Caveat Resistor: the Church of Russiagate
originally published 14 May 2018 - part 2 of 2
The Deep State and DNC officials are colluding to pull off a heist on the Democratic Party that will maximize the power of the military-intelligence network within electoral politics, allowing the US military-intelligence apparatus to rewrite the laws that govern it at a time when the government's war powers are undeniably expanding. To distract from this broad daylight heist, the establishment media, wearing its opposition to the president as a badge of honor, spins an elaborate fiction in which those intelligence agencies are comrades in the anti-Trump Resistance, defenders of truth, justice and the American Way. The media, too, are indispensable allies in the fight against Trump, fearless standard-bearers of impartial journalism, incorruptible merchants of facts.
Caveat Resistor.
You may believe you have signed up for a political movement, but you are getting a religion, and it does not tolerate heretics. The Resistance, once a broad-based grassroots coalition fighting for progressive change against the system that produced President Trump, has been weaponized and turned against its own members in an effort to silence dissent.
WE COULD BE HEROES (BUT WHY BOTHER)
In Resistance cosmology, Special Counsel Robert Mueller is the St. George to Trump’s dragon - a righteous crusader destined to take down the monster holding the people in thrall. His ascension as the Voice of Resistance was accompanied by a rollout of merchandise selling solidarity: “It’s Mueller Time!” But Mueller, who presided over the transformation of the FBI from a law-enforcement agency to a Minority Report-esque pre-crime organization during his tenure as Bush’s FBI Director, is no friend to the Left. His FBI massively expanded its surveillance of Americans and enabled the Bush administration’s evisceration of civil liberties. Now, as the “grand inquisitor” of Russiagate, he has a blank check to lay siege to the Trump presidency for as long as he desires. As the investigation drags on into its second year, Mueller has trampled attorney-client privilege, the rules of special prosecutions, the fourth amendment, and other inconvenient laws in his quest to bag the great orange whale, yet failed to uncover the holy grail - proof of collusion with the Russian government. Trump’s hands are tied, with every muscle of the Resistance tensed and ready to rip out his throat should he fire the Special Counsel, and Mueller is just biding his time until someone in the president’s inner circle screws up. Meanwhile, the Resistance hangs on his every word.
Ex-FBI Director James Comey is the top martyr in the Resistance pantheon, a Christ-like figure unjustly brought low by the spray-tanned tyrant. Establishment court jester Jimmy Kimmel was already selling “Comey Is My Homey” t-shirts for $29.99 hours after Trump fired the FBI Director, whom noted war criminal John McCain called “arguably the most respected person in America” without a trace of irony. Acting as Attorney General under Bush, Comey signed off on the arrest and imprisonment of US citizens on US soil without due process; authorized the torture program; OK’d the NSA’s domestic surveillance operations; tried to outlaw end-to-end encryption; and used National Security Letters to collect email and browsing records on American citizens without a warrant. His saintly, slightly constipated visage conceals a vindictive bumbler.
Beyond specific agents, though, the FBI’s history is one of all-out war with the Left. Recasting the agency as the shock troops of the Resistance requires a complete break with history. There is a reason COINTELPRO remains a household word in activist circles - the program decimated leftist groups in the 1960s. Agents infiltrated, surveilled, sowed dissent, provoked, entrapped, smeared, and otherwise terrorized law-abiding citizens the Bureau saw as threats. COINTELPRO began at the height of the Red Scare and officially concluded in 1971 after its exposure resulted in public outcry, though its techniques remain in use, emboldened by unprecedented expansion of agency powers under the Patriot Act, targeting Muslims, Occupy protesters, and Black Lives Matter activists. Then as now, agents saw Russian influence behind every protest; then as now, the media was a willing partner in their operations, taking agents’ claims as gospel and reprinting them uncritically. Then, however, no one was dumb enough to think the FBI was on the side of the activists.
