Foreign Government Lobbying is an Abomination and Should Be Eradicated Immediately – Part 1

If you don't think that the endgame to all of this lunacy is a world where every America-critical movement from Black Lives Matter to Our Revolution to the Green Party is ultimately swept up in the collusion narrative along with Donald Trump and his alt-right minions, you haven't been paying attention.
That's because #Russiagate, from the start, was framed as an indictment not just of one potentially traitorous Trump, but all alternative politics in general. The story has evolved to seem less like a single focused investigation and more like the broad institutional response to a spate of shocking election results, targeting the beliefs of discontented Americans across the political spectrum.
- Matt Taibbi in RollingStoneThe New Blacklist
If we lived in a somewhat sane civilization, the all encompassing mass media obsession with the intel agency narrative that Russian meddling in the 2016 election (and apparently every other non-establishment American political movement) represents a serious threat to democracy, journalists and thought leaders might take a step back and look at the overall nefarious influence of foreign money throughout our incredibly corrupt society. But since we don't live in a sane civilization, we'll just continue to scapegoat Russia for everything while letting predatory homegrown oligarchs and their political couriers off the hook. After all, that seems to be the point.
I for one will not allow this nonsense to proceed without strenuous objection. It's ridiculous to the point of comical that we're turning a Russian troll farm spending $100,000 on clownish Facebook ads (like the one below) into a national security issue, while the Trump and Clinton campaigns spent a combined $81 million on Facebook ads. Moreover, 56% of the so-called sophisticated Russian ads were run after the election was over. We're being told with a straight face that a Russian troll farm helped swing the U.S. election by spending a grand total of $44,000 on ridiculous Facebook memes.
continue reading