The always reliable NBC News has published an important and informative article titled “Russia-linked Twitter accounts promoted ‘doxxing’ over racial tension videos”, which uses fearless investigative insinuations and cutting-edge vagueness to inform readers that viral videos of Americans being racist are essentially a Russian fabrication.

The article’s four authors boldly document the shocking, bombshell findings of a Clemson University study that “almost 30 suspicious Twitter accounts” were involved in retweeting videos of racist behavior from white Americans, and, as alert readers should all be aware by now, “suspicious” is another word for “Russian”. Since we all know that racism has never been a problem in America and only Russian agents could possibly promote such an outlandish idea, we can safely assume that anyone we see sharing viral videos of white Americans being horrible to minorities is a subversive agent of the Kremlin.

Due to the need to protect western democracy from the malign influence of Moscow, it has become increasingly necessary for patriotic citizens to call attention to these nefarious propagandists so that social media users don’t become hypnotized by their soul-corrupting memes. This is why you will very often see alert netizens sounding the alarm online whenever they catch someone doing something Kremliny, such as expressing skepticism of western intelligence agencies or criticizing Kamala Harris. Here are five things you can do to avoid being caught in the crossfire of this vital information war and getting labeled a Russian agent yourself:

1. Always support all actions of the US military and its allies.

There’s only one person who benefits from skepticism toward the activities of western military forces, and that’s Vladimir Putin. Nobody but a GRU agent would question the fact that our brave men and women in uniform are out there fighting for freedom and democracy in the highest interest of everyone involved. Our trusted leaders have never lied to us about what they are using the armed forces for, and they’re not about to start now.

This rule applies to news which demonstrates the need for military action as well. If the television tells you that Bashar al-Assad has dropped poison gas on an area full of children and video cameras, and you find your mind quibbling over details like the absence of any strategic reason for such a thing, just relax and keep watching. This is just your mind trying to turn you Russian. The TV will straighten you out.

2. Believe everything the news reporters tells you.

It is a known fact that Putin’s main goal in his hybrid warfare against truth and freedom is to weaken our trust in our institutions. That’s step one of his plot: weaken our trust in our institutions and media. Step two, well, nobody knows what step two is, but step three is the annexation of America and the EU into the Russian Federation.

The best way to thwart this sinister plot is therefore to place as much trust as possible in authoritative news bodies which, unlike Russian media, have no record of circulating fake news or propaganda at any time ever. There is a fully diverse range of trusted media outlets for you to choose from, varying all the way across the entire political spectrum from politically conservative outlets like The Wall Street Journal and Fox News, to highly progressive news outlets like The Washington Post and MSNBC. There’s something for everybody!

3. Accept Joe Biden as your Lord and Savior.

President Joe is happening. It’s like one of his famous neck kisses: you might not like it, you might not want it, but it’s happening. So you may as well get used to the idea. Don’t struggle against it. Don’t protest it. Don’t be Russian about it.

This rule also applies to the surrogate Joe Bidens waiting in the wings in case Plan A falls through. No objecting to President Kamala, President Liz or President Beto, either. If the DNC decides that that’s what’s best for you then you’ll vote for it and say thank you, you insolent little shits.

4. Kiss up to power, kick down at the oppressed.

Your government loves you. Your government would never do anything to harm you. Your government would never do anything to harm anyone. Anyone who criticizes your government or its friends is your enemy. They are Russian. They must be destroyed.

The unwashed masses want to take from your leaders what is rightfully theirs. The unwashed masses have been hypnotized by Russia. They do not know what is best for them. They are useful idiots. It is your job to correct their thinking, loyal citizen. Correct them as forcefully as necessary.

5. Believe all America’s problems started in January 2017.

It is common knowledge that the White House has been infiltrated by the Kremlin using a complex scheme involving hackers, Facebook memes, Trump Tower, and urinating Russian prostitutes. All of America’s problems began at that time, whether they be racism, gun violence, deportations, Republican Party corruption, or political divisiveness. Any attempt to trace any problems to any time prior to January 2017 or any location other than Moscow is Russian. If we get rid of the Putin Puppet, we solve all of America’s problems forever.

If you meticulously follow these five steps, loyal citizen, you can be sure to avoid ever being labeled a Russian agent. Probably. Maybe. Depends how obedient you are. I wouldn’t worry about it.

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It is noteworthy that Engel was heavily relied upon to report on “intelligence” reports issued by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which is run by a Syrian expatriate named Rami Abdulrahman and operates out of his clothing shop in Coventry. Abdulrahman was a pass-through operation for the anti-Bashar Assad Syrian opposition that was found to be operating with subsidies from Britain’s MI-6 Secret Intelligence Service.

The infamous British government “Dodgy Dossier” on Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction” was proffered by Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Director of Communications and Strategy, Alastair Campbell, to a gullible media in February 2003. The dossier was used by Blair and US President George W. Bush to bolster their decision to invade and occupy Iraq. The so-called intelligence in the dossier on Iraq was deliberately exaggerated by London and Washington to justify the rush to war.

Following along Britain’s recent history of producing false and misleading files and dossiers, the overly hyped Steele Dossier, authored by former MI-6 agent Christopher Steele, has been used to cast blame on the Russian government for meddling in the 2016 US presidential election on behalf of Donald Trump. Left out of the Steele Dossier was any mention of the pro-Trump activities of other non-US actors, including exiled Eastern European oligarchs resident in Britain and Israel, as well as the governments of Israel, Saudi Arabia, Australia, Britain, the Netherlands, the United Arab Emirates, and Turkey in the 2016 election.

With regard to British-based exiled oligarchs, the Khodorkovsky-financed Dossier Center in London recently passed a dossier, said to contain the communications of Russian businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, to NBC News’s Engel. The news network even admitted that it had “not independently verified the materials” prior to reporting on the dossier’s contents.

One alleged communication in the dossier, titled “Development Strategy of a Pan-African State on US Territory,” proposed “several ways to further exacerbate racial discord in the future, including a suggestion to recruit African Americans and transport them to camps in Africa ‘for combat prep and training in sabotage.’ Those recruits would then be sent back to America to foment violence and work to establish a pan-African state in the South, particularly in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana.” The alleged proposal called for “enlisting poor, formerly incarcerated African Americans ‘who have experience in organized crime groups’ as well as members of ‘radical black movements for participation in civil disobedience actions’ to ‘destabilize the internal situation in the US’”

NBC’s report is assuredly based on a hoax because the underlying plot to which it refers is over fifty years old. The idea for a majority African American nation to be called the Republic of New Africa, carved out of the US South, was first promulgated in 1968 by the Malcolm X Society, named after the assassinated leader of the Nation of Islam. The states proposed as part of the Republic of New Africa were Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina – the very same states named in the Khodorkovsky dossier – in addition to adjacent black-majority counties in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina; and to the black-majority counties adjacent to this area in Arkansas, Texas, North Carolina, Tennessee and Florida. As a further clue to the Khodorkovsky Dossier being a hoax is the inclusion of majority African American regions of Texas on a map of the envisaged black nation in the South. The dossier’s documents are such a forgery, the authors could not even offer a degree of originality to the Republic of New Afrika’s model from 1968.

