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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
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So Hillary Clinton totally had Vince Foster assassinated amirite? Give me a break.
You know, when people are trying to disentangle the convoluted and fucked-up situation we're in, which is undeniably full of deception and political scheming (both domestic and foreign), it'd be nice if you could stop sneering at them and acting like they're nothing but tin-hat-wearing conspiracy theorists.
"We'll take the next chance, and the next, until we win, or the chances are spent."![]()
Hence why I referred to them as rumors. Even the people I'm hearing it from admit that there is no real confirmation beyond the timing and job positions of the alleged victims coinciding.
Or would you like to play the game of differentiating truth from lies in Russia. Take it easy.
Daily Beast Opinion: How Putin Played the Far Left
In the aftermath of the U.S. intelligence community’s recent report on the Russian-directed hacking of the Democratic National Committee, it’s easy but misleading to conclude that the Russian government’s propaganda strategy lies solely in advancing the careers of conservative Republicans in the United States. Backing Donald Trump’s candidacy, via steady leaks of stolen communiques to organizations like Wiki Leaks, was but one prong of the Kremlin’s assault on American liberal democracy. Part of its campaign to vilify Hillary Clinton involved catering to her rivals on the far-left and pushing any number of crankish conspiracy theories that appeal as much to “anti-imperialists” as to neo-Nazis.
There’s nothing new in that, really.
Moscow’s attempts to cultivate America’s far-left long predate the presidency of Vladimir Putin. The Kremlin, according to available evidence, donated more funds per capita to the U.S. Communist Party than any other communist claque during the Soviet period, when Moscow’s intelligence operations against the “main adversary” involved recruiting agents of influence and spies of a progressive background who were sympathetic to the Soviet cause. But the past 18 months have seen a noted spike in information warfare aimed at gulling the Bernie Bros and Occupy-besotted alternative-media set, which saw Clinton as more of a political danger than it did Trump.
Perhaps the starkest case in point is Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein and her constituency. In December 2015, the Kremlin feted Stein by inviting her to the gala celebrating the 10-year anniversary of Kremlin-funded propaganda network RT. Over a year later, it remains unclear who paid for Stein’s trip to Moscow and her accommodations there. Her campaign ignored multiple questions on this score. We do know, however, that Stein sat at the same table as both Putin and Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, Trump’s soon-to-be national security adviser. She further spoke at an RT-sponsored panel, using her presence to criticize the U.S.’s “disastrous militarism.” Afterward, straddling Moscow’s Red Square, Stein described the panel as “inspiring,” going on to claim that Putin, whom she painted as a political novice, told her he “agree[d]” with her “on many issues.”
Stein presents herself as a champion of the underclass and the environment, and an opponent of the surveillance state and corporate media, and yet she seemed to take pleasure in her marriage of true minds with a kleptocratic intelligence officer who levels forests and arrests or kills critical journalists and invades foreign countries. Their true commonality, of course, is that both Putin and Stein are dogged opponents of U.S. foreign policy.
Indeed, her pro-Kremlin stance wasn’t limited to merely praising Putin’s amicability. Stein joined the Russian president and Kazakhstani dictator Nursultan Nazarbayev in describing Ukraine’s 2014 Euro Maidan revolution as a “coup,” and claimed, bizarrely, that NATO is currently “fighting… enemies we invent to give the weapons industry a reason to sell more stuff.” For good measure, she also asserted in September that “Russia used to own Ukraine,” by way of defending its colonization. She even selected a vice-presidential candidate who, when asked whether the downing of Flight MH 17—a massacre almost certainly caused by Russian-supplied separatists in eastern Ukraine—was a false flag, responded, “[T]hat’s exactly what has happened.”
Green Party officials across Europe slammed a “delusional” Stein for her views, with leading Russian environmental activists saying they were “deeply shocked” by her comments during her Moscow trip.
No matter. For her efforts in burnishing Kremlin conspiracy theories for American audiences, Stein was awarded not simply with an invitation to the 2015 RT gala, but RT even hosted her party’s 2016 presidential debate—a move Stein hailed as a “step towards real democracy.” RT also covered “live updates” from Stein’s reactions to the debates between Clinton and Trump, a decision Stein further praised. This mutual affection is, naturally, of a piece with RT’s broader modus operandi in the U.S.