Like the FBI, the CIA is a lifelong enemy of the Left. While legally prohibited from operating on American soil, the agency always ignored such restrictions, launching Operation CHAOS in 1959 to spy on Cuban exiles arriving in Florida in order to recruit anti-Castro operatives. This domestic surveillance program expanded to college campuses during the Vietnam War, using many of the same techniques as the FBI’s COINTELPRO agents to infiltrate and sabotage anti-war groups. FBI and CIA competed for the favor of President Johnson with their reports on campus activism. CHAOS was discontinued in 1973, but the CIA has periodically gotten the band back together to surveil dissidents during Reagan’s regime-change wars in Central America and the first Gulf War, always denying it vigorously when caught. Former CIA and NSA Director Michael Hayden epitomizes the CIA’s antagonistic relationship with the truth - Hayden had the dubious distinction of lying under oath more than anyone else in the Bush administration when he testified about the agency’s torture program. Yet we are supposed to trust their “high confidence” that the Russian government “aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances.” These are the same intelligence agencies that Schumer warned had “six ways from Sunday” of getting back at Trump - but they aren’t vindictive, just impartial lawmen keeping the world safe for democracy (ex-CIA Director John Brennan to Trump: “America will triumph over you").
The CIA has rehabilitated its image since the days of the Church Committee with the help of Hollywood, establishing the Entertainment Liaison Office to encourage positive film portrayals of the agency in return for access and advice, and the mainstream news media, which it has effectively controlled since the days of Operation Mockingbird. While Mockingbird, in which the agency paid journalists to plant or promote some stories and suppress others, was exposed in 1975, it was never discontinued - if anything, the program has expanded now that it’s out in the open. New guidelines adopted by Comey’s FBI enshrined the Mockingbird model in law in 2014, permitting agents to impersonate journalists. Given all this, it’s unsurprising that only 32% of Americans report trust in the mass media. Democrats, who’ve uncritically embraced the media establishment as partners in the anti-Trump Resistance since the election, report higher levels of trust than Republicans (51% to 14%).
With establishment media outlets consolidated into just a few monolithic corporations able to unilaterally dictate the limits of acceptable discourse, the CIA no longer needs to buy friendly journalists. Former CIA directors Leon Panetta and John Brennan are regular contributors to NBC, MSNBC and CBS. Despite self-identifying as members of the Resistance - the intelligence community has been at war with Trump since the beginning - they endorsed the president’s nomination of “Bloody” Gina Haspel for their old job just as they’ve endorsed the other hawks with whom he’s stacked his cabinet. Haspel ran a black site prison in Thailand and destroyed evidence of torture against presidential orders, but she’s OK with the Resistance. And Henry Kissinger. And John Negroponte. Not a peep of Resistance against too-unhinged-for-CNN John Bolton or Rapture-awaiter Mike Pompeo from these old spies, either. Those intelligence vets who do stand up for human rights, like Ray McGovern, are quickly silenced. Their Resistance never makes it onto the news.
James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence under Obama, leaked the discredited Steele dossier to CNN, lied about it to Congress, and was rewarded with a position at CNN. Clapper is no stranger to lying under oath, most famously denying the NSA’s domestic spying program to Congress. He embodies the unhealthy relationship between the government and the supposedly independent media who cover it. Anderson Cooper, the dashing Vanderbilt scion, interned with the CIA for two years. Though his homosexuality gives him liberal cover, he’s as hawkish as his ex-CIA colleagues. Wolf Blitzer worked for AIPAC before joining CNN and one could be forgiven for believing he still collects a paycheck from the Israeli lobby; he raised the specter of the Holocaust while condemning Trump’s response to the Charlottesville riots, called out former Trump press secretary Sean Spicer for comparing the false flag Syrian gas attack to the Holocaust, and in general works the Trump/Hitler angle tirelessly. Blitzer was scouted by the CIA while writing for the Jerusalem Post in Tel Aviv. No CNN commentator has ever spoken out against an American war, and the reason is clear from the commercials that run between programs - ads for Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, Raytheon - as if the average CNN viewer was in the market for a cruise missile.
