The Establishment Has Taken A Gamble By Continuing To Push The Russia Narrative

First, these facts are important to mention:

-Mueller’s indictments this month are based in “evidence” which contradicts facts that are already established in the public domain. Mueller’s statement cites Guccifer 2.0 as the persona for Russia’s supposed hack of the DNC. Yet it was found last year that the intelligence agencies’ reports deliberately manipulated the data about Guccifer 2.0 to make it look like it was sourced from Russia. Among the many other ways Mueller’s claims are shown to be false, we know that a hack of the DNC never even took place, as was found when Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity ran digital tests last year which showed a remote hack of the DNC would have been physically impossible.

-The charge of Trump/Russia collusion is still a conspiracy theory. There’s still no evidence that the Trump campaign coordinated with Putin to win the election. And all the instances we’ve seen so far of contact between Trump’s team and the Russians have at the most pointed to mid-level corruption, not to any larger conspiracy. If such a conspiracy were going on, there’s no doubt we would have heard about it by now; America’s intelligence agencies have vast information-gathering networks, and if the communications proving collusion existed, they would have been picked up and leaked by now. (Predictably, the convenient recent New York Times story claiming that Trump coordinated with the Russians to commit cyberattacks is not substantiated, and is sourced from the extremely untrustworthy James Clapper.)

-The constitution’s definition of treason says that someone needs to aid a country America is officially at war with in order for their actions to be treasonous. Congress has not declared war with Russia, a fact that proves Trump’s very mild concessions towards  Russia are not an act of treason. And even if one were to expand the definition of treason to include actions more general than that, the accusation of treason would in that case be based in personal opinion, not in official legal terms.

Notably, the members of the Western political and media class rarely go into enough detail in their claims about Russia for these contradictions to risk being brought up in an argument. Most of the time, all that’s needed to inflame public sentiments towards seeing Russia as a threat are vague statements about how America has been “attacked.” But in the age of social media, these claims are made with a risk.

It’s much easier than it was in past decades to expose the deceptions of our government. Every time a false claim about a big issue is spread around the mainstream media, my social media feed fills up with memes and alternative media articles that counter it. That may be a somewhat biased example, but the power of the independent online media is proven by how obsessed Washington DC has lately been with censoring and attacking independent news outlets.

There’s a network of professional and driven journalists and experts-Caitlin Johnstone and Stephen Cohen some of the most notable among them-who are working to fight establishment narratives, and just because they’re on the margins doesn’t mean they’re not a threat. So when the CIA, the Atlantic Council, and the other entities in charge of producing war propaganda have put out as much conflicting information as they have lately, it’s getting difficult for the establishment to maintain its dominance over the public’s perceptions.

This April, for instance, when glaring contradictions started coming to light in the media’s claim that Assad had committed a chemical attack, U.S. and British media put out a massive onslaught of articles designed to smear the independent journalists who were reporting these flaws in the Syria story. This campaign to attack dissent about the Syria narrative was done very suddenly and quickly, and this made many people suspect that something shady was going on behind the scenes. Now such a slip-up has danger of happening again, as the media pushes the same messages about Russia in lockstep.

During 2016, the DNC leaks and the failure of the Clinton campaign made the political establishment lose control over the narrative. We need to re-create the atmosphere of disillusionment and transparency which created that moment in history, and we need to maintain it so that meaningful change can be affected. Trump’s many pro-war and neoliberal policies show that he’s not the one who will enact that change. The revolt we need has to come from the bottom up.