by Gordon M. Hahn
Fiona Hill’s recent Foreign Affairs article on Trump and Putin (www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2021-09-27/kremlins-strange-victory) is a classic example, a monument to much of American rusology’s transformation into propaganda, making Russia and Russia-Eurasia policy the most popular football in American domestic politics.. I have no idea what Ms. Hill’s political party affiliation is here in the US, but it is possible to discern from her coal miner’s daughter background she mentions and the long tenure at the pro-Democratic Party (DP) think tank, The Brookings Institute. One could, but I will not conjecture as to what would motivate a DP-oriented person to work for a Republican administration, no less one led by an erratic, loose mouth with a questionable moral history. Although former President Trump seems to be getting himself under control, however gradually and belatedly, he was a bad choice for president even if one might support many of his policies, as I wrote around the time of his election (https://gordonhahn.com/2016/11/10/president-trump-and-u-s-russian-relations/). What makes Hill’s DP partisanship clear is the content of her article. She hits all the DP’s requisite notes: Trump equals Putin, male chauvinism, racial inequality — the usual liberal tripe. For all of Russian Vladimir Putin’s shortcomings they fall significantly short of that which American politicians, media and many analysts assert as they engage in domestic squabbling. To overstate any strong points the Russian president might have is no less harmful but far less frequent and hence not a problem. Unfortunately, rusological abuse has become so much a part of the fabric of American political discourse that I am forced to play the same game to set straight the record Hill presents on the subject of Putin, Trump, their similarities and differences, and American politics.
I met Ms. Hill once twenty years or so ago, and we had a cordial lunch in The Brookings cafeteria. She always had struck me as one of the more reasonable Russia specialists, and our meeting confirmed this feeling. However, decades in the swamp will leave even the best a little wet and grimy. In her FA piece, therefore, she appears to do her best to mix objective analysis with DP talking points, and some issues go unaddressed raising fundamental concerns. That Hill persistently points to supposed similarities between the two leaders, Trump and Putin, suggests one of the purposes of her article is the proselytization of one of the DP’s main propaganda point of the last few years.
Hill on Putin-Trump Similarities
Thus, we read that Putin “was the first populist leader to take power in a major country in the twenty-first century. Putin had blazed the trail that Trump would follow during his four years in office.” Etc., etc. The version of the recently popularized trope ‘populist’ is another DP talking point propounded by its affiliated ‘experts’ and talking heads. The use of ‘experts’ often is intended to give propaganda a scholarly veneer. It is probably no coincidence that this trope came into broad use when Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016’s presidential election. This election was free but unfair in favor of the DP, and this fact needed to be covered up. Here is how Hill describes this poorly defined political concept: “The essence of populism is creating a direct link with ‘the people or with specific groups within a population, then offering them quick fixes for complex problems and bypassing or eliminating intermediaries such as political parties, parliamentary representatives, and established institutions. Referendums, plebiscites, and executive orders are the preferred tools of the populist leader.” She adds that “Putin has used them all over the past 20 years,” but her perhaps main or at least other target, Trump, is soon brought into scope, as is another major DP talking point, male chauvinism: “All of Putin’s machinations greatly impressed Trump. He wanted to ‘get along’ with Russia and with Putin personally. Practically the only thing Trump ever said to me during my time in his administration was to ask, in reference to Putin, ‘Am I going to like him?’ Before I could answer, the other officials in the room got up to leave, and the president’s attention shifted; such was life as a female adviser in the Trump White House.” This oppressed White House expert was not given her due respect, we are led to believe, yet another DP victim of the white supremacist Republican male and his institutional racism and sexism, you see, according to her unverifiable version of events. But Hill cannot point to one example of Trump following the specifics of populism that she delineates here and to some degree accurately lays at Putin’s door. She cannot provide any evidence that Trump was “impressed” by Putin’s machinations. Instead, she cleverly inserts his desire to “get along” with Russia and with Putin. In the conduct of foreign policy, it behooves any president to seek to get along with other leaders and countries, even foes, to the extent possible, and this can be accomplished without being ‘impressed’ by or admiration for one’s interlocutors and adversaries.
Returning to Hill’s populism within the context of American presidential administration, recall that populists create “a direct link with ‘the people’ or with specific groups within a population.” I seem to recall, reaching back into my failing memory of history, ancient albeit, that the first ‘black’ (half black, half white, but who cares about the other half) American president playing to “specific groups within a population.” I think most Americans can. The first of his several autobiographies invoked such unifying ideals as the “typical white person” (his own grandmother!). Obama spoke of Republicans as “our enemies” to Hispanic Americans and speaks to this day of America’s structural and institutional white racism. One could go on and on. But this never seems to have concerned Ms. Hill, who worked in the Obama administration.
Again, recall the Hillian populist’s fondness for “quick fixes for complex problems.” It was not Trump who had the federal government take over a sixth of the U.S. economy under the very unaffordable Affordable Care Act, doing so by repeatedly lying about the nature of the problem and about the consequences of the bill. It was Obama. ‘You can keep your doctor, and you can keep your plan,” and ‘health insurance will be less expensive,’ he quipped charmingly. After the bill passed, his officials openly acknowledged lying to the American people about all this and other matters. I and tens of millions of Americans could not keep their plans, it turned out. Their plans were cancelled, and their doctors moved to other plans, which were always more expensive, sometimes 50 percent more expensive.
Recall Hill’s point that ‘populists are inclined to bypass or eliminate intermediaries such as political parties, parliamentary representatives, and established institutions’ and that ‘referendums, plebiscites, and executive orders are the preferred tools of the populist leader.’ Now, as I recall Trump was the nominee of a political party, negotiated with the opposition’s parliamentary representatives, and went through established institutions to get legislation passed and implemented. He called no referendum or plebiscite nor tried to call one or the other, and his use of executive orders paled in significance in comparison with his predecessors. Indeed, when Trump tried to issue an executive order to repeal an Obama executive order, Hill’s DP screamed bloody hell. Moreover, leading liberal constitutional lawyer Jonathan Turley did work on this subject and concluded that it was Obama who had created an “imperial presidency” through his use of executive orders and administrative fiat the likes of which Nixon would have envied (https://jonathanturley.org/2014/05/21/a-question-of-power-the-imperial-presidency/).
Moreover, it is Hill’s DP and its Obama who abused the FBI, Justice Department, CIA and other government agencies to influence the 2016 (and through their surrogates 2020) presidential elections [the fraudulent Steele dossier, etc. (see below)] and to initiate baseless impeachments (see, for example, https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/thu-twenty-days-infamy-january-2017-red-flags-fbi-blew). It is the same one that rigged 2020 by censoring Trump and covering up the Biden family White House business in cahoots with its paid and bought for Big Tech and other mass media. Now the DP is attempting to create a single-party regime by among other things institutionalizing rigged elections, using Big Tech to carry out censorship, packing the Supreme Court, and moving to make DC and Puerto Rico states and leave the southern border wide open in order to change the complexion of the American population and thus shift the American electorate in its favor. But Hill finds no space to mention or even allude to any of this or bring forth an ‘ism’ to characterize it. I will: it’s authoritarianism of the kind that Americans find so objectionable in Putin.
