witch-hunt is necessary. Senate Troll Hunter-in-Chief Mark Warner can just relax, because here's all the shocking proof he'll ever need:

Keep the Russiagate Revenue Flying (continued)

The timing of these two announcements (within 24 hours of each other) is probably just a weird coincidence:

1. Monday: The State Department, using funds donated by the bloated Pentagon, is launching a brand new $40 million offensive against scary "foreign propaganda."

2. Tuesday: Alumni of the Clinton and Obama administrations are launching a brand new major national security "strike force" against scary Donald Trump's scary responses to the scary foreign propaganda.

The first initiative is designed to propagandize against the Enemy Outside, and the second one is designed to propagandize against Enemies Inside, Outside and All Over. Both offensive forces are ultimately designed to instill the requisite levels of free-floating anxiety in an already anxious, yet unduly depressed and disgusted and financially strapped, electorate. If they can't get people to the polls with the promise of a better life tomorrow, maybe they can get people to the polls by dangling the prospect of no life at all tomorrow. 

 Be miserable and barely hanging on, or be dead. It's your choice.

The first initiative adds massive amounts of military money to the State Department's Center for Global Engagement, which Barack Obama signed into law in 2016 for the express purpose of propagandizing directly to the American public. In other words, it is an elite and glorified troll farm that should be the envy of those 13 grossly underpaid and recently indicted Russian sock puppets. From The Hill:

The new influx of funds will bolster the center’s operations in the current fiscal year. 
“This funding is critical to ensuring that we continue an aggressive response to malign influence and disinformation and that we can leverage deeper partnerships with our allies, Silicon Valley, and other partners in this fight,” Steve Goldstein, the department’s undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, said in a statement. 
“It is not merely a defensive posture that we should take, we also need to be on the offensive.” 
The announcement comes less than two weeks after special counsel Robert Mueller indicted 13 Russians for allegedly participating in an elaborate scheme to meddle in the 2016 presidential election by creating false U.S. personas and spreading divisive content on social media platforms.

Goldstein comes to his diplomatic gig direct from Corporate America, where most recently he was chief of marketing for BP Global Solutions. Previously he was a vice president for TIAA, a financial consulting firm, and also had served as vice president of communications for the Wall Street Journal. As founder of a start-up called Winning Algorithms, he seems absolutely perfect for his new gig doling out public money for all manner of aggressive and offensive things.

This definitely falls into the category of "Keep the Russiagate Revenue Flying," given that the Silicon Valley tech giants are obviously being paid directly by the government to censor content that the government doesn't like. Facebook, for example, has already announced it will hire at least a thousand new law enforcement and surveillance state personnel by the end of this year to monitor the ads and political posts from its users. When you think about it, $40 million to fight the grossly underpaid Russian trolls sneaking their cheesy click-bait ads onto social media is probably just a down-payment. Censorship and the suppression of dissent costs a lot of money.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, a Trump appointee who has openly called Trump a "moron" and nonetheless continues serving at the pleasure of Trump, has no choice but to go along to get along. There's lots of oil and gas out there, and his own recent employer, Exxon-Mobil, and its investors and stockholders, are no doubt counting on him.

The new money will be used, in part, to supply grants to civil society groups, media providers, academic institutions, private companies and other organizations that are working on projects to counter disinformation. 
The department said it plans to award an initial $5 million in grants from the so-called Information Access Fund. The fund will receive $1 million in initial seed money from the State Department’s public diplomacy coffers in order to get off the ground quickly, the department said.

And lo and behold, quick as a wink, "National Security Action" sprang into action - less than a day after the State Department announced that any number of vague, unnamed entities will be partaking in the propaganda windfall for a whole new offensive army of paid meat puppets  Again, it's probably a total coincidence, given that the 200 Obama and Clinton alumni are coyly not revealing who, exactly, will be paying their bills. The Washington Post, which got the big scoop, didn't bother to ask - possibly because it, too, is partaking of the State Department troll farm "seed money" to prevent all that domestic discontent-sowing going on around here.

"We decided, essentially, this is an emergency moment and that there was a need to pull together the national security community on the progressive side to counter Trump's policies and put forward an alternative" in this midterm year, said  (former Obama national security adviser) Ben Rhodes, one of the founders.
Leaders of the new group described its mission exclusively to The Washington Post ahead of its debut Tuesday....

 We're a temporary organization. Our hope is to be out of business in three years," Rhodes said.

(When, presumably, they can all traipse back into more secure security gigs  under a Democratic majority.)

The new group of credentialed experts, via TV appearances and op-eds and Democratic campaign consultancies, hopes to instill a new brand of existential angst into voters which Hillary Clinton simply could not sell them. The problem, says Democratic national security strategist Wendy Sherman, is that voters were more seduced by Trump's populist message than they were scared by his reckless bellicosity and his appalling ignorance of international affairs. Therefore, it is the new group's daunting task to scare voters into accepting the Democrats' and Republican neocons' more discreet ways of waging wars and colonizing the world's populations via trade deals and corporate plunder and predatory loans from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Of course, being a career diplomat herself, she didn't put it quite that way. Because that would have been way too Trump-like and crass.

Instead, 

She cited climate change and Trump's withdrawal from the Paris accord as one decision with deep national security implications, and the heightened rhetoric and tension surrounding North Korea's nuclear program as another. The group will also focus on cyberthreats in general and Russian election interference and Trump's response in particular, Sherman and others involved in the effort said.
"It's not easy to talk about national security issues" in local elections, Sherman said. "Most often, people don't see it as having anything to do with their daily lives, but here we have climate change, North Korea and other issues that have everything to do with people's lives. I think people are much more aware of it" now than in 2016, Sherman said.

