What If Hillary Had Trump's Russian Connections?
According to Andrew Sullivan, Russiagate was a giant liberal hoax. A simple thought exercise will help you understand how ridiculous this is.
by Ben Cohen
The growing alliance of “anti-woke” journalists gaining traction in our public discourse is pushing the narrative that the Left is forcing the Right to become more radical. We have been covering this issue at The Banter because it presents dangerous historical revisionism and exonerates a racist, fascistic movement that has existed independently in America for centuries.
According to writers like Andrew Sullivan, Bari Weiss, Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald, America’s ongoing culture war is a product of liberal excess: Trump supporters are violent and irrational because liberals are obsessed with gender pronouns. The media is dysfunctional because liberals are hysterical. Joe Biden is failing because he is spending money on social welfare programs.
The “Big Lie” (that wasn’t a lie)
Central to the anti-woke alliance is the notion that Russiagate was the liberal version of Trump’s “Big Lie”. Trump claimed he really won the 2020 election and liberals claimed Trump is a Russian stooge. So naturally, both sides are just as bad.
Furthermore, had liberals accepted Trump’s initial victory in 2016 and stopped talking about Russia’s interference in the election, Trump supporters would have been far easier to deal with.
“Anti-woke” cheerleader Andrew Sullivan summarizes this in a recent post blaming liberals for MAGA intransigency:
The minute Trump was elected president in a stunning upset, he was accused of rigging the election in league with a foreign power. How else could he have won?, wondered the entire press corps who had assumed Clinton was a shoo-in. And so they basically accused a new president of treason and illegitimacy — and kept that narrative going for years. For good measure, they printed an entirely unverified dossier, originating with Democrats, just because it was full of juicy anecdotes, and people were talking about it. They talked endlessly of the president being peed on by prostitutes to compromise him — when they had zero evidence to back it up.
And you wonder why Trump’s supporters dug in? If your candidate came from behind in one of the most riveting campaigns in modern history — and then was instantly greeted by media accusations that it was all due to his treasonous conspiracy with Putin — wouldn’t you feel ticked off? Wouldn’t you even feel that the media was the enemy and would never give Trump any benefit of any doubt? Polarization goes both ways.
If you follow this logic, Trump supporters cannot be blamed for their extremism. They were pushed by media elites obsessed with a so-called conspiracy to march on Charlottesville, beat up minorities for being the wrong color, and then storm the Capitol in an attempt to overthrow the election. In fact, had liberals not pursued Russiagate with such fervor, MAGA supporters would have embraced them with open arms and tuned into CNN every night to hear a different perspective!
To dismantle this ridiculous narrative, let’s play a little game.
What if Russia had helped Hillary?
The Atlantic’s David Frum recently wrote an exhaustive, brutally eye opening piece demonstrating the Trump and his campaign team’s blatant ties to Russia. Citing publicly available, impeccable sources that include major news investigations and findings from the Senate Intelligence Committee and FBI investigations, Frum shows definitively that Trump was perhaps the worst compromised candidate in presidential history.
Using Frum’s bullet points, let us pretend that multiple investigations found out the following about Hillary Clinton:
Clinton had extensive financial ties with Russia, and had potentially engaged in money laundering.
Clinton had attempted to open a hotel in Moscow and stood to make hundreds of millions of dollars
Clinton announced her candidacy for president, continued trying to open her hotel and had her representatives lobby aides to Vladimir Putin, then publicly denied she had any business ties with Russia.
A Clinton aide revealed to a foreign diplomat that Russia was attempting to intervene in the US election on Clinton’s behalf before the US government or anyone else had any idea.
The Clinton campaign accepts a request to meet a Russian lawyer promising dirt on Trump.
Clinton asks Russia on live television to hack the US government on her behalf.
After Wikileaks hacked RNC emails in an attempt to assist the Russian interference efforts, the Clinton campaign tried to contact Wikileaks.
The Clinton campaign then denied and attempted to cover up Russian involvement in the election.
Through an ally, Clinton campaign shared campaign information with a Russian intelligence officer.
Clinton inexplicably broke with US foreign policy norms and began to support all of Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy goals on the campaign trail.
Multiple people close to Clinton got caught lying about their Russian connections, some of whom go to jail.
Had any of this happened, no reasonable person could believe that Hillary Clinton’s candidacy would have survived. She would have been destroyed by the media and immediate put on trial for treason. Republicans and Trump supporters would have called for her execution — as one prominent Trump adviser did over Clinton’s imaginary Benghazi crimes. Even if an investigation didn’t find evidence of a prosecutable criminal conspiracy, the right wing media complex and RNC would have spent decades reminding the public that Hillary Clinton had business ties to Russia, urged Putin to hack the US government, and accepted meetings with Russian intelligence officers. And they would have been completely justified.
Both sides!
