The USA is going the way of Yugoslavia. By Chris Hedges, who used to work for the New York Times but has an interesting perspective because he lives in left-world.
There is no report, investigation or new revelation, including the recent release of Special Counsel John Durham’s … that will implode the myth that Russia was responsible for the election of Donald Trump.
Myths are impervious to facts. They fulfill an emotional yearning. They are a short circuit from reality into a world of childish simplicity. Hard and painful questions are avoided. Thought-terminating cliches are spat out to blissfully embrace a willed ignorance.
The cynical con the Democratic Party and the FBI carried out to falsely portray Donald Trump as a puppet of the Kremlin worked, and continues to work, because it is what those who detest Trump want to believe.
Note the “DNC approved”
If Russia is blamed for Trump’s election, we avoid the unpleasant reality of our failed democratic institutions and decaying empire. We avoid facing the inevitable rise of a Christianized fascism [??] borne out of widespread impoverishment, rage, despair and abandonment.
We avoid acknowledging the complicity of the Democratic Party in the orchestration of the largest social inequality in our nation’s history, the evisceration of our basic civil liberties, endless wars and an electoral system bankrolled by the billionaire class, which is legalized bribery. The myth allows us to believe that Democratic politicians, like the establishment Republicans who have joined them, are the guarantors of a democracy they destroyed. …
Messengers who bear news of the religion’s falseness are ignored:
Shatter the myths, even if the facts are incontrovertible, and you become a pariah.
I found this out when I and a handful of others, including Robert Scheer, Phil Donahue and Michael Moore, denounced calls to invade Iraq. It made no difference that I had been the Middle East Bureau Chief for The New York Times, was an Arabic speaker and had spent seven years reporting in the region, including in Iraq. I was censored, driven from The New York Times and attacked by George W. Bush’s useful idiots in the media, and the Democratic Party, as an apologist for Saddam Hussein.
The same ugly reception greeted those of us who questioned the “evidence” used to argue that Trump was a tool of Russia. We were branded stooges of Moscow and Trump apologists. We were again locked out of the debate.
Reality:
All the investigations into Trump’s ties with Russia are unequivocal. There was no collusion. The Steele dossier, financed at first by Republican opponents of Trump and later by Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and compiled by former MI6 British intelligence officer, Christopher Steele, was a fake. … Mueller did not indict or accuse anyone of criminally conspiring with Russia.
Durham’s 306-page report, sent to Congress by Attorney General Merrick Garland earlier this week, is even more excoriating. It concludes that the FBI engaged in a witch hunt — code named Crossfire Hurricane — orchestrated by Hillary Clinton’s campaign that was aided and abetted by senior FBI officials who loathed Trump. …
The FBI and media are out of control:
The report documents a systematic abuse of power by senior members of the FBI to advance Hillary Clinton’s campaign. …
The courtiers in the liberal media, who cater to an anti-Trump demographic and who spent years giving credibility to rumors, gossip and lies about Trump and Russia, predictably minimized or dismissed the report’s findings.
It’s always bad when the secret police get involved in your country’s politics.
Now for the bad news, from a lefty who desperately needs to believe it isn’t overwhelmingly his side that is currently making stuff up:
The myth of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election provides a convenient escape hatch from the political, social, cultural and economic rot that plagues the U.S.
The liberal class, by clinging to this conspiracy theory, is as disconnected from reality as the QAnon theorists and election deniers that support Trump.
The retreat by huge segments of the population into non-reality-based belief systems leaves a polarized nation unable to communicate. Neither side speaks a language rooted in verifiable fact.
This bifurcation, one I witnessed in the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, fuels the distrust and hatred between antagonistic demographics. It accelerates political disintegration and dysfunction. It is used to justify, as was true with the FBI investigation of Trump, gross abuses of power.
If those you oppose are evil — and rhetorically we are close to embracing such apocalyptic rhetoric — anything is permitted to thwart the enemy from achieving power. This is the lesson of the Durham report. It is an ominous warning.
hat-tip Stephen Neil
