07/25/16 – Adam Johnson – The Scott Horton Show

Hey y'all, Scott here.
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All right, introducing Adam Johnson, all-around great guy.
You should follow him on Twitter, at Adam Johnson.
And he writes for Alternet, and for FAIR, and for Medium.
And, you know, look, I know, and I think anybody who knows here is familiar with any of your work, Adam.
No, you're not pro-Trump at all.
You just don't like a lot of spin in the media.
Your job's on spinning the spin.
So we know you're not taking Trump's side, but you are really setting us straight about a lot of the rumors and innuendo about Trump going on lately, especially in regards to Russia.
So very important stuff.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you?
I'm doing well.
How are you?
I'm doing real good.
Appreciate you joining us here.
So, you know, I think, first thing, even if this sounds kind of silly on the face of it, no, I kind of think this is maybe the most important part of it.
They photoshopped in a bunch of pictures of Donald Trump standing with Putin behind him that, you know, if you're Adam Johnson or Scott Horton, you can look at that.
You know it's fake.
But if you're just a regular doofus consumer of news, you might not even know that that's a photoshopped picture.
It's not like a Salon.com photoshop where it's very obvious, or maybe it is Salon, I don't know.
But usually these photoshops are very obviously photoshopped.
They're not trying to deceive you.
They're just pasting a bunch of pictures in in a way that you can tell it's supposed to be fake.
It's just an image, not a photo.
But these look like they're photos, don't they?
Yeah, I thought that was ethically murky.
Yeah, typically photo montages are pretty obviously photo montages, and they have a series of photos of Putin sort of leering behind Trump, which I imagine most people assumed were kind of illustrative.
But yeah, I don't, you know, people casually read the news.
One study I like to cite says that only 40% of people read past the headline.
So I think one can infer from that that a similar portion of people look at pictures.
And I think putting pictures of Trump and Putin together is definitely in the ethical gray area from a journalistic standpoint.
I think that was kind of sleazy.
But that's just indicative of this larger narrative that's being pushed.
And as you mentioned, yeah, I mean, I think Trump is about as bad as it gets.
He has the unique talent of being worse than Clinton, which is not easy.
But this kind of Cold War narrative or Cold War trope that Trump and Putin are somehow in cahoots is really just sort of disgustingly convenient.
It's sort of the, I kind of describe it as the least offensive take you can have in center-left circles, because it ingratiates you to the national security state, which is the best way to get a promotion as a sort of nominal liberal journalist, while at the same time appearing or acting as anti-fascist or anti-racist.
But really what you're doing is you're just doing classic liberal red baiting, Cold War, Russia baiting, which is, again, it's just so easy.
You know, BuzzFeed does it.
Vice does it.
It's the easy way to sort of get ahead and to kind of look like you're this hipster who kind of hates all corruption.
But really what you're doing is you're propagandizing this myth of this omnipotent Russian threat, which of course helps fuel the war industry and helps fuel the surveillance industry and all that other good stuff.
Well, you know, I wonder, just on the face of it, do you think it even makes sense?
I mean, I don't know.
You're like me.
You're so deep into paying attention to all this stuff that maybe it's hard to tell.
But when it comes to average Joe, he's a Republican businessman and they're trying to red bait him.
And yet their front woman is the lady in the pink dress who wrote the book, It Takes the State to Raise Your Child.
And it just seems like, you know, what are you thinking really with this?
I actually wish Clinton was the socialist you want her to be.
Well, I don't really think she is.
But I'm just saying from the right, she certainly fits the caricature, Bill Clinton's busy body wife, you know.
Is it possible that Trump, that Putin wants Trump to win?
Of course it is.
You know, I don't.
That seems to kind of make sense.
He's gestured towards non-aggression towards them.
And by the way, so did Obama.
This is, by the way, the same script Obama ran in 2008 and 2012, that he was going to be more, you know, sort of less aggressive towards Russia, which relative to Clinton he has.
But there are forces in this country who don't like that, who don't want that, who want regime change in Syria, who want direct intervention in the Ukraine.
And that Trump has kind of bucked that from the right, I think has kind of thrown people, you know, for kind of off base.
