ANDREW LEVINE—Putin probably wanted Trump to win more than that he wanted Clinton to lose – not because he thought that, in Trump, he would have a president his government could work with, but because he would have a president he could blackmail or otherwise control. If Russian intelligence is a tenth as good as it is made out to be, they probably have all kinds of dirt on the Donald. If they do, why would they not use it to their advantage? There is plenty of circumstantial evidence suggesting that this is the case, but, so far, if anybody outside Trump’s innermost circle really knows, they are keeping the information to themselves.
WESTERN EXCEPTIONALISM
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GLEN FORD—Americans only imagine that they are materially better off than the people of other developed nations — a fallacy they assume to be the case because of U.S. global military dominance. More importantly, most white Americans feel racially entitled to the spoils of U.S. dominance as part of their patrimony, even if they don’t actually enjoy the fruits. (“WE made this country great.”) This is by no means limited to Trump voters.“The first Black U.S. president, Barack Obama, was among the most aggressive defenders of white supremacy in history.”
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MOON OF ALABAMA—The Dutch IT expert and blogger Marcel van den Berg was wondering how Dutch keywords and hashtags showed up on the Hamilton 68 “Russian bots” dashboard. He found (Dutch, English auto translation) that the dashboard is a total fraud.
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RICHARD EDMONDSON—You would think that the Kagans would be concerned about the prominence in the new government of people like Tyahnybok. In 2005 the Svoboda leader co-signed an open letter to then-President Yuschenko calling for a parliamentary investigation into the “criminal activities of organized Jewry in Ukraine.” He also asserted at one time that Ukraine is run by a “Moscow-Jewish mafia,” and complained that “Germans, kikes, and other scum” were undermining the country. Equally he has expressed solidarity with Stepan Bandera and other Ukrainian insurgents who took up arms in World War II to fight “Muscovites, Germans, Jewry and other filth,” as he put it.
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CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—I am not being hyperbolic here. Neoconservatism is not some political ideology which can be placed on a left-to-right spectrum based on one’s ideas about fiscal policy and social issues, it is the civilian-slaughtering American supremacist agenda to butcher, bomb, sanction, starve, bully and manipulate the world population in order to ensure the hegemony of the US-centralized power establishment. I am not condemning an opposing set of political opinions here, I am condemning the mass murder of innocent men, women and children.