Hill provides no evidence or quotations to support her claim that Trump “admired Putin for his presumed wealth and for the way he ran Russia as if it were his own private company. As Trump freely admitted, he wanted to do the same thing. He saw the United States as an extension of his other private enterprises.” She then lists several “glaringly obvious” similarities. Let us go through them. Again, as anyone who has read my work would know, this is not to say that Putin is a democratic leader, it is to point out the partisan hypocrisy of someone who calls out Trump by making charges that are either true of any politican or that are to be found in far greater abundance in the rule of DP leaders, such as Obama and Biden. First comes the supposedly Putin-Trump shared “manipulation and exploitation of the domestic media.” This is a truly astonishing bit of absurd hypocrisy. As I will demonstrate below, given the DP’s constant manipulation of the entire dinosaur print and electronic media (New York Times, CNN, etc., etc., etc.) as well as the post-modern DP-syncphantic social net of FB, Twitter, YouTube banning conservative thought nearly everywhere. When such astonishing absurdities come from someone, then that someone is far involved in something far removed from scholarly analysis and well into the realm of pure propaganda.
Next, Hill proposes Putin and Trump shared “appeals to their own versions of their countries’ ‘golden age.’” Again, no specifics on Putin or Trump are given here. But it needs to be said that many democratic and authoritarian leaders do this. Putin does, but so did Reagan. ‘Cosmopolitan, liberal elites’ like Biden, Obama, and their fellow travelers Bill Ayers, BLM, Antifa and the like have their own preferred ‘golden ages’: 1960s nihilist hedonism, Black Panther and Weather Underground terrorism, and violent race riots. They hope to repeat the same revolutionary activity through BLM and Antifa political violence and terrorism. Hill also notes a shared: “compilation of personal lists of “national heroes” to appeal to their voters’ nostalgia and conservatism—and their attendant compilation of personal lists of enemies to do the same for their voters’ darker sides.” Can Hill provide us with Trump’s list or Putin’s list? Since I am no Trump supporter, being a constitutional conservative and supporter of some semblance of presidential propriety and humility, and an observer of Russian politics, I would be interested in such documents.
Hill persists and offers yet another ‘glaringly obvious similarity’ between Putin and Trump: “Putin put statues of Soviet-era figures back on their pedestals and restored Soviet memorials that had been toppled under Gorbachev and Yeltsin. Trump tried to prevent the removal of statues of Confederate leaders and the renaming of American military bases honoring Confederate generals.” Can Hill mention one Soviet-era figure’s statue Putin personally ordered be put back on his pedestal? This nonsense is belied by the fact that Putin has repeatedly supported the legacy of perhaps Soviet enemy number one — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn — has dedicated monuments to victims of the Soviet Gulag. But no matter, no nuance is needed when it comes to analyzing Putin and his arch-complex country. And why does Hill support the violent destruction of property in America? Would she support conservatives, if they started to dismantle statues in America to Lenin, Marx, Malcolm X, Che Guevera, the inveterate anti-black racist Maragret Sanger…..need I go on? If not, then she would be a Putinist.
Hill is like the Energizer rabbit, she just keeps going and…. Her next development of DP talking points is “(t)he two men also shared many of the same enemies: cosmopolitan, liberal elites; the American financier, philanthropist, and open society promoter George Soros; and anyone trying to expand voting rights, improve electoral systems, or cast a harsh light on corruption in their countries’ respective executive branches.” Let’s take these juicy morsels in turn. The claim of enemies is odd, since it was never Trump but Obama who declared his opponents were enemies. This speaks to such enemies’ ‘cosmopolitanism’ as well as their famous, self-declared ‘tolerance.’ It is those same ‘cosmopolitan, liberal’ elites who are attempting to establish a Putin-like single-party dominant system in the U.S. Cosmopolitan liberals like Hill’s so-called “American financier, philanthropist, and open society promoter George Soros” financed the 2020 riots by BLM and Antifa that ended in tens of deaths and tens of millions of dollars in property damage across the country. Soros demanded that Facebook’s Zuckerberg begin censoring conservatives on Facebook, which the latter shortly began doing (www.georgesoros.com/2020/01/31/mark-zuckerberg-should-not-be-in-control-of-facebook/ and www.mediamatters.org/facebook/after-enabling-right-wing-propaganda-facebook-hires-fox-news-veteran-key-news-role). Is this philanthropy or authoritarian revolution and censorship? Given Hill’s sensitivity to not being listened to by male Trump advisors in the White House, one would expect more suspicion of ‘American financier, philanthropist, and open society promoter’ Soros, given the kind of people he funds for public office, including those who cover up rapes in schools for the benefit of the transgendered (https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/10/18/loudoun-county-prosecutor-who-sought-arrest-of-man-whose-daughter-was-allegedly-raped-has-ties-to-soros-mcauliffe/?utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwAR19GfEv7hO7FL8ZEHv5BI6s5xoC8nYj8ZWNypQMpWv4XrLua8n9VYdGFFQ). We retrogrades, I must self-criticize (you remember ‘samokritika’ Fiona, don’t you?), have trouble keeping up with which group is now given preference over other groups and over the law as well.
Hill claims: “Trump also aped Putin’s willingness to abuse his executive power by going after his political adversaries; Trump’s first impeachment was provoked in part by his attempt to coerce the government of Ukraine into smearing one of his most formidable opponents, Joe Biden, ahead of the 2020 presidential election.” She knows quite well that Trump did not attempt to coerce Zelenskii. Zelenskii himself said so, and one can read the transcript to see there was not even a quid pro quo. Indeed, her co-star witness at the relevant impeachment hearing, the Ukrainian nationalist, American NSC officer Alexander Windman, has now been exposed in a new book to be the lone whistleblower on the Trump-Zelenskiycall, and Windman was the only one who listened in on the call to express concern over Trump’s words (https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-driving-force-behind-trumps-impeachment-was-not-the-whistleblower-new-book-alleges). Hill also expressed concern about the call after its contents, often distorted in the pro-DP media, came to light, leading to Trump’s impeachment. At the same time, Hill’s DP cosmopolitan, liberal colleague Joe Biden, our illustrious ‘president’ and Obama’s ‘VP’, is on videotape acknowledging that he pressured Ukrainians to stop investigating his corrupt son Biden who with the ‘Big Guy’ (Joe Biden) was running a business out of the White House with China, Russia, Ukraine, among others. He exerted pressure by doing what the Democrats and Hill said Trump did: he threatened to withhold assistance to Kiev. Ms. Hill did you ‘miss’ this item, or are Hunter’s emails and computer files all part of yet another ‘Russian operation’?
