RussiaGate as Organised Distraction
Prof. Oliver Boyd-Barrett, via Organisation for Propaganda Studies
Image source
For over two years RussiaGate has accounted for a substantial proportion of all mainstream US media political journalism and, because US media have significant agenda-setting propulsion, of global media coverage as well. The timing has been catastrophic.
The Trump Administration has shredded environmental protections, jettisoned nuclear agreements, exacerbated tensions with US rivals, and pandered to the rich.
In place of sustained media attention to the end of the human species from global warming, its even more imminent demise in nuclear warfare, or the further evisceration of democratic discourse in a society riven by historically unprecedented wealth inequalities and unbridled capitalistic greed, corporate media suffocate their publics with a puerile narrative of alleged collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia.
The RussiaGate discourse is profoundly mendacious and hypocritical. It presumes that the US is a State whose electoral system enjoys a high degree of public trust and security. Nothing could be further from the truth. The US democratic system is deeply entrenched in a dystopian two-party system dominated by the rich and largely answerable to corporate oligopolies; it is ideologically beholden to the values of extreme capitalism and imperialist domination. Problems with the US electoral system and media are extensive and well documented.
US electoral procedures are profoundly compromised by an electoral college that detaches votes counted from votes that count. The composition of electoral districts have been gerrymandered to minimize the possibility of electoral surprises. Voting is dependent on easily hackable corporate-manufactured electronic voting systems.
Right-wing administrations reach into a tool-box of voter-suppression tactics that run the gamut from minimizing available voting centers and voting machines through to excessive voter identification requirements and the elimination of swathes of the voting lists (e.g. groups such as people who have committed felonies or people whose names are similar to those of felons, or people who have not voted in previous elections).
Even the results of campaigns are corrupted when outgoing regimes abuse their remaining weeks in power to push through regulations or legislation that will scuttle the efforts of their successors.
Democratic theory presupposes the formal equivalence of voice in the battlefield of ideas. Nothing could be further from the reality of the US “democratic” system in which a small number of powerful interests enjoy ear-splitting megaphonic advantage on the basis of often anonymous “dark” money donations filtered through SuperPacs and their ilk, operating outside the confines of (the somewhat more transparently monitored) ten-week electoral campaigns.
Regarding media, democratic theory presupposes a public communications infrastructure that facilities the free and open exchange of ideas. No such infrastructure exists. Mainstream media are owned and controlled by a small number of large, multi-media and multi-industrial conglomerates that lie at the very heart of US oligopoly capitalism and much of whose advertising revenue and content is furnished from other conglomerates.
The inability of mainstream media to sustain an information environment that can encompass histories, perspectives and vocabularies that are free of the shackles of US plutocratic self-regard is also well documented.
Current US media coverage of the US-gestated crisis in Venezuela is a case in point. The much celebrated revolutionary potential of social media is illusory. The principal suppliers of social media architecture are even more corporatized than their legacy predecessors. They depend not just on corporate advertising but on the sale of big data that they pilfer from users and sell to corporate and political propagandists often for non-transparent AI-assisted micro-targeting during ‘persuasion’ campaigns.
Like their legacy counterparts, social media are imbricated within, collaborate with, and are vulnerable to the machinations of the military-industry-surveillance establishment. So-called election meddling across the world has been an outstanding feature of the exploitation of social and legacy media by companies linked to political, defense and intelligence such as – but by no means limited to – the former Cambridge Analytica and its British parent SCL.
Against this backdrop of electoral and media failures, it makes little sense to elevate discussion of and attention to the alleged social media activities of, say, Russia’s Internet Research Agency. Attention is being directed away from substantial, and substantiated, problems and onto trivial, and unsubstantiated, problems.
Moreover, in a climate of manufactured McCarthyite hysteria, RussiaGate further presupposes that any communication between a presidential campaign and Russia is in itself a deplorable thing. Even if one were to confine this conversation only to communication between ruling oligarchs of both the US and Russia, however, the opposite would surely be the case. This is not simply because of the benefits that accrue from a broader understanding of the world, identification of shared interests and opportunities, and their promise for peaceful relations.