The Khodorkovsky Dossier’s authors obviously believed that no one, including NBC News, would recall that its proposed black secessionist nation in the American South was the fifty-one year- old Republic of New Afrika. Many of the architects of the Republic of New Afrika died long ago. They include the republic’s provisional first president, Robert Williams, a North Carolina civil rights activist, who later fled to Cuba and China. Milton Henry, also known as Brother Gaidi Obadele and a student of Malcom X, was elected the republic’s first vice president and Betty Shabazz, Malcolm X’s widow, was elected second vice president. Succeeding Williams as president in 1970 was Milton Henry’s brother, Richard Henry, who was also known as Imari Obadele. The capital of the republic was designated as a member’s farm in Hinds County, Mississippi. Mississippi’s state capital, Jackson, is one of the two county seats of Hinds County.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation immediately declared the Republic of New Afrika a seditious organization and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover made the arrest and prosecution of the republic’s leaders among his top priorities. The Republic of New Africa maintained a paramilitary group called the Black Legion. In 1969, a gun battle between the Black Legion and the Detroit police resulted in the death of a Detroit police officer.

Another Republic of New Afrika leader was “Monster Kody” Scott, also known as Sanyika Shakur. Before embracing black nationalism, Shakur had been a member of the Los Angeles street gang called the “Eight Tray Gangster Crips.”

There has always been a belief by many informed observers that the “threat” of the Republic of New Afrika, which was advanced by the FBI, was exaggerated as part of the bureau’s COunter INTELligence PROgram, also known as COINTELPRO. If the FBI hyped the Republic of New Afrika until COINTELPRO’s dissolution in 1971, Khodorkovsky’s Dossier Center in London is surely doing so today by resurrecting the Republic of New Afrika as a threat. COINTELPRO’s psychological warfare against groups like the Republic of New Afrika, Black Panthers, Nation of Islam, the Communist Party USA, and the Socialist Workers Party was on a plan to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, or otherwise neutralize” targeted groups by creating a “negative public image” and “releasing negative personal information to the public.” In effect, Khodorkovsky’s Dossier Center has adopted the key elements of J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO to resurrect the Republic of New Afrika and falsely assign blame to the Russian government.

The only relevance of the Republic of New Afrika to the present day is Chokwe Lumumba, formerly Edwin Taliaferro of Detroit, elected second vice president in 1971. In 2013, Lumumba was elected mayor of Jackson, Mississippi. Lumumba died on February 25, 2014 from an unknown cause, said to have started out from the symptoms of a common cold. Many of Lumumba’s supporters believe that the mayor’s death was the result of a medically-induced homicide. The Hinds County coroner refused to perform an autopsy of Lumumba, increasing suspicions about the cause of his death.

The only possible result of the Khodorkovsky Dossier being relevant today is the possible desire to stoke residual suspicions about Lumumba’s death in 2014. Otherwise, the Republic of New Afrika is but a distant memory and a footnote of American history. However, the dupes at NBC News, who were not able to realize they have been played like a cheap fiddle, have treated dusting off the Republic of New Afrika by Khodorkovsky’s London propaganda operation as a major newsworthy event.

Headlines were blaring the word “Russian” again the other day because the mass media narrative managers found yet another reason for westerners to feel terrified of the icy potato patch that we’d barely ever thought about prior to 2016. I’d like to talk about the Kremlin’s latest horrifying horrific addition to its fearsome doomsday artillery, and recap a few of the other incredibly frightening and terrifying tactics that those strange Cyrillic-scribbling demons of the East are employing to undermine truth, justice, and the American way. Just to make sure we’re all good and scared like we’re supposed to be.

Gather the kids, clutch your pearls and sign off on hundreds of billions of dollars of extra military spending, my patriotic brethren! Here are five super scary ways the Red Menace is trying to destroy you and everything you hold dear:

1. Whales

Is this beluga whale actually a Russian spy? https://t.co/GC8hYIuH7J

— USA TODAY (@USATODAY) 29 апреля 2019 г.

Headlines and TV news segments from virtually all mainstream outlets were falling all over themselves the other day to report the fact that some Norwegians found a tame beluga whale with a harness on it, and “experts” attest that the animal may have been part of a covert espionage program for the Russian navy.

While there is no indication that this spying cetacean has been trained in the arts of sonar election meddling or shooting novichok from its blowhole, the Guardian helpfully informs us that the harness was labeled “Equipment of St. Petersburg”, and was equipped to hold “a camera or weapon”.

“Marine experts in Norway believe they have stumbled upon a white whale that was trained by the Russian navy as part of a programme to use underwater mammals as a special ops force,” the Guardian reports.

The Norwegian tabloid Verdens Gang, which picked up on the discovery well before the breathless English headlines began gracing us with their presence, is a teensy bit less Ian Flemingesque in its reporting on the matter: the harness is equipped for a GoPro camera. The words “Equipment of St. Petersburg” are written in English.

Why is the Russian military writing “Equipment of St. Petersburg” in English on the garments of its aquatic special ops forces, you may ask? If there were indeed a secret beluga espionage squad assembled by Russian intelligence services, would they not perhaps avoid writing the home address of the whales on their harnesses altogether, and maybe, you know, not let them run free in the wild?

And to that I would say, stop asking so many questions. That’s just what Putin wants.

2. Crickets

NBC and MSNBC Blamed Russia for Using “Sophisticated Microwaves” to Cause “Brain Injuries” in U.S. “Diplomats” in Cuba. The Culprits Were Likely Crickets. https://t.co/7G8p0PyCKI

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) 7 января 2019 г.

A report seeded throughout the mainstream media by anonymous intelligence officials last September claimed that US government workers in Cuba had suffered concussion-like brain damage after hearing strange noises in homes and hotels with the most likely culprit being “sophisticated microwaves or another type of electromagnetic weapon” from Russia. A recording of one such highly sophisticated attack was analyzed by scientists and turned out to be the mating call of the male indies short-tailed cricket. Neurologists and other brain specialists have challenged the claim that any US government workers suffered any neurological damage of any kind, saying test results on the alleged victims were misinterpreted.

The actual story, when stripped of hyperventilating Russia panic, is that some government workers once heard some horny crickets in Cuba.

*cough*

3. Puppies

Robert Parry explores the strange mystery of the Russia-gate puppies, https://t.co/XL9pxJW4E8

— Consortium News (@Consortiumnews) 4 октября 2017 г.

Ye gads, is is nothing sacred? Is there any weapon these monsters won’t use to transform the west into a giant, globe-spanning Mordor?

