Bill Maher, who is still a thing, would like very much for America to begin further escalations with the only other nuclear superpower on the planet. Apparently unsatisfied with the crushing sanctions, global psyops campaign, active election meddling, NATO expansionism and psychotic proxy wars the US has already been shoving forward for years, Maher says it’s time for America to start turning up the heat on Russia.

On a recent episode of whatever the fuck his show is called now, Maher began his closing segment with the words, “New rule: if Russia is going to keep attacking America, then America really should fight back.” He went on to explain what he meant by the moronic turd loaf he’d just uttered in a searingly unfunny monologue about Kremlin trolls and social media.

“The conventional wisdom,” Maher droned in his intolerable it’s-true-because-I-say-so voice, “is that in the 1980s Saint Ronald Reagan defeated the Soviet Union, you know, and then the Berlin Wall came down and everybody was friends. But what really happened was we stopped fighting the Cold War, but the Russians never did,” rewriting history so as to exclude minor details like the well-established fact that America was openly rigging Russia’s elections well into the mid-nineties.

“There is an entire building in St. Petersburg filled with a Russian troll army,” Maher continued. “Hundreds of employees of their defense department, sitting in front of computers, pretending to be Americans, and creating thousands of tweets, memes, news site comments, and flat-out fake stories designed not to take sides on any issue, but just to get us fighting about it. To create chaos, the better to elect the chaos candidate.”

The building Maher is referring to was reported on by the New York Times in 2015, back before mainstream liberals were told Russia was something they should care about. It allegedly employed about 300 internet shills, only a small fraction of which were dedicated to English-language trolling. So obviously definitely something worth starting World War Three over.

After a joke at which one polite audience member laughed where he said the Russians had turned “Facebook into Fakebook,” Maher proceeded to spend the rest of his segment down-punching on social media users everywhere, from proud parents sharing pictures of their children to concert goers and vacationers sharing their experience with friends.

And you know honestly, as unwatchable as Bill Maher’s four-minute war propaganda segment was, the most obnoxious part was that last bit. Maher speaks in a condescending, authoritative tone of voice that would be well-suited for punching up at power — which is what comedy should be used for — but he uses it to punch down instead. From proud moms on Facebook to Colin Kaepernick to Jill Stein voters and Cornel West, Maher is consistently down-punching on groups with little power or influence to shame them into falling in line with the same power establishment whose war agendas he’s been facilitating. The man uses his power, his platform, and his personal gifts to bully, to gaslight, and make humanity worse. He is a pervasively toxic person.

Sometimes people say I write about this Russia bullshit too much, but those are the same sort of people who’d be telling me to write less about Iraq in 2002 or Vietnam in the early sixties. We’re being shepherded into consenting to new cold war escalations which could easily end all life on this planet, for no purpose other than the US power establishment’s vain struggle to maintain its global dominance. We barely survived the last Cold War and betrayers of our species like Bill Maher are helping to drag us into a new one, all for a fucking paycheck. A cold war has countless little unpredictable moving parts, any one of which could go catastrophically wrong at any moment. This is something literally everyone should be talking about.

This latest gibberish about a few dozen internet trolls being grounds for even more escalations has been severely straining the limits of human stupidity, with everything from Pokemon Go to Black Lives Matter activists being implicated in the accusations. As award-winning journalist Robert Parry aptly put it, Russiagate jumped the shark with this one. A few thousand dollars in social media ads, some of which might-maybe-kinda-sorta have had something to do with the Kremlin, did not influence the 2016 election, and did not cause the tensions and divisiveness between the people of America. If you think that it did, you are stupid.

And now, here we are. The US Air Force is preparing to place nuclear bombers on 24-hour alert, something that has not happened since the Cold War ended in 1991.

Or I guess we should start saying the first Cold War now.

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