Again - $40 million to convince Americans, most of whom don't have enough savings socked away to pay for an emergency car repair, that North Korean nukes and Russian interference should be their most pressing concerns, doesn't seem like nearly enough cash to pay all these "aggressive" experts. 

And as for Trump caring about a $40 million or even a billion-dollar domestic propaganda campaign that also has him in its cross-hairs: he doesn't. He's already achieved fame and personal fortune beyond his wildest dreams. All the negative and never-ending attention in the world - even from his own Secretary of State - has been nothing but beneficial for his brand.

Bernie Is Stuck Between Bullshit and a Pile of Doo-Doo

What's a politician to do when, after joining the Joe McCarthy wing of the Democratic Party and criticizing Donald Trump for his Russiagate denialism, he is then himself accused of not condemning the alleged cyber-infiltration of his own campaign by Russian bots and trolls?

If your name is Bernie Sanders, the last thing in the world you do is finally come clean, admit the error of  your ways, and declare your independence from the whole phony Narrative of Russian meddling in our "democracy." Sanders, who had thrown in his lot behind the original instigator of Russiagate - Hillary Clinton - is the latest victim of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who gratuitously smeared both him and Jill Stein in his "indictment" last week of three Russian companies and thirteen of their grossly underpaid Internet meat puppets. 

Sanders's pathetic response to this smear was to take a page right out of Hillary Clinton's playbook, and blame Hillary Clinton herself for not doing enough to stop the Russian "attack" on the United States.

Sanders either didn't know, or has chosen to ignore, the fact that Russiagate is not only about weakening and punishing Donald Trump, but also about weakening and punishing - and censoring - what still remains of the contemporary American Left. And that includes Bernie Sanders, still considered the dangerous front-runner for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.

Sanders is only the latest in a long line of American leftists throughout our history to be targeted by the right-wing plutocracy for the sin of not being able to prove a negative. The centrist Washington gossip rag, Politico, gleefully joins the latest attack via its pro-Clinton reporter Edward-Isaac Dovere:

Bernie Sanders on Wednesday blamed Hillary Clinton for not doing more to stop the Russian attack on the last presidential election. Then his 2016 campaign manager, in an interview with POLITICO, said he’s seen no evidence to support special counsel Robert Mueller's assertion in an indictment last week that the Russian operation had backed Sanders' campaign.
The remarks showed Sanders, running for a third term and currently considered a front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, deeply defensive in response to questions posed to him about what was laid out in the indictment. He attempted to thread a response that blasts Donald Trump for refusing to acknowledge that Russians helped his campaign — but then holds himself harmless for a nearly identical denial.

Got that, Bernie? Since Donald Trump denies that the Russians helped him, and you now deny that the Russians helped you, then you are really no better than Trump. You might even secretly support Trump. Hell, you probably are Trump. At the very least, you are un-American, which is the same thing.

In doing so, Sanders and his former campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, presented a series of self-serving statements that were not accurate, and that track with efforts by Trump and his supporters to undermine the credibility of the Mueller probe.
“The real question to be asked is what was the Clinton campaign [doing about Russian interference]? They had more information about this than we did,” Sanders said in the interview with Vermont Public Radio.
After being contacted by POLITICO about the interview, Sanders issued a lengthy statement calling the Russian involvement a “direct assault on the free democratic systems that stand in contrast to the autocratic, nationalistic kleptocracy of Vladimir Putin and his backers in the Russian oligarchy” which “deserves unconditional condemnation.”

When it comes to enhancing and amplifying the Russiagate narrative, mainstream journalism has given up all pretense at objectivity. If you deny that Russians infiltrated your brain and your operation, you are being "self-serving."

The more that you deny something, the more guilty you are deemed to be. Off with your head!

  Bernie is certainly not helping himself by buying into the Narrative at the same time that he denies culpability. He is fully on board with it, his only quibble being his own lack of involvement and personal benefit. He cravenly declares himself a true believer in the Mueller Dogma, and is now reduced to begging his inquisitors for mercy. He'll even name names, most prominently the name of Hillary Clinton herself!  He's willing to testify that his campaign warned the Clinton campaign way back in September 2016 of Russian infiltration. What more do they want - that he drape himself in the American flag and carry an autographed photo of Ronald Reagan around with him whenever he delivers one of his anti-billionaire diatribes?

After correctly observing that Mueller's cut-and-paste revelations about a Russian oligarch's troll farm were really nothing new, Bernie "was adamant that he did not benefit from Russian bots," according to the Politico article, while acknowledging that said bots were there to turn his supporters against Hillary and not to specifically bolster his own campaign.

As Dovere pontificated, this pathetic defense will not and cannot stand:

Sanders has repeatedly condemned President Donald Trump for not acknowledging the Russian attack on the 2016 election alleged in the Mueller indictment and being investigated by congressional committees. But he has refused to say that his campaign benefited from the activities. (my bold)

I have here in my pocket a list of 200 names.... Have you now, or have you ever been, an Internet subscriber who benefited from reading Tweets from bots and trolls? Has a Russian ever visited or written a comment on your website? Guilty, guilty, guilty!

Sanders said the key point was that he was campaigning hard for Clinton after losing the nomination to her, and “at this point we were working with them.”
Sanders has faced questions since Friday about why he has not more strongly condemned the Russian actions that benefited his campaign. On Wednesday, liberal writer Joan Walsh of The Nation tweeted in response to Sanders’ comments about Clinton: “Seriously, this could be the end of Sanders 2020. Someone who cares about him ought to tell him how badly he stepped in it today.”

