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.

Sexing Up The New York Times

The New York Times announced this week that its paid subscription revenue had passed the record $1 billion mark, thanks in large part to its reinventing itself as the go-to source for #Resistance fighters of the liberal class, hungry to share their hatred of everything the Trump regime stands for.

During an earnings call on Thursday, Mark Thompson, the chief executive of The Times, said the company was pleased with the “continued strong retention” among the users who subscribed to The Times amid the 2016 presidential election.

“We’ve continued to make encouraging progress and are seeing far lower monthly churn than a few years ago,” he said.

Digital advertising revenue increased 14 percent last year, to $238 million. In the last three months of the year, digital advertising revenue rose 9 percent, to $84 million; it now represents 46 percent of the company’s total advertising revenue.

And to complement the never-ending appetite for Donald Trump, the newspaper has honed its own edginess to razor-sharp intensity by dishing ever more salacious dirt on the lives of Trump, his detestable inner circle of unworthies, and all manner of Trump-like predators and schmucks. Unfiltered quotes from the potty mouth of the Mooch, details of the crimes of Harvey Weinstein so graphic that it would have been unthinkable for the Times to print them even a year ago, lurid gossip from previously discredited opposition research dossiers - it's all fit to print now. 

And given its own long history of prudish standards and practices, the Times certainly has a lot of catching up to do. Just witness how many times its staid op-ed writers have been inserting "shithole" into as many columns as they can, just because they suddenly can. Trump, who rose to power in New York City through regular sleazy publicity in the tabloids, has succeeded in turning the Paper of Record into a tabloid practically all by himself.

Still, when the Times decided to publish its latest weekend book review section as a click-worthy treatise on sex lit, both ancient and modern, it just can't help displaying its historical squeamishness. Even when unabashedly selling sex, the editors find it necessary to paint their project with the gloss of virtue and clinical intellectualism.

It fell to a 20-something book review staffer named Lauren Christensen to write the Times Insider "explainer" piece about the project, because "everybody knows" that 20-somethings are shallow creatures who are mainly interested in reading about Kim Kardashian, cute pets, "The Bachelor," teen pregnancies, and sex.

 In the interests of her target audience, Christensen had already recently reviewed a book about the history of sex toys. Then she claims to have been surprised when a male colleague dropped by her desk to recommend other books in the genre, such as "Buzz" and "Vibrator Nation."

Since these books were written from a feminist point of view, the referrals were construed by Christensen to be a matter of professional collegiality and not an instance of sexual harassment in the workplace. Thus, like any minion at the bottom of the heap, she "dutifully" posted some blurbs to Instagram, to many ensuing clicks and eyeballs.

"Thus the seeds of what has now resulted in the Sex Issue — brilliantly christened 'Pleasure Reading' by our editor, Pamela Paul — were sown," enthuses Christensen, in a cute and suck-uppy attempt at double entendre humor.

And now we get the birth product resulting from the great unsheathing.

First the disclaimer: For all her heavy reading, Christensen for some reason finds it necessary to defend her own virtue, skating right on the regressive edge of learned female helplessless. She can't seem to stop insisting in her "explainer" piece how truly naive she is at heart, and how embarrassed she initially felt about doing the project. I guess she hasn't been reading her own newspaper's articles on Trump and Weinstein and their ilk. And she really should start, because whenever women feel forced into doing uncomfortable things at work, the psychological damage can last a lifetime. Then again, maybe she's just acting the part of the arch Times critic:

Inevitably, oversight of the issue fell by consensus to me, the lone 20-something. I have ever since been trying to pretend that, when it comes to sex, I have the slightest clue what I’m talking about. I started by pooling my resources, aggregating 50 covers of the most erotic books throughout literary history for the week’s visual back page, “Under the Covers.” (Please appreciate the word “seminal” on that page; it is one of my proudest career achievements to date.) The day that email went out revealed my impossibly erudite colleagues in a new light, instantly transformed as they were into giddy schoolchildren trading naughty jokes behind the teacher’s back. One by one the previewers revealed the steamy, guilty pleasures of their literary pasts. We’ve collectively done some pretty dirty reading.

