Michael Shellenberger and Alex Gutentag didn’t miss the recent string of Russian collusion theories that we were subjected to this week. The Russians were using the House Republican majority to interfere in the 2024 election. Nancy Pelosi lobbed the ‘Kremlin is blackmailing’ Trump narrative again—all of which are tinfoil hat material. These theories have long been debunked, with Shellenberger, Gutentag, and Matt Taibbi recently publishing a series about how Moscow wanted Hillary to win, how the intelligence community laid the groundwork for the collusion hoax long before the FBI, and how this community of spooks, overall, has been engaged in a sustained campaign of targeting Trump supporters and trying to shape public opinion. Their illegal spy operations have been exposed, so why are Americans addicted to these Russian narratives? Like Hunter Biden with crack cocaine, they can’t get enough—and Shellenberger knows why.
You could probably guess the answer, too. It’s that a healthy share of Americans remain convinced that Russia tinkered with our election when it was the CIA. Granted, the Kremlin crackpots are fewer in number than they were in 2019, but it’s enough to keep these zombies glued to MSNBC and CNN. Liberals still snort these fake narratives like cocaine, and it makes it easier for Democrats to target and attack their political enemies as traitors. It veers back into the neo-McCarthyism that the Left had embraced since 2012 when Barack Obama mocked then-GOP nominee Mitt Romney for declaring that Russia is a geopolitical foe of the United States. There’s also another reason: Democrats don’t have much to run on in 2024.
The Substack post added that Hillary Clinton’s people needed to neutralize the Clinton Cash book written by Peter Schweitzer, which dropped before the Uranium One deal was reported in The New York Times, where Clinton, then-secretary of state, signed off on an agreement that allowed a Russian company, Rosatom, to control one-fifth of all uranium production capacity in the United States. Uranium One’s then-chairman had donated millions to the Clinton Foundation. The spooks were worried about Trump’s foreign policy, and all these roads intersected in the creation of this Russian collusion hoax. The post also highlights what these collusion delusion games signify for Democrats nowadays (via Public):
While this information helps fill in some of the gaps that exist in terms of understanding how the Russia collusion conspiracy theory began, it does not explain why the media and Democratic politicians continue to push it. Part of the reason appears to be that, though the Russia conspiracy theory was debunked several years ago, many Democratic voters continue to believe it. As such, the conspiracy theory offers a readily available cognitive framework in which to put concerns around Trump and MAGA Republicans.
The Russia conspiracy theory has the additional benefit of triggering the same “out-group” heuristic triggered by Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade of the 1950s. By casting Trump and MAGA Republicans as aligned with a hostile foreign power, it is easier to justify unethical and illegal behaviors to persecute them. We saw this previously when leaders of the Censorship Industrial Complex, such as Renée Diresta and Alex Stamos, first generated media hysteria over “foreign disinformation” before implying that “domestic disinformation” from MAGA voters was somehow connected to Russian disinformation attempts. McCarthyism is the process of re-framing domestic political opponents as foreign enemies.
At the same time, it’s not clear that the Russia conspiracy theory still has the power it had from 2017 to 2020, which raises the question of why Democrats are still using it. The answer may be that the Democrats do not feel they have much else to run on in 2024. Trump is ahead in the polls, and Democrats’ fears that he and other Republicans will completely ban abortion appear to have subsided. Biden and the Democrats got almost everything they wanted on climate change.
As such, the Russia conspiracy theory signifies the emptiness or nihilism of the Democratic party. It has achieved the agenda it set out to achieve on everything from health care to climate change to LGBT rights. It has now little left to advocate for beyond demonizing its political opponents as Putin’s puppets.
They’ve got nothing left. Is that the main reason? Biden’s memory has degraded. Most Americans don’t view his agenda favorably, with nearly half saying they’re in worse financial shape than they were four years ago. Inflation remains high, and most think he’s too old, which dovetails into mental health issues. To make matters worse, Biden is facing a full-blown Muslim voter revolt in the Rust Belt. Young people, Blacks, Hispanics, and the rank-and-file of organized labor are running from this guy. In short, Biden took the Obama coalition and f**ked it. So, yeah, why not sell the Kremlin cocaine that makes liberals believe the Russian interference/disinformation tales? The media already tried to do that with the indictment of the FBI’s confidential informant, who alleged that Burisma bribed the Bidens, but that doesn’t negate the shady access-selling deals by the Biden family:
To be sure, there is evidence that the Russian government spreads disinformation. For example, on Tuesday, Justice Department Special Counsel David Weiss alleged that an FBI informant named Alexander Smirnov lied when he claimed a Ukrainian natural gas company had given millions of dollars in bribes to the Biden family. Weiss wrote that Smirnov admitted Russian intelligence officials “were involved in passing” him the story. The revelation proves that there is no evidence of Biden family influence peddling and that the Russian government is actively interfering in the 2024 election, concluded some journalists.
In truth, the allegations by Weiss about Smirnov prove no such thing. It is well established that President Biden’s son, Hunter, and brother, James, sold access. There are many emails and text messages, for example, showing the two men promising meetings and involvement from President Joe Biden in various business deals. And one of Hunter Biden’s business partners has testified that selling access to Joe Biden was at the center of various deals the men sought with investors around the world, from Ukraine to China.
While the claim that the Russian government is actively interfering in the 2024 election should be understood as a conspiracy theory, we know that Russian interference in the 2016 election was too trivial to have any measurable impact.
Smirnov was a trusted source for years, and the FBI fought like the Japanese on Okinawa to prevent congressional Republicans from seeing his FD-1023 report. Only with threats of contempt lobbed at FBI Director Chris Wray last year did the Hoover boys relent, but now they’re throwing him under the bus when they knew he was passing Russian disinformation. It comes right as the Hunter Biden plea deal blows up, along with looming trial dates for the president’s son over tax evasion and gun charges. The same FBI that illegally spied on Trump campaign officials. The same agency that set up fake kidnapping plots of Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan.
Sorry, but I’m more worried about Langley and the Hoover folks messing with our rights and elections than the Russians.