And so what you have is basically an ideological realignment where you have, you know, Keith Olbermann today citing John Schindler, who's probably the most wacky neocon out there.
You know, says he's a former NSA spook, has previously advocated for creating internment camps for Muslims.
The Daily Beast stopped publishing him.
That's how radical he was.
He had to start going to the New York Observer, which is its own kind of garbage dump, to propose his wacky ideas.
He's the only person who's ever solicited, who's written the worst kind of gossipy crap aimed at Clinton that actually made me write a pro-Clinton article, which I think that's like the second time I've done that.
Because it was so bad.
It was basically that the Clinton email showed that she was Satan incarnate.
And so you have Keith Olbermann kind of teaming up with this really wacky neocon, you know, who calls for Snowden to be executed, to basically say that Trump is in league with Putin.
So you have this, you have these nominal liberals that are starting to spout the most kind of weird, you know, you have the head of Center for American Progress retweeting, you know, William Crystal talking about how Trump is a mentoring candidate.
And I think this is what happens when you have a pundit class that doesn't really have its ideological bearings.
It doesn't really know what it stands for.
And this is why, like, you know, people hate on leftists or even to some extent libertarians, but at least you kind of know where they stand, you know?
And I think liberals are sort of ideological jellyfish floating in an ocean of propaganda.
And here they see this perfect opportunity to go after Trump for this kind of, they're basically attacking Trump from the right.
And it's a really weird and cynical and I think deeply depressing thing that the Democratic Party is doing right now, because what they're doing is they're propagandizing themselves into a corner.
So later on when, you know, when the issues of Ukraine and Syria and NATO come up, they have to take a more staunchly right-wing position.
And I think that's really pernicious.
I think that's really dangerous.
Yeah, well, and especially because Hillary, if she does win, she will have all the pressures that Obama has on him as a Democrat to prove that he's a tough guy.
He's no Jimmy Carter.
And also that because she's a woman, it'll be double.
That she has to prove what a tough guy she is to all the Republicans.
And we all know, of course, ever since she started her own political career, that's always been her first order of business is to make sure that her right flank is covered on every single thing.
And even outhawking Robert Gates when it comes to attacking Libya and that kind of thing.
Well, I mean, with her I think it's actually legitimate.
I mean, I really think she's just a centrist Republican, Midwest Republican, who thinks that the U.S. military is fundamentally good, that U.S. power is fundamentally good and incorruptible.
When you look at the emails, especially in Libya, you have Sid Blumenthal saying that, hey, by the way, there's reports of death squads executing black Libyans.
And she just rugs it off.
I mean, there's a sort of, I don't want to say sociopathy, but a kind of pathological deference to American power that, again, not even Obama, I don't really think, indulges much at all.
And the fact that Obama's bombed seven Muslim countries in as many years and is relatively a dove to Clinton is, I think, pretty dangerous.
I'm also not sold that Trump is somehow a dove.
Everyone talked about how he interfered with the RNC platform to make less bellicose language against Russia on Ukraine.
But what they also don't mention is that he also interfered to get rid of language saying that the RNC supports the creation of a Palestinian state.
Because now he's taking millions of dollars from Sheldon Adelson.
So Trump now is taking a very far-right position on Israel, even more far-right than the Democratic Party, which is extremely hard to do.
I had missed that, that it was his people that had changed that.
I knew that the language had changed on Palestine.
Yeah.
That was one of his things.
Yeah.
So, you know, you have a lot of guys in the anti-war crowd.
I know a lot of your folks who sort of are tepidly behind Trump under the assumption that he'll be less, I guess, bellicose.
I'm not convinced.
I think the assumption is that he's a gamble, whereas Clinton is the sure thing.
And maybe that's true.
But as far as Trump goes, I don't believe that he will be.
Yeah, no, I agree with you.
I mean, the only place, well, and this is where it really counts, though, is Russia.
I mean, all this Manchurian candidate stuff aside, he did say, hey, you know, I'd rather get along with Russia.
And maybe he only said that because every other wonk in D.C. says the opposite.
So that's how he makes himself unique.
