"They have vacated the world of reason"

[Nordic]

This is intended to be a thread about the mass hysteria, created and fed by the mass media, as to how Trump is a Russian agent, a puppet of Putin, and a treasonous bastard.

This article describes it better than I ever could.

"They have vacated the world of reason. They’re in the land of the paranoid now, and they don’t even know it."

http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2017/03/le ... cy-theory/

The Left’s great Russian conspiracy theory
Brendan O'Neill



2 March 2017 5:33 PM

The chattering classes have officially lost it. On both sides of the Atlantic. Of course they’d been teetering on the cliff edge of sanity for a while, following the bruising of their beloved EU by 17m angry Brits and Hillary’s loss to that orange muppet they thought no one except rednecks would vote for. But now they’ve gone over. They’re falling fast. They’re speeding away from the world of logic into a cesspit of conspiracy and fear. It’s tragic. Or hilarious. One or the other.

Exhibit A: this week’s New Yorker. It’s mad. It captures wonderfully how the liberal-left has come to be polluted by the paranoid style of McCarthyist thinking since Trump’s victory. It’s a New Yorker for a future, dystopian America that’s been captured by the Evil Empire. The mag’s masthead is in Cyrillic and its famous dandy mascot — Eustace Tilley — has morphed into Putin. It’s now ‘Eustace Vladimirovich Tilley’. Inside the mag it’s even more feverish. A 13,000-word report, ‘Trump, Putin and the New Cold War’, is accompanied by a drawing of a deep-red, UFO-style Kremlin hovering over the White House and firing lasers into it. It’s CGI Hollywood meets House Un-American Activities in an orgy of liberal dread over Ruskies ruining the nation.



It used to be right-wingers who fretted over Russians and Reds and pinkos colonising Westerners’ lives and minds. Now it’s lefties. Trump is regularly called ‘Putin’s puppet’. He’s an ‘unwitting agent’ of Moscow, we’re told. The New York Times even called him ‘The Siberian Candidate’, echoing the title of the 1962 thriller The Manchurian Candidate, in which an American is brainwashed by Korean Communists to become an assassin. That’s how some seriously view Trump: a Putin-moulded footsoldier of Russian interests who’ll assassinate the American way of life, if not American citizens. I mean, Vanity Fair actually asks: ‘Is Trump a Manchurian Candidate?’ These people need a lie down. You have to get deep into the New Yorker’s prolix report to discover that US officials still haven’t provided evidence for their claim that Putin ordered the hacking of Democrat emails in order to hurry Trump to power: ‘The declassified report [on Putin’s meddling] provides more assertion than evidence.’

But that hasn’t stopped the left McCarthyists, these Reds on the Web fearmongers, from buying into all kinds of claptrap about Putin putting Trump in the White House. In December, a YouGov survey of Democratic voters found that 50 percent of them think ‘Russia tampered with vote tallies to help Trump’. That is, White House-eyeing Putinites actually meddled with voting machines or ballot counts. There’s no evidence whatever for this. In YouGov’s words, it’s an ‘election day conspiracy theory’. A kind of delirium is spreading.

The spectre of Putinite meddling is now blamed for everything that doesn’t go the liberal elite’s way. Ben Bradshaw said it is ‘highly probable’ Russia interfered in the EU referendum. Here, ‘highly probable’ is code for ‘I don’t have a solitary shred of evidence for this but I feel it in my waters’. Even the concern over ‘fake news’, which is a problem, is being bent to this broader, swirling fear of malevolent foreigners waging war on our apparently pristine politics and media. It always uses the lingo of invasion. Meet ‘the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media,’ said a Guardian report at the weekend, about a rich bloke who’s setting up various news websites.

The Guardian piece talks about the ‘war of the bots’, including ‘Russian bots’ (‘organised by who?’, it asks, menacingly). Apparently these ‘automated bots’ on Twitter and other social-media sites — a bot being a computer programme designed to say the same stuff over and over — are pumping out political messages and hashtags that have helped to ‘change the conversation’ and boost support for the likes of Trump and Brexit. What’s really being said here is that my mind, your mind and the mind of anyone who doesn’t love the EU or think Hillary would have made a good president have been invaded by Russian bots — ‘organised by who?’ You know who! — and made to believe certain things. Richard Dawkins summed it up in a tweet about the Guardian piece: ‘Terrifying. Sinister social-media bots read minds & manipulate votes. Explains mystery of Trump & Brexit.’

