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Trump has never met or spoken to any Russian people, ever /s
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That’s a blatant lie, and I don’t understand why ostensibly leftist people like Taibbi and Greenwald keep repeating it, since it only helps far-right authoritarians like Putin and Trump.
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An assertion is not an argument. Feel free to respond to the facts as outlined in very specific detail by these award-winning journalists.
I never said anything about how or where Q-Anon started. I only said a key assertion (at least according to people I know who follow it) was that the Democrats and the national security state were conspiring to destroy Trump. Greenwald, Taibbi and Mate (who are Left-leaning journalists, not Q-Anon supporters) say the facts behind what they believe was a totally bogus Russiagate investigation, including the Muller investigation, actually bear out that suspicion. This is true whether you love Trump or hate him. Facts are facts, regardless of the ideology of the journalist who reports them and the person who hears them.
Worth noting is that all of these esteemed journalists were erased from MSNBC’s guest list the moment they questioned the official narrative. As with their wall-to-wall coverage of Trump during the 2016 election, the networks made big money on the Russiagate investigation, which dragged on for years. One way they encouraged its propagation was by suppressing dissenting voices almost entirely.
I once looked inside a “collective intelligence organism”, namely a Birther forum. The members were busy investigating the fake Kenyan birth certificate from every possible angle except looking for authentic Kenyan birth certificates to compare it to.
(The hoaxer based their certificate on a scan of an Australian birth certificate, ensuring that any honest and competent investigation would quickly prove that it was fake.)
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It’s funny how the “conspiracy” has evolved to support the current issues that support Trump from the previous issues that supported Trump - but are really really, really about an anti-Trump conspiracy that requires the firing of every anti corruption official in the executive and dismissing charges against administration officials that have literally plead guilty to those charges.
But they know the rubes will believe anything as long as the lie is big enough.
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If such a large persistent “information” organization exists with no known leadership and no obvious infrastructure or way to capitalize their efforts- it’s because they’re already capitalized and lead surreptitiously. Those who believe otherwise are simply dupes.
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The core and continuing assertion of the Qanon conspiracy theory is that there’s a specifically liberal/Democratic child sex trafficking ring in operation (out of the basement of a pizza restaurant that has no basement – diabolical!) and supported by a wealthy Jew, that Il Douche’s depredations are all done secretly in the service of fighting it (he’s a mastermind, don’t you know?), and that the various investigations of his corruption and ties to the Putin regime are all done by Dem-affiliated intelligence organisations and the liberal media outlets to thwart his efforts.
Even taking into account the conspiracy theory’s attempts to tack on real and semi-open conspiracies (e.g. the military-industrial complex, the national security state, Epstein’s wealthy and powerful supporters) as ret-conned evidence, at its heart it’s still garbage. It’s about as deserving of a reputable platform as is the reptilian ranting of David Icke.
It does seem surprising. Taibbi saw first-hand and wrote about the rise of the corrupt and authoritarian Putin regime. Greenwald can’t be happy with that regime’s anti-LGBTQ policies. And yet both pretend that it’s just a total co-incidence that Il Douche hired known Russian assets Flynn and Page and Manafort as advisors. Both appear on Russian propaganda outlets like RT.
There’s not much that the FSB could hold over them in terms of kompromat (Taibbi admitted to the harassing behaviour of his Moscow years), so I suspect that this affection of naivite concerning Russian meddling in Western politics more a combination of their wanting to be “more progressive than thou” (especially in terms of demonstrating that they know so much more than the rest of us about the real-world conspiracies mentioned above) and carving out personal brands based on that.
Both have done good work on reality-based conspiracies. Providing support for fantasy-based ones is a needless choice.
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I’m aware you didn’t talk about the origins of QAnon because it’s very inconvenient to mention how the whole thing is founded on bullshit when you were and are trying to claim it is legitimate. The people you know that follow the storm have been taken in by grifters trying to profit from it, and that is the basic facts of the case.
As far as the Russia investigation, Greenwald has been such an ardent defender of Barr that he has said that because Barr mentioned the Mueller report didn’t sound like Mueller’s usual self that was enough to question if someone else wrote the Mueller report or coerced his hand in it. You are talking about feelings not influencing facts, but you are quoting journalists you proudly put their feelings on display in their journalism and say that they are superior because they acknowledge their personal bias - when a lot of times it makes them start at a conclusion and work backwards in their journalism. Which is basically the opposite of the “feelings don’t care about facts” meme.
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[Pizzagate gunman] Welch likes to read. A favorite is “Wild at Heart: Discovering the Secret of a Man’s Soul,” by John Eldredge, about masculinity in evangelical Christianity.
According to Eldredge, men have three core desires: battle, adventure, beauty. The first desire is for a “battle to fight.” Eldredge says that deep in the heart of every man is a warrior… The second desire is for an “adventure to live.” Eldredge points to the desire that most men have for exploration, creation, and adventure as uniquely masculine and a reflection of the heart of God… The third desire is for a “beauty to rescue.”