VILLAINS
The rise of independent media loosened the stranglehold of the Mockingbird establishment, a fact that was unavoidable during the 2016 election. Mainstream media refused to cover the Sanders campaign, relegating DNC debates to time slots opposite major football games, yet his rallies drew tens of thousands of supporters, he won several primaries while raking in record small-dollar donations, and if not for his party’s electoral machinations, he probably would have secured the nomination. On the Right, the rise of Alex Jones unsettled the Clinton campaign enough that she called him out by name in a speech. The media clearly had an emergency on its hands, and the “fake news” psy-op was born. Media complicity in Deep State propaganda reached a new low when the Washington Post uncritically promoted the anonymous blacklist PropOrNot, which smeared hundreds of alternative-media websites as Russian propaganda geared toward sowing discord and influencing the election - and warned that the end goal was “Russian-orchestrated political violence in the US,” calling on the FBI and Justice Department to investigate the blacklistees for espionage. WaPo, which declined to name the individuals behind PropOrNot or share any information aside from their Ukrainian national origin, was forced to rescind the allegations when several of the libeled sites threatened to sue, but accusations of Russian disinformation have been a staple of online arguments ever since.
A closer look at PropOrNot reveals ties to CrowdStrike, the security firm credited with finding the not-quite-smoking-gun evidence that Russia "hacked the election." CrowdStrike was paid by the DNC to uncover evidence of Russian hacking; unable to do so conclusively, they fudged it, gave it to US intelligence, and enlisted Twitter influencer Andrea Chalupa to post thousands of unhinged tweets calling for an audit of the election in the hope that no one with the proper technical knowledge would take a closer look at CrowdStrike's mess. Irene Chalupa, Andrea’s sister, is a news anchor on Stopfake.org, the "Ukrainian Snopes" established during the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea to combat Russian propaganda; a third sister, Alexandra Chalupa, works as a strategist with the DNC. Coincidence, surely.
PropOrNot’s Ukrainian connections suggest something more ominous in store for dissident journalists than baseless smear campaigns. In late 2014, the far-Right government of Petro Poroshenko established a Ministry of Information Policy to combat - you guessed it - Russian propaganda. Tasked with developing and implementing a “state information strategy,” protecting citizens from “partial, ill-judged and unreliable information” (fake news), and “registering media outlets and defining professional standards," the Orwellian bureau recruited private citizens to join its “i-army” in the fight against Russian disinformation. A website called Mirotvorets that kept a database of "enemies of Ukraine" doxxed more than 5000 journalists operating in the separatist region of Donetsk. Labeled “terrorist collaborators,” they were deluged with death threats; some were violently attacked. Self-styled "patriotic journalists" dismissed them as "traitors" who had it coming. The US government doesn’t do this - yet - but PropOrNot is just Mirotvorets recreated for the American stage; the blacklist has already led to many alternative media journalists being smeared as Russian agents or "useful idiots," and rancor directed at journalists who question the establishment line on Russiagate and related stories has only grown since last year.
Government response to the alleged Russian infiltration of US media is shaping up to resemble the three-pronged strategy of the Ukrainian MIP, which is unsurprising given that the US stage-managed the Euromaidan uprising that installed Poroshenko's government. The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Report on Russian Active Measures, released in March, recommended "educating" and "inoculating" populations against Russian influence campaigns (NATO-allied influence campaigns are OK, apparently), as well as freeing the executive branch to respond to “foreign threats” with military force if deemed necessary - an especially terrifying measure given the concurrent blank-check AUMF being debated in Congress. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which likens Russian election interference to 9/11 (!), came to similar conclusions in its not-alarmist-at-all report Putin's Asymmetric Assault on Democracy, in some cases using the exact same phrases ("inoculating the population against fake news"). Though neither report found evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, the House had some helpful ideas for stepping up penalties on whistleblowers, while the Senate suggested criminalizing the sharing of "fake news." This tradition goes all the way back to the Warren Commission, which failed to reach any conclusions regarding the JFK assassination but nevertheless recommended increased surveillance of activist groups. Like 9/11, "Russian hacking" is just a means to tighten control of the people by a government diametrically opposed to authentic Resistance in any way, shape, or form.
