Editor’s note: Breaking views are thoughts from individual members of the editorial board on today’s headlines.

As much as it seems to pain mainstream Democrats, Donald Trump didn’t win the presidency because of a vast Russian conspiracy.

He won because, for one, his message of protectionism and economic nationalism happened to appeal to many people in critical states, especially in the Rust Belt. And two, Hillary Clinton was a horrible candidate who turned off progressives.

Clinton embodied everything wrong with mainstream politics. Among other things, Hillary Clinton was just another corporate Democrat who supported the Wall Street bailouts while millions of ordinary Americans suffered, and she was a warmonger who voted for the war in Iraq and supported continued military interventionism across the planet.

Weakened by this history and revelations that the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee rigged the Democratic primary against Bernie Sanders, it’s not hard to figure out why Clinton lost and how Donald Trump pulled off the win.

But rather than work to correct this, establishment Democrats and the pundits who support them have instead latched onto the idea that Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election made a meaningful difference in the election so as to undermine the legitimacy of the Trump presidency.

They have used hysterical language in support of this claim. As journalist Glenn Greenwald has recently pointed out, there is no shortage of wild assertions by Democrats (and hawkish Republicans like John McCain) comparing Russian meddling, to whatever extent it existed, to an act of war, the Pearl Harbor attacks and the September 11 attacks. Clinton herself has referred to Russian meddling as “cyber 9/11.”

This is the language of neoconservatives and war hawks. While the presidency of Barack Obama all but silenced the anti-war movement on the left in this country, any principled liberal or progressive still committed to peace ought to reject such warmongering rhetoric.

While Americans should be bothered by Russian interference, to whatever extent it actually occurred, the continued emphasis on it absent any compelling evidence it made any significant difference in the outcome of the election only empowers those committed to perpetual war and the surveillance state.

The indictments recently announced against Russian nationals don’t really add much to what we already know. Unless there’s some major development on the way proving Trump-Russia collusion and/or that Russian efforts swayed the election in any meaningful way, we’re still far from “the Russians hacked the election” or the idea that the Russians committed an act of war against us.

With the evidence available so far, it isn’t a stretch to say that the United States did more to meddle in the 1996 Russian elections in favor of Boris Yeltsin than we know Russians did in support of Trump. And lets not pretend the United States doesn’t have a long history of election meddling around the world – including over 80 documented instances of election meddling between 1946 and 2000. Did we commit acts of war against all those countries? Against Russia?

Americans should reject those clamoring for a new Cold War. If actual evidence ever surfaces of Trump-Russian collusion or Russian meddling efforts with significant outcomes, we should talk about it then. But for now, we’d all be better off talking about issues of greater substance and significance.

Sal Rodriguez is an editorial writer and columnist for the Southern California News Group. He may be reached at salrodriguez@scng.com