But the more they attack him, the more he's going to double down and say, yeah, you're damn right I want to get along with Russia.
And how do you like that?
And then compared to Hillary, who blew the reset, I mean, it's all her fault that the reset fell apart, not Russia's.
And compared to her, and as you just said, which I totally agree with, her instincts on this stuff, plus all the political incentives on her, he has the political incentive that only Nixon can go to China thing.
She doesn't have that.
I mean, I think with him, it's pure politics.
Like, here's the thing.
I agree.
For months, they kept trying to demagogue Jeremy Corbyn and the United Kingdom about his support for Hezbollah.
They were saying, oh, you know, he said nice things about Hezbollah.
I could literally fit the amount of people who give a damn about Hezbollah into a Wendy's.
Like, nobody really cares.
And the thing is that your average American on vis-a-vis foreign policy, I think Trump knows this, is scared of quote-unquote Islamic radical terror, whatever they want to call it.
And at the end of the day, if they had to list 100 people they're scared about, Russia just really isn't one.
And so I think there's a very kind of finite, you know, beltway crowd that thinks Russia is this great nemesis.
But I think the more logical, more elegant explanation, aside from a Trump-Putin conspiracy, is that Trump intuitively understands that this is not something most people really care about.
And if they do, they agree with him.
I mean, what do you mean you want to pick a fight with Russia?
I'm with this guy.
Who doesn't?
The Soviet Union's gone.
Right, and Trump says, well, he's fighting ISIS in Syria, which is somewhat true.
And again, the Syrian army and the Russian army are not blowing up cafes in Germany, and they're not shooting up rock concerts in Paris.
I mean, to me, the more elegant solution is that Trump has, and forget ethics, you know, you can say that Assad has killed a lot of people, and he certainly has, but that's separate from the sort of optics of it.
And I think that's a more likely explanation than this sort of Manchurian candidate scenario that's now being openly floated among certain quarters.
Yeah.
All right, now, so it seems to me like if there's any substance to it at all, it's that this guy Manafort used to be an advisor for Yanukovych that America overthrew in 2014.
And so I guess maybe that's supposed to mean that since Yanukovych was preferred by Putin, then that means that Manafort works for Putin and Manafort controls Trump.
Is that it?
Is that the best they got?
This is the ultimate lie by omission.
Manafort has also been an advisor to Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, John McCain, Bob Dole.
I mean, you know, we could do this all day.
The idea that he was an advisor to someone who was, I guess, a pro-Russian ally among literally dozens of relationships he's had is a deeply cynical way of framing his past.
And this is what you see in a lot of this stuff.
You see a lot of the same things you see in your average conspiracy theory.
I mean, the fact that you would mention that he's an advisor to a pro-Russian Ukrainian president without mentioning that he's been an advisor to virtually every major Republican candidate is a classic conspiracy theory thing to do, right?
You selectively pick the least attractive trait and you highlight it and you omit context, which I think Carr did a good job pointing out in his breakdown of John Marshall's conspiratorial piece in Talking Points Memo, that so much context is missing from this.
And again, the reason it's missing is because everyone's rushing to come to this conclusion and they're not really stopping to take a breath and say, okay, does this actually really make much sense?
And the idea that he's this Putin lackey, again, it's all guilt by association.
The word ties and the word links are terms that are dismissed as conspiratorial in most contexts unless you're writing for a major publication.
And then it's okay.
But if I was to use the same standard in a number of other cases, I would be laughed out of the room.
But when you're trying to push this narrative, you get away with these types of things.
And again, it's all circumstantial.
Well, I like how you had that other article too at FAIR about how they're so anti-Putin.
They're as anti-Putin as they are anti-Trump.
So they use Trump as a way to attack Putin as kind of this easy shortcut.
So they can basically just claim that Putin is this nefarious influence behind whatever ails you here and around the world.
Yeah, Trump is a vehicle.
He's a spectacle.
He's the host to a kind of cold war parasite.
And again, if you're a center-left journalist, it's the easiest thing to write.
The take writes itself.
It's how do I look like I'm being subversive or challenging power without really doing it?
And the way you do that is you criticize a candidate that's widely derided in Trump.