TV AS SKINNER BOX
Resistance media, while keeping up a jaw-dropping 91% negative coverage of Trump's administration, always seems to miss the most egregious crimes of his presidency: Saudi Arabia using US weapons to commit war crimes on the people of Yemen; more civilian deaths by drone in the first nine months of Trump’s presidency than in two years of Obama; Jared Kushner’s collusion with the Israeli government to squash a UN Security Council resolution condemning illegal Israeli settlements; a threefold increase in NSA data collection last year. Instead, the media chorus is a maelstrom of sound and fury, signifying nothing - Stormy Daniels, the White House press dinner, and ominous palace gossip that Trump is going to fire Mueller any day now. The president’s obsession with his media image is his Achilles’ heel, and establishment outlets have become adept at increasing and decreasing pressure to produce desired behavior.
The Resistance’s silence on Trump’s overseas military adventures lays bare the moral bankruptcy of the media. CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, who gushed that Trump had finally become president after bombing Syria last year, busted out his cheerleader outfit again after last month’s strikes, qualifying his approval by expressing concern that Trump wasn't bombing enough. Seven of the top 10 US newspapers supported last month’s missile strikes in Syria, putting aside that they were illegal under both US and international law. Only the NY Times, NY Daily News, and San Jose Mercury News abstained from the military-industrial lovefest, stopping short of condemning the strikes. The Wall Street Journal actually proposed expanding the war into Iran and Russia. Not one of the top 100 papers condemned the strikes on legal or moral grounds, though like their counterparts in Congress, many bemoaned the lack of a “greater Syria strategy” - more bombings. Beneath the surface of the elusive "liberal media" is the “cruise missile left,” deftly framing US imperialist aggression as humanitarian, a fantasy helped along by propaganda organizations like the Oscar-winning White Helmets in Syria. Instead of strong anti-war voices, the Left gets “Pentagon liberals” like Rachel Maddow who mouth progressive buzzwords while shilling for the military-industrial complex. Maddow actually teared up while covering Trump’s latest strike on Damascus, clearly experiencing some sort of transcendent wargasm as the missiles descended on the ancient city. An early and enthusiastic Russiagate acolyte, she has devoted most of her airtime since the election to the elusive “scandal,” ignoring matters of substance on which she could have scored points against Trump. The president could rescue a kitten from a burning building and the Resistance establishment would claim he set the fire, but when he bombs a sovereign nation without provocation, they fall to their knees. This is not Resistance. This is enabling.
BRINGING THE REVOLUTION HOME
The idea of a broad-based Resistance arose from the post-election war-room meetings of a massive network of Obama administration alumni. Still “obsessed” with the man one ex-staffer called “our Jesus Christ,” the shell-shocked Obama acolytes flew into action days after the election to protect their leader’s legacy, though they had a hard time listing any of the touchstones of that legacy aside from Obamacare, DACA, and “his climate regulation." Perhaps Politico found it impolitic to remind the reader of the "people power" revolutions engineered by the Obama/Clinton State Department - the secular Arab republics that fell in the Arab Spring to become terror-ridden hellholes, or their last great achievement knocking out the pro-Russian Yanukovych government in Ukraine, leading to Russia's annexation of Crimea and separatist clashes in the east that continue to this day. But these starry-eyed Obama cultists, still motivated by their guru's “stirring message of hope and change" despite having encountered neither in the preceding eight years, saw only possibilities. Hope springs eternal! They became the architects of the Resistance, determined to take Trump down and restore the rightful political order by bringing home the color revolution model that had worked so well abroad. Now all they needed were some warm bodies to fill the streets.
