All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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All right, introducing Bronco Marchteach from Jacobin Magazine and author of the book Yesterday's Man about Joe Biden.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Bronco?
I'm doing as well as I can be, I guess, at this time.
Thanks for having me back.
Great.
Well, I appreciate you joining us.
Really important article that you have here at Jacobin, Trump, the Putin puppet, just dramatically escalated the undeclared war against Russia.
And I should clarify that Putin puppet is in ironical quotes at the top there.
So let's start with that.
You know what?
I should set this up a little more carefully.
A lot of people on the left, well-meaning people, millions of regular civilian people with no power, they desperately believe and want to believe that the problem with Trump is he's a secret agent of Vladimir Putin.
And if you go on Twitter, you can see average Joes and Janes constantly saying, yep, see Putin sure getting his money worth with Trump and all of this.
And here we are a year out from Robert Mueller crying uncle and admitting that he had nothing.
And yet the narrative absolutely remains on huge parts of the left, not just liberal Democrats, but socialists and progressives and leftists of all different descriptions and in a very vague descriptions, but who just lean kind of left.
People really believe this and you don't.
So what's up with that?
Well, you know, I think I'll make one clarification.
I think that on the on the socialist left, which is where I am, people tend to be a little more skeptical about this kind of stuff.
I mean, oh, sure.
I'm sorry.
I should have said that, too.
I did not mean to imply everybody buys it.
There certainly have been many great critics like yourself who don't as well.
I should have said that Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Aramata, you know, people like that have sort of from the beginning been been selling it.
But you're right in that.
Well, and a great many random Twitterers, too, you know, kind of regular people with lower profiles, but alternative media people and and just regular people.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
And I think people kind of take it as a, you know, people on the left, whether with a liberal or further left, I think still still have kind of memories of being kind of criticized for decades, you know, ever since the the eruption of the Cold War for being, you know, too soft on foreign policy or being too friendly to, you know, the enemies of the West, you know, whatever they they happen to be at any given moment.
And so I think for a lot of people, there's there's this kind of psychological motivation here to to kind of finally be able to use the attacks and the tactics of the opposing side against them, you know, to say, oh, no, it's the Republicans and it's the right.
There's actually they're the ones who are the real Russian puppets, the real Russian assets.
Sometimes they even say, you know, communist assets, even though Russia has not been communist for decades.
So I think that's a part of it as well.
And I think there's also there's a really, I think, alarming kind of national security state aspect of this, where it's a way to kind of push Trump and other and even actually Democrats and liberals into a more kind of militaristic mindset, particularly when it comes to Russia.
The reason I am skeptical about this idea that Trump is a Putin puppet is basically I mean, if you look at what his administration has done, it does not really make a whole lot of sense.
You know, people focus a lot on Trump's words and some of the interpersonal behavior that he has with, say, somebody like Putin, which, you know, if you actually look at how he behaves around other world leaders, particularly other autocrats, it's not really that much different.
I mean, he's, you know, famously kind of acts like a subservient way around the Chinese premier, even though, obviously, Trump is a massive hawk on China.
He does the same thing with a whole host of authoritarian leaders, sort of, you know, how he behaves when he's face to face with someone.
He isn't quite the kind of tough guy that he is when, you know, they're thousands of miles away in their respective countries.
So people are focused on that kind of thing to say, well, you know, clearly he must be in the pocket of Putin because look, look at how obsequious he is when they're around each other.
In reality, his administration has done lots of things that are damaging to Russian interests from trying to elbow Russia out of the European natural gas market, to trying to create a coup in Venezuela, which was very bad for all the money Russia invested in Venezuela, to obviously going after Iran, which is also allied with Russia.
In this particular case, I wrote about this Yahoo News report that came out, I think it was maybe a week or two ago, that basically revealed that in 2018, Trump had relaxed the rules around the CIA's ability to kind of do these cyber attacks on foreign adversaries, you know, and quite erotically, you know, in the same way or the same exact kind of things that Democrats have kind of been saying, you know, Russia is the greatest evil in history for having done allegedly in 2016.
Yeah.
OK, so there's so much there.
I can't help.
I'm sorry.
I know the Yahoo report is such a big deal and that's kind of the core of it.
But I got to start with the natural gas example that you brought up there, because one, it also is so important.
And two, I just finished talking about that with Daniel L. Davis, the U.S. Army whistleblower from the Afghan war.
And we were talking about how obviously the idea that you would have a natural gas pipeline between Germany and Russia is the greatest invention in the history of peace.
And you would have to be insane or be directly, you know, losing billions yourself to disagree with that.
Who could possibly try to intervene with a process like that?
These two countries who fought the two world's worst wars against each other before.
Absolutely.