It’s no wonder than QAnon appeals to the same young men who eat up evangelical garbage like Eldredge. “You feel worthless, but you’re actually special” is a powerful message. As for some of the other followers…
Now that Shock’s girls are grown and she’s not working a factory job, she has more time for herself.
…I wonder how much stems from fundamental loneliness. “You are not alone. You have people who stand with you in this important work.”
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And, to be clear, those grifters were there from the beginning. They didn’t hijack QAnon, they created it. It isn’t just an on-line wankfest of “truth seekers”, either:
Conspiracy theories (inevitably tied to anti-Semitism), toxic masculinity and appeals to the egotism of dimwitted suckers are at the heart of right-wing populist appeals like QAnon, because that’s all fascism needs to get a foothold with these idiots. From Orwell’s 1940 review of Mein Kampf:
However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life. The same is probably true of Stalin’s militarised version of Socialism. All three of the great dictators have enhanced their power by imposing intolerable burdens on their peoples. Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people ‘I offer you a good time,’ Hitler has said to them ‘I offer you struggle, danger and death,’ and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet.
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Snakes eating their own tails: Trump seems to get ideas from them.
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I hadn’t really thought about that aspect before, but it makes sense. The people I know who tend towards the conspiracy theories have a background of being somewhat clever but were lazy students who got bad grades. The conspiracy theories replace the earned knowledge of study with the empty belief of bullshit, while giving them the feeling of knowing something other people don’t. It simulates of the satisfaction of learning without the necessary work.
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I’ve found the same of people who are drawn to and never outgrow Objectivism and capital-L Libertarianism, as well as Anarkiddies. They believe they know something everyone else doesn’t (“let me blow your mind” is a common refrain), but in the end are so intellectually lazy and so unsupported by facts that they have to resort to shoddy logical fallacies (which they believe other people are too stupid to recognise).
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I had a great respect for Taibbi and Greenwald, which has been seriously tarnished by their position on this.
But if you look at their body of work and interviews with them you can guess why they bought into it so hard - it feeds into their justified bias against the American political, military and intelligence establishment. They’re smart guys, and good researchers, so they can come up with fairly plausible versions of what is basically a rather baseless belief.
And yes PeaceLove, the “Russia-gate conspiracy” being “thoroughly discredited” is a baseless belief, that requires taking known liars and proven incompetents at their word - and completely ignoring Trump’s decades long track record of corruption and grift.
Also, if you take a look back at 2015, when this “conspiracy” started, few people seriously believed Trump was going to win.
There’s plenty of leaks from both Democratic and Republican sources to back that up, basically every opinion piece and talking head during the campaign held that opinion. Republican politicians spoke openly of their contempt for Trump, repeatedly - and these same politicians have proven time and again that they’re utterly spineless and without any real convictions, they would not have said those things if they believed Trump was going to be President.
Hell, there’s been numerous leaks from the Trump campaign and transition team that say they were totally unprepared for getting into the White House, because they didn’t believe he would win.
So why the fuck would anyone set up an elaborate conspiracy to undermine a Presidential candidate that basically nobody but the people who voted for him (and tbh, probably not even all of them) took seriously until he won?
That’s not even getting into how Barr’s hand-picked inspector-general turned in a report that basically said “Yep, the investigation into the Trump Campaign’s ties to Russia, and Russian interference in the election was 100% legit. Although the FBI did make a couple of minor paperwork errors.”
And the Senate Intelligence Committee, dominated by Republicans and until recently headed up by Richard Burr who is a big supporter of Trump, also backed up both the Mueller Report and the Intelligence community consensus on Russia messing with the US election in favour of Trump.
Why the fuck would they do that? Why back up their political opponents on this issue, and this issue alone?
Unless, just maybe, the facts overwhelmingly support those conclusions and they feel the threat to their country is bigger than their loyalty to Trump. Or they don’t want to go down with him.
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They refuse to believe it because they see the US as the more powerful entity, and hence the only “real” problem. I hate to say it, but Chomsky falls down that hole, too (with regards to Serbia and the Yugoslav wars, specifically the bombing at the start of the Kosovo wars, which undoubtedly saved lives).
But both can be true… both the US and Russia can be bad, destructive actors and I’d argue they are.
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Probably because many of their teachers were women, and they didn’t believe a woman could EVER have anything to say to them. It’s a perfect storm of arrogance and misogyny.
Which makes them feel they have some special, secret knowledge of reality… and if they get an inkling that they were wrong, their masculine egos tell them they can’t admit defeat, cause that’s “weak like a woman.”
None of us are immune from making mistakes.
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This circular argument starts and ends with the dubious premise that suspecting a shady character of committing a crime is “conspiring to destroy him.”
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Don’t get me wrong. I still respect them, just not quite as much as I did before - ditto with Chomsky.
They’re not wrong about the US being a bad actor in global politics overall , but their focus on that to the exclusion of all else is more myopic than I would’ve given them credit for.
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