That’s right, in 2017 puppies became one of the many, many things we’ve been instructed to fear in the hands of our vodka-swilling enemy to the east, with mass media outlets reporting that a Facebook group for animal lovers was one of the sinister, diabolical tactics employed by St. Petersburg’s notorious Internet Research Agency. As the Moon of Alabama blog has explained, the only evidence we’ve seen so far actually indicates that the Internet Research Agency’s operations in America served no purpose other than to attract eyeballs for money. As journalist Aaron Maté wrote of the highly publicized Russian Facebook meddling, “Far from being a sophisticated propaganda campaign, it was small, amateurish, and mostly unrelated to the 2016 election.”

The late, great Robert Parry, one of the earliest and most outspoken critics of the Russiagate narrative, covered this one for Consortium News in an article he authored a few months before his untimely passing:

As Mike Isaac and Scott Shane of The New York Times reported in Tuesday’s editions, “The Russians who posed as Americans on Facebook last year tried on quite an array of disguises. … There was even a Facebook group for animal lovers with memes of adorable puppies that spread across the site with the help of paid ads.”

Now, there are a lot of controversial issues in America, but I don’t think any of us would put puppies near the top of the list. Isaac and Shane reported that there were also supposedly Russia-linked groups advocating gay rights, gun rights and black civil rights, although precisely how these divergent groups were “linked” to Russia or the Kremlin was never fully explained. (Facebook declined to offer details.)

At this point, a professional journalist might begin to pose some very hard questions to the sources, who presumably include many partisan Democrats and their political allies hyping the evil-Russia narrative. It would be time for some lectures to the sources about the consequences for taking reporters on a wild ride in conspiracy land.

Yet, instead of starting to question the overall premise of this “scandal,” journalists at The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, etc. keep making excuses for the nuttiness. The explanation for the puppy ads was that the nefarious Russians might be probing to discover Americans who might later be susceptible to propaganda.

“The goal of the dog lovers’ page was more obscure,” Isaac and Shane acknowledged. “But some analysts suggested a possible motive: to build a large following before gradually introducing political content. Without viewing the entire feed from the page, now closed by Facebook, it is impossible to say whether the Russian operators tried such tactics.”

4. Pokémon

Yes, Pokémon.

This Russia hysteria has been a long, wild ride, and sometimes it’s honestly felt like they’re just experimenting on us. Like they’ve been testing the limits of how ridiculous they can make this thing and still get mainstream Americans to swallow it. Like the establishment propagandists are all sitting around in a room smoking blunts and making bets with each other all,
“I’m telling you, we can sell a Pokémon Go Kremlin conspiracy.”
“Do it!”
“No way. There’s no way they’ll go for it.”
“Yeah well you said that about the puppy dogs!”

And then they release their latest experiment in social manipulation and place bets on how many disgruntled Hillary voters they can get retweeting it saying “God dammit, I knew that jigglypuff looked suspicious!”

The October 2017 CNN report which sparked off a full day of shrieking “OMG THEY’RE EVEN USING PIKACHU TO ATTACK OUR DEMOCRACY” headlines was titled “Exclusive: Even Pokémon Go used by extensive Russian-linked meddling effort”, and it reported that Russia had extended its “tentacles” into the popular video game for the purpose of election meddling. Apparently the Internet Research Agency attempted to hold a contest using the game to highlight police brutality against unarmed Black men, which of course is something that only an evil autocracy would ever do.

Not until the fifteenth paragraph of the article did we see the information which undercut all the frantic arm flailing about Russians destroying democracy and warping our children’s fragile little minds:

“CNN has not found any evidence that any Pokémon Go users attempted to enter the contest, or whether any of the Amazon Gift Cards that were promised were ever awarded — or, indeed, whether the people who designed the contest ever had any intention of awarding the prizes.”

Mmm hmm.

5. Laughter

Turns out jokes are a Russian disinformation conspiracy.
Is nothing safe? What will those barbarian Others think of next? Weaponizing our tears? https://t.co/0CFcTL65q0

— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) 15 декабря 2018 г.

Late last year the BBC published an article titled “How Putin’s Russia turned humour into a weapon” about yet another addition to the Kremlin’s horrifying deadly hybrid warfare arsenal: comedy. The article’s author, ironically titled“Senior Journalist (Disinformation)” by the BBC, argues that Russia has suddenly discovered laughter as a way to “deliberately lower the level of discussion”.

“Russia’s move towards using humour to influence its campaigns is a relatively recent phenomenon,” the article explained, without speculating as to why Russians might have suddenly begun laughing at their western accusers.

Is it perhaps possible that Russian media have begun mocking the west a lot more because westerners have made themselves much easier to make fun of? Could it perhaps be the fact that western mass media have been doing absolutely insane things like constantly selling us the idea that the Kremlin could be lurking behind anything in our world, even really innocuous-looking things like puppy dogs, Pokémon and whales? Could we perhaps be finding ourselves at the butt end of jokes now because in 2016 our society went bat shit, pants-on-head, screaming-at-passing-motor-vehicles insane?

Nahhh. Couldn’t be. It’s the Russians who’ve gone mad.

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Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts has a national following but she also has considerable baggage. The recent revelation that she falsely described herself as “American Indian” back in 1986 for purposes of career advancement, which comes on top of similar reports of more of the same as well as other resume-enhancements that surfaced when she first became involved in national politics, prompted Donald Trump to refer to her as “Pocahontas.” Warren, who is largely progressive on social and domestic issues, has been confronted numerous times regarding her views on Israel/Palestine and beyond declaring that she favors a “two state solution” has been somewhat reticent. She should be described as pro-Israel for the usual reasons and is not reliably anti-war. She comes across as a rather more liberal version of Hillary Clinton.

And then there is New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, being touted as the “new Obama,” presumably because he is both black and progressive. His record as Mayor of Newark New Jersey, which launched his career on the national stage, has both high and low points and it has to be questioned if America is ready for another smooth-talking black politician whose actual record of accomplishments is on the thin side. One unfortunately recalls the devious Obama’s totally bogus Nobel Peace Prize and his Tuesday morning meetings with John Brennan to work on the list of Americans who were to be assassinated.

Booker has carefully cultivated the Jewish community in his political career, to include a close relationship with the stomach-churning “America’s Rabbi” Shmuley Boteach, but has recently become more independent of those ties, supporting the Obama deal with Iran and voting against anti-Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) legislation in the Senate. On the negative side, the New York Times likes Booker, which means that he will turn most other Americans off. He is also 49 years old and unmarried, which apparently bothers some in the punditry.