And I think almost always for pretty good reasons.
But you turn it into a way of doing the most generic and most obvious thing to do, which is to bash one of our major enemies, which is Russia.
And especially since Russia interfered in Ukraine in 2014, the rhetoric has just really multiplied a lot.
And obviously when they bombed Syria in September of last year, that really kind of escalated it that more.
So you really have a really cold war fervor.
And you don't really see it coming from the White House.
It's similar to how the propaganda worked with ISIS.
You don't really see it coming from the Obama administration.
You see it coming sort of from outside of it.
You see it coming from pro-Clinton organs in the think tank, from the New America Foundation, which wrote that piece in Slate with the fake pictures you mentioned.
And of course, the New America Foundation, ironically enough, takes millions of dollars from the State Department and USAID.
So that money, of course, doesn't corrupt because American money doesn't corrupt.
Only Russian money does.
And you see this kind of fever pitch of kind of cold war propaganda.
The John Chaits, everyone sort of gets in line.
And I think it's dangerous.
I don't think people have really thought through what the implications of what they're saying are.
And there's a really good adage that Carl Sagan always says, which is extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
And the idea that a foreign leader is manipulating a candidate to push his radical agenda is an extraordinary claim.
And yet, so far, the evidence has been far, far less than extraordinary.
You hate government?
One of them libertarian types?
Maybe you just can't stand the president, gun grabbers, or warmongers.
Me too.
That's why I invented libertystickers.com.
Well, Rick owns it now, and I didn't make up all of them, but still.
If you're driving around and want to tell everyone else how wrong their politics are, there's only one place to go.
Libertystickers.com has got your bumper covered.
Left, right, libertarian, empire, police, state, founders, quote, central banking.
Yes, bumper stickers about central banking.
Lots of them.
And, well, everything that matters.
Libertystickers.com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.
You know, I can't help but get the idea that this is how it's always been, right?
Where the leaders are always this wrong about everything, this dishonest about everything.
And this is how the first cold war started in the first place.
Stalin wanted to do the deal that said, I swear to God, I'll stay out of Western Europe forever.
And they didn't even want to talk about it with him.
Scare the hell out of them, Harry.
Go out there and tell them Stalin's going to take over the whole world if we don't stop him.
As though that wouldn't be the best way to defeat the Soviet Union.
To encourage that kind of overextension or whatever.
But anyway, they were lying.
And it's just like now.
They're lying.
They know they're lying.
And I keep bringing this up in every interview because I can't help but spread it around.
Because it just drives me crazy.
I talked with Mark Perry, the Pentagon journalist.
And I asked him about these generals and how, come on, they know they're lying though, right?
That they're the aggressor.
That NATO is the root of all evil in Eastern Europe.
Not Russia.
Give me a break, you know?
All these coups and all this stuff.
And he basically said that no, the generals, the admirals and all these people whose interest it's in.
They believe all their own BS about Russia right now.
And nobody ever really says to them.
It's not part of any of their conversations.
That, well, you know, we did kind of overthrow the government in Ukraine in 2014.
And that's what's led to the crisis in the Crimean Peninsula.
There is no admission.
There is only consensus.
Only the group think.
And it's just like looking at Twitter.
I mean, it's just absolutely unbelievable, Adam.
On Twitter, the consensus that, oh my God, Russia did this.
But each and every one of these people has to know.
The DNC hack, I mean, or whatever it is.
They have to know that they don't really know that.
They have to know that they don't know that.
Any more than they knew Saddam had warehouses full of sarin gas either.
But everybody knows, so I guess I'll just repeat it.
Yeah, it's funny because, I mean, obviously NATO isn't the root of all the evil.
But they're certainly a major instigator.
I mean, NATO has expanded quite a bit.
And, of course, Russia knows that.
And Russia is rightfully skeptical of that.
Because the U.S. obviously also works on regime change within Russia in a very kind of subtle way.
And I have the same opinion about a lot of these, I guess, State Department NATO stans, as I do about people that are very religious.
Which is, what are the odds that your religion happens to be the right one?
