What RussiaGate Did to America--and to Me

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This is of course the totalitarian game plan: if you can’t get your way with persuasion, then silence your critics.

RussiaGate–the Power Players’ conspiracy to spread fake news about fake news–is back in the news. RussiaGate didn’t just harm America, it also negatively impacted me personally, as Oftwominds.com was on the fake news PropOrNot list of 200+ “Russian propaganda” sites that launched the conspiracy in October 2016–a conspiracy intended to suppress free speech and delegitimize, de-platform and de-monetize critics of Hillary Clinton and the clique / policies she represented.

RussiaGate’s opening salvo against free speech was the bogus PropOrNot list of 200 purportedly “Russian propaganda” sites first published online in late October, 2016, and famously promoted on page one by the Washington Post on November 24, 2016, and then parroted for months afterward by other Big Media outlets.

No one seems to have saved the original list, at least I haven’t been able to find it online, but it included my website, OfTwoMinds.com. Given my non-partisan stance, this surprised me, but I was reassured to find oftwominds in excellent company: virtually every “can’t be bought” site of value–left, right, center, apolitical–was also listed.

Overlooking the intent to undermine and discredit us all, I remain honored to have been identified as being worthy of such august company. Rather than being besmirched, I am honored.

Let’s start by noting that I am not a “conspiracy theory” bloodhound. My position is more along the lines of “we need more conspiracy theories, as we’re running low due to previous ‘theories’ being proven correct.” Big Tobacco, price-fixing by cartels, COINTELPRO, and so on, all dismissed as “conspiracy theories” to mask the harmful skullduggery going on behind the public defense of the miscreants.

The basic gearing of RussiaGate was to claim that Russia engaged in a vast effort to undermine US democracy by influencing US media to support Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. Simply put, that Hillary was odious to a large swath of the American public was not the cause of her losing the election–it was the darn Russkies who wanted Mr. Trump to win because he was going to deliver the world to the Kremlin.

A free press is an open invitation for manipulating public opinion. The media itself has always sought to influence public opinion, based on the views of the owners of the media outlet, and the US government has long sought to present its policies and actions in a positive light via efforts to control or influence what the media produces as “news,” “commentary” and “facts.”

Thus the yellow journalism of the late 19th century helped instigate the Spanish-American War of 1898 (a splendid little war by these accounts) and in the 1960s, the government promoted the notion (undermined by the Pentagon Papers, hence the freakout when those were released to the public) the Vietnam War was not only winnable, but the light at the end of the tunnel was now visible.

That foreign entities also accept this open invitation to influence American public opinion is equally obvious. America’s free press is especially attractive if the foreign power itself has a tightly controlled pro-government media. To these powers, America’s free press is like a candy store.

A free press–and democracy–require a skeptical, critical, well-informed public, a citizenry capable of sorting the wheat from the chaff and sniffing out a con, PR, propaganda, a story too good (or bad) to be true, and so on.

Those wielding power find it immensely annoying when their standard-issue PR fails to gain the widespread approval of the citizens / consumers, and the story of RussiaGate is their effort to undermine free speech to get their way–to the detriment of democracy and the national interest.

In other words, if you can’t gain approval by legitimate means, then silence your critics with lies. This is the presumption of a hollowed out, amoral, venal, self-serving leadership: the “solution” to the public’s preference for another candidate is to crush free speech.

This is of course the totalitarian game plan: if you can’t get your way with persuasion, then silence your critics. RussiaGate upped the totalitarian ante by claiming that any and all critics of Hillary Clinton and her policies were “useful idiots” of foreign influence. Stalin and Mao would have heartily approved, as this is right out of the totalitarian playbook.

There was no need to construct a physical Gulag for dissenters; the RussiaGate conspirators had a digital Gulag erected for dissenters. This digital Gulag was constructed by Big Tech, which like every other totalitarian system, declares you guilty without having to provide any evidence in a court of law proving your guilt.