California Senator Kamala Harris is a formidable entrant into the crowded field due to her resume, nominally progressive on most issues, but with a work history that has attracted critics concerned by her hard-line law-and-order enforcement policies when she was District Attorney General for San Francisco and Attorney General for California. She has also spoken at AIPAC, is anti-BDS, and is considered to be reliably pro-Israel, which would rule her out for some, though she might be appealing to middle of the road Democrats like the Clintons and Nancy Pelosi who have increasingly become war advocates. She will have a tough time convincing the antiwar crowd that she is worth supporting and there are reports that she will likely split the black women’s vote even though she is black herself, perhaps linked to her affair with California powerbroker Willie Brown when she was 29 and Brown was 61. Brown was married, though separated, to a black woman at the time. Harris is taking heat because she clearly used the relationship to advance her career while also acquiring several patronage sinecures on state commissions that netted her hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The most interesting candidate is undoubtedly Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, who is a fourth term Congresswoman from Hawaii, where she was born and raised. She is also the real deal on national security, having been-there and done-it through service as an officer with the Hawaiian National Guard on a combat deployment in Iraq. Though in Congress full time, she still performs her Guard duty.

Tulsi’s own military experience notwithstanding, she gives every indication of being honestly anti-war. In the speech announcing her candidacy she pledged “focus on the issue of war and peace” to “end the regime-change wars that have taken far too many lives and undermined our security by strengthening terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda.” She referred to the danger posed by blundering into a possible nuclear war and indicated her dismay over what appears to be a re-emergence of the Cold War.

Not afraid of challenging establishment politics, she called for an end to the “illegal war to overthrow the Syrian government,” also observing that “the war to overthrow Assad is counter-productive because it actually helps ISIS and other Islamic extremists achieve their goal of overthrowing the Syrian government of Assad and taking control of all of Syria – which will simply increase human suffering in the region, exacerbate the refugee crisis, and pose a greater threat to the world.” She then backed up her words with action by secretly arranging for a personal trip to Damascus in 2017 to meet with President Bashar al-Assad, saying it was important to meet adversaries “if you are serious about pursuing peace.” She made her own assessment of the situation in Syria and now favors pulling US troops out of the country as well as ending American interventions for “regime change” in the region.

In 2015, Gabbard supported President Barack Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran and more recently has criticized President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the deal. Last May, she criticized Israel for shooting “unarmed protesters” in Gaza, but one presumes that, like nearly all American politicians, she also has to make sure that she does not have the Israel Lobby on her back. Gabbard has spoken at a conference of Christians United for Israel, which has defended Israel’s settlement enterprise; has backed legislation that slashes funding to the Palestinians; and has cultivated ties with Boteach as well as with major GOP donor casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. She also attended the controversial address to Congress by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in March 2015, which many progressive Democrats boycotted.

Nevertheless, Tulsi supported Bernie Sanders’ antiwar candidacy in 2016 and appears to be completely onboard and fearless in promoting her antiwar sentiments. Yes, Americans have heard much of the same before, but Tulsi Gabbard could well be the only genuine antiwar candidate that might truly be electable in the past fifty years.

What Tulsi Gabbard is accomplishing might be measured by the enemies that are already gathering and are out to get her. Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept describes how NBC news published a widely distributed story on February 1^st, claiming that “experts who track websites and social media linked to Russia have seen stirrings of a possible campaign of support for Hawaii Democrat Tulsi Gabbard.”

But the expert cited by NBC turned out to be a firm New Knowledge, which was exposed by no less than The New York Times for falsifying Russian troll accounts for the Democratic Party in the Alabama Senate race to suggest that the Kremlin was interfering in that election. According to Greenwald, the group ultimately behind this attack on Gabbard is The Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), which sponsors a tool called Hamilton 68, a news “intelligence net checker” that claims to track Russian efforts to disseminate disinformation. The ASD website advises that “Securing Democracy is a Global Necessity.”

ASD was set up in 2017 by the usual neocon crowd with funding from The Atlanticist and anti-Russian German Marshall Fund. It is loaded with a full complement of Zionists and interventionists/globalists, to include Michael Chertoff, Michael McFaul, Michael Morell, Kori Schake and Bill Kristol. It claims, innocently, to be a bipartisan transatlantic national security advocacy group that seeks to identify and counter efforts by Russia to undermine democracies in the United States and Europe but it is actually itself a major source of disinformation.

For the moment, Tulsi Gabbard seems to be the “real thing,” a genuine anti-war candidate who is determined to run on that platform. It might just resonate with the majority of American who have grown tired of perpetual warfare to “spread democracy” and other related frauds perpetrated by the band of oligarchs and traitors that run the United States. We the people can always hope.

Photo: Flickr

Last week, as a polar vortex engulfed broad swaths of the upper Midwest, Rachel Maddow offered a chilling hypothetical. “What would happen if Russia killed the power in Fargo today?” she asked her viewers. “I mean, what would you do if you lost heat indefinitely as the act of a foreign power, on the same day the temperature in your front yard matched the temperature in Antarctica?”

Since Robert Mueller began his collusion investigation nearly two years ago, Maddow has emerged as one of the nation’s leading “Russiagate”conspiracists, but she is hardly alone. Days after the MSNBC host speculated that Russian President Vladimir Putin might try to freeze unsuspecting North Dakotans to death, NBC News published an article with the headline, “Russia’s propaganda machine discovers 2020 Democratic candidate Tulsi Gabbard.”And like Maddow’s on-air musings, the report has proved no less irresponsible.

“The whole story was a sham,” The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald writes. “The only ‘expert’ cited by NBC in support of its key claim was the firm New Knowledge, which just got caught by the New York Times fabricating Russian troll accounts on behalf of the Democratic Party in the Alabama Senate race to manufacture false accusations that the Kremlin was interfering in that election.”

New Knowledge CEO Jonathon Morgan was able to perpetrate his fraud, at least in part, through “Hamilton 68”—a dashboard that “highlights the activity of … 600 accounts that researchers believe are either tied to the Russian government or repeat the themes of its propaganda,” according to The New York Times. (In Greenwald’s telling, the tool “has so been abused that even some of its designers urged the media to stop exaggerating its meaning.”) Since the scam was exposed, Facebook has closed the accounts of several of those responsible—including Morgan—while Alabama Sen. Doug Jones has called for a federal investigation.

So why might New Knowledge identify Tulsi Gabbard as a possible Kremlin favorite? And more significantly, why is a major news network willing to carry water for such a scandal-plagued organization? Perhaps only Morgan and NBC News executive editor Catherine Kim can answer those questions definitively, but the answer is almost certainly Gabbard’s politics and platform, both of which fall to the left of the Democratic establishment.

Since announcing her run for president in January, the Hawaiian congresswoman has pledged to take on entrenched wealth and a runaway military-industrial complex. “We’re being torn apart by powerful, self-serving politicians and greedy corporations,” she said during her campaign kickoff speech in Oahu. “People fomenting hatred, bigotry and fear; inciting conflict between us because of the color of our skin, the way that we worship, or the political party that we might belong to.”

Gabbard’s run for president invites any number of legitimate criticisms. Her past jeremiads against “radical Islam” have reportedly earned the praise of Steve Bannon, and she has professed a curious admiration for India’s Hindu right; the LGBT community remains leery of her candidacy despite her support for the Employment Non-Discrimination Act and the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act; meanwhile, her anti-interventionism can appear “shot through with a pernicious nationalism,” as Branko Marcetic observes in Jacobin.