A real politik analysis might advise the insertion of wedges between China and Russia so as to head off the perceived threat to the USA of a hybrid big-power control over a region of the world that has long been considered indispensable for truly global hegemony.
Even if we address RussiaGate as a problem worthy of our attention, the evidentiary basis for the major claims is weak. The ultimate unfolding of RussiaGate discourse now awaits the much-anticipated report of Special Counsel and former FBI director Robert Mueller. Mueller’s indictments and investigations have to date implicated several individuals for activities that in some cases have no connection whatsoever to the 2016 Presidential campaign. In some other instances they appear to have been more about lies and obstructions to his investigation rather than material illegal acts, or amount to charges that are unlikely ever to be contested in a court of law.
The investigation itself is traceable back to two significant but extremely problematic reports made public in January 2017. One was the “Steele dossier” by former MI6 officer Christopher Steele. This is principally of interest for its largely unsupported allegations that in some sense or another Trump was in cahoots with Russia. Steele’s company, Orbis, was commissioned to write the report by Fusion GPS which in turn was contracted by attorneys working for the Democratic National Campaign.
Passage of earlier drafts of the Steele report through sources close to British intelligence, and accounts by Trump adviser George Papadopoulos concerning conversations he had concerning possible Russian possession of Clinton emails with a character who may as likely have been a British as a Russian spy, were instrumental in stimulating FBI interest in and spying on the Trump campaign.
There are indirect links between Christopher Steele, another former MI6 agent, Pablo Miller (who also worked for Orbis) and Sergei Skripal, a Russian agent who had been recruited as informer to MI6 by Miller and who was the target of an attempted assassination in 2018. This event has occasioned controversial, not to say highly implausible and mischievous British government claims and accusations against Russia.
The most significant matter raised by a second report, issued by the Intelligence Community Assessment and representing the conclusions of a small team picked from the Director of Intelligence office, CIA, FBI and NSA, was its claim that Russian intelligence was responsible for the hacking of the computer systems of the DNC and its chairman John Podesta in summer 2016 and that the hacked documents had been passed to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. No evidence for this was supplied.
Although the hacking allegations have become largely uncontested articles of faith in the RussiaGate discourse they are significantly reliant on the problematic findings of a small private company hired by the DNC. There is also robust evidence that the documents may have been leaked rather than hacked, and by US-based sources.
The fact that the documents revealed that the DNC, a supposedly neutral agent in the primary campaign, had in fact been biased in favor of the candidature of Hillary Clinton, and that Clinton’s private statements to industry were not in keeping with her public positions, has long been obscured in media memory in favor a preferred narrative of Russian villainy.
Why then does the RussiaGate discourse have so much traction? Who benefits?
First, RussiaGate serves the interest of a (1)corrupted Democratic Party, whose biased and arguably incompetent campaign management lost it the 2016 election, in alliance with with (2)powerful factions of the US industrial-military-surveillance establishment that for the past 19 years, through NATO and other malleable international agencies, has sought to undermine Putin’s leadership, dismember Russia and the Russian Federation (undoubtedly for the benefit of western capital) and, more latterly, further contain China in a perpetual and titanic struggle for the heart of EurAsia.
In so far as Trump had indicated (for whatever reasons) in the course of his campaign that he disagreed with at least some aspects of this long-term strategy, he came to be viewed as unreliable by the US security state. While serving the immediate purpose of containing Trump, US accusations of Russian meddling in US elections were farcical in the context of a well-chronicled history of US “meddling” in the elections and politics of nations for over 100 years. This meddling across all hemispheres has included the staging of coups, invasions and occupations on false pretext in addition to numerous instances of “color revolution” strategies involving the financing of opposition parties and provoking uprisings, frequently coupled with economic warfare (sanctions).
A further beneficiary (3)is the sum of all those interests that favor a narrowing of public expression to a framework supportive of neoliberal imperialism. Paradoxically exploiting the moral panic associated with both Trump’s plaintive wailing about “fake news” whenever mainstream media coverage is critical of him, and social media embarrassment over exposure of their big data sales to powerful corporate customers, these interests have called for more regulation of, as well as self-censorship by, social media.