As edgy as it pretends to be, the Times still very much dwells in the Victorian Age, when people also merely pretended to be squeamish about sex as they lustfully went about reading about it, writing about it, and doing it.  How does one even censor a Sex Issue, anyway? Christensen daintily explains:

The real fun began once these pieces started rolling in — turns out it’s not so easy to compile a Sex Issue while maintaining The Times’s elevated house style. Some edits were obvious: As much as I admired Ms. Marnell’s rough-around-the-edges, colloquial and honest writing style, I simply couldn’t run either of the two “b” verbs she used as synonyms for intercourse. Less obvious was that I’d need to remove a detailed, explicit quote from the memoir she reviewed, “Getting Off: One Woman’s Journey Through Sex and Porn Addiction.” I had to paraphrase it at the expense, I felt, of the full force of both the book’s and Ms. Marnell’s prose. Mercifully, Philip B. Corbett, the paper’s standards and ethics arbiter, did allow me to keep the quote, “I came so hard I thought my heart would explode.”

The Times recently got rid of its copy-editing desk, but thankfully, Corbett's job is still apparently safe.  He's the guy who pretends to carefully weigh what is and what is not acceptable to print, so as to give the repressed writers the pleasure of exploding with joy whenever they're allowed to keep in the naughty bits, like "seminal." After all, seduction wouldn't be sexy if it didn't maintain the aphrodisiac of coquettish modesty.

But back to how good Trump has been for the Times Narrative brand. The president being a self-described non-reader, I wonder if the "Sex Issue" might even inspire him to add some of its titillating recommendations to his lonely bedside table copy of Mein Kampf. The volumes would certainly enhance the pleasure of eating cheeseburgers in bed, and might even inspire him to turn off Fox News for a few minutes every day as he laboriously mouths all the words between bites. Perhaps he can start with the YA (youthful audience) section before finally working himself up to Ovid (for poetry in Tweets) and Joyce (for improving his stream-of-consciousness skills.)

I think I'm being arch.

Wall Street Might Run For President Directly

Former Attorney General Eric Holder, who made the term "too big to jail" infamous, says he is pondering another revolving-door spin from his gig defending white collar criminals - this time all the way to the Oval Office. 

We’ll see,” he said during a breakfast sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor in Washington, DC.

 

He was asked if he’s mulling a run for the White House because he’s learning how to raise funds and giving political speeches.
“I think I’ll make a decision by the end of the year about whether or not there is another chapter in my government service,” he replied.

This is known as the political trial balloon. We'll see whether enough voters swoon when he again explains his deferred prosecution agreements with Wall Street criminal banks and how he agonized over giving presidents, including most recently the demented Donald Trump, the right to drone people to death at will anywhere on the planet.

Admittedly, the bar has been set conveniently low for Democrats, even a heavily damaged Democrat like Holder. In his first "major rare interview," he did after all schmooze to Rachel Maddow that even one of his kids would be a better president than Trump. Unlike the Normless Wonder, Holder would protect and respect the FBI and other members of the Intelligence Community who have all but ignored "the malefactors of great wealth" in order to set up sting operations against Muslim terrorists. Unlike Trump, Holder never called their countries of origin "shitholes" as he respectfully wrote his often-secret legal opinions on how to quietly tail them if not therapeutically drone them to death by means of unnaccountable surgical strikes.

Ditto for immigration. Holder never used racist dog-whistles as he gave the Obama administration legal cover for its record mass deportations, many of whom were unaccompanied minors who were condemned to almost certain deaths from gang and political violence when they were forcibly returned to their Central American home countries.

Somehow, the issue of Trump's horrific pardon of Sheriff Joe Arpaio never came up during the "rare" sit-down with his good pal Rachel, because that might have led to the awkward question of his own notorious pardon recommendation for Clinton donor and fugitive Wall Street crook Marc Rich, issued on the eve of Holder's first revolving door-spin from ignoring wealthy criminals in public to vigorously defending them, for big bucks, in private.

His kid-glove treatment of the money-laundering, drug-dealing kingpin HSBC alone should disqualify Holder from a presidential run.But no matter. The luxury corner office of Covington and Burling will always stay open for him, as would another revolving door spin the next time a corporate Democrat wins.