By the same measure, the indictments of Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort, political consultant Rick Gates and strategist Roger Stone suggest it’s possible, even probable, that some form of collusion transpired between Russia and team Trump, if not the president himself. Still, it seems telling that more than a year ahead of the 2020 primary, the mainstream media are already branding one of the Democratic Party’s fiercest critics of American empire an unwitting Putin pawn.

“The playbook used by the axis of the Democratic Party, NBC, MSNBC, neocons, and the intelligence community has been, is, and will continue to be a very simple one: to smear any adversary of the establishment wing of the Democratic Party—whether on the left or the right—as a stooge or asset of the Kremlin (a key target will undoubtedly be, and indeed already is, Bernie Sanders),” Greenwald concludes. “To accomplish this McCarthyite goal, this Democratic Party coalition of neocons, intelligence operatives, and NBC stars will deceive, smear, and even engage in outright journalistic deception, as NBC (once again) just proved with this report.”

truthdig.com

Photo: Flickr

When Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard announced her candidacy for the presidency on CNN last month, I had a feeling I’d be writing about her a fair bit. Not because I particularly want her to be president, but because I knew her candidacy would cause the narrative control mechanizations of the political/media class to overextend themselves, leaving them open to attack, exposure, and the weakening of their control of the narrative.

Mere hours before her campaign officially launched, NBC News published an astonishingly blatant smear piece titled “Russia’s propaganda machine discovers 2020 Democratic candidate Tulsi Gabbard,” subtitled “Experts who track websites and social media linked to Russia have seen stirrings of a possible campaign of support for Hawaii Democrat Tulsi Gabbard.” One of the article’s authors shared it on Twitter with the caption, “The Kremlin already has a crush on Tulsi Gabbard.”

The article reported that media outlets tied to the Russian government had been talking a lot about Gabbard’s candidacy, ironically citing as an example an RT article which documented the attempts by the US mainstream media to paint Gabbard as a Kremlin agent. The article’s authors cited the existence of such articles combined with the existence of “chatter” about Gabbard on the anonymous message board 8chan (relevant for God knows what reason) as evidence to substantiate its blaring headline. Even more hilariously, the source for its weird 8chan claim is named as none other than Renee DiResta of the narrative control firm New Knowledge, which was recently embroiled in a scandal for staging a “false flag operation” in an Alabama Senate race which gave one of the candidates the false appearance of being amplified by Russian bots.

This article is of course absurd. As we discussed recently, you will always see Russia on the same US foreign policy page as anti-interventionists like Tulsi Gabbard, because Russia, like so many other nations, opposes US interventionism. To treat this as some sort of shocking conspiracy instead of obvious and mundane is journalistic malpractice. There are many, many very good reasons to oppose the war agendas of the US-centralized empire, none of which have anything to do with having any loyalty to or sympathies for the Russian government.

But we will continue to see this tactic used again and again and again against any and all opposition to US-led interventionism for as long as the Russiagate psyop maintains its grip upon western consciousness. And make no mistake, these smears have everything to do with anti-interventionism and nothing to do with Russia. There will never, ever be an antiwar voice who the political/media class and their centrist followers espouse as good and valid; they’ll never say “Ahh, finally, someone who hates war and also isn’t aligned with Russia! We can get behind this one!” That will never, ever happen, because it is the opposition to war and interventionism itself which is being rejected, and in the McCarthyite environment of Russia hysteria, tarring it as “Russian” simply makes a practical excuse for that rejection.

All the biggest conflicts in the world can be described as unipolarism vs multipolarism: the unipolarists who support the global hegemony of the US-centralized empire at any cost, versus the multipolarists who oppose that dominance and support the existence of multiple power structures in the world. The governments of Russia, China, Iran and their allies are predominantly multipolarist in their geopolitical outlook, and they tend to be more in favor of non-interventionism, since unipolarity can only be held in place by brute force and aggression. Unipolarists, therefore, can always paint western anti-interventionists as Russian assets, since the Russian government is multipolarist and opposed to the interventionism of the unipolarists.

The nonstop propaganda campaign to keep the coals of Russia hysteria burning white hot at all times can therefore be looked at first and foremost as a psychological operation to kill support for multipolarism around the world. It can of course be used to manufacture consent for escalations against Russia, China, Syria, Venezuela, Iran etc as needed, but it can also be used to attack the ideology of anti-interventionism itself by smearing anyone who opposes unipolar oppression and aggression as an agent of a nefarious oppositional government.

The social engineers have succeeded in constructing a narrative control device which encapsulates the entire agenda of the unipolar world order in a single bumper sticker-sized talking point: “Russia opposes Big Brother, therefore anyone who opposes Big Brother is Russian.” This device didn’t take an amazing intellectual feat to create; all they had to do was recreate the paranoid insanity of the original cold war, and they already had a blueprint for that. It was simply a matter of shepherding us back there.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, there emerged a popular notion of a “peace dividend” in which defense spending could be reduced in the absence of America’s sole rival and the abundant excess funds used to take care of the American people instead. The only problem was that a lot of people had gotten very rich and powerful as a result of that cold war defense spending, and it wasn’t long before they started circulating the idea of using America’s newly uncontested might for a very expensive campaign to hammer down a liberal world order led by the beneficent guidance of the United States government. Soon the neoconservatives were pushing their unipolarist narratives in high levels of influence with great effect, and shortly thereafter they got their “new Pearl Harbor” in the form of the 9/11 attacks which justified an explosion in defense spending, interventionism and expansionism, just as the neoconservative Project for a New American Century had called for. And the rest is history.

And now our collective consciousness is planted right back in the center of that paranoid, hawkish political environment of the first cold war. The main difference now is of course that Russia is nothing remotely like a superpower today, and that the establishment Russia narrative is made entirely out of narrative, but the most important difference is that this time the establishment narratives are not taking place within the hermetically sealed bubbles of major news media corporations. People are able to communicate with each other and share information far more easily than they were prior to the fall of the Berlin wall, and westerners are able to easily access Russian media and anti-interventionist narratives if they want to.

Whoever controls the narrative controls the world, as I never tire of saying. This difficulty in replicating the hermetically sealed media environment of the original cold war poses a severe challenge for narrative control, and it is for this reason reason that there is now so much skepticism of the establishment Russia narrative. It is also the reason for the establishment’s aggressive maneuvers to censor the internet, to demonize Russian media, and to smear anti-interventionist perspectives.

But we can’t keep living this way. We all know this, deep down. The people at the helm of the unipolar world order are advancing an ecocidal world economy which is stripping the earth bare and filling the air with poison while at the same time pushing more and more aggressively against the multipolarist powers, one of which happens to have thousands of nuclear warheads at its disposal. The unipolarity so enthusiastically promoted by the neoconservatives and their fellow travelers has reached the end of the line after just a few short years, and now it’s time to dispense with it and try something else. They will necessarily smear us with everything but the kitchen sink for saying so, but we are right and they are wrong. The state of the world today proves this beyond a doubt.