As I helped catalog at the Columbia Journalism School, RT, rather than focus solely on puffing up GOP candidates, expends more effort in targeting America’s far-left fellow-travelers. There’s a reason, after all, that Kremlin-funded Sputnik hosts podcasts by Americans who claim “progressive” viewpoints—at least when it comes to altering the exclusively domestic landscape in America. Nor are these fake news outlets tilling fallow soil.
Consider one of the flagship magazines of the American left, which, for all its support of gay rights, government transparency, and voting rights as they pertain to U.S. society, has developed a notoriously soft spot for a regime that violently opposes all of the above.
The Nation’s coverage of Russian affairs is a national embarrassment. RT is a website that hosts neo-Nazis as “expert” commentators. Yet that does not stop The Nation from publishing whataboutist articles in defense of the propaganda channel; articles pushing the same argument, with the exact same headlines, as those found in white-nationalist publications.
The Nation’s crop of Russia watchers have lately busied themselves by lending credence to the “autonomy referendums” in eastern Ukraine, thus legitimizing illegal and neo-imperialist land-grabs, or notions that the entire Ukrainian crisis was “instigated by the West’s attempt… to smuggle [Ukraine] into NATO.”
That these views bizarrely mesh with those of Trump and his Breitbart-friendly advisers is perhaps another oddity of an age of ideological psychosis. Stephen Cohen, The Nation’s lead Russia analyst (and husband of the magazine’s editor in chief and publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel), has even been endorsed by David Duke and the wife of white-nationalist Richard Spencer, the intellectual godfather of the pro-Trump “alt-right,” as a rare voice of sanity when it comes to U.S.-Russian relations.
At times, the substance and style of what has been dubbed the “alt-left” are indistinguishable from that of its counterpart on the other end of the political spectrum. And Moscow’s info-warriors appear to appreciate the resemblance, as the American arm of Sputnik exhorted supporters of Bernie Sanders to vote for Trump (as did Trump himself, repeatedly).
In years of researching Kremlin influence-peddling, I’ve discovered first-hand just how eerily similar far-left and far-right Putinists are to each other.
When I pointed out that one of The Nation’s contributing writers, former J.P. Morgan banker James Carden, now executive editor of the American Committee for East-West Accord—an organization partly funded by vanden Heuvel’s family—continues to contribute to Kremlin-funded Russia Direct, what I received was nothing short of a deranged ad hominem. Carden, who appeared on RT a few weeks ago to claim that The Washington Post is pursuing a “project of promoting a new Cold War with the Russian Federation,” sent me a note on Linked In calling me a “sniveling shit,” and vaguely (if unintentionally hilariously) threatening me with physical violence, demanding to see if I was “brave as BATMAN [sic]” in person. He later apologized.
Another Nation staple, contributing editor Doug Henwood, has maintained a professional relationship with Wiki Leaks founder Julian Assange, yet is apparently very tetchy about the collaboration, as I also discovered when I engaged him. Henwood had planned to work with Assange on putting out a book about Hillary Clinton’s Goldman Sachs speeches—Henwood annotating, Assange writing the foreword—transcripts of which were of course originally hacked by Russian intelligence and disseminated through Wiki Leaks, at least according to 17 different U.S. intelligence agencies, two of which concluded that this was done with the express purpose of helping Trump get elected. When I brought up this pending project, as detailed both on the book publisher’s website and in multiple articles, Henwood called me a “fucking idiot.” (Henwood’s publisher, when contacted for this story, noted that Henwood was no longer affiliated with the endeavor, saying that he had now grown “weary of chronicling Hillary Clinton’s boundless political shortcomings.”)
Wiki Leaks is clearly the online epicenter of the 21st-century’s red-brown convergence. How else to account for how an Australian cyberanarchist has found common cause with a racist millionaire real-estate baron—apart, that is, from their apparent mutual regard for the opposite sex?