Dear, dear me. What has become of these people? They really believe Putin made Brexit happen? That Ruskies tampered with vote counts in the US? That Russian computer bots ‘read minds’? They’ve lost it. They’ve gone. . The people who spent the past few months banging on about the ‘post-truth’ politics of Brexit and Trump have shown they don’t have the first clue what truth is. The people who posed as champions of logic have revealed themselves as peddlers of paranoia.

In his seminal 1964 essay ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’, written in the aftermath of McCarthyism, Richard Hofstadter nailed the two elements of the fearful, fact-lite political mind: first, the obsession with ‘patterns’ of behaviour that might point to a conspiracy; and second, the conviction that the entire political order is under threat from some external force. He noted that McCarthy often talked about the ‘baffling pattern’ of certain politicians’ antics, which seemed to compliment, at least, ‘the wellbeing of the Kremlin’. And he described how political paranoiacs always think civilisation itself is being menaced: ‘The paranoid spokesman traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders.’

This beautifully describes the situation today. Those opposed to the current political order now scrabble about for evidence of Putin-friendly ‘patterns’ of behaviour among Trumpites, tying together every fleeting phone call or dinner engagement into proof that the White House is primarily concerned with the ‘wellbeing of the Kremlin’. And they, too, wring their hands over the end of America or the end of Europe — ‘the death of whole worlds’, the end of everything. They have vacated the world of reason. They’re in the land of the paranoid now, and they don’t even know it.

I have never seen such mass hysteria occur in the US. Then again I've never seen such an organized concert of relentless lying in the media as I have about this.

When Bush ACTUALLY STOLE the presidency from Gore there was not this level of hysteria.

When 9/11 happened we didn't have this level of unfounded hysteria.

I don't like mobs. When people turn into mobs, I step back and observe them with alarm. Even as a child in the schoolyard I would do this. Maybe I'm missing the gene for mob-like behavior.

It is so bad now that the PTB are actually trotting out the recently-sobered-up war-criminal George W Bush like he's some sort of wise elder statesman, complete with ubiquitous photos and stories of him hugging the popular former First Lady Michelle Obama.

Doesntbthat strike everyone else here as FUCKING WEIRD. SURREAL? BRAZEN?

We've even seen it affect this place, which is really too bad. Tragic even.

I remember my first election when Reagan beat Carter. I was shocked, appalled, dismayed, horrified, all of it. Did I wantbthe CIA to overthrow him in a hysterical mindset of idiocy? No. I never did. Never crossed my mind that HE MUST BE REMOVED AT ALL COSTS.

So what is all of this really all about?

I mean, I know what it's all about -- the Deep State hates him because he was not supposed to win. He's like the anti-Jimmy Cartet in a way, the last president who was actually fairly elected by the people of the US. The Deep State wants their war with Russia - that is their overriding goal, and they fear Trump because they can't control him in their usual ways. He might do anything. He might give up their game.

That's not what interests me as far as this thread. My interest in this thread is:

How did the media, which supposedly losing influence over the hearts and minds of Americans, conducted their most successful psyop operation ever? (I mean, excluding 9/11 which had a massive and genuinely traumatic and deadly event to go along with it -- this time it's just a fucking ELECTION).

How is the media pulling this off and why is so much of the mob going along with it?

[kool maudit]

There is only one political division afoot, and the rest is tactics. Russia is tactics, spying is tactics, anything procedural or particular is tactics.

Let us consider two potential worlds. In one, the peoples of what were once the world's nations sort of blend and swirl in a loose circumstance whose key spirals are the world's cosmopolitan centres of capital. Multilateral bodies administered by a mixture of elected officials and transnational managers enforce norms and laws across borders, faiths, and understandings. Those things that once divided us become issues of personal conscience in a process whose model is the decline of the Christian faith in Europe. Taboos and legal restrictions locate and prohibit flare-ups of speech or action whose focus is the identification of difference. The nominal left will focus on these restrictions as well as wealth-distribution prgrammes whose goal, again, is to minimize group-difference. The nominal right will focus on similar restrictions in the non-human realm of goods and capital.