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Although probably no more harmless than the fluttering of a butterfly’s wings deep inside the Amazon rainforest, news that veteran journalist William M. Arkin severed relations with NBC over its relentless pro-war, anti-Trump narrative was exactly the message the omnipotent media kings needed to hear as attacks on alternative (i.e. conservative) voices have reached totalitarian proportions.

In a farewell letter to his colleagues, Arkin said he was “alarmed at how quick NBC is to mechanically argue the contrary, to be in favor of policies that just spell more conflict and more war.”

“We shouldn’t get out Syria,” he asked rhetorically, suggesting Trump’s particular brand of foreign policy has not been a total flop. “We shouldn’t go for the bold move of denuclearizing the Korean peninsula? Even on Russia … do we really yearn for the Cold War?”

For many, news of Arkin flipping his bosses the proverbial bird on the way out the door was the sort of salute many have dreamed of delivering to the Legacy Media ever since the conspiracy theory of Russia intervention in the 2016 election turned into a nice excuse for the hulking Orwell Brothers – Google, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube – to start culling alternative media voices like hunters on the opening day of deer season.

Although Arkin’s letter betrays some naiveté – at one point he says he believed, despite his experience with the Iraq War, that he was invited back to NBC in the midst of the 2016 presidential campaign to “break through the machine of perpetual war acceptance and conventional wisdom to challenge Hillary Clinton’s hawkishness” – it is his frank admittance that the media has assumed the role as “cheerleader” for evermore military misadventures that strikes a nerve.

“I would assert that in many ways NBC just began emulating the national security state itself – busy and profitable,” he wrote. “No wars won but the ball is kept in play.”

Reading Arkin’s letter forces one to question at what point the mainstream media stopped serving as the voice of reason and restraint and started shaking the pompoms on behalf of military conquest. It seems that something fundamentally changed in the American mindset following the 20-year Vietnam War, which was arguably the last time the Liberals displayed genuine disgust with war.

Despite a plethora of global butchery today that warrants some serious criticism and debate, ‘progressive’ Liberals – from college campuses to Hollywood to the media establishment, institutions they essentially own lock, stock and barrel – would rather devote their time to insanely personal issues instead (specifically, matters related to sexuality, political correctness, feminism and race).

Although it may be argued that many millions of people did take to the streets around the world to protest the 2003 Iraq War, for example, those efforts are known today for what they failed to accomplish: halting the mad rush to war without UN approval against a country that played no role whatsoever in the attacks of 9/11. The fact that the media was overwhelmingly on the side of the hawks certainly did not help the campaign.

In the New York Review of Books, writer Michael Massing ventured to ask members of the mainstream media tribe “where were you all before the war?”

“Why didn’t we learn more about these deceptions and concealments [of the Bush administration with regards to what some had dubbed ‘faith-based intelligence’] in the months when the administration was pressing its case for regime change—when, in short, it might have made a difference?” 

Across the pond, meanwhile, the glaring disconnect that existed between the war-wary public and the pro-war press was summed up by Roy Greenslade of the Guardian: “There is a genuine scepticism about the existence of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, a readiness to question America's warmongering leadership and an obvious unease at Tony Blair's zealous push for war,” Greenslade wrote. “People…do not seem to accept the views of President Bush and Blair that Saddam Hussein is a threat to world peace. Yet, and here is the rub, the vast majority of the British press certainly does.”

The situation today with regards to the media and its coverage of war is bad to the point of appalling. In the past, it was the generals and political leaders who geared up the nation for war while the journalists at least feigned to be the arbiters of common sense and caution. Today the calculus has flipped and we find the media openly and unashamedly agitating for bloodshed long before the military commanders have sounded the charge. Much of this lamentable situation underscores the hazards of allowing a small clique of super-influential media companies – Comcast, Disney, AT&T, 21st Century Fox, CBS and Viacom – to control the vast majority of what the public sees and hears. But I digress.

It only requires a brief glimpse as to how the media responds to the ‘promise’ of military aggression to understand that something has gone seriously awry with American journalism. What did it take for CNN to quickly shelve Russiagate and finally endorse Trump as POTUS more than a year after he’d been in the White House? It took Trump launching a crack-of-dawn missile strike on Syria in April 2017. CNN analyst Fareed Zakaria could barely contain his jingoistic juices when he declared the morning after the bombardment, “I think Donald Trump became President of the United States. I think this was actually a big moment…Trump understands there is no need to go to a pesky Congress every time they want military force.”

Meanwhile, MSNBC anchor Brain Williams demonstrated far more enthusiasm for military hardware than could be considered healthy when he remarked while watching US missiles streaming towards Syria: “I am tempted to quote the great Leonard Cohen,” Williams said, ‘I am guided by the beauty of our weapons,’ and they are beautiful pictures of fearsome armaments what is for them a brief flight over this airfield.” Worse, Williams only ventured to ask a guest “What did they hit?” after this bombastic prelude.

On the flip side, when Trump made the audacious announcement in late December that he would be pulling US troops out of Syria it came off as a Kleenex moment for the media mavens. Max Boot, neocon cheerleader on behalf of non-stop bloodshed wailed in the Washington ‘Truth Dies in Darkness’ Post that “We are at the mercy of an ignorant and impetuous president.” At the same time, Rachel Maddow over at MSNBC showed consternation at the thought of US troops actually exiting some illicit military theater where we have no right to be in the first place.

This is the sort of choice American viewers get when the question of war and peace is on the table.

Amid such groveling behavior from so many ‘loyal’ members of the mainstream media, I will wrap this up by saying ‘hats off’ to William M. Arkin for having the courage to remind his media bosses about the real purpose of journalism, which is certainly not to parrot the official line when it comes to the prospect of war, or worse, push for military offensives on behalf of the military industrial complex. The duty of the journalist is to speak truth to power, even if it means forfeiting a paycheck in the process.

A journalist with NBC has resigned from the network with a statement which highlights the immense resistance that ostensibly liberal mass media outlets have to antiwar narratives, skepticism of US military agendas, and any movement in the opposite direction of endless military expansionism.

“January 4 is my last day at NBC News and I’d like to say goodbye to my friends, hopefully not for good,” begins an email titled ‘My goodbye letter to NBC’ sent to various contacts by William M Arkin, an award-winning journalist who has been associated with the network for 30 years.

“This isn’t the first time I’ve left NBC, but this time the parting is more bittersweet, the world and the state of journalism in tandem crisis,” the email continues. “My expertise, though seeming to be all the more central to the challenges and dangers we face, also seems to be less valued at the moment. And I find myself completely out of synch with the network, being neither a day-to-day reporter nor interested in the Trump circus.”

