True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 195: The Russia House
Aired: 2021-11-17
Duration: 01:28:47


=== Trump's Moscow Mystery (06:54) ===

[00:00:00]  So the allegation is this, Liz.
[00:00:02]  Oh, no.
[00:00:03]  Donald Trump, in the 2013, I believe, Miss Universe contest, visits Moscow, which is a large city in Russia, which is a large country in Asia.
[00:00:15]  While there, he's told that the bed of the suite that he is renting has been slept in by president and first lady Barack and Michelle Obama.
[00:00:27]  Donald Trump hires two ladies of the night to come to this hotel, gives them sparkling water, effervescent, where it bubbles in their guts.
[00:00:42]  They remove their strangely lacy Russian underwear, several layers due to the coldness of the air, remove their garter belts, squat, and release a vicious stream of urine on the bed.
[00:01:03]  We don't have to do this.
[00:01:05]  Well, we do have to do this because we already recorded it.
[00:01:07]  But I'm asking you this.
[00:01:09]  Say, Liz, say you're an intelligence agent still.
[00:01:14]  And I come to you with this.
[00:01:19]  What would your first question be here?
[00:01:22]  Why are you telling me this?
[00:01:49]  You know, something that I've also learned from the Steele dossier stuff is if you can just repeat a rumor and say it's, oh, it's not a rumor.
[00:01:57]  It's raw intelligence.
[00:01:59]  Or you just like meme some.
[00:02:01]  Remember, everyone just memed it into being real.
[00:02:03]  They're like, the P-tape is real, which I'm saying ironically, but then we're just memeing it.
[00:02:08]  I do want it to be real.
[00:02:09]  I mean, first of all, invasion of privacy.
[00:02:13]  Well, listen, baby, compromise is for everybody to see.
[00:02:18]  That's why it's compromised.
[00:02:22]  It wasn't compromised, just a sex tape.
[00:02:24]  Well, my question is, they released the tape.
[00:02:26]  What?
[00:02:26]  It's Donald Trump sitting in a chair watching two chicks piss?
[00:02:29]  Yeah, that's what I never understood.
[00:02:31]  The allegation wasn't that Donald got peed on.
[00:02:34]  It's that he had girls peed.
[00:02:36]  That's true.
[00:02:37]  Yeah.
[00:02:38]  And the other allegation, I mean, there were other allegations that he had sex tapes, but I'm like, I got to be real with you.
[00:02:43]  Releasing a sex tape in the day and age that we're in now, not too bad for your career.
[00:02:51]  That's true.
[00:02:52]  Kardashian it.
[00:02:53]  Exactly.
[00:02:54]  So there, I mean, yeah, I do believe that the Russians have a video of Donald Trump giving Ray J head.
[00:03:01]  Like, I think that like night vision, yes, yes, him looking wait, what was wait with Paris's?
[00:03:10]  There was a video to playing in the background.
[00:03:12]  There was like a, it was like something horrible.
[00:03:15]  I can't remember.
[00:03:15]  There was a TV show on really, yes.
[00:03:19]  It was like, you know, one night in Paris only has two stars on IMDb.
[00:03:23]  It made me sad.
[00:03:24]  Yeah, but it was kind of sad.
[00:03:26]  It's there's not, um, it doesn't say on the Wikipedia there.
[00:03:30]  I've never watched.
[00:03:31]  I've never seen, you know, when all of those like fappening and all those like pictures got released, I never looked at any of them.
[00:03:38]  You shouldn't.
[00:03:38]  Yeah.
[00:03:39]  First of all, I don't even know who any people are.
[00:03:41]  It's compromised.
[00:03:43]  It's compromot.
[00:03:44]  Second of all, it's none of your business.
[00:03:46]  It's none of my business.
[00:03:48]  You know, if I, if I be a creep, don't be a creep.
[00:03:51]  Rule number one: don't be a creep.
[00:03:54]  Exactly.
[00:03:54]  Like, I do want to see, I'll be real with you.
[00:03:56]  I want to see what Ray J's dick looks like.
[00:03:58]  Like, I've never wanted anything more than that.
[00:04:00]  You know what?
[00:04:01]  You got to ask him.
[00:04:02]  Maybe he'll show you.
[00:04:03]  Better yet, use your imagination.
[00:04:05]  That, that's, that's always.
[00:04:08]  That's, you know what?
[00:04:09]  It works.
[00:04:10]  It works.
[00:04:11]  I'm thinking of it right now.
[00:04:12]  Hello.
[00:04:13]  With that being said, my name is Brace.
[00:04:19]  I'm Liz.
[00:04:20]  We are, of course, joined by producer Young Chomsky.
[00:04:23]  And you are listening to Druan.
[00:04:26]  Hello.
[00:04:27]  But with the backwards R that they do when they try to make things look Russian.
[00:04:32]  Oh, yeah.
[00:04:32]  Fun stuff.
[00:04:33]  It's like Truan.
[00:04:35]  You know, that's not even what, that's not even an R in the Russian language, but I digress.
[00:04:42]  Liz, we are doing a little HG Wells time machine today, aren't we, baby?
[00:04:47]  Yeah, we're finally doing the damn thing.
[00:04:48]  We're talking about Russia Gate, which you might be like, why?
[00:04:53]  And you know what?
[00:04:54]  Yeah.
[00:04:54]  You're not following the news because a big Russia Gate story came out.
[00:04:58]  And I really, I mean, you know, Brace can tell you, I've really been dying to talk about this for a little time because this is an old hobby horse of mine.
[00:05:05]  Liz, Liz's, this is one of Liz's pet obsessions, Russia Gate.
[00:05:09]  And it's, I think I mentioned this in the interview, but we sort of started our podcast too late to catch in on the fucking just like no real heat of Russia Gate stuff.
[00:05:19]  But my God, what a this was a real trip down memory lane for remember when Trump got up and was like, if the Russians have the emails, send them to me.
[00:05:28]  And everyone got mad at him for that.
[00:05:29]  It's like, dude, which I thought was like genius move.
[00:05:32]  Genius.
[00:05:33]  You know what I always said?
[00:05:35]  And you know what?
[00:05:35]  He never took my advice.
[00:05:37]  And that was mistake number one.
[00:05:39]  But what he should have done is said, hey, NSA, you're spying on everybody.
[00:05:43]  Why don't you got the damn emails?
[00:05:45]  Hillary, you know, Hillary deleted the emails.
[00:05:48]  Hey, ask the NSA.
[00:05:49]  Yeah.
[00:05:50]  They've got it.
[00:05:50]  Exactly.
[00:05:51]  Yeah.
[00:05:51]  NSA, you're looking at me.
[00:05:53]  You know, you release it.
[00:05:54]  That's what you can do.
[00:05:55]  100%, baby.
[00:05:57]  But he did.
[00:05:57]  That's a, you know, that's a pivot.
[00:05:59]  You flip it back on them.
[00:06:00]  Yeah.
[00:06:01]  And I gotta say, revisiting this too, and I, you know, it's again, it's 2021.
[00:06:06]  We're almost at 2022.
[00:06:07]  You know, this is.
[00:06:08]  Oh my God, don't say that.
[00:06:10]  Well, okay, we're almost at 2023.
[00:06:12]  But Hillary Clinton.
[00:06:14]  We don't know.
[00:06:15]  That's going to be a bad year.
[00:06:16]  And I'm not saying this in a way that comes from a place of much misogyny or anything like that.
[00:06:22]  Hillary Clinton was one of the most repellent personalities I think ever thrust into the public sphere.
[00:06:28]  My God.
[00:06:30]  Yeah.
[00:06:30]  Against Donald Trump, what would these fools think?
[00:06:34]  This is a thing that is coming from a place of just total unyielding misogyny.
[00:06:43]  Think how much.
[00:06:45]  Now, here's my thing: what?
[00:06:47]  If Hillary won, I would, yes.
[00:06:51]  Maybe everyone's brain wouldn't have broken.
[00:06:54]  I know.