Social media responses increasingly involve more restrictive algorithms and what are often partisan “fact-checkers” (illustrated by Facebook financial support for and dependence on the pro-NATO “think tank,” the Atlantic Council). The net impact has been devastating for many information organizations in the arena of social media whose only “sin” is analysis and opinion that runs counter to elite neoliberal propaganda. The standard justification of such attacks on free expression is to insinuate ties to Russia and/or to terrorism.
Given these heavy handed and censorious responses by powerful actors, it would appear perhaps that the RussiaGate narrative is increasingly implausible to many and the only hope now for its proponents is to stifle questioning. These are dark days indeed for democracy.
Oliver Boyd-Barrett is Professor Emeritus at Bowling Green State University. He is author of the forthcoming book RussiaGate and Propaganda: Disinformation in the Age of Social Media (Routledge).
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Cut’n’Paste from the Saker, has some relevance to this closing decade of collision between the “irresitable armed” NATZO juggernaut and the rock that was in the middle of the road:
“James Speaks on March 12, 2019 · at 3:11 pm EST/EDT
From where I am standing Trump’s decision-making on foreign policy has all the hallmarks and foresight of a thuggish drunken sailor.
Trump’s style is that of a NYC real estate developer, that is bluff and bluster, keep them off balance because the adversary is also bluff and bluster. The art of the deal.
_Nasrallah is a man whose principles are founded in his faith and who lives his faith as though a tower on a foundation of bedrock._ He sees right through Trump.
Still, I’m glad we have Trump rather than the Hillary monster, whose beliefs were pure delusion that every country in the ME could be subdued with only enough saturation bombing. Had she won, many of us would be dead by now and much of civilization a smoking ruin.”
Dear Admin,
why are all the comments in italics? It’s very tough to read more than a line or two.
And while the sheeple are diverting their junk-fed brains with Russiagate, a minor site announces the real news:
https://www.almasdarnews.com/article/breaking-syrian-army-launches-massive-assault-on-southern-idlib/
On the money. Thanks, Vaska.
I cannot plough through the comments – they are in all-italics which hurt my old eyes (I also have age-related macular degeneration in first stage). That is such a pity, because comments on Off-Guardians are very interesting and informative. Please change them back to normal text.
The all-italics come and go. It’s a long term cyclical thing.
A depressingly accurate analysis of the downward spiral of what we were once pleased to call western democracy. I would just add one quibble. You refer to the “assassination” attempt upon the Skripals. If the object was to kill them,, then it could have been done in multiple ways that were far easier, less public, and more effective. There is a good body of evidence to suggest that their death was not the objective. Skripal was likely involved in the production of the Steele dossier. He had expressed a desire to return to Russia. He simply knew too much, so he had to be warned off. A separate but parallel objective was to use his alleged poisoning (in high likelihood a narcotic disabler) as another stick with which to beat the Russians. Here the timing is critical, and it occurred in a time frame of the Syrian false flag operations in Douma.
The official story is completely absurd, as Rob Slane and others have documented. It is equally depressing that the UK msm have so utterly failed to inform their readers of the facts. The D Notice only partly explains that failure.
Lots of analysis, lots of comments, but it’s all about Operation Beluga. Simples. You’re welcome.
‘Climate cataclysm is coming, climate cataclysm is coming!’
Funny.
That doesn’t rate a mention by the presstitutes.
Although anthropogenic global warming is a real problem and Russiagate is not-so, they share a common characteristic of human beings that the “presstitutes” and the engineers of Russiagate have exploited so well: the psychotic, complacency-driven myopia of almost all human beings.
Climate-cataclysm is not the real problem and–to any rational analysis–never has been, since even before Arrhenius first predicted a link between atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and average global temperature.
The problem was and remains one in which anthropogenic climate cataclysm is a part, but perhaps neither the most significant nor the finally anthropoterminal part, just the first part to lose its easy deniability (thus the first “part” that is the psychotic myopic’s most recent “all”).
