Article Analysis: What the Liberal Media Misses about the Threat Behind the Gaetz Gaggle Stunt

Editor's note: this article originally appeared on the morning of October 25th, 2019 on my Facebook page - if you're looking for sources, check out the comments section of the original article. For my latest piece "Polls, Joe Biden's Big Lead and other Elite Liberal Establishment Lies" please click here.

House Republicans Ratf–k Impeachment Hearing in Reckless Bid to Please Trump

My how quickly the worm turns; it was only a couple of days ago that I was praising Rolling Stone for publishing an intense critique of mainstream liberal neo-McCarthyism in Matt Taibbi's excellent "Everyone is a Russian Asset" - in today's article analysis we're going to take a look at a decidedly less impressive piece from Tim Dickenson. I chose this article not to pick on Dickenson (whose work I find hit and miss) but rather to highlight Rolling Stone's perplexing habit of slapping an edgy headline on what amounts to bog standard liberalism and calling it counterculture; the truth is that I could have picked any one of about twenty-five articles in corporate media - they're all terrible for the exact same reasons.

Unless you've been living under a rock for the past forty-eight hours, there's a pretty good chance that you've heard about the Matt Gaetz-led political theater stunt in which roughly forty GOP Congress members "stormed" into a soon-to-begin impeachment deposition hearing in what has been largely described in the mainstream "liberal" media as an attempt to curry favor with the Klepto Kaiser.

To his credit, Dickenson's piece takes a half-assed stab at poking holes in Gaetz's ridiculous claims that his mayo mob where there to "protest a lack of transparency and due process for the president" in the ongoing Democrat-led House impeachment inquiry and the author is one of the few people to hint at the notable far--right (read: fascist) element among the GOP House brigade of belligerence. Unfortunately like virtually every other piece covering this story in the "liberal" corporate media, the article then bogs down into simultaneously declaring the Republican "stunt" pathetically ineffective and also over-hyping the fact that some of Gaetz's gang entered the "Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF)" - an issue which only resonates with unhinged national security liberals who think the CIA is dreamy; in other words the exact same Bircher nutbags who already want to impeach Trump because of the mythical "pee tape" and think Putin has decided the last twenty-five elections in the so-called West.

Now before we go any further here I just want to be clear about where I'm coming from; I've vocally supported impeaching Trump from almost the precise moment he took office for a growing list of reasons that include (but are not limited to) repeatedly profiting from open corruption, admitting he obstructed justice on television and that whole "being an actual goddamn fascist" thing. While I (correctly) never bought into the Russia part of Russiagate, I've known that Trump is a crook for a very long time and that was even before Downmarket Mussolini admitted he fired his own FBI director for investigating him on live TV.

Furthermore, I absolutely support impeaching Herr Donald for his attempts to use US foreign policy to leverage American allies into persecuting his political rivals - even if those rivals are almost certainly guilty of their own corruption, as Palooka Joe Biden likely is in this case. In my opinion debating Trump's guilt or the legitimacy of this impeachment inquiry pretty much went out the window when the president (again) went on TV and asked Ukraine and China to investigate Palooka Joe; a sentiment at least one Trump ally says was clarified by the administration to mean "investigating corruption is an easy way to earn goodwill with Trump" when asked by Chinese government officials "if Trump was serious when he suggested China open an investigation into Biden."

In other words, this guy is guilty and while I may sincerely doubt the Democratic Party's ability to get this impeachment across the goal line, I'm very much in favor of trying. So what's the problem with Dickenson's piece and the nearly infinite number of articles just like it in the "liberal" corporate media?

Simple, they're wasting time selling fairy tales about national security and our brave spies while still missing the clear and present danger that Gaetz's little "stunt" exemplifies; despite the clever talking point disseminated throughout the usual suspects in the media, the GOP's slow-speed assault on the impeachment inquiry deposition hearing did not have an audience of merely one person.

