So the Mueller report is finally in, and it appears that hundreds of millions of Americans have, once again, been woefully bamboozled. Weird, how this just keeps on happening. At this point, Americans have to be the most frequently woefully bamboozled people in the entire history of woeful bamboozlement. If you didn’t know better, you’d think we were all a bunch of hopelessly credulous imbeciles that you could con into believing almost anything, or that our brains had been bombarded with so much propaganda from the time we were born that we couldn’t really even think anymore.

That’s right, as I’m sure you’re aware by now, it turns out President Donald Trump, a pompous former reality TV star who can barely string three sentences together without totally losing his train of thought and barking like an elephant seal, is not, in fact, a secret agent conspiring with the Russian intelligence services to destroy the fabric of Western democracy. After two long years of bug-eyed hysteria, Inspector Mueller came up with squat. Zip. Zero. Nichts. Nada. Or, all right, he indicted a bunch of Russians that will never see the inside of a courtroom, and a few of Trump’s professional sleazebags for lying and assorted other sleazebag activities (so I guess that was worth the $25 million of taxpayers’ money that was spent on this circus).

Notwithstanding those historic accomplishments, the entire Mueller investigation now appears to have been another wild goose chase (like the “search” for those non-existent WMDs that we invaded and destabilized the Middle East and murdered hundreds of thousands of people pretending to conduct in 2003). Paranoid collusion-obsessives will continue to obsess about redactions and cover-ups, but the long and short of the matter is, there will be no perp walks for any of the Trumps. No treason tribunals. No televised hangings. No detachment of Secret Service agents marching Hillary into the White House.

The jig, as they say, is up.

But let’s try to look on the bright side, shall we? Disgraceful as this Russiagate fiasco has been, at least it was all just an honest mistake, and not any kind of plot, or conspiracy, or anything as disturbing as that. It’s not like the majority of the corporate media perpetrated a massive, coordinated, intelligence agency-initiated psyop on the Western public for two and half years. No, they just “got it wrong,” again … like they did with those Iraqi WMDs.

The corporate media, after all, are comprised of dedicated, professional journalists, who maintain the highest ethical standards, and who would never knowingly bombard the masses with hysterical McCarthyite propaganda based on absolutely nothing but the word of a bunch of deep state types who were trying to force a president out of office and delegitimize a populist backlash against the spread of global neoliberalism.

Plus, there is no “deep state.” Not really. That’s just one of those right-wing conspiracy theories that only Trump-loving fascists believe in. I mean, it’s not as if elements of the FBI, the DOJ, and the DNC paid a former MI6 spook working for a Washington PR firm contracted by a Washington law firm contracted by the Clinton campaign to fabricate a “dossier” alleging that “the Russian regime [sic] has been cultivating, supporting, and assisting Trump for at least five years” in order “to sow discord” within the Transatlantic Alliance, and then fed that fabricated dossier to their contacts in the corporate media, who used it to generate mass hysteria, which the Congress then used to justify the appointment of a special prosecutor, whose investigation of the allegations contained in the fabricated dossier the corporate media and deep state types used to generate even more mass hysteria … and so on, until hundreds of millions of people actually believed that Donald Trump was some kind of Russian intelligence asset, and was going to be impeached and tried for treason.

Now, that would be scary, if that had happened!

Another thing that (thank Christ!) didn’t happen was when the corporate media hired a bunch of ex-intelligence agency officials to appear on their “news” shows every other night disseminating Russiagate propaganda while at the same time effectively banning journalists with dissenting views from challenging their lies. Well, and OK, to the degree they did that (and they certainly did it to some degree), they didn’t do it intentionally, or knowingly, or with malice aforethought or criminal intent. They probably just misplaced the telephone numbers (and the email addresses and Twitter handles) of Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, Aaron Mate, and other infamous “collusion rejectionists,” so they had no choice but to bring in the spooks.

Look, I don’t want to beat this to death. The important thing is that we can all be grateful that none of that stuff I just mentioned happened, and, basically, just shut up and get back to work. This is not the time to remind everybody how totally insane and hysterical things got, and how they ran around like headless chickens squawking about “Russians” coming out of the woodwork, accusing anyone they disagreed with of being “Kremlin agents” or “Russian bots,” and begging corporations to censor the Internet.

No, it’s time to, you know, let bygones be bygones, and just forget about all this “Russiagate” business, and the FBI, and that made-up dossier, and how respected publications like The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Guardian, and others published completely fabricated stories about secret meetings that never took place, power grid hackings that never happened, Russia-linked servers that never existed, imaginary Russian propaganda peddlers, and … well, too many other examples to list.

Talking about all that is just a distraction (as my former colleagues on what has recently become the radical Rooskie-hunting Left wasted no time in advising everyone). Worse, it only helps Donald Trump, who, OK, maybe isn’t a Russian intelligence asset anymore, but is still almost literally Adolf Hitler … or at least some sort of inhuman monster that bears no resemblance whatsoever to Obama or any other normal president, and who is certainly going to declare martial law, proclaim himself Führer, and unleash his underground white supremacist army on us, or something more or less along those lines.

And as for the non-existent deep state, and the Democrats, and the corporate media, and the millions of Americans they accidentally bamboozled … well, I imagine they’re feeling pretty silly right now. So this is not the time to demand a full accounting from the patriots in the intelligence community, or to compare the professionals in the corporate media to the keys of an enormous Goebbelsian piano mechanically hammering out whatever tune the ruling classes decide to play. Yes, they made a few mistakes, and got a little carried away, but they’re only human, after all. I’m sure they’re all very, very sorry, and will never, ever, do it again.

C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play Publishing (USA). His debut novel, ZONE 23, is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant Paperbacks. He can be reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org.