The base problem is what is now a too-rapidly approaching cataclysm cataclysm. Like the blissfully unaware insect in the path of a car accelerating rapidly from the rear, it’s well past time to contemplate kissing your tuchas goodbye.
On one “side issue” mentioned here, concerning the fate of the Democrats: It’s no longer possible to fix the party. Trump will most likely be re-elected in 2020, and there will presumably be another surge of anti-Russian propaganda after the election. Russia is the Democrats’ scapegoat of choice. The reason Democrats are almost certain to lose has been repeatedly raised, yet dismissed as irrelevant. Years of research have consistently confirmed that most voting choices come down to economic issues. Democrats split apart their own voting base in the 1990s, middle class vs. poor, and the Obama years confirmed that this split is permanent. Russia didn’t do that. Democrats did.
“… Although the hacking allegations have become largely uncontested articles of faith in the RussiaGate discourse they are significantly reliant on the problematic findings of a small private company hired by the DNC. There is also robust evidence that the documents may have been leaked rather than hacked, and by US-based sources …”
This small private company, Crowdstrike, was founded and is headed by Dmitri Alperovich, a Fellow at The Atlantic Council (which some of us may recall pays Eliot Higgins to run his Bellingcrap propaganda outfit) which itself has received donations from Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Pinchuk. Pinchuk has donated money to the Clinton Foundation in the past.
It was Crowdstrike that first started the Russiagate accusations which snowballed into an avalanche of bullshitting and witch-hunts that ironically have caught Paul Manafort, as an agent working for Ukrainian (ha!) interests, in their grip.
Michael Krieger “What is CrowdStrike? Firm Hired by DNC has Ties to Hillary Clinton, a Ukrainian Billionaire and Google”
https://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2017/03/23/what-is-crowdstrike-firm-hired-by-dnc-has-ties-to-hillary-clinton-a-ukrainian-billionaire-and-google/
Profound article Oliver. Lies, lies, and damn stinking lies on a daily basis. I cannot even stomach the so called media anymore, nor the craven presstitutes who write or report for such contemptible organisations. Its all like a Punch & Judy show. Keeping the masses entertained and ‘informed’ with banal bumfluff and trivialished tosh, and the repeated inventions of the next bogeyman to keep people fearful and under the thumb.
It is worth considering a brief listing of some of the obvious hoaxes and false flags of recent years, in no particular order.
1. Skripal
2. Litvinenko
3. Russiagate
4. Corbyn’s anti Semitism
5. Worldwide anti Semitism hoaxes, US, France
6. Iraq WMD
7. David Kelly
8. White Helmets
9. Syrian Gas attacks
10. 9/11
11. Most of the past “terrorist” attacks in the US, UK, Europe
12. The “mass shooting” incidents in the US
13. MH17
14. Russian sports doping.
There was a large UK content in at least 9 of the above 14 cases.
1,2,3,4,6,7,8,9,11.The UK Establishment/ Spooks seem to be the prime movers on multiple occasions.
There was a very significant Zionist element in 8 of these.
2,3,4,5,6,8,9,10.
The most important players seem to have been British and Zionist Spook Organisations, probably closely coordinated with other western intelligence agencies. Though they are frequently a law unto themselves, without any proper oversight, it is unlikely that these are rogue operations. They were carried out at the behest of governments. Or at least powerful factions within governments, and the Deep State. And of course their efforts were fully supported by the worldwide Zionist MSM.
What conclusions can be drawn from this?
1. Hoaxes, false flags, murderous and scurrilous dirty tricks, have been a permanent feature of western political life, at least for many decades, going back to the Zinoviev Letter of the 1920s, JFK, Tonkin Gulf, Gladio, Northwoods, and probably very many others that have never come to light.
2. We have to expect further hoaxes on a regular basis, directed against Iran, Venezuela, China, Russia, and against the populations of western countries themselves, for internal political purposes. There are many possibilities, some of which have been openly discussed in the past, like a faked Iranian attack on a US warship, or another 9/11 type provocation on the US itself, to provide a casus belli. Planting of nuclear material in Iran. There will probably be periodic resumptions of the spate of terrorist attacks and mass shootings. They will turn on the tap as and when required. The possibilities are legion.
