“I did that in my garage,” Dore added. “Those other stations didn’t do that. Not because they don’t have the resources I have. They did that ’cause they didn’t want to. They did that ’cause they weren’t interested in the truth. They did that because what they wanted to do was fuckin’ get Donald Trump so bad they were willing to turn off their critical thinking skills and just listen to their lizard brains. And they wrecked America in the process. And we stood up against it, and we got smeared for standing up against it, and we still get smeared.”

“Congratulations to everyone here, congratulations to our crew,” Dore said. “Congratulations to Ron and Steph and everybody, congratulations to Aaron Maté and Max Blumenthal and Kyle Kulinski, and whoever else got this right; it’s a small club, it’s a short list. And we took a lot of slings and arrows for it, and we’re still taking. People hate you when you out-left them. We out-lefted everybody, and we did it in the right way. And so congratulations to you guys, congratulations to myself, congratulations to this show, and thank God I didn’t try to get into journalism school but I tried to get into comedy first. Because if I was trying to get into that club, I would be just as shitty as the reporters at the Washington Post, the New York Times, MSNBC and CNN, and half the Youtubers, and we’re not. We did a much better job.”

Dore’s sentiments are being echoed around the small sphere of progressive political commentators who’ve been saying since the beginning that Russiagate was a pernicious lie advanced by secretive government agencies who’ve been plotting to shove Russia off the world stage since the fall of the Soviet Union, by the Democrats who’ve had a vested interest in avoiding accountability for their failures and malfeasance in the 2016 election, and by the mass media who’ve been reaping extreme profits by peddling the clickbait sensationalist conspiracy theory that the Kremlin has infiltrated the highest levels of the US government.

And rightly so. It is good that these alternative media figures are puffing their chests and shouting their I-told-you-sos, because you can be absolutely certain that the people who’ve been advancing the Russiagate narrative will never go out of their way to acknowledge the undeniable fact that they have been proven wrong while there were voices standing to their left getting it right. The mainstream narrative will do its very best to pace mainstream attention away from the inconvenient fact that there was abundant evidence contradicting a narrative which monopolized public energy for more than two years while manufacturing support for dangerous cold war escalations and sucking all oxygen out of the room for discussion of progressive reforms, so it is absolutely necessary for those voices who have been vindicated to make noise about it themselves.

“How’s this one looking?” asked Aaron Maté on Twitter, linking to a post he made last year correctly predicting the outcome of the Mueller investigation: “My prediction, FWIW: 0 indictments/claims of a Trump-Russia conspiracy. Mueller throws faithful a bone w/ suggestive wording like ‘questionable/suspicious/unexplained’ activity. We’re left w/ indictments unrelated to collusion/campaign, or for process crimes resulting from probe.”

“Russiagate skeptics will be vindicated as we expected to be, but those responsible for this fake neocon intrigue got a new Cold War, record defense budgets, and a McCarthyite political atmosphere to denigrate opponents of permanent war,” tweeted journalist Max Blumenthal. “A waste of energy and a setback for peace.”

“Early on, I argued with Rep. Jamie Raskin that Trump should be opposed on a principled, progressive basis – not with a phony intel intrigue cooked up by spooks and Clinton dead enders,” Blumenthal added. “Like most Dems, he went with Russiagate & wound up emboldening Trump.”

“For almost three years I’ve been lambasted every single day for ‘defending Trump’ because I rejected that there was ample evidence for a Trump/Russia global espionage conspiracy,” tweeted journalist Michael Tracey. “You know who was really ‘defending Trump’ after all? The people who promoted this nonsense.”

“I’m not gleeful – just disgusted that much of the US media spent 2 years spreading baseless (but very dangerous) conspiracy theories and mindlessly believing what their CIA, NSA and FBI sources whispered to them without seeing evidence – yet again,” tweeted journalist Glenn Greenwald.

“The Mueller news is exactly what I expected and told you would happen,” tweeted Secular Talk’s Kyle Kulinski. “But relax, centrist dems, I also predicted that when Trump is no longer POTUS he will be indicted on financial crimes, and this will also come to pass.”

Russiagate is looking like this generation’s WMD - a catastrophe for the reputation of the news media: https://t.co/mHACNsK10b — Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 23, 2019

Clear-eyed leftists got Russiagate right while everyone else got it wrong because they were the only group ideologically positioned to do so. People defending Trump on the right were doing so out of blind partisan loyalty while ignoring out of necessity what has long been the single most damning piece of evidence against Russiagate: the fact that Trump has been advancing insanely aggressive escalations against Russia and its allies, thereby showing him to be at least as much of a neocon-coddling establishment crony as his predecessors. Those advancing the narrative from the Democratic Party-aligned “center” are far too eager for any excuse to bust Trump and far too trusting of the same mass media outlets which lied us into the Iraq war. This leaves only the true left to see things with lucidity, and only the most lucid among them saw it.

For a clear-eyed leftist, it’s been an exhausting couple of years. The effort to hold on to facts and evidence while being buffeted by relentless waves of gaslighting propaganda has been tough and many have lost friends and allies on the way. These lies have created a highly toxic environment by leeching poison into the natural discourse and halting the progression of our species. Most people who got swept up in the Russiagate fervor were manipulated by their disgust for Trump and their desire to get him out, no matter if it was true or not. I think the great lesson here is that you can’t out-manipulate the grand manipulators. You have to stick to the truth even when it appears to go against your own self interests because your ego has levers and it can be used to puppet you. If you always value the highest interest over your self interest then you can’t be played. Demand evidence and keep demanding it until you get it. If you do, change your mind, if you don’t, stick to your guns. That’s the only way we’ll get out of here alive.

I am really happy to see everyone congratulating each other on social media. For those of you who think this is a little unseemly, let that go right now. Pat yourself on the back and make sure you give others props too. Make thank you lists of people who held strong and send them out on social media. Write “I told you so” posts. It’s important that we mark a line in the sand right now or else the gaslighting will continue and history will be written over. Say it loud and proud that you were right, and they were wrong. The manipulators’ efforts will now go into getting people to delay their reactions for as long as possible (“Wait until we’ve seen the report!”) while they move the goalposts (“It was always about *insert anything but Russian collusion here* for me”) and/or memory hole the whole deal by saying as little as possible and moving the news cycle as quickly as they can on to the next thing. If we all stand around being polite, they will get away with it. Don’t let them. Make this one stick.

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