Hill further claims “Trump imported Putin’s style of personalist rule, bypassing the professional civil servants in the federal government…to rely instead on the counsel and interventions of cronies.” Who are these ‘cronies’ Trump relied on for (gasp) ‘counsel’, Ms Hill? In what specific instances and when, where, and how were there such ‘interventions’ and in what specific ways were they improper or illegal? Hill’s charges start to sound like the infamous Steele dossier (see below).
Then Hill gives us: “Foreign politicians called in chits with celebrities who had personal connections to the president and his family, avoiding their own embassies in the process. Lobbyists complained to whomever they could reach in the West Wing or the Trump family circle. They were quick to set attack dogs on anyone perceived as an obstacle and to rile up pro-Trump trolls on the Internet, because this always seemed to work. Influence peddlers both domestic and foreign courted the president to pursue their own priorities; the policymaking process became, in essence, privatized.” No, say it ain’t so Fiona!? Foreign politicians called in chits with celebrities who had connection with the president! Ms. Hill, so what. Did Trump know, and if he did, so what? What ‘chits’? Celebrities? Not in American politics or Washington, DC, and certainly never in a Democrat administration. So, so Republican is Hollywood, I know. Lobbyists? There are, of course, no DP lobbyists. None. Except there are, and they have been involved in illegal activity targeting Trump since 2016 (see below). Read up on Fusion GPS, Perkins Coie, and Baker McKenzie (BM), especially the latter’s money laundering and offshore operations in the Pandora Papers (https://www.icij.org/investigations/pandora-papers/baker-mckenzie-global-law-firm-offshore-tax-dodging/). Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain has been Biden’s long-time advisor and lawyer while being a long-time BM partner. Trolls?! No Obama-Biden-Clinton trolls on Facebook or Twitter, that is for certain. And if there are, they are part of a massive, unprecedented Putin propaganda operation or ‘ecosystem’, pure and simple, for sure. And those Putin ops are financed to a level that U.S. oligarchs could never dream of, pure and simple. Look at how underfunded U.S. government media and DP-allied corner store media, the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, CBS, NBC, ABC, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram are. How can Hillary, Barack and Grandpa Joe compete?
Then Hill gives us the coup de grace of DP Clinton-Obama-Biden lies. “(T)he convergence of politics in the United States and Russia during Trump’s term” (!) was epitomized, in her tale, by Trump’s “disorganized but deadly serious attempt to stage a self-coup and halt the peaceful transfer of executive power after he lost the 2020 election to Biden.…on January 6, when a mob whipped up by Trump and his allies—who had spent weeks claiming that the 2020 election had been stolen from him—stormed the U.S. Capitol and tried to stop the formal certification of the election results. The attack on the Capitol was the culmination of four years of conspiracies and lies that Trump and his allies had fed to his supporters on social media platforms, in speeches, and on television.” Interesting, because the so-called “insurrection” that Hill’s Pelosi, Clinton, Obama, and Biden claim occurred was led by unidentified demonstrators and included FBI agents who recruited some of those who led the storming of the building (www.revolver.news/2021/06/federal-foreknowledge-jan-6-unindicted-co-conspirators-raise-disturbing-questions/ and http://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/25/us/politics/capitol-riot-fbi-informant.html). Interesting also because Trump contrary to whipping up hysteria in his Jan. 6 speech called on marchers to be “peaceful”, and, as the Washington Post even reported, when they arrived from the location where Trump made his speech, the forced entry into the Capitol had already been in progress for significantly more than a full hour. “President Trump’s speech didn’t conclude until 1:11pm, and with at least a 45-minute walk between the two locations with crowd-related delays, that would put the first people from Trump’s speech at Capitol Hill no earlier than 1:56pm — a full hour and sixteen minutes after troublemakers arrived. …” The Washington Post also states: “[Capitol Police Chief, Steve] Sund’s outer perimeter on the Capitol’s west side was breached within 15 minutes,” meaning the Capitol was breached over an hour before Trump speech attendees could have even begun to arrive (www.washingtonpost.com/politics/sund-riot-national-guard/2021/01/10/fc2ce7d4-5384-11eb-a817-e5e7f8a406d6_story.html or https://archive.is/1PO6b). Incidentally, I criticized Trump for calling a demonstration in the tense circumstances after the election, but those circumstances — the deep polarization and distrust among Americans today — is a function of DP policy and actors, and much less so of Trump’s loose mouth and certainly not of other Republicans. It is also important to point out that Trump requested 10,000 additional troops to maintain order during the demonstration, but DC’s DP mayor and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi rejected it. For an insurrection, the event was curious since no firearms were present among the demonstrators arrested, and their apparent (not necessarily actual) ringleaders negotiated with, and promised Capitol police after they entered to be orderly and not break anything.
I would like to hear whether Ms. Hill thinks it is a “Big Lie” that there was massive, unprecedented DP election fraud and slanting of the campaign playing field to undermine the veracity of the 2020 election. Any objective observer would state that there clearly was, and I have presented some of the evidence in an appendix to a paper I published months ago (https://gordonhahn.com/2020/12/29/the-authoritarianization-putinization-of-america-parts-1-and-2-complete/; see also https://sharylattkisson.com/2020/11/what-youve-been-asking-for-a-fairly-complete-list-of-some-of-the-most-significant-claims-of-2020-election-miscounts-errors-or-fraud/). More has come out since. In particular, an official audit of the 2020 elections carried out in Arizona has found that there were 55,000 illegal or improper ballots counted that should not have been counted in a state where Biden won by a mere 11,000 votes (www.publishedreporter.com/2021/09/30/arizona-election-audit-results-reveal-possible-shenanigans/). In just one Georgia county nearly 7,000 mail-in ballots had no chain of custody record, meaning they could have been completed and inserted into the system illegally in order to commit fraud (https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/elections/georgia-sec-state-raffensperger-missing-chain-custody-docs-6995-absentee). (Ms Hill and her kin will not be familiar with the sources such as John Solomon’s Just the News and investigative journalist Sharyll Atkisson because these these award-winning journalists, who were forced out of ‘ecosystem of media outlets’ backing the DP as soon as they refused to follow the party line. Now they are regarded by DP types as purveyors of ‘fake news.’ Then add in Facebook’s vote-harvesting in Democrat districts, the censorship of, and ubiquitous propaganda against Trump in the media, which we know was coordinated between the DP and its much more ‘dense ecosystem of media outlets’, and you have a fundamentally unfair election.
