Are we losing WWIII before we even realize it started?
Putin’s cyber attack on Hillary’s servers was the beginning of World War III.
I know it has not yet led to the kind of human carnage we think of when we talk about the other great World Wars. Here, the first volley was not an assassination with a bullet, but rather a common email virus that got a few key members of the DNC to click on what they thought to be a password reset and instead opened up a backdoor for the Russian state to supply Wikileaks with proprietary data about the worst behaviors of #crookedhillary.
The Russians may have hoped that our progressive digital news services would compete with each other to “cover” the election by amplifying any new information that it received; but I doubt the Putin hacker loyalists counted on the extent to which social media editors would do the heavy lifting of creating BuzzFeed-worthy headlines to maximize CTR throughout the FB news feed.
The “public” (who we educated, successful, coastal Obamacrats forgot about while frothing our lattes) was outraged about Hillary’s scripted, conniving ways and wanted nothing more than to leave their rural home and drive to a giant auditorium to cheer on Trump’s alt-right propaganda: “Lock. Her. Up. Lock. Her. Up!”
You people were vicious, violent, screaming, ‘Where’s the wall? We want the wall!’ Screaming, ‘Prison! Prison! Lock her up!’ I mean you are going crazy. I mean, you were nasty and mean and vicious and you wanted to win, right? But now, you’re mellow and you’re cool and you’re not nearly as vicious or violent, right? Because we won, right?
Last night my 17-year old son said that I was a conspiracy theorist. I told him I wasn’t so political, that I was not a big Hillary supporter like most of those around me, and I hadn’t voted for her or Bernie during the primaries; but that I knew about Trump from the late 80’s in New York when I first moved there to go to Columbia. I am a narcissistic just like him. I know how to appeal to the interests of my audience, as he does. I hustle like him to turn my ideas into reality. And I can spin every failure into a momentary pause on the way to eternal greatness. It’s just how I’m wired. But unlike him, I am not a pathological liar. Nor am I obsessed with proving that I can win somebody else’s pageant. Nor am I so insecure that I need to surround myself with people that agree with me, and attack those that don’t.
Narcissism is a slippery slope to discuss, as it becomes quickly an issue of degree. And so instead of that, I asked my son about Trump the cryptographer. He responded “huh?” And I wondered aloud about this 70 year-old man who apparently gets his email read to him, whose every other tweet could be fixed by a spell-checker, who epitomizes the old-school luddite NY corrupt real estate shyster:
Did we ever get to see his tax records? Do you have any idea how many other things he must be concealing all these year doing all of these shady deals? How is it that he managed to keep all of these records totally secure while the Russians had no problem breaking into and publishing Hillary and the DNC’s most precious files? What do they know about him that we don’t. What are they holding over his head as leverage that we are not aware of. Do you really think Russia was able to hack into her servers and not his?
1977 was an intense year for me. I was 6 years-old. My parents were breaking up. I saw Star Wars 20 times in Boston. I felt consumed with secrets and my goal in life was to become a spy for the CIA. I wrote a letter to its Director under Gerald Ford, George H. Bush. I told him about my goal and I remember getting a letter back that said: “Focus on your school work and get good grades and come back to us when you graduate College,” or something to that effect.
And so I thought about George H. who went from the CIA to becoming Reagan’s VP to then become President in 1989 around the same time that I moved to New York and was first exposed to the cheesy chintzy un-charm of Trump and his brand of buildings and other stunted franchises like his airline and arena football team. Then came Bill Clinton as President. And then George W. And then Obama. And then Trump? The CIA that I dreamed of working for are now telling us that Putin and his henchmen attacked our Internet security to spill classified private information about a candidate in Hillary they didn’t like (while holding onto compromising information about another candidate in Trump who they prefer because they feel like they can control him).
My son pressed me on how I could prove that Putin’s meddling actually changed the course of the election. Of course I couldn’t give him that. The cause arguments are still settling. There is no perfect equivalency metric we can use now to compare the Russian’s hacking with Hillary’s own likability with the pent-up frustration of the Rust Belt, with on and on and on. The sad thing is that by the time we do finally finish the proper investigations into how Russia attacked our election to create chaos and usher in the era of a compromised unqualified President, that it will be too late. We will have already lost World War III before we even had the conviction to declare it had started. And the blitzkrieg of racist, misogynist, anti-semitic, anti-science, pro-Russian appointments that Trump rushed to fill prior to taking office will be seen as the bridge that enabled Putin’s Russia to annex post-Obama America without a single shot being fired.
Postscript: I published this at 4am Sunday night and woke up today to the following text from my son:
I laughed, thinking that he was just fucking with me and my “conspiracy theories,” until I went online and saw this:
