MAX PARRY—Most telling is that among the scenarios considered, even in the postulated drill where the premise was a decisive victory for Trump, TIP determined that Biden should ignore the vote result and consider any measures necessary to attain the presidency, including provoking a constitutional crisis and possible civil war where Democratic-held states would be encouraged to secede from the Union, the electoral college abolished, and statehood awarded to Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico. Upon reading the TIP report, it is clear that the real purpose of the bipartisan exercise was to mastermind the very disputed election outcome and concentration of power it predicts would be triggered by Trump. It is also possible that the project enlisted mass media in its scheme.

ERIC ZUESSE—During the coup, eight busloads of Crimeans, who had come to Kiev to demonstrate against the oust-Yanukovych Maidan demonstrations, hurriedly reboarded their buses in order to flee from nazis who were attacking them, and they finally got cornered en-route home, by those pursuing attackers, in the town of Korsun, and some of their buses were burnt, and many of these Crimeans got clubbed to death by the nazis.

Then, during the interim between the Korsun massacre and the 16 March 2014 Crimean referendum on rejoining the Russian Federation, a Ukrainian federal prosecutor from Crimea, who opposed the coup and managed safely to flee back home by her own private means, was interviewed on local Crimean television and recounted how terrified she had been by the nazis. She was asked whether Crimeans had the right to vote in a referendum to return to being Russians, and she said, “Citizens of Crimea, you have every right in the world” to do that.

CHRIS HEDGES—The two warring factions within the ruling elite, which fight primarily over the spoils of power while abjectly serving corporate interests, peddle alternative realities. If the deep state and Venezuelan socialists or Russia intelligence operatives are pulling the strings no one in power is accountable for the rage and alienation caused by the social inequality, the unassailability of corporate power, the legalized bribery that defines our political process, the endless wars, austerity and de-industrialization. The social breakdown is, instead, the fault of shadowy phantom enemies manipulating groups such as Black Lives Matters or the Green Party.

GLENN GREENWALD—The most prolific activism demanding more Silicon Valley censorship is found in the nation’s largest news outlets: the media reporters of CNN, the “disinformation” unit of NBC News, and especially the tech reporters of The New York Times. That is where the most aggressive and sustained pro-internet-censorship campaigns are waged.

Due in part to a self-interested desire to re-establish their monopoly on discourse by crushing any independent or dissenting voices, and in part by a censorious and arrogant mindset which convinces them that only those of their worldview and pedigree have a right to be heard, they largely devote themselves to complaining that Facebook, Google and Twitter are not suppressing enough speech.

YASHA LEVINE—I gotta give it to Alejandro. He’s in a great position, able to weaponize both sides of his immigrant identity. With Joe Biden’s neoliberals going full identity politics, he’s able to deploy his “Latino side” to buttress the progressive nature of our new drooling White House overlord, all while heading a federal agency whose primary function is to terrorize immigrants who snuck into America for work and to deport them on an industrial scale. But Alejandro’s just as comfortable weaponizing his Jewish victimhood…