I mean, it makes sense when you consider that Trump's economic strategy for a very long time and not just Trump's, but Trump has really kind of accelerated is to turn the United States into a perpetual state.
Obviously, Obama kind of helped to accelerate this with all of the above energy approach they took.
And in 2015, he relaxed the ban on oil exports and U.S. fossil fuel exports have gone up since then.
So I think, you know, it's very much part and parcel with his economic philosophy, which is, you know, try and assert dominance in foreign markets.
He obviously is trying to compete with Russia.
He doesn't want their natural gas pipeline to be the one that's flowing through Europe.
He would rather have the U.S. involved in that.
So, I mean, really pretty typical kind of geopolitical maneuvering when you think about it.
But in this kind of political climate, the one that's been created really, really by the Democratic Party since 2016, everything has to have a much more complicated and much more kind of outlandish spy thriller-esque explanation in this case.
You know, well, no, it's really, you know, Trump is actually just a Putin puppet.
I'm not sure.
I haven't seen if they've actually tried to fit this particular thing into the idea that Trump is actually doing this for Putin's benefit, which would obviously be absurd.
But I have seen in other cases, you know, for example, Trump pulling out of the various Cold War arms agreements, which Russia's not happy about.
That's been painted in previous times.
I've seen people on MSNBC say, oh, this is another gift to Putin.
Everything is a gift to Putin somehow.
Right.
Yeah.
When he brings two new countries into NATO, that's a gift to Putin.
When he hires Tillerson, when he fires Tillerson, Putin, Putin, Putin.
All roads lead to Putin.
Well, that's the beauty of conspiracy theories, right?
The great thing about conspiracy theory is that no matter what comes up to disprove it, no matter what facts find the face of the theory being advanced, you can always somehow wrap this around the original conspiracy theory.
You can always make it make sense, you know, no matter what happens.
And I mean, you know, it's not a new or mind-blowing point that I'm making, that the whole Russiagate thing is a conspiracy theory.
I think a lot of people have said that before.
I think what is kind of interesting and potentially alarming about it is how it's such a deeply ingrained and fundamentally mainstream conspiracy theory.
It's a thing that people in the highest levels of the media and, you know, even the government, the U.S. government, really believe it.
And if they don't believe it, they cynically use and convince, you know, ordinary people that it's true, with, I think, pretty bad results, as this Yahoo report shows us.
Right.
Well, and back to the Yahoo report in a minute.
But on the kukri angle there, that, yeah, no, that really is a huge thing, that it is essentially a classic conspiracy kukri.
In fact, in a class with chemtrails and birthers and really stupid stuff.
I mean, there are some good conspiracy, you know, proper, intelligent and well-reported conspiracies like Obama has a secret torture prison in Somalia or, you know, you're not supposed to think that or say that or talk about well-reported writings along those lines.
That could be dismissed.
But of course, it's true.
But no, this is really like QAnon only for the Democratic Party, for the rank and file.
As Bill Moyers said about the right wing a generation ago, the delusional are no longer marginal.
And this is essentially the narrative of the day.
In fact, Nancy Pelosi just said it again, I think last week or two weeks ago, that with this president, all roads lead to Russia, as she said, you know, during the impeachment too.
And what was the impeachment about?
That he had held up an arms deal to Ukraine for a little while before he went ahead and sold them the weapons that Obama smartly was afraid to sell them because the government that Obama had helped install in power there in a violent coup in 2014 was infested with Nazis, particularly their armed forces were infested with Nazis.
And so he was afraid to arm the group that he'd put in power.
Obama comes in, arms him up.
But when he holds off for a moment, that literally gets him impeached, third president in American history.
I love that part of the story.
They really went through with that.
I'm glad that you mentioned the Ukraine element because, you know, one of the honestly breathtaking things that has happened in this in this four year period, even as increasing evidence has has put into doubt the idea that Trump was ever really controlled by Putin or that he was a Putin asset.
And, you know, obviously, once the Mueller report came out, that really kind of exploded the whole idea.
This has nonetheless remained a fixture of people's analysis of the Trump administration.
I mean, you know, again, at the highest levels of the media.
Meanwhile, Ukraine's involvement in the 2016 election, which is well documented, Politico did a very at the time.
So did outlets like the Financial Times, basically the Ukrainian government wanting to cozy up with what they thought was going to be the next president of the United States, Hillary Clinton, was feeding the Clinton campaign damaging information about Trump's alleged Russian ties that, you know, the campaign was presumably going to use in order to to discredit him.
So, you know, again, trying to curry favor with the administration, obviously, Ukraine wanted the lethal weapons from the United States government that Obama wouldn't give to them.
Clinton, I think, was a lot more amenable to that.
In fact, the woman who was going to potentially be a secretary of defense had advocated for it, Michelle Flournoy.