If Bernie Sanders thought that the Democratic establishment would forgive and forget, if not openly embrace him, for ultimately ditching his base of supporters and groveling to Hillary Clinton, he is bound feel confused and betrayed. It's so sad when the ditcher becomes the ditchee. Oftentimes, the betrayed one is reduced to lashing out at the very person for whom he sacrificed everything. Joan Walsh is right that he's stepped into a pile of doo-doo, but she is wrong about the consistency and the quality of it. His mistake is not that he is blaming Hillary. His mistake is that he has wallowed with the corrupt duopoly in the Russophobic bullshit for so long that he just can't find a face-saving way out of it.

So despite the utter unfairness of the establishment's treatment of Bernie, I find it impossible to feel sorry for him or come to his defense. He's a washout, not for the lack of patriotism that the corporate media are impugning, but for his utter lack of courage and principles in failing to repudiate the latest Big Lie.

When American Propaganda Attacks

Donald Trump is getting some well-deserved criticism for trying to co-opt the latest school massacre and make it all about himself. To wit: if the FBI wasn't so busy investigating him and his entire extended crime family, they would have heeded the numerous tips and warnings and stopped Nikolas Cruz in his maniacal tracks before he slaughtered 17 innocent people.

If only the mainstream media weren't also co-opting the latest school shooting by making it all about the Attack of the Russian Bots co-opting the latest school shooting!

In its latest front-page scare story designed to manufacture public consent for war on Russia, whose chintzy meddling marketing campaign against our "democracy"  has already been hysterically likened to Pearl Harbor and Nine-Eleven by war profiteers both in and out of government, the New York Times warns that the only thing we have to fear other than fear itself (oh, and assault weapons) are the Russian bots taking over Twitter.

The implicit message to all those disaffected young people complaining that nobody is protecting them is that their anger might be getting unduly stoked by Kremlin hashtags. Think twice before thinking for yourself and marching on Washington and other activist things. Be aware that every time you read about a rally or a march on Facebook or Twitter, it might be fake Russian news designed to divide you and sow your discontent to truly dangerous, foreign levels.

While CNN is moving quickly to co-opt the students of Parkland, Florida by casting the brightest of them in one of their "town hall" spectaculars this week, the Times was shamelessly melding the shooting story with the Russiagate story. Not only are the bloodthirsty, perpetual war-financed cable networks pouncing on the story, the Russian Bot Army is horning in on it.

The accounts addressed the news with the speed of a cable news network. Some adopted the hashtag #guncontrolnow. Others used #gunreformnow and #Parklandshooting. Earlier on Wednesday, before the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., many of those accounts had been focused on the investigation by the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.

“This is pretty typical for them, to hop on breaking news like this,” said Jonathon Morgan, chief executive of New Knowledge, a company that tracks online disinformation campaigns. “The bots focus on anything that is divisive for Americans. Almost systematically.”

Any news event — no matter how tragic — has become fodder to spread inflammatory messages in what is believed to be a far-reaching Russian disinformation campaign. The disinformation comes in various forms: conspiracy videos on YouTube, fake interest groups on Facebook, and armies of bot accounts that can hijack a topic or discussion on Twitter.

 Those automated Twitter accounts have been closely tracked by researchers. Last year, the Alliance for Securing Democracy, in conjunction with the German Marshall Fund, a public policy research group in Washington, created a website that tracks hundreds of Twitter accounts of human users and suspected bots that they have linked to a Russian influence campaign.

You can tell this is propaganda because the Times doesn't inform readers about the powerful plutocrats and corporations that run and bankroll these "research groups." The Alliance for Securing Democracy, as myself and a few others (notably Glenn Greenwald) have written before, is staffed by many of the discredited neoconservatives and liberal interventionists who made the fraudulent case for the US invasion of Iraq. It is funded not only by defense contractors, but likely also by a new State Department initiative called the Center for Global Engagement. Signed into law by President Obama in 2016, the Center is funded by public money and allows for the previously outlawed direct dissemination of propaganda by our own government to us, the citizenry. If the New York Times, whose torrents of Russophobic articles are now so intense that it's impossible to keep up with them all, is not also a beneficiary of this public funding, then they're being cheated out of a multimillion-dollar windfall. 

Is it a coincidence that the CEO of the Alliance for Securing Democracy, Laura Rosenberg, arrived at her job direct from Obama's State Department?

As The Nation's Adam Johnson reported in 2017, 

Originally created in March of last year for anti-ISIL messaging, the Global Engagement Center distributes “counter” propaganda, social-media messaging, and original journalistic content. The revamp would—according to the author of the NDAA language Senator Rob Portman’s office—“increase the authority, resources, and mandate of the Global Engagement Center to include state actors like Russia and China.”

What isn’t clear is if the Global Engagement Center, with all of its new “authority, resources and mandate,” will be used to target American audiences or pay American journalists. In 2013, Congress repealed major sections of the 1948 Smith-Mundt Act, which had previously instituted a ban on the State Department and related agencies from “propagandizing” directly to Americans. The 2013 changes, which were first reported by the late Michael Hastings in Buzzfeed, led to much confusion at the time as to what the repeal did and didn’t do (some thought it deeply pernicious, others not so much). Subsequent attempts to clear up the current law on targeting Americans haven’t resulted in a clear consensus, a problem that’s becoming increasingly urgent as the US government doubles its efforts to combat the much-publicized Russian propaganda machine.