Wiki Leaks, it is worth recalling, began as a seemingly noble “transparency” organization that sought to help shine a light on post-Soviet autocracies and their human-rights abuses. Yet somewhere along the way it saw fit to partner with anti-Semites who delivered leaked U.S. State Department cables to Belarus’s pro-Moscow dictatorship, which used these sensitive documents to chase down dissidents. Nor has this caused Wiki Leaks or Assange any moral misgivings. As Vox’s Zack Beauchamp detailed, Assange refused to investigate Wiki Leaks’s role in aiding the machinations of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, Europe’s last dictator, whose secret police (still known by its Cold War acronym, the KGB) arrested activists and opposition figures.
A quick glimpse through Wiki Leaks’s Twitter feed lately is enough to confirm the group’s disconcerting preference for siding with the Putinist narrative, and Kremlin interests, all in the name of anti-Americanism.
Assange has personally run a not-so-subtle rearguard defense for Trump, an overture that has been reciprocated by the president-elect, who now publicly defers to Assange’s analysis of the DNC hacks over that of the U.S. intelligence arms Trump is about to command in little over a week’s time. When not slamming last year’s Panama Papers leak as an “attack story on Putin,” Wiki Leaks’s feed, long thought to be personally manned by Assange, has layered Kremlin-friendly conspiracy over everything from the Eurovision Song Contest to, like Stein’s candidacy, the destruction of MH 17. (Little surprise, then, that Stein considers Assange a hero.) Or, as Wiki Leaks tweeted on Ukraine, “Cable shows USA was already warned of #Russia’s concerns so it now looks like #Obama is the provocateur; not #Putin.”
Stein, The Nation, and Wiki Leaks are hardly outliers on social media or insignificant in their political reach; to their respective audiences, they wield as much influence as Breitbart does with Trump loyalists.
In a few swing states, after all, Clinton lost to Trump by a margin smaller than Stein’s total statewide voter haul. The Nation has tens of thousands of subscribers and a venerable, 150-year-old pedigree for liberal advocacy. The Wiki Leaked DNC and John Podesta emails, meanwhile, gradually released during and after the Democratic National Convention in August, did untold damage to Clinton’s campaign.
What remains of the internationalist wing of the Republican Party is understandably unnerved by how much of the American right has happily aligned with Putin’s spymasters and arms-length purveyors of “active measures” and provided cover for a foreign government’s interference in a U.S. election.
But the American left has just as much reason to take stock. Ideologically promiscuous and unbound by the orthodoxies of a single party or historical narrative, Putin has cultivated dupes, fellow travelers, and purblind fools among plenty of American progressives who, whether by accident or design, have facilitated the rise of the most extremist and reactionary president this country has ever elected.
edited 14th Jan '17 6:46:45 AM by Krieger22
I have disagreed with her a lot, but comparing her to republicans and propagandists of dictatorships is really low. - An idiot![]()
I was under the impression you were talking about people in the UK dying. In Russia, well that's certainly more plausible, but far from certain; believe it or not, people in Russia die for reasons other than being assassinated by government spooks, just like in the United States.
edited 14th Jan '17 6:54:17 AM by CaptainCapsase
Get Republicans Elected Every November....
I just figured they were doing it without being compromised by Moscow. Fuck the far-right. Fuck the far-left.
Starting to think Ottawa should direct CSIS and the RCMP to start preparing for hacks aimed at directing Canadian elections...
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.
If you weren't prepared for that eventuality, you really should have been. If and when the United States develops its own cyber-espionage capabilities to parity with Russia's, prepare for every single election the world over to be like this until effective countermeasures are devised and implemented.
edited 14th Jan '17 7:03:53 AM by CaptainCapsase
Why yes, the alt-right was behind that "Rape Melania" sign
. Who else in the First World would routinely threaten to rape women they dislike?
/pol/ users want to infiltrate the inauguration protests
. And try to identify folks and hand over the identities to the DOJ when Trump is in power.