So this is well documented, well known.
It's the exact kind of thing that really Trump was accused of doing with Russia, you know, collaborating with a foreign government to undermine a candidate.
And now it's sort of been, not even memory hold, it's kind of it's been willed into non existence by the media.
I, you know, I've seen national security officials testify and say, well, this is a complete conspiracy theory.
And then people have just sort of repeated it mindlessly.
Just yesterday, there was a Politico report about, you know, the the dirt that had been fed to Devin Nunes from, you know, a Ukrainian official about, you know, that was damaging towards Biden.
And at one point, just casually in a line, the author writes, you know, the Ukrainian interference, people have tried to create an analogy between Russian interference and Ukrainian interference in 2016.
And then sort of after that thing, the idea of which has actually been sort of debunked or denied by national security officials.
And it's sort of that that's that it's kind of well, you know, a bunch of people, some of whom are, you know, paid to lie for a living, have said that this is not true.
So it's not.
And what's remarkable is that this is essentially saying that it's not true, which begs the question, why is that?
If it's completely untrue based on the words of, you know, unnamed national security officials, why is that report about Ukrainian interference in 2016 on Politico's website, surely it should be true if it's all false.
So this is kind of the Alice in Wonderland kind of world that U.S. politics has been in since 2016, where where the complete, you know, fraudulent conspiracy theories are true and stuff that's true and documented as is not true.
It's a lie modeling.
Right.
And you're accused of a conspiracy theorist for not believing in it because, oh, yeah, right.
Like the CIA and FBI's, you know, counterintelligence division would ever lie to you.
What a conspiracy theorist you are for believing that.
The way CIA officials have been treated as kind of authoritative sources, as, you know, people who can do no wrong.
And it's like, you know, the CIA is is people are trained to do information warfare.
That's a big part of their job.
You know, people often say whether we can or not, we're never stopping a CIA agent.
You know, that's certainly what John Kiriakou has said, that, you know, basically, CIA agents, you never really leave agency and, you know, a big part of your job is to to lie or obfuscate the truth.
And so.
It's like Ray McGovern.
Right.
Sorry, bad timing on a joke there.
Well, the people who push the Russia gay conspiracy are often able to even use CIA officials or former intelligence officials, again, whose job is to be versed in kind of information warfare to to be able to muddle muddy up the truth.
And yet they've been given free reign on TV to say this.
And what does it result in?
It's resulted in all this kind of pressure on the Trump administration.
And believe me, I'm no fan of Trump, but it clearly has pressured him to a point where he's he's gone above and beyond to prove that he is not soft in Russia.
Actually, he can be just as hawkish on Russia as anyone else.
And it's kind of led us to this really perilous moment where, you know, the idea that we should be celebrating bad international relations between the Russian government and the U.S. government, two of the largest nuclear armed states in the entire world, is truly, truly frightening.
We'll be right back.
Just one second.
Be right back.
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And this is the single most important issue in the world for all of humanity, for every single one of us, and for all of us together.
America's relationship with Russia, that's everything.
Because they got 7,000 H-bombs and we got 7,000 H-bombs.
That's it.
Nothing else is even on the list of important things after America getting along with Russia.
This whole thing is criminally insane to the nth degree.
And you have in your article here, and I'll remind the audience that it's Bronco March Teach writing in Jacobin, Trump, the so-called Putin puppet, just dramatically escalated the undeclared war against Russia, and you have quotes from Trump himself saying, well geez, they keep accusing me of being in the pocket of the Russians, I guess I better do something tough, and this kind of thing, where it is that blatant, clearly.
But now I guess I should really let you get to the point of the article, or I guess the major new development that the article is framed around, this Yahoo News report about the license that Trump has given to his enemies in the CIA to do whatever they want to Russia and anybody else, I guess.
Yeah, great report, the Yahoo News team.
Sadly, I think it's not gotten as much attention as I think it deserves, which is, again, a common fact in this climate of the last four years, where basically anything that isn't convenient to that Russiagate narrative just either gets hacked or is completely ignored.
So the substance of it is that in 2018, Trump, unlike Obama, Obama resisted this, Trump has relaxed the rules around the CIA's use of cyberattacks on foreign adversaries.
So that includes Russia and countries like China and Iran, and in fact Iran has been, according to the report, the main recipient of these cyberattacks that the CIA is now able to do more easily.
That includes, as I said before, the exact kind of things that the Democrats have showered Russia with frightening, the hacking troves and release to embarrass Russian officials and others, or any government officials, hacking into the electrical grid.
We might remember back in, I think, 2017 and 2018, Rachel Maddow baselessly fearmongering about the idea that when winter hits in parts of the US, in the Midwest, for example, if Russians hack into the electrical grid and shut things down, what's that going to look like?