=== Danchenko's Indictment (15:27) ===

[00:06:55]  Maybe that was what we were supposed to happen.
[00:06:57]  So, what Liz and I are saying here is that we are going to work tirelessly, ceaselessly, and slavishly, slavishly, never knew how to pronounce it for the election of every single person that is endorsed by Emily's list from now on.
[00:07:14]  We have with us today, recently released from Siberia in the Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 mission, where you get the guys out of prison.
[00:07:26]  Aaron Mate, who has been dropped off by one of those Russian-type helicopters that you see in movies, rappelling into our compound where we pay groups of teenagers to post mean things on our other podcasts,
[00:07:43]  like in their Reddits and stuff like that, to discuss with us the one thing that we have always wanted to talk about, but have been contractually obligated by Fusion GPS not to Russia Gate.
[00:07:59]  Roll the tape.
[00:08:11]  It brings me no pleasure to report this, ladies and gentlemen.
[00:08:17]  I've been informed on the ticker tape here that Aaron Mate, the host of Pushback at the Gray Zone and author of a Substack blog at mate.substack.com, has been arrested by the Department of Justice and is facing a firing squad.
[00:08:37]  But they're going to make it way worse because he betrayed this country.
[00:08:42]  He has granted us one final interview before his gruesome and gory death at the hands of they're actually giving it, they're giving dogs guns to shoot him with because they don't respect him.
[00:08:54]  And the DOJ has led us in here to the American Lubianca.
[00:08:58]  Aaron, thank you so much for joining us, the premier Russia Gate researcher.
[00:09:04]  And it is a pleasure to have you.
[00:09:07]  How are you doing?
[00:09:08]  I'm good.
[00:09:08]  Good to be here before my pending death.
[00:09:13]  Aaron, before we get started here today, talking about all things to do with Trump, Russia, Russia Gate, and certain dossiers, I rarely get to ask this question on the show or in life, and I'm thrilled to be asking it to you right now.
[00:09:28]  How does it feel to be right?
[00:09:33]  It feels good, but again, how could I not have been right?
[00:09:38]  Right?
[00:09:38]  I mean, the thing was so insane that we were told the president was a Russian agent.
[00:09:45]  He was being blackmailed with sexual compromise.
[00:09:49]  Russian bots were invading our country and brainwashing millions of people to hate each other and vote for Donald Trump.
[00:09:57]  And Facebook memes from a St. Petersburg troll farm were going to destroy our democracy.
[00:10:02]  I mean, what's what possibly, what, what about that could possibly turn out to be correct?
[00:10:09]  And I mean, I'll admit that there were some moments when I was like, it was lonely and I was a bit scared.
[00:10:14]  Like, what if this thing just goes on forever and there's no resolution?
[00:10:19]  And that was freaky.
[00:10:20]  But, you know, I just, this thing was so dumb and it was so destructive that I knew it had to collapse eventually.
[00:10:26]  So actually, that I have a question about that because what you said, is this thing going to go on forever?
[00:10:33]  There was big news this week, which is why we have you on.
[00:10:36]  And we're going to get to that in a second.
[00:10:38]  But it feels like every time it felt like, okay, now the narrative about Russia Gate has collapsed.
[00:10:44]  Now it's over.
[00:10:45]  Now it's over.
[00:10:46]  The media has like found a way to keep it going and sort of say, well, that may have collapsed, but now there's this.
[00:10:55]  Or actually, if you look at it this way, it's still really true.
[00:10:59]  And so I keep wondering if it ever really is going to go away or if there, I don't think there'll ever be a like final mea copa from anyone, you know?
[00:11:11]  But it does sort of feel like something that will just continue kind of slowly petering out forever and ever and ever.
[00:11:20]  Yeah, because it's a cult.
[00:11:22]  It really is a cult.
[00:11:24]  If you look at Iraq WMDs, that ended with basically they found a couple of scapegoats like Judy Miller who got thrown under the bus.
[00:11:34]  But now no one seriously claims anymore that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction.
[00:11:39]  that ended, but they achieved that through some through some scapegoats.
[00:11:43]  That's not happening this time.
[00:11:45]  And it's interesting to think about why.
[00:11:48]  I mean, there's many reasons.
[00:11:49]  First of all, I just think this thing was so ridiculously embarrassing.
[00:11:55]  Like, I guess it's plausible that Saddam Hussein might have been pursuing weapons of mass destruction.
[00:12:01]  I mean, he had used them before against the Kurds, of course, when he was given them by the U.S.
[00:12:06]  But in this case, this was like claiming that the president was a traitor, blackmailed with a P-tape by Vladimir Putin.
[00:12:15]  And it went on for so long.
[00:12:17]  And I guess one thing different here is that, you know, the Russiagate served just so many powerful interests that it's just too big to fail.
[00:12:27]  Whereas Iraq WMDs, that was, you know, just one sector of the elite.
[00:12:31]  But this, this was like a complete convergence of elite interests and it served them really well for the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party.
[00:12:40]  This was the way to avoid a reckoning with the fact that they lost to Donald Trump, which was humiliating.
[00:12:48]  That converged with the national security state, who didn't care that Trump was like a racist or a sexist.
[00:12:56]  They cared that he was a buffoon and sometimes actually he was too honest.
[00:12:59]  Sometimes he said actually the wrong things.
[00:13:02]  And he basically wasn't a suitable steward of the global U.S. empire, right?
[00:13:07]  So RussiaGate was a way to constrain him.
[00:13:10]  And it also was a way to actually like taint the true things that he was saying back in 2016 when he was criticizing, you know, foreign interventions.
[00:13:20]  That was not a good thing if you were in the national security state or in the bipartisan foreign policy establishment.
[00:13:25]  So basically, painting him as a creation of Russia was a good way to taint the appeal of the anti-interventionist rhetoric that he was saying.
[00:13:35]  And I'm not saying he was saying that because he believed it.
[00:13:37]  I just think he had his finger on the pulse of the electorate in certain places and he recognized that people were sick of sending their kids off to war and they were sick of spending a lot of money on wars.
[00:13:47]  And I think accusing him of being a Russian agent was a good way to taint that.
[00:13:52]  And then you have the media, which for them, this was like amazing because you have this like real life spy thriller.
[00:13:57]  And it's also a way for them too to avoid their responsibility in giving Trump billions of dollars worth of free airtime.
[00:14:04]  So you just have, I think, this convergence of interests in pushing this.
[00:14:08]  And that's why you won't see the reckoning that it deserves, no matter what the facts actually show us.
[00:14:14]  Yeah, I think with the WMDs, I mean, they served that huge media push and that narrative really served its purpose and it got us in there.
[00:14:22]  But once we were in there, and especially once we were in there for a while, they didn't really need that anymore.
[00:14:26]  You know what I mean?
[00:14:27]  They could kind of just like push it away.
[00:14:29]  And you're right, except for a few scapegoats, like a lot of people kind of got by unscathed.
[00:14:35]  Like people might bring up, you know, Jonathan Chade or whoever's support for the war now, but it doesn't really matter.
[00:14:41]  And it seems like with the I mean, Joe Biden got elected president, so it really exactly.
[00:14:46]  I mean, and literally everybody, almost every single person who's been running for president who was old enough to have done it, like was a supporter of the war.
[00:14:53]  I mean, Hillary Clinton, for Christ's sake, there's no, I mean, there's no reckoning with any of these people.
[00:14:57]  But with Russia Gate, it was wild because we really saw it like unfold in real time and then get pushed.
[00:15:07]  I mean, which I was very young when the Iraq war happened.
[00:15:10]  So I was obviously able to notice a lot more details now and then immediately pushed under the rug in real time as well.
[00:15:16]  And it really boosted the careers of several people who will face, again, zero reckoning.
[00:15:22]  In fact, like any sort of consequences and probably will never talk about it again.
[00:15:26]  But, you know, we're bringing this up this week, especially because this is, there's sort of been like not a final nail in the coffin, because I think there are just more and more nails that you could really, this could be a big fucking coffin, but a nail in the coffin of Russia Gate was hammered in with the with the arrest of Igor Danchenko, an analyst or former analyst at the Brookings Institution,
[00:15:54]  who appears to have been the source for a good part of the Steel dossier.
[00:16:02]  And I think just to put a lot of this news in perspective, because this made major headlines, you know, all over, you know, famously, Washington Post had to basically retract a couple of stories they'd written, delete a bunch of stuff.
[00:16:16]  And I really wanted to bring you on today to ask, well, why is this important?
[00:16:20]  Like, who is this cat?
[00:16:21]  What the fuck is the Steel dossier?
[00:16:23]  Why is he being arrested?
[00:16:26]  But I think the figure of Mr. Monsieur Danchenko here is really just such an interesting one because the Steel dossier was painted as this, like basically a spy document, you know, gathered intelligence from high-level possible double agent Russian insider sources.
[00:16:46]  And it appears to just be a slob who lives in America who might have been just calling some guys he went to high school with in Russia and asking for rumors.
[00:16:55]  So what makes the arrest of Danchenko important?
[00:16:59]  And like what effect does that have on the on the Russia Gate Steel dossier narrative?
[00:17:04]  Let me just say before I answer that, just one important other factor that I forgot and why Russia Gate persisted, which is that whereas with something like Iraq, you had at least the like real progressive left against it, Russia Gate duped a lot of people on the left, either into, you know, kind of just ignoring it or going along with it to the point where like Robert Mueller was now a hero for some people.
[00:17:29]  He was the one who was going to bring down Trump.
[00:17:31]  And to the point where like one of the biggest liberal rallies during the Trump era was not to oppose his tax heist or to save the Iran nuclear deal or to save Obamacare, but it was to oppose the firing of Jeff Sessions.
[00:17:45]  Yep.
[00:17:47]  Which is just so fucking funny and so sad.
[00:17:50]  But that was that's what the resistance and the left became.
[00:17:54]  And I think for leftists especially, people were so scared of Trump, and I get that.
[00:17:59]  It's fair enough.
[00:18:00]  that they were willing to go along with anything that could be presented as the as the answer to him, as the as the solution that was going to bring him down.
[00:18:10]  So it just it just worked perfectly in enrolling everybody and playing on their fears.
[00:18:17]  And I think that's why it went on for so long.
[00:18:19]  And that's why, again, it'll be hard to reckon with just because it just had so much buy-in than any other previous kind of scandal of its nature.
[00:18:28]  So in terms of Denchenko, yeah.
[00:18:31]  So look, what set off RussiaGate really was this allegation in June 2016 from this firm called CrowdStrike, which was hired by the Clinton campaign.
[00:18:46]  And they said that Russia had stolen emails from the Democratic Party server.
[00:18:50]  Yes.
[00:18:51]  And we can get into it later on if you want why that's a duo cut.
[00:18:54]  Why that's fake.
[00:18:54]  Yeah.
[00:18:55]  It's a duvis cut.
[00:18:56]  It's sickness.
[00:18:57]  But what really kicked things into high gear was, you know, six months later in January 2017, BuzzFeed publishes the Steele dossier.
[00:19:06]  And it's this collection of like lurid claims about Trump, that there's, that there's a longstanding conspiracy between Trump and Putin.
[00:19:14]  And it's not just a conspiracy, but to keep Trump in line, Putin is blackmailing Trump with compromise, with a sex tape he has of Trump and the Ritz Carlton.
[00:19:24]  And we got this picture in the media that the person who wrote this dossier, Christopher Steele, who's a former British spy, was this like master sleuth.
[00:19:34]  And anonymous intelligence officials were claiming to like the New Yorker and CNN that like they were looking into Steele's claims and all of them were checking out, you know?
[00:19:44]  And so we got this impression that Steele was like, we were told that Steele was doing this legit sleuthing work and had all these high-level Kremlin sources.
[00:19:53]  Well, it turns out that the FBI knew early on, at really the exact same time that the dossier came out in January 2017, that Steele had no sources and that basically his only source, this guy named Igor Denchenko, was not even in Russia.
[00:20:07]  He was a DC-based Russian expat and that basically he was just making stuff up.
[00:20:13]  But that was kept from us for basically the entirety of Russia Gate.
[00:20:17]  So now Danchenko has been indicted for lying to the FBI in how he talked to the FBI way back when, back in 2017, when he spoke to them, how he talked to them about his communications with his sub-sources, people who he said were giving him information that goes into the dossier.
[00:20:33]  And it turns out from this indictment that just like Danchenko, these are people who have no access to the Kremlin, but basically one of his sub-sources is a longtime Clinton operative, a guy named Charles Dolan.
[00:20:46]  And another guy who he claimed to speak to, in reality, he didn't even speak to.
[00:20:50]  So the FBI says that he lied in claiming that he spoke to this guy named Sergei Million, who's not Russian.
[00:20:57]  He's Belarusian.
[00:20:58]  Yes.
[00:20:58]  But they didn't even see me.
[00:20:59]  He's not happy.
[00:21:01]  Million, from what I understand, is not happy that this guy has been spreading his name all over town.
[00:21:09]  Of course not.
[00:21:10]  Look, this is an example.
[00:21:11]  Like during this like four-year frenzy to find any possible contact between like a Trump associate and someone with a Russian passport, all these people like Sergei Million got like used for like a, for fan fiction.
[00:21:29]  And they got accused of all this crazy shit that kind of ruined their life.
[00:21:32]  Like Million was accused of being one of the main sources for the dossier who even gave over, who gave the allegation about the P-Tape.
[00:21:40]  And it was false.
[00:21:41]  In reality, as we learned now from this indictment, he never even spoke to the Steel's key source, Danchenko.
[00:21:48]  And but that, you know, all these people like him just got used and had their lives ruined, had to spend a lot of money on lawyers because they were useful to the narrative.
[00:21:57]  Yeah, you said something that's like really key to this story, which is this info was kept from us, that this idea that, you know, the FBI knew that this was all bullshit, blah, blah, blah, that the intelligence community kind of knew that it was just a bunch of gossip.
[00:22:11]  It was opo research.
[00:22:12]  It was the kind of shit that campaigns produce or campaigns hire consultants to produce that's sort of just like, hey, this is all the kind of weird gossip we've heard, maybe, but I just kind of want to get a paycheck.

