“Russian hacking” is the Left/Never-Trumpers’ explanation for Donald Trump’s election.
In their furrowed-brow telling, they have just discovered something called “Russian interference” and “Russian influence.” Don’t ask where so many of them have been all of our lives, because they’ve spent about a century telling us there was no such thing.
That was then. Today, they insist that this newfound Russian interference and influence secretly drove nearly 63 million American deplorables to reach for that GOP lever again and again to vote for Donald Trump, not Hillary Clinton.
Let me squeeze in a little historical context. The late, great Sen. Joseph McCarthy was not, in fact, wont to make such sweeping, conspiratorial charges without offering well-documented evidence, as we might see in his remarkable peroration of the still strange and perplexing career of George C. Marshall (pdf here; get over the Birch imprint; this is a reissue of the original 1952 Devin-Adair book publication).
Back to postmodern times.
Russia exerted this influence and interference, anonymous “officials” declare daily through the nation’s top organs, by its alleged hacking of the email accounts of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and the DNC, and subsequent alleged passing of these tens of thousands of emails to Wikileaks. That would be Julian Assange’s “radical transparency group,” as the Washington Post calls the phenomenal Internet-based publisher of government documents, which, hosannas to the gods, now performs a watchdog-role by default that most media, including the Post, have rejected, making themselves noxious and obsolete.
It is hard to imagine Jeff Bezos’ sheet today publishing that massive, pre-hacking-era document “theft,” the Pentagon Papers. Fie! That would be “stealing,” according to our brave, new, uniparty-state-submissive stenographers. Better for all good media to ensure that government “secret” documents never, ever get to those of us who just elect and employ the government.
Thus, due to Russia — not the globe-spanning criminality and corruption (and open borders, forked-tongue Alinskyism) of Hillary Clinton; and not one bit of Donald Trump’s revolutionary America First political program — Trump won the presidency. Ergo, Trump = Putin puppet. That makes the Clinton crime syndicate, the degenerate Podestas, the Left, Never-Trumpers such Amnesty McCain (and that bizarre pop-up candidate, Evan McMullin) the Second Coming of … Joe McCarthy?
Well, just a minute, stop, we don’t mean to suggest anything like that, witch-hunt, witch-hunt, Red Scare, glug, glug….
One difference (of many) is Joe McCarthy, as noted, sought and found evidence in his investigations, which, contrary to “conventional wisdom,” were strictly into secret Communists working covertly for the Kremlin and/or world Communism from inside the US government (and he nabbed 50, at least). It is simply reckless to muscle a conspiracy theory onto the American people wthout evidence. And no, accepting the word of “anonymous officials” from hyper-politicized agencies just doesn’t cut it. I am put in mind of David Horowitz at the Heritage Foundation a while back, calling half of the justices on the Supreme Court “Communists” without offering a shred of evidence to back up his incendiary charges. As the late, great Stanton Evans noted to me at the time: Joe McCarthy would never, ever have done that.
All of this toggling back and forth must indicate how unsettled these issues remain. Back to today.
Something, many things, are wrong with the current-day picture, some of which I have discussed here, here and here.
So long as the source of this hacked/leaked evidence is the flashpoint, the evidence itself, the emails, the “real news” are obscured: the terrible patterns of government corruption, media collusion, lies, “rigging,” etc., that the emails help reveal.
Actually, maybe that’s a goal of this “Russian” offensive.
In the meantime, no one is contesting the veracity of these same emails. Indeed, the most important fact at the bottom of the pile is that Wikileaks has a perfect record when it comes to the veracity of the millions of documents it has published.
The contents of DNC/Podesta emails amplify and extend the revelations of the tens of thousands more emails on the Hillary Homebrew Server (and bleached from the Hillary Homebrew Server), and, presumably, the hundreds of thousands of emails on the Anthony Weiner laptop, reportedly being investigated by a US attorney in New York, and more.
It is what this body of evidence tells us, leads us to wonder about and (bing, bing, bing) further investigate that is crucial to keep in mind: the endemic corruption of the Clintons, their Foundation, their Democrat Party, their media, the Obama administration, a large portion of which, by the way, is linked to Russia.
In the meantime, it seems safe to assume that what we deplorables could piece together in time for November 8 was, naturally, a factor in Donald Trump’s election. The MSM were of little or no help on these counts, and no wonder: Wikileaked emails prove that top journalists in Washington regularly sought approval, editing suggestions from their Democrat sources. The political parties and institutions were AWOL too, providing zero checks or balances. Elites, Democrat and Republican alike, were thus content, no — desperate — to keep the party and these parties of corruption going.
Most telling of all may be what “they” all seem to be after with this giant Russian gambit. Yes, the Left/Never-Trumpers want to delegitimize the most amazing electoral triumph probably in US history, in which Donald Trump successfully carried off a populist, America First victory over all of the powers-that-were; but they also seek to erase the evidence against the ancien regime as being Kremlin-tainted — even though the documents themselves are genuine! To dismiss this avalanche of evidence of crime and corruption because, let’s say, Putin himself pushed the button to release it, would be like dismissing the evidence against a Mafia don or mass murderer that is genuine, but passed to law enforcement by a criminal informant. It would nearly spell the end of the crimimal justice system. Certainly, it would allow a lot of criminals to get a pass. It does make me wonder if we are also watching the groundwork being laid to equate Hillary Clinton’s legal defense with our patriotic duty.
A final point. I remain agnostic on the source of these damning emails. I would bet these were leaks from within the US government; however, I don’t rule out “Russian hacking.” I don’t rule out Julian Assange’s denial that Russia was WikiLeaks’ source, either. Indeed, the latter two could both be true if Wikileaks received the email troves from a third or fourth party. In any case, it seems worth noting that Soviet/Russian disinformation campaigns of consequence going back to the Trust in the 1920s (Edward Jay Epstein explains it here) are typically based in deception: lies, forgeries, blackmail, coercion and other crimes. This we began to learn right after the Soviet Union came into being nearly one hundred years ago; later, during the great congressional investigations of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s; much later in state-controlled releases of Soviet intelligence documents in London (Mitrokhin) Moscow (Vassiliev) and Washington (Venona); in defector/witness testimonies as related by numerous authors, more recently including Pete Earley, whose Comrade J includes the fascinating tale from “Comrade J,” Russian intelligence’s top spy in the US from 1995-2000, about how it was that the Soviet intelligence “created the myth of nuclear winter” — remember that? The Kremlin didn’t bring Western media and the political Left to a fever pitch by releasing genuine documents, either; this sustained Russian influence operation campaign depended on disseminating bad science.
All of which is to say, it is just not a normal hallmark of Kremlin strategy to let the sun shine in as a means of changing the world.
As for America’s “best and brightest” — they might try it sometime.