Look, I don't know if you've taking a look at the overarching themes and tenor of GOP rhetoric surrounding the possible impeachment of Herr Donald, but it seems pretty clear to me that these folks are purposely trying to stir up armed protest and far right violence in response to any attempt to impeach Trump. Sure you can say that the right has been gibbering about a coming "Civil War" for a very long time, but I'll remind you that we aren't talking about shock jock radio hosts here - these are extremely prominent administration surrogates, big time Republican donors and actual elected Republican officials trying to turn up the hate seed to eleven and marshal the armed reactionaries whose votes and support lie behind this entire far right movement, into the street. It's not an accident that the Gaetz mob included an open nazi like King and a couple of casual nazi sympathizers like Scalise or Hunter, just like it's not an accident that Sleaze Bannon (the street fighting right wing populist who had a plan to fight Trump's impeachment from day one) is back to defend against this threat to the Klepto Kaiser's rule.

The Bannon-Trump plan (as frequently hinted at in self-aggrandizing interviews by Bannon himself) always revolved around using the threat of armed right wing crazies to keep the system from stopping Trump's attempts to mold America into a budding white ethno-state - do you sincerely think a guy like Roger Stone wasn't choosing his words carefully when he said "try to impeach him. Just try it. You will have a spasm of violence --an insurrection-- in this country like you have never seen before... Both sides are heavily armed, my friend... this is not 1974... people will not stand for [the impeachment of President Trump]. Any politician who votes for it would be endangering their own life?" It's not desperation or a coincidence that Republicans, including high-level officials in the GOP, are now speaking in terms of a religious war, soviet-style totalitarianism, violent armed insurrection and yes, a civil war - this is a strategy, and an extremely dangerous one.

Will it work? Will the fascists behind Trump be able to pull Fox News Nation into the streets to shut down any attempt to hold Trump accountable for violating the Constitution and abusing his (considerable) power? Well to some degree it's already working; everyone from prosperity gospel Pastors, to Major League Baseball Umpires are now low-key (but actively) threatening armed resistance to Trump's impeachment; thankfully however a few random crackers with large gun collections, an army of blackshirts does not make - for now.

Frankly the problem here is that I'm not really sure it matters precisely how *many* right wing nutjobs the pro-Trump forces convince to threaten or perhaps even carry out violence in the long run. From armed standoffs in Nevada, through the militant occupation of Oregon's Malheur National Wildlife Refuge and on to GOP minority state senators killing a climate change bill in Oregon by fleeing the capitol and hiding behind a phalanx of armed right wing militia nuts, history has demonstrated that it doesn't take a very large number of gun-toting fascists to make cowardly liberals shut up about their "rules and norms" before quietly submitting to whatever the fascists demand.

Truthfully half the time the reactionaries don't even need to get violent; anyone who saw the Gaetz Gaggle's march on television and wasn't immediately reminded of the infamous "Brooks Brothers riot" that helped end the recount and secure George W. Bush's stolen presidency in 2000, clearly hasn't been paying much attention to American history - and yet, there's no mention of the Brooks Brothers riot in this article, or the vast majority of the articles on the subject in the mainstream "liberal" media. I guess something like that just doesn't rate when compared to salacious the possibility GOP congressmen were secretly there to bug a SCIF chamber on behalf of Snowball, the greatest enemy of the people - I mean, Vladdy Putin.

*eye roll*

- nina illingworth 

Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus.

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog.

Updates available on Twitter, Mastodon and Facebook.

Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!    

Article Analysis: Bad Grandma's Bircher Bromide Bungle and Further Thoughts

Editor's note: this article originally appeared as a two part series over the course of October 22nd on Facebook; for my latest piece "Screw Yoo: the Turtle, the War Criminal and the Mutant who would be King" please click here.

All analysis by Nina Illingworth unless otherwise indicated.

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"Everyone Is a Russian Asset" 

As those of you who read my writing regularly already know, I'm a big fan of Matt Taibbi's work over at Rolling Stone, even if I don't always agree with him on every issue and I question some of the relationships he maintains online. In this October 21st opinion piece, Taibbi dissects the unhinged neo-McCarthyist attack former Democratic Party presidential nominee Hillary Clinton recently unleashed on both 2020 presidential nomination candidate Tulsi Garbard and 2016 Green Party candidate Jill Stein. 