The lengthy email covers details about Arkin’s relationship with NBC and its staff, his opinions about the mainstream media’s refusal to adequately scrutinize and criticize the US war machine’s spectacular failures in the Middle East, how he “argued endlessly with MSNBC about all things national security for years”, the fact that his position as a civilian military analyst was unusual and “peculiar” in a media environment where that role is normally dominated by “THE GENERALS and former government officials,” and how he was “one of the few to report that there weren’t any WMD in Iraq” and remembers “fondly presenting that conclusion to an incredulous NBC editorial board.”

“A scholar at heart, I also found myself an often lone voice that was anti-nuclear and even anti-military, anti-military for me meaning opinionated but also highly knowledgeable, somewhat akin to a movie critic, loving my subject but also not shy about making judgements regarding the flops and the losers,” he writes.

Arkin makes clear that NBC is in no way the sole mass media offender in its refusal to question or criticize the normalization of endless warfare, but that he feels increasingly “out of sync” and “out of step” with the network’s unhesitating advancement of military interventionist narratives. He writes about how Robert Windrem, NBC News’ chief investigative producer, convinced him to join a new investigative unit in the early days of the 2016 presidential race. Arkin writes the following about his experience with the unit:

^{“I thought that the mission was to break through the machine of perpetual war acceptance and conventional wisdom to challenge Hillary Clinton’s hawkishness. It was also an interesting moment at NBC because everyone was looking over their shoulder at Vice and other upstarts creeping up on the mainstream. But then Trump got elected and Investigations got sucked into the tweeting vortex, increasingly lost in a directionless adrenaline rush, the national security and political version of leading the broadcast with every snow storm. And I would assert that in many ways NBC just began emulating the national security state itself — busy and profitable. No wars won but the ball is kept in play.}

^{“I’d argue that under Trump, the national security establishment not only hasn’t missed a beat but indeed has gained dangerous strength. Now it is ever more autonomous and practically impervious to criticism. I’d also argue, ever so gingerly, that NBC has become somewhat lost in its own verve, proxies of boring moderation and conventional wisdom, defender of the government against Trump, cheerleader for open and subtle threat mongering, in love with procedure and protocol over all else (including results). I accept that there’s a lot to report here, but I’m more worried about how much we are missing. Hence my desire to take a step back and think why so little changes with regard to America’s wars.”}

Arkin is no fan of Trump, calling him “an ignorant and incompetent impostor,” but describes his shock at NBC’s reflexive opposition to the president’s “bumbling intuitions” to get along with Russia, to denuclearize North Korea, to get out of the Middle East, and his questioning of the US military’s involvement in Africa.

“I’m alarmed at how quick NBC is to mechanically argue the contrary, to be in favor of policies that just spell more conflict and more war. Really? We shouldn’t get out Syria? We shouldn’t go for the bold move of denuclearizing the Korean peninsula? Even on Russia, though we should be concerned about the brittleness of our democracy that it is so vulnerable to manipulation, do we really yearn for the Cold War? And don’t even get me started with the FBI: What? We now lionize this historically destructive institution?”

“There’s a saying about consultants, that organizations hire them to hear exactly what they want to hear,” Arkin writes in the conclusion of his statement. “ I’m proud to say that NBC didn’t do that when it came to me. Similarly I can say that I’m proud that I’m not guilty of giving my employers what they wanted. Still, the things this and most organizations fear most — variability, disturbance, difference — those things that are also the primary drivers of creativity — are not really the things that I see valued in the reporting ranks.”

That’s about as charitably as it could possibly be said by a skeptical tongue. Another way to say it would be that plutocrat-controlled and government-enmeshed media networks hire reporters to protect the warmongering oligarchic status quo upon which media-controlling plutocrats have built their respective kingdoms, and foster an environment which elevates those who promote establishment-friendly narratives while marginalizing and pressuring anyone who doesn’t. It’s absolutely bizarre that it should be unusual for there to be a civilian analyst of the US war machine’s behaviors in the mainstream media who is skeptical of its failed policies and nonstop bloodshed, and it’s a crime that such voices are barely holding on to the fringes of the media stage. Such analysts should be extremely normal and commonplace, not rare and made to feel as though they don’t belong.

Click here to read William M Arkin’s full email, republished with permission.

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Photo: Flickr

What threat? Does Britain really feel threatened militarily by Russia? The absurdity of this assertion beggars belief.

Carleton-Smith is apparently convinced that “Russia has embarked on a systematic effort to explore and exploit Western vulnerabilities, particularly in some of the non-traditional areas of cyber, space, undersea warfare.”

Let’s ignore the fact that undersea warfare might be reasonably described as “traditional” because it has been conducted since at least the siege of Syracuse in 414 BC, while the first functioning (if unsuccessful) military submarine was the Turtle in the American Revolutionary War of 1776, and consider cyber warfare.

In 2014 NBC News reported that “Documents taken from the National Security Agency… describe techniques developed by a secret British spy unit called the Joint Threat Research and Intelligence Group (JTRIG) as part of a growing mission to go on offense and attack adversaries ranging from Iran to the hacktivists of Anonymous. According to the documents, which come from presentations prepped in 2010 and 2012 for NSA cyber spy conferences, the agency’s goal was to ‘destroy, deny, degrade [and] disrupt’ enemies by ‘discrediting them, planting misinformation and shutting down their communications’.”

NBC went on that “According to notes on the 2012 documents, a computer virus called Ambassadors Reception was ‘used in a variety of different areas’ and was ‘very effective.’ When sent to adversaries, says the presentation, the virus will ‘encrypt itself, delete all emails, encrypt all files, make [the] screen shake’ and block the computer user from logging on . . .”

So Carleton-Smith thinks Russia is entirely at fault, and a greater threat to Britain than Islamic State, because it is taking action in cyber-world to try to counter all the British (and US and Australian) efforts to “destroy, deny, degrade and disrupt” un-named “enemies” by “discrediting them, planting misinformation and shutting down their communications.”

As to space, perhaps Carleton-Smith needs to be reminded that a week after he was appointed head of the British army on June 11, 2018, President Trump declared “I am hereby directing the Department of Defense and Pentagon to immediately begin the process necessary to establish a space force as the sixth branch of the armed forces. Our destiny beyond the Earth is not only a matter of national identity but a matter of national security.”

In one of his disjointed rambling speeches Trump had already given notice that “Space is a war-fighting domain, just like the land, air, and sea. We may even have a Space Force, develop another one, Space Force. We have the Air Force, we'll have the Space Force.”

His initial comments were off-script, but his potentially devastating fantasies were given substance by later actions — and it is therefore not surprising that the world sat up and took notice, and that China and Russia are developing plans to counter this obscene extension of the global aggression displayed by Washington’s Military Industrial Complex and its well-rewarded Congressional cheerleaders.