How doubly ironic, therefore, that President Trump is wondering right out loud why President Obama himself was so sanguine and lackadaisical about this unprecedented Russian attack on our pristine electoral processes. If I had to hazard a guess, it was because the brilliant Obama didn't dream that the protectionist Trump would ever win, and that there would even be a need for an all-out effort to sway American public opinion on Russia as the default enemy du jour. After all, Obama's shtick back then was the "pivot to China" - code for choking off its economic growth via the US oligarchy-serving Trans-Pacific Partnership. Therefore, the US oligarchy has been forced to "pivot" to a new contrived arch-enemy - Russia - to avoid the rise of any more "axes of evil" to threaten the profits and power of the US hegemon.

***

Everything is fair game for domestic attack under the fig leaf of Russian meddling, and that includes the Black Lives Matter movement and other radical, youth-based movements. Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller thus dutifully added to his Narrative indictment the juicy bit about Russian trolls orchestrating and advertising rallies by black people against police brutality.

Times columnist Charles Blow dutifully enhanced this scare-narrative in his Monday group-think piece, which included a gratuitous dig at the "lionized social justice hero" Colin Kaepernick - he didn't vote! - as well as implicit criticism of activist-writer Michelle Alexander, whose New Jim Crow Blow huffily described as an "activist bible" for those millions of young black voters who didn't come out in record numbers for either racist presidential candidate and as a result, got us all saddled with the more loathsome and outspoken racist candidate. And Bernie supporter, the rapper Killer Mike? He had the nerve to not support Hillary even after she won the nomination!

It's malcontents and critics like these, Blow not so subtly implies, who created the vacuum necessary for the Russian bots and trolls to swoop in and keep all the black folks home on Election Day.

"There is no way to know how many black people would have settled on the exact same course of action without the interference," Blow concludes. "But what we do now know with absolute certainty is that in making their electoral choices, black folks had unwanted hands on their backs, unethical and illegal ones, nudging them toward an apathy built on anger.What happened in this election wasn’t just a political crime, it was specifically a racialized crime, and the black vote was a central target."

Judging from all the laudatory reader comments, Blow struck a real chord among the mostly white readership. Finally, somebody liberal and black was brave enough to let Kaepernick and Killer Mike and all those uppity Black Lives Matter youths have it. It's red-baiting and race-baiting at its finest. It's the new Democratic Party McCarthyism writ large.

My initial  comment, which made the above critiques, was axed by the Times censors. I had better luck with my second submission, published the following day:

This column strikes me as a veiled insult to young black voters, whom Blow casts as naive enough to be influenced by some truly cheesy Russian ads disseminated by only 90 underpaid trolls.

So easy to scapegoat "Russians" for "amplifying" the domestic discontent here in Exceptional USA. Given that this was the same tactic used by the US political-media complex against protests during the civil rights era and the Vietnam War, I'm kind of surprised it still has such influential staying power - until I remember Joseph Goebbels's maxim for effective propaganda: repeat it over and over and over again, and people will start believing it. The best part of this current Russophobic campaign is that it saves people the trouble of thinking for themselves.

Think about it for a minute. Young black people who didn't vote in the last election because they "felt like" it was no use are effectively being guilt-tripped for refusing to participate in a corrupt system in which the ultra-rich decide who can best represent oligarchic interests. Telling people that they were victims of a racialized crime by Russian trolls deflects attention from the real culprits, the oligarchs who run the place, named Koch, Adelson, Sinclair, and plundering corporations like Exxon-Mobil and six too-big-to fail/jail banks which effectively evicted and impoverished millions of black and brown people.

So hey, look over there at the evil Facebook ad of cartoon Hillary with devil horns punching out Jesus!

This ad, first released among a trove last November, displays "the sophistication" of the Russian influence campaign, according to the Washington Post. 

If this is the mainstream media's idea of sophistication, then we're in far worse trouble than I thought.

Or maybe not: the students currently fighting their own existential battle - their right to not get shot to death - sound a lot more savvy than their doddering elders. Just let Wolf Blitzer and the gang try and tell them it's partly the Russians' fault that one of their classmates snapped, and watch some real sophistication spring into action. I have an optimistic feeling that the students won't be co-opted gently into that premature night of total and permanent darkness and ignorance.

Keep the Russiagate Revenue Flying: Update

Part of Donald Trump's timeless, if limited and grotesque, appeal is that he occasionally blunders into the unvarnished truth. So it is with his latest tweeted observation that "they're laughing their asses off in Moscow" over the indictment by Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller of three companies including Russian troll farm and thirteen of its grossly underpaid sock puppets. The American powers that be would actually have us believe that a Russian oligarch who got started in the troll business attacking bad reviews of his rancid hot dogs is waging an all-out attack against our "democracy" by bringing his cheesy marketing campaign to our own precious shores.

The fact that Mueller released his "blockbuster" indictment at the start of a three-day holiday weekend is the first clue that it's mainly a combination of old news and partisan agitprop. Because whenever government officials want unpleasant or misleading news to be as unexamined as possible, they release it in News Dump Prime Time: the start of a long holiday weekend, rather than bright and early on a Monday morning, when bright-eyed reporters and pundits are scrambling for something new to talk about and analyze and disseminate in the greatest numbers.

Even so, when even Russiagate true believers like the Washington Post are taking notice that Mueller actually cut and pasted a significant portion of the indictment from a Russian magazine piece published last fall by actual Russian journalists, you kind of get the feeling that this indictment is not so much a rancid hot dog as a nothing-burger. It's old news being blown out of all proportion. It's a hunk of gristle thrown out for a ravenous media establishment to chew on in the lack of any new meaty blockbusters about Trump-Russia "collusion." 