=== Info War Fallout (11:14) ===

[00:22:22]  I'm making this for you.
[00:22:24]  I hear Lindsey Graham calls his back moles his little, his little ladybugs.
[00:22:29]  Yeah.
[00:22:29]  But also a big part of that story is it wasn't just kept from us.
[00:22:33]  It was journalists literally not, I mean, it was journalists kind of keeping it from us in a sense.
[00:22:39]  They were happy to quote anonymous, what is the classic one?
[00:22:43]  Anonymous intelligence officials, which is just unheard of.
[00:22:47]  The new precedent for like everyone is just allowed to be anonymous now for all stories, which is just insane.
[00:22:57]  You know, we mentioned BuzzFeed Ben choosing to publish that dossier, you know, parlaying that into a gig at the Times and, you know, doing the hard-hitting reporting of profiling Drunken Canal.
[00:23:08]  Just like the, the amount, the sheer amount of like careerist bullshit that surrounds perpetrated and like blew this whole thing so out of proportion and insane is so infuriating to me.
[00:23:23]  I know that you are a person of journalists.
[00:23:26]  And so I feel bad lumping you in with this, but I hate journalists so fucking much for this kind of bullshit because like we were getting ready for this episode and I like, I was reading like, I don't know, if I don't know who it was, if it was like a Taibbi piece or Greenwald piece from, you know, you, you three basically been like beating this drum for fucking five years now at this point.
[00:23:50]  And it was like an SNL video of the like, you know, I don't know, a bunch of the female cast members like singing some song about Mueller or whatever.
[00:24:02]  All I want for Christmas is Mueller to indict Trump.
[00:24:04]  And I just was, I forgot.
[00:24:06]  I mean, this is like from 2018.
[00:24:08]  And I somehow forgot just how fucking insane this shit made people.
[00:24:13]  We don't need a long ass dog.
[00:24:16]  Just a single page that shocks Mueller, please come through.
[00:24:22]  That's our only other option of coup to the point where, I mean, it was, it was just fully pervasive.
[00:24:33]  It was in the water.
[00:24:34]  It was everything.
[00:24:35]  It completely and totally distorted the entirety of Trump's admin, which has been the last four years.
[00:24:41]  I mean, it's just, it's difficult to understate the impact that this shit has had.
[00:24:47]  And it's like, fucking the people that kept all this info from us is basically what I'm saying.
[00:24:52]  RussiaGate ruined everything, you know, even with comedy.
[00:24:56]  Think about it.
[00:24:57]  Like, not that I, not that I was like a fan of SNL before the Russiagate era, but like, I mean, think about comedy in general.
[00:25:04]  Like comedians should have been making fun.
[00:25:07]  I mean, some comedians were, you know, on the fringes were making fun of Russia Gate, but otherwise, like, you know, like, look at Stephen Colbert, who was, I think, genuinely talented.
[00:25:15]  He was, when he did the Colbert report, I think there was like some, whether you think it was like politically sophisticated or not, there was some genuine talent there on his part, I think.
[00:25:26]  And when he was like, but then he was now like a late night host during the Russiagate era.
[00:25:30]  And he's like, instead of making fun of all this stuff, like they're all, their jokes are all about how Trump is gay with Putin, right?
[00:25:36]  That was basically comedy.
[00:25:37]  Like mainstream.
[00:25:38]  That part is true.
[00:25:39]  They did hook up once, but not including the steel dossier.
[00:25:43]  Right.
[00:25:43]  The steel dossier.
[00:25:44]  But no, you're right.
[00:25:45]  You're totally right.
[00:25:46]  I mean, it became like this.
[00:25:48]  That was the joke.
[00:25:49]  Like, I feel like for SNL during the entirety of the Trump years, it was like, I didn't, if I had watched it, I would like not understand who the fuck these characters are introducing even are.
[00:26:00]  Like, Bob Mueller is like a cultural icon with these people.
[00:26:04]  That's fucking insane.
[00:26:06]  Well, it was like this kind of thing.
[00:26:08]  And I think that, you know, I keep saying this, but like everything is Russia Gate is like how I just kind of like can view politics now, which is that like Russia Gate helped fuel this like incessant need for everyone to stay up, stay up on the news.
[00:26:22]  You have to know what's going on.
[00:26:23]  Trump, oh, all these different shoes are going to drop and Manafort and, you know, fucking, I don't know, whatever, all of these people and all these clues.
[00:26:31]  And oh, you know, this about spying and Putin this and all this.
[00:26:34]  And this kind of just like, you know, fucking Mad Out screaming at you every night in your, in your face about all this bullshit that is, you know, the kind of hyperbolic catastrophism that is like has seeped into everything.
[00:26:50]  Like this was the playbook, like you said, it was the playbook.
[00:26:53]  And a ton of people got rich off of it.
[00:26:54]  A lot of book deals and a lot of, you know, a lot of careers were made based on this stuff.
[00:27:01]  And it's still going, you know, in its own way.
[00:27:05]  It all starts from dysfunction, right?
[00:27:06]  So a really dysfunctional country was able to give rise to a figure like Donald Trump, who was able to like exploit the ruins of a neoliberal society to victory.
[00:27:17]  Basically, enough people were so fed up with the way this country has been governed that they're willing to elect that guy.
[00:27:25]  And instead of reckoning honestly with what his victory means, you know, what policies have been pursued to give rise to a figure like that and how things could change, everybody who basically benefits from the same economic system that gave rise to Trump used Russia Gate to deflect instead.
[00:27:45]  And that applies to basically, you know, to everyone.
[00:27:49]  And that's why you have like rich comedians like Stephen Colbert, not willing to look honestly at, you know, the reality of the country that gave the, that gave Trump, and instead looking to find an answer in a Trump Russia conspiracy theory and figures like Robert Mueller.
[00:28:05]  And it got.
[00:28:06]  It was just, like, if you look back at things, like, there's some New Yorker story where they do, like, a review of Robert Mueller's style.
[00:28:14]  It was on, like, the style section.
[00:28:16]  And, like, looking at his, like, Brooks Brothers suits and, like, the way he carries himself, it became this, like, really, I mean, psychologically, it's really fascinating how unwilling people were to look honestly at the dysfunctions of this country and how desperate they got to look anywhere else, you know.
[00:28:35]  And it's, like, so insane.
[00:28:36]  I mean it was literally literally like okay, so well, there was a coup and Russia installed the president, like that seemed somehow more logical to some people reading the NEW YORK Times than like anything else.
[00:28:50]  Yes, yes and um, and then like one of the most insane things is that this, this whole frenzy, it really incentivized, I mean, to the extent that already the U.S. Media doesn't really cover foreign policy accurately, right?
[00:29:03]  And it goes along with the National Security State.
[00:29:06]  But because the prominent narrative was that Trump was a Russian puppet, it incentivized the media even more to like basically ignore all the incredibly reckless policies that Trump was actually pursuing towards Russia.
[00:29:19]  Because like whatever Trump himself personally intended, and it sounds to me like he actually likes Putin and he really wanted to build a Trump Tower Moscow there.
[00:29:27]  He wanted to get along.
[00:29:28]  Yeah.
[00:29:29]  But the problem is he appointed all these like crazy neocons like John Bolton and Mike Pompeo.
[00:29:34]  And of course, they don't give a shit about getting along with Russia.
[00:29:37]  Their whole agenda is, you know, world domination.
[00:29:39]  So what did they do?
[00:29:40]  They launched a coup in Russia's ally Venezuela.
[00:29:44]  They tore up all these vital nuclear accords like the INF Treaty and they almost killed the New START Treaty.
[00:29:49]  They increased the war games on Russia's borders.
[00:29:52]  And all these things, you know, drastically escalated tensions with Russia.
[00:29:56]  But because that undermined this fashionable narrative that Trump was doing Putin's bidding, which is really what you would hear on MSNBC every single day, the media was all the more incentivized to ignore that stuff.
[00:30:08]  So whenever I would write about this in the nation, I would do like a column once or twice a month and I would just go through whatever like the dominant conspiracy theory was of the day about Mana Ford or Michael Cohen or whoever.
[00:30:18]  And I would show why the available evidence shows all these things to be baseless.
[00:30:23]  And at the end, I would try to like just include whatever the list was of like insanely reckless Trump administration decisions were going on that were being overshadowed.
[00:30:31]  And there was like, there was one all the time.
[00:30:33]  But that's another case where again, the, if you look at progressive media too, it just, this kind of stuff didn't get as much coverage because it undermined the preferred narrative.
[00:30:44]  Yeah.
[00:30:44]  And I think, I mean, the, the thing with Russia gate too is that like, I mean, we say Russia gate, right?
[00:30:52]  Which means basically 10 million different things.
[00:30:55]  Like there's, there's a line of thinking from like, yeah, you know, Russia put some memes that said, you know, the I got your back, brother, meme with like the, like the redneck and the black guy.
[00:31:10]  And then, but then like, on the other hand, you have like Jonathan Chape being like, perhaps he was cultivated in the 1980s in a classic Jean-Le Carre style sting in Russia, where they got a picture of his wiener and have been holding over him ever since.
[00:31:31]  So it was like truly like Manchurian candidate kind of stuff.
[00:31:34]  And I think a lot of people have put that on the back burner.
[00:31:37]  You know, if you, if you pay attention to politics, you hear insane and sometimes prominent people say just absolute batshit stuff all the time, especially if they're a pundit, right?
[00:31:48]  And reporters do this too, but you see crazy bullshit constantly.
[00:31:53]  And I think like, you know, as time moves forward, you kind of forget how crazy things were or just have a general sense of the bizarre insanity of like a certain era.
[00:32:04]  But with like, there was a certain point during the Trump presidency when there were some serious people.
[00:32:10]  Well, I would say deeply unserious people, but you know, purportedly serious people who are really putting forth like, yeah, I think he's essentially like a Manchurian candidate, which is insane.
[00:32:23]  I mean, that's like JFK Jr. level, like, you know, coming back from the dead level of just batshit insanity.
[00:32:30]  But it's all lumped in together, right?
[00:32:32]  Like it's all one big thing.
[00:32:33]  And so now you have people who are like, kind of like, well, I don't know about that, but like, I know Russia did help him somewhat.
[00:32:40]  It's like, well, like basically the actual, it's like proven stuff that we know Russia did amounts to like, I mean, if you got like 10 guys together and gave them some Nadderall, you probably could have done a lot more, you know?
[00:32:54]  Also, like when you say it's Russia, that is already doing so much work because it's like, well, wait, it's a private firm that exists in Russia, but is it from at the behest of the Russian government?
[00:33:07]  Would that be in the same way that an American company that exists in America is doing something, contracted out to do something?
[00:33:13]  Does that mean it's on the at the behest of the American government?
[00:33:16]  I mean, maybe yes, maybe no.
[00:33:17]  Like all of those things kind of don't like those little facts don't even get negotiated because it's all been kind of lumped in.
[00:33:24]  And so all of these sort of fuzzy boundaries between fact and fiction, like it all gets blurred together and no one really like, it just does a lot of discursive work, I guess is what I'm saying.

