CHAPTER FIVE

Now They Want to Fight the Cold War?

Trump’s election sparked the biggest Red Scare since actual Reds had infiltrated the highest levels of the U.S. government. Russians are more evil than when they were allying with Hitler, annexing Eastern Europe, committing mass murder with forced starvations, sending writers and scientists to gulags, holding show trials, shooting down American planes, and funding terrorists. Liberals were cool with that.

Back when the Soviet Union was actually threatening America with nuclear annihilation and Russian spies were crawling through our government, liberals were defaming Joe McCarthy. Jimmy Carter warned Americans about their “inordinate fear of communism.” Sting alerted teenagers to the silliness of the Cold War, singing, “the Russians love their children, too.” Dr. Seuss taught little children that the only difference between the USA and the USSR was that we buttered our bread on different sides. (1984 New York Times Notable Books of the Year!) (Not a joke.)

As far as liberals are concerned, those were Russia’s halcyon days.

The left was already testy with the Red Bear for giving up Communism. Russia’s descent into insanity and madness accelerated when Putin refused to allow LGBTQ marches through Red Square. For having the same position on gays as Obama, circa 2008, Russians were walking on the fighting side of American liberals. But it wasn’t until Trump beat Hillary that Russia became the most psychotically evil country in the world, and Putin the mastermind of a malevolent plot to steal the election from the rightful president, Hillary Clinton.

Today, NO fear of Russia is “inordinate.” The Russians do not “love their children, too.” The entire Democratic Party and two-thirds of the Republican Party are horrified that Trump wants to get along with a nuclear-armed nation that is less corrupt than Saudi Arabia; doesn’t steal our technology; fights ISIS; and tried to warn us about the Boston Marathon bombers.

Hating Russia is something new for the left. Does all this high-octane anger about Russia mean that Democrats are finally willing to admit that Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy?

The most fevered fantasies of John Birchers are today the considered opinions of The Washington Post’s editorial page. It must be baffling to Putin to be considered the biggest monster ever produced by his nation.

WOULD YOU BUY A USED CONSPIRACY THEORY FROM THIS WOMAN?

A normal person gets an ice cream headache trying to follow the details of the left’s Russian conspiracy theory. The basic allegation is that Trump, an incompetent buffoon, managed to engage in a complex international conspiracy with Russian intelligence to steal the 2016 presidential election from Hillary.

In addition to Republicans’ generally cynical nature, part of our skepticism stems from the fact that Democrats claim they are robbed every time they lose an election, unless it’s a landslide.

History, according to Democrats:

So we’ve gotten used to The New York Times turning over two-thirds of its op-ed page to Lyndon Larouche–inspired conspiracy theories1 disputing a Republican’s election victory. (Gary Sick: How Reagan Stole the 1980 Election by Conspiring with Iranian Terrorists to Keep Holding Americans Hostage.)2 (Also not a joke.)

2017: NEW YORK TIMES, FRONT PAGE, 6 COLUMNS!!!

Never has a conspiracy theory been based on so little and consumed so many. That took the deft touch of the Clintons.

Every sane person knows that Trump did not collude with Russia to sway the election. Even some lefties have had to admit, I don’t want to defend the guy, but this is crazy. See, for example, the collected articles of Stephen F. Cohen in The Nation.3

Mark Penn, longtime Clinton pollster, said of the left’s Russia neurosis: “Today you can sit down with an impressionable elite—a Harvard-educated lawyer, for example—and they know, with absolute certainty, that somehow Trump was laundering money with the Russians in exchange for help in the election. They have no evidence for these claims and yet they ‘know’ it, just as strongly as elites once believed the earth was flat.”4

We’ve had to restart the Cold War because Hillary Clinton settled on “Russian collusion” as the reason she lost. Inasmuch as Hillary ran against Trump for the same job, one could make the argument that her assessment is not 100 percent objective.

What happened to the anti-war party? Liberals used to be the ones always telling us we have to have a mature relationship with the rest of the world. But today, they’re perfectly happy to push us to the brink of war, just to make their Trump hysteria sound high-minded.

Unfortunately, there’s zero evidence for any of it. We’re still waiting for any evidence that Trump colluded with his own campaign staff.

THEY’RE UNDER THE BED AFTER ALL!

Before we spend months interviewing witnesses who claim to have seen Tiffany Trump talking to Mikhail Baryshnikov at Barney’s, we have to ask whether there’s any evidence that the Russian government attempted to influence the election—much less that they succeeded.

The claim, as put by Representative Adam Schiff, the West Coast’s Chuck Schumer, is the following:

Last summer [of 2016], at the height of a bitterly contested and hugely consequential presidential campaign, a foreign adversarial power intervened in an effort to weaken our democracy and to influence the outcome for one candidate and against the other. That foreign adversary was of course Russia and it activated through its intelligence agencies and upon the direct instructions of its autocratic ruler Vladimir Putin, in order to help Donald J. Trump become the 45th president of the United States.5

First of all, if the Russians did anything that put Trump in the White House, they were helping our country, not harming it.