 Adam Taylor of the Post writes:

In a 4,500-word report titled “How the 'troll factory' worked the U.S. elections,” journalists Polina Rusyaeva and Andrey Zakharov offered the fullest picture yet of how the “American department” of the IRA used Facebook, Twitter and other tactics to inflame tensions ahead of the 2016 vote. The article also looked at the staffing structure of the organization and revealed details about its budget and salaries....

 Zakharov explained how it was a strange feeling seeing something he had so closely investigated become a major issue in the United States, when it had not been a “bombshell” when he published his report at home.

Zakharov confirmed to the Post that people, if not "the Kremlin" itself, are indeed laughing their asses off.  "A lot of Russian conservatives were proud," he said. "They said: 'Look at what Russians can do! Only 90 people with $2 million made America scared! We are strong!' And for conservative people here, they see that Americans have CNN, Radio Free Europe, etc., that cover Russia. They say, 'Why can’t we establish groups in America and have our own influence?' That's how conservative people think here. They think this was normal."

The troll farm workers should probably demand a raise from the rancid hot dog oligarch. After all, if the tsar freed the Russian serfs in the 19th century,  the ruling oligarchs who have now inherited the earth should free them anew and pay them more than the paltry grand or so a month that they're currently making.

This is so reminiscent of other sock puppet campaigns, such as the "Correct the Record" troll farm run by Clintonoid flack David Brock. Poorly paid (even unpaid) trolls would flood the Internet comment boards with boilerplate attacks every time some actual person criticized their candidate. I can't tell you how many times these anonymous posters would accuse me, personally, of hurting Hillary's chances - and later actually personally costing her the election all by myself - every time I had something nice to say about Bernie Sanders, or something unflattering to say about Hillary herself on New York Times comment threads.  Who knew I had so much power at my typing fingertips? I don't know whether to laugh my ass off or cry in despair whenever one of these rancid sock puppets still digitally gets in my face and accuses me of being a Russian stooge, a closet Republican Trump operative, an anti-feminist, or all three.

As the Los Angeles Times reported about Brock's troll farm in May 2016, toward the end of primary season,

“It is meant to appear to be coming organically from people and their social media networks in a groundswell of activism, when in fact it is highly paid and highly tactical,” said Brian Donahue, chief executive of the consulting firm Craft Media/Digital.
“That is what the Clinton campaign has always been about," he said. "It runs the risk of being exactly what their opponents accuse them of being: a campaign that appears to be populist but is a smokescreen that is paid and brought to you by lifetime political operatives and high-level consultants.”
The task force designed to stop the spread of online misinformation and misogyny is the brainchild of David Brock, a Clinton confidant who once made a career of spreading such misinformation and misogynistic attacks against her and Bill Clinton. His critics say he kept his taste for dirty tricks when he switched sides to become one of the Clintons’ most valued operatives.

Although the "operatives" employed by Correct the Record were actually caught posting pornographic content on Bernie Sanders social media pages, no investigations or indictments of Brock's troll farm were ever forthcoming from the FBI and the Justice Department. Because only American trolls and corporations and the Kochs and the Adelsons and the Sinclairs are ever allowed to meddle in American elections.

In the interests of democracy and fairness and international good will, I think we should stage at least one televised debate between the Russian trolls and the American trolls to determine once and for all who can shout out their boilerplate talking points the loudest. For one thing, they work cheap (if not absolutely free), and would cost the corporate media conglomerates practically nothing. For another thing, they would bring in huge ratings and revenue for the corporate media, which is all that really matters in our politics-as-spectator sport "democracy." Naturally, such a show would have to be staged in a secret offshore location to protect the Russian trolls from actually being arrested as a result of Mueller's indictment. I would suggest a real working farm, with the stage adorned by various high-tech agricultural implements, the better to sow the chaos and the discontent. They'll have a wonderful time threshing it all out and making lots of hay as the oligarchs who own both countries reap all the unjust rewards for themselves.

The specially selected audience could be fitted out with truth-o-meters in order to measure their emotional responses to each troll. The grand prize for most effective trollery and flame-throwing might even be a contract for a paid gig on CNN or MSNBC or Fox as a part-time contributor.

Russiagate would be such a fun, farcical spectacle were it not for the fact that both the countries involved hoard vast quantities of nuclear weapons. Their greed instinct is threatening to overtake their survival instinct, to the detriment of every living thing on this planet.

Keep the Russiagate Revenue Flying

Talk about amplifying a bellicose propaganda campaign. Right in the middle of the New York Times's latest "The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!" front page scare-story is a hyperlink to "narrative architect" Molly McKew's piece in Politico. That piece, which I wrote about here, itself had amplified and hyperlinked to numerous other fear-mongering articles written by the gigantic pulsating hive mind of the corporate media. 

However, since the Times piece was ostensibly about the leaders of the Intelligence Hive Mind amplifying the fear in sworn testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, the sneaky hyperlink insertion was necessarily discreet:

 Russia appears eager to spread information — real and fake — that deepens political divisions. Bot armies promoted partisan causes on social media, including the recent push to release a Republican congressional memo critical of law enforcement officials.

  The Times felt no obligation inform its readers that its linked source, Molly McKew, is a Washington lobbyist posing as a pundit who gets paid big bucks by a couple of Eastern European oligarchs who'd simply love to get rid of Vladimir Putin, who got an outsize share of the loot when the Soviet Union collapsed.