=== Ad Campaigns and Psychological Operations (14:42) ===

[00:33:37]  The fact that, you know, we can still, it's still an open question and it's still, it's still taken for granted that Russia had an influence at all on the 2016 election is such an amazing propaganda achievement.
[00:33:50]  Yeah.
[00:33:50]  It's amazing.
[00:33:51]  I mean, think about what the U.S. does all around the world, you know, constantly, like spending millions of dollars to support whoever it wants to install, like launching a coup in Venezuela.
[00:34:00]  I mean, you can go on forever, right?
[00:34:02]  Cuba.
[00:34:02]  Look at, I mean, look at that.
[00:34:05]  Yes.
[00:34:05]  Yeah.
[00:34:06]  Oh, God.
[00:34:06]  I just saw that.
[00:34:07]  That was really good.
[00:34:09]  Yeah.
[00:34:09]  Her dad's, wasn't her dad Jorge Ramos?
[00:34:12]  Yes.
[00:34:14]  I call them Viceroy News.
[00:34:16]  Yeah.
[00:34:17]  Well, fucking Maduro had his number.
[00:34:18]  Yeah.
[00:34:19]  Yeah.
[00:34:20]  Sorry, go on.
[00:34:20]  So yeah, so you know, and so, but the fact that the fact that Russia is even discussed in the same sentence as the election is just insane.
[00:34:26]  And look, what is documented is that yes, a Russian troll farm did put out some clickbait ads and social media memes before the 2016 election.
[00:34:37]  Now, if you look at them, they're ridiculous.
[00:34:40]  They're moronic.
[00:34:40]  Yes.
[00:34:41]  And they're barely about the election.
[00:34:42]  I mean, I looked at.
[00:34:43]  And I think the ad buy was real small too.
[00:34:46]  The ad buy over like a three-year period was $100,000 and only $46,000 was before the election.
[00:34:53]  And only like a tiny percentage of those ads even mentioned Clinton or Trump.
[00:34:59]  Most of it was just clickbait, trashbait.
[00:35:00]  Basically, what this troll farm was doing was they were just doing standard clickbait.
[00:35:06]  They were going after certain demographics like evangelicals, black people, gun owners, and trying to like generate traffic and then use their audience numbers to then sell that to vendors.
[00:35:19]  That's basically what they were doing.
[00:35:20]  It was clickbait.
[00:35:21]  Clickbait Ponzi's classic, classic business model, actually.
[00:35:26]  But yet this, when this, and look, that was actually Facebook's initial conclusion when they did a review of Russian-based ad buys, you know, for the 2016 election.
[00:35:35]  They initially concluded that this was basically just a commercial operation.
[00:35:39]  But the Washington Post then reported what happened in a story, I think it was in 2017.
[00:35:45]  They said that Clinton and Obama campaign operatives came up with theories that instead of these ads being like standard commercial clickbait, that really this was a part of a sophisticated effort to influence the election.
[00:36:00]  And then Mark Warner, who is the powerful head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, when he got these theories from these Clinton and Obama operatives, he flew out to Facebook's headquarters.
[00:36:09]  And this is at a time in 2017 when Facebook was under heavy congressional pressure.
[00:36:18]  I think the famous haircut photo comes from that, right?
[00:36:20]  Yes.
[00:36:22]  And lo and behold, all of a sudden then Facebook came out publicly and said, oh my God, we've discovered all these nefarious Russian bots and trolls.
[00:36:29]  And then that set off this whole, you know, like this whole other aspect of Russia gate of like, we're invaded by Russian bots.
[00:36:35]  And there's even like this hilarious Senate hearing where like they took the Russian ads and Facebook posts and like blew them up in like giant cardboard posters.
[00:36:44]  And they're presented in like this like wall of Russian Facebook memes as if we're, these are like, this is what is invading and brainwashing our country.
[00:36:51]  And really the way, you know, there's quotes from people like Hillary Clinton saying that this is like the equivalent of Pearl Harbor.
[00:36:58]  And some people were even saying it was worse than Pearl Harbor.
[00:37:00]  I mean, there was some really scary shit.
[00:37:03]  I mean, this sort of, this is sort of, you know, started the era of people being like, well, these cyber attacks.
[00:37:09]  So they started basically referring to these in the same sort of general idea as like blacking out infrastructure or something.
[00:37:16]  Like this became, it was elevated from like whatever, even at the worst, even if it's like, even if their worst possible fear was true and it was like Russia being like, check out shirtless Bernie drawing or whatever.
[00:37:30]  Like they were equating that, which isn't even what it was with like, I don't know, fucking like a first strike.
[00:37:41]  Like, you know, it's, it's, it's totally insane.
[00:37:44]  Like it became on the level of warfare.
[00:37:46]  That's how that's how it was being.
[00:37:47]  And it had to be, right?
[00:37:48]  Because not just to justify the Russiagate narrative, but to be inside the national security state and to justify your position, you have to be turned into a paranoid freak where everyone and everything is your mortal enemy, where even, you know, Bernie memes can destroy your democracy.
[00:38:05]  You have to think that way to justify the fact that you're profiting off of, you know, warmongering.
[00:38:11]  And from Russia Gate, this little cottage industry of spook firms kind of like sprouted up where like all of a sudden these like firms like Graphica and the Atlantic Council's DFL Lab, I think it's called, all of a sudden emerged to like police disinformation and social media memes.
[00:38:31]  Oh, yeah.
[00:38:32]  One of them even produced a report for the Senate Intelligence Committee.
[00:38:36]  And it's one of my favorite pieces of Russia Gate.
[00:38:41]  Like it's just amazing.
[00:38:42]  It says, so it takes an ad that was put up by this Russian troll farm.
[00:38:46]  And it's a picture of Jesus consoling a despondent young man.
[00:38:51]  And Jesus says to him, having trouble with masturbation, if you reach out to Jesus, we'll beat it together.
[00:38:58]  Okay.
[00:38:58]  Wait, come on.
[00:38:59]  I swear to God.
[00:39:00]  I swear to God.
[00:39:01]  It's some kind of like.
[00:39:02]  Yo, Jesus said that?
[00:39:05]  And so basically.
[00:39:06]  It's not real.
[00:39:07]  So it's some kind of ad where basically they're trying to like appeal to people with masturbation issues using Jesus.
[00:39:13]  And so the Senate report, which is written by the spook firm, all these people with like State Department connections.
[00:39:19]  Yeah.
[00:39:19]  It says that this was an example of the Russians exploiting American vulnerabilities and weaknesses to recruit assets.
[00:39:28]  This was a part of Russia's recruitment.
[00:39:32]  This was part of Russia's asset recruitment strategy.
[00:39:36]  I swear to God.
[00:39:37]  Aaron, let me ask you a question real quick.
[00:39:39]  Have you ever gotten one of those emails that's like, we have you on webcam masturbating to pornography?
[00:39:46]  Like we will release the video unless you send one BTC to fucking some address and stuff like that.
[00:39:51]  I have gotten those.
[00:39:52]  So, you know, those are actually real.
[00:39:54]  And that is how the GRU, that is, that is 90% of GRU assets come from like high-ranking generals being like, yo, this thing can record.
[00:40:06]  No.
[00:40:08]  And then sending the BTC.
[00:40:09]  But once you send the BTC, you're in the pocket.
[00:40:12]  But I digress, go on.
[00:40:26]  What's funny is, if that were true, these people are so stupid that they probably would never even pick that up, right?
[00:40:31]  Yes.
[00:40:32]  Instead, they look to like these dumb memes and try to see some kind of crazy plot where they're trying to like recruit American masturbation addicts.
[00:40:41]  It's um and uh and then you know, and then there's all these funny like uh sort of tangents from that.
[00:40:48]  So the same firm that wrote that report for the Senate, they're recall, they were called new knowledge at the time.
[00:40:53]  They since changed their name like five times.
[00:40:55]  Uh, and they blackwater style.
[00:40:57]  Exactly.
[00:40:58]  They were caught actually running basically like a false flag.
[00:41:02]  I don't know if you guys remember this.
[00:41:03]  They ran like a false flag social media campaign in an Alabama Senate race.
[00:41:10]  If you remember that race, like that guy, Roy Moore was his name, like that, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:41:15]  So masturbation addicts.
[00:41:17]  So they, they ran this thing where they actually bought a bunch of bots and like created all these fake pages, exactly what they accused Russia of doing.
[00:41:24]  Yeah.
[00:41:25]  And they interfered in that election.
[00:41:27]  And Roy Moore's supporters, you know, actually blame them, blame that firm for losing.
[00:41:31]  They, they say it might have been decisive, but it's like, regardless, it's just so funny that the same firm that was like raising paranoia about Russian bots was doing the exact same thing in a U.S. election.
[00:41:43]  Yeah, it takes one to know when.
[00:41:45]  I mean, the thing is, like, you know, talking about how so many aspects of this and like sort of all it, like, this is an intelligence operation, essentially.
[00:41:56]  Like, it may not be the one that they're alleging.
[00:42:00]  In fact, it seems very obvious that it's not the one that they're alleging.
[00:42:03]  But like, if we, if we trace sort of like the lineage of the Steele dossier stuff and like how that comes from being basically just bullshit in the ether, half-remembered rumors, fully fabricated stuff into becoming something that actually is like involved in not only national news, but like an actual like investigations by law enforcement agencies.
[00:42:24]  I mean, you know, we can trace this from Danchenko sitting in his fucking desk at think tank row, like in his notes out, being like, damn, it'd be crazy if fucking Trump had gotten some chicks to piss on.
[00:42:35]  That doesn't even make sense.
[00:42:36]  Why would Trump get he's staying in a hotel room and he gets women to pee on the where's he sleeping that night?
[00:42:43]  This doesn't make any sense.
[00:42:45]  Anyways, but uh, he so like it comes from like this guy and then it gets filtered through or even maybe like through Hiddolan or like whatever.
[00:42:54]  But Danchenko gives it to Steele.
[00:42:56]  Steele has his credentials as like this like, you know, big MI6 agent, like very, you know, James Bond.
[00:43:03]  I watched that Hulu interview with him and they intersperse, you know, pictures of James Bond quite often during one segment talking about his past.
[00:43:10]  And that's sort of how he's presented.
[00:43:11]  this like suave spy, which Americans often, I think, in politics are just impressed when anyone's thin.
[00:43:19]  And, you know, he gets a, he gives it to Fusion GPS, which is the just totally scumbag firm that was hired by basically the Clinton campaign.
[00:43:29]  And the two guys at Fusion GPS, former Wall Street Journal reporters, who use their connections and their credentials and Steele's credentials to basically like make a rumors into not reality because you know they didn't actually happen, but into reality in the sense that like it's affecting politics.
[00:43:49]  So like this is literally a psychological operation.
[00:43:53]  Yeah.
[00:43:53]  Right.
[00:43:53]  Like this is like straight out of the book of like, you would do this in Argentina in 1982.
[00:43:59]  Right.
[00:44:00]  Like if you wanted to, if you wanted to fuck with somebody.
[00:44:02]  And it's totally bizarre how, not even bizarre, it's actually totally anodyne how it came about, but it is like, it is a psychological operation because all these people, once BuzzFeed releases the Steele dossier in 2017, then the arms race for how much you're covering this really gets the ante up.
[00:44:19]  I mean, I think it's really telling that Steele had to go to fucking Mother Jones.
[00:44:26]  Because like before, before this shit really comes out, like they have to go to fucking Mother Jones.
[00:44:32]  Like that is like third tier media outlet you go to.
[00:44:37]  You know, I think the thing too that, you know, it's not just that BuzzFeed Ben released it.
[00:44:43]  That did open the floodgates.
[00:44:45]  But the other thing that happened was what James Comey had his little honeypot meeting with Trump to basically get CNN, give CNN the go-ahead to release the story.
[00:44:55]  And this is like my favorite move that I think a lot of people maybe forgot.
[00:44:59]  But like basically Comey goes to, this was when like everyone had the Steel dossier.
[00:45:06]  BuzzFeed wasn't ready to publish or it was unclear what was happening.
[00:45:09]  They were crossing some lines, even publishing it when they did, right?
[00:45:12]  They set kind of a new precedent there journalistically, as much as I hate that word.
[00:45:18]  But all the outlets, like you said, Mother Jones had it and they were kind of sort of able to report a little bit of it, but all the outlets like really wanted to move on it, but they couldn't corroborate any of it.
[00:45:29]  And they were still kind of holding themselves to some sort of like ethical standard, I suppose.
[00:45:33]  So it's a real question why then James Comey had a meeting with Trump.
[00:45:38]  And this is in January 2017 before the inauguration, where he basically says like, bro, listen, this is so crazy.
[00:45:45]  Like all these journalists have this dossier about you.
[00:45:49]  And like, I think that's so fucked up.
[00:45:50]  But like, I just wanted to let you know that they have it.
[00:45:53]  So you should not give them a reason to publish it because they don't have a news hook.
[00:45:59]  They can't in good like ethical practice or whatever publish this without an appropriate news hook.
[00:46:05]  So don't give it to them.
[00:46:06]  Like, bro, I'm just being your, your homie and warning you.
[00:46:09]  But then that meeting gets leaked, which is the entire purpose of that meeting.
[00:46:13]  So now every news outlet has the news hook that they need, which is James Comey, you know, classified meeting giving, you know, Trump information about a dossier.
[00:46:26]  We've heard about this dossier.
[00:46:27]  And that's, you know, off to the races.
[00:46:29]  You got Jake Tapper.
[00:46:31]  It's really unclear if he was given the story by Clapper himself, Clapper Tapper, which really it shouldn't rhyme if you guys are going to do something inappropriate, in my opinion.
[00:46:42]  I don't think it should either.
[00:46:44]  But, you know, my point being that like, you know, there's a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes that is just completely impenetrable, I think, in terms of like whatever power struggles are happening, but insanely, insanely layered and fucked up.
[00:46:59]  I mean, if you look back at that period, it's an amazing time.
[00:47:03]  I mean, I think they did exactly what you said.
[00:47:06]  They totally set up Trump.
[00:47:07]  They told him about the dossier just so they could leak the fact of that briefing and give people like BuzzFeed an excuse to publish it.
[00:47:14]  And the question is, why?
[00:47:16]  Like, why are they so bent on doing that?
[00:47:18]  There was that famous quote from Chuck Schumer around that exact same time where he's on the Rachel Maddow show.
[00:47:24]  And that's an amazing time because Trump is like at that point, he shocked the world.
[00:47:28]  You know, he freestyled this entire campaign out the dome.
[00:47:32]  Kanye's taking meetings with him.
[00:47:34]  It's incredible.
[00:47:35]  And he won.
[00:47:35]  And he's also.
[00:47:36]  He's featuring on some songs.
[00:47:37]  Like, he's doing good.
[00:47:38]  Yeah.
[00:47:39]  He's killing.
[00:47:40]  And he's also telling everyone, like, he's making, he's like meeting with Mitt Romney and like having him come out and kiss the ring and then tossing him to the curb.
[00:47:48]  It's, he's making fun of everyone.
[00:47:50]  And he's even mocking the intelligence community.
[00:47:52]  He's like mocking them about their Russian hacking claims.
[00:47:55]  So Chuck Schumer goes on Rachel Maddow show.
[00:47:57]  And this is like only a couple of days before Trump gets inaugurated.
[00:48:00]  And Schumer's like, Trump is being very foolish.
[00:48:03]  If you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.
[00:48:09]  So he's basically saying that like the intelligence community can like sabotage the elected president if they want to.
[00:48:15]  And that's, that's what they did.
[00:48:17]  And I would love to know why.

