CommentsCONSPIRACY THEORIES GALORE-Two days ago I happened to write an article about the amazingly stupid conspiracy theory that the Green Party, which has run a presidential candidate every election since 1996, ran a presidential candidate in 2016 because of a Russian plot to sabotage American democracy. Today, Buzzfeed News reports that the Senate Intelligence Committee has asked Jill Stein’s campaign to comply with a document search.
This is what Russiagate has come to. This psychotic conspiracy theory is now so desperate to turn this endless fountain of nothing into something that it is rifling through the documents of a campaign which received one percent of the popular vote because its candidate had dinner in Russia two years ago.
What else can I say about this besides what I wrote the other day? Jill Stein gave a perfectly reasonable explanation of the dinner she had in which she was photographed at a table with Michael Flynn and Vladimir Putin, and not one shred of evidence has ever been produced anywhere contradicting it. The Green Party necessarily has to run a presidential candidate every election in order to secure party viability; if they hadn’t run Stein they would necessarily have run someone else. The existence of third parties is a perfectly legitimate, legally sanctioned and desirable part of the American electoral process, and in the rest of the world they are considered normal. There is no legitimate reason whatsoever to suspect that Stein’s candidacy had anything to do with a Kremlin conspiracy.
And yet U.S. empire loyalists everywhere are having another one of their notorious online “bombshell” parades about this document search as though it means something.
A Hillary Clinton campaign official appears to be having some sort of conniption about it:
Medium’s village idiot Amy Siskind is doing a whole song and dance pretending that the news proves anything about anything.
MSNBC shill Scott Dworkin flat-out lies saying Putin paid for Stein’s Russia trip (she paid her own way).
And yet there is nothing to this report other than a deeply disturbing political stop-and-frisk meant to punish a political candidate for daring to defy the neoliberal neoconservative one-party system and make this fact-free McCarthyite feeding frenzy look legitimate.
But it isn’t legitimate. If Russiagate was legit, it wouldn’t be advancing profoundly stupid conspiracy theories about third party candidates which require such a suspension of disbelief that you need to forget the entirety of the Green Party’s recorded history in order to believe them. If Russiagate was legit, the people selling it to us wouldn’t be caught lying about it over and over and over again.
America’s power establishment is using Russiagate to cover up last year’s revelations about the rigged Democratic primary process and to manufacture public support for new cold war escalations with China’s right arm. There is no truth backing it up.
Last year we learned that one of America’s two major political parties actively sabotages candidacies which don’t perfectly kowtow to establishment agendas, and this year we’ve seen this same establishment running relentless punitive character assassination campaigns against any leftist candidates who dare to run outside the rigged Democratic party system.
Which of course is why it’s so funny when people claim that Russia attacked American democracy. In order for anyone to attack American democracy, democracy would have to exist in America.
(Caitlin Johnstone is a rogue journalist, poet and utopia prepper who writes on Medium where this piece first appeared. Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
-cw