In the second world, those things that divide us embark on a process of retrenchment or consolidation following the "shock of openness" that followed the industrial revolution and its many new methods of travel and communication. Faith-zones and collections of folkways harden; even as regional "empires of practice" may collude increasingly to form new regional blocs, caliphates, or alliances, the outside borders of these collectives will harden. A focus on direct democracy, or "populism", increases global volatility while lessening national or regional volatility. The "many-to-many" globalisation model is redirected to a series of smaller and more bilateral agreements between Westphalian states. Global initiatives do not proceed from an initial assumption of broad consensus.

The politics of 2017 all come from this division. When blocs of people favouring one outcome find that blocs favouring the other have behaved illegaly or questionably, we will hear about the specific bone of contention in loud tones. When there appear double standards ("Swedish feminists defend Islamic patriarchy", to use one right-wing example) or hypocrisies ("Trump's 'America First' plan aligns near-exactly with Russian interests!, to use a liberal one), they will be seized upon and made hay of, but... they're not important, in and of themselves. They are only important insofar as they may advance the cause of one world versus the other. You will notice this by how promiscuously they are employed, and how quickly they are discarded.

The divide is essential, not procedural.

[stefano]

How is the media pulling this off and why is so much of the mob going along with it?

It doesn't feel all that new to me - I'm sure it's different if you're living in the States but it looks pretty much like hysteria over Iraq before the Second Gulf War to me. And they pull it off in exactly the same way: they buy or bully a few key people in media to massage the message as needed, and the rest of the time they phone them as 'officials who commented on condition of anonymity.'

For example:

But that hasn’t stopped the left McCarthyists, these Reds on the Web fearmongers, from buying into all kinds of claptrap about Putin putting Trump in the White House. In December, a YouGov survey of Democratic voters found that 50 percent of them think ‘Russia tampered with vote tallies to help Trump’. That is, White House-eyeing Putinites actually meddled with voting machines or ballot counts. There’s no evidence whatever for this.

You see a lot of articles with 'Russia hacking the election' in headline, but then the copy is accurate: Russia is alleged to have hacked DNC emails with a view to influencing the election. They use hack next to election on purpose in the headline to make that association, in the same way they used to force 9/11 into stories about Saddam Hussein, to force that association until a lot of Americans believed Hussein had had something to do with 9/11. (Crediting Caitlin Johnstone for that very good example in How To Spot A Media Psy-Op. You just need a co-operative sub-editor to do that and it's very effective. Then you fluff it up with some anonymous quotes.

As to why the audience is receptive it's because they hate Trump and will believe almost anything that makes him look bad, and don't want to believe Trump won the election fair and square (albeit in terms of old rules that are unfair to a lot of voters). And also because there is something to it. The email leak might have been Seth Rich but Trump has evidently been involved with gangsterish Russian money in real estate deals, and the overall pattern of Russia promoting isolationist nationalism in NATO countries (including through informal channels) is clear. These guys who leave the Trump team all get the sack for lying about those contacts in particular.

[kelley]

didn't the reagan campaign collude with a foreign government in its bid for the white house?

precedent exists. the hysterical descriptions might not hold water but there's something rotten here in a state that's not denmark.

[SonicG]

Nordic wrote:
I mean, I know what it's all about -- the Deep State hates him because he was not supposed to win. He's like the anti-Jimmy Cartet in a way, the last president who was actually fairly elected by the people of the US. The Deep State wants their war with Russia - that is their overriding goal, and they fear Trump because they can't control him in their usual ways. He might do anything. He might give up their game.

I am still having a very very hard time seeing any evidence for this..."He might give up their game." Really? I think the issues that are most important to the rabid dogs of his administration are pretty obvious and being pursued quite openly. Revealing the inner machinations of the "Deep State" are so far away from what they want, it boggles the mind to think otherwise...

