The Russians Who Hacked 2016 Election Came From California, Colorado and New York
Today’s fragmented media environment and nano-second attention spans have led hundreds of thousands of people to swallow the “Russians ‘hacked’ the 2016 election” line whole while suffering total memory loss regarding decades of Corporate Democrat™ demonization and censorship demands for Conservative media.
Instead, this group of neoliberals seem to think that Rush Limbaugh’s show is a 110% Kremlin-endorsed psy-op.
Most progressives don’t have time to monitor every form of media. They’ve got enough to do with work, family, friends and education.
Conservative media — which has nothing to do with Russian cyborg troll armies dedicated to destroying Hillary Clinton’s Presidential ambitions — is not only alive and well, much of it has always functioned completely outside the neoliberal-dominated media world.
For many decades, genuine Conservative media and thought was as “underground” and looked-down upon as dirtbag socialists, communists, genuine rights advocates, advocates for Native American culture, anti-colonialists and even stupid, ugly, worthless 55 year old women like me.
Now, there’s a scrubbed-clean #MAGA version of a “conservative” like Greta Van Susteren who does get featured on MSNBC. Greta, aside from being a Scientologist, is no more ‘conservative’ than Kamala Harris, but that doesn’t matter to MSNBC, a special-interest channel with specific market demographics.
And for every “officially sponsored opposition member” like Greta Van Susteren, there are harder-edged, plain-spoken people like Michelle Malkin who have successfully used social media to establish a platform, audience, and properties (Hot Air, Twitchy) she later sold profitably to a real media giant: Salem Media Group, headquartered in Camarillo, CA.
Salem Media’s testimonials indicate the organization’s reach and value to advertisers.
All of these are media or charitable organizations geared toward Christian and/or conservative audiences.
Among the many unattractive qualities of neoliberals, I have always found one of the worst to be their seemingly inborn, unalterable tendency to insult the intelligence of those who are opposed to them. Given our culture’s fake bi-polar political dichotomy, people who’d fall for that or think that paid entertainers representing the fake “opposite side” are probably … not all that smart themselves.
In other words: how dumb are you if you think this massive body of U.S.-based alternative media that is — in many cases — far more effective at reaching its constituents than so-called Mainstream Media — was somehow completely ineffective during the 2016 US election while mysterious cyborg “hackers” caused the horrific, world-ending result of a Hillary Clinton in exile instead of the Oval Office.
These are people who think like this.
Not one of those comments is from a legitimate individual social media account belonging to a human being. Every one of them is a bot, troll or cyborg.
In contrast, the people who so horribly attacked Ijeoma Oluo for tweeting about Cracker Barrel were very real, although many were operating behind pseudonyms.
I am not saying Michelle Malkin is racist or that all people who visit her website or who read links from Twitchy, or who write for RedState or any of the other publications owned by Salem Media Group are racist.
That’s what their ineffective, weak opponents — the neoliberals — say. It’s what they’ve said for years, and it is what the ineffective, weak, clumsy recent progressive psy-op focused on Caitlin Johnstone and Mike Cernovich was trying to accomplish. The clumsy effort wanted, and still wants, to tie progressives in with its broad-blanket Conserva-racist-Russian-communist brush.
99.9 percent of those who read Michelle Malkin have no idea who Caitlin Johnstone is, and probably have only heard Mike Cernovich’s name in passing.
Maybe .02% of those who read Michelle Malkin stand ready to take any race-bait available and blast it out to their racist audiences and friends who are on-duty 24–7 to mess with people like Ijeoma who dare to speak out about legitimate, utterly-justified fears of being black in all-white environments.
It’s sad as hell, because the people at the Cracker Barrel probably would have tipped their cowboy hats to her if they’d realized how she really felt and truly understood the reasons.
Just like the neoliberal pundits who want their ever-shrinking audiences to believe that progressives are racist for saying #Medicare4all, #Fightfor15, #Collegeforall, #NoWar, #NoDAPL, the real racists on the far right have the identical motive: isolating ordinary people, keeping them in fear and hatred and darkness.
One of these sides is much more effective in mobilizing and motivating cyber-armies of human beings. And it’s not the neoliberals.
In response to decades of being shut out of the official national media discourse, people on the right and Christians (those are not the same things) have had to develop parallel systems of communication and media. These systems are thriving and have been for some time.
So, if you get attacked by a right-wing group online — and those of us who are legitimately on the left do experience these attacks — chances are, it’s a cyber-army but with living troops. These troops don’t want progressives talking to the average conservative whose life doesn’t revolve around racism any more than their opposing “side” does. Yes, they do want to silence and attack women of color, men of color, and any random other who expresses real support for people of color and anti-racism.