3. It is very unlikely that anyone will ever be held accountable in any way for these operations, even those which are exposed. No one ever has in the past. Those involved are protected at the highest levels.
4. New terrorist groups like ISIS, bogus political movements like the EDL, and fake NGOs like the White Helmets, will be created when necessary and orchestrated by the spook organisations, to provide an element of cover and deniability for these operations.
5. Even obviously false narratives which do not bear up to the most cursory scrutiny, like Skripal and David Kelly, will be manufactured and pushed relentlessly by a servile controlled media, and further protected by blanket surveillance and rigid censorship. Future operations may be equally crude and risible. Plausibility does not appear to have a very high priority for those who initiate these operations. This is a function of the arrogance, ignorance and lack of intelligence of our ruling elites. It is seen in the crudity and lack of sophistication of the recent Venezuelan regime change operation.
One thing is certain. There will be many more of these hoaxes.
That is very likely, the distraction operations will continue. People usually like to attack the person who is President when it is the whole system that needs attacking.
Much ado was made about Skripal but the many innocent people who become victims of knife attacks in Britain do not feature. Then PM May deleted 21,000 police positions so crime is taking over the streets.
Their mendacity mandates that it’s about ‘austerity’ when in effect it is about war preparations (euphemism: security). They have an aircraft carrier now – and crime in the streets.
Now they want to domineer us with expensive US made 5G. And what exactly do we need 5G for? More surveillance? Better domineering?
5G is said to be very dangerous to humans because of microwave radiation. Don’t know much about it though.
I recommend careful study of the following article, which was written over sixteen years ago. I think that it would have to be acknowledged as being remarkably prescient, and it is still highly informative.
Milosevic, that is a WOW find! Dated 2002 yet reads like it was written tomorrow. Deserves what you say, careful study, because if our present knowledge of 911Truth was written by someone in .li in 2002 then maybe our future is written there too.
“…launch a cruise missile at a largely empty section of the Pentagon…”
How do you explain the large airliner-sized tail (as deconvolved par moi from the last image of the gas station video)? Carnival float cardboard cutout decoy decoration?
I think it’s possible for reasonable people to disagree about what, if anything, crashed at the Pentagon. (unlike the WTC, where only unreasonable people disagree that two Boeing-767-sized aircraft were involved.)
The above article was written in 2002, when 9/11 research was at a fairly early stage, and almost everybody who disbelieved the Official Story also disbelieved that a large airliner had crashed into the Pentagon. If that particular detail of the Official Story turns out to be true, that hardly invalidates the rest of the article.
I don’t think I’m familiar with the “gas station video”. Do you have a reference?
If you look at the blurred image that was produced, it seems pretty obvious it was a cruise missile of some sort. Looked smaller than a Tomahawk.
I think the concensus is that the alleged video from the Pentagon parking lot is simply fake, and therefore of no evidentiary value. (If it were real, why wouldn’t they also release the hundreds of other security camera videos that they must have?) If you’re referring to something other than that, I’d be curious to see the reference.
@Robbo
He’s also done another far more detailed analysis, somewhere on you tube.
Not a plane Robbo, logic dictates: elsewhere, Gen. Stubblebine even admits to seeing the photo you refer to, BEFORE it was tampered with and there was no tail section: the tail section was inserted after he began to question the material released to him.
@Robbobbobin
At the 10:00 minute mark, Gen. Stubblebine starts to talk about the Pentagon image that got altered, after he went public: he describes the picture as imagery that “got a new suit”,
when before, what he could see was a missile !
The interesting thing about the General is, that it was his wife that finally got him to question himself & others cognitive dissonance and inability to believe that his government could be implicated in a cover up. 😉
The Wahhabi fundamentals should praise you for letting them off the 9/11 hook. You’re also letting them off hundreds of other terror hooks all over the Globe like Mecca , Paris, Bali, Mumbai etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Islamist_terrorist_attacks . I hear they are swimming in oil money.
