Mueller-Dämmerung

If Nietzsche was right, and what doesn’t kill us only makes us stronger, we can thank the global capitalist ruling classes, the Democratic Party, and the corporate media for four more years of Donald Trump. The long-awaited Mueller report is due any day now, or so they keep telling us. Once it is delivered, and does not prove that Trump is a Russian intelligence asset, or that he personally conspired with Vladimir Putin to steal the presidency from Hillary Clinton, well, things are liable to get a bit awkward. Given the amount of goalpost-moving and focus-shifting that has been going on, clearly, this is what everyone’s expecting.

Honestly, I’m a bit surprised. I was sure they were going to go ahead and fabricate some kind of “smoking gun” evidence (like the pee-stained sheets from that Moscow hotel), or coerce one of his sleazy minions into testifying that he personally saw Trump down on his knees “colluding” Putin in the back room of a Russian sauna. After all, if you’re going to accuse a sitting president of being a Russian intelligence asset, you kind of need to be able to prove it, or (a) you defeat the whole purpose of the exercise, (b) you destroy your own credibility, and (c) you present that sitting president with a powerful weapon he can use to bury you.

This is not exactly rocket science. As any seasoned badass will tell you, when you’re resolving a conflict with another seasoned badass, you don’t take out a gun unless you’re going to use it. Taking a gun out, waving it around, and not shooting the other badass with it, is generally not a winning strategy. What often happens, if you’re dumb enough to do that, is that the other badass will take your gun from you and either shoot you or beat you senseless with it.

This is what Trump is about to do with Russiagate. When the Mueller report fails to present any evidence that he “colluded” with Russia to steal the election, Trump is going to reach over, grab that report, roll it up tightly into a makeshift cudgel, and then beat the snot out of his opponents with it. He is going to explain to the American people that the Democrats, the corporate media, Hollywood, the liberal intelligentsia, and elements of the intelligence agencies conspired to try to force him out of office with an unprecedented propaganda campaign and a groundless special investigation. He is going to explain to the American people that Russiagate, from start to finish, was, in his words, a ridiculous “witch hunt,” a childish story based on nothing. Then he’s going to tell them a different story.

That story goes a little something like this …

Back in November of 2016, the American people were so fed up with the neoliberal oligarchy that everyone knows really runs the country that they actually elected Donald Trump president. They did this fully aware that Trump was a repulsive, narcissistic ass clown who bragged about “grabbing women by the pussy” and jabbered about building “a big, beautiful wall” and making the Mexican government pay for it. They did this fully aware of the fact that Donald Trump had zero experience in any political office whatsoever, was a loudmouth bigot, and was possibly out of his gourd on amphetamines half the time. The American people did not care. They were so disgusted with being conned by arrogant, two-faced, establishment stooges like the Clintons, the Bushes, and Barack Obama that they chose to put Donald Trump in office, because, fuck it, what did they have to lose?

The oligarchy that runs the country responded to the American people’s decision by inventing a completely cock-and-bull story about Donald Trump being a Russian agent who the American people were tricked into voting for by nefarious Russian mind-control operatives, getting every organ of the liberal corporate media to disseminate and relentlessly promote this story on a daily basis for nearly three years, and appointing a special prosecutor to conduct an official investigation in order to lend it the appearance of legitimacy. Every component of the ruling establishment (i.e., the government, the media, the intelligence agencies, the liberal intelligentsia, et al.) collaborated in an unprecedented effort to remove an American president from office based on a bunch of made-up horseshit … which kind of amounts to an attempted soft coup.

This is the story Donald Trump is going to tell the American people.

A minority of ideological heretics on what passes for the American Left are going to help him tell this story, not because we support Donald Trump, but because we believe that the mass hysteria and authoritarian fanaticism that has been manufactured over the course of Russiagate represents a danger greater than Trump. It has reached some neo-Riefenstahlian level, this bug-eyed, spittle-flecked, cult-like behavior … worse even than the mass hysteria that gripped most Americans back in 2003, when they cheered on the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and the murder, rape, and torture of hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children based on a bunch of made-up horseshit.

We are going to be vilified, we leftist heretics, for helping Trump tell Americans this story. We are going to be denounced as Trumpenleft traitors, Putin-sympathizers, and Nazi-adjacents (as we were denounced as terrorist-sympathizers and Saddam-loving traitors back in 2003). We are going to be denounced as all these things by liberals, and by other leftists. We are going to be warned that pointing out how the government, the media, and the intelligence agencies all worked together to sell people Russiagate will only get Trump reelected, and, if that happens, it will be the End of Everything.

It will not be the End of Everything.

What might, however, be the End of Everything, or might lead us down the road to the End of Everything, is if otherwise intelligent human beings continue to allow themselves to be whipped into fits of mass hysteria and run around behaving like a mindless herd of propaganda-regurgitating zombies whenever the global capitalist ruling classes tell them that “the Russians are coming!” or that “the Nazis are coming!” or that “the Terrorists are coming!”

The Russo-Nazi Terrorists are not coming. The global capitalist ruling classes are putting down a populist insurgency, delegitimizing any and all forms of dissent from their global capitalist ideology and resistance to the hegemony of global capitalism. In the process, they are conditioning people to completely abandon their critical faculties and behave like twitching Pavlovian idiots who will obediently respond to whatever stimuli or blatantly fabricated propaganda the corporate media bombards them with.

