Thread by @caitoz

Luke Harding's Continued Employment Discredits All Western Media

@lukeharding1968 continues to receive mainstream traction promoting theories that Trump conspired with the Kremlin, despite he and his theories having been fully discredited many times over.
caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/luke-harding…

.@Guardian has published an article co-authored by Harding on "what are assessed to be leaked Kremlin documents" which "suggest" that Russian officials had a conversation which delivers "apparent confirmation that the Kremlin possesses kompromat" on Trump

https://twitter.com/lukeharding1968/status/1415612838882721794

Note the highly qualified language, an ever-present phenomenon in the thinly sourced Russiagate stories we were inundated with throughout the entirety of Trump's presidency: "suggest", "assessed to be", "apparent", "appearing to", "seem to".

Also note how Harding and company do not know what's in the appendix referenced which supposedly elaborates on their most incendiary claim.

Also note how "Western intelligence agencies" are the authoritative sources behind these claims.

Beyond this, the actual document provided by The Guardian has come under scrutiny for containing numerous linguistic errors unlikely to have been made by native Russian speakers.

https://twitter.com/IvanTkachev1/status/1415700344848494592?s=20

Then there's the little itty bitty problem that the president who the authors claim was beholden to the Kremlin via kompromat was indisputably far more hawkish toward Moscow than the president who preceded him...
caityjohnstone.medium.com/25-times-trump…

...and also, so far at least, was more hawkish toward Moscow than the president who has replaced him.

https://twitter.com/aaronjmate/status/1354847994957455362

If the Kremlin did compromise Trump with blackmail, then it was a very poor investment indeed as it clearly had no impact on US foreign policy.

But the most damning evidence of all against this claim is the fact that serial fabulist Luke Harding had anything to do with it.

This is after all the same reporter who authored The Guardian's notorious 2018 claim that Trump crony Paul Manafort had meetings with Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy.
consortiumnews.com/2018/12/01/the…

This was an evidence-free claim that was clearly false from the moment it was published and discredited even further by the fact that the Mueller investigation found no evidence for it.
theintercept.com/2018/11/27/it-…

This is the same author who was involved in publishing a WikiLeaks password which led to unredacted documents becoming public.
caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/02/26/deb…

The same author who was humiliatingly incapable of substantiating his allegations of Trump-Russia collusion when he finally encountered an interviewer who challenged him to defend the titular claim in his book, Collusion.

Luke Harding should not be able to find employment anywhere more influential than the far side of a cashier's counter, yet here he is still getting his ridiculous stories published by one of the most influential news media outlets in the English-speaking world.

Given legitimacy by The Guardian's publication, the western political/media class is picking up this transparently bogus story and hyping it through the roof.

These articles will generate plenty of clicks, and they will make sure mainstream liberals maintain their virulent hatred of Russia. What they will not do is help anyone form a truth-based worldview.

If you needed any more proof that western media do not exist to tell you the truth about the world, there you go. The news in our society exists not to create an informed populace but to preserve partisan worldviews which protect the interests of the imperialist oligarchic class.

Luke Harding's Continued Employment Discredits All Western Media (Audio)

soundcloud.com/going_rogue/lu…