Just when you thought the epic RussiaGate fantasy fiction series was nearly dead and on life-support, the British Establishment reiterate their push by recycling tried and tested media operatives.
The latest episode of the RussiaGate saga has to do with a supposed “fresh leak” of documents from data trawling and political consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica. Some 100,000 documents are said to expose its dodgy dealings in 68 countries, claiming to show ‘global electoral manipulation’ on an ‘industrial scale.’
However, despite the dramatic claims by Establishment outlets like The Guardian, a closer examination of the evidence indicates that this latest breaking ‘bombshell’ is nothing but a convenient distraction to help obscure a series of western propaganda failures of recent.
Dr Norman Lewis writes for RT International…
Carole Cadwalladr, a journalist for the Observer, the Guardian’s sister paper, whose exposure of Cambridge Analytica’s misappropriation of 87 million Facebook profiles brought the company down in 2018, is making these claims after a raft of documents from Brittany Kaiser, an ex-Cambridge Analytica employee turned whistleblower, began to appear on an anonymous Twitter account on New Year’s Day.
The leaks from the now-defunct data firm are supposedly ‘explosive.’ They contain material on elections in Malaysia, Kenya and Brazil. Apparently, they expose the inner workings of the data company and lay bare the global infrastructure of voter manipulation. The documents retrieved from Kaiser’s email accounts and hard drives, are only the start of thousands more to come. According to Kaiser, these reveal the true depth of the sinister data firm’s operation that go ‘way beyond what people think they know about ‘the Cambridge Analytica scandal.’
Well, if there is one thing we definitely do know about the Cambridge Analytica scandal, it is that there has not been one piece of evidence to show how the firm used Facebook data to manipulate voters in the Trump election or during the Brexit referendum. To this day, no one can show who was targeted. With what ads? In what locations? There is no clear picture what Cambridge Analytica did for Trump. Or what it did in any of the dozens of elections worldwide it claimed to have worked on.
As it turns out, Russiagate promoter and Integrity Initiative-linked Carole Cadwalladr is being sued for libel by prominent Brexit campaigner Aaron Banks over defamatory statements made by Cadwalladr claiming the Banks was somehow involved with the Russians in orchestrating Brexit – again, without providing any actual evidence to back-up her popular mainstream conspiracy theory. In December, a judge issued a preliminary ruling in a libel case brought by Banks against Cadwalladr. According to the complaint, she attempted to defame Banks publicly on multiple occasions by repeatedly making evidence-free statements like, “We know that the Russian government offered money to Arron Banks,” and, “And I am not even going to go into the lies that Arron Banks has told about his covert relationship with the Russian government,” and, “I say he lied about his contact with the Russian government. Because he did.”
Not surprisingly, the mainstream media establishment has showered Cadwalladr with journalism awards for her supposed ‘coverage’ of heavily amplified but still unproven Russiagate conspiracies.
If that’s not shocking enough, the British establishment have now dusted-off the world’s most discredited ‘intelligence’ operative, he of Dossier fame, Christopher Steele, to try to buttress Cadwalladr’s shaky Russia conspiracies. Steele is, if anything, resilient. Dr. Lewis adds here:
This ‘infrastructure of subversion’ on an industrial scale is a chimera of innuendo, paranoia, and wild assertions with no evidence that it manipulates anyone, that is, apart from the gullible political parties who have paid millions on the very stupid idea that voters could be manipulated to control outcomes.
But who needs facts? Certainly not someone like Christopher Steele, the ex-head of MI6’s Russia desk and the intelligence expert behind the so-called ‘Steele dossier’ into Trump’s relationship with Russia. You remember how well that went?
In a rare public intervention to comment on the leaks, he admitted without any sense of self-awareness, that he had not seen the documents and thus did not know what was in them. But he was apparently certain, as reported by Cadwalladr, that ‘these problems are likely to get worse, not better, and with crucial 2020 elections in America and elsewhere approaching, this is a very scary prospect. Something radical needs to be done about it, and fast.’
In the end, most of output emanating from members and associates of the British government-funded Integrity Initiative anti-Russian propaganda ‘clusters’ – serves to create a convenient smokescreen to help conceal any real scandals which the Establishment seem ever-desperate to deflect from, namely, that it is western state agencies who are actively meddling in others’, as well as their own elections. Lewis explains:
In the weird conspiracy-sphere, facts are unimportant; denial is proof. The more one denies a baseless claim, the more it proves there is something to hide. Case closed.
The truth is much simpler. Facebook are protecting this data precisely because if the truth were to come out – that the millions of dollars political parties spend on their platform during elections do very little to affect the outcome – this would seriously impact their business model. This is business, not politics.
Not only Facebook’s business model, but also – all of the big data guru consultants’ model too.
Upon closer examination, it quickly becomes clear that Carole Cadwalladr isn’t actually doing journalism here, but rather just cobbling together a string of heavily aired logical fallacies and mainline propaganda themes, all glued together with xenophobic fear mongering about an alleged Russian take-over of the West. Like her original Brexit thesis which appears to have been predicated on the a tenuous theory that there was a ‘unusual swing of opinion from Remain to Leave’ during the latter stage of EU referendum in 2016, claiming this was evidence that ‘Brexit advertising worked’, and that the Russians were behind it. This conspiracy theory is then underpinned by a series of amateur assumptions long since debunked by astute commentators like Craig Murray and others.
It is only because these fabricated theories from Cadwalladr and Steele help to fill in the geopolitical narrative gaps for NATO member states – that they are given top billing and unearned credence. This in itself is a sad fact which speaks to the institutional corruption of western governments and our mainstream media organisations in the 21st century.
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