I mean, it's exceedingly convenient that the U.S., whose military is 14 times larger than Russia's, that has one of the most sophisticated propaganda systems in the world, that basically sold us a war of aggression in Iraq that, of course, was entirely without any basis, that they somehow are on the defensive and Russia is always one step ahead of us.
Intuitively, this doesn't really make a lot of sense.
If you just step back and look at the actual numbers, right?
For example, the New York Times had a story last year, I think it was in October, talking about how the Pentagon needs to close the Arctic gap.
That Russia had caught up to the U.S. in terms of ice choppers, these boats that literally just chop through ice.
And they had the same amount as we did, and therefore that was dangerous.
And I nicely pointed out to the journalists that Russia has 14 times the land mass in the Arctic Ocean.
They would naturally have more, let alone the same.
And the response is, well, you know, and it's like, well, yeah, that seems logical to me that Russia would have to protect its Arctic waters.
And so there's just an exceeding amount of intellectual capture and kind of national solipsism that you see within the reporting class and the think tank class, that America is fundamentally good and Russia is fundamentally evil.
And there's no light between the two.
And they're all being held captive by this Ilya Putin, whose approval ratings are in the low 80s.
And I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that he also controls the media.
So I don't want to put too much emphasis on that, but that's a pretty high approval rating.
And I think that while some of that could be accounted for by the fact that Russia owns a lot of the media, you can't completely dismiss that altogether.
You know, he was elected.
And this cognitive dissonance of Russia must be under the capture of this evil dictator, while at the same time we have to liberate them from themselves, is, I think, informs so much of this groupthink.
And you see that with the Russian, with the whole Putin, Trump, Manchurian candidate narrative.
Well, and, of course, what's funny is the Cold War is what's strengthening Putin.
The people of Russia obviously see him as a capable leader in a time when the Americans are trying to hem them in.
Even though they called off their side of the Cold War 25 years ago, we never did call off ours.
As you mentioned, they're still working on regime change inside Russia right now.
They're so brave about it, they write about it in the Washington Post.
You know, if Putin doesn't like it, he might find himself on the other end of one of our regime changes here pretty soon, they say.
So, you know...
We certainly have a track record for it.
But, you know, I think with the last two years of Russia panic have exposed, and especially with these last few weeks, which I think are completely out of control, like unhinged, I think most of the people will kind of look back in a few years and realize that they were off the rails.
It's really exposed that the Cold War was never really about ideology.
That there really is so much to gain.
And I don't want to go to the sort of generic military-industrial complex, but I really think it's fitting here.
There's so much money invested in just keeping this war machine alive.
And, you know, 20,000 guys driving around in Syria and Iraq with balaclava masks and Toyotas doesn't really kind of justify the budgets.
So you really do have to have a kind of false parody, this boogeyman.
And I think the fact that Russia, which is a fundamentally neoliberal, you know, capitalist, goonish economy, that's really not dissimilar from most of our allies.
The fact that they're this enemy, and of course it's not about human rights, right?
We're friends with countries that are way worse than human rights, so that's not the issue.
It just sort of shows that you need a bad guy, you know?
And Putin, for all of his trappings and all of his thuggery, really fits that model.
And the moral posturing from the center-left pundit crowd sort of follows from that.
And I think it's sort of depressing to watch in real time.
It's just like with the Trump thing, too.
It doesn't mean that you or me are fans of this guy Putin.
After all, he's some kind of very conservative Republican, or maybe even a little to the right of that for what he is.
Doesn't make us fans of his in any way.
Just trying to stick up for the truth here.
A little bit of context.
Vladimir Putin was the first foreign leader to call George W. Bush on 9-11 and say, my government is at your disposal, anything we can do to help you.
And who faced down a real political fight with his own military to say, yes, we're going to allow the Americans to use our bases in Kazakhstan, etc.
And again, I'm not saying I support any of those things, but I'm just saying, that was the context of how this century started.
Totally.
And there was the whole, I looked into the soul thing.
It's funny, I mentioned in my article in Alternate that there is a conspiracy theory, as it were, that the Moscow bombings in 1999 that killed over 300 people were actually the work of the FSB to frame Islamist separatists to justify the second Russian incursion into Chechnya later that year.
Did you read this part?