Are people going to freeze to death?
This is the exact kind of thing the CIA is now able to do with a lot more free reign.
One of the other things I point to is that the CIA is now able to hack into financial institutions, which it notes that under Obama, basically Obama resisted this idea because Treasury officials warned the administration that if the CIA did this, it could potentially destabilize the global economy and, who knows, potentially lead to some sort of economic crash.
So the CIA is now able to do that, thanks to Trump.
And it's just one more example of the ways in which the, frankly, in my view, sensible policy of the Obama administration towards Russia, largely sensible, trying to not escalate things, to avoid conflict and war, has been completely jettisoned.
And it's Obama's own party that has jettisoned it.
It's now a kind of article of faith that a strong president has to do everything possible to kind of escalate tensions with Russia and to aggressively posture against it.
Even though Trump has actually done this in a way that Obama never would have dreamed of, that Obama always resisted, he never gets any credit for it.
Basically, if anyone ever did acknowledge that Trump was probably the most aggressively anti-Russian president in decades, then you would lose all incentive, or he would lose all incentive, rather, to pursue these hawkish measures.
Because it's very clear to me that he's pursuing them in order to get this kind of stench of being a Russian asset or a Putin puppet off of his back.
And that's what the FBI told CNN back in 2017, was that, well, if we can't use the 25th Amendment to overthrow him, then at least we can rein him in.
And that was why they launched the special counsel investigation into the thing that, of course, recent reports show that they knew that there were no connections to the Russians.
The FBI had already finished investigating it before they launched the special counsel investigation.
That was their words, to rein him in.
And boy, did it work.
And by the way, Obama's restraint, we're only grading on a curve here, because of course he did support the Nazi-backed coup.
He did expand NATO.
He did put troops in Poland.
He did, at least in his first term, he started on the project to put the anti-missile systems in Poland and the Czech Republic before he did finally back down on that, I think.
And then, of course, his Syria policy was very much against Russian interests.
Even though Putin bailed him out on his Syria policy when al-Qaeda trapped him into a war with the false flag sarin attack of 2013.
And Putin lent him a helping hand and said, I'll tell you what, I'll have Assad turn his chemical weapons over to you to destroy if you don't attack, which was saving his bacon.
And Obama sure owed him one.
In fact, I don't know if you know this, Bronco, but the late, great Mark Perry, pardon me, that Mark Perry is still alive, thank you very much, the late, great Robert Perry.
He believed that the reason that the neocons, Robert Kagan's wife, Victoria Nuland, and some of these others worked so hard to do the coup in Ukraine in 2014 was as revenge and to nip this relationship between Obama and Putin in the bud because they were getting along too well.
And here Putin was also twisting the Ayatollah's arm and telling him he wanted the Ayatollah to sign the nuclear deal with Obama too.
And so he was saying that was one of the main reasons that they did it was just to scatter this relationship before it's too productive.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't know about that particular story, but it wouldn't surprise me because as I think we all know pretty well by now, the national security state in Washington is kind of its own thing.
It's its own entity that has kind of just grown and grown and gotten more powerful and really operates and does what it wants, regardless of who's in power.
I mean, there's a reason why the foreign policies and the national security policies of administration after administration, basically it tends to be the same, regardless of who is in power.
Of course, there's certain differences.
There's little things here and there.
Obviously Trump is a huge opponent of the Iran deal.
Obama championed it.
So there are some differences, but they all kind of go broadly in the same direction.
And obviously the national security state is so big and powerful that kind of by hook or crook, it works to get its way.
And one of the big things that they've wanted ever since the fall of the Soviet Union is of course to limit Russian influence as much as possible in Europe.
I mean, that's why NATO has just expanded and expanded at steady clip, even though it has always pissed Russians off.
And in fact, it actually violated the agreement that George H.W. Bush made with Russian officials.
He promised that, no, no, NATO was not going to expand.
Don't worry.
We're not going to do anything aggressive.
Now that the Soviet Union is done, we're going to stay where we are.
Right.
All right.
I'm so sorry that we're all out of time, because it's such an important discussion, but I want to thank you, obviously for your time on the show, but also for covering this story.
It's so important that people get critical takes on these anti-Russian narratives that we're getting deluged with constantly here.
So that everybody is Bronco Marchteach.
He is the author of the book, Yesterday's Man, about Joe Biden, and he writes at jacobinmag.com.
And this one is called Trump, the Putin Puppet, Just Dramatically Escalated the Undeclared War Against Russia.
Thank you again for coming on the show.
Thanks for having me.
The Scott Horton Show, anti-war radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, apsradio.com, antiwar.com, scotthorton.org, and libertarianinstitute.org.