I really couldn't agree more with this take:

The Deep State 2.0
How President Trump’s fake populism bails out the 1 percent.
Essay: Anatomy of the Deep State
BY MIKE LOFGREN | FEBRUARY 21, 2014

The prospect of four years of Donald J. Trump’s nonstop rants about imaginary conspiracies against his daughter, wholesale slander against the judicial branch and attacks on the press as enemies of the people has caused some Americans to slip into a comforting form of denial. He will be a blip in our history, they say, because our formal institutions, and the American people, will ultimately prevail against a rogue disruptor.

Others, more hard-boiled, appeal to the powers-that-be that they believe actually run the country regardless of electoral results: the Wise Men, the Power Elite or what I have called the Deep State. These informal power groupings, according to speculation, will attempt to gently but firmly pry Trump’s tiny fingers from the wheel before he sails the ship of state into an iceberg.

A third camp sees Trump as a lesser evil than the Deep State. Some of these voices are are more restrained warnings, while others, mostly Trump defenders on the right, become nearly hysterical in attributing the demise of Gen. Michael Flynn as national security adviser to the Deep State’s revenge against the president. This odd hypothesis has culminated in one of Fox News’ ankle-biters, Andrew (“Judge”) Napolitano, depicting Trump and Flynn as innocent snowflakes beset by the dark, remorseless forces of the state-within-a-state.
....
After denouncing foreign policy activism, the president and his team are now on a collision course with Iran, threatening to tear up that country’s nuclear agreement with ourselves and five other world powers, engaging in bellicose rhetoric about putting it “on notice,” and even fantasizing a Gulf of Tonkin-like incident between US and Iranian warships. His bluster about reinstating torture appears to have subsided — for now — but Trump is reportedly considering reopening CIA “black sites,” one of the Deep State’s sinister symbols.

Donald Trump will not dismantle the extra-constitutional power structures that have grown more influential in the last decades of near-perpetual war, increasingly intrusive surveillance, financial deregulation and widening inequality. He will further entrench them. This has confounded those in the media, who once regarded him as a vulgar but basically harmless jackass who probably wouldn’t win but who in any case increased ratings and circulation, as well as those Americans desperate for silver linings who saw him a change agent that would shake up a polarized political system and slaughter a few sacred cows.
The powers-that-be probably never liked Trump’s vulgarity, but they had in any case a hedged bet during the campaign: Hillary Clinton, a firm friend of Wall Street, was denounced as such by an opponent who was an even bigger friend of the Street. It was a no-lose proposition.

No, appearances aside, the Deep State will easily survive and thrive under President Trump, as well as under President Pence...

[stefano]

Great post kool maudit, thanks.

[American Dream]

Wake up and smell the vodka redux

Submitted by Bill Weinberg on Tue, 03/07/2017

Well, our new Attorney General Jeff Sessions is revealed by Justice Department officials as having met with the Russian ambassador when he was a Trump surrogate last year, which means he perjured himself in his confirmation hearings—although he tries to mince the matter by saying he met with Sergey Kislyak in his capacity as a senator and not a Trump campaign operative. This is pretty disingenuous, as he distinctly said: "I did not have communications with the Russians." (CNN, WP, The Hill)

The White House has also now admitted that Mike Flynn and Jared Kushner had a previously undiclosed meeting with Kislyak during the campaign. (NYT)

Robert Reich offers a list of seven "close Trump associates who have been accused of having undisclosed contact with Russian agents, or who have reportedly been investigated by the FBI"... Sessions, Flynn, Kushner, Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, Roger Stone and Carter Page.

The Crooks & Liars website makes note of several Russian oligarchs and political operates with links to Trump (often via the men on Reich's list) suffering mysterious deaths in recent weeks. The most recent case—of Ukrainian magnate Alex Oronov, who apparently met with Michael Cohen on a "peace plan" that would recognize Russian control of Crimea—is also noted by the Independent.

Add to which... the obvious quid pro quo of tweaking the GOP platform to remove military aid to Ukraine... the talk of abandoning NATO commitments at a time when Russia is waging multiple foreign wars and threatening more... the Tillerson-brokered Exxon-Rosneft deal that was iced by US sanctions over Crimea... All this "show me the evidence" talk is willful denialism.