Hill on Putin-Trump Differences
Let’s take a look at some of the supposed differences between Putin and Trump that Hill discusses: “In this regard, Putin actually offers an instructive contrast. Trump railed against a mythological American deep state, whereas Putin—who spent decades as an intelligence operative before ascending to office—is a product of Russia’s very real deep state. Unlike Trump, who saw the U.S. state apparatus as his enemy and wanted to rule the country as an outsider, Putin rules Russia as a state insider. Also, unlike Trump, Putin rarely dives into Russia’s social, class, racial, or religious divisions to gain political traction. Instead, although he targets individuals and social groups that enjoy little popular support, Putin tends to promote a single, synthetic Russian culture and identity to overcome the domestic conflicts of the past that destabilized and helped bring down both the Russian empire and the Soviet Union. That Putin seeks one Russia while Trump wanted many Americas during his time in office is more than just a difference in political styles: it is a critical data point. It highlights the fact that a successful U.S. policy approach to Russia will rest in part on denying Putin and Russian operatives the possibility to exploit divisions in American society.”
So, Hill tells us of America’s “mythological deep state.” Now, I quite agree that the deep state is mythological if by this one means some massive, invisible, even institutionalized network of rogue intel and security officials and operatives creating a kind of ubiquitous simulacra and/or undertaking secret operations against official U.S. policy. This was actually along the lines of the myth fostered for decades, ever since the 1960s, not by Trump or Republicans, but by radical leftists and some DP liberals. Indeed, the early OSS and related structures and even the later CIA have a dark history of criminal activity; one word suffices here: Tuskegee. But this is not what Trump, Republicans, and other conservatives mean in the present context. What is meant by them is a network of de jure and de facto partisan DP liberal and leftist operatives and career bureaucrats insinuated into the governmental apparatus in DC (and in state and local governments) especially during the 8 years of the Obama administration. Remember Obama promised a “fundamental transformation” of the country and his erstwhile wife promised that “Barack knows that we are going to have to make sacrifices; we are going to have to change our conversation; we’re going to have to change our traditions, our history; we’re going to have to move into a different place as a nation.” The Obama fundamental transformation to new traditions, a new history, and a different place is ongoing today under Obama’s VP. It was facilitated by the likes of the Obama, Biden, their Justice Department heads, their ambassadors in Ukraine, the FBI’s James Comey, Doug McCabe, Peter Strzok, Bruce Ohr, DNI Chief James Clapper, CIA Chief John Brennan, among others, and their DP co-conspirators (Hillary Clinton, the Democratic National Committee, DNC worker Ali Chalupa, DP operative (Bruce’s wife and former FBI agent) Nellie Ohr, Hillary Clinton’s lawyer Michael Sussman. If Ms. Hill and readers are not familiar with these names, then I suggest they become familiar with them or voluntarily renounce their right to speak on such issues, as these names are central to our country’s recent criminal history. Sussman was just indicted miraculously enough given the nature of Biden’s presidency for falsely representing himself to FBI agents when submitting dirt on Trump as a ‘concerned citizen’ but actually promoting early false ‘Russiagate’ claims. In particular, Sussman manufactured a claim that Trump had a secret server that communicated with the Kremlin through a server of Russia’s Alfa Bank, and he coordinated with Hillary, a cybersecurity firm, its chief executive, a university team of cyber technicians and media such as CNN to develop and propagandize the false claim (www.washingtonpost.com/context/u-s-v-michael-sussman-indictment/ae5ef5ba-6576-4190-a340-9cc854d08f23/ and https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-indictment-of-hillary-clintons). Hillary’s lawyer also played a key role in the founding element of Russiagate–the alleged hacking of the DNC’s server by Russian operatives (see below). But as there emerge such revelations of what some might call Russian-like machinations and illegalities, Hill is propounding false allegations of Trump’s January 6th ‘self-coup.’
All of the above speaks to Hill’s claim that Trump “saw the U.S. state apparatus as his enemy and wanted to rule the country as an outsider.” Quite simply, we now know that the entire Russiagate, Steel dossier, Trump server connected to the Kremlin through Alfa Bank and the like were frauds perpetrated by the Obama administration and its FBI, Justice Department, CIA, and military (Millie). Indeed, it has come to light that the No. 1 source for the false Steele dossier that was used to get a FISA warrant to spy on the Trump campaign was, Igor Danchenko, both a ‘Russian asset’ and a one-time research assistant for and co-author with Hill. Indeed, it was Hill who introduced Danchenko to Steele, leading to the collusion of this Russian and this Brit on the dossier to rig a U.S. presidential campaign (https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/declassified-fbi-notes-steele-fiona-hill-dossier-source). When the FBI interviewed Danchenko for the dossier case, he claimed his sources were not informed Kremlin insiders or people who knew such people but mere close acquaintances and friends. None of the dossier’s claims – from ‘golden showers’ to Trump lawyer Michael Cohen’s ‘trip to Prague’ to meet with Russian intelligence – was true. Thus, while Danchenko’s information may or may not have been Russian disinformation, it was more importantly bad information that should have been vetted but was not because the DP-controlled siloviki, like the DP-dominated mass media, found the disinformation politically beneficial in the battle with Trump. Worse yet, the FBI knew when the dossier was published in January 2017 precisely who Steele’s primary sub-source was and his utter lack of qualifications, connections and valid intelligence on any Trump activity in Russia and Trump-Putin ties. Yet special counsel and former FBI director Robert Mueller continued working and the media kept asserting ‘Trump collusion’ for years based on the false dossier (www.nytimes.com/2020/07/25/us/politics/igor-danchenko-steele-dossier.html?fbclid=IwAR1RXyIc9FlscsaJ1Qgbf32nCT4xZw9C1tH5gGiPmGUTVqMeRO0XkW6NctY; www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/February%209,%202017%20Electronic%20Communication.pdf; www.judiciary.senate.gov/press/rep/releases/judiciary-committee-releases-declassified-documents-that-substantially-undercut-steele-dossier-page-fisa-warrants; and www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2020/07/20/the_primary_subsources_guide_to_russiagate_as_told_to_the_fbi_124516.html?fbclid=IwAR230DXZYRRh3VRFT4AZh1rLPsnST0hzjmOuSAgssgpgW9huDglwU8aoFMc). Hill seemed to be similarly aware and testified to the Russia-Ukraine-related impeachment hearings staged by the DP in congress that Steele’s dossier was a “rabbit hole,” that Steele “could have been played” by the Russians, and that “it’s very likely that the Russians planted disinformation” in the dossier, adding, “I don’t believe it’s appropriate for him to have been hired to do this” (https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/declassified-fbi-notes-steele-fiona-hill-dossier-source).