Second, if there were ever an election Russia wanted to affect, it was when Ronald Reagan was running for his second term in 1984. In addition to the obvious reasons for a godless dictatorship to dislike Reagan, the Kremlin had become convinced that he was planning a first strike if reelected. No effort was spared to defeat him. All of the USSR’s foreign embassies were instructed to send agents to the United States to help defeat Reagan. The KGB issued talking points to their agents. You can still read them in New York Times op-eds from that period: Reagan was accelerating the arms race, he was crushing liberation movements abroad, he was part of the military-industrial complex. Oh, and he was a racist.6 See, e.g., “If the Reagan Pattern Continues, America May Face Nuclear War,” by W. Averell Harriman, in The New York Times, January 1, 1984.7 And also the entire oeuvre of Anthony Lewis.

Reagan won a forty-nine-state landslide. The entire Soviet government, working hand in hand with America’s most influential newspaper, couldn’t put a dent in a U.S. election in the 1980s—back when the Times was influential. But jumping into an exponentially larger media market in 2016, Russia turned the tide with a few Facebook ads! Okay, sure.

Third, what exactly did the Russians do to “influence” the 2016 election?

Four states decided the 2016 presidential election: Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Ohio. And Iowa—I’ll give you Iowa. To become president, you have to win states. In order to establish that Russia had any impact whatsoever on the election, much less helped Donald J. Trump become the forty-fifth president of the United States, you would have to prove that about eighty thousand people in those five states saw a particular Russian post on Facebook and then get them to testify, No, I didn’t care about my job being outsourced or Mexican heroin destroying my community. Where’d you get that? The reason I voted for Trump was the Pizzagate conspiracy I saw on Facebook.

That’s the heart of the “Trump colluded with Russia” story. This is what liberals mean when they say Russia “hacked” our election. Not that any voting machines were tampered with or votes changed, but that Internet postings and the WikiLeaks dump of DNC e-mails so mesmerized the electorate that voters had no choice but to vote for Trump.

Obviously, this is stark raving mad.

HUNT FOR RED NOVEMBER

Sure, the Russians would do bad things to America if they thought it would work. But it requires delusional thinking of the first order to imagine that trained spymasters would do any of the things Russia is accused of doing to help Trump.

The original claim—backed by SEVENTEEN INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES (actually, only four8) (and three of the four have major credibility problems)—is that Russia hacked the e-mails of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary aide John Podesta, then gave them to WikiLeaks.

Did that help Trump? Maybe. Could anyone have predicted that it would help Trump? Absolutely not. I’d like to be at the meeting where the junior Russian spy says to the head spy, “See, if we leak DNC e-mails showing the party conspiring against Bernie Sanders, it will help Trump!”

Even seasoned campaign veterans have no idea how to affect an election. In 1980, the Democrats prayed that the GOP would nominate Ronald Reagan. In 2016, Democrats couldn’t believe their good fortune to be running against Trump. Republicans were sure Jeb!’s stupendous fund-raising made him the inevitable nominee. (Ask Mitt Romney.) Reagan won, Trump won, and Jeb! got four delegates.

The Democrats’ e-mail leak mostly hurt the DNC chairperson, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who was forced to resign. But beyond that, no one could have guessed how the e-mail dump would play out.

The Russians—if it was the Russians—may have been trying to save the Democrats. Had they behaved rationally, Democrats would have said: Hillary is damaged goods. We’ve got to draft Biden. This is a party with a history of dumping their candidates late in a campaign—as they did to New Jersey senator Robert Torricelli in 2002. Everyone except Huma Abedin knew that Biden was the better bet. It was an open secret that Obama preferred Biden. Maybe the e-mails were leaked to help Obama. Motives in these cases are always concocted after the fact. Only the media would say, “It would be bad for our country to undermine Hillary!”

The Russians hack us out of reflex. They have vast intelligence bureaucracies left over from the Soviet days, so why kill off those jobs? One agency digs the holes and another agency fills the holes. It’s the claim that releasing the DNC’s e-mails would lead to a predictable and certain outcome where everything falls apart.

PAYBACK’S A BITCH

Let’s assume MSNBC’s most lurid fantasies about the Russians are all true. The next question is: So what? Mexico and Israel meddle in our elections all the time. So do the Chinese. Apparently the British do, too. Former British spy Christopher Steele—with ties to MI-6!—tried to sway the 2016 election with his infamous “Russia dossier.”

In the early 1990s, the People’s Republic of China funneled millions of dollars in illegal campaign donations to Bill Clinton and the Democrats. In addition to the illegality of the donations themselves, there was also evidence of a quid pro quo, which was aggressively covered up by the president and the attorney general.

No independent counsel—and boredom from our media watchdogs.

Antonio Villaraigosa, then–California State Assembly Speaker, thanked the president of Mexico for helping to overturn the will of California voters. After 60 percent of Californians voted in favor of Proposition 187, which would have denied government benefits to illegal aliens, a federal judge overturned it. Celebrating the ruling, Villaraigosa said, “I say President Zedillo had great impact in defeating Proposition 187.”9

How about the interventions of Mexican oligarch Carlos Slim? In 2008, Slim saved The New York Times from bankruptcy. Suddenly the country’s most influential newspaper had second thoughts about protecting our southern border.10 I wonder if there’s a way to rank the relative influence of the editorial page of The New York Times versus that of Russian bots on Facebook?