But, as Occupy Democrats notes, Trump is now taking his pointing talks from the left, accusing those who want to probe his Russian connections of "McCarthysim."

Beyond surreal.

[Searcher08]

Thank you Nordic, for the great OP and k_m and stefano for most excellent contributions. Back later!

[SonicG]

I am merely an observer... I don't consider posting information here as some sort of advocacy for Hilary Clinton or the "Deep State"...I am a US citizen but don't pay taxes and currently reside much much closer than the vast majority on this board to one area that is being highly touted as a possible war zone...But it is hard to look at the myriad of connections with Russia, the suspicious deaths of Russians (which doesn't mean I am discounting any of those done in by the western intelligence apparatuses)...and most importantly, the money, always follow the money. Of course, I have no expectations of investigations going any deeper into what and how the 1% move and shake things. Why weren't the Panama Papers screaming headlines until the last banker was hung with the entrails of the last priest?
Well...But again, there is equal hysteria, especially with screaming "McCarthy" and "Redbaiting" when soviet communism is a mere glimmer in most peoples' eyes, if not wholly unknown to the young 'uns...The press is trying to cover the whole entire shitshow of Trump and they really aren't helping themselves by stirring shit up with accusations of wire-tapping...Oh wait, he was wire-tapped byt the FBI because they were investigating financial improprieties...Where and when will there be an outcome? Always waiting for that other show to be dropped...

In this first segment, Maddow followed Russian money as it flows from Moscow to Cyprus, New York and Florida, among other places. A key conduit is Deutsche Bank, which was fined $630 million in January for money laundering after moving $10 billion (possibly tied to stock fraud) out of Russia. Deutsche Bank is also one of the few banks in the world that still lends money to Donald Trump. After the scandal, CEO Josef Ackermann left Deutsche Bank and landed softly as chairman of the Bank of Cyprus, where many Russian oligarchs bank. Ackermann was chosen by the two vice chairmen of the Cyprus bank — one is Russian and a close friend and business associate of Vladimir Putin’s, and the other is American and a close friend of Donald Trump’s. The American (spoiler alert) just became our commerce secretary: Wilbur Ross.
...
Kevin G. Hall is the chief economics correspondent for the McClatchy DC Bureau, and he’s been bird-dogging our new secretary of commerce, Wilbur Ross, for months. Hall’s reporting fills in more details on Ross’s interest in the Bank of Cyprus. In 2014, Ross bought a majority state in the bank and became vice chairman. The next largest stakeholder, also a vice chairman, is billionaire businessman Viktor Vekselberg, friend of Putin and former board member of the Russian state-controlled oil company, Rosneft, which is now under a partial sanction by the US Treasury Department. The vice chairman before Vekselberg was Vladimir Strzhalkovsky, a former KGB officer and Putin friend. Yet another Russian, Dmitry Rybolovlev, was also a bank investor. He’s the guy we met in Maddow’s piece who bought Trump’s Palm Beach mansion in 2008.
(Feb. 27, 2017)
If you want to dive even deeper into the connections between Commerce Secretary Ross, Russian oligarchs and Cyprus, that island haven for illicit Russian finance, read James Henry’s meticulously detailed study. Henry is a lawyer and former McKinsey & Co. chief economist who now devotes his time to exposing corrupt international banking as a journalist. He writes, “Since the 1990s, Cyprus has served as one the top three offshore destinations for Russian and former Soviet Union flight capital, most of it motivated by tax dodging, kleptocracy and money laundering.” And there’s one particularly interesting thread that Hall is the first to tug: He compared the flight records of Trump’s campaign plane and those of a plane that appears to belong to the Palm Beach mansion-buying Rybolovlev (see above). The two planes were often at the same airports at the same time. The Rybolovlev-connected plane is usually based in Moscow and Switzerland, but, writes James, “it made numerous flights all over the US from August 2016 through November 2016, the peak season for the US 2016 presidential campaign — of course right at the moment when Moscow was supposedly trying to jack the election on Trump’s behalf.” There are no eyewitness reports placing Rybolovlev and Trump together, but, James concludes, the coincidence deserves further scrutiny.
(Feb. 25, 2017)
http://billmoyers.com/story/dig-deep-russia-love-money/

Please show me how this is made up "fake news". Please use some Rig-Int and explain that Rybolovlev's flights were just coincidance or he just really became a big fan of Trump after paying a ridiculously inflated sum for that mansion...