According to Clinton (and her numerous defenders in the liberal mainstream discourse) those dastardly Russians are planning on pushing Tulsi Gabbard into a third party candidacy (which Gabbard has already ruled out on multiple occasions by the way) and Jill Stein is legitimately a Russian asset - which conveniently means pretty much everyone who has directly pointed out that Hillary wanted to start a real as f*ck hot war in Syria if she won the presidency in 2016, is now supposedly working for Vladdy Putin.

While I strongly recommend you read the whole article, it would be harder to come up with a better summation of Taibbi's thesis than the one the author clearly articulates on his own:

"Hillary Clinton is nuts. She’s also not far from the Democratic Party mainstream, which has been pushing the same line for years."

Obviously it will come as a surprise to no one that I agree with Taibbi when he says Clinton is nuts, but it's the latter half of his argument that I feel has become largely lost in the chaos and shuffle of Trump's deranged fascist presidency and the lukewarm opposition to that fascism the Democratic Party has offered up in response. As Taibbi thoroughly documents, the most bonkers thing about a former U.S. Secretary of State blaming her 2016 loss on Putin and accusing everyone she feels crossed her of being a secret Russian sleeper agent is the fact that none of the crazy sh*t Hillary just spewed out is really any different than the wild conspiracy theories moving throughout liberal mainstream political discourse and the mainstream, Democratic Party-friendly side of American corporate media.

There is no, let me repeat that, *no* credible evidence whatsoever that either Tulsi Gabbard or Jill Stein are working for Russia; there never has been and if such evidence actually existed one would think that Robert Mueller's months and months long investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election might have turned some up. While I'm certainly not a huge fan of Tulsi Gabbard as a politician or as a potential presidential nominee, the fact is she's a sitting U.S. Congresswoman and an active officer of the American military reserves - if merely half of what the liberal establishment claimed about Gabbard were true, you can bet your backside the goddamn NSA would have found out by now and we'd be talking about a trial for high treason. All of this is bullsh*t and plenty of people know it, including fellow 2020 Democratic Party nomination candidates Robert O'Rourke, Pete Buttigieg, Andrew Yang and Bernie Sanders as well as mainstream, Clinton-friendly media observers like Noah Schachtman (editor of the Daily Beast) and analyst Van Jones. Even the Washington Post has noted that Clinton has provided no evidence to back up these accusations, which in turn obviously implies that she should have to because there is no public evidence that either Stein or Gabbard are working for Vladimir Putin!

Frankly the mainstream media outlets and political mercenaries pushing this line of dogsh*t ALSO know it's malicious garbage; as anyone who read "Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign" can tell you, the entire "Russian asset" smear that has become the go to political attack for neoliberal establishment minions was cooked up over Shake Shack takeout by Clinton, John Podesta, Bobby Mook and various other campaign lackeys to explain away Hillary's shocking (but still entirely predictable) election night loss - check it out on page 395 of the 1st print hardcover.

Hell even a little basic deductive reasoning should lead any rational observer to question these claims, even if you buy into the weird neo-McCarthyist, New Cold War logic the liberal establishment is selling here. If Donald Trump was working for Russia, then why did Hillary Clinton's campaign purposely try (successfully, apparently) to "elevate" Downmarket Mussolini to the GOP nomination? Wouldn't that be both extremely dangerous and also "helping Russia" influence an American election? I mean using that rational, should we be asking if *Hillary Clinton* is a "Russian asset" - after all it was Hillary Clinton and her campaign's 100% real emails "zee Russians" supposedly leaked and if everyone who doesn't like Hillary Clinton is working for the KGB, I'd say those completely unaltered emails were a pretty big "asset" in terms of getting Trump into the White House, wouldn't you?

This is of course ridiculous because neither Hillary Clinton nor her campaign are, or were working for Russia but the fact that you can use the exact same logic to publicly indict Clinton, as Clinton is using to publicly indict Gabbard and Stein, goes a long way towards demonstrating what an utter pile of bullsh*t this entire "Russia" saga in American politics has turned out to be. 

