John Mattes, a San Diego area former journalist and ex-volunteer for Bernie Sanders has been the source of information for numerous “Russian hacking” media articles. For more information on this story, please see Part I and Part II on the Hard News Network.
Some would ask why someone like me so dedicated to opposing the principles of progressive politics across that side of the spectrum would bother to investigate a story and expose a media lie that was sustained and enlivened by corporate media outlets from Huffington Post to MSNBC to the New York Times and beyond that paints progressives in a bad light. The truth of the matter is that revealing journalistic malpractice is not about validating their views or mine; it is crucial to defending a society where people are free to make choices in dissent to the consensus. In undercover audio from last week, my colleague Adrian Lloyd (@JMSOPodcast) revealed just how far quack journalist John Mattes would go to defend the consensus rather than present the facts and the evidence:
- He stated that people that he knew are Russian agents were posting on the San Diego Berniecrats Facebook forum because they were sharing articles from RT, yet he has never produced photographic evidence of any of that. Instead he has produced posts by fellow group members Josephine Piarulli, Jim Boydston, and Aleta Pearce that have no connection to Russia or anything else (2:40).
- He claimed that Cambridge Analytica’s use of keyword strategies was evidence of a nefarious propaganda campaign as part of the “Russian infiltration”. How is that unique from any other SEO marketing group? Indeed if Russia wanted to read about this ubiquitous strategy they could just read the Journal of the American Medical Association. Are they Russian agents too? (9:00)
- He implied that Facebook could solve the issue of Russian infiltration by only allowing “real people” onto the platform. So in other words, according to John Mattes who opposes voter ID, your identity should have to be validated if you want to use a social media platform. No word on how he would propose to validate the identities of users in remote mountain areas of Perú or Indonesia if they want to connect to someone they know in the USA. (19:50)
Bizarrely he asserted this:
“We license and we monitor our media outlets, but since Facebook does not want to admit they’re a media outlet they don’t want to have the same parameters placed on them that media, traditional media companies have.” This is in direct contradiction of freedom of the press under the 1st Amendment, and Mattes as a self-declared investigative reporter should know that. (25:50)
Whose guilt complex?
There were several moments in the interview where I began to see reminders of the 2000 Gore campaign’s “Blame Nader” excuse making, only on steroids. At one point he unleashes this tirade against #BernieOrBust voters:
“Many of them (non-Hillary voters) cannot come to grips with what they brought upon us. Now think about, if you showed your obsession or your fetish with Hillary Clinton to vote against Hillary Clinton in the fall, you were giving a vote to Donald Trump. So you were making a judgment, now candidly those people who were so indoctrinated are still unable to come to grips with what they did. They elected a racist, homophobic man and they contributed to it. They may have to come to grips with what did they do? What did they do to African Americans? What did they do to gays and lesbians? What did they do to immigrants? . . . There has not been a self-realization on the part of these people, and they wallow in their ‘never Hillary’. Why not come to grips with what you did. . . by voting against Hillary?“
Mattes’ statement is highly ironic in that it was he, not Piarulli or Pearce, that ran to the media and concocted a baseless attack campaign that painted his former circle of fellow volunteers as guileless dupes of an amateurish troll campaign. He was doing this on behalf of his own personal career and the Super PAC American Bridge 21st Century (AM21C), an entity run by Sanders nemesis and Clinton acolyte David Brock.
When Adrian Lloyd asked Mattes on the phone about how he reported his findings, he said this: “Throughout the Fall of 2016 on a daily basis I shared what I was uncovering in terms of the posts, in terms of the posters, in terms of the trending, I shared that with the research arm of Hillary Clinton’s campaign [AM21C]. I’ve been criticized for that because I contacted her alter ego, a PAC run by David Brock. Yes, I alerted the Clinton campaign, and likewise I alerted the Obama Administration. I shared my information with a member of the national security team for Barack Obama.”
This is not only an admission to spying on behalf of a campaign on voters (Mattes never clued his friends in on this activity until going public), but possibly that he was acting as an informant for the US government. So then the question is this: If the government did have warning of this “Russian infiltration” not only from electronic surveillance but from a human informant, why was this ahem “credible threat” not addressed at the time? And if Mattes presented such evidence to the US government of infiltration, how come all that have emerged since then are irrelevant screenshots like this one from the Rachel Maddow Show. In this (see below), Mattes supplied to the helmet haired real-life Chicken Little a post by Boydston from March 19, 2017 which was more than 4 months AFTER the election. If he had so much evidence dating from September 2016 that he was supplying to AB21C, the national security apparatus, or whoever else he was talking to, why did he produce only this? It cannot be that it is “classified information” since he was reporting it to a Super PAC.
