Caitlin Johnstone

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MSM Uses Russiagate To Punch Left

The Daily Beast, whose corporate owner has Chelsea Clinton on its board of directors, recently published a report titled “Kremlin Troll Wrote for Far-Left U.S. Sites”, which it then promoted with great success on Twitter using incendiary taglines like “Those Hillary-hating hot takes you read on leftie sites during the election? Some of ’em were written in Moscow.” The short, low-energy Daily…

Caitlin Johnstone
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The Daily Beast, whose corporate owner has Chelsea Clinton on its board of directors, recently published a report titled “Kremlin Troll Wrote for Far-Left U.S. Sites”, which it then promoted with great success on Twitter using incendiary taglines like “Those Hillary-hating hot takes you read on leftie sites during the election? Some of ’em were written in Moscow.”

The short, low-energy Daily Beast blurb went viral by reporting on another arm-flailing Russiagate “bombshell” by the Washington Post, whose sole owner is a CIA contractor and dangerous oligarch. WaPo’s article revolves around a pseudonymous writer with alleged ties to the Kremlin who succeeded in getting published by numerous alternative media outlets, most notably in CounterPunch.

I’ve got no love for CounterPunch’s elitist editors, who spent July of this year orchestrating a deceitful smear campaign against me, nor for their humorless gray-ponytailed sausage fest of a publication. But this story, like all Russiagate “bombshells”, falls apart under the slightest amount of scrutiny. Contrary to the viral proclamations of the Daily Beast, none of the articles in question had anything to do with Hillary Clinton, and only one of them was published prior to the election. As CounterPunch editor-in-chief Jeffrey St. Clair and managing editor Joshua Frank wrote in their almost-readable account of the ordeal, the amount of online traction that the pseudonymous writer Alice Donovan was able to accrue with these articles was so small that they had a mere 49 Twitter followers at the time this story broke.

And yet empire loyalists everywhere, from bloodthirsty neocon Eli Lake to psychotic tweakers Eric Garland and Louise Mensch, are parading about this inconsequential accident as though it means something.

https://twitter.com/LouiseMensch/status/945727867748483073

I decided yesterday that I’m going to be more proactive about publicly shaming the countless establishment sycophants who accuse me of being a Kremlin agent online, and following that decision one of them happened to post on Medium about the very article we are discussing here. Stephen Roloff writes as follows in response to my last article:

“After several reads of Ms Johnstone’s entertaining pieces, I find myself amazed that a bright young journalist would choose to brand herself as an unabashed apologist for the traitorous tragedy of the current administration.
At first I thought that the “rogue journalist” moniker was a tongue-in-check reference to Sarah Palin’s “rogue politician”, that Ms Johnstone was simply looking to make a name for herself as a contrarian “intellectual”. Just American opportunism at work.
However, articles like the one below leads me to think that “she” may in fact be a higher-order creation of Putin’s shadow army, a poisonous arrow designed for the heart of “liberal” (I’m so tired of those cold war leftovers) inteligencia.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/kremlin-trolls-burned-across-the-internet-as-washington-debated-options/2017/12/23/e7b9dc92-e403-11e7-ab50-621fe0588340_story.html?undefined=&utm_term=.a046cf8f7577&wpisrc=nl_most&wpmm=1“

Everyone with any online following who dares to publicly question the CIA/CNN Russia narrative already faces these McCarthyite accusations on a daily basis. The WaPo report is plainly being used to fan the flames of that paranoia even higher, and the examples above show that it is succeeding. Now all lefty outlets are fair game in the US power establishment’s relentless crusade to attack, silence and subvert everyone to the left of John McCain.

The left (the real left, not the “I support drone bombing children but it’s okay because I call Caitlyn Jenner by the correct pronouns” faux-left that Americans are permitted to support) is under constant assault by America’s unelected power establishment due to its opposition to war and oligarchy, both of which the US power establishment is entirely dependent upon. This is why such CIA and Clinton-backed assaults like the one in question take place, and this is why the true left is so desperately weak and fragmented in America today. Generations of establishment psyops have warped and fractured the true left into neurosis and impotence, which is why you now see high-profile leftist outlets like CounterPunch spending an entire month coordinating a smear campaign on a socialist political blogger instead of facilitating the revolution. Russiagate is the ultimate weapon in facilitating these manipulations.

We’re going to have to get real with ourselves and do some major soul searching if we’re ever going to become capable of fighting back against these establishment manipulations, because there will be more, and they are only escalating. These relentless attacks on the left will succeed in herding all revolutionary thinking into the neoliberal neoconservative so-called “center” if we do not find ways of rising above the manipulations and disrupting the establishment propaganda machine. Fight back, and fight back hard.

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