Thread by @caitoz

Democrats Ignore US Military’s Refutation Of ‘Russian Bounties’ Story

The #Bountygate narrative has been officially discredited by a top military official who says there's no evidence, but Democrats predictably ignore this fact and keep saying it anyway.
medium.com/@caityjohnston…

The US military has been unable to find any evidence that the Russian government paid bounties on US troops to Taliban-linked fighters in Afghanistan, confirming what was already obvious to anyone who hasn’t had their brain stem hijacked by mass media-induced Russophobia.

Like many other critical voices, I said from the beginning that there was no reason to believe the Russian bounties narrative and that the mass publication of baseless anonymous claims by US intelligence operatives constitutes journalistic malpractice.
medium.com/@caityjohnston…

There is no excuse for a reporter to ever present anonymous CIA press releases under the guise of news, especially when they make no sense; Taliban forces would need no financial incentive to attack a hostile occupying force.
caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/06/27/men…

Once the news media had reported the unsubstantiated rumor given to them by anonymous spies, spinmeisters like @Maddow began presenting it as an objective fact, and from there the entire Democratic political/media class began parroting it like it was true.

https://twitter.com/aaronjmate/status/1305570430925766657

It was fake. But now aggressions have been ramped up against Russia, Democrats have introduced a bill mandating sanctions on any Russians involved in this imaginary conspiracy, and legislation has been passed making it harder for Trump to withdraw troops from Afghanistan.

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1305625923656577036?s=20

The story did its job, and now that it’s proven false the same people who promoted it are uniformly ignoring the new evidence which clearly shows it to have been bogus.

https://twitter.com/aaronjmate/status/1305625704214732801?s=20

This story has been so ubiquitously promoted within the establishment liberal echo chamber that it’s impossible to list all the dishonest portrayals it’s been given since June, but to pick just a few recent examples:

Again, that’s just a very few very recent examples. Now that their claims have proven false, how many of these highly influential people do you think are using their massive platforms to spread awareness of this fact? Take a wild guess.

If you said zero, you are correct.

In fact Democratic Party influencers are even continuing to promote the debunked Russian bounties story many hours after the report debunking it became available on mainstream platforms. This guy works for the Biden campaign:

https://twitter.com/AndrewBatesNC/status/1305665426534301696?s=20

And we can absolutely expect this to continue. They never let the lack of evidence for their position get in the way before, and they won’t let it get in the way now. That's exactly what echo chambers are designed to do.

https://twitter.com/caitoz/status/1305651973341896704?s=20

An email published by WikiLeaks in 2016 was sent by John Podesta to billionaires George Soros, Peter Lewis, John Sperling, and Herb and Marion Sandler in 2007 going over a meeting they'd had discussing the creation of a "robust echo chamber" for liberals.
wikileaks.org/podesta-emails…

Usually when you see the names Podesta and Soros together it just means you stumbled into a bad corner of the internet pervaded by sloppy thinking and an irrational trust in anonymous 8chan posts, but this one actually gives us useful insight into the aforementioned dynamic.

The fact that echo chambers are actively created by establishment manipulators enables establishment-friendly narratives to remain afloat long after evidence should have sunk them.

https://twitter.com/caitoz/status/1289917590911950849

The oligarchs who rule over us understand that humans are storytelling animals and you control the humans by controlling the stories. We will be unable to fight lies with truth until we collectively understand this fact as well as our oppressors.