=== Intelligence Community Sabotage? (15:45) ===

[00:48:19]  I have my theories.
[00:48:20]  Like it's not just, it's not just that Trump was doubting the Russian hacking thing, although I think that's a major thing.
[00:48:26]  I just think also, you know, his campaign rhetorically, rhetorically, had some anti-war sentiment, you know, that like Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn kind of thing where we have to like be nationalist and not be involved in foreign wars.
[00:48:40]  And also we have to like focus all of our energy on taking on China.
[00:48:43]  Like that also was a big thing.
[00:48:44]  Yeah.
[00:48:44]  Yes.
[00:48:44]  Yeah.
[00:48:45]  Yeah.
[00:48:46]  He also was telling the truth about Libya and Syria.
[00:48:48]  He talked about how the U.S. basically armed Al-Qaeda in Syria, which is correct.
[00:48:53]  Yeah.
[00:48:54]  And I suspect, and I can't prove this, but given that John Brennan was the head of the CIA at the time, and for John Brennan, like the program in Syria, Timber Sycamore, that was like his baby.
[00:49:05]  He was really into that program.
[00:49:06]  Yeah.
[00:49:07]  I have to wonder if things like that factored into this too.
[00:49:09]  I can't prove that, but that's just one possibility that I raise.
[00:49:13]  My, I mean, my gut feeling has always been that we were just watching kind of like interagency battles being like played out, that like there's something between the like kind of old, older school,
[00:49:27]  kind of like Roger Stone kind of wing of the intelligence community of what's left of what remains of that and the kind of like newer, colder sort of like Obamaite slash some of the Clinton people that were still kind of in there.
[00:49:43]  Some of the more careerists that have been there that weren't the kind of old Watergate guys like Stone and you know and that side of the side of the camp that you were kind of watching battle out.
[00:49:53]  Because I mean, one of my big conspiracy theories that I have no basis for other than just my own little pea brain thinks it is that Stone is the one who gave Trump the birther stuff because and that he was like kind of going off of whatever his own sort of like that, that that was fed to Trump by someone and with someone, with some you know backing and some reasons yeah, Trump didn't think of that.
[00:50:19]  And even Stone, going down through this whole thing feels very much like you know, some old battles being kind of like fought out and some people getting their like grudge matches in or what have you.
[00:50:32]  But that's the only thing that's ever made sense to me, especially when you see, like you said, these big players Comey is a big player Clapper, John Brennan, these guys, you know they don't.
[00:50:44]  I mean they know where all the bodies are buried.
[00:50:46]  You know what I mean.
[00:50:48]  I mean I think too is like a really sort of simple, you know, aspect of it is also like Clinton is kind of like their woman right, like she's from that world, she's part of that world, she's like knows how to deal with that.
[00:51:01]  You know I, I agree with you, Aaron.
[00:51:02]  It's like Trump just wasn't, you know, like he.
[00:51:07]  You know, like they don't know if he's gonna play ball, like they have these, you know these these, this sort of permanent state There or like these.
[00:51:13]  You know permanent employees of the State There have their designs and their plans and their timber sycamores and and you know, with Trump getting in there, you know that that's really just like you want to keep him harried with that kind of stuff.
[00:51:25]  Um, you know, plus it's.
[00:51:28]  You know, I think a lot of these guys are Cold War relics and they just Can't, they simply can't handle having a president who, yes, is a member of the KGB.
[00:51:36]  It's fine to be that, you know, it's it's the it's over, you know, the times are done.
[00:51:42]  We're friends with Russia now.
[00:51:43]  And, you know, ironically, all this is great for Trump's shtick of being an outsider, right?
[00:51:49]  Of being the guy who's going to drain the swamp, because what does the swamp do?
[00:51:52]  They launch this like unprecedented deep state scam to try to rein him in and even like getting like a federal investigation.
[00:51:59]  It's like it like kind of what's so funny about Russia Gate is that you know, for like you can make fun of like paranoid Fox viewers, right?
[00:52:06]  For a million reasons.
[00:52:07]  But in this case, the paranoia is legit because it really was an op to take him down, to take their guy down.
[00:52:15]  And because of that, he got he rallied.
[00:52:16]  The troops rallied around him.
[00:52:17]  His base, like this fired up their base big time.
[00:52:21]  And it also gave him an excuse to like, of course, abandon all the promises he made about helping the working class, right?
[00:52:27]  This was like, I think this was perfect for Trump, as much as he may have not enjoyed it.
[00:52:32]  But like, this was a great way for him to like say, oh, sorry, I know I was going to like bring back factories to Michigan, but you know, then the deep state conspired against me.
[00:52:42]  Like it gave him, I think, an out to basically blame the entrenched bureaucrats for all of his failures.
[00:52:51]  Yeah, I mean, it's RussiaGate was just like, it was almost perfect for like a lot of people.
[00:52:58]  Cause like a lot, and for Trump too, it's like Russia Gate had the funny way of just like constantly getting him out of trouble and like giving him victories, right?
[00:53:09]  Because all of the little victories that they thought they were winning with Russia Gate, I mean, obviously there were the rabid, insane, brainwashed people who followed it like, you know, QAnon style.
[00:53:19]  But like in a lot of ways, like Michael Cohen's, I mean, do you remember?
[00:53:23]  So a big for listeners who have not read the Steel dossier or aren't super familiar with Russia Gate, a lot of it was, or one of the big parts of it was Michael Cohen having this meeting in Prague with the Russians.
[00:53:40]  And that was like this big sort of accusation.
[00:53:43]  It's a very specific accusation.
[00:53:46]  And it was repeated.
[00:53:47]  And I think McClatchy actually put out two like big articles on it.
[00:53:51]  And it turns out that never happened.
[00:53:54]  He never went to Czechoslovakia.
[00:53:56]  Although I did watch an interview with him when he said that, but I'm like, hmm, but has he been to Czechia?
[00:54:01]  Is that, you know, they did change their name, possibly, you know, as a little back scratch favorite of Donald Trump there.
[00:54:07]  But like, you know, it didn't happen.
[00:54:09]  Like he wasn't there.
[00:54:10]  It didn't happen.
[00:54:11]  And so like, so many of these claims sort of fell apart.
[00:54:13]  And a lot of these people were sort of like, okay, like you can fucking toss aside Papadopoulos and like, you know, Manafort, whatever.
[00:54:21]  Like, you know, but like it never got to Trump.
[00:54:25]  And it's funny because like, yeah, duh, Trump has been in bed with the Russian mob and stuff.
[00:54:30]  He's in New York real estate.
[00:54:32]  Like he does, he does real estate deals in Russia and Turkey.
[00:54:36]  Like, yes, of course he is.
[00:54:38]  But all of this was just pure, like, it's either, it's either totally fantasy or like based off the smallest nugget and blown up to such a huge size, it becomes so pixelated that it basically resembles, you know, modern art or something.
[00:54:53]  Like it is, it's, I don't know.
[00:54:56]  Russia Gate to me was just like.
[00:55:00]  It's one of those things where if you look back, the Trump years drove so many people to such depths of absolute, like just depraved insanity that now seem just, you know, in the light of day that Mr. Biden brought along with his presidency, so ridiculous and asinine and just like totally wacko.
[00:55:21]  But at the time we're like, I mean, you had Adam Schiff became a national figure because of this.
[00:55:27]  Like the most repellent personalities, not only in America, but throughout the world and in all of history became hugely prominent, like spokespeople as the anti-Trump resistance.
[00:55:39]  And it was just, I mean, it's just shocking to see.
[00:55:41]  And now it's like, yeah, you can, like people, you can laugh at it now, but it was, my God, I mean, Aaron, you must have been felt like you were fucking in a, in a goddamn nuthouse, man.
[00:55:52]  Like, I don't know how you dealt with that as a journalist.
[00:55:55]  Well, it was part of it is, honestly, it was just so funny because it's like you're observing a psychological phenomenon where no matter how many times things collapse, people like Adam Schiff get humiliated.
[00:56:07]  They can't stop themselves.
[00:56:09]  They just keep digging.
[00:56:10]  They can't.
[00:56:10]  They can't.
[00:56:10]  It kept going.
[00:56:11]  So like Adam Schiff tells the country for years that he's seen evidence of collusion.
[00:56:16]  Then the Mueller report happens.
[00:56:18]  And instead of just packing it up, what does he do?
[00:56:20]  He insists that Robert Mueller come back to testify.
[00:56:22]  Do you remember that?
[00:56:24]  And Mueller was obviously not down.
[00:56:26]  Like his team kept delaying.
[00:56:28]  He didn't want to.
[00:56:28]  He said publicly, the report is my last word.
[00:56:31]  But Adam Schiff was so desperate for a TV moment to salvage this conspiracy theory that he'd built up for two years and insisted was real that they brought Mueller back in.
[00:56:43]  And look what happened.
[00:56:43]  Mueller couldn't even talk properly.
[00:56:45]  He couldn't even know the details of his investigation.
[00:56:47]  It was sad.
[00:56:48]  It was elder abuse.
[00:56:51]  And then when that failed, they pivoted next to like the Ukraine thing.
[00:56:55]  That was like the kind of like redo of Russia Gate, which of course no one forgot about that.
[00:57:01]  And that was like another six months.
[00:57:02]  And that was an impeachment.
[00:57:03]  They impeached Trump over that.
[00:57:05]  And I forgot they snuck in that impeachment.
[00:57:09]  But it's so crazy that we forgot that.
[00:57:11]  That was like the biggest story.
[00:57:13]  And like, I also was like, wait, what was the Ukraine thing?
[00:57:15]  Oh, my God.
[00:57:16]  It was impeachment.
[00:57:17]  Yeah.
[00:57:18]  And everyone was building up to this.
[00:57:20]  But of course we forget it because it's so, it's so like the energy level was so insane, but the details were so empty.
[00:57:27]  Like it's hard.
[00:57:28]  It's hard even to formulate right now what that actually was about and what the details were.
[00:57:33]  And again, it was more of the same kind of cold war paranoia where like during impeachment, because Trump had briefly frozen some weapons to Ukraine, Adam Schiff was going up there.
[00:57:43]  Adam Schiff was going up there and saying that Trump was threatening our national security, that we fight Russia over there so we don't fight them over here.
[00:57:50]  And again, because liberals and leftists hated Trump so much, no one paused to think about what the implications were of what we were being asked to support.
[00:57:59]  We basically were asked to like cheerlead for a proxy war on Russia's borders in Ukraine and to get mad at Trump for like briefly pausing some weapons.
[00:58:08]  Even though, by the way, Obama had done the exact same thing.
[00:58:10]  Obama, after basically launching the proxy war in Ukraine with the Madan coup in 2014, Obama resisted the neocons in Washington who wanted to send more weapons there.
[00:58:20]  Because I think Obama recognized that he didn't want to arm neo-Nazis and fuel this insane proxy war.
[00:58:26]  And when Trump briefly did the same thing, he paused those weapons, he got impeached for it.
[00:58:30]  And that was the kind of paranoid Cold Warrior culture that RussiaGate encouraged.
[00:58:37]  And of course, what did, just like Russia Gate, Trump ended Ukraine gate.
[00:58:43]  He ended impeachment with his highest poll ratings ever.
[00:58:46]  Yes, yeah.
[00:58:47]  Well, you know, the fucked up thing too is he was pausing those Ukraine shipments because he actually wanted to give that to the damn proud boys so that they could take over the capital.
[00:58:57]  He's like, these guys are even more racist.
[00:58:59]  And I think we should arm them because Israel is already arming the Azov battalions.
[00:59:03]  at the beginning of this you mentioned my mk ultra trigger which is crowd strike and
[00:59:26]  And I would be remiss if we didn't mention the kind of the hidden hand guiding this entire thing, which is the Clinton crime family.
[00:59:42]  You also mentioned Syria.
[00:59:43]  And I do want to say that one thing that was very clear to me, I remember during the 2016 election, and I think I've said this on the show before, but whoops, don't care.
[00:59:54]  Is that the kind of Russia?
[00:59:58]  I don't even know the kind of like anti-Russia stuff in the news and from politicians, especially from the Clinton campaign, had really started to ramp up prior to, I would say, like in the summer of 2016.
[01:00:13]  And I remember specifically too, that was a big talking point about Syria because there was a big contention, which you also mentioned, there's a big, you know, that was a big debate between Trump and Hillary where she, you know, she kept mentioning that she wanted a no-fly zone in Syria, which would mean kind of a proxy war with Russia as they were, you know, right?
[01:00:35]  We've talked about that on the show.
[01:00:36]  That means, you know, a no-fly zone is someone has to patrol that aka shoot down those planes, which would be Russian planes.
[01:00:42]  So there was kind of like all this already kind of like percolating a lot of anti-anti-Russia kind of like, you know, war drums that were kind of banging on.
[01:00:54]  And my suspicion, even again, this is unfounded, but just my own personal feelings is that some of the internals were causing the Hillary campaign to get a little nervous, more so than they ever wanted to let on.
[01:01:09]  And so there was a kind of like, okay, what's going to be our escape hatch if we do have to kind of explain how we could lose this to such a buffoon?
[01:01:20]  Well, we've got this kind of thing going with the Russia.
[01:01:22]  You know what I mean?
[01:01:23]  Like there was this sort of like, maybe perhaps there can be an off-ramp here if there needs to be, because this stuff did start kind of going much, much earlier than even the Steel dossier.
[01:01:36]  So we should probably explain why do I care about CrowdStrike?
[01:01:39]  Why do I care about Fusion GPS and all of these horrible firms that weirdly are all contracted by the Hillary campaign?
[01:01:48]  Well, yes.
[01:01:48]  So April 2016 is when two really important hirings happen.
[01:01:54]  First, the Clinton campaign hires Fusion GPS, and that's the firm that went on with the Steel dossier.
[01:01:59]  And then shortly after, by the end of the month, April 29th or so, the DNC says that it's discovered that it's hacked and it hires a firm called CrowdStrike.
[01:02:11]  Yes.
[01:02:12]  Hacked, by the way.
[01:02:13]  Hacked.
[01:02:13]  But it wasn't hacked.
[01:02:15]  And CrowdStrike immediately within a day says, oh, it's Russia.
[01:02:19]  It's Russia.
[01:02:20]  And then, so then fast forward to June, a few things happen.
[01:02:25]  On June 12th, Julian Assange comes out publicly and says that we have emails about Hillary Clinton coming out very soon, and they're going to be very, very good.
[01:02:35]  He's previewing the DNC leaks that come out the next month.
[01:02:39]  Okay.
[01:02:40]  Yeah.
[01:02:40]  And drop.
[01:02:41]  The drop.
[01:02:42]  And three days later, that's when CrowdStrike emerges publicly on June 15th, June 15th or 14th, and says, oh, guess what?
[01:02:49]  We have evidence that Russia hacked the DNC.
[01:02:53]  And that basically, that triggered Russia Gate publicly.
[01:02:56]  And all of a sudden, the narrative became that Russia stole the Democratic Party emails.
[01:03:02]  So if you were to look at those emails, if you're to report on them, you're basically doing Russia's bidding.
[01:03:08]  That's what the narrative became when those emails were released in July.
[01:03:12]  And meanwhile, back in June, Christopher Steele produces his first report for Fusion GPS alleging that Trump is a Russian asset.
[01:03:23]  So you have between April and June, the Clinton campaign hiring these two contractors and these contractors, both Fusion GPS and CrowdStrike, lodging these allegations that Russia basically is helping Trump.
[01:03:39]  And amazingly, the FBI comes to rely extensively on both of these firms.
[01:03:44]  So for the Steele dossier, the FBI uses that for investigative leads.
[01:03:49]  They have a spreadsheet where they're chasing everything that was said in the Steele dossier.
[01:03:53]  And then when they go to the FISA court to spy on Carter Page, who's a Trump campaign volunteer, they cite the Steele dossier four times and they say that he's credible and that he's their main source.

