I’m more than a little provoked by Egberto Willies’ diary, www.dailykos.com/... in which he declares that we’re devoting too many resources to the Russia issue, as if we have any control over the media, #1, but #2, as if treason were small potatoes, and as if the presence of a would-be despot with the values of the murderous Putin in the White House is no big deal. It’s no big deal, I guess, that Rex Tillerson is completely unqualified to lead State, that Pruitt is trying to gut the EPA, that Price is leading the charge to destroy health care, that the very well connected (to the dark side) Devos is in charge of education which means an assault of public, fact based education and that Jefferson Beauregard Sessions is the Attorney General of the US.
Russia in concert with, if not in collusion with the Trump Campaign, created a highly successful psy-ops assault on our election. One of the most serious elements of this was the effect it had on young progressives who were riled up by the Wikileaks dump of DNC emails — all of which were blown way out of proportion. This no doubt led to some erosion of support for HRC at the worst possible moment, creating a rift with Bernie supporters and a false narrative, that the DNC had somehow “stolen” the primaries. Arguably just as bad, the endless supply of fake news and truly scurrilous stories about Bill and Hillary Clinton, some generated by the Right, but much coming from Russia and other European sources as part of the Russian assault, spread like wildfire all over social media and sadly, young people in particular ate it up.
I saw this in real time. Some of my own dear friends bought into real trash and spread it all over Facebook. They aren’t stupid and they’re anything but malicious but they’re young, they don’t read real newspapers as much as they should, and they bit hook line and sinker into some truly vicious propaganda and passed it along as though it were Gospel.
This ugly nonsense most certainly suppressed the vote on the Left. It turned people against Hillary Clinton and distorted the record of Bill Clinton. Young feminists bought into the idea that Hillary was somehow aiding and abetting Bill in the suppression of women, as though she were the madam in a brothel!
And in the final days of the campaign, in concert with Comey’s disastrous meddling, the scurrilous lies about the Clinton Foundation, the fake news, and Wikileaks all combined to suppress votes in the center — particularly among white suburban women I think — and ultimately allowed a narrow victory in the battlegrounds with potentially catastrophic consequences not just for America but for the world.
All of the issues we’re now confronting — the right wing assault on medical care, an understaffed and incompetent State Department, hyper-aggressive ICE agents; threats to the economic well-being of most Americans, “tax reform” that means strip-mining even more resources from poor and working and middle class Americans — but also the attack on education, science, the arts and the environment — all these awful things are a result of Trump’s “election.” And Russia had a lot to do with that.
We can’t ignore this. For one thing it was too effective and it will most certainly keep happening. We have to educate ourselves so that we don’t fall into that poisonous trap again. We have allowed Al Gore to be slandered; then John Kerry; now Hillary Clinton and each time we’ve blamed these able, gifted people for having been destroyed by the Right and now by a combination of the Right and the Russians with a great deal of help from the tragically flawed James Comey.
Finally, I’d like to make a couple of observations. #1, Russia is important not only because of possible Trump Campaign collusion but because it represents a touchstone in the international white supremacist, neo-Nazi movement that is threatening all Western democracies. We just saw a torchlight parade of bigots in Virginia. Every minority in America is now at risk. We ignore this fundamental threat to American democracy and American values at our own peril. It is an absolutely critical issue.
#2, all too many comments about poor people are unforgivably patronizing. You guys sometimes sound, with all due respect, like assholes. You seem to think that poor black mothers or old folks struggling to make rent can’t comprehend or don’t care about global affairs, about human rights around the world, about the environment.
That’s gotta stop! Lack of money doesn’t equate to lack of brain cells or even education. Many poor people are highly educated and yes, we’re struggling for every cent but that doesn’t mean we’ve shut off our minds.
And we’re perfectly capable of multi-tasking. Which is what we’d better do or this country won’t survive until 2018. We can’t really count, right now, on having free and fair elections in 2018.
Think about that.