Anti-Trump, anti-Russian fundamentalism emanates from the heart of “The Resistance.” Fundamentalism—meaning strict adherence or imposition of the basic principles of any theory, politics, or religion—is one aspect of totalitarianism and/or fascism, but I’m not using those words because we’re not there yet, or at least not domestically. I can still write this without getting arrested.
“Global hegemony” more accurately describes the US empire of bases, and “barbarism” the cruise missiles, proxy wars, and covert operations savaging the Global South. Bombs literally smash dissent and defiance, but they don’t persuade hearts and minds. More often they have the opposite effect.
On Sunday, February 18, Resistance icon Bernie Sanders appeared on “Meet the Press” and said:
What most Americans know is that, at the end of my campaign, when it appeared that Clinton was going to win, and certainly after she won the nomination, what the Russians were doing is flocking to Bernie Sanders Facebook sites, and they were saying to Bernie Sanders supporters—as they were, by the way, to Black Lives Matter supporters, people who were fighting for social justice, as they were saying to the Muslim community, “If you voted for Sanders, you have to understand Hillary Clinton is crazy, she’s a murderer, she is terrible”—all kinds of horrible, horrible things about Hillary Clinton.
And it turns out that one of our social media guys in San Diego actually went to the Clinton campaign in September and said, “Something weird is going on. Bernie’s not in the campaign. Hundreds of these people are now coming onto his Facebook sites.” So I think we already knew that. It was an effort to undermine American democracy and to really say horrible things about Secretary Clinton.
Americans didn’t need Russian Facebook posts to read horrible things about Secretary Clinton
Bernie obviously doesn’t read Black Agenda Report, Counterpunch, Global Research, and other left news sites, many of which were on the Prop or Not list, which the Washington Post published despite its dubious origins. He must not listen to the one and only Jimmy Dore Show on the YouTube, even though Jimmy still has a soft spot for Bernie. Jimmy and those of us who write for the aforementioned publications all said horrible things about Hillary Clinton before, during, and after the 2017 campaign.
Hillary Clinton is a murderer and a war criminal. She violated the first principle of international law—the sovereignty of UN member nations—in Libya and all the other nations that the US was already at war with when she became Secretary of State. She committed war crimes and crimes against humanity under the preposterous pretense of preventing genocide. Anyone who would murder so many innocents is a sociopath—a person manifesting extreme antisocial attitudes and behavior and a lack of conscience. That’s one definition of crazy.
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama presided over the murder of Afghans, Syrians, Iraqis, and Libyans, including President Muammar Gaddafi. That’s not counting those who died in US proxy wars, crackdowns by ruthless US-backed dictators, and the US-backed right-wing coup in Honduras with all its brutal consequences.
And that’s all apart from the bribery and corruption uniting the State Department and the Clinton Family Foundation during her tenure, including the undisclosed cash contributions that flowed to the foundation during the sale of Uranium One—and with it, one-fifth of the uranium production capacity of the United States—to the Russian firm Rosatom. In her official capacity, Secretary of State Clinton approved that transaction.
I’m not Russian and I’m not trying to undermine American democracy, but I’ve written about all this, sometimes on Facebook and Twitter, and sometimes for publication. In 2017 I wrote “Clinton E-Mail on Libyan Conquest: We Came, We Saw, We Got Oil.” Of course that’s not all “we” got; Libya also has uranium, cobalt, credit markets, warm water ports, and opportunities to rebuild everything that NATO destroyed. But “we” did get oil, which has become shorthand for imperial loot. Executives of the Waha Group (Marathon, ConocoPhillips and Amerada Hess) wrote to thank Secretary Clinton.
I put quotation marks around “we” because it’s not a pronoun that identifies the vast majority of Americans, despite its standard use as such in political discourse. To the victors go the spoils, but we’re not the victors. At least half of us couldn’t survive a $1000 emergency, and all we get, war after war, is deeper in debt for all the missiles and military tech manufactured to destroy nations, sow chaos, and make profit for weapons manufacturers. Most of us are still chained to the oil companies just to make our way to wherever we have to go, often on roads and bridges in disrepair because the money’s all gone to the wars.
Thanks for the memories, Secretary Clinton. Thanks President Obama. You’re both sociopaths and murderers, but I’m not Russian, and I’m not trying to undermine American democracy. Neither are writers for the aforementioned publications or other left, antiwar, anti-imperialist American writers and broadcasters.