So those on the not approved because they’re critical of the approved narrative are shadow-banned, deplatformed and thus demonetized, i.e. starved of income so they disappear into a shallow grave in the wastelands of our digital Gulag.

That the RussiaGate accusations were preposterous was no impediment. Desperate times demanded desperate measures, it seems, for PropOrNot’s polyglot mix of left, right and apolitical sites (such as mine–I’m a critic of all ideologies) were all identified as outlets of Russian propaganda.

But not everyone drank from the poisoned chalice. To their credit, various publications stuck pins in the putrid RussiaGate fake news bubble:

The Propaganda About Russian Propaganda (December 1, 2016) (New Yorker)
“To PropOrNot, simply exhibiting a pattern of beliefs outside the political mainstream is enough to risk being labelled a Russian propagandist. Indeed, the list of ‘propaganda outlets’ has included respected left-leaning publications like CounterPunch and Truthdig, as well as the right-wing behemoth Drudge Report. The list is so broad that it can reveal absolutely nothing about the structure or pervasiveness of Russian propaganda.”

Washington Post fake news story blurs the definition of fake news (December 8, 2016) (Columbia Journalism Review)

Consortium News provided the money-shot in early 2018: “The purpose of PropOrNot has been to trick people into demanding that freedom of speech be rolled back.”

Consortiumnews.com, Foreign Policy, Intelligence, Obama Administration: Unpacking the Shadowy Outfit Behind 2017′s Biggest Fake News Story January 28, 2018) (Consortium News)
“The purpose of PropOrNot has been to trick people into demanding that freedom of speech be rolled back. This was/is to be done by destroying fact-based media. If you read further, the entire plan is laid out starting from 2015 when it started coming together.

Where this wasn’t feasible, they set up hack and harass attacks at various publications to get them to stop publishing hard-hitting journalists. This still hasn’t been entirely effective because it caused publishers to dig in and harden their internet properties instead.

The softer more indirect approach Harding pushed in March 2015 quickly developed into the unified media strategy he wanted for the U.S. and Europe. Control the information and don’t allow contradicting information or news into the media stream. When it does get in, call it propaganda.

Enter PropOrNot.”

What RussiaGate did to America was undermine free speech to serve the interests of one powerful political clique, to the detriment of the nation, its principles and its citizenry.

I’ve written extensively about our digital Gulag. The basic idea behind our Big Tech constructed and operated Gulag is no one can hear you scream because you’re now a deplatformed or shadow-banned phantom: you see your post, but nobody else does. Clever, isn’t it?

What we have is the illusion of free speech rather than authentic free speech. This is the core dynamic of Ultra-Processed Life: substitute a fake, phony, synthetic, but oh-so profitable ultra-processed facsimile for what was once authentic.

Is Profit-Maximizing Data-Mining Undermining Democracy? (March 19, 2018)

Shadow Banning Is Just the Tip of the Iceberg: We’re All Digital Ghosts Now (October 27, 2018)

Big Media: Selling the Narrative and Crushing Dissent for Fun and Profit (December 21, 2020)

How Did Someone Like Me Get Shadow-Banned? (June 19, 2023)

Given that my loathing of corruption and totalitarian tactics is non-partisan, in my view justice would be minimally served by giving everyone involved in RussiaGate a tenner (10-year sentence) in Alligator Alcatraz. But alas, as I’ve been observing recently, America’s elites aren’t above the law; there is no law.

That our elites–yes, all of them–feel untouchable / unaccountable is hubris, for it assumes there is no Divine Justice or karmic consequence for their self-serving abuse of free speech, transparency and democracy and the rapacity of their self-enrichment. That their hubris is a nail awaiting a hammer doesn’t occur to them, so the eventual concluding act in this inescapable series of events will come as a surprise.

So the news claiming fake news was itself fake news. And there’s no consequence of this?

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Source: http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2025/07/what-russiagate-did-to-america-and-to-me.html