I'm not hysterical but this whole thing is quite hysterical. Maybe I am just a mad anarchist accelerationist...

[liminalOyster]

Here's an unsettling barometer of our current situation; a passionate defense of total ignorance and the saccharine crocodile tear conviction with which it is undergirded. Simple denial? Or ontological obstructionism? Sorry for the re-formatting mess - there are some tweets mixed in the text.

The Dangerous Stupidity of Blaming "The Deep State" For Trump's Historic Incompetency
Stop inventing conspiracies to excuse the world-class cock-up that is Donald Trump's White House.

JUSTIN ROSARIO
21 HOURS AGO

After Trump won the election, one of the (many) questions that flashed through my mind was: "What the fuck is Alex Jones going to do now?" His entire shtick depends on him being the "enemy" of the government. But Trump is a good buddy of his and if the shape-changing lizard people and weather controlling helicopters are real, Trump would expose the truth. But since everything Alex Jones says is pure bullshit designed to prey upon the abject stupidity of his audience, what's a professional conman to do?

The answer is "The Deep State," a shadowy gathering of corporate, military and political elites that secretly control the government. Think The Illuminati but with less robes and virgin sacrifices. These are supposed to be the people behind the nonstop leaks from the intelligence community and they're behind the 100% made up (Alex Jones has the proof!) Russia story.

Normally, who gives a damn what Alex Jones and his rancid collection of con artists like Jerome Corsi of swiftboat fame and drooling inbreds like Dan Bidondi think? But with the tinfoil hat wearing Trump in the Oval Office looking for imaginary wiretaps and bleating out evidence-free conspiracies, it's become a serious problem. The hard right is, of course, eating it up because they need an enemy at all times; but instead of just appealing to the terminally ignorant, Jones' nonsense is now permeating a conservative movement desperately looking for any excuse to avoid admitting Trump was a disastrous mistake.

True to the right's inability to take any kind of personal responsibility, the phrase "Deep State" is cropping up more and more often when discussing Trump's bumbling failures and rapidly growing Russia problem:

Alex Jones and Infowars reporters Lee Ann McAdoo and Millie Weaver talk with Trump insider Roger Stone and former CIA and black ops commander Steve Pieczenik about the deep state coup against Donald Trump.
Stephen K. Bannon, the White House chief strategist who once ran Breitbart, has spoken with Trump at length about his view that the “deep state” is a direct threat to his presidency.
"The president just has a great nose for these things," the official said. "It's the bureaucratic leaks — the deep state — that bother him most. Even if it turns out not to be true that they surveilled Trump Tower, he will have a very good point to make about the level of sabotage coming from Obama holdovers."
If you've been paying attention to the anti-Hillary faction of the far left, you will be utterly unsurprised to learn they espouse the exact same nonsense:

What is the Deep State? It's a hybrid network of structures within which actual power resides. It includes the military-industrial complex, Wall Street, hordes of private contractors whose sole client is the government, national security agencies, select (not all) members of the State, Defense, CIA, Homeland Security, a few key members of the Congressional Defense and Intelligence Committees, and so on.
Follow
Glenn Greenwald ✔ @ggreenwald
1) Trump presidency is dangerous.
2) CIA/DeepState abuse of spy powers to subvert elected Govt is dangerous.

One can cogently believe both.
12:58 PM - 15 Feb 2017
3,938 3,938 Retweets 7,505 7,505 likes
A common thread between the two allegedly opposed ideological camps is that both the hard right and the hard left despise the American government and want to see it dissolved. To that end, they're both trying to run interference for Trump because he's the best chance they'll ever have to break the back of American democracy and bring about its long-anticipated collapse. Another common thread is that both groups imagine that they'll be insulated from the massive civil unrest and widespread violence that would result from said collapse. But millions of other people's lives being thrown into the wood chipper is a small price to destroy the Great Satan.