The simple truth is that Trump's a crook, Clinton was a terrible candidate and the "Russia" part of "Russiagate" has always been about making sure nobody in the Democratic Party or elite liberal establishment was ever head accountable for punting a winnable election to a bloviating, moronic, billionaire rapist, fascist reality TV show host whose catch phrase was seriously "you're fired." Bad Grandma can point the finger all she likes but the facts of the matter are that nobody can stop reality, from being real and there's nothing real about the endlessly intimated Russian sleeper plot to destroy American neoliberalism at all.

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"Hillary Clinton slanders Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, Green Party candidate Jill Stein as Russian spies" 

In my previous post I talked a bit about Matt Taibbi's new article and elaborated on the origins as well as the purpose of the liberal mainstream's "Russian asset" smear; despite being firmly able to debunk Bad Grandma's preposterous Bircher smears however, we're still no closer to understanding precisely why Hillary Clinton attacked Gabbard and Stein without prompting. After all the simple truth is that Clinton, her campaign staff and the elite Democratic Party establishment already got away with blaming their 2016 election loss on mysterious Russian spies and collaborators - nobody in the party was fired after losing to Donald Trump and nothing inside the Dem Party's leadership structure changed at all.

In this October 19th piece at the World Socialist Web Site, Andre Damon makes a fairly compelling argument that this is, in the end, all about Pig Empire imperialism in Syria. Along the way Damon also drops a number of delightfully true and objectively damning observations like:

"Clinton’s attacks on Gabbard and Stein make clear once again that the Democrats’ assertions of “Russian meddling” in the 2016 election were primarily aimed not at Trump, but at the anti-war and anti-capitalist sentiments that led millions of people to refuse to vote for her in 2016."

"As a central part of their anti-Russia campaign, Clinton and the Democrats promoted the media effort to poison public opinion against journalist Julian Assange by slandering him as a “Russian agent,” preparing the way for the Trump administration to indict him on bogus espionage charges and secure his imprisonment in London under conditions that threaten his life. At the same time, in the name of countering the supposed menace of Russian “fake news,” the Democrats pressured Google to slash search traffic to left-wing political websites and insisted that Facebook and Twitter delete left-wing accounts with millions of followers."

Finally Damon ties up the article by pointing out Hillary Clinton's fairly explicit and largely unreported calls for more media censorship; an issue that is no doubt dear to his heart as the World Socialist Web Site is one of the online outlets that have been most damaged by the Google de-ranking shenanigans we talked about in my "cone of silence" piece earlier here on Facebook:

"I think it’s a lot harder for Americans to know what they’re supposed to believe,” she said. In the 1970s, with only three major national newspapers, “It was a much more controllable environment.” 

This is all great stuff and at the end of the day, it's hard to argue with Andre Damon's central thesis here - but if there's one thing I've learned from years of studying the political machine known as "Clinton, Inc" it's that these folks use the whole damn cow. It seems unlikely to me that Clinton's only reason for going full Q-Anon here is her unbridled love for horrific forever wars in the Middle East. If so, what else might be behind Hillary Clinton's decision to appear on former Obama campaign manager David Plouff's mainstream liberal political podcast and go completely frothing Bircher nutjob on Gabbard and Stein?

Former Democratic Party operative turned liberal commentator Van Jones thinks it's a question of simple revenge. After all, Gabbard's decision to resign her high-ranking position in the DNC and then endorse Bernie Sanders 2016 Democratic Party nomination campaign was considered highly disrespectful by the Clinton campaign - a fact we know because Wikileaks released an email from Clinton go-between Michael Kives to Tulsi Gabbard that directly said as much (see below.)

While many internet commentators have wondered if Hillary is just trying to keep herself in the news as part of a secret plot to jump into the 2020 Democratic Party nomination sometime in the very near future, I'm less certain that's what is going on here. While I have no doubt that Clinton's accusations were both personal and strategic, I have a hard time imagining someone with Hillary's fragile ego being prepared to risk losing a third Presidential run - putting up a sixth place finish in New Hampshire and dropping out isn't much of a plan for protecting your political legacy.