=== Debunking CrowdStrike Claims (11:54) ===

[01:04:05]  It's the same thing with CrowdStrike.
[01:04:07]  When CrowdStrike says that Russia has hacked the DNC, the FBI never conducts its own examination of the DNC servers.
[01:04:17]  They instead rely entirely on CrowdStrike's forensics, which is like...
[01:04:20]  Because CrowdStrike wouldn't give it to them.
[01:04:22]  Because CrowdStrike wouldn't give it to them.
[01:04:23]  And so it'd be like if I accuse somebody, if I accused a neighbor of robbing my apartment, but I insisted to the police that they rely on my own investigation.
[01:04:35]  Like, no, check it out.
[01:04:36]  He would tell, look, it smells like him.
[01:04:40]  You can't come in and check it out.
[01:04:42]  I don't want you fucking awesome.
[01:04:44]  But literally, but literally, literally, you know, that argument, like, oh, like, I know it's him because it smells like him.
[01:04:50]  That was kind of CrowdStrike's argument.
[01:04:53]  They were like, these properties we see, this malware we see inside the server, it's consistent with Russian hacking.
[01:04:59]  And funnily enough, when they made the same argument about an alleged Russian hack in Ukraine not long afterwards, they had to retract that.
[01:05:06]  And they had made that allegation of the supposed Russian malware.
[01:05:11]  That same Russian malware that they said they saw in Ukraine, they also said they saw in the DNC server, which in the case of Ukraine, they had to retract.
[01:05:17]  So their record is actually not great.
[01:05:21]  And they're hired by the Clinton campaign.
[01:05:23]  So it's like, how are you relying on them?
[01:05:27]  It's amazing.
[01:05:28]  And funnily enough, the person who hired CrowdStrike for the Clinton campaign is a guy named Michael Sussman.
[01:05:35]  And in September- Yes, and what a beautiful last name, considering what you're about to say here.
[01:05:42]  In September, Michael Sussman was indicted for lying to the FBI in trying to push another Trump-Russia conspiracy theory, which is that the Trump campaign in Russia had a covert communications channel between a Trump-affiliated marketing server and this Russia bank called Alphabank.
[01:06:02]  And Sussman was indicted for lying to the FBI.
[01:06:05]  And he even gave him over.
[01:06:06]  He even gave him the FBI this technical data that basically was concocted to make it look as if there was an Alphabank Trump tie.
[01:06:13]  So the guy who's been indicted for lying to the FBI for trying to push a fake Trump Russia conspiracy theory is the same guy who hired CrowdStrike and actually managed the flow of information between CrowdStrike and the FBI because CrowdStrike wouldn't let the FBI come in itself.
[01:06:30]  It is just, I mean, I got to say.
[01:06:33]  Listen, I'm all for lying to law enforcement here, but you don't have to do it in this case.
[01:06:40]  Like Sussman didn't really have to, like, these people just got so caught up in their own operation, essentially, that, like, it ended up fucking biting them in the ass and they became no longer useful to the people that they should be useful to.
[01:06:53]  And it's like, you know, it's everyone's kind of being like, you can see it happening now with like Danchenko.
[01:07:00]  You know, it's like you can see sort of not any, no, well, there are some retractions, like in the case of the Washington Post.
[01:07:07]  And the case of the Washington Post is really funny too, because they had Wempel there, who's been sort of beating this drum of like, this is fake and bullshit for a long time while the actual newspaper is just like publishing these essentially bullshit reports that like are that it's it's literally collecting a Pulitzer Prize for it along with New York Times.
[01:07:27]  So funny.
[01:07:28]  So funny.
[01:07:29]  It's fucking it's and that's that's the crazy thing too is that like the media, the fucking all these people being like, well, people don't trust.
[01:07:36]  There's so much disinformation now.
[01:07:38]  People don't trust the media anymore.
[01:07:40]  When these people are either, these are the options.
[01:07:43]  You're so fucking stupid that you fell for one of the most obvious bullshit schoolyard lies that like could possibly be concocted.
[01:07:53]  Not even like a good lie.
[01:07:55]  Like the Trump Alpha Bank thing.
[01:07:57]  Okay, maybe you can confuse a journalist because they're like, I don't know how servers communicate.
[01:08:01]  But like the pissing on the fucking bed thing, I'm sorry.
[01:08:04]  Anybody who at all believed a dossier that that was in is you're a fucking mark and a chump.
[01:08:11]  Like that's ick 100%.
[01:08:13]  There's no excuse for that.
[01:08:15]  Or B, they knew it was bullshit and they're lying to you on purpose to get ratings, to get people to read them again, to have this sort of ongoing viral news story that A makes the money.
[01:08:26]  This is a sub A, and sub B provides them like a fucking news hook to bash Trump with.
[01:08:33]  I mean, it's the most discrediting thing, I think, since WMDs.
[01:08:40]  And the fact that it dovetails that every motherfucker is Snopes now, like, you know, debunking, debunking, debunking.
[01:08:48]  Who debunks the debunker is what I'm asking you here.
[01:08:52]  And what I'm saying is the FBI needs to expand the scope of these arrests to get everyone from Ann Applebaum to Jonathan Chate in cuffs, in chains, put them on a work farm, make him dig a canal.
[01:09:06]  That leads me, Aaron, to really what I wanted to get to, which is, and I know that you have this in your head, so don't even pretend that you don't.
[01:09:16]  Your list of shame.
[01:09:18]  Who covered themselves in the most slime during Russia Gate?
[01:09:23]  Who used it the most to advance their career?
[01:09:25]  Who looked the American peoples in their SSRI gazing eyes and told them the most insane fantasies night after night, day after day, and in these newspapers and magazines?
[01:09:37]  Give me your worst motherfuckers of Russia Gate.
[01:09:40]  I mean, it's a long list.
[01:09:41]  I mean, the obvious top candidate is Rachel Maddow, which was just insane.
[01:09:46]  And it's so funny.
[01:09:47]  Like, she would do things like before Trump was inaugurated, she did this long monologue where she was pointing out that the U.S. had sent all these new troops to Russia's borders, which in her opinion is a wonderful thing.
[01:09:59]  And she was worried in like really solemnly and really like scared tones that Trump was going to withdraw the troops from near Russia because Putin was going to use the P-tape to blackmail him.
[01:10:13]  And it was that set the tone for the next three years.
[01:10:15]  And she became, it was crazy.
[01:10:17]  I mean, she poisoned the minds of millions of people.
[01:10:20]  It's actually sad, but she did.
[01:10:21]  And, you know, there's so many funny things like the time when she warned that Russia was going to cut the power to people in North Dakota and freeze them to death.
[01:10:28]  I mean, it was insane.
[01:10:31]  But look, it's everybody.
[01:10:32]  Like anybody who has a show on MSNBC, they was complicit.
[01:10:37]  You know, they never allowed on anyone who was like remotely skeptical of the narrative.
[01:10:42]  It was just complete propaganda.
[01:10:44]  Same with CNN.
[01:10:47]  Jonathan Chait, you know, declared himself.
[01:10:49]  He's the goat.
[01:10:50]  He's the goat.
[01:10:51]  He declared himself to be.
[01:10:52]  Well, the editor of New York Magazine for fucking publishing that.
[01:10:55]  All of them.
[01:10:56]  The Daily Beast.
[01:10:57]  All of them.
[01:10:57]  Like Jonathan Chate called himself a P-leaver.
[01:11:00]  Michelle Goldberg.
[01:11:02]  Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times said that we need to have a national conversation about whether the P-Teep is real.
[01:11:09]  You need to have a conversation with me where you're at the bottom of a well and I'm looking down at it, lady.
[01:11:14]  And I got the dog that's supposed to rescue you and it's in a cage.
[01:11:18]  Go on.
[01:11:18]  The Daily Beast was just nonstop propaganda.
[01:11:22]  There was not the Daily Beast, which by the way, ultimate fake news called me anti-Semitic when, my God, Daily Beast.
[01:11:33]  I never addressed that on the show, but I remember and I will get my revenge.
[01:11:41]  Was that in the article written by that?
[01:11:44]  Yes.
[01:11:44]  Yeah.
[01:11:44]  Oh, man.
[01:11:46]  I think you might be in that too.
[01:11:47]  I don't think I made that one.
[01:11:48]  That was like, but I didn't, I mean, it was impossible to read.
[01:11:51]  That was like the most insane screed I've ever seen.
[01:11:55]  It's just a rant.
[01:11:56]  It's a guy just like spewing words.
[01:11:58]  Yeah.
[01:11:59]  I know, anti-far researchers really fell off after Trump lost too.
[01:12:02]  So I don't think he'll be getting a repeat.