The Wahhabi can build on a long history of Islamist violence starting with their own war lord Prophet.: basically the opposite of a Buddha, a Jesus or a modern Gandhi.
Shakar! Keep the focus on the Jews!
consider Syria: obviously, the Chosen People aren’t going to do the dirty work themselves; that would be beneath them, and possibly dangerous. The smart thing to do is to recruit some stupid goyim, in the form of DAESH, to do it for you. The stupid wahabi death squads probably don’t even know who they’re actually working for. Perhaps they assume that the constant stream of money, guns, and drugs is a gift from Allah.
Good article, though it ought to have included a dishonourable mention of Bill Browder, considering how influential the Magnitsky Act was in stirring up anti-Russian hysteria in the Obama era, and all to cover up Browder’s own crimes committed in Russia.
Mark; Ouse4msm:
Mark: you missed the Zionist element in 1. Skripal. Which was Bill Browder pushing his Magnitsky sanctions pseudo-narrative through the Labour Party, from day one. As soon as the announcement was made by Johnson: Thornberry and Cooper were on their feet pushing the Buzzfeed “From Russia with Blood” dossier about the “killing fields of the South East” [Abbott]. Which raises the possibility that 1,2,3 on your list were the same extended operation [Operation Beluga – to discredit Putin …according to ‘Superflic’ Capitaine Paul Barril]. Steele is implicated throughout. There is a loose association of ex-MI6 operatives clustered around Richard Dearlove that I have called the ‘Dearlove Cabal’. Which ties in with the Iraq ‘dodgy dossier’. Browder is deeply mired in Russiagate, as you probably know.
With common personnel: I would term this a very British ‘Deep State Event’. It would be tempting to tie in Kelly, but I can’t find the link from open sources. I wish I had more time to look into it: but it looks like we have our very own version of North’s ‘Secret Team’ of ‘civilian’, plausibly deniable, AZC helpers.
[Ian Austin – Corbyn’s bete noir (now a TInGer) – is also linked to Browder (he proposed an earlier amendment to add Magnitsky style sanctions – with Cooper and Hodge) so it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to add 4 in too].
I file the daily anti-Israel rants win the same drawer as RussiaGate. The most striking aspect of the anti-Israel rhetoric is that it is utterly disconnected from facts and logic. America simply refuses to accept responsibility for the misery this country so persistently causes.
utterly disconnected from facts and logic
(waiting for Mossad trolls to arrive — three, two, one …)
Milosevic: Jesus hell’s bells Milosevic, I came here too OffG to get away from the Zionist trolls! Don’t want them infesting these pages with their deluded rants. Tho I’m sure you, Mark, BigB, and a couple others would sort them out! As I cannot tolerate or stomach MSM anymore, neither can I stomach seeing the face of that murdering war criminal. I choose not to hit the play button. Thanks for the link anyways
“…I cannot tolerate or stomach MSM anymore, neither can I stomach seeing the face of that murdering war criminal.”
So don’t look at the face of the majority Israeli electorate. They won’t care.
However much it has been and is being gerrymandered to fit the narrative of Zionism, within that constraint, the illegitimat e gerrymander also known as “The State of Israel” runs a pretty open social democracy. Bibi has consistently got the job by gaming the system in ways that are constantly used and approved by “social democrats” and their ballot-box supporters everywhere.
Dear BB,
You’re right of course. That was an arbitrary list of 14, and all were pushed by the Zionist MSM. I was just thinking out loud trying to identify the main players on a nuts and bolts basis. I think the UK connection is more significant than most people realise. Though you could argue 9/11, which was clearly a Zionist operation, far outweighs the rest. There was no real shock effect on the powers that be in the UK after these various bizarre events, just a ready made narrative being put out with a slick PR campaign being cranked into gear.