The Gravitas of the Chin-Stroker

The Trouble With the Latest Hacking Story

A Homeland Security official has told NBC News that Russian hackers "successfully penetrated" the voter registration rolls of an "exceptionally small" number of states prior to the 2016 elections. There is no evidence that the data were actually tampered with, as in purging the names of registered voters. It simply means that the lists were read, copied and collected.

What virtually none of the alarmist news coverage bothers to explain is that US voter registration rolls are already legally accessible public records. If Russia wanted to access voter data in Washington, D.C., for example, all its spies had to do was click on the District's Board of Elections official website. Every registered voter's information was already there for the taking: name, home address, party affiliation, precinct ward and whether or not they voted in each election since 2012.

Elsewhere in the United States, it's often harder. Those wishing to penetrate the voter registration rolls might have to submit a formal request, either in person or by mail.  This is exactly how you end up on the junk mail lists of every politician running for office. It's annoying and intrusive at times, but as far as I know, political hacks have never been accused of hacking the rolls during campaign season.

Alexander Howard of the Sunlight Foundation, a government transparency advocacy group, has called for tighter restrictions on voter roll access for all entities: for example, requiring submission of a formal Freedom of Information Act request in order to obtain voter information. As it stands now, three states - Alaska, Arkansas and Colorado - impose absolutely no restrictions on who can access the data. Other states impose wait times or charge hefty fees in order to give the voting public a semblance of privacy and protection from bad actors, such as corporate marketers. California prohibits all access to voter information from outside the US, and specifies the information can only be used for political purposes. 

Interestingly enough, Colorado is among the handful of states now complaining that its public rolls were "targeted" by Russia, while California denies outright the Homeland Security claim that its database was infiltrated by Russian spies.

Since a massive breach of national electoral data already occurred in 2015, exposing the personal information of 191 million American voters for anyone in the world to see online, pointing fingers at Russia at this point is a little like complaining about the barn door being left open. If you've ever voted, says Howard, then somewhere out there in cyberspace your name, your address, your gender, your voter ID number, your voting frequency (but not who you voted for) and whether or not you voted in any primary since 2000, is possibly still available free for the taking, by anybody with the tools to search for it. (I purposely did not search for it myself.)

But whatever amplifies and advances the required Narrative which blames Russia and only Russia for abusing voter information and endangering our democracy is A-O.K. by our famously independent mainstream media.

Here's a suggestion from Ludditeville: let's bring back paper registration and paper records and paper ballots, all of which will require actual physical burglaries and physical tampering to complete any espionage and other dirty tricks, just like in the good old Watergate days.

Crayfish Girl Power

"This Mutant Crayfish Clones Itself, and It's Taking Over Europe" reads the New York Times headline about a rapidly evolving arthropod.

Talk about burying the lede. It's not until several paragraphs later that we learn that the prolific marbled crayfish - also known as the Texas Crayfish - are all females whose enormous batches of eggs contain only immaculately conceived females, or replicas of both Mom and each other. Take that, everybody who is so worried about the alleged #Backlash against the #MeToo movement. I am woman, hear me roar. Or more accurately, I am woman cloned crayfish, so hear me emit a high-pitched chirp out of my scaphognathite.

Not only is it high time we rid the lexicon of the sexist term "crawdaddy," it also might be a good idea to ban men from all future crayfish mating call competitions, especially since the new variety no longer has any need for a mating call.

From the Times article:

For nearly two decades, marbled crayfish have been multiplying like Tribbles on the legendary “Star Trek” episode. “People would start out with a single animal, and a year later they would have a couple hundred,” said Dr. Lyko.

Many owners apparently drove to nearby lakes and dumped their marmorkrebs. And it turned out that the marbled crayfish didn’t need to be pampered to thrive. Marmorkrebs established growing populations in the wild, sometimes walking hundreds of yards to reach new lakes and streams. Feral populations started turning up in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Croatia and Ukraine in Europe, and later in Japan and Madagascar.