[01:12:04]  Well, and then there's Natasha Bertrand, who one of the heavy hitters of Russia Gate who just like, you know, you got to respect.
[01:12:12]  Yes, awful, you know, whatever, a liar, they'll never take accountability, blah, blah, blah.
[01:12:18]  You got to respect the hustle because she fucking, I mean, this lady, this lady was grinding so hard during Trump.
[01:12:26]  She makes all you guys look like fucking people who you turn on DoorDash for an hour and do two delivery.
[01:12:32]  She's got DoorDash on.
[01:12:33]  She's got Grubhub on.
[01:12:35]  She's fucking driving Uber in the middle.
[01:12:37]  She's got people in the, she is grinding so hard.
[01:12:39]  She's like, she's now a national security reporter.
[01:12:42]  Incredible.
[01:12:43]  She put up work.
[01:12:43]  And look, what, and so, of course, what are they doing now?
[01:12:45]  Now they're the ones pushing the Havana syndrome thing.
[01:12:48]  Yes.
[01:12:48]  Because of course they are.
[01:12:50]  And they also pushed the thing about Hunter Biden's laptop just being Russian disinformation.
[01:12:54]  Yes, she's earned.
[01:12:55]  Which he didn't deny either.
[01:12:59]  That's true.
[01:12:59]  Of course he didn't.
[01:13:00]  Of course he didn't.
[01:13:00]  So they asked and he was like, the Russians could have been.
[01:13:02]  It could have been Russia.
[01:13:04]  Yeah, I mean, which is, I mean, I guess there's like a 0.000000001 chance of that happening, but a 99% chance of you left your laptop at this place or someone stole it from you.
[01:13:18]  But you know what's funny is the saddest part to me were the leftists who fell for it.
[01:13:22]  There are people who like wrote articles like in the New York Times and The Guardian about upset that more Bernie supporters aren't taking Russian interference seriously.
[01:13:29]  Yeah, yeah, that was on the cover of what was it?
[01:13:32]  In fact, I know who it was, but I'm not going to say it because I'm going to be nice, but I don't know why.
[01:13:37]  You don't have to be nice.
[01:13:38]  What was there in left case for Russia Gate?
[01:13:41]  There was all these things like that.
[01:13:42]  And there was, you know, at the Nation.
[01:13:43]  David Kleon guy.
[01:13:44]  Yeah.
[01:13:45]  At the Nation magazine, I felt like where I was, you know, like where I wrote most of my Russia Gate stuff, it's like, I felt like sometimes they had to kind of apologize for my existence.
[01:13:55]  They did.
[01:13:55]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:13:55]  Yeah, absolutely.
[01:13:56]  That was definitely a vibe.
[01:13:58]  Even when I won the Izzy Award, which like in, you know, in the independent media world that I'm in, that's like the best award you can get.
[01:14:04]  You know, it's like, you know, it's, it's, it's a real honor.
[01:14:07]  And, but they had to kind of like quietly announce it.
[01:14:11]  And they didn't, it's, it was just because there are people there who really believed in it.
[01:14:15]  And when, um, and were really upset that, that this like contrarian point of view, whatever you want to call it, was being published.
[01:14:22]  And it's just sad for me that like Bernie supporters got duped because like the, it was being used not just as a fake way to resist Trump, but it was also being deliberately used to slow down Bernie and to prevent him from ascending.
[01:14:37]  Because what happened in 2016?
[01:14:39]  The emails that were stolen, that were blamed on Russia showed that the party was corrupt and they were biased against Bernie.
[01:14:47]  And then that same wing lost.
[01:14:49]  So like they were done.
[01:14:51]  This was the perfect opportunity for Bernie and his movement to ascend and to like present like a genuine working class candidate, you know, versus Trump, who was a fake working class candidate.
[01:15:02]  He claimed to be there for the working people, but of course that was a scam.
[01:15:06]  So this was Bernie's moment.
[01:15:07]  And he had no more reason to protect the Clinton wing because like A, they lost and B, they tried to sabotage him.
[01:15:14]  So what did Bernie do?
[01:15:15]  He went along with the Russia Gate narrative.
[01:15:17]  He introduced some measure to counter Russian interference.
[01:15:21]  He speculated that Trump was doing Putin's bidding.
[01:15:24]  He basically propped up the scam that the neoliberal wing of the party was being used to suppress him.
[01:15:32]  And of course, what did that earn him on the eve of the Nevada caucus in 2020 when he was doing well?
[01:15:37]  They rushed gated Bernie.
[01:15:39]  They like they had to, didn't they?
[01:15:41]  Remember that, like that they asked him about on the tarmac and stuff.
[01:15:44]  Like it was like, it was for a few days when it was useful to the powers that be, they really hammered on like, well, will you, will you deny Russia your, like, will you tell Putin you don't want his help?

=== Production Of Cult Behavior (03:41) ===

[01:15:59]  And I mean, it's a way of making someone grovel, essentially.
[01:16:02]  Yeah, yeah, it fucking worked.
[01:16:04]  He went along with it.
[01:16:05]  Yeah.
[01:16:05]  Yeah.
[01:16:06]  I think for like the leftists that kind of like fell for this stuff or like progressive liberals, whatever we want to call people, you know, it's the same thing that Brace said, where it's like, either you're so stupid that you fell for the most obvious, like stupid fake thing in the world, which, okay, you got to work on that.
[01:16:24]  Or two, you know, you had your own kind of, you know, personal careerist or social reasons for going along with something like this.
[01:16:33]  And I think like something I've noticed is that people always refer to things, like I keep saying like Russia Gate is like the model for everything, but people keep referring to things as like the narrative, the narrative, as if it's a thing that just gets like plucked out of like a cloud and plopped on.
[01:16:50]  And like, you're just, you're observing it.
[01:16:53]  It's a natural force.
[01:16:54]  Yeah, totally.
[01:16:55]  But like the thing is, and especially, I mean, this is what was so kind of, you know, insane and jarring about watching Russia Gate unfold in real time is that you're watching the production on social media, right?
[01:17:10]  I mean, because so much of this stuff, whether it was the Chucklefuck kind of entrepreneurs or the kind of like different media people trying to like, you know, I mean, what happens in the media, a lot of it happens first on social media, which is crazy.
[01:17:25]  And there's a sort of crowdfunding model there.
[01:17:29]  Striking.
[01:17:30]  Yeah, thank you.
[01:17:31]  To what we call, you know, building of the narrative that like everyone participates in.
[01:17:37]  That's the nature of social media, whether they are, you know, blue checks or lobies or whatever that is.
[01:17:44]  And that kind of production that we witnessed over and over and over and over again through the fucking four or five years, the last four or five years that we're still watching to this day, you know, continuing to go on.
[01:17:56]  Like that to me is what to strip away all this stuff with Russia Gate is like, how can we map how these things happen?
[01:18:06]  Because it's all like.
[01:18:08]  It is happening in real time over and over again.
[01:18:10]  And it's all just as much bullshit as Russia Gate was.
[01:18:14]  And yet trying to map how these things form and get produced and reproduced and consolidated or whatever into the what we call the quote unquote narrative, which feeds up or down, right?
[01:18:28]  Up into Pulitzer Prize winning stories or down into like your mom's Facebook feed or what have you, like is really important.
[01:18:37]  You know, it's not just that some executive or editor decided this will be the story.
[01:18:41]  Boom.
[01:18:42]  But like there's a social aspect to this production that, I mean, Russia Gate is just, it's a fucking perfect example.
[01:18:50]  It's the example of how everyone kind of, I mean, even Trump's detract, I mean, even like Hillary's detractors or Trump's supporters or everyone like kind of came together to create this monster.
[01:19:01]  And all of it is completely unmoored from anything resembling reality in any sense.
[01:19:08]  It's cult behavior.
[01:19:09]  It's just cult behavior.
[01:19:11]  It's like for to gain entry into like respectable neoliberal liberal society, it's just, you just internalize that there are certain beliefs you have to adopt no matter what the facts are.
[01:19:23]  And that's what was the case here.
[01:19:25]  And that's, and that, as you said, it's being repeated now constantly with everything on it, whatever is the dominant kind of liberal obsession of the day.
[01:19:32]  And if you dissent from it, then all of a sudden you're like, whatever, you're a Trump supporter or you've been a Nazi or you've been, or you're a Russian asset.