And so they've taken the imaginary "Deep State" and started to conflate it with the institutional resistance Trump is facing in Washington. That's a problem because that's what the less insane part of the right wing is grabbing onto and it's fostering an even deeper distrust of the government.

It's the ultimate expression of confirmation bias. A majority of the Republican Party held its nose and voted for Trump. They assumed the GOP would rein him in and they could just get along for a few years without much trouble. But Trump is controlled by Steve Bannon and only barely so. The rest of the time has been a humiliating display of ignorance, dishonesty and pure incompetence. Rather than face this, Republican voters are looking to blame anyone but themselves and Trump, making the "Deep State" a very attractive alternative.

But our institutions were designed to resist autocratic rule and they're doing more or less what they're supposed to do. The press is digging into Trump's scandals. Our intelligence community is refusing to bury evidence of collusion with a hostile foreign power. The FBI, after throwing the election to Trump, is making an unusually forceful effort to avoid being seen as compromised. The Democrats in Congress are raising the alarm that this is not normal. Even Republicans in Congress are slowly, oh so slowly, starting to acknowledge that something is seriously rotten in Trump's administration.

In normal circumstances, we should be happy our system is not immediately caving in to Trump's obvious desire to run America the same way Putin runs Russia. Yet the ability of our body politic to fight off the infection of corrupt autocracy (so far) is infuriating conservative Trump voters and this Deep State nonsense makes it look like a grand conspiracy. This leads to further damage in the foundations of our democracy, making us even more vulnerable to future tampering by outside powers. And while this is great for advancing the nihilistic dreams of total collapse the hard left and hard right cling to, it's bad news for the rest of us, including the rank and file conservative voter.

As long as the right refuses to admit that Trump is a bipartisan problem that requires a bipartisan solution, all this talk about the "Deep State" is going to do nothing but tear at the fabric of our nation. If that's what gets you out of bed in the morning, by all means, keep gnashing your teeth about it. But if you want to leave your children and grandchildren a legacy that doesn't look like Mad Max: Fury Road, it's time to face some hard truths about the true source of the chaos in the White House.

There are 609 days left to the 2018 elections.

- This article kills fascists

[divideandconquer]

Eh...I think all this Russian/Trump hysteria has been created to divide, distract, divert, demoralize, disorient, ect. as the global elite drive more nails into our collective coffin. Trump is USA's Brexit. Let the masses believe they have the power to install an "anti-establishment," "anti-globalist" president; let them believe they have the power to stop the globalizing agenda, when in fact, Trump is, in my humble opinion, fully on board with the establishment NWO agenda. He's playing a role, maybe as himself, but still, everything he does and doesn't do is scripted to a degree. I'm sure they allow him some leeway, allow him to improvise, because this role comes so naturally to him. But Trump is their trump card...ultimately, a huge red--or orange-- herring

Trusting the mainstream media is dangerous to your health...literally.

[82_28]

I think true or false there is a time where a "fake story" becomes the story itself. What I mean is, is that it is too late. The narrative has legs as it were. Like most, I don't know anything about shit. I am a mere distant observer. I watch the nightly news every night (all the big three in fact) to get the pulse of what is being pushed upon the US and in turn, the world. Then I make dinner, surf the web and then watch the comedy shows. I don't know if it is too much TV or not.

That bit of anecdotal bullshit by me aside. The story is now the story. It will never be proven true or false because of the frisson of the narrative. That there, again, is the story. Luckily, whatever that means, the constitution is still intact.

[Karmamatterz]

It is so bad now that the PTB are actually trotting out the recently-sobered-up war-criminal George W Bush like he's some sort of wise elder statesman, complete with ubiquitous photos and stories of him hugging the popular former First Lady Michelle Obama.

Doesntbthat strike everyone else here as FUCKING WEIRD. SURREAL? BRAZEN?

It's absolutely insane out of control. It's also alive and living quite well on this board.

Thanks for the OP Nordic.