Long after the Steele dossier’s distribution and propagandizing, as its contents were wholly discredited and its victims continued to suffer, corrections gradually came forth from many of those who purveyed it: Steele, Isikof, and others. Hill, out of whose office Steele’s number one source of false information, Danchenko came, testified in the impeachment hearings. Yet she characterized Steele’s dossier as a “rabbit hole” and opined Steele “could have been played” by the Russians: “(I)t’s very likely that the Russians planted disinformation” in the dossier. She added: “I don’t believe it’s appropriate for him (Steele) to have been hired to do this” (www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/declassified-fbi-notes-steele-fiona-hill-dossier-source). But it was Hill who introduced Danchenko to Steele. At about the same time, it was revealed that the CIA had considered Danchenko a possible Russian asset. Questions come to mind. How was it that Hill, who worked on the National Intelligence Council (a kind of CIA intel think tank), became a dupe with a Russian asset researching for, writing with, and receiving job recommendations from Hill? Did Hill know Danchenko was feeding information/disinformation to Steele at the time? Why didn’t Hill and/or the CIA warn the FBI or tell the media that the dossier was suspect and that Danchenko may have been a Russian plant when the dossier was still being deemed credible in many quarters? Why did their admissions as to the dossier’s lack of veracity and Danchenko’s alleged Russian asset status come only after the dossier had been debunked and actual investigative reporters began looking deeper, beyond the Obama-Clinton-Biden talking points? Were the new claims of the doctored dossier being the victim of Russian disinformation a way to shift the blame back on the Russians? And if Danchenko was a ‘Russian asset’ as was suddenly revealed, why was he never arrested? These questions need answers; Hill steers well clear of them. While one hopes and I still tend to believe that Hill was not involved in the DP’s state ‘self-coup’ against Trump, this possibility might deserve some research. After all, Hill herself became a DP apparat’s media darling and its ‘star witness’ in the Trump impeachment hoax, not exactly a scholar’s role.
Hill avers that Russia has a “very real deep state.” To be sure, this again is a matter of definition, but Hill is a little off here as well. If by ‘the deep state’ one means a network as defined above, then Russia’s deep state is not so deep. It does not constitute some network unknown to top Russian state and intelligence officials and, except in perhaps some rare cases, does not go against or operate outside of official Russian policy. Her claim that unlike Trump, “Putin rules Russia as a state insider” may be true now after more than two decades in power and his gradually creating and more recently hardening a soft authoritarian system. But when he came to power, the Russian state was divided between numerous state-oligarch clans and crumbling state bureaucracies and Putin was central to none of them, except the former KGB, the FSB. He had to consolidate and then build power while strengthening and centralizing the state apparatus, removing oligarchic often criminalized opponents or autonomous actors like Boris Berezovskii, Mikhail Khodorkovskii, and Vladimir Gusinskii and regional autonomists in Tatarstan, Chechnya, and many other Russian regions. It is this circumstance of their arrival at the top of the system that Trump and Putin may be more similar than different. Like Putin, Trump had limited ties inside the state apparatus and his policy orientations were at odds with the establishment.
Hill contends that unlike Putin, Trump often “dives into” – that is, as I read it, relishes stirring up – the country’s “social, class, racial, or religious divisions to gain political traction.” This is somewhat true as far as Putin and Trump in relative terms are concerned. Putin, to be sure, as Hill notes, “targets individuals and social groups that enjoy little popular support” and “tends to promote a single, synthetic Russian culture and identity to overcome the domestic conflicts of the past that destabilized and helped bring down both the Russian empire and the Soviet Union.” “Putin seeks one Russia.” All good; she has this right. It can be added that the drive for national unity is a long-standing cultural value stretching back to the very same Russian empire and Soviet Union she mentions. That is, the quest for national solidarity often fails in Russian culture, and this is true going back many centuries.Putin has not played the ethnic card virtually at all rhetorically, but he has rolled back some of the autonomy that ethno-national regions enjoyed under Boris Yeltsin’s unofficial asymmetrical hyper-federative or even confederative system and is increasingly putting the Russian nationalist at the center of the country’s identity and culture. However, this then means that Putin is not so much the populist, as Hill claims.
If we use Hill’s criteria, then she should have been equally distraught over Obama’s incessant race-baiting and class warfare. For Obama, America is a racist country and business owners and entrepreneurs ‘didn’t build it.’ like the Nazis’ Jews the white man supposedly has lived and continues to live off the backs of others — in this case, not the German people but rather blacks, Hispanics, and women. Republicans are “enemies,” not political opponents. If any president wanted ‘many Americas”, it was Obama, not Trump. Trump’s problem is his rude mouth and verbal divisiveness, not his policies or even his politics. Obama was far more disciplined and controlled in his language and tone, but his message and policies were extremely divisive and conflictive. That Hill gets the “critical data point” (real swamp-speak) regarding Obama’s versus Trump’s divisiveness so wrong is crucial for understanding the swamp’s bias. Divisiveness, you say? After Trump’s inauguration, which one Defense Department official has gone on record to report that the Obama White House discussed somehow blocking (and recall Biden’s proposal to Obama invoke the Logan Act against Trump in the infamous January 2017 meeting days before the inauguration), violent riots broke out in DC. Not one DP official, not Obama, not Biden condemned the violence. When DC rioters forced White House security to move President Trump to a safe bunker, not one DP official, not Obama, not Biden condemned the violence. When BLM/Antifa riots broke out in summer during the 2020 presidential campaign, the DP’s VP candidate Kamala Harris and other DP leaders encouraged the looting, beating, shooting, and killing.
Despite all the similarities (and differences) between Trump and Putin that Hill conjures, she leaves out one of many actual, essential differences. Whereas Putin’s law enforcement organs on occasion crack down on peaceful opposition demonstrations, U.S. law enforcement and local governments under Trump did not break up even one of the hundreds of violent DP-backed BLM and Antifa riots. Does Ms. Hill recall Maidan-overthrown, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych’s ‘titushki‘ or Putin’s ‘Nashi‘? This troubling ‘populist’ practice of using mob violence against one’s political opponents (and innocent citizens) is one the DP, not Republicans, effectively deployed by encouraging the summer 2020 violence. And BLM and Antifa violence far exceed anything the titushki and Nashi ever did.
Hill’s Conformist Misreading of Russia
Ignoring culture and history and brushing aside NATO expansion, color revolutions, and American officials’ open calls for Putin’s removal from power, Hill gives us the usual, simplified ‘Washington consensus’ account of U.S.-Russian relations. This view interprets the state of the relationship solely in terms of Russia’s actions, singly aggressive and interventionist, negating any American agency. That’s it. Nothing else is going on. U.S. actions that Putin and the many Russians who agree with him see as detrimental to Russian national security and interests are disregarded as phantoms. Yet Russian actions – often taken in response to those phantom American acts – are most real and threatening and come entirely from the mind and will to power of Vladimir Putin. Neither Russian history and culture nor recent aspects of relations with the West or Western policy affect him or Russians. ‘Automotonic’ Putin wakes up in the morning machinating how to expand his power and that of Russia’s in order to expand his power further, almost all of it targeting the U.S. and it’s ‘way of life.’ Never mind that Russia’s economy is dependent on the survival of that way of life; if America collapses, Europe’s and China’s economics collapse and therefore so will Russia’s. And never mind that Russia has decent relations with other republican governments with the same pluralist way of life: India, Italy, and Japan, for example. Putin’s mind and lust for power is the lone significant phenomenon, and it is none other then the Clinton acolyte, who like Hillary herself was ostensibly jilted by white male misogynists and racists like Trump and Putin.