The public instead must be informed that "Russia" is out to destroy American democracy by its constant meddling, and that Donald Trump, by dint of his own failure to condemn Russia all day and every day, is thereby a traitor to his country as well as a likely money-launderer and grifter. What better way to start a war and scapegoat a president, even as they merrily give this same traitorous president billions more dollars than he asked for to continue waging undeclared wars in the Middle East, Africa, and beyond?

If the Media-Political Complex can keep our eyes exclusively glued on Trump and his tabloid bromance with Putin, they won't even need to write a scary front-page story about his American drones just having killed hundreds of people in Syria! When they do report this horror, the targets were only "mercenaries," or "Russians," if not reduced to a solid baker's dozen. In some accounts, since their very nationalities are in doubt, their very humanity is in doubt. They are, in the long run, probably nobody at all. No big deal. Trump's sin is not that he murders and maims people, but that he occasionally has had nice things to say about his frenemy. He is a very convenient smokescreen indeed. When propaganda high beams are leveled at a fog, the cloud only becomes more opaque. And isn't that the whole point?

Meanwhile, as the Times breathlessly informs us: 

Russia is already meddling in the midterm elections this year, the top American intelligence officials said on Tuesday, warning that Moscow is using a digital strategy to worsen the country’s political and social divisions.

Russia is using fake accounts on social media — many of them bots — to spread disinformation, the officials said. European elections are being targeted, too, and the attacks were not likely to end this year, they warned.

“We expect Russia to continue using propaganda, social media, false-flag personas, sympathetic spokespeople and other means of influence to try to exacerbate social and political fissures in the United States,” Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, told the Senate Intelligence Committee at its annual hearing on worldwide threats.

Dan Coats is repeating Molly McKew's talking points right down to the letter. The agenda, obviously, is to cast all domestic dissent as Russian propaganda. American citizens, the majority of whom don't even have a few hundred bucks stashed away to pay for an emergency car repair, would be so satisfied with their lives if it weren't for those Russian bots and trolls amplifying stuff on social media. And if you do dare complain, and if you do express healthy skepticism about the source of your pain and suffering, the implication is that you're really no better than Trump:

The warnings were striking in their contrast to President Trump’s public comments. He has mocked the very notion of Russian meddling in the last election and lashed out at those who suggested otherwise.

The Intelligence Committee's top Democrat, Mark Warner, re-amplified the pivot point "tell" of McKew's flimsy Narrative Architecture, which maintains that even though the dissent might initially be all-American, the fact that "Russian bots" are co-opting it renders it dangerous and meaningless and downright unpatriotic - especially when citizens start accusing the FBI, the NSA and the CIA of political motivations:

 “Other threats to our institutions come from right here at home,” he said. “There have been some, aided and abetted by Russian internet bots and trolls, who have attacked the basic integrity of the F.B.I. and the Justice Department. This is a dangerous trend.”

Translation: Shut up, get off the streets, return to your homes, lock your doors, draw the curtains and love Big Brother as he spies upon you for your own good. Your thinking has been corrupted, but we're here to help you and purify you and keep you safe.

 The only dangerous trend I could see in that paragraph was Mark Warner himself. If anything, he is even scarier than Donald Trump, because he cloaks himself with such a patina of phony virtue.

Neocon Democrats Already Blaming Russia For Shutdown Mess

If When the Democrats are pressured into striking a deal with the bad guys to keep the government chugging along for awhile longer, they want you to know it was all the Russians' fault. David Leonhardt (see previous post) will be so disappointed when he finds out that that his scolding had little to do with "the big cave."

The Democratic veal pen now known as HuffPo has collaborated with the new neocon think tank, Alliance for Securing Democracy, to spread the word that the criticism of hapless Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is emanating not just from American constituents, but from Kremlin "bots" using the hashtag #SchumerShutdown on social media.

Despite all the best algorithmic and human censorship efforts of Twitter, Google and Facebook, Russian-trolled anti-Schumer messages are "blowing up" the Internet. You see, The Alliance has devised its own copyrighted "Gizmo" measuring tool to prove it! The attack on Wall Street stooge Schumer is getting so bad it's even surpassed the nefarious #ReleaseTheMemo campaign. The Alliance would have you believe that no actual Americans ever had the intellectual wherewithal to be curious about much of anything before the Russians went on the Internet and infiltrated all their brains. You'd think that the all-American right-wing propaganda mill known as Fox News was just sitting around and twiddling its pudgy little thumbs.

HuffPo reporter Jennifer Bendery writes:

#SchumerShutdown has surpassed #ReleaseTheMemo as the highest trending hashtag among Russian influence campaigns. They seized on that hashtag earlier this month in an effort to pressure Republican lawmakers to release a classified memo written by House GOP aides that allegedly describes abuses in FBI surveillance practices. Conservative organizations like Breitbart and the Daily Caller have given major coverage to the memo, but Democratic lawmakers have denounced it as deeply misleading.

Alliance for Securing Democracy tracks activity from 600 monitored Twitter accounts linked to Russian influence operations. It has found that Russian bots and trolls frequently amplify content attacking the United States, conspiracy theories and misinformation.

Coincidentally (of course) Twitter has just sent emails to 677,775 users informing them that they were being monitored for the thought-less crime of having read and/or shared tweets from Kremlin propaganda mills.