With more than 4.2 million participants across over 600 cities, the Women's March was the largest single day of mass political action in American history, hailed unequivocally as a triumph of the Resistance. Organizer Carmen Perez specifically warned against focusing too much on Trump, while lead strategist Mrinalini Chakraborty clarified that it was less an anti-Trump rally than a “solidarity march that highlights global issues.” Participants included environmental, civil rights, labor, women’s, and immigrants’ groups - a genuinely broad grassroots coalition with much bigger fish to fry than Trump - and the March’s “unity principles” support an admirable array of social-justice causes from anti-war to workers’ rights. Unsurprisingly, COINTELPRO began nibbling at the Women’s March before the event even began. Mic called out the ubiquitous pink “pussyhats” at the March as “trans-exclusionary” for implying a link between women and vaginas; the story was picked up by at least 15 "mock the snowflakes"-type conservative blogs. A Facebook squabble over privilege was clearly intended to drive a wedge between experienced activists and their less "woke" peers, the latter of whom showed up at the march in unprecedented numbers anyway. The three non-white organizers - Perez, Tamika Mallory, and Linda Sarsour - were denounced as anti-Semites for refusing to disavow the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan; Sarsour, a Palestinian who supports the BDS movement, was called a terrorist and worse for finding Zionism "creepy," and the organizers' refusal to let the accusations distract from their activism only made their detractors more strident. Ironically, that left only Bob Bland, the one white leader, who had initially brought the three seasoned activists on board because of the glaring lack of diversity in protest leadership as well as her own lack of protest experience. To Bland’s credit, she stuck by her co-organizers, marking International Women's Day with "a Day Without a Woman," a sort of performative general strike in which participants abstained from all economic participation while wearing red, but the damage was done - the fickle Resistance media was almost snarky in its coverage, panning the event as well as the March group itself and suggesting would-be activists check out Indivisible instead. It was clear who had gotten the contract for the Resistance.
While the Women’s March was inspiring constructive protests by thousands of newly-minted activists, the Indivisible Guide was inspiring obstructionism. Indivisible modeled itself on the Tea Party, which had effectively blocked the Obama administration from accomplishing much of its planned legislative agenda. Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin refashioned the Tea Party’s modus operandi for progressives, emphasizing the need to organize locally, present a united front, delegitimize the opposition, and obstruct, obstruct, obstruct. This is the model the Resistance establishment has chosen to champion, and it’s not difficult to see why, as it perfectly mirrors the official policy platform (or lack thereof) of the DNC and DCCC. Indivisible is the bible of the Party of No. The guide advises readers to find and influence extant activist groups where possible rather than “reinvent the wheel” by starting their own - to infiltrate and coopt, COINTELPRO-style, activist groups and transform them into obstructionist (inactivist) groups. Rather than form an intersectional opposition network - a more geographically diffuse take on the Occupy model, and an organizational nightmare if you're trying to create an easily-controlled color revolution - the Resistance was encouraged to be reactionary, avoid "policy solutions," and stall for time like their lives depended on it - just as Republicans did in their opposition to Obama. The potential for a new Occupy was thus averted. The FBI had outsourced COINTELPRO without having to lift a finger.
Politico champions Greenberg and Levin for their success in stonewalling Trump, but they forget the ending of the Tea Party story. Just as Obama eventually resigned himself to governing by executive order, unable to secure Congressional approval to so much as blow his nose, so will Trump. He has already unilaterally bombed Syria twice, pulled out of the JCPOA and Paris Climate Treaty despite global pearl-clutching, and now - with Congress poised to hand him unprecedented warmaking powers - could light up the globe if another world leader made fun of his hair. Just as instructive is what he has not done - Trump has not met with Putin at all, nor attempted to engage Russia politically, as he promised on the campaign trail. The posturing with missile strikes in Syria is simply an elaborate and expensive form of interpretive dance - this is the only way the US is allowed to communicate with the evil empire from which we have isolated ourselves, since to get closer, to understand the “enemy,” would be to collude. It’s yet another self-handicapping gunshot wound to the foot, hand-delivered by a Resistance that could have at least backed Trump into a more geostrategically advantageous corner.