Hill gives us an amazing contradiction. She claims that “most American policymakers simply wish that Russia would just go away so they can refocus their attention on what really matters.” Yet a paragraph later, we read: “His (Putin’s) hope is that leaders in the United States will get so bogged down with problems at home that they will cease criticizing his personalization of power and will eschew any efforts to transform Russia similar to those the U.S. government carried out in the 1990s.” Thus, American policymakers are uninterested in Russia, but they are engaged in efforts to transform it similar to those the U.S. government carried out in the 1990s. But it is the very catastrophe of those U.S.-designed reforms and the corruption that Americans fostered in the bargain that turned many like Putin against democracy. Americans wrote presidential decrees, helped run and finance presidential campaigns, used insider information on the Russian market to get rich, while they expanded NATO and organized color revolutions in countries allied to, and later in the 2000s when Putin was president in countries adjacent to Russia, backing openly anti-Russian candidates.
It may be recalled that days before 9/11 Putin warned the Bush administration that a terrorist attack against the U.S. was afoot in Afghanistan and afterwards was the first world leader to call and lend his support. He would support the Northern Route of transport of troops and materiel’ through Russia and Central Asia to Afghanistan. He was thanked with NATO expansion to and color revolutions in countries on Russia’s borders and a failed NATO Afghanistan operation that has now left the jihadi hornets nest there to Russia and its allies to deal with.
But in Hill’s mind, it is Putin who not only created the new cold war but “does not want the standoff to fade away or get resolved. As the sole true champion of his country and his people, he can never be seen to stand down or compromise when it comes to the Americans.” She forgets or chooses to keep silent on Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s ability to do precisely that until the domestic system began to breakdown and democrat-oriented President Boris Yeltsin’s warnings in the late 1990s about Russia’s alienation from the West should NATO expansion continue to Russia’s neighboring states. One wonders what leader would risk the domestic backlash he/she would likely deserve if he/she let the world’s most powerful military alliance continue to surround it, stealing markets while it damages the country’s national security; an alliance emanating from a region of the world from which Russia has been invaded repeatedly (Teutonic Livonia, Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Sweden, Napoleon’s European Grand Army, Hitler’s Germany and its fascist allies), militarily intervened repeatedly (Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth during the Time of Troubles, Western powers in the 1918-1921 Russian civil war), and politically meddled in repeatedly (numerous 18th century Russian palace coups, German support for Lenin in the revolutionary era, and Western funding and other involvement in post-Soviet Russia’s 1996 presidential election and Western support for various Russian opposition elements under Putin) (www.youtube.com/watch?v=k227KvKFYN8&ab_channel=RT).
We get an inkling of one of Hill’s motivations, when she turns to her support for Clinton and Navalnyi (who wants to remove Putin from power and is thought by many Russians, including many pro-republicans, to be no less authoritarian than Putin). It is true, as she writes, that “Putin must intimidate, marginalize, defuse, or defeat any opposition to his rule. Anyone who might stand in his way must be crushed.” But the same has been somewhat true of Obama and Biden more smoothly and Hillary Clinton more abrasively, and in Clinton’s case certainly to a degree unprecedented and far outstripping Richard Nixon or any other high-ranking American politician and presidential hopeful. A key root of Hill’s consternation with Trump is likely his defeat of the prospective first female president. Her defeat, after all, paved the way for more repression of women in America, like, for example, Ms. Hill slaving away in the U.S. White House. For Putin, according to Hill, “the jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny and Clinton fall into the same category. In Putin’s view, if Clinton had become U.S. president, she would have continued to hound him and hold him to task, just as she did when she served as secretary of state in the Obama administration, by promoting democracy and civil society to root out corruption in Russia.” I guess Hillary makes at least one U.S. policymaker not ‘wishing that Russia would go away.’
Policymakers like Hill would be better advised to promote democracy (read ‘republican government’, there are no democracies with direct rule) and civil society (by de-demonizing their Republican ‘enemies’) and fight corruption at home. Regarding Russia, a strong defense of the national interest, not that of international bureaucracies and movements like NATO no less those such as the UN, George Soros, the Great Reset, and the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and the Green Deal. Despite Russia’s authoritarianism we can cut deals on policies in our national interest and avoid conflict by recognizing that Putin represents a strong strain in Russian politics and political culture and that he is not out to destroy the U.S., restore the USSR, or conquer Europe. His attempts to intervene in U.S. politics pale in significance to American efforts to do the same in Russia.
Hill’s ‘Misreading’ of America
For it is American political culture that Hill and other ‘policymakers’ need to ‘promote’ or at least stop destroying first. The DP has degraded that culture to such an extent that is almost completely lost and it is not just with Obama’s imperial presidency. (I will exclude the DP’s pocket teachers unions’ rejection of teaching the Constitution for some four decades and ideologues like Obama denigrating the constitution as a document of ‘negative rights’ and recently the Biden administration placing a warning on the U.S. Constitution, Declaration of Independence and other of America’s founding documents as “harmful or difficult” for some to view, as they represent “outdated, biased, offensive, and possibly violent views and opinions,” see http://www.theblaze.com/news/harmful-content-warning-constitution-declaration-national-archives). The degradation of American culture and political culture was inspired from the top, among the policymaking elite, the swamp, starting with those very same Clintons, whom Fiona prefers to the relatively benign Trump because they would ‘hound’ and ‘hold to task’ Putin. This the same Clinton tandem responsible for: Whitewater and other political corruption; Bill and Monica Lewinsky’s perversity in the Oval Office; Hillary’s claims of a “right-wing conspiracy” against her husband for the very accurate accusation of that perversity; the feminist and freedom fighter Hillary’s forming a dirt-digging team to undermine the numerous charges of rape and sexual harassment against Hillary husband, such as Bill’s sexual assault/attempted rape of Kathleen Willie (Me Too!); Hillary’s illegal use of a home server for processing top secret documents; Hillary’s connivance with the DNC to rig the DP nomination election in her favor against Bernie Sanders; Hillary’s concoction of the story that Trump-Alfa-Putin secret server and the Steele dossier, introducing into American culture another perverted story of Trump, prostitutes, and ‘golden showers’; and much, much else. These crimes do not bother Hill.