=== Cult Behavior In Neoliberal Society (04:33) ===

[01:19:41]  I mean, I get, that's my top, I get called that the most.
[01:19:43]  You're proper not ID service kind of fucking.
[01:19:47]  Yeah.
[01:19:47]  And it works beautifully.
[01:19:48]  It's it's it yeah, it's elegant.
[01:19:50]  It's very elegant.
[01:19:51]  Yeah.
[01:19:52]  Yeah.
[01:19:54]  You know, it's, it's, it's, I think, I think it was frustrating too, because I saw a lot of people, you know, call, call people I somewhat respect useful idiots during this whole term.
[01:20:06]  When it's like, you know, it's, you don't know if people are useful.
[01:20:09]  You can just be an idiot.
[01:20:11]  You don't have to be useful.
[01:20:12]  Like that's such a capitalist way of thinking.
[01:20:14]  Like I'm not useful.
[01:20:16]  I'm just stupid.
[01:20:19]  And so, you know, I do regret my one regret is that we started the podcast too late to ever be swept into anti.
[01:20:25]  Like proper not ID service once called us like Russian things, but like that was Schmench came for me once.
[01:20:32]  That's true.
[01:20:32]  Yeah.
[01:20:32]  And I'd like to come for her and take her on a motherfucking date because she is, and I will not have any dissent over this.
[01:20:40]  That's a little pun on Dissent Magazine there, which did publish an article called Five Reasons the Left Should Support Russia Gate.
[01:20:46]  I will not brook any dissent on that because British people, you got to rate them differently.
[01:20:51]  It's not telling you how you rate them, but you just got to rate them differently.
[01:20:54]  That's just how that's a difference with the metrics, you know, metric system.
[01:20:58]  Alexander Coburn taught me that when I was under his tutelage, I'm making that up.
[01:21:04]  Well, thank you so much for joining us.
[01:21:07]  This was fun to talk about.
[01:21:10]  It was fun.
[01:21:11]  My final question to you, they'll send us out here: is what's next for Russia Gate?
[01:21:19]  Well, Russia Gators are going to Russia Gate, right?
[01:21:23]  Yeah.
[01:21:23]  So, what does that mean?
[01:21:24]  It means that, look, the guy who got indicted just now was Igor Danchenko, and he was, he does have a Russian passport.
[01:21:31]  And he actually was once investigated for being a possible Russian agent a long time ago.
[01:21:37]  So, what they're going to do is they're going to say that this guy was spreading Russian disinformation and he fooled our noble, silver-haired, beautiful British accent Christopher Steele into spreading Russian disinformation.
[01:21:52]  The Russians did it again.
[01:21:54]  It's always the Russians' fault.
[01:21:55]  It's Russians all the way down.
[01:21:57]  So, what I'm saying, that in a nutshell, is where Russia Gate goes next.
[01:22:01]  It's just going to keep Russia gating.
[01:22:02]  The funny thing is, is that like if that would be really sick if Russia had just made up Russia Gate to just make everyone go insane.
[01:22:15]  Like, yeah, tell him Trump pissed on a bat or something.
[01:22:17]  See where that takes him.
[01:22:18]  He's a Russian agent.
[01:22:20]  That would be, that would be, well, when the Venona Papers 2 comes out, come out in 2060.
[01:22:26]  Hopefully, we'll see that that's the case.
[01:22:29]  Thank you so much, Aaron.
[01:22:31]  I know you have a Conquer Jet to catch to St. Petersburg shortly.
[01:22:37]  But if that Conquer Jet does, I don't know why I'm saying Conquer Jet.
[01:22:42]  If I was just reading about these, you know, you get from fucking New York to London in two and a half hours in these motherfuckers.
[01:22:47]  They don't want you flying on them.
[01:22:49]  My dad said he flew on one once and like when I like the few years after they came out, but they don't let you do it anymore.
[01:22:57]  Anyways, Aaron is the host of pushback at the gray zone and of course writes at mate.substack.com.
[01:23:04]  That is spelled like Urba Mate without the little guy on top of the E.
[01:23:08]  He is a fantastic follow and I got to say, after this, great podcast guest.
[01:23:13]  So, Aaron, thank you for joining us.
[01:23:15]  And if I knew how to say goodbye in Russian, I would do that, even though it would be corny, but I'll just say it in Hawaiian.
[01:23:25]  Fuck.
[01:23:26]  Aloha.
[01:23:27]  Aloha.
[01:23:28]  Yeah.
[01:23:28]  Aloha.
[01:23:29]  Aloha, guys.
[01:23:30]  Thanks for having me.
[01:23:50]  Brace.
[01:23:53]  Is there compromise on you?
[01:23:55]  No.
[01:23:56]  Well, I mean, so listen.
[01:23:59]  Okay.
[01:24:01]  What do you mean by that?
[01:24:02]  Because compromise means a lot.
[01:24:03]  You should just leave it at that.
[01:24:04]  No, Sometimes a non-answer.
[01:24:08]  Is there compromise on you?
[01:24:10]  I don't think so.
[01:24:12]  Oh, yes.
[01:24:13]  I don't think so.
[01:24:14]  That means there is.

=== I Got So Hungry During That Movie (03:18) ===

[01:24:15]  Yeah, I don't think so.
[01:24:16]  Listen, everything that I've done, I've done a sex tape.
[01:24:20]  I'll be real with you.
[01:24:21]  I've done a sex tape.
[01:24:24]  I never told you my plan for a sex tape.
[01:24:26]  So I was going to leak a sex tape, but like have it like clearly come from me.
[01:24:32]  But just the actual tape has a guy that's like very obviously not me in it, but I insist is me.
[01:24:39]  And I'm mad that it got released.
[01:24:40]  That was like kind of my big plan to do, which I guess if you're listening to this, I'm just kidding.
[01:24:46]  And if that happens, it's real.
[01:24:51]  And yes, I did hook up with Ray J.
[01:24:54]  Oh, I should have Ray J play me.
[01:24:58]  Anyways.
[01:25:00]  Did you see the movie Syneckeye New York?
[01:25:03]  Yes, I did.
[01:25:03]  It's like that, but for like a sex tape.
[01:25:06]  Yeah.
[01:25:07]  Me just interesting.
[01:25:08]  There's just like more and more insane like characters and people filming and like that you're building.
[01:25:16]  And like, it's not because like, it's just like what it wouldn't get covered by any media outlets.
[01:25:22]  I have to like consistently email like a daily dot.
[01:25:25]  Like, wait a second.
[01:25:26]  How have you seen that movie?
[01:25:27]  You haven't seen any movie.
[01:25:29]  Schenectady, New York.
[01:25:30]  I dated a girl who worked at Opera Plaza and that fucking one next to the Good Vietnamese chicken joint up on Polk Street.
[01:25:39]  And so I go see movies all the time.
[01:25:41]  The tiny theater.
[01:25:41]  The tiny little guy.
[01:25:42]  And so I go, when she worked there, I would go fucking, I would see movies and wait for her to get off work and eat free popcorn and stuff like that.
[01:25:49]  I ended up seeing a lot of movies that way.
[01:25:52]  And I remember the first time I went there, I was really fucking hungry.
[01:25:57]  We were supposed to get dinner afterwards.
[01:25:59]  And she couldn't get off work for another couple hours.
[01:26:01]  And she's like, well, you want to go see a movie?
[01:26:03]  And I saw the movie Hunger about the Irish Hunger South.
[01:26:06]  Because you were hungry?
[01:26:07]  Well, no, it wasn't because I was hungry.
[01:26:09]  She was like, oh, damn.
[01:26:10]  I am also interested in what this film is about.
[01:26:13]  I got so hungry during that fucking movie.
[01:26:16]  It was insanely triggering.
[01:26:18]  I used to go to Max's a lot when I was a kid.
[01:26:19]  My parents were.
[01:26:20]  Love Max.
[01:26:21]  I would go to Max's a lot as well.
[01:26:22]  Yeah, it's a very classic 90s joint.
[01:26:25]  Classic.
[01:26:25]  We love Opera Plaza, don't we?
[01:26:27]  We love a joint.
[01:26:28]  Love my Map America ATM there, the flower shop that's there.
[01:26:32]  Yeah, there's that crazy Burger King, too.
[01:26:34]  That's like up the street.
[01:26:36]  That's up the street.
[01:26:37]  Yeah, that's not it.
[01:26:38]  Yeah, with the drive-through there.
[01:26:40]  Yeah, yeah, the drive-through.
[01:26:41]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:26:43]  And that's when Google Maps is like, hey, just take the 101.
[01:26:48]  And you're like, that's not the 101.
[01:26:49]  That's Vanessa.
[01:26:49]  It's Vanessa.
[01:26:50]  Why are you calling it?
[01:26:51]  101.
[01:26:52]  What are you fucking doing?
[01:26:53]  Shithead.
[01:26:54]  I also saw Andrew Dice Clay in the AMC theater there to 25 people.
[01:26:59]  Yeah, they briefly opened a comedy club in the beginning part of that building.
[01:27:05]  And my dad took me to see Andrew Dice Clay there with 15 people there.
[01:27:09]  And all I could think of, I was so high.
[01:27:11]  And all I could think of was like, this man played sold out Madison Square Garden.
[01:27:15]  And now there's like a five-drink minimum comedy club that closed a month after we went.
[01:27:20]  He's like, it was awful.
[01:27:23]  Anyways, that was your bonus of Brace and Liz talking about Vanessa in San Francisco.
[01:27:28]  We could keep going.
[01:27:29]  I could keep going.
[01:27:30]  I've done shit all over fucking Vanessa, man.
[01:27:32]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

=== Manless Ray High Times (01:14) ===

[01:27:33]  I know.
[01:27:33]  My God, my dad worked on Vanessa.
[01:27:36]  Don't even get us started on Polk Street.
[01:27:38]  Yeah.
[01:27:39]  Well, my dad worked on Vaness.
[01:27:41]  His station moved because my dad worked at a TV station and it became the Hillary Clinton campaign headquarters for San Francisco.
[01:27:48]  And when I would walk by there, after she lost, they just left all the shit in there.
[01:27:53]  And there was a fucking cardboard cutout of Hillary Clinton.
[01:27:55]  Yeah.
[01:27:56]  For years, for like two years.
[01:27:57]  The building is demolished now.
[01:27:58]  But that's incredible.
[01:28:00]  Yeah.
[01:28:01]  Yes.
[01:28:02]  Also, smoke crack for the first time right off of Vanessa.
[01:28:05]  Anyways, let us close this episode out.
[01:28:08]  My name is Manless.
[01:28:12]  No, I don't like that.
[01:28:14]  No, that didn't feel manless.
[01:28:17]  Manless.
[01:28:17]  Well, I am manless until Ray J gets here.
[01:28:20]  My name is Brace Belden.
[01:28:26]  I am joined by, what's your name?
[01:28:28]  Get back to the mic.
[01:28:29]  What's your name?
[01:28:30]  My name's Liz.
[01:28:32]  And of course, producer Young Chomsky, who also said he would produce the Ray J stuff with me, which I really appreciate, bro.
[01:28:40]  Thanks for the thanks for the lookout there.
[01:28:43]  And the podcast, what's I can't remember what it's called?
[01:28:45]  True, non.
[01:28:46]  We'll see you next time.