Then we come to Carleton-Smith’s “undersea warfare” (which happens to be the title of the US Navy’s “professional magazine of the undersea warfare community”). This is an intriguing inclusion in his list of Russian threats to Britain, because recently there were other (“non-traditional”?) undersea operations in the Arctic, named ICEX 2018. Concerning these manoeuvres it was reported that the submarines USS Connecticut, USS Hartford and the Royal Navy’s HMS Trenchant, “spent 105 days under ice while steaming over 21,000 nautical miles. Combined, they performed 20 through-ice surfacings including the first three-submarine ICEX since 1991.”

The Arctic is extremely important to Russia as a potential source of minerals and a commercially important shipping route, as the ice continues to melt. As observed by Russia’s defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, “The Arctic has turned into an object of territorial, resource and military-strategic interest for a number of states. This could lead to growth in the potential for conflict in this region.”

The potential for conflict was highlighted by the US-UK submarine manoeuvres and a number of other indicators described in SCF, not the least of which is Britain’s parliamentary declaration that “NATO’s renewed focus on the North Atlantic is welcome and the Government should be congratulated on the leadership the UK has shown on this issue.”

Which brings us, finally, to Carleton-Smith and NATO, which organisation he greatly admires. He believes the military alliance represents the “centre of gravity of European security”, insisting that it has been “extraordinarily successful” and therefore “In my experience, we should reinforce success.”

That would be the NATO “success” that destroyed Libya in a nine-month aerial blitz that resulted in anarchy and expansion westwards of Islamic State. As I write, Voice of America is reporting that “at least nine security service members were killed in a suspected Islamic State group attack in the south-eastern Libyan town of Tazerbo” which rather makes nonsense of the Carleton-Smith claim, in his interview with the Daily Telegraph’s foreign editor, a sycophantic creep called Con Coughlin, that “The physical manifestation of the Islamist threat has diminished with the complete destruction of the geography of the so-called Caliphate.”

Then there is the US-NATO “extraordinarily successful” conflict in Afghanistan, where the death of yet another US soldier has just been notified along with news that 27 Afghan soldiers were killed in a bomb explosion while they were praying. This is somewhat at variance with views of Carleton-Smith’s father, Major General (retired) Sir Michael Carleton-Smith, who told his local newspaper that the war in Afghanistan “undoubtedly it has been worth it. Afghanistan still has massive problems, but it’s a better place now than it was when we went in.” What garbage.

But then we realise that there is a bigger picture, as explained in the UK Defence Journal which tells us that “Further to the Defence Select Committee’s report… Carleton-Smith stated that the defence budget ‘should be in direct proportion to the threat’. This remark was made more poignant by the fact that the previous day, Lt Gen Frank Leidenberger from Germany referred to “the good old days of the Cold War”, and suggested that in 2018, we are in a ‘lukewarm war’. Mark Lancaster MP (Minister of State for the Armed Forces) was another who argued that the threat now is as bad as it was during the Cold War.”

When you want more money, you hype the threat.

Carleton-Smith ended his address to the Royal United Services Institute in London by saying “we are all custodians of something exceptionally precious, not just our Army, but our nation’s Army and it’s made of flesh and blood – and beating hearts.”

And damn-fool generals.

The WSJ/NBC News poll began on the day the summit was held. Eighty-eight percent of Republicans approve of the job the president is doing.   Of them, 64% strongly approve of Donald Trump. One can now say with certainty that the attempts to turn him into a lame-duck president have failed.

The more criticism Donald Trump gets from the media, the more his supporters rally behind him, and that’s a solid base.  There is nothing to suggest that the Trump-GOP deal is on shaky ground. The president can bank on the backing of the Party’s grassroots, and that’s what’s most important. As Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, explained, “I can’t read his intentions or what he meant to say at the time. Suffice it to say that for me as a policymaker, what really matters is what we do moving forward.” There is a reason to believe the GOP will do well during the November midterm elections, strengthening the president’s position.

“The Summit with Russia was a great success, except with the real enemy of the people, the Fake News Media,” Trump tweeted. A Washington Post-ABC News poll found that most Americans do not feel Trump went ‘‘too far’’ in supporting Putin in Helsinki.  According to the Federalist, “Americans don’t give a hoot about the so-called Russia collusion.”

As of May, public confidence in Trump’s handling of economic policy had also seen a jump since January (53% in May, 46% in January) according to the Pew Research Center. With Defense Secretary James Mattis and State Secretary Mike Pompeo at the helm,  foreign policy has at last been aligned with the goals set by the president.

In late 2017, Donald Trump was in dire straits, suffering one setback after another. Now everything has changed and he can stand his ground and invite the foreign leader he wants to Washington without worrying about what his opponents say.  

Defense officials could have easily avoided making any comments about the invitation made to the Russian president, leaving the State Department staff to deal with the issue, but they did state their position. On July 20, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy John Rood defended the White House's invitation to Russian President Vladimir Putin to come to Washington in the fall. "I think it's a very normal and practical thing," he said.

After the Helsinki meeting, experts started to work on arms-control cooperation. The New START was mentioned as part of the agenda in Finland, but it is still not known if the treaty is to be extended or replaced with something new. Thanks to the summit, the differences over the INF Treaty are being addressed by experts, but the fate of the agreement has still been left hanging.  There is a dialog happening over Syria, but nothing has been made public as yet. The unrest in Iraq and the situation in Libya cannot just be ignored. Afghanistan is not in the spotlight, but the escalated fighting in the northern part of the country is an issue of mutual concern. These are the potential areas of cooperation.

The diplomatic row has yet to be settled. If relations are improving, it’s time to fully staff the respective embassies in order to facilitate contacts and to change the environment. The US could refuse to recognize Crimea as part of Russia and then just drop the issue in favor of areas where progress can be made. After all, it’s a European problem. Washington could maintain a close relationship with Ukraine and Georgia, while ceasing its support of their full-fledged membership in NATO, in order to allay Russia’s concerns.  Moscow could help Washington make progress on North Korea, including through economic projects in which the US and South Korea could play a role. The administration could also let the fate of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project be decided by Russia and the EU.  It does not prevent US LNG from being shipped to Europe, but so far East Asia has been more attractive for American exporters, so why make an issue of it? Russia and the US could join together to work out guidelines for a new European security document to be submitted jointly to the OSCE for consideration. If it goes through, the US president would greatly strengthen his position internally and abroad.

A top-level meeting always provides an impetus for progress in a relationship. The presidents could meet at least three more times this year: at the UN General Assembly session in September; at the meeting President Trump invited President Putin to in the fall; and at the November G20 summit in Argentina.

The relationship is a disaster right now, but there are no irreconcilable differences or fundamental conflicts. The Helsinki event set the stage for diplomacy. President Trump believes that “There are many answers, some easy and some hard, to these problems… but they can ALL be solved!” The public reaction in the United States shows that progress in this relationship can boost the GOP position in Congress. Suppose a major agreement is signed at the summit that Donald Trump is to set up in Washington, and the meeting takes place right before the November midterm elections! The president and his party will see their chances improve. A victory would spur progress in the relationship, paving the way for major agreements that would be a real feather in Trump’s cap during his campaign for a second term.