What about a possible deflection strategy? As Chapo Trap House pod-caster extraordinaire has noted in relation to another controversy, Clinton's accusations came awful close on the heels of Ronan Farrow's new book - a book which implicated Hillary in helping to protect now-exposed Hollywood rapist (and former Clinton donor/surrogate) Harvey Weinstein. If that's not tactically ruthless and politically Machiavellian enough for you, how about the fact that news that Bernie Sanders was going to pick up 3 key endorsements (including AOC's endorsement) on October 16th and the very next day, October 17th, Clinton came along to drop some Alex Jones-style nonsense about Gabbard, Stein and Russia - effectively driving the good tidings for Sanders out of the headlines in a media environment already dead set on ignoring his campaign? Was this part of the liberal mainstream's quixotic fight to destroy Bernie Sanders and push Joe Biden or Liz Warren across the finish line in the 2020 Democratic Party nomination contest?

Frankly, I don't know the answer to these questions any more than the next person who is not Hillary Clinton or one of her numerous in-the-know minions. What I can say after years of tracking the twists and turns of Clintonite and Democratic Party internal politics under the influence of the Third Way philosophy, is that there is a non-zero percent chance the real answer here is "all of the above."

Say what you will about Clinton, her husband and the hawkish wing of the Democratic Party they've spent decades nurturing, none of these folks has ever had a problem coming up with new ways to punish their enemies and game the system.

- nina illingworth


Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus.

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog.

Updates available on Twitter, Mastodon and Facebook.

Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!  

Article Analysis: Warren's Surrogate Gaffe, Media Double Standards towards Bernie and the Cone of Silence

Editor's note: this article originally appeared October 21st, 2019 on Facebook; for more of my recent writing, please check out my image blog at Can't You Read; including this piece of why war in Syria is still bad despite Trump, institutional loyalty, class and propaganda in "Ghost Wars" by Tim Weiner, and what's changed about liberal attitudes towards Ed Snowden in the past six years. 

All analysis by Nina Illingworth unless otherwise indicated.

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"Elizabeth Warren Under Fire as Campaign Surrogate’s Racist, Homophobic Tweets Come to Light" 

Frankly I'm not going to spend a lot of time analyzing the above piece from October 14th because there's really not a whole lot to analyze here, but let's summarize a little bit: 

One of Elizabeth Warren's high-profile campaign surrogates (activist Ashlee Marie Preston) who happens to be a black trans woman made the ludicrous claim that Bernie Sanders has never supported the LGBT community and declared that she "had the receipts" to prove it. 

As it turns out however, it was Preston herself who had left a long list of receipts online - specifically all manner of homophobic, bigoted and racist tweets which I'm not going to bother to review here, you can just read the article if you want to get a good idea of how awful they were.

Predictably, Preston issued a defiant "sorry, not sorry" non-apology and began deleting tweets while the Warren campaign did everything it possibly could to deny any sort of official ties to Ashlee Marie - offering meekly that Preston was "not on the payroll" of the Warren campaign, which is pretty funny because I'm pretty sure Bernie Sanders isn't paying folks like Nina Turner or Killer Mike either but nobody would doubt they are Sanders campaign surrogates. As the photo at the top of the Law and Crime article above clearly indicates, Ashlee Marie Preston was clearly an official part of the Warren campaign and whether or not they paid her directly for her time and services out of the campaign kitty is completely irrelevant to the subject at hand. 

While the Warren campaign's response *is* more than just a little shameful, the simple truth is that I'm not here to bust Liz's chops for employing a bad campaign surrogate without doing the proper amount of vetting beforehand. Mind you, I do take exception to the campaign's attempts to portray itself as an innocent and friendly bystander while Liz uses folks like Preston and loyal think tanks like Demos to mercilessly slander and attack Sanders in the public discourse, but Warren isn't the first campaign to screw up by failing to properly vet a particularly aggressive and effective surrogate, nor will she be the last either. This is obviously a serious gaffe, but it's not even remotely as openly disqualifying as say Palooka Joe Biden's corruption or Trapper Keeper's habit of chucking binders at subordinates.