[liminalOyster]

Amy Siskind‏
@Amy_Siskind

Wikileaks -
Don't fall for it again America!
Our democracy is at stake.
Don't let Putin/Russia hurt us further!
#ImpeachTrump

Nasty Woman#43904390‏ @peggyblah 12m12 minutes ago
More
@Amy_Siskind what a coincidence - again! - that wikileaks has stuff to embarrass a trump opponent - this time, the intel community! shocking

Worth noting that the (admittedly random) respondent's profile reads: "i believer in research-based science, separation of church and state, and civil liberties."

[brekin]

That's not what interests me as far as this thread. My interest in this thread is:

How did the media, which supposedly losing influence over the hearts and minds of Americans, conducted their most successful psyop operation ever? (I mean, excluding 9/11 which had a massive and genuinely traumatic and deadly event to go along with it -- this time it's just a fucking ELECTION).
How is the media pulling this off and why is so much of the mob going along with it?

There is no getting around the fact that the media that is bewailing and bemoaning the fact of the Trump presidency are the ones who helped/got him elected.
So yes there is a psyops of sorts "to delegitimize/oust the president" happening now, but you can't segment out one ring of the surreal psyops circus and say this is crazy in isolation. There has been a chain and pattern of surrealism to the whole affair. The Media super-normalized Trump (a caricature of caricature of rotten, spoiled, steak eating bloated capitalist corporate titan) for a 1.5 year, where he came out of nowhere (Trump's career was going nowhere) and grabbed the highest office in the land and now is demonizing him.

Trump had completely lopsided coverage, and just to use one of his current adversaries as an example, CNN was like a Trump campaign organ that occasionally mentioned Clinton's email probe, Benghazi, spoiler Bernie and some of the oh yeah, other repub Candidates. Now CNN operates and reports like a police surveillance van parked outside the White House. Isn't that a wee bit inconsistent behavior?

My guess is one or a combination happened.

1. "The system" needed someone like Trump to push through its increasingly nefarious agenda unapologeticly and unfiltered, but needed someone they could distance themselves from and not be associated with. "How did Hanibal Lector get into the White House?".
2. The ptb got "dictator's remorse" and done goofed and put the wrong Man in the High Castle who they can't manage or control.
3. It was a publicity/marketing stunt for Trump that went too far, Trump's presidency has become the unintended bonus last season of Celebrity Apprentice.
4. The system really is based on representational voting and the majority of the US voters are stupid. Stupid to vote for Trump, or a throw away vote, or not to vote for Clinton.
5. The US voter/citizen has become increasingly susceptible to paranoid fantasies and sadistic, humiliating narratives and they summoned someone to fulfill them.
6. Of the military/industrial/governmental/corporate/criminal complex the criminal has garnered more power and is calling the shots through financial/bodily blackmail.
7. Orwell's equivalent three nation powers Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia (US, Europe, Russia, Asia) are preparing for big, hot war and are preparing the ground work.
8. After decades of video gaming, people have started to develop a variant of Stockholm Syndrome, identifying more with the Big Boss than the mere hero-players.

And Nordic, I'm a little surprised at how surprised you are at many peoples reactions to this. Trump stands for and embodies what some people have resisted, hated and fought against their whole lives. He knowingly and earnestly morphed into a "type" that is completely polarizing. Now he daily flaunts the fact of his ascendancy validating everything that he stands for. No doubt some people's reactions are totally off kilter and they are willing to believe almost anything to deligitamize him, but you have to acknowledge their sincerity in disliking/hating him. Even if their "formal" reasoning why he needs to go is reaching at times, viscerally they can't stand his existence as their president. That is no small matter. I think if you considered someone you viscerally cannot stand the fucking sight of and embodies everything you can't stand morally/philosophically/politically suddenly in a year's time becoming president and continuing to and amplifying what you can't stand about them, this wouldn't seem so strange.

Trump for many is the first proof that not only is the system sometimes wrong or unfair, but willfully evil and getting away with it. The media is actually probably fairly tolerant compared to many anti-Trump conversations people have when they unburden themselves. Most people I notice don't even have the cognitive capacity to talk about him at length anymore with even the like minded. It's too much for them, like Jesus coming back as Satan.