If you want a glimpse of the dystopian future … it isn’t an Orwellian boot in your face. It’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Study the Russiagate believers’ reactions to the Mueller report when it is finally delivered. Observe the bizarre intellectual contortions their minds perform to rationalize their behavior over the last three years. Trust me, it will not be pretty. Cognitive dissonance never is.

Or, who knows, maybe the Russiagate gang will pull a fast one at the eleventh hour, and accuse Robert Mueller of Putinist sympathies (or appearing in that FSB video of Trump’s notorious Moscow pee-party), and appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the special prosecutor. That should get them through to 2020!

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CJ Hopkins
March 21, 2019
Photo: J. Scott Applewhite (AP)

CJ Hopkins Summer 2018 thumbnailDISCLAIMER: The preceding essay is entirely the work of our in-house satirist and self-appointed political pundit, CJ Hopkins, and does not reflect the views and opinions of the Consent Factory, Inc., its staff, or any of its agents, subsidiaries, or assigns. If, for whatever inexplicable reason, you appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to support it, please go to his Patreon page (where you can contribute as little $1 per month), or send your contribution to his PayPal account, so that maybe he’ll stop coming around our offices trying to hit our staff up for money. Alternatively, you could purchase his satirical dystopian novel, Zone 23, which we understand is pretty gosh darn funny, or any of his subversive stage plays, which won some awards in Great Britain and Australia. If you do not appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to write him an abusive email, please feel free to contact him directly.

43 thoughts on “Mueller-Dämmerung”

  1. No, it’s not “… worse even than the mass hysteria that gripped most Americans back in 2003, when they cheered on the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and the murder, rape, and torture of hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children based on a bunch of made-up horseshit.”
    But it is very,very bad.

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  4. Hello! Allow me to reveal that one-time liberals or ‘progressives’ deteriorate into right wing ass holes.
    Crimea river.

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  5. For what it’s worth I consider myself to be one of those left ideological heretics who saw through this bullshit. I did give Trump too much leeway on foreign policy (as a Canadian, my business is to give a shit about US foreign policy – or so I see it) falling for the misleading noises he made (although I also believe the deep state and forces more powerful than a mere president shaped Trump along the way). But I saw through the bull of Russia gate from day one, understood the media’s full throated complicity, understood the Clintons and the FBI were covered in filth and so on … . I believe we cannot even approach understanding what’s going on out there without getting straight the corruption and complicity, the total lack of democracy, the decisive role of an oligarchy etc. in this attempt to toss Trump into the trash. Seeing through this bullshit, or if you bought into it, seeing it now for what it is … is necessary to opening up to the sick, demented reality that operates behind the faces of the television and the masks of the msm.

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    1. You do understand that the US is not a democracy, and never has been, right? Not being a jerk here, and I agree with much of what you’ve said. But it has become so commonplace for folks to talk about our “democracy” and how this or that will damage it, or how this or that goes against our democracy, that I am always unsure if they actually believe we are a democracy, if they simply have heard the term so often they use it blindly, if they don’t know the difference between a democracy and a republic, or if they are using the term so broadly as to include any form of government that has elections.

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  7. Excellent article. Too many interesting things to reply to.

    However, we have a situation where the world’s finest journalists created a gigantic fairy tale preaching to an already brainwashed audience.

    Contemporary journalism

    Noam Chomsky to Andrew Marr (BBC) : “I’m not saying you’re self censoring. I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying. But what I’m saying is that if you believe something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.”

    In other words, to be a contemporary journalist, you have to be really, really dumb. Dumb enough to accuse Trump of collusion and imagine you will get away with it. The problem is that despite what liberals have been told, Trump is a lot smarter than them and wasn’t prepared to be the fall guy for anything.

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  9. For all the BS and manipulation it sure has been a distractive and entertaining part of my pion exsistance however sad this may sound/be. One good thing will come of it one way or another: Sayings like: Don’t be a “Trump” or thats really “Trumpish” . Will be Trump’s legacy> :)

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  10. As Mumia Abu Jamal has said “‘If Trump is the price we have to pay to defeat Clintonian neoliberalism – so be it.”
    Burned out one time radicals, ‘progressives’, leftists – now sunk back as apologists for the system. They ‘claim; to represent organizations, groups, advocacy associations. One time.

    Generals without an army. This encrudation of full time ‘staffers’ aides, consultants, advisors, secretaries, deputies, – this class layer of liberal drum beaters, this whatever-causes-money-to-flow. We are the ones who get paid to shovel out the war/Wall Street/pentagon/Isreal party line. But they can’t deliver the big numbers because they are separated from their old base. Who doesn’t trust them anyroad. So, it’s bluff. The old full-timers clique talks loud but has not got the numbers muscle behind it. This is a fraud on the public.

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  15. Meanwhile, over at Counterpunch Joshua Frank is employing the gloat-o-meter to determine whether the likes of Greenwald and Taibbi are celebrating too much over the Mueller non-indictments. You’d almost think he *wanted* the Russiagate story to be true.

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