In the high-profile pages of Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi just did what has been on every sane person in this country's mind: a respected journalist letting loose with what needs to be said about this upside down, embarrassing epoch.

The collective meltdown over Trump's election is a result of citizens having not been given the slightest clue by their mainstream news media, of the extent to which the chronic dysfunction of our government has led to a mutiny in the citizenry based on a distrust and loathing of establishment politics and media. This whole "Russiagate" farce been conjured up by the aggrieved Duopoly and their courtiers in the press, as a distraction from the fact that people despised the anointed HRC so much that they were willing to take a chance on the demented, low grade moron, cheap car salesman, real estate goon from NYC, in what was clearly a trend around the world of snubbing the establishment.

So here we are, as an avalanche of the most absurd propaganda threatens to tear the country apart at its seams. But what it really amounts to is, folks like c99ers and our wider ilk of dissenters across the country and world, find ourselves in the unenviable position of being cast into the interrogation glare of propagandists who accuse us of defending the Orange Buffoon, sleazy asshole in the White House. While they unwittingly defend the horribly hubristic, entitled and corrupt Clinton. It's pretty twisted.

The headline gets right to it, "The New Blacklist: Russiagate may have been aimed at Trump to start, but it's become a way of targeting all dissent."

Here's some snippets of Matt's excellent piece:

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.

One of the first rules of a shunning campaign is that it doesn't have to make sense. It just has to be what everyone's saying. Since most Americans went to high school, we tend to be instinctively familiar with the concept...

Their Hamilton 68 "dashboard," easily accessible online to civilians and journalists alike, supposedly tells us what the enemy wants us to think at any given moment. Citing a secret methodology, it claims to track 600 Twitter accounts for their "relationship to Russia-sponsored influence," and regularly spits out mysterious conclusions about Putin's preferences in the American political scene. More and more often now, the site's pronouncements turn into front-page headlines.

When the dashboard declared that Nunes' #Releasethememo campaign had become the "top-trending hashtag" among Russian twitter accounts, a gaggle of press outlets and politicians rushed to point out that Nunes was doing the work of the enemy. (Even Rolling Stone got into the act, accusing Nunes of working "in concert with Russian propagandists").

Of course, in keeping with a growing pattern of Russiagate stories being quietly walked back sometime after the sensational headline, reports later broke that most of the Twitter furor driving #Releasethememo came from domestic Republicans – from "inside the house," as the Daily Beast put it. Even one of Hamilton 68's own was later quoted downplaying the story.

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. The story has evolved to seem less like a single focused investigation and more like the broad institutional response to a spate of shocking election results, targeting the beliefs of discontented Americans across the political spectrum.

(emphasis mine)

From Trump to Bernie Sanders to Brexit to Catalonia, voter repudiation of the status quo was the story of the day. The sense of panic among political elites was palpable. The possibility that voters might decide to break up the EU, or put a Trump, Corbyn, or Sanders into power, led to a spate of "Do we have too much democracy?" essays by prominent think tankers and national press figures.

Two years later, the narrative has completely shifted. 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 by the diabolical anti-Western dictator, Vladimir von Putin-Evil.

A major target of this idiocy has been Sanders, who is already being pitched to the public as the Kremlin's next Manchurian Candidate. "When Russia interferes with the 2020 election on behalf of Democratic nominee Bernie Sanders," the Washington Post unironically asked last November, "how will liberals respond?"

Parts of the Russiagate story may be real. Sleazeballs like Paul Manafort and Trump are, like Putin himself, capable of anything. We'll find out soon what exactly they all got up to together, if anything. But we should already be able to admit that others – like the millions of Americans on both sides of the aisle who voted against status quo politicians two years ago – aren't, and weren't ever, traitors. And any campaign to label them as such is potentially more dangerous than anything, even a Trump presidency.

(emphasis mine)

Here's Jimmy going over the Greenwald smackdown of James Risen (a debate that was moderated by Jeremy Scahill)

For more on the flimsy-at-best premise of this ridiculously insane institutionalized propaganda see CStMS's great piece from over the weekend, in which she expertly dissects the dangerous language being tossed around so capriciously in the media, namely that if anything did occur it would certainly not be election "rigging" or "interference."