The US power establishment’s confrontation with Russia is too important to be left to the whims of facts and evidence. The sprawling plutocratic power structure that is loosely centralized in the United States has been on a collision course with both Russia and China for a long while now and it needs to move its chess pieces into place. This conflict is about nothing other than power, money and resources, and you can’t persuade 320 million heavily-armed Americans to consent to a potentially world-ending conflict by telling them it’s about making plutocrats richer and more powerful.

So they lie. Among the many, many lies that America’s unelected power establishment advances on a daily basis, they are saying that the heightened tensions with the world’s only other nuclear superpower are about protecting America’s democracy. The allied plutocrats who own America’s elected officials and the rest of the secretive second government which manipulates US and international affairs have been hard at work lulling Americans back into the illusion that they live in a democracy with one hand while manufacturing support for military escalations with the other.

A pleasure to host #SecDef James Mattis at Amazon HQ in Seattle today pic.twitter.com/JnQZoSOnFN — Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) August 10, 2017

Though it’s unclear how much its officials know, the Democratic National Committee has played an important, willing role in all this. They disgraced themselves when they were caught rigging the party primary whose fairness they were singularly responsible for ensuring, possibly while involved in some highly illegal activities, so they’ve got every motive imaginable to try and shift the blame someplace else. Collaborating with the intelligence community to lie to the American people about Russia is a perfect way to do that.

It makes perfect sense, then, that when the left-leaning outlet The Nation brought the explosive findings of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity into the public spotlight with a lucid and thorough article, the DNC would want to push back on it. The findings both decimate the Russian hacking narrative and possibly implicate the DNC in colluding to frame Russia for what was almost certainly an insider leak, so some statement from the Committee was to be expected. I don’t think, though, that anybody expected its response to be quite so empty and vapid as the letter they ended up sending to The Nation’s editors:

The US intelligence community has an extensive history of lying to the American people to advance its own agendas. This is not a conspiracy theory, this is a well-documented fact, and anyone who says otherwise is either ignorant or dishonest. And yet, of the 54 words in the DNC’s response to The Nation, four of them reference “conspiracy theory.”

It reminds me of former acting DNC Chairwoman Donna Brazile repeating the phrase “we have ample evidence” for the Russian hacking no less than three times back-to-back like a gibbering lunatic, as though saying something more than once in quick succession compels the listener to accept it as truth:

Let me give that a try, just in case it works:

It is the US intelligence community’s job to lie to you.

It is the US intelligence community’s job to lie to you.

It is the US intelligence community’s job to lie to you.

The US intelligence community lies repeatedly and continually. Even when not trying to lie, they are often wrong. These are just facts. — Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 5, 2017

We clear on that? Nobody gets to bully us into accepting the US intelligence community’s assertions as true, least of all the Committee that just got done violating its own Charter and actively sabotaging the will of the American people. Nobody gets to tell us that anyone who questions the same intelligence community who lied to us about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is a conspiracy theorist or a Trump supporter. Nobody gets to shame us for disbelieving known liars and manipulators. That is not a thing.

Never let anyone shout you down for expressing healthy skepticism about the US intelligence community’s claims. They forever forfeited their right to do that when they deceived the entire world into allowing the unforgivable Iraq invasion which slaughtered a million human beings and plunged the region into chaos, and they are now entitled to nothing other than a planet-sized grain of salt being placed atop everything they try to serve us. The “17 intelligence agencies agree” narrative once universally accepted as unquestionable Russiagate dogma became three agencies plus the ODNI, which turned out to actually be a couple dozen loyalists hand-selected by known Russophobic racist James Clapper, and now the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity have released some extremely damning evidence that absolutely must be addressed by the establishment which has been advancing the official Russia narrative.

Related Reading: Pundits And Politicians Are Tacitly Admitting That They Lied About Russia

Day 2: I’m sharing this article every day until it gets a response from the intelligence community. #HackingHoaxhttps://t.co/4sd55rnT89 — Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) August 11, 2017

Keep pushing.