Taibbi on what Russiagate has become: a way to silence dissent.
"Putin loves you; therefore, you love Putin. The enemy re-tweets you, therefore, you're in league with the enemy. We're at war with them, therefore we're at war with you."
"If you don't think that the endgame to all of this lunacy is a world where every America-critical movement from Black Lives Matter to Our Revolution to the Green Party is ultimately swept up in the collusion narrative along with Donald Trump and his alt-right minions, you haven't been paying attention.
That's because #Russiagate, from the start, was framed as an indictment not just of one potentially traitorous Trump, but all alternative politics in general."
" By an extraordinary coincidence, virtually all the "anti-system" movements and candidates that so terrified the political establishment two years ago have since been identified as covert or overt Russian destabilization initiatives, puppeteered from afar ... "
"we've been told Putin was all or partly behind the lot of it: the Catalan independence movement, the Sanders campaign, Brexit, Jill Stein's Green Party run, Black Lives Matter, ... "
" ... reflexively identifying most anti-establishment sentiment as illegitimate, treasonous, and foreign in nature."
" ... the Russiagate narrative evolved to describe leftists, libertarians, and other assorted malcontents as additional "useful idiots" for Putin. This really began with the ill-fated "PropOrNot" web site ..."
" Think-tanks and pundits have increasingly followed suit, demanding that all good patriotic Americans renounce such "Putin-backed" protest movements.
A major target of this idiocy has been Sanders, who is already being pitched to the public as the Kremlin's next Manchurian Candidate."
"The Hamilton 68 "dashboard" almost exactly mirrors that Homeland Security Advisory program. It's a snappy-looking media-ready thingamadoodle with no real purpose beyond constantly reminding the public to be afraid of enemies in their midst. And it's run by many of the same ought-to-have-been-disgraced War on Terror yahoos who led us into the last mess.
Not only is the notorious Kristol of Weekly Standard and Project for a New American Century fame one of its leaders, but so is Michael Chertoff, ... That these people now are being upheld as heroes of liberalism is incredible. Only a few short years ago they were widely derided as the very dumbest people in the country, raving paranoiacs who humped every false lead from Niger to Ahmed Chalabi's hotel suite in order to justify invasions, torture, secret prisons and the establishment of a monstrous, intractable, and illegal surveillance regime. "
Taibbi on fire. Read the whole thing:
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/taibbi-russiagate-trump-putin-mueller-and-targeting-dissent-w517486sidd