The New Blacklist
Russiagate may have been aimed at Trump to start, but it's become a way of targeting all dissent
Vladimir Putin posing in front of anti-American Russian Math.
If you don't think that the endgame to all of this lunacy is a world where every America-critical movement from Black Lives Matter to Our Revolution to the Green Party is ultimately swept up in the collusion narrative along with Donald Trump and his alt-right minions, you haven't been paying attention.
Putin loves you; therefore, you love Putin. The enemy re-tweets you, therefore, you're in league with the enemy. We're at war with them, therefore we're at war with you.
One of the first rules of a shunning campaign is that it doesn't have to make sense. It just has to be what everyone's saying. Since most Americans went to high school, we tend to be instinctively familiar with the concept.
Mass Media Politics ARE High School
Several years ago it hit me. The "civilized" world works just like high school. Politics are pop culture and personal experience as navigated by the personality archetypes we find in high school.
It was highly detrimental to my mental health to realize that Chucky "the Cave" Schumer was just a wealthy debate nerd with good counting skills and debate partner. You can find all the high school archetypes you want in public life.
High school as we experienced it "back in the day" is a free market of political interaction. I believe it to be highly relevant to political propaganda and mass manipulation.
Here's Lynn Cheney yukking it up on stage with Biff and Buffy McMoneybags:
Dick Cheney – “We’ve got proctors throughout the audience with microphones, you’ll notice they are the people with orange shirts.”
Lynn Cheney – “Dick, what do those orange shirts remind you of?….I’ll say it. How about John Kerry’s sun tan.”
Dick Cheney – “Oh, I may have to disassociate myself from that.” ;-)
The worst thing about that kind of high school shit? It was effective. Then and now. Now we've got Revenge of the Nerds where outcasts tear and shout down (rightly so, you've seen the movies) the cool kids with numbers.
What you don't have is sober adult conversation. That stuff happens outside of the public, as it would offend people's sensibilities. "High schoolers are just not ready for adult life."
The reality is that "adult" is code for horrifyingly amoral, and nobody wants to hear Kissinger talking about killing brown people for 3rd world population control or some freaky Neocon talking about how we can win a limited strike nuclear war.
Russians in Your Bodily Fluids
This Russians-are-in-our-precious-bodily-fluids insanity has progressed to the point where an anti-Russian documentary won the Oscar and host Jimmy Kimmel proudly declared, "At least we know Putin isn't rigging this competition!"
If you don't think that the endgame to all of this lunacy is a world where every America-critical movement from Black Lives Matter to Our Revolution to the Green Party is ultimately swept up in the collusion narrative along with Donald Trump and his alt-right minions, you haven't been paying attention.
That's because #Russiagate, from the start, was framed as an indictment not just of one potentially traitorous Trump, but all alternative politics in general. The story has evolved to seem less like a single focused investigation and more like the broad institutional response to a spate of shocking election results, targeting the beliefs of discontented Americans across the political spectrum.
Two years ago, remember, the American political establishment was on the ropes. Donald Trump, a race-baiting game show host who'd run for office as a publicity stunt, was galloping to the Republican nomination in a rout. He got 14 million primary votes; the Republicans' chosen $100 million man, Jeb Bush, got 286,000. On the Democratic side, the overwhelming party favorite, Hillary Clinton, was fighting to hold off a Corbynite socialist with little money and even less institutional support.
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Two years later, the narrative has completely shifted. By an extraordinary coincidence, virtually all the "anti-system" movements and candidates that so terrified the political establishment two years ago have since been identified as covert or overt Russian destabilization initiatives, puppeteered from afar by the diabolical anti-Western dictator, Vladimir von Putin-Evil.
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We've jumped straight past debating the efficacy of democracy to just reflexively identifying most anti-establishment sentiment as illegitimate, treasonous, and foreign in nature.
I've been called a Putin Puppet, and here on Steemit, RT host 
These political tactics should be completely obvious to any American watching. We're taught to sniff out snake oil and to distrust politicians. Not quite sure what happened there... We can't seem to smell bullshit even when it is being spat directly into our faces.
Recycling Wrongs Don't Make Right
The Hamilton 68 "dashboard" almost exactly mirrors that Homeland Security Advisory program. It's a snappy-looking media-ready thingamadoodle with no real purpose beyond constantly reminding the public to be afraid of enemies in their midst. And it's run by many of the same ought-to-have-been-disgraced War on Terror yahoos who led us into the last mess.
Not only is the notorious Kristol of Weekly Standard and Project for a New American Century fame one of its leaders, but so is Michael Chertoff, the man who took over the Homeland Security department – and its asinine color-coded scare program – when Tom Ridge couldn't stomach it anymore.
That these people now are being upheld as heroes of liberalism is incredible. Only a few short years ago they were widely derided as the very dumbest people in the country, raving paranoiacs who humped every false lead from Niger to Ahmed Chalabi's hotel suite in order to justify invasions, torture, secret prisons and the establishment of a monstrous, intractable, and illegal surveillance regime. And now we're letting these same people dominate every news cycle when this time, years early, they're already admitting they might be wrong?
The anti-Russian neoMcCarthyism attempts to exclude and erase nearly all the news voices who have been correct in the 21st Century. Instead we are to depend on the likes of Bill Kristol and his sociopathic perpetual war goons...