What I personally find more revealing about this whole sad episode is the nominally-liberal, mainstream corporate media's disturbing cone of silence surrounding a story which, if it had been a Sanders campaign surrogate, would almost certainly have been a front page story for at least a couple of days. There's a reason I'm sharing a link from Law and Crime, an objectively right wing (albeit not fascist) news blog and it's because if you do a Google search right now, you'll discover that while multiple "winger" outlets across the spectrum from blogs to Fox News picked up the story, it somehow didn't even rate a comment on sites like MSNBC, Vox, Salon, the Washington Post or any one of the numerous, even pro-Biden websites that dominate the "liberal blogosphere."

Naturally sycophants and apologists will simply argue that the incident isn't newsworthy and the right's only interests here are sensationalism and the endless culture war, but any fair-minded observer of the ongoing liberal vilification of both Bernie surrogate Susan Sarandon and Sanders himself for not disavowing Sarandon will know that's utter hogwash - this might not be disqualifying for Warren, but it sure as sh*t is "news" in any reasonable understanding of the word.

At this point it absolutely could not be *more* obvious that mainstream liberal media is openly "in the tank" for a Liz Warren nomination run; that's not a conspiracy, that's just a reasonable analysis of the available evidence and it should definitely concern you if you're still clinging to the lie that Warren is "basically the same" as Bernie if you're a working class voter. There's a reason Wall Street, billion dollar media corporations and rich Democratic Party donors are all "coming around" on Liz Warren and it certainly isn't because they now agree with Bernie's agenda - the same agenda these liberal media outlets want you to believe Warren has improved upon for her 2020 nomination run.

Indeed as those of you who study the growing phenomenon of online censorship are no doubt already aware, this problem actually goes much deeper than just the mainstream corporate media because the entire establishment is against Sanders and in on this cone of silence. For just one obvious example, do a quick Google search for "Susan Sarandon liberals insane" and then repeat that same search with "Duck Duck Go" - as you'll see, someone at Alphabet (the giant company that used to be Google) doesn't think pointing out the objectively insane liberal obsession with Susan Sarandon is worth including in the front four pages of results; that's not an accident (see below.)

Of course all of this will hardly be news to anyone who watched the Washington post publish sixteen negative headlines about Sanders in sixteen hours during the 2016 Democratic Primary but the obvious contradictions here, both in terms of the media's supposed role in the election process and the staggeringly obvious bias against Sanders require constant reminding in the face of this same "cone of silence." Elections are not supposed to be decided by an openly biased corporate media complex and the newsworthiness of a given story isn't supposed to have anything to do with whether or not the boss likes a given candidate - yet clearly, in the American "democratic" system, nothing is as it's "supposed" to be in a liberal democracy and the ruling classes are determined to stop Bernie Sanders and his labor class political revolution at all costs.

The obvious question then becomes, will the American labor class get "fooled again" or will they find a way to see past the cone of silence and an interconnected web of aristocratic lies to vote for the only candidate in the 2020 Dem Primary who actually represents their interests? 

Nobody can predict the future, but I'm willing to bet that after four years of lies, smears and open gaslighting against the real left and the roughly eighty-nine percent of American society that comprises the labor class, folks are awful tired of watching Lucy snatch away the football. If 2016 taught us anything it's that while the liberal corporate media can certainly *lose* an election, they are utterly incapable of winning one - unless liberal elites are prepared to shatter the Democratic Party into a thousand pieces by blatantly rigging another nomination process, Bernie Sanders will be the 2020 nominee on the Democratic side, and yes, he'll beat Donald Trump or Mike Pence regardless of how this impeachment inquiry shakes out.

This is the end of the line for neoliberalism; the only question left is will the rich folks burn the party to the ground to stall the rise of Democratic Socialism and thereby hand the country over to a reality TV show fascist (again) for another four years? I wouldn't bet against it, but after watching 26,000 excited people cram into a Sanders rally on a cold October Saturday, it's clear that they're going to have to do a little better than the same old cone of silence to stop Bernie's momentum this time.

- nina illingworth

Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus.

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog.

Updates available on Twitter, Mastodon and Facebook.

Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!