Let’s take the details of one Clinton-Obama-Biden crime. The aforementioned Sussman indictment states that in or around April 2016, Hillary’s DNC “retained Sussmann to represent it in connection with the hacking of its email servers by the Russian government. In connection with his representation of the DNC as the victim of the hack, the defendant met and communicated regularly with the FBI, the DOJ, and other U.S. government agencies. In or around the same time period, Sussmann was also advising the Clinton Campaign in connection with cybersecurity issues” (www.washingtonpost.com/context/u-s-v-michael-sussman-indictment/ae5ef5ba-6576-4190-a340-9cc854d08f23/). Around 30 April 2016 the very same Sussman hired the cybersecurity company Crowdstrike headed by Dmitrii Alperovitch and former FBI official Shawn Henry to investigate the purported hack of the DNC’s email server. In May DNC operative and Ukrainian nationalist Ali Chalupa informed the DNC of impending interesting developments she was working on with regard to Trump. In mid-June CrowdStrike announced discovering Russian malware on the DNC’s server. The next day, self-described Romanian hacker Guccifer 2.0 said he hacked the DNC and gave the documents to WikiLeaks. He soon posted online some DNC computer files that contained metadata that indicated Russian involvement in the hack. Guccifer 2.0’s actual existence or identity has never been disclosed and no U.S. government effort to find him/her has ever been touted or described. The Russian hack story begins to follow the same pattern of the Trump-Alfa-Kremlin server story: Sussman gets involved with an entity, and suddenly there appears ‘evidence’ of alleged Russia activity in support of Trump. On 5 July 2016, FBI Director Comey publicly exonerated Hillary of any criminal wrongdoing when she stored on and communicated highly sensitive and classified information with her private email server. Seventeen days later and days before the DP national convention, thousands of DNC emails were published on WikiLeaks demonstrating Hillary campaign-DNC collusion to promote Clinton’s candidacy against that of Bernie Sanders.
As investigative journalist George Parry has put things together, six days later, on 28 July CIA Director John Brennan informed then-President Obama on Hillary’s plan to frame Trump as a Russia colluder as “a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server” ahead of the upcoming presidential election. Brennan’s notes (which were not declassified until 2020) read in part: “We’re getting additional insight into Russian activities from [REDACTED]…CITE [summarizing] alleged approved by Hillary Clinton a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service.” Six weeks later, on 7 September, U.S. intelligence officials submitted an “investigative referral” to FBI Director Comey on Hillary for her “plan concerning U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections” in order to distract the public from her server scandal (https://spectator.org/john-durham-and-the-mysterious-dnc-email-hack/ and https://www.foxnews.com/politics/dni-brennan-notes-cia-memo-clinton). Comey ignored the referral and in a 2020 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing denied remembering the submission of any such referral to his office! (www.foxnews.com/politics/dni-brennan-notes-cia-memo-clinton).
Meanwhile, the FBI attempted to investigate the alleged Russian hack of the DNC server but handed the investigation over to the complainant. This is like handing over the investigation of a alleged crime to a victim with a record of making false allegations. When the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI learned of the alleged hacking, it moved to examine the server, but the DNC refused and instead hired Sussman-recruited Crowdstrike to carry it out. No U.S. law enforcement or intelligence agency attempted against to gain access to the DNC server. The FBI — the same one that was exonerating Hillary’s illegal use of a home server for handling top secret documents — relied exclusively on Crowdstrike’s report, which was essentially a DNC report. Parry properly asks: “Why would the DNC, the purported victim of a crime, refuse to fully cooperate with law enforcement in solving that crime? Was it hiding something? Was it afraid the server’s contents would discredit the Russia-hacking story? Why, instead of full and complete cooperation with the FBI, was the DNC having CrowdStrike and Perkins Coie run the investigation and, in effect, filter and control the flow of information regarding the server’s contents to the FBI?” He notes the investigation I have cited elsewhere carried out by Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), an organization of former CIA, FBI, National Security Agency, and military intelligence officers, technical experts, and analysts, including William Binney, a former NSA technical director and cofounder of the NSA’s Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center; Edward Loomis, former NSA technical director for the Office of Signals Processing; and Skip Folden, a former IBM information technology manager. Their research concluded the DNC server data had been downloaded on a thumb drive on location at the DNC and not extracted by an external hacking. In addition to technical data evidence, the VIPS investigators noted that in the event of any hack, the NSA would have a data record easy to access and make public. Yet the NSA never produced any such evidence. Parry rightly asks: ‘Can this be because no hack occurred?” The investigation also concluded that the files published by Guccifer 2.0 on 16 June had been “run, via ordinary cut and paste, through a template that effectively immersed them in what could plausibly be cast as Russian fingerprints.” In other words, the files were deliberately altered to give the false impression that they were hacked by Russian agents (https://spectator.org/john-durham-and-the-mysterious-dnc-email-hack/ and www.thenation.com/article/a-new-report-raises-big-questions-about-last-years-dnc-hack/).
Oddly enough, despite the reliance of the DP on Steele and his doctored ‘dossier’, the DP and its operatives in the U.S. government and media have ignored an interesting admission by Steele, the former intel (MI6) agent from Hill’s former homeland and her long-time acquaintance. A 5 March 2018 New Yorker profile of Steele revealed that, on July 26, 2016 (four days after WikiLeaks published the DNC emails), “Steele filed yet another memo” in which “Steele’s sources claimed that the [DNC] digital attack involved agents ‘within the Democratic Party structure itself’ as well as Russian émigrés in the U.S. and ‘associated offensive cyber operators.’” (Parry’s emphasis retained, https://spectator.org/john-durham-and-the-mysterious-dnc-email-hack/ and http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/12/christopher-steele-the-man-behind-the-trump-dossier). At the 5 December 2017, Counterstrike’s chief executive Shawn Henry, in addition to admitting that the cyberfirm could not conclude conclusively that the DNC server emails had been extracted from outside, that is, hacked, acknowledged that Counterstike’s contract to examine the DNC servers was not with the DNC but with none other than……….wait for it………..“Michael Sussman from Perkins Coie” (https://spectator.org/john-durham-and-the-mysterious-dnc-email-hack/ and U.S. House of Representatives Executive Committee on Intelligence Interview with Crowdstrike Executive Shawn Henry, Executive Committee, U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Intelligence, 5 December 2017, https://intelligence.house.gov/uploadedfiles/sh21.pdf). “Consequently, CrowdStrike’s findings were protected by the attorney-client privilege, an argument raised during the HPSCI (House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence) proceedings by an attorney from Perkins Coie. As he explained to the HPSCI, CrowdStrike was working for Perkins Coie and was ‘performing work in order to help Perkins Coie advise the DNC on this matter.’ Therefore, it was up to Perkins Coie and the DNC to decide what information CrowdStrike would be allowed to share with the HPSCI” (https://spectator.org/john-durham-and-the-mysterious-dnc-email-hack/). More clues the ‘Russia hack’ may come when the name of the cybersecurity company and chief executive left unidentified in the Sussman indictment are revealed at trial or beforehand. The obvious question is: Are the noted unidentifieds Crowdstrike and/or former FBI official Shawn Henry or Dmitrii Alperovitch?
There is a sense that perhaps Hill’s motivation is rooted in Hillary and the inverted hierarchy of values promoted by the swamp here. This is an odd reversal of foreign affairs issues being deployed and twisted for domestic political battles. Hill is ready to excuse any criminal and immoral Clinton and DP activity for the sake of ‘hounding’ and ‘holding to rask’ Putin and Russia. Or is this a continuation of the abuse of foreign policy for the sake of domestic politics, with the hounding of Putin serving as a cover for the base A team v. B team, any means to serve my team politics that has seized America’s elite and populace?
