Thread by @soncharm

A big thing that irks some of us so much about Russiagate is the constant application of double-standards. (e.g.: Trump ‘sought dirt’, Hillary *got dirt*, but only Trump is investigated)

I think these double-standards ultimately stem from a cultural and class split.

Hillary is ‘one of us’. She’s ‘elite’, she’s an insider, part of DC establishment. She knows how things are done, she has all the right contacts, and even if she’s not of *your* party, you basically trust that she plays the game by the tacitly agreed-upon ruleset.

But Trump is clearly an ‘outsider’. He didn’t come to the position by any of the right channels, lay any of the right groundwork, has none of the right contacts. Who even ARE these uncouth people and what are they doing crashing our game?

This framing creates suspicion of all things Trump, and a strange, infuriating, but somewhat understandable blindness when it comes to Clinton.

‘What about her paying for the dossier? from foreigners?’ I have been asking for months and months.

Blank stares.

The reason this gets blank stares is that insiders aren’t even capable of putting that in the same mental category as Trump ‘seeking dirt on Hillary from Russia’. Even though it’s *literally the same action if you just describe it*, people can’t see it that way.

That’s cuz Hillary is One Of Us. I mean, she’s not a possible gangster money launderer like Trump, with connections to who knows what. She’s a politician we know, and we know lots of people who work for and with her, she’s a known quantity, we get her.

So, their subconscious tells them, *whatever* she did was probably fine. How could it not be fine?

Peoples’ brains just dismiss the whole dossier question out of hand without even logically addressing it.

But Trump, meanwhile, ‘sought dirt’! Unforgivable!

To observers seeing this it comes across as an illogical if not downright insane double standard.

Which it is, of course.

But the reason for it is class allegiance. Hillary’s part of the accepted ‘political’ class and Trump is not. So she gets a pass where he doesn’t. Simple.

What’s scary though is when you have investigators and prosecutors who are *also* all part of that same ‘class’ and share all its assumptions. That’s how you get *the FBI* applying those double-standards in their investigatory capacity. This is dangerous.

This whole thing maybe doesn’t happen if the FBI had been headed by, like, a middle class ex-cop who got promoted through the ranks, rather than a JD with philosophy pretensions who did stints at Lockheed and fucking Bridgewater. I’m just saying.