Liberalism this is not
Mattes’ comment about the Bernie Or Bust people is a window into the mind of the people that have made “liberal America” into a profoundly illiberal social culture. In the Voting Rights act of 1965, the following statement appears in Section 4c prohibiting voter tests:
(C) THE PHRASE “TEST OR DEVICE” SHALL MEAN ANY REQUIREMENT THAT A PERSON AS A PREREQUISITE FOR VOTING OR REGISTRATION FOR VOTING (1) DEMONSTRATE THE ABILITY TO READ, WRITE, UNDERSTAND, OR INTERPRET ANY MATTER, (2) DEMONSTRATE ANY EDUCATIONAL ACHIEVEMENT OR HIS KNOWLEDGE OF ANY PARTICULAR SUBJECT, (3) POSSESS GOOD MORAL CHARACTER, OR (4) PROVE HIS QUALIFICATIONS BY THE VOUCHER OF REGISTERED VOTERS OR MEMBERS OF ANY OTHER CLASS.
Most Americans would consider it a regressive and backward proposal to consider repealing any portion of this act, but unfortunately many commentators of the political elite (and the elite of the left most often) are attempting to suggest that there might as well be a literacy test if the votes don’t go their way. Take for example Foreign Policy‘s Jason Brennan who claimed that “Trump Won Because Voters Are Ignorant, Literally. Democracy is supposed to enact the will of the people. But what if the people have no clue what they’re doing?” And that was just the headline and subtext.
However, if the literacy test does not pass legal muster among the average voter, the political establishment of the Democratic Party will employ the guilt test. This is the deliberate emotional blackmail of voters that chose any option besides theirs in an election. The Democrats are employing any means at their disposal to wag fingers and tsk tsk at people that chose in November 2016 to not vote, or voted for a 3rd party candidate. And for those that decided to vote for Donald Trump they have already been attributed the label of the “irredeemable” by the Our Lady of the Blue Pantsuit. This is not the language of a liberal philosophy, but rather of a coercive judgmental one.
Our Lady of the Blue Pantsuit blesses the faithful. Please recite three “Hail Hillary full of grace” blessings when reading this. (Teen Vogue)
The Donkey Inquisition
This snobbish behaviour is characteristic of the party from the top of the pyramid (Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama) to the local organizational level. This mindset holds that those of us that have found fault in the doctrine of their party or Clinton’s personal record are merely intolerant hard-headed ingrates that lack the mental, moral, and intellectual capacity to be an informed voter. This type of attitude is in direct contradiction to the actual roots of the words liberal/liberalism which come from the Latin word liber (free). However due to the intertwining of liberal politicians with John Maynard Keynes’ social-democratic economics under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the term’s meaning has become elastic to the point of nullity.
To make matters worse, “liberalism” remains associated with business friendly policies in most of Europe and Australia as opposed to the United States. The confusion over this contradiction in terms has caused the formation of an ad hoc network of self-declared “liberalists” led by British vlogger Carl Benjamin (“Sargon of Akkad”) that aim to restore the previous enlightenment ideas that they call “liberalist principles“.
For this reason I respectfully dispute the claims made by Jimmy Dore and others that the Democratic Party schism is solely between “liberals” and “progressives”, because like progressives many “liberals” of bygone eras no longer have a home in either party. Opposing military intervention, foreign aid, deep state surveillance, and the lack of civil liberties is no longer a position linked to party affiliation. The defense of civil liberties and an open society is a cause that transcends communities of conservatives, liberals, progressives, or non-affiliated citizens. I am not going to support the views of the #BernieOrBust people involved in this article on immigration amnesty, Gaza, or the Fight for $15. They are not going to support me on issues of repealing Obamacare, deregulating the housing industry, or privatizing Social Security. I am willing to live with that, and hopefully so would they. But we do recognize that there is a common obstacle to us even talking about any of those topics: A political orthodoxy and duopoly sustained by a state security juggernaut and media apparatus that see its survival as essential for their success.
Let me leave you with one more quote from Mattes concerning fellow volunteers for the Bernie Sanders campaign that perfectly showcases his contempt for free choice:
On Sanders knowing he would lose and conceding:
“Think of how naive it was for people to believe that the Democratic Party was gonna give us a fair shake. I mean that’s just absurd. The Democratic Party is controlled by the same corporate interests as the Republican Party. . . Bernie did the right thing.”
On Piarulli, Boydston and the BernieOrBust crowd:
“I don’t know who ever said I was an administrator of a Bernie Sanders group. I’ve been a public spokesperson [for who?], ALL of my talks have been recorded. So again, I don’t want to disparage two sad individuals who ultimately ended up in the #NeverHillary camp, who if they didn’t vote they certainly tacitly supported the outcome of the election.”
By the power vested in him as an undercover operative of a political organization and his media enablers, John Mattes has judged you guilty of breaking the consensus. You have been warned.
This article is originally available here
