Last November, I wrote a piece on how media networks routinely normalize Donald Trump’s propaganda — from news channels that gave Donald $2 billion of free coverage during the 2016 election, to vetted tech bros who profit from Trump’s brain farts while allowing the child-president to threaten countries with nuclear war, because of the “newsworthiness” of his tweets.

Since then, the factors that led to the biggest upset in U.S. political history have become even more pronounced. While liberal media and the so-called “Resistance” movement are still trying to figure out their game plan, Donald continues to woo key demographic groups, exploit mainstream media, and dominate Democrats when it comes to digital ad spending. The Trump 2020 campaign has already spent $4.5 million on Facebook and Google ads; according to Axios, that’s twice as much as all the Democrats who are running against him combined.

To make a long story short, for the past two years the liberal establishment has used “Russia” as a lightning rod for its own inability to attract voters. Yet, Mueller has yet to accuse a single American of collusion with Russia, and instead is nailing members of the Trump team on financial crimes.

As the Trump-Russia narrative wears off, and those who profit from it have fewer and fewer “bombshells” to obsess over, liberals will go back to what they do best — gaslighting their own base and smearing progressives.

This means The Washington Post, The New York Times, NPR, CNN, MSNBC and other experts in democracy are rallying the troops against “sexist” Bernie, “Assad-supporting, Russia-supported” Tulsi, “anti-Semitic” Ilhan, and anyone who dares to defy the bipartisan support for war, apartheid, class warfare, and environmental destruction. Nothing brings the duopoly together better than supporting coup attempts abroad, or colluding against the working class.

As Margaret Kimberly described the present moment in her weekly Freedom Rider column featured in the Black Agenda Report:

The charge that Trump colluded with the Russian government in the 2016 election has been abandoned even by the people who turned the allegation into a well paid cottage industry. The Mueller investigation has come up empty and Democrats are scrambling to keep their creation alive in order to make themselves politically relevant. They should be planning how to go about giving the people what they need and want. But Medicare for All and any other proposals that would benefit the masses are off the table for them and their corporate donors.

Trump and the right-wing propaganda machine behind him will be the obvious benefactors from Democrats’ inability to energize progressives. Right-wing personalities in the U.S. (a competitive market in itself) don’t even need to be creative about their marketing — all they need to do is use liberals’ attacks against the working class and sling them right back, but with an all-American, Koch-approved racist, xenophobic, sexist, and militarist sizzle.

Here’s how this partnership works. Democrats manufacture outrage about Rep. Ilhan Omar’s criticism of AIPAC, which enables Trump to label Democrats “anti-Jewish” and members of his team to describe Omar, the first Black Muslim woman ever elected to Congress, as “filth.” Or ex-Clinton staffers use their dwindling influence to attack Bernie Sanders for flying on planes and for having a second home, which gives Fox News material to attack Bernie and paint all Democrats as hypocrites.

By punching progressives from the left, corporate Democrats help the right-wing movement redefine the political spectrum in the U.S. and paint proposals with overwhelming public support as fringe and “far left.” This type of “bothsidesism” is a tool of the trade for Democrats who use the pretenses of bipartisanship and incrementalism to avoid action on climate devastation, student debt, stagnant wages, and other pressing issues that have nothing to do with Russia.

The Cost of Russiagate

Ever wonder why, amid all the grave concerns regarding Trump’s win, the question of dark money behind his campaign remains unexplored by mass media? Or why the 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision, which helped unleash unprecedented amounts of outside spending in U.S. elections, doesn’t get discussed much on mainstream media? It’s because the issue of money in politics doesn’t appeal to the donor class, which is another reason why Russiagate was a godsend to the U.S. oligarchy, including Trump.

In their paper on the 2016 presidential election, Thomas Ferguson, Paul Jorgensen, and Jie Chen express skepticism about the popular narrative that Russian “influence campaigns” won Trump the presidency. Instead, the political scientists highlight the growth of right-wing media empires that have blossomed through partnerships with firms “as American as apple pie”:

Large numbers of conservative websites, including many that that tolerated or actively encouraged white supremacy and contempt for immigrants, African-Americans, Hispanics, Jews, or the aspirations of women had been hard at work for years stoking up “tensions between groups already wary of one another.” Breitbart and other organizations were in fact going global, opening offices abroad and establishing contacts with like-minded groups elsewhere. Whatever the Russians were up to, they could hardly hope to add much value to the vast Made in America bombardment already underway … Some firms could add value though, but every one of them was as American as apple pie. With no publicity, the tech giants — Google, Facebook, Twitter — were all trying to muscle in on the richly rewarding arena of campaign consulting. Their aim was not to “weaponize” internet ads, in the ominous sounding term that analysts of Russian internet now throw around — their interest lay in monetizing them, just as they have restlessly tried to do in everything they engage in.

In his interview with PBS, featured in the documentary The Facebook Dilemma, Trump’s digital media director Brad Parscale explains this process in-depth, including how Trump’s team used Facebook’s “Custom Audiences” tool to microtarget the people who were most likely to show up to vote.

While the Russiagate fixation succeeded in diffusing and diverting accountability for the Democratic establishment, it also provided cover for Trump’s actual advantage — the growing alt-right networks that are running circles around Democrats’ engagement strategy.

As Democrats cannibalize their base, in collaboration with Silicon Valley and the news entertainment industry, Trump’s team of neocons is moving the U.S. closer to war, environmental destruction and, as predicted by Steve Bannon, a total “deconstruction of the administrative state.”

The cost of Russiagate, two years after the made-for-TV presidential extravaganza, is that Democrats are once again fighting on two fronts (against progressives and Trump), while Don’s team of Breitbards is planting stories and weaving plot lines that get gobbled up by the same corporate channels and personalities that claim to fight for the Left.