Also, totally coincidentally, HuffPo has just sent its own emails to its entire stable of unpaid freelance contributors informing them that their "content" would no longer be accepted. This  includes all content from writers like Joe Lauria who dare to express healthy skepticism that RussiaGate has any basis in reality, or that endless war might not be in the best interests of humanity.

  HuffPo editor Lydia Polgreen, late of the New York Times, told the New York Times that she's banned the messy, noisy, free-thinking bloggers so as to "declutter" the site and give more room to quality journalism, such as, presumably, the pro-war propaganda provided by neocon think tanks.

HuffPo certainly did not see fit to inform its readers that the Alliance for Securing Democracy (which it approvingly describes as a "bipartisan" outfit led by former national security officials) is top-heavy with discredited extremist Bush-era neocons who thought it was a dandy idea to invade Iraq and destabilize the entire Middle East and beyond to make the world safe for greedy oil companies and bankers and "defense" contractors.

As a matter of fact, the head honcho of the Alliance is Michael Chertoff, Bush's Homeland Security director. The paranoia-for-profit industry has been very good to him, his private security firm having raked in big bucks from its no-contract Orwellian RapiScan machines used at airports all over the world to humiliate travelers on the pretext of thwarting terrorism. Chertoff has a nice supplemental gig working alongside Obama's former attorney general, Eric Holder, at the Covington and Burling white shoe law firm in Washington, D.C.

Also serving on the Alliance board are neocon columnist Bill Kristol; former acting CIA Director Mike Morell; CNN fear-monger, Harvard professor and former congressman Mike Rogers; Jamie Fly, foreign policy adviser to Marco Rubio; and Clinton campaign operative and Obama administration official Jake Sullivan.

Glenn Greenwald called this power hub of Democratic-Neocon propagandists  "one of the most consequential but under-discussed changes in the American political landscape."

He wrote last summer:

The song Democrats are now singing about Russia and Putin is one the neocons wrote many years ago, and all of the accompanying rhetorical tactics — accusing those who seek better relations with Moscow of being Putin’s stooges, unpatriotic, of suspect loyalties, etc. — are the ones that have defined the neocons smear campaigns for decades.
The union of Democrats and neocons is far more than a temporary marriage of convenience designed to bring down a common enemy. As this new policy group illustrates, the union is grounded in widespread ideological agreement on a broad array of foreign policy debates: from Israel to Syria to the Gulf States to Ukraine to Russia. And the narrow differences that exist between the two groups — on the wisdom of the Iran deal, the nobility of the Iraq War, the justifiability of torture — are more relics of past debates than current, live controversies. These two groups have found common cause because, with rare and limited exception, they share common policy beliefs and foreign policy mentalities.

One bright note: from what I can tell, the nationwide women's marches over the weekend were not centered on Russia fear-mongering despite the best co-opting efforts of the Democratic Party. They were not even exclusively centered on "resisting" Trump, but rather on women running for office in the interests of social and economic justice, and people joining together in solidarity across class, race and gender lines.  

They'd better watch out, or next time the politicians (even the trolling Trump) and police might not be so friendly about the protests which they now find so convenient to encourage. They still seem to have no doubts that the marches are anything more than a get-out-the-vote effort for the establishment party.

Clinging To the Guns and Religion of RussiaGate

The Democrats are not so incensed about the biggest tax increase in American history that their whole raison d'être isn't still the alleged Russian meddling in our already-tainted electoral process.

Just as Barack Obama once derided generic Heartland voters for "clinging to their guns and religion," the affluent and willfully ignorant liberal class are still clinging to #RussiaGate while they also half-heartedly exert themselves to jump on the #MeToo bandwagon.

I say half-heartedly, because Al Franken is still sitting in the Senate despite that sophomoric photo of his 55-year-old self pretending to grope the breasts of a sleeping fellow entertainer, and despite several other complaints about his Russian rushin' hands and roamin' fingers doing their slimy work at more mundane photo-ops.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi did a Party-serving 180 last week, pivoting from praising reputed predator Rep. John Conyers as a Democratic "icon" into demanding his resignation just days later. Perhaps the ease of her about-face had something to do with him being the creator of H.R. 676, the original Medicare for All legislation. His proposed bill, which had been moldering in the House for many years, had recently gotten new life and sponsorship on the resurgent wave of left-wing populism. What better way to kill a bill than for its author to be exposed as a creep?

Professional victim Hillary Clinton, seeing an opening, is also co-opting #MeToo in her perpetual Blame Game Tour. Thank goodness, there are now so many more creeps to pretend to kick around besides just her good pal Harvey Weinstein and her hubby Bill Clinton. It has finally become safe for her to take a stand. Of course, she is making this brave stand all about herself.  

Jill Filopovic, who's run loyal feminist interference for Hillary Clinton in the past, has a new piece up in Sunday's New York Times asserting that, besides the mythical BernieBros, it was Charlie Rose and Matt Lauer and other male journalists who actually cost Clinton the election by constantly bringing up that whole trustworthiness and likeability thing. It makes you wonder: had Hillary been victorious, would Filopovic have written a similar column congratulating Rose and Lauer for carrying Hillary over the finish line?

It also makes you wonder why Barack Obama, who'd demeaned Hillary in a 2008 primary debate by snidely calling her "likeable enough," is not also being called to task for his own sexism. Oh, I forgot -  as the spiritual leader of a soul-less party which lost nearly a thousand seats during his White House tenure, he is immune. As a matter of fact, the liberal class maintains an absolute hunger for him. They're so smitten, they've even been sadly reduced to fawning over fawning coffee table books about him.