Yeah, I read that and I'm familiar with that from back when it happened, too.
Yeah, and of course, Robbie Martin always points it out.
And he's right to point it out, because it is an almost one-to-one analogy to 9-11 conspiracy theories.
And I note that the New York Times ran an op-ed about why Obama shouldn't trust Putin in Syria.
And they cited this and they linked to a New York Book Review article that sort of got into the, again, it's very conspiratorial, it's FSB links, so-and-so knew so-and-so, but they didn't know, it sort of reads exactly like, it's a slightly more literate version of loose change, basically.
And what everyone's feelings about either of those, I note that the editorial standards are completely different when you're talking about other countries.
They're accusing the Russian government of knowingly slaughtering 300 of its own civilians to justify an incursion into Chechnya.
It is almost an identical scenario to 9-11 theories.
And here the New York Times publishes it as if it's fact.
And Vox.com references it tangentially as fact.
And there is no other context with which that standard would be applied to our own government.
That the editorial standards, the evidentiary standards, are so rock-bottom low with Russia.
It is laughable.
And so what I submit to people is they say, okay, here we have three or four different security firms that have, quote-unquote, confirmed that Russian hackers were behind the DNC leaks.
And all of these are government contractors for the US.
So what I keep asking people is I say, okay, has this been confirmed by someone who isn't on the United States government payroll?
Because if Russia accused the US of hacking them and trying to manipulate their elections and shrouded out three or four security firms that were on the Russian government payroll and were populated by former agents of the FSB, which is what counter-crowd-storic is.
It's populated by former NSA and former FBI.
Would we look at that as an objective standard of proof?
And I don't believe we would.
So we have a radically different standard for ourselves than we do for Russia.
And I think that it is incumbent upon American press to point that out and to do so gingerly and to do so politely.
But the hysteria takes on a life of its own.
I haven't seen anything like it since probably the buildup to the bombing of ISIS in 2014 and before that since 2002, 2003 before Iraq.
There's a weird kind of barrage of stories that come out at once and are very hysterical.
They tried it with Syria in 2013, too.
I'm sorry.
You're right.
Syria in 2013 was way worse.
Although, again, I always felt the White House's heart wasn't really in that.
So it wasn't as bad.
But, yes, I agree.
As far as the double standard there, I was just talking with Jeffrey Carr, who you cite in your article here, throwing cold water on the DNC leak accusation there.
And we talked about, you know, what are the indicators that these government contractors are pointing at?
And they're completely ridiculous.
The smiley face had extra parentheses.
And that's how that's usually how Russians do smiley faces.
And it was a hacked version of Word 97 off the Pirate Bay that a million people downloaded before.
And they had Cyrillic on their computer.
Well, wait.
And then I think you point this out, too.
I thought these guys were the master planner conspirators behind everything in the world.
But they leave their, you know, Windows language settings in the metadata behind.
I mean, on the other hand, if you were from Zimbabwe and you were trying to frame the Russians, you could easily sprinkle all that crack in the metadata and make it look like whatever you want.
Yeah.
I mean, first off, there are 260 million Russian speakers in this world.
So by definition, any one of those people is an agent of Putin, who, of course, is everywhere, nowhere.
He's the alpha and the omega.
Yeah.
I mean, that's the inconsistency I point out.
So I'm not a security expert, obviously.
I'm a media critic.
I'm a subcountry lawyer.
I try not to punch above my weight class.
But I also know there is kind of an emperor's clothes thing where a bunch of techno jargon gets thrown at people and a bunch of fancy security experts and, you know, terror experts come out and say X is true.
Therefore, X is true.
And I think people sort of credulously go along with it.
But at the same time, there is such a thing as common sense.
And so I look at that.
I'm like, OK, these can't both be true.
It can't both be true that Putin is this omnipotent evil force who is literally steering the election of the most powerful country in history, but also doesn't have the foresight to find a native Romanian speaker.
There are 4,000 native Romanian speakers in Russia.
There are obviously hundreds of thousands of more in countries that Russia has influence in, former Soviet republics.
They couldn't find one?
They couldn't phone in a guy?
This is this great, like, Putin conspiracy?