It could always be worse. At least it's not the invasive pet pythons dumped in the Everglades which have developed the ability to clone themselves. Yet. 

Plus, crayfish are both edible and easy to catch with one's bare hands. Go to a pond and they will literally swarm around your feet just waiting to be picked up. True, they might pinch your fingers. But what's a little pain compared to the torture of having to constantly pinch pennies at the overpriced supermarket?

Food snobbery may well become a thing of the past once everybody, men and women alike, no matter their income level, can prepare and consume Crayfish Thermidor or Crayfish Newburg.

Still, gather your crayfish while ye may. It's inevitable that, smelling one more good thing to exploit, venture capitalists and private equity vultures will quickly swoop in to create factory farms out of all the ponds where the crayfish clones have gone forth and multiplied. The thought of an unlimited and free source of self-serve food for the world's hungry people is probably too much for finance capitalists to bear. And since the unlimited future of Marmorkrebs seems pretty much guaranteed, betting on crayfish futures the way a certain former first lady bet and won on cattle futures is already dead in the water.

Capitalism itself never dies. It simply mutates into newer forms, money begetting money out of nothing except itself, and then has the nerve to call itself the Mother of Innovation. 

So to paraphrase Star Trek's Mr. Spock, may the new crayfish species live long and nurture and prosper and remain impervious to the predatory Klingons of Wall Street.

Disinformation, Neocon-Style

It's deja vu all over again. When you look closely at the pushback against the Nunes memo exposing the alleged misuse of the secret FISA Court for political gain or revenge, you begin to see a pattern and a formula.

The propagation of anti-Russian fever is weirdly reminiscent of the run-up to the US invasion of Iraq.  That Vladimir Putin is "hacking" our crumbling democracy is as much an article of faith as Saddam Hussein's cache of weapons of mass destruction. The methods by which this faith is being propagated to the American public become especially obvious when you notice that some of the same Iraq War cheerleaders are involved in this latest neocon effort.

The initial public acceptance of the invasion of Iraq, as well as the "belief" of the majority of polled subjects in Russian meddling in the presidential election stays alive thanks largely to the process of amplification.

The first part of the conflict-creation recipe involves bellicose think tanks and defense industry-beholden politicians planting scary stories in the mainstream media, whose stenographers graciously grant the planters anonymity due to the "sensitivity" of the situation and fears that national security will be threatened if the public gets too much information. The second step is for the warmongers to then point to these planted stories as proof positive that they are full of facts, the actual details of which must unfortunately be withheld to protect the interests of the planters. These two steps are like yeast. They make the disinformation cake rise and rise.

This is what former Vice President Dick Cheney did in 2002.  His office fed New York Times reporters Judith Miller and Michael Gordon the "scoop" that Saddam Hussein was buying uranium from Africa and using it to build nuclear weapons. Then Cheney went on Meet the Press and pointed to the New York Times as his proof that Saddam did indeed plan to attack the US.  To give the disinformation an added dose of verisimilitude, "investigative" reporter Miller even went to jail for a time to protect the powerful sources of the false information. Rather than out herself as a stenographer, she made herself a martyr - until the whole scam fell apart, and she lost her job at the Times.

Where one neocon bit the dust, however, there are plenty more to take her place. Take, for example, one Molly K. McKew, a self-described "information warfare expert" who got her start in propaganda at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, and went on to lobby Congress on behalf of some of the former Soviet satellite countries whose billionaire leaders she also personally advised, before reinventing herself as a Russophobic pundit on cable TV shows and penning articles for such mainstream organs as Politico and the Washington Post.

At least McKew, unlike Judith Miller, is honest enough not to pose as an actual investigative journalist. Instead, she modestly gives herself the Orwellian title "narrative architect."

How does an architect construct a narrative? To get the recipe, just read her latest lengthy, convoluted and alarmist Politico effort, entitled "How Twitter Bots and Trump Fans made #ReleasetheMemo Go Viral." The main secret ingredient of McKew's concoction is, paradoxically, the exact same process of amplification that she accuses the TrumPutin trolls of employing on Twitter. It takes one to know one, I guess. She liberally links to articles and data that she either dreamed up herself, or that come from like-minded Neocon think tanks, or that are anonymously-sourced articles in the establishment press planted by these same think tanks and revolving-door politicians.