The most valuable aspect of #RussiaGate, and selective Me-Tooism, and #HillaryWuzRobbed, and #BarackHunger for the establishment Democrats is that they deflect the public's attention from the recent clamoring, by the majority of US citizens, for true universal health care and other socialist things like free college tuition and debt jubilees. The party elders aim to take the public's attention away from Bernie Sanders and his railing against the same "billionaire class"  which continues to enrich the party while it robs the rest of us blind. Sanders, the most popular politician in America, is already threatening  to usurp the presidential nomination from their preferred roster of "rising stars," including centrists Kamala Harris and Cory Booker.

  Other than opportunistic fund-raising appeals from party veal pen clicktivist organizations, you aren't seeing an inordinate number of Tweets from the usual outraged liberal suspects about the GOP's blatant theft of the public purse in the dead of night. And that's for a very good and pragmatic reason. The millionaires and billionaires who run the Democratic Party will themselves benefit very nicely from the package, and thus they'll have more spare cash to donate to the liberal politicians who give them such cozy, discreet cover. These politicians, if they do win back power next year, will likely claw back only a portion of the GOP's tax cuts for the rich, just as Obama delayed letting the Bush tax cuts expire for his own re-election purposes. And they'll call it a victory.

 It's so much more lucrative to confine one's outrage to Donald Trump's misogyny, to slimy sex predators, and to Vladimir Putin's reputed personal placement of $100,000 worth of cheesy ads on Facebook. Heaven forbid that Democrats speak out against their own wealth-serving neoliberal policies, which have so graciously ushered in a de facto oligarchy.

Of course, they would have preferred to cut Medicare and Social Security and other people-friendly programs under their own smokescreen of "fiscal responsibility" and "shared sacrifice" rather than having the whole rotten can of worms exposed by the ultra-right wing of the Uniparty for all of us to see. They would have preferred a more gradual immersion of the frogs into the slowly boiling water rather than tossing hundreds of millions of lesser critters off the gangplank in one fell swoop. They need the bad things they allow to happen to good people to be gradual, because that is the only thing that keeps their false, futuristic message of hope alive, and most importantly, keeps some people still  fooled enough to vote an ever-dwindling number of them into political office.

So, look over there, voters! - it's Michael Flynn, pleading guilty to lying to the federal cops about talking to "the Russians" as if they were space aliens fixing to blow us all up in our beds. In case you'd forgotten, it is as much a crime to lie to G-men in America as it is to lie to the police in a totalitarian society. You are considered to be under oath in a federal police interrogation as much as you are under oath in an official court proceeding. And if you happen to lie to the inquisitors, either by commission or by omission, the FBI always has surveillance data furnished by other branches of the Intelligence Community and the secret FISA court to catch you out.

So let what happened to Michael Flynn be a lesson to us all.

Naturally, the powers-that-be try to cover themselves by inventing a few sacrificial lambs to show the public just how above-board their ongoing palace coup is. One "highly regarded" FBI agent was yanked off the RussiaGate investigation after some of his personal emails criticizing Donald Trump were exposed. ABC News chief investigative correspondent Brian Ross was suspended for four weeks without pay for falsely reporting that Trump had ordered Flynn to contact the Russians while still only a candidate. He was, in fact, the president-elect when he issued the order. That's quite a difference. Oops. But since Trump obliged his critics by unleashing his usual tweet-storm in defense of Flynn and railing against "fake news", that's all the proof you should need that Trump is a traitor to his country as well as a financial swindler who serendipitously wound up in the White House.

And lest Democrats still be accused of clinging as insanely to their Russophobia  as the right-wing yahoos cling to their guns and religion, the New York Times has even published a gossipy piece about how the NRA itself might be involved in Russian collusion.

A conservative operative trumpeting his close ties to the National Rifle Association and Russia told a Trump campaign adviser last year that he could arrange a back-channel meeting between Donald J. Trump and Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian president, according to an email sent to the Trump campaign.

A May 2016 email to the campaign adviser, Rick Dearborn, bore the subject line “Kremlin Connection.” In it, the N.R.A. member said he wanted the advice of Mr. Dearborn and Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, then a foreign policy adviser to Mr. Trump and Mr. Dearborn’s longtime boss, about how to proceed in connecting the two leaders.

This might sound like an disingenuous question, but what conservative operative doesn't have close ties to the money provided by the National Rifle Association? The fact that such an email even bears the title "Kremlin Connection" sounds suspiciously... oh, I don't know - suspicious? 

Also suspicious is that the Times doesn't even possess this alleged email; rather, its "contents" were merely described to the newspaper by an anonymous source "close to the investigation." To further cement the Narrative, it seems that the email was also forwarded to certain evangelical leaders. Thus are guns and religion so neatly tied up into one propaganda package.

Only at the very end of the piece, written by Nicholas Fandos, do we off-handedly learn that the Russian mafia might have ties to the NRA. And why not, given the impunity with which the international weapons cartel has long operated? There is truly nothing like burying the lede when one has a specific agenda. In other words, this whole #RussiaGate brouhaha is really nothing more than a mob war among a bunch of crime families vying for power.

The modern-day mobs euphemistically call themselves "public-private partnerships" and "Congress." And they essentially run the world. Donald Trump is too much of a loudmouth Tweety Bird for the tastes of the more discreet Dons, whose own political prestige and protection rackets and front organizations he so seriously endangers with his big, fat, unfiltered mouth. A pretender to the Godfather throne, he threatens to ruin the whole Racket. The neoliberal fat cats are desperate to swallow this demented, off-key canary. Not for the greater public good, of course, but to save their own feral skins.

Eat Me