I think the UK connection is more significant than most people realise.
see this article for a historical episode of Foreign Meddling in US elections:
Ron Unz — Alexander Cockburn and the British Spies
Mark; Milosevic:
I have no reason to suppose that Quiglley’s Anglo-American (AZC) Milner Group of globalists, or Docherty and Macgregor’s ‘Secret Elite’ – who planned and precipitated WW1 – are not alive and well …as a modern iteration grouped round Dearlove (John Scarlett will be lurking in the shadows to, I presume). However, that is supposition. That is why Britain is so secretive: filing Whitehall menus for 90 years. We are only just finding out about WW1! The really good stuff gets ‘water damaged’: never to see the light of day again. We’ve been caught ‘parallel archiving’ before (over the abhorrent MauMau repression). The FOIA was my greatest mistake: TBliar.
Maybe the grandchildren can have a conversation in a century, when the great grandson of Mark Curtis will go through the archive to corroborate what we are pretty sure we know already. 😉
ouse4msm,
Bill Bowder, who gave Hilary Clinton 400 million dollars, moved to Russia in 2000 and renounced his US citizenship. Vlad threw him out of Russia because he had been laundering money 1.5 BILLION dollars through the HSBC Bank and owed 23,000 thousand dollars in taxes. So Bowder who is big buddies with the other vampire Soros, has been out to get Putin ever since, and accusing him of the very crime he himself has been committing since 2000.
So Browder doesn’t have ‘much’ of a self interested axe to grind?
Courtesy of Truther sites such as OffG on the www people have an alternative to bloating their brains by absorbing MSM mental corn syrup, such as RussiaGate. Even an Armchair Analyst can get to the truth faster than the MSM can pour out lies. From SyrPer:
“Armchair Analyst #288605
After waiting for the Idlib offensive to happen [to clean out the last ISIS terrorists from Syria], for what felt like an eternity, I gleefully followed events on LiveUAmaps, and saw how Idlib has got completely covered with air-and-artillery strikes by Syria and its Allies.
The locations — mostly along the two highways and inside the ‘demilitarized zone’, but also deep inside the terrorist’s area. Strikes against supply lines, stores and headquarters suggest that those strikes were very well planned and based on meticulously gathered Intel.
In other words, they must have hit the Islamists extremely hard. This is supported by the low numbers of civilian casualties reported by the opposition media. If there were civilian victims to parade around, the ‘rebels’ for sure wouldn’t pass on this opportunity.
In my book, this silence also strongly indicates the HTS are taking heavy losses. Moreover, the Turks suddenly starting their patrols “to protect innocent civilians inhabiting the front lines from [alleged] indiscriminate regime shelling” speaks volumes. ”
I think it is time that brain specialists began to investigate, because I believe there is an invisible epidemic of Gross Mental Obesity in “the West” from ingesting mental corn syrup poured out by the MSM — same as the visible epidemic of Gross Bodily Obesity from ingesting hydrolysed corn syrup in its food and drink.
An excellent analysis. One can easily argue that the current outbreak of so called rampant – “anti-Semitism” – now being endlessly peddled by MSM is simply another manifestation of the “distraction” propaganda narratives used to silence dissent and shut down critical thinking among we “plebs.” Just as challenging the Russiagate nonsense resulted in accusations of being a “Putin Puppet,” or “Russia-bot,” now simply questioning wealth distribution, amoral neoliberal economic madness, or the role of banks in our criminal economic model is enough to get one labeled an “anti-Semite.” One needn’t even mention, the unmentionable words – “Israel,””Zionism,” or “Palestinian rights” directly to be smeared as a hateful “anti-Semite.” Suddenly is is sufficient simply to dare publicly question the legitimacy of the global oligarchy and it’s systems of control and domination. How convenient.
Meanwhile this same “oligarchy” has in violation of all international laws and norms simply named “random Guaido” the new president of Venezuela! Who knew our global revolution could be so easy? Let us all simply take our cue from our wise oligarchs and now proceed to name our own new leaders for ALL Western nations that continue to trample upon the rights of humanity and the rights of a l living planet to simply survive.
And Branson will hold flash concerts that nobody shows up for. …
Yes the oligarchy are all in it together.
Tutisicecream: I wonder what the bastard would show up wearing? A pussy riot hat? Of course they’re all in it together Tuts. Its called class warfare.