The proof is in the pudding if not in the cake, McKew gloats. You see, Trump decided to release the Nunes memo before he even read it, thanks to the thousands and thousands of #ReleasetheMemo tweets arriving at his desk and those of the "Trumpiest of congressmen" in the past few weeks. It is such a terrible thing when mere trolls have the power to influence such powerful Establishment Influencers.

McKew further amplifies her Politico message by pointing out that since the mighty Washington Post also agrees that Trump and the GOP have been unduly influenced by Russian trolls, it has got to be true. Another term for this propaganda technique is affinity bias, which supplements the endless repetition of boilerplate talking points through the use of an echo chamber.

Since Molly McKew can't blame the twitter campaign directly on Russian trolls, she points to Russian bots who retweeted the messages of actual human Americans, thereby infecting the minds of many other Americans. If this sounds confusing, it is meant to be confusing. She therefore blames the nefarious use of computational propaganda, which she defines as

“the use of information and communication technologies to manipulate perceptions, affect cognition, and influence behavior”—has been used, successfully, to manipulate the perceptions of the American public and the actions of elected officials. The analysis below, conducted by our team from the social media intelligence group New Media Frontier, shows that the #releasethememo campaign was fueled by, and likely originated from, computational propaganda. It is critical that we understand how this was done and what it means for the future of American democracy.

Molly McKew then refers to a number of computational charts of Twitter feeds which derive directly from computerized analyses allegedly conducted both by herself and by former Homeland Security head Michael Chertoff's new neocon think tank, Alliance for Securing Democracy. (I previously wrote about this war consortium's bogus Hamilton68 Dashboard, which purports to have the Big Brother ability to figure out who is tweeting, what they're tweeting, when they're tweeting, and where they're tweeting it from. Naturally, McKew seizes upon the Dashboard propaganda to further amplify her own argument. Chertoff's organization itself amplified the #ReleasetheMemo amplification frenzy when it planted an article in HuffPo complaining that the hashtag had lost a bit of its oomph during the manufactured government shutdown scare. This piece was where I myself first learned about #ReleasetheMemo.)

McKew ultimately undermines her own analysis of "Russian interference" when she is forced to admit that her research revealed that real American human tweeters actually started the memo campaign. What difference does the truth really make at this point? So she is nobly respecting the privacy of the US humans involved. For now, anyway. The implicit message is that you American humans best be careful what you write, lest Putin appropriate your words and you become fair game for eventual unwanted exposure by the Molly McKews of this enterprise.

 It is computational propaganda—meaning artificially amplified and targeted for a specific purpose—and it dominated political discussions in the United States for days. The #releasethememo campaign came out of nowhere. Its movement from social media to fringe/far-right media to mainstream media so swift that both the speed and the story itself became impossible to ignore. The frenzy of activity spurred lawmakers and the White House to release the Nunes memo, which critics say is a purposeful misrepresentation of classified intelligence meant to discredit the Russia probe and protect the president.

McKew further amplifies her own neocon message when she links to the warmongering paranoia of the Atlantic Council, another pro-war think tank at the forefront of fomenting Cold War 2.0 for greatly amplified profits to the weapons manufacturers who own it and operate it.

We ordinary people are not supposed to know all this, though, because otherwise how could the neocons manufacture our mindless consent for perpetual war and help us to overcome our "sickly inhibitions" against death and destruction on the epic scale that a hot war with Russia would entail?  What matters is that we allow the "right" people to manipulate us and make us believe that our leaders really, really care about us. The "Russians," McKew and her fellow disinformation specialists warn us, would have us believe we're all on our own, without a hope and without a prayer.

"And yes," she concludes, "that also reinforces the narrative the Russians have been pushing since 2015: You’re on your own; be angry, and burn things down. Would that a leader would step into this breech, and challenge the advancing victory of the bots and the cynical people behind them."

It takes a professional Narrative Architect like McKew to construct a Potemkin Village made out of Mom and apple pie, with the American flag being the only drapery you'll ever need to protect your privacy and your lives.

