I think I’ve finally got it figured out now.

As we all know, nobody actually wants Hillary Clinton to keep talking. Nobody, if they’re really honest with themselves, wants her to keep coming back, smearing Bernie Sanders, shitting on progressives, and blaming every living vertebrate not named Hillary Rodham Clinton for her loss in the 2016 election. Even her most ardent supporters are secretly wishing she’d just shut the fuck up and go away at this point so they could stop cleaning up after her and working overtime to spin her bullshit into something vaguely positive.

So why doesn’t she? Why does she keep coming back in, doing interviews, attacking the left, embarrassing her supporters and relitigating a primary election she’d do well to let the world forget? I think I know why.

I’ve seen some theories as folks try to answer this burning question for themselves (she’s gearing up for a 2020 run, she’s trying to sell books, she’s bat shit psycho, etc.), but none of those have really added up for me. I think Hillary keeps coming back because she needs to.

Hillary needs to keep coming back trying to convince everyone that President Trump isn’t her fault because her media goons convinced her supporters that President Trump would cause the end of the world. The fearmongering targeted at the left was relentless and brutal in the leadup to the November 8 election, and as a Jill Stein supporter I was told on a daily basis that I was helping to inflict armageddon upon America. I was told that if Trump won, Muslims would be rounded up and thrown into internment camps, marauding bands of brownshirts would be patrolling the streets slaughtering minorities with impunity, 11 million immigrants would be mass-deported, and Trump’s insanity would get us into a nuclear war.

People didn’t get these ideas in their heads out of nowhere, they got them because every time Trump said something asinine the entire mass media machine would ring frantic alarm bells about it for days and extrapolate every single thing he said into its most horrifying possible interpretation and implications. Liberals are still to this day suffering from Trump derangement syndrome because they were told over and over again that hell on earth would be unleashed if Trump won, and then he won.

In opting for this risky gamble of telling Democrats that something uniquely horrible would happen if Trump won, and then losing, Hillary Clinton was forced into a position where she had to either (A) tell America that everything was going to be okay, thereby admitting that much of what her people had been saying about Trump was a lie, or (B) let the fear persist and try to avoid getting blamed for it. She opted for B.

Since Clinton and her cronies have opted to continue advancing the narrative that Trump is going to destroy everything, her entire objective now is to convince everyone that that isn’t her fault. Nobody wants to go down as the woman who helped cause the end of the world, even if that bizarre reality tunnel only exists in the realm of propaganda. She’s keeping everyone locked in that fear, and she wants to make sure that everyone sees Bernie Sanders, James Comey, Russia, WikiLeaks, progressives, the media, the DNC, Barack Obama and everyone else under the sun as the ones who are responsible for that fear, not her.

Clinton ran for president for the same reason Trump ran for president: ego. She wanted to attain the ultimate political trophy because of the way that attainment itself would make her feel. In terms of ego candy, being the woman who helped destroy the world is the polar opposite of becoming the first female president, so she’s trying to avoid it at all cost. She can’t stop coming back in and trying to manipulate the way people see the 2016 election until she’s convinced that the damage she did to her legacy has been indelibly blamed on other people. Until then, she’s going to have to keep trying to influence public sentiment.

America was spoonfed a boatload of lies in order to force the election of what the US oligarchs perceived as a more reliable pro-establishment candidate to protect their assets. Anyone who’s looking at the situation clearly can see that Trump isn’t extremely awful because of the few ways he’s differed from other recent presidents, he’s extremely awful because of the things he’s got in common with them. By far the most evil things that he has done haven’t been new horrors unique to his administration, but continuations of Bush and Obama’s neoconservative civilian-slaughtering foreign policy, oppressive neoliberal domestic policy, and Orwellian surveillance policy. After all the fearmongering and freakouts, we’ve seen conclusively that Trump is essentially a Republican Obama, who was himself essentially a Democratic George W. Bush. If anything, Trump is just more personally obnoxious about doing the things his predecessors did.

You were lied to, America. The mass media propaganda machine filled you to the gills with fear just to try and scare you into electing their prefered candidate, and they’re keeping your countrymen saturated in fear all because they painted themselves into a corner. They can’t admit that they lied, so they’re going to keep terrorizing you with irrational fear propaganda even though their plutocratic bosses ended up with a lackey in the White House who’s catering to at least 90 percent of their wishes anyway. And as long as that’s happening, Hillary’s going to keep showing up trying to make sure you don’t blame her for that fear.

This is not the first time the propagandists have used fear to try and manipulate the public, and it won’t be the last. Until we learn collectively to cease succumbing to this vile tactic and start pushing toward what we want instead of running from what we fear, our world will remain dominated by manipulative tyrants. Don’t let them scare you. Take the wheel and steer toward what you want.

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