As to the Johnstone-Cernovich psy-op? Who knows? It, like the seeming throng that attacked Ijeoma for saying she was afraid to go into an all-white Cracker Barrel with her children (I hope and pray it was less than 15 people, some using sock puppets and cyborg accounts), seemed to attract people with real racist attitudes to the foreground, where they persisted long past the time logic or decency should have shut them up.
The majority of American conservatives aren’t overtly racist. How do I know? Because one side of my family were 5th generation Republicans, and the other, Communists and socialists. Bedrock American conservatives from the Heartland would also listen to reason and think about new, genuine information which we are not taught in school (we are taught the exact opposite). I was raised by the conservative, Republican side and my grandfather, the former Sheriff of my small, agricultural hometown —to actively denounce and shun racists. My hometown was memorialized by the horrifically neoliberal Atlantic writer James Fallows — as one of America’s great small towns.
That’s why I write articles like
People say “it’s about education,” and it’s true: our educational system has failed to convey dozens of failures in complete opposition to the high-minded principles we learn in school. Our educational system does not serve the 99%, it serves the 1% as cheaply as possible.
This is an excerpt from a 1995 article in American Quarterly by George Liptsitz, “The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: Racialized Social Democracy and the ‘White’ Problem in American Studies.” Lipsitz is currently a professor at UC Santa Barbara and published a book of the same title in 1999.
To me, what this country owes to this young student is a better education and better chance at life, along with African-American students and all others. This young 17-year old lady wasn’t being asked to personally take her money and pay reparations. The people who have those funds, along with funds she could have used for a better salary, job or affordable, nice home, are the ones who took it, and still owe it.
This type of thing isn’t covered in school in any comprehensible way. The neoliberals, neoconservatives, and other mouthpieces don’t want anyone to hear that message.
It’s not high on the priority list for the average ‘white’ conservative to even think about the vast number of documented, legitimate complaints that African Americans have. It angers them right off the bat to hear things that make them feel responsible for the horrors this country’s lower-quality leaders have done since the founding of this nation. After all, it was their blood spilled on all those battlefields. Not — Bill Clinton’s. It’s their tax dollars that enable the endless wars and bail out the thieving, home-stealing mortgage criminals, yet somehow, can’t pay a buck to keep national parks open or give a homeless vet a decent place to live.
Somebody is going to have to fix this and it isn’t Baitlin Johnstone or a guy whose best claim to fame is teaching other guys how to make Super Semen.
It will entail sacrifice. But the thing is: an awful lot of people have already sacrificed every single thing they have up to and including their lives, and up to and including all the sacrifices each and every black American, Native American, and Latino American has made for all of this time.
A lot of people have already sacrificed an awful lot to do their part to uplift this country and the world. Lipsitz comes right out and says the problem will never be fixed until white people fix themselves.
For individualistic, “can do” people who’ve overcome so many adversities and challenges to achieve success … I have to think that can happen. I have to believe that people can see the humanity in each other and see a way to do what’s right.
And for progressives, we need to study the success of the alternative conservative and Christian media and learn what we can from it. And be aware: if masses of racially-motivated trolls show up on social media, they likely are human beings. Horrible. True. At least if they’re Hillbots or Obamabots, they’re likely fake.
Racism motivates a tremendous number of people. More people are afraid of being called racist these days than are overt “in your face” David Duke or Ijeoma Olua racists. The other side has used this national Original Sin and “peculiar Institution” to divide our country for the entire time.
Would I talk to a white conservative about the facts behind racism and our messed-up economy? Absolutely: one element at a time. If people ask me, and they often do not, “which conservative writer with whom do you often agree, at least in part” I would easily answer Victor Davis Hanson (VDH). Our ‘white’ backgrounds are quite similar. He is an honest man, right now truthfully stating what a load of horse-hoeey the #CalExit “movement” is.
VDH would, perhaps, have some understanding of, as a military historian and classicist, what I say here:
Some hundred and fifty-some years ago, a poor Irishman who took a rich white man’s place in the Civil War, and died in The Wilderness, did not owe the Southern emancipated black men a single thing. But that rich man? He owed a lot: to both of them. And as yet, has not paid.
Rome fell for a reason, and Nazi Germany, should never have risen. This is what we should think about. That, and education. You know: the stuff Bernie Sanders said should be free for all and that Joan Walsh and her corn cob friends all say is racist.