Hey—would anyone mind if a Russian oligarch bought a chunk of stock in Fox News?

Since the election, famed Hollywood director Oliver Stone hasn’t stopped sneering about the hubbub over Russian interference, saying, “Israel interfered in the U.S. election far more than Russia and nobody is investigating them.”11

It was openly discussed during the primaries that Trump had lost billionaire Sheldon Adelson’s support after vowing to remain “neutral” in negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.12 Lickspittle Marco Rubio, hustling for Adelson’s money, called Trump “anti-Israel.”13 One month before the election, Adelson gave $25 million to a pro-Trump super PAC.14 Suddenly, Trump was vowing to overturn long-standing government practice and “recognize Jerusalem as the undivided capital of the State of Israel.”15 PROMISES MADE. PROMISES KEPT! (Sorry about the wall. We just didn’t have time to get to it.)

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But liberals have to calm down, step back, and stop acting as if foreigners meddling in our elections is the equivalent of the 9/11 attack.

They do it to us—and we do it to them all day long. Megalomaniac George Soros believes he has a right to go around rearranging other societies because they are displeasing to him. He has been actively interfering in Russia’s affairs since the 1990s. Between looting billions of dollars from British pensioners and enriching himself by destroying the economies of Southeast Asia, Soros was part of the Harvard brain trust that robbed Russia blind.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, President Clinton tapped Strobe Talbott to help rebuild the Russian economy along Western lines. Talbott said, Can I bring my pal George Soros? Following the prescriptions of Harvard professor Jeffrey Sachs—brought in by Soros—the geniuses decided to impose “shock treatment” on the Russian economy. They privatized everything—industries, natural resources, media, technology, and mines. With no normal stock market or private sources of capital, hundreds of billions of dollars in Russian national assets were auctioned off to a small group of cronies at knockdown prices.16

In the end, a tiny group of elites who didn’t live in Russia owned everything.17

Among the billionaire Russian émigrés and their foreign backers was Soros.18 As Soros bragged to The New Republic in 1994, “the former Soviet Empire is now called the Soros Empire.”19 Congressional hearings were convened, but it was too late to do anything. The House Banking Committee chairman, Jim Leach, described what Soros’s group had done as “one of the greatest social robberies in human history.”20

Since then, Soros—often working with the U.S. State Department—has spent about a billion dollars21 to install governments more to his liking in the former Soviet republics. He didn’t care for the pro-Russian candidate who won the 2004 Ukrainian election—the candidate Paul Manafort advised. So Soros used his network of “nonprofits” to claim that the election was stolen. The State Department forced Ukraine to have a do-over. This colossal interference with another country’s election was called “the Orange Revolution.”

He did the same thing in Georgia in 2003 (“the Rose Revolution”) and Kyrgyzstan in 2005 (“the Tulip Revolution”). All three “color revolutions” followed the Soros formula: The winner of an election was immediately accused of fraud by Soros-funded locals, based on Soros-funded “exit polls,” and forced to step down as a result of Soros-funded “youth protests.”22 Then our government would muscle the country into holding another election.

If Soros ever did anything like this to Israel, the Mossad would take him out. Putin responds—allegedly—with Facebook ads about the 2016 election and we’re supposed to rank him with Adolf Hitler.

Of course, when Americans horn in on other countries’ affairs, it is only with the highest moral purpose. As Soros himself says, his meddling is merely intended to defeat “the chauvinistic, xenophobic far right.”23 I guess it’s just lucky that he always manages to come out richer.

Although I notice that Soros’s butting into other countries’ affairs has neither turned out well nor been warmly appreciated by the targeted countries.

The Ukrainian president deposed by Soros in 2004, Viktor Yanukovych, was returned to office by the voters two years later. On the other hand, the Soros-approved leader in Kyrgyzstan, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, was met with violent protests and had to flee the country. In Georgia, the Soros-installed leader, Mikheil Saakashvili, was also forced to flee; he was later stripped of his citizenship and is currently wanted by the government on various criminal charges. Thanks, pompous American billionaire!

Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Belarus have ejected Soros’s intermediaries from their countries.24 Malaysian premier Mahathir Mohamad blamed Soros for Asia’s economic meltdown in the late 1990s, calling Soros’s attacks on their currency “villainous acts of sabotage.”25 China launched an investigation into Soros-backed organizations.26 At a 2004 press conference, Vladimir Putin denounced Soros’s toying with the elections of former Soviet republics.27 The prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán, won a huge election victory in April 2018, on a platform that consisted, in large part, of denouncing George Soros.

For a guy who loves to run around talking about how President George W. Bush destroyed America’s reputation throughout the world with his cowboy diplomacy, Soros is probably more responsible than any other single person for making the rest of the world hate us.

It’s taken about half a century, but it’s great to get both parties on the record, agreeing that it’s an act of the foulest espionage to meddle in another country’s politics. I think all Americans would be happy with an agreement that George Soros is not allowed to keep interfering in other countries’ elections and they will not interfere in ours.