The Real “Colluders” With Russia
Progressive conspiracy theorists.
(c) Can Stock Photo / Frostie
Even now, despite the lack of any shred of evidence, Democrats and their media allies are pushing the meme that Donald Trump or members of his administration are really Russian agents. They do this apparently for two major reasons. First, they would dearly love to generate an upwelling of public demands for Trump’s impeachment and removal from office. Second, and just as important for them, they need to create a public narrative about how they so thoroughly lost the elections of 2016, which were about far more than just Donald Trump. In a phrase from the Chinese, they have lost — at least temporarily — “the Mandate of Heaven.”
The Collusion Controversy
The humiliation from the election of Donald Trump was bad enough. Concerning that, Democrats could justly observe that their candidate had a plurality of around three million votes. However, the damage to the Democratic Party extended far beyond Trump’s election. It was even more extensive than the fact Republicans retained control over both the Senate and the House of Representatives. Even more humiliating and shocking to the progressives of the Democratic Party is that they lost the working class. Progressives’ entire raison d’être throughout history has always been to protect the working class from large corporations and the perceived depredations of the wealthy. Yet now, the working class is abandoning them. How can this be?
Because of this abandonment, not only has the Democratic Party lost any control of the levers of power in the national government, it lost control over the majority of state and local governments. The Wall Street Journal has reported the GOP now controls a record 69 0f 99 state legislative chambers, having flipped three state chambers including the Iowa Senate and the Kentucky house. Both of these chambers turned Republican for the first time in about 100 years. The tally of new Republican pickups related by the WSJ essay goes on and on. Republicans picked up three new governors in Missouri, New Hampshire, and Vermont, which brings the tally of GOP governors to 33, 66 percent of all the state governors! In half of all states, the Republican Party holds the governorship and both state chambers, and can claim 29 state attorneys general.
How, then, can progressives rationalize such huge and humiliating losses? Rather than reflecting on any errors they might have made on the nature of reality, they have opted on developing a theory of a conspiracy between Donald Trump and the Russian government. Their ultimate explanation on how they lost is that the Russians with the help of Donald Trump fooled the American people into believing Hillary Clinton was an awful person. They did this, the theory goes, by taking stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee’s computers and publishing them through Wikileaks.
And what were Donald Trump’s contributions to this conspiracy? What exactly did he do, or promise to Vladimir Putin in return for Russia’s help? To date, the only answers to these questions have been a lot of innuendo with absolutely no real evidence so far. Unfortunately, Trump has given fuel to this fire with his many past statements of admiration for Putin during and shortly after the election. By trying to inveigle Putin into helping out in the destruction of ISIS in Syria, Trump has inadvertently given the impression he would turn a blind eye to Russia’s hostility and misbehavior in places such as Syria itself, Ukraine, Georgia, and the Baltic Sea states. One would have thought Trump’s authorization of cruise missile strikes against Putin’s ally Syria for Syria’s use of nerve gas would have disabused progressives of this notion. Or that news the Trump administration is more likely to increase sanctions on Russia than weaken them would remove these doubts. Similarly, moves by Trump’s administration to bolster the defenses of Ukraine and NATO against possible Russian aggression should have silenced these innuendos.
Recent Developments
As time progresses, the accusations Trump is a traitor and a benefactor of Russian aggression grow increasingly unbelievable. Democrats so far have been incapable of unearthing any evidence to the contrary. So said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, on May 3, 2017 after going to the Langley CIA headquarters for a briefing.
So said former Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, on May 8. 2017.
So said Sen. Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia.
So said Sen. Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, on May 10, 2017.
Even ex-CIA Director John Brennon said so, although he attempted to obfuscate the issue. That obfuscation however also provided a great deal of enlightenment on who the real, unwitting “collaborators” were. Below is a video showing his entire testimony before the House Intelligence Committee on May 23, 2017.
Under questioning, particularly by Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC), Brennan had to admit he knew of no collusion between the Russians and Trump and his associates. However, he also made clear what had made the CIA so fearful about contacts between the Russians and individuals within the Trump campaign. To be sure, these contacts might all be completely legal, but Brennan said that knowing the Russian “M.O.”, he was very fearful the Russians would find a way to suborn, trick, blackmail, or even recruit Trump’s associates, whether wittingly or unwittingly. These are all suspicions of course for which we have no evidence. They were, however, all that was required for the American intelligence community and the FBI to be set up to be manipulated by the Russians.
The next piece of the puzzle was provided by the Washington Post in a May 24 article entitled How a dubious Russian document influenced the FBI’s handling of the Clinton probe. In the middle of the 2016 presidential campaign, the FBI received what was thought to be a Russian intelligence document. This secret document, which is now suspected of being a Russian plant to influence American intelligence, claimed there was a tacit understanding between the Clinton campaign and the Loretta Lynch Justice Department to cover up the misuse of classified information on Clinton’s private email servers. The Russian document said this fact was revealed by an email between then-chair of the Democratic National Committee, Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Leonard Benardo, an official with the Open Society Foundations, an organization founded by billionaire George Soros. The entire affair is described in the Washington Post video below.
FBI Director Comey bought the story. As the Washington Post article states,
Current and former officials have said that Comey relied on the document in making his July decision to announce on his own, without Justice Department involvement, that the investigation was over. That public announcement — in which he criticized Clinton and made extensive comments about the evidence — set in motion a chain of other FBI moves that Democrats now say helped Trump win the presidential election.
The problem with Comey’s reasoning was that email cited by the so-called Russian intelligence document simply did not exist. Concerning this, the Washington Post article states,
Wasserman Schultz and Benardo said in separate interviews with The Washington Post that they do not know each other and have never communicated.
In mulling all this over in the Wall Street Journal, Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. concluded it is the American intelligence services and the FBI who are “the real unwitting agents of Russian influence.” It was not Trump’s campaign using the Russians that engineered Clinton’s defeat; the Russians did that brilliantly all by themselves with the Trump campaign playing absolutely no role. A Wall Street Journal video painting this picture is embedded below.
No doubt, all of the factors considered above played a role, perhaps a very big role, in Hillary Clinton’s defeat. Nevertheless, it leaves out the biggest factor of them all: the American people. To accept that mostly the factors above determined the election results, one would have to assume the American people have no capacity for independent reasoning. What has caused Americans to revolt against their progressive elites in government, the news media, and in academia is the same thing that has caused electorates to revolt against their own national elites all over Western Civilization. The cause of all the revolts is completely independent of the Russians. That cause is the failure of all these elites to understand economic and social reality, and how that failure of understanding is greatly harming the populations of the West.
In the meantime, American progressives would do themselves a very great favor if they got over their Trump Derangement Syndrome.
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