Neither are Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and the rest of the Fox News hosts, nor the writers and editors of Breitbart News or any of the alt-right, wing-nut websites. I mention them not as kindred spirits, but as far more prominent Americans who said horrible things about Hillary Clinton in 2017. People do that during political campaigns; they say horrible things about each other, true or not. Hillary Clinton called Trump supporters a “basket of deplorables.” He called her “crooked Hillary” whenever he had the media’s abundant attention, often to crowds cheering, “Lock her up!”
Americans didn’t need Russia’s social media meme bombers to find writers, broadcasters, and social media aficionados saying horrible things about Secretary Clinton. Some had reason and evidence; others were just determined to elect their own equally horrible, amoral, unconscionable, sociopathic candidate, Donald Trump, who is now a war criminal as well.
This is obvious, indisputable, and readily reviewable. The evidence is in last year’s print, broadcast, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram archives, but nevertheless, a confounding number of Americans are willing to blame “the Russians” or Vladimir Putin for Hillary’s defeat.
Defenders of the Mueller indictments say they don’t allege that 13 Russians swung the election for Trump. They don’t say that 13 Russians hacked into the DNC or Podesta emails or gave them to Wikileaks. Or that they hacked and altered the tallies of any electronic voting machines, despite how readily those machines invite hacking and fraud. They don’t even say that Putin was in command of this operation.
They’re right; the Mueller indictments don’t say any of that. Anyone who thinks they do should read them, but how many Americans will? If they’re not Fox News fans, MSNBC, CNN, and the rest of the liberal extremist media have probably already convinced them that the Russian government is responsible, as has Resistance royalty: Bernie Sanders, Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe, and California Congressional Reps Adam Schiff, Ted Lieu, and Jackie Speier, just to name a few. I mention the Californian Reps because I live here where they make the most noise when they’re not in Washington, although many Americans outside the Golden State now recognize the glazed eyes and fundamentalist countenance of Adam Schiff, who represents West Hollywood to the eastern border of Pasadena, and Echo Park to the Angeles National Forest. Jimmy Dore and his wife Stef Zamorano live in Pasadena, and Stef has suggested suing Schiff for neglecting his constituents to lead the anti-former-communist crusade on the national stage.
On Meet the Press, Bernie Sanders said that “everybody knows” the Republicans are trying to sabotage the 2018 midterms. Seemed like he actually made a little slip on the air there; he probably meant “the Russians,” although he said the Republicans, because he went on to further accuse “the Russians.” Perhaps he was imagining that the Russians would help the Republicans defeat “The Resistance,” but whatever he meant, he went on to say:
And I think one of the of the weirdest things in modern American history is you have every intelligence agency, you have the Mueller report, you have Trump’s own administration saying the Republicans [another slip?] want to sabotage the 2018 campaign. Everybody knows this, except the President of the United States, and I think people are asking, “What is going on with this president?”
What we have got to do—and I think Senator Langford talks about some of the issues—front end, front end, what we have got to say to the Russians: “You are doing something to undermine American democracy. You are not going to get away with it. This is a major assault. If you do that, there will be severe, severe consequences. We’ve gotta protect states and communities to make sure that their voting is not compromised.”
Seems kinda reckless to accuse the nation with the second greatest number of nuclear missiles in the world of a major assault and then threaten them with “severe, severe consequences” just because 13 Russians have been noodling around on social media, maybe helping to organize a few pro-Trump rallies. Not that the number of nukes really matters since both the US and Russia have enough to destroy all but the faintest traces of life on earth. A member of the Russian Parliament said Mueller’s story is straight from a Hollywood crime comedy, probably with the title “Thirteen Friends of Vladimir Putin,” but that doesn’t mean that the country’s military strategists aren’t taking further steps to defend it.
Also seems kinda reckless to be bolstering the argument for internet censorship or even state control, especially when, as “The Resistance” so often claims, the spectre of fascism haunts the US and the world. According to Julian Assange, information control of the internet with artificial intelligence is a greater danger than global warming.
Nevertheless, Bernie Sanders is still the most popular politician in the US, still drawing record crowds, and now reported to be discussing a 2020 run for president.
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Ann Garrison is an independent journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2014, she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize for her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes region. She can be reached at @AnnGarrison or [email protected]