In contrast to Hill’s supposed expectations of rule of law as expressed by her critique of Trump, we see no such expectations regarding her Hillary. This at a minimum is a consequence of bias. At a maximum it could be a sign of something far worse – and one hopes this is not the case – a manifestation of Hill’s own possible involvement in these DP nefarious affairs, a coup d’ etat by any other name: an attempt to seize power in violation of the constitution and law. In this regard, it is worth noting again that ‘Source No. 1’ for the Steele dossier was Hill’s research assistant and co-author and that Hill was a long-time acquaintance with Steele and introduced Danchenko to him. Again, one hopes that Hill was not involved in generating the Obama-Clinton-Biden coup’s false dossier and seemingly equally fake Russia hacking claim.
If Hill gets Trump and Putin wrong, she also gets Biden wrong or more likely is laying the same A Team v. B Team game she plays with Hillary. Thus, must save America from Putin’s “political interference campaigns,” by fixing America’s problems. He must “shore up American democracy, tackle inequality and racism, and lead the country out of a period of intense division.” But the divisiveness has been the work of her party. When George Bush Jr too the presidency, he did so prepared to work with the Democrats, but within months of 9/11 he was being treated by a war criminal by the opposition party: ‘No war for oil’, ‘Bush lied, people died.’ No connection is made by analysts between the false premises for the Iraqi war and the reaction of great powers like Russia to Washington’s hubris. Is it divisive, Ms. Hill, to attempt to slander a presidential candidate or block a president’s inauguration through the propagation of a falsified ‘dossier’? The Steele dossier and other false DP propaganda was spread across platforms like Facebook and Twitter and Trump and other conservatives have been censored on them now for years. But the threat is Putin, according to Hill: “Putin has weaponized this technology against the United States, taking advantage of the ways that social media undermines social cohesion and erodes Americans’ sense of a shared purpose. Policymakers should step up their cooperation with the private sector in order to cast light on and deter Russian intelligence operations and other efforts to exploit social media platforms.” It was precisely the ‘cooperation’ of ‘policymakers’ with the actually not-so ‘private sector’, deeply penetrated by DP-loyal, former law enforcement personnel, that is driving America’s polarization, not the small number of trolls deployed by Putin (see the links pertaining to the Sussman indictment cited earlier).
Hill then proposes continuing to move in the same cultural Marxist direction that means the end of republican governance and free markets in the U.S.. Not just polarization but inequality must be fixed by a government that tells women and minorities that America is structurally racist and misogynist. A Biden government that fosters racist, anti-white critical race theory, positing that all whites are genetically racist, cannot fix inequality, corruption, and polarization through education. Such an education will raise, not lower barriers between societal sub-groups. Micro-aggressions and minor slights (such as men walking out of a White House meeting supposedly when a woman speaks) chalked up to institutional racism surely divide rather than heal, especially when they are spun out of all reality and lead to job loss, expulsion from university, and loss of reputation. I have never heard Ms. Hill or any Democrat condemn the anti-white, anti-male bigotry in our universities or speak up for professors being fired for refusing to privilege minority students. But why would they? This is what they call ‘equality’ and ‘democracy’.
Hill then recommends avoiding any attempt “to mobilize Americans around the idea of a common enemy, such as China.” But did Ms. Hill ever speak out against Americans’ demonization of Russians mobilized by Obama, Hillary, and Biden? Thus, “Biden should rally them in support of the democratic U.S. allies that Trump spurned and derided.” Does Hill have any comment on Biden’s throwing ‘democratic’ Ukraine under the bus by ending U.S. threats to sanction Europe over the North Stream 2? Or the appointment of Victoria ‘f*** the EU’ Nuland? Finally, she recommends “a new transatlantic agenda on the mutual fight against populism at home and authoritarianism abroad through economic rebuilding and democratic renewal.” If there is to be a fight against populism and authoritarianism, then let it begin with a re-democratic renewal of the DP and much of the corrupt system at home. Ms. Hill is already seeing the fundamental rebuilding of America as envisioned by Biden succeeding Obama: reverse racism and outlandish charges of a institutionalized ‘white supremacist’ order; purges of conservatives in all walks of life under the Woke ‘cancel culture’; record-breaking inflation; collapse of the supply chain; minimal job growth; draconian, politicized, and economy- and middle class-busting COVID restrictions, bankrupting debt increases, an invited invasion of illegal immigrants let loose into society without vaccinations while vaccine-less Americans are demonized and punished by the president. For the American people, it is Biden’s victory that is strange.
Finally, of interest is Hill’s mirror-imaging the Russian penchant to pursue unity. Hill tells us that the “critical data point” “highlights the fact that a successful U.S. policy approach to Russia will rest in part on denying Putin and Russian operatives the possibility to exploit divisions in American society.” And so perhaps, Hill is right in saying that Russia and the U.S. are more similar than we have thought. The need to deny, as Hill proposes, ‘the possibility to exploit divisions in society’, you can be sure, is something that has been emphasized hundreds, if not thousands of times by authoritarian leaders, including autocratic leaders of Imperial Russia, USSR, and now post-Soviet Russia when meeting with their closest associates and advisors. If Washington’s revolution from above initiated with the Obama-Clinton-Biden coup continues to authoritarianize the American state and society, the call to unity and for the need to quarantine dissident voices will grow inside and outside the corridors of power. In politics the U.S. will indeed become more like Russia, and many, many more will join Trump as accused ‘colluders with the Kremlin,’ white supremacists, fifth columnists, and the like — a strange ‘Kremlin victory’ indeed.
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FORTHCOMING FROM MCFARLAND PUBLISHERS IN 2021
About the Author – Gordon M. Hahn, Ph.D., is an Expert Analyst at Corr Analytics, http://www.canalyt.com and a Senior Researcher at the Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS), Akribis Group, www.cetisresearch.org. Dr. Hahn is the author of The Russian Dilemma: Security, Vigilance, and Relations with the West from Ivan III to Putin (McFarland, forthcoming in 2021), Ukraine Over the Edge: Russia, the West, and the “New Cold War” (McFarland, 2018), The Caucasus Emirate Mujahedin: Global Jihadism in Russia’s North Caucasus and Beyond (McFarland, 2014), Russia’s Islamic Threat (Yale University Press, 2007), and Russia’s Revolution From Above: Reform, Transition and Revolution in the Fall of the Soviet Communist Regime, 1985-2000 (Transaction, 2002). He also has published numerous think tank reports, academic articles, analyses, and commentaries in both English and Russian language media.
Dr. Hahn also has taught at Boston, American, Stanford, San Jose State, and San Francisco State Universities and as a Fulbright Scholar at Saint Petersburg State University, Russia and has been a senior associate and visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Kennan Institute in Washington DC, and the Hoover Institution.