Between Russiagate and his cabinet of rabid hawks and neocon revenants, Trump has ensured he will be incapable of governing effectively. The energy of the Resistance has been transformed - the rushing water has become the dam - and the would-be color revolution sits on the shelf, an insurance policy against Trump becoming the populist, swamp-draining crusader he fooled his working-class supporters into believing he was. But this assumes Trump was ever an anti-establishment candidate. He may not be of the Washington political elite that produced Clinton, but he moves through those circles as a real estate billionaire with his fingers in so many dubiously legal pies he needs multiple lawyers to keep track of them all. After his inauguration, Trump wasted no time cuddling up to Netanyahu and the Saudi royal family, the two worst violators of human rights and the US’s closest allies. As he revealed he was willing to play ball with the ruling class, that human life meant as little to him as it did to them, they breathed a sigh of relief, but have kept the Resistance on a tight leash, ready to let it loose should he evince a glimmer of geostrategic rebellion.
STRANGE BEDFELLOWS
During the election, Trump was simply too unpredictable, too un-beholden to powerful interest groups, to satisfy the Deep State or the neocons. It’s hard to remember now, as he drops record numbers of bombs, but he ran on an unusually noninterventionist platform for the Republican party. Clinton, voted Most Likely to Start World War 3 in the DNC yearbook, was the consummate Deep State Democrat. Faced with a candidate who might cut off their war supply, the self-styled Never-Trumpers donned the mantle of the Resistance and wasted no time trumpeting their ideological common ground with the Democratic Party. Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan, who had already rebranded their notorious Project for a New American Century as the Foreign Policy Initiative to escape the stink of the Bush doctrine, were well-versed in liberal vocabulary, having weaponized LGBT rights against Putin’s Russia. Imperialist Pollyanna Max Boot tried out some liberal buzzwords of his own, baring his newly enlightened soul in a meditation on white male privilege. The neocons were Russia hawks before it was cool - they joined the Republican party in the 1980s because of Democrats’ waning enthusiasm for Cold War militarism. Democrats, having already choked down Clinton’s neocon foreign policy, found the PNAC boys’ belligerence easy to swallow afterwards and readily adopted their imperialist rationale to give ideological heft to their own newborn Russophobia (again, it’s hard to remember now that Putin is blamed for all the country’s evils from mass shootings to institutionalized racism, but Obama actually mocked Romney during the 2012 election for his Russophobia: “the 1980s are calling to ask for their foreign policy back”). The bipartisan lovefest gave neocons a chance to rebrand with the added bonus of delegitimizing the few remaining anti-war voices of the Resistance; they were the real progressives now.
The worst tendencies of the new Resistance-Plus emerged in the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a bipartisan initiative whose stated mission is defending “democracy” against Russian interference, “applying the lessons” of 2016’s still-unproven election meddling and documenting “Vladimir Putin’s ongoing efforts to subvert democracy in the United States and Europe.” The ASD created the Hamilton 68 Dashboard, which purports to track Russian twitterbot influence despite utterly unscientific methodology - the tool was enthusiastically adopted by the establishment media, which uses it to smear dissident journalists. ASD is run by Clinton campaign foreign policy advisor Laura Rosenberger and rabid neocon Jamie Fly, who spent the Obama years lustfully advocating for preemptive war on Iran; he openly mocked the idea of diplomacy as a foreign policy option and essentially called the president a slacker for only dropping 72 bombs a day. Yet the ASD is fully in alignment with the new Democratic Party line epitomized by Clinton, in which the party that once protested the Vietnam War now out-hawks the GOP.
