is a Serbian-American journalist, blogger and translator, who wrote a regular column for Antiwar.com from 2000 to 2015, and is now senior writer at RT. Follow him on Twitter @NebojsaMalic

is a Serbian-American journalist, blogger and translator, who wrote a regular column for Antiwar.com from 2000 to 2015, and is now senior writer at RT. Follow him on Twitter @NebojsaMalic

Partisan hacks in both media and entertainment have forced even the Force to become political. But after the new and woke ‘Star Wars’ films underperformed with American moviegoers, the activists blamed – who else – Russia!

The latest – and perhaps the last – installment in the saga, ‘The Rise of Skywalker,’ premiered the weekend before Christmas. While the box office receipts have reportedly been anemic, Rotten Tomatoes review averages show that the audience liked it as much as 2015’s ‘The Force Awakens.’ By contrast, critics hated it – almost as much as moviegoers hated 2017’s ‘The Last Jedi,’ which was beloved by critics and activists alike.

Also on rt.com Dear Media: The new ‘Star Wars’ trilogy is garbage, and your endless fawning ‘rankings’ can’t change that

That clearly cannot stand, according to one Annalee Newitz, whose tirade about ‘Star Wars’ was published in the New York Times on Christmas eve. The best she can say about ‘Skywalker’ is that it’s the Joe Biden of ‘Star Wars’ movies, managing to “deliver a few liberal-sounding messages,” while the previous two movies were like Barack Obama, and “gave fans truly diverse casts and grappled in a relatively nuanced way with the class and race conflicts that have hovered at the margins of every ‘Star Wars’ story.”

Then she pulls the trump card – or rather, a Hillary: a “recent study” (sic), says Newitz, showed that “over 50 percent” of anger directed at director of ‘The Last Jedi’ on Twitter “came from the same sources as Russian election meddling.”

You: Stop looking for politics in Star Wars. Me: Episode IX kneecapped a woman of color to appease Russian bots. https://t.co/jCoJMiH5g2pic.twitter.com/ZunUvzbh2C — Seth Masket (@smotus) December 26, 2019

“So it seems that it was political operatives, not fans, who were denigrating the movie and fomenting some of the virulent racism and misogyny against its cast,” Newitz concludes triumphantly.

Not surprisingly, just like every other ‘Russiagate’ conspiracy, this too is bunk. Even before the study – by one Morten Bay, a researcher at the University of Southern California – was published in November 2018, CNet had unmasked the reporting about it as fake news.

Simply put, Bay had looked at Rian Johnson’s twitter account and handpicked 967 tweets using methodologies put forth by various “Russian troll hunters.” Then he subjectively decided whether those tweets were negative, positive or neutral, coming up with 206. Of those, 61 belonged to real people alleged to have a political agenda, 11 he declared to be bots, and 33 trolls – amounting to 105, and therefore “more than half.” Clever, isn’t it?

Never mind that only 16 of the 33 “trolls” supposedly had “characteristics consistent with” Russians, as determined by Palpatine-knows-who.

Also on rt.com The only ‘Russian bots’ to meddle in US elections belonged to Democrat-linked ‘experts’

Likewise, never mind that the entire field of “troll hunting” should have been conclusively discredited last December, when the very same paper that published Newitz’s tirade revealed the existence of actual “Russian” bots as the handiwork of a Democrat-tied outfit – and one that was later entrusted by the Senate to write a report on “Russian meddling,” no less!

According to these revelations, a company called New Knowledge had literally meddled in the 2017 special election for the US Senate in Alabama, creating a thousand fake Twitter accounts with Russian names and having them follow the Republican candidate in an elaborate “false flag” operation, amplified by friendly news outlets and the notorious Hamilton 68 dashboard.

No one really got punished for this. New Knowledge – since rebranded as Yonder – is still being treated as an authority by “Russiagate” truthers.

The blue ticks of America have lost the ability to understand or describe the world around them. They turn to elaborate and frankly insane conspiracy theories to help try to make sense of what is happening around them. pic.twitter.com/dQ7pZNd6xh — Stacy Herbert (@stacyherbert) December 26, 2019

Being a Russiagater means never letting facts get in the way of the Narrative – which, in this case, is that Johnson’s ‘Last Jedi’ was the best of them. Which in turn means that JJ Abrams trying to undo the monumental narrative mess that his predecessor had made must amount to racism, sexism, misogyny and general Badthink. The way things are going, it may be just a matter of time before someone accuses him of secretly colluding with the Kremlin!

It is not “Russians” or the “alt-right” phantom menace that made everything in the West political, however, but rather the horde of self-appointed social justice warriors, who seek to inject their Message literally everywhere. Since Newitz argues that ‘Star Wars’ is the “new national mythos” of America, obviously that makes it a perfect vessel.

At the end of the day, however, the American moviegoing public thinks otherwise, and no amount of name-calling or crying ‘RUSSIA’ will change that.