A prolific tweeter herself, McKew amplified her message even more today by plugging her own appearances on both NPR and MSNBC to further warn Americans about the dangers of unsanctioned amplification. For super-duper amplification, the New York Times' David Leonhardt graciously plugged her piece in his column. She'll even be appearing at SXSW in Austin next month to amplify her paranoid brand to music fans. 

Meanwhile, the Republicans' cynical can of worms which I wrote about in my previous post is already on its way to being pried open thanks to Donald Trump's "unprecedented" attack on the surveillance state. The Times has filed suit, demanding that the entire transcript of the FISA matter regarding Carter Page be opened to public scrutiny. In ordering the cherry-picked Nunes memo declassified, Trump probably unwittingly opened a legal door toward more transparency. This is likely the real reason that the Neocon alliance was gnashing its teeth over a nonexistent threat to national security.

***

Further reading on Molly McKew and her Manichean mindset and possible grift:

Meet Molly McKew, War Lobbyist and Hero of #TheResistance, Washington Babylon. 

A New Cold War Against Russia is a Terrible Idea, New Republic.

American Says She Was Hounded Out of Moldova by Pro-Russian Politician, Buzzfeed

***

I've been reading Robert Coover's brilliant but underappreciated, maligned, and even repressed account (The Public Burning) of Cold War 1.0 and the Rosenberg executions. One passage in particular struck me, because it so perfectly captures the "zeitgeist" of RussiaGate, and why so many otherwise intelligent people are falling for the "narrative architecture" being amplified by Molly McKew and her compatriots in government and media.

Speaking as an imaginary Richard Nixon, Coover writes that there was

"... an almost Wagnerian scope to the prosecution's presentation, incorporating many of the major issues of our times, whether or not relevant to the crime charged; the sense throughout that this was clearly a struggle between the forces of good and evil... and a lot of pretty fair spy stories to the bargain, if the prosecution was to be believed: secret codenames, recognition signals, covert drop sites, escape plans, cover stories, payoffs, cat-and-mouse games with FBI surveillance teams, border intrigues. But there was more to it than that. Not only was everybody on this case from the Judge on down - indeed, just about everyone in the nation, in and out of government myself included - behaving like actors caught up in a play, but we all seemed moreover to be aware of just what we were doing and at the same time of our inability, committed as we were to some higher purpose, some larger script as it were, to do otherwise. Even the Rosenbergs seemed to be swept up in this sense of an embracing and compelling drama."

And further,

"And then what if, I wondered, there were no spy ring at all? What if all these characters believed there was and acted out their parts on this assumption, a whole courtroom full of fantasists? Certainly most of them had a gift for inventing themselves - or as they'd say in the CIA and KGB, for elaborating their covers - maybe, helplessly, they just dreamed it all up. Whereupon the Rosenbergs, thinking everybody was crazy, nevertheless fell for it, moving ineluctably into the martyr roles they'd been waiting for all along, eager to be admired and their heroism and their loyalty to the cause of their friends, some of whom, they were certain (the FBI said there was a spy ring, there had to be one) were members of the alleged conspiracy"

RussiaGate hysteria will live on until war breaks out, or until a Democratic-Neocon majority again takes over Congress and the White House and things can can get back to a semblance of normal: in other words, respectful bipartisanship and fairness and collegiality in love and secret war and tons of money. Nobody wants to give up his place on the stage at this point, because doing so would be both heresy and an admission of fraud, not to mention a career-buster. It's all a show. We are either complicit actors, unwilling spectators, or outright traitors to the Narrative Cause if we refuse to become properly cowed and afraid. We are simply not allowed to despise Donald Trump if we don't also firmly believe that he is a Putin puppet. We must pledge allegiance to the FBI, the CIA, and the NSA, if only because Trump is treating them so nastily. His insulting Tweets are deemed by the Miss Manners crowd to be so much worse than his real crimes, such as extrajudicial drone assassinations of civilians, which have now already overtaken those of his predecessor.

The one weapon we do still have is to relentlessly expose "consultants" like Molly McKew for exactly who they are: war profiteers. As ever, simply follow the money.