To pretend that Trump’s ties to Russia were not extremely alarming is yet another sign of the ridiculous double standards much of the media engages in. Writers like Andrew Sullivan want to brush this under the carpet in order to focus on the real culprits: elitist liberals. Sullivan has a long track record of unhinged hatred towards Democrats, so much so that he blamed Trump’s election in 2016 solely on Hillary Clinton. “I find myself wondering at odd times of the day and night: Why is Trump in the White House?” Sullivan wrote in early 2017. “And then I remember. Hillary Clinton put him there.”
Not the racists who voted for Trump. Not the Republican Party that protected him. Not the misogynists who wouldn’t vote for Clinton because she was a woman. Not the Russians who intervened on his behalf. Not James Comey who announced the FBI would be investigating Hillary Clinton for non-existent crimes a week before the election. No, it was all Hillary Clinton.
Two sets of standards
Republicans are held to different standards in America. They can openly lie, cheat, and attempt to steal an election and never pay a price for it. Democrats on the other hand, are now not even allowed to ask questions about it. Trump blatantly colluded with Russia. Trump incited a riot and tried to overthrow a democratic election. But if Democrats stopped making a fuss, Republicans wouldn’t have to resort to criminality and violence!
The truth is that Trump did collude with Russia in order to win the election in 2016. He did it openly and without shame. He then saddled up to Putin when in office and disavowed his own administration’s attempts to contain Russian aggression.
But Democrats are too Woke, so let’s focus on that instead.
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The Left's Racism Problem
If we do not recognize the fifth column working on behalf of the fascists attempting to destroy this country, we will all pay the price for it.
by Justin Rosario
Every now and then, I come across an article that reminds me that I am not an insane person howling at the moon. Perry Bacon Jr.’s article in the Washington Post reinforces a point, albeit indirectly, I’ve been making about the barely concealed racism of the far left for some time now.
Their rampant hatred of the Democratic Party does not stem from “the corrupt duopoly” or Democrats being “corporate sellouts”. Instead, the ostensibly pure progressives of the far left fear and loathe a Democratic Party that increasingly no longer centers white men. Bacon argues that Democrats have had to do an awkward dance of appealing to/appeasing white voters while not completely throwing the rest of their base (mostly meaning black voters) under the bus. Bacon suggests the time for that dance to end is here.
I submit that what Bacon calls “white appeasement politics” has been dwindling for a while now, and the result has been an angry backlash from not only the American right wing, but also the far left. The fact that the very white rage of the far left is a mirror of the very white rage of the right wing is not a coincidence. It is perfect Horseshoe Theory in effect. The further left you go, the closer to the right you get.
“Southern black voters shouldn’t count”
I cannot speak to the motivations of the pseudo-progressive movement that deliberately cost Al Gore the 2000 election. But I do know that by the time Bernie Sanders was running in 2016, they were running a similar playbook and had adopted a less than subtle racism to go along with it.
This lack of subtlety was evident in the lament that “Southern states shouldn’t count” during the primaries because “they are all red states”. Sanders himself engaged in a variation of this by claiming Southern states voting early “distort reality” in the primaries. This was a nonsensical argument. Should only states with majority white Democratic voters go first? How would that reflect reality more accurately? The real meaning was clear enough: The objection was to black voters in Southern states, who overwhelmingly rejected Sanders twice, having their voices heard.
When pushed, the far left often would fall back on, “If only black voters knew more about Bernie…” The inherent racism of assuming black voters do not know any better is an open sewer the right wing has been wallowing in for decades.
At the same time, if one spends any amount of time on social media, it is hard to miss that the bulk of the venom from these alleged leftists always seem to be reserved for minorities and women. Women of color, especially black women, are magnets for some of the worst online hostility. The far left loathes Kamala Harris with the fire of a thousand exploding stars. A key point of overlap with the right wing. Again, not a coincidence when one looks at the horseshoe drawing closer together.
This becomes even more obvious when one considers how the Democratic Party is forced to appeal to/appease white voters….
"Look what you made me do!" has always been the most pathetic of excuses.
Hillary Clinton was not a weak candidate, as some whinny holier than thou microbrained trolls who infest this site want everyone to believe. There was always a concentrated effort stretching over a quarter of a century to destroy her, from the far right who accused her of being an out of control feminist socialist, to the far left who accuse her of being a war mongering corporate sellout.
Thanks to bum wipes like them, as well as the Liberally Biased Mainstream Media™ who buried all her positives and created negatives to hang on her and attack her, we ended up with a corrupt asshole in the White House who smeared his fat unwiped ass over everything regarding the presidency. We wouldn't have had to deal with something like the Coronavirus, because a President Hillary Clinton would have been on it and would have kept any damage down to a bare minimum, then we would have lived our lives back to normal again.
The Ninth Circle of Hell awaits filth, like Gene Hetzel, when they finally die!