Like, just intuitively, right?
Again, there's an emperor's clothes here thing.
That doesn't make sense to me.
And I've pointed this out, and I haven't really heard a satisfactory response to that.
And they also, you know, couldn't scrub metadata.
OK, so let's say they're incompetent.
And again, I'm more than willing to concede they're incompetent.
I'm more than willing to concede that it was some bumbling Russian outfit that may or may not have some vaguelinks to the FSB.
Then if they're not competent, then they're not really that threatening.
They can't both be true.
And I think this is where you kind of lose me and where I say this doesn't really add up to me.
And I combine this with the fact that the Obama administration, the FBI, CIA, whoever, has yet to come out and say this is Russia.
So you only have private security firms, all of whom are effectively paid to say these things.
And who knows?
Maybe Russia.
I don't know.
All I know is that before we start going off the rails and coming up building this house of cards of Trump puppet, you know, Trump as a marionette, we have to have something a little more solid than that.
And I'm not particularly sure what the rush is.
I don't know why we can't give it more time and try to really figure out what's going on.
Oh, yeah, you are.
You say it in your article, and you nailed it perfect, that when the story first was floated about a month ago, or the first part of the hack was leaked or however that worked, I'm sorry, I sort of missed the story the first time around here, that the Democrats told the newspaper, yeah, well, so we talked about it and we decided what we're going to do is we're going to really try to just say, oh, yeah, well, Russia leaked it and hope that that distracts them.
Well, it's not quite what they said.
So what happened was is that the leak happened on June 14th.
And then on June 22nd, Bloomberg did a piece where they broke the news that these alleged hackers had also broken into the Clinton Global Initiative.
And the exact quote was this.
If the Democrats can show the hidden hand of Russian intelligence agencies, they believe that voter outrage will probably outweigh any embarrassing revelations from the DNC leak, a person familiar with the party's thinking said.
So basically what you have here is you have a pretty glaring conflict of interest, the party that's hired the security firm needs the specter of Russian hacking to distract from what the leaks actually contain.
And I think that's notable.
Of course, that's not just positive.
It's not a smoking gun, but it really does, it shows a glaring conflict of interest on the part of the DNC to hype the menace of the Russian threat, to obfuscate the contents of the leaks themselves.
Yep.
All right, man.
Well, I sure hope that you keep writing about this because the reasonable takes, let's wait and see until we have some real evidence takes, are few and far between.
There's Carr.
There's one good one in Time magazine that has some good quotes.
But I hope you'll stick with it because just in the face of the consensus going around right now among all the smart media people, as you call them, the liberal trying to fit in crowd, and I don't think we could really overstate how dangerous this kind of thing is when we're talking still about the two, at least, nuclear superpowers, if there's only one economic superpower here.
We each got right around 7,000 H-bombs, so that means we got to be friends.
I don't care who wants to sell jet fighters.
Screw them.
We got to be friends with Russia.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't know what the great ideological difference is.
I think it's a total false market.
It's a false market to sell weapons.
I mean, I really don't know what else it is.
Yeah.
No, you're totally right.
I mean, yeah, the Atlantic Council, which is the biggest anti-Russia propaganda outfit, is funded by Michelle Raytheon.
I mean, it's a racket.
It's a racket that I think is really, really spiraling out of control recently, and I think it needs to be tempered a little bit.
Yeah.
I'm trying to remember if it was Crimea or which exact event it was, but it was something along the lines of NATO-Russia where Andrew Coburn wrote an article about going to a party outside of Washington, D.C., where it was all government contractors celebrating the dawn of the new Cold War here and how this is going to be so great for business and how they all agreed that they need to do whatever they can to keep this thing hyped up and keep it going.
Absolutely.
Because why wouldn't they?
It's up to everybody else to stop them.
That's all.
Well, they're not paying for it.
The public is.
Right.
All right.
Well, listen, man, you do great work, and I appreciate you doing the show again.
Thank you.
All right, y'all.
That is Adam Johnson.
He is a contributing analyst for FAIR.org.
Does a ton of great work for FAIR.org.
And also you can find him at Alternet and at Medium.com.
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