Kagan threw a public tantrum after Trump’s nomination, calling himself a “former Republican” and announcing that “the party cannot be saved, but the country still can be.” For a minute, it looked like the GOP might take him up on his implied offer, embracing non-interventionism in the person of the mercurial Trump, but the president-elect soon disappointed everyone by cleaving to the traditional party line. Still, 2016 could be considered a referendum on neoconservatism - in the crowded GOP primary, the neocon candidates were quick to flame out despite heavy funding. Bush, whose very name is synonymous with his older brother’s eponymous Doctrine, couldn’t crack 1% of the electorate despite his bottomless campaign war chest. Rubio, whose lack of experience and foreign policy knowledge made him an ideal empty vessel for the ideas of advisers like Jamie Fly, had a brief moment in the sun as the Not-Trump candidate, but even the most skilled puppeteer couldn’t make a statesman out of him. Cruz was never a proper neocon, but the PNAC relics were desperate for a candidate at that point, and the sniveling Senator from Texas was at least a politician. At a time when the world had finally awoken to the utter moral irredeemability of the imperialist sociopaths, it was liberals who were tricked into offering them shelter under the auspices of the Resistance. We fucked up. Like vampires, neocons cannot enter one's home uninvited; like vampires, they are unlikely to leave without draining the host of blood. The neocon faction was quick to take over the GOP last time they switched parties, and they are almost certainly involved in the unprecedented numbers of former CIA and military intelligence running for office on the Democratic ticket, many of whom cut their teeth in covert ops fighting the neocons' wars. While the DNC squabbles about impeachment and delusional lawsuits, the neocons are consolidating control; Kagan, clearly in for the long haul, is already calling himself a "liberal interventionist."
When progressives fell in line behind Clinton as the Democratic nominee, they were forced to reconcile her overcompensatory militarism with their own anti-war sentiments. Excusing the crimes of one neocon excuses them all - Clinton robbed the party of the moral legitimacy it has always clung to in the country’s darkest hours. Under Obama, Democratic voters could at least claim they’d been hoodwinked - they’d voted for hope, change, and anyone-but-Bush, and he’d given them drones, whistleblower prosecutions, and Bush-in-a-black-man-suit. But Clinton never misled anyone about her positions. Sure, she swaddled her warmongering in a lot of humanitarian bubble-wrap, making sure everyone had heard the stories of Gaddafi’s viagra-fueled rape brigades before laying waste to the most advanced country in Africa, but under her leadership, the State Department was essentially transformed into an arm of the military, giving diplomatic cover to military action and expanding the US military presence into over 100 countries. Like Kristol, Boot, and the other PNAC war-junkies who have been wrong about everything from Iraq to Trump himself, she adamantly refuses to learn from her mistakes, or even admit they were mistakes - a misplaced confidence that her followers mistake for a leadership quality. And it is progressives who suffer, who are ignored, ridiculed, antagonized, and smeared unless they adopt the new orthodoxy. Even Jill Stein, whose quixotic fundraising efforts for a recount the Clinton campaign didn't even want should have endeared her to the election-deniers, got the full Ralph Nader treatment as those supporters flailed around for anyone to blame besides the person in the mirror.
The portion of the media now devoted to covering the Gospel of Russiagate means Trump is literally getting away with murder, somewhere in Yemen or Somalia, with the collusion of a Congress about to be packed full of intelligence operatives. Journalists are all but burned at the stake for the heresy of questioning western-friendly geopolitical narratives, tarred as bots, trolls, and useful idiots, their accounts blocked or censored in a chilling presentiment of the Ukrainian Ministry of Information Policy's state-sponsored violence. A free and adversarial press is integral to a free society. Religious doctrine and palace intrigue masquerading as news is not. The Resistance must recover its moral center and start acting instead of reacting. If the US starts World War 3, it will not matter if Trump fires Mueller, because we will all be dead.