Nearing the two year mark since the shocking 2016 presidential election result devastated both the Democratic and Republican Party power structures, liberal mainstream media journalists are still stuck in the denial stage of the Kübler-Ross model of grief.
They were so certain Hillary Clinton would win, the election result they expected was so cemented into their minds as an immutable reality before the election had even taken place that they could not let go of the perfect world they had created in their imagination, even after the electorate knocked down their castle in the sky.
Because they were so sure she was going to win, Hillary Clinton couldn't have really lost. All too ironically, they turned for solace to the line Donald Trump was feeding to his followers to embrace in anticipation of defeat ahead of the November election:
The election must have been rigged!
So on and on the Democratic Party and its supporters in the media have gone about Russian interference in the 2016 election, an interpretation that it now appears will never abate for the fiercest of Democratic partisans.
Admitting the DNC rigged the election against itself by ignoring independent voters and aggressively quelling the nearly successful primary challenge by an independent candidate, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, is out of the question.
The #TreasonSummit!
The Helsinki summit between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin has been styled "the Treason Summit" by hordes of liberal social media activists, following the lead of the New York Times, which ran an op-ed Sunday, entitled "Trump, Treasonous Traitor: The president fails to protect the country from an ongoing attack."
The article, by New York Times columnist, Charles M. Blow, begins by establishing the fact of Russian interference in the election as an indisputable conclusion of the U.S. intelligence community, and pointing out that, "it was not only the spreading of inflammatory fake news over social media," before referencing a May 2018 Senate Intelligence Committee report:
"In 2016, cyber actors affiliated with the Russian Government conducted an unprecedented, coordinated cyber campaign against state election infrastructure. Russian actors scanned databases for vulnerabilities, attempted intrusions, and in a small number of cases successfully penetrated a voter registration database. This activity was part of a larger campaign to prepare to undermine confidence in the voting process."
Blow is counting on his busy or lazy readers not to click the link to the report to read the very next line that he chose not to share:
"The Committee has not seen any evidence that vote tallies were manipulated or that voter registration information was deleted or modified."
That part doesn't play into his spin, so he chopped it off. At America's future former newspaper of record.
Misleading partisan journalism at its finest.
There's no doubt that Russian intelligence did their job by gathering as much intel on the U.S. election as they could, and probing digital infrastructure for weaknesses.
It's no newsflash that governments spy on each other. That's something every government's intelligence agencies do. That's something the United States' official allies like Israel (which perennially interferes in U.S. elections) and the U.K. do. The U.S. does it too. In 2013, leaked documents revealed the NSA had wiretapped German Chancellor Angela Merkel's phone and were spying on a number of German officials and journalists.
That doesn't stop these ostensible allies from engaging in diplomacy and international summits, and no one accuses the president or State Department of treason for meeting with them. This is a hysterically partisan attack, and it's not about America's national security, and it's not about Russia.
It's about the unwillingness or inability of American liberals in the press to admit that Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election to Donald Trump fair and square.
Russian Fake News
The hysteria over Russian fake news having an impact on the 2016 election is practically fake news itself. Last Fall CNN's Dylan Byers breathlessly reported that, "Facebook estimates 126 million people were served content from Russia-linked pages."
That's such a big number, that it appears as if Russia significantly interfered in the U.S. election with an information campaign on Facebook. But when you dig into the article, past the point where the average person stops reading, you discover how fake it is:
"Facebook does not know, however, how many of those 126 million people actually saw one of those posts, or how many may have scrolled past it or simply not logged in on the day that one of the posts was being served in their News Feed."
It gets even better:
"'This equals about four-thousandths of one percent (0.004%) of content in News Feed, or approximately 1 out of 23,000 pieces of content,' Stretch writes. 'Put another way, if each of these posts were a commercial on television, you'd have to watch more than 600 hours of television to see something from the IRA.'"
Not nearly as alarming, is it?
Independent Voters
The truth is– notwithstanding partisan journalists everywhere twisting themselves and the truth into pretzels to blame Trump on Vladimir Putin– that Donald Trump did not win the election– Hillary Clinton lost it by failing to appeal to independent voters. If that's a lesson the DNC and its partisan acolytes in the press refuse to learn, the electorate will teach them again in 2018 and 2020.
Independent voters weren't swayed by Russian clickbait mills. They saw in Hillary Clinton everything they find disconcerting about the establishment and its partisan power structures.
They saw in Donald Trump, an independent, outside-the-beltway candidate, an opportunity to challenge both the Republican and Democratic establishments by electing someone the establishment didn't anoint.
That isn't my opinion. That is an absolute fact, borne out by the exit polls on that fateful November Tuesday. I recommend that journalists worth their salt go back and read IVN's report on the election results by party affiliation (or lack thereof) by Breton Peace and Shawn Griffiths the Wednesday after.
In all three critical swing states, partisan voters voted for their party, and independent voters swung toward Trump. These independent voters are patriots that care more about their country than they care about their party.
And I bet almost none of them speak a lick of Russian.
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This article first appeared on the Independent Voter Network.
I'm the author and have reprinted it on The Humble Libertarian with permission from the publisher.
Click here for more of IVN's Independent Thought Alarm.
