Joe Giambrone
The Moscow Circus is back in town for an extended engagement. Democratic Party neo-liberals have abandoned the concept of debating one another to produce the most popular candidate for voters and instead have devolved into an endless stream of slander and evidence-free conspiracy theories about alleged ties to Russia. Hillary Clinton’s recent remarks smearing Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard, and also 2016 Green Party candidate Jill Stein, have epitomized this “Neo-McCarthyism,” a strategy based on a Big Lie—that the Russian government is somehow backing one’s political opponents. No proof is required: not against Representative Gabbard, not against anyone. Clinton’s audience is pre-conditioned, over several years of anti-Russian propaganda, to simply believe these kinds of baseless claims.
The political environment has been poisoned since Clinton blamed a hypothetical Russian plot for her loss, rather than accepting electoral defeat with a bit of grace.
Said Clinton:
“This is an attack against our country. We are well beyond normal political concerns here. This is about the integrity of our democracy and the security of our nation.”
Her own campaign had already been exposed for rigging the 2016 Democratic Party primary in her favor against Bernie Sanders, glaringly anti-democratic. The exposure of Clinton’s “secret takeover” of the DNC prompted Tulsi Gabbard to resign from that organization and speak out against it. Hillary Clinton’s 2016 money-laundering scheme may have skirted campaign finance laws to the tune of $84 million.
The beauty and convenience of blaming Russia for all ills is that Russia remains an official enemy, a perpetual bad guy in a black hat,who can do nothing right. In the “Russian troll” myth, all Russians are the government of Russia, or simply “Putin,” despite no evidence ever having been produced to substantiate this assumption. We know that a “troll farm” called the Internet Research Agency is located inside Russia, and this is in fact a private company of spammers churning out cheap garbage on a wide variety of topics. A journalist might ask the reasonable question of why the Russian government would continue to use a known entity that’s appeared across Western news reports and is even cited in US government indictments for years? Is that how covert operations actually work?
Troll farms and spam-bots are in no way unique to Russia, either. Troll farms are in China, Mexico, Israel and anywhere else people spend some money on computers and cheap labor to produce social media junk. You could build a nefarious “troll farm” in your garage tonight if you wanted to. There is no barrier to entry. A “bot” is just a simple computer program to send out the junk, but which is now elevated to mythic status when the word “Russian” precedes it.
Unfortunately, for Hillary Clinton et al., her “Russian bots” slander was exposed earlier this year as a fraud, a hoax, a sham, as revealed in the NY Times and by Glenn Greenwald in The Intercept. It turns out to be ridiculously easy to fake a “Russian bot” presence and smear your political opponents, in this case one Judge Roy Moore of Alabama:
“NBC News, to smear Gabbard as a Kremlin favorite, relied on a group that it heralded as ‘experts’ without telling its audience about the major fraud which this firm just got caught perpetrating in order to, on behalf of the Democratic Party, fabricate claims of Kremlin interference in the Alabama Senate race (Greenwald).”
Fabrications. This company is “New Knowledge,” and its head, Jonathan Morgan, was actually banned from Facebook for pulling this fraud:
“That fraud was overseen by New Knowledge’s CEO, Jonathon Morgan… In other words, Morgan used his own fake Russian accounts to lie to the public and deceive the national media into believing that Kremlin-linked accounts were trying to defeat the Democratic Senate candidate when, in fact, the accounts he was citing were ones he himself had fabricated and controlled (Greenwald).”
The thoroughly debunked “Russian bots” smear against Major Tulsi Gabbard appeared in Greenwald’s piece, “NBC News, to Claim Russia Supports Tulsi Gabbard, Relies on Firm Just Caught Fabricating Russia Data for the Democratic Party.”
“Within a few days of Gabbard announcing her presidential bid, DisInfo 2018, part of the cybersecurity firm New Knowledge, found that three of the top 15 URLs shared by the 800 social media accounts affiliated with known and suspected Russian propaganda operations directed at U.S. citizens were about Gabbard.”
This was all but settled in February of 2019, until Hillary Clinton resurrected the smear last week.
But Why attack a current Major in the US Army National Guard?
Hillary Clinton and her neo-liberal faction represent certain interests that Rep. Gabbard vocally opposes. This conflict is direct and non-negotiable.
(more…)
Like this:
Like Loading...
Political Film Blog 