And then what? Be accused of shilling for one particular candidate when they warn that there is a Russian influence op targeting them or announce that they shut down such an influence op?
edited 14th Jan '17 7:05:50 AM by Krieger22
I have disagreed with her a lot, but comparing her to republicans and propagandists of dictatorships is really low. - An idiotReally long Twitter thread where one Anonymous spokesperson disavows Assange
.
As much as I am inclined to distrust anything said by Anonymous, that progression really makes sense — Wikileaks has had many dedicated freedom of information advocates working for it, but is dominated by Assange, who is essentially a professional right-wing troll.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Did a pile of intelligence agencies agree or at least allege that the Swedish or something ran an influence op to get Obama elected? Do you know what you sound like?
Mother Jones interview with the author of the dossier containing the allegations
.
Intelligence agencies are alleging that Russia ran a disinformation campaign intending to damage the legitimacy of Hillary Clinton and, if possible, see Donald Trump elected. That's what's known right now. Speculating that the Trump administration is controlled by Russia is about as credible as an assertion that Russia tampered with voting machines. Not strictly speaking impossible, but implausible enough that we can more or less dismiss it because of the ridiculous Gambit Roulette that would entail. It's very possible that Trump himself is compromised, but in regards to his nascent administration, it's unlikely that goes much further than his person and a few close associates.
edited 14th Jan '17 7:31:06 AM by CaptainCapsase
What you've been talking about isn't just in regards to Trump's conflicts of interest, you're basically claiming, among other things, that the FBI has been secretly infiltrated by the Russians from bottom to top, and that this was done without anyone actually noticing.
If the CIA is really that incompetent, then their claims about Trump being compromised hold absolutely no weight, because they're clearly morons.
edited 14th Jan '17 7:35:39 AM by CaptainCapsase
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Don't put words in my mouth. What I did say was repeat my recollection of previous allegations by FBI sources that the New York field office was staffed by agents who had an extensive dislike of Hillary
.
And that the CIA, in a case of following the book because they can't operate in the US, did nothing because they could not possibly do anything that could be seen as going to bat for one presidential candidate over the other.
edited 14th Jan '17 7:37:54 AM by Krieger22
I have disagreed with her a lot, but comparing her to republicans and propagandists of dictatorships is really low. - An idiot
And you draw a line between that and Russia somehow. Incidentally, if I had to guess, inciting this sort of paranoia is probably one of the major objectives of this espionage campaign (and of the historical Soviet espionage campaigns), and it appears to have succeeded in that regards.
That's correct about the CIA, but I more meant, "the CIA and every other intelligence agency in the United States", because there's around 10 of them beyond the FBI.
edited 14th Jan '17 7:39:30 AM by CaptainCapsase
I think it's going too far to say the agents are Russian plants. However, I don't see any functional difference between that and them not stopping the Russians from installing their candidate.
This whole thing started months ago back before anyone thought Trump could possibly win. I don't think Russia expected him too either so setting up a way to discredit him if he wins seems unusual. Putin is smart but he isn't clairvoyant.
edited 14th Jan '17 7:40:16 AM by Kostya
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At which point do I claim that the agents' dislike of Clinton was because of Russian inducement? At which point do I claim that Russian interests drove the writing of Clinton Cash? Give me an answer, instead of counteraccusing.
edited 14th Jan '17 7:39:51 AM by Krieger22
I have disagreed with her a lot, but comparing her to republicans and propagandists of dictatorships is really low. - An idiot
You're drawing a line between Russia in the sense that you are basically accepting the (extremely speculative though very remotely plausible) claim that Trump himself is literally a Russian agent, and also the politically convenient stance that Russia is the main or even sole cause of Trump's victory, rather than a contributing factor.
edited 14th Jan '17 7:42:21 AM by CaptainCapsase
If that's what the intelligence community believed, Trump would be in jail or at the bottom of a river; these people (the alphabet agencies) do not fuck around any more than their Russian counterparts do.
As best as we can tell, they believed the Russians leaked information to help Trump, and Trump's team up to and including the man himself may have been complicit in this. There's a big gap between that and a literal Manchurian Agent like people here seem to believe.
edited 14th Jan '17 7:46:03 AM by CaptainCapsase
