by Sasha Stone and Ryan Adams

People will wonder, years from now, how the catastrophe that half of America inflicted upon all of us came about. Let’s hope that historians make clear without a doubt that much of it can be traced back to the dehumanization of Hillary Clinton. The most ignorant on the right were conditioned to believe that she never deserved their respect. The most gullible on the far left would quickly be taught that she had it coming — and boy did they give it to her. Trump supporters and Bernie supporters had that attitude in common: they believed and still believe that Hillary deserved to be trashed and destroyed. The continuing saturation of that disgusting narrative is the reason we now face the peril of Trump’s blatant crimes being shrugged off, at the grave risk of allowing him to get away with it.

People always say “why are you still talking about the primary when we have to fight Trump” and “why are you dividing the left when we need to unite.” Ah, but there’s the rub. The Democrats were ratfucked in 2016 by a group of people ten moves ahead. That division, that fracture they helped manufacture, and that the Bernie movement fell headlong into, still exists. Democrats are too crippled to move forward, too divided to unite. Remember, this was the first important election the “purity generation” faced. You could almost have called it “Nixon’s dirty tricksters meet the purity generation.” When purity is your main objective, you are always going to be easy to exploit. By contrast, Republicans have no such requirement for purity. They play dirty, talk dirty and do whatever it takes to win. All of our time last year was wasted on a war between leftist purists and Democratic pragmatists. Bernie supporters think he won that war. But he lost the primary and the desertion of a stubborn movement ensured Democrats would lose the election too.

Trump’s desire to humiliate Hillary went far beyond winning the election. Sure, to win would be a crushing humiliation in itself, but Trump knew if he couldn’t win he could settle for embarrassing her, hoping to damage irreparably the admiration she had earned throughout her career. This is why, even now, even after he won the election, he can’t let it go. He can’t let go of the inadequacy he feels whenever he measures himself against Hillary Clinton. He should never have won and he knows it. Worse, he knows that everyone who matters to him knows it. Trump would have done anything to exact revenge on the woman who gave this speech, even at the cost of colluding with Russia. He was not even as desperate to win as he was desperate to humiliate her:

Eventually, even Bernie Sanders would stand on that hill and bring up emails, speaking fees, allow his cult to call her a whore, ignore the death threats some of his followers made, and then sit silently as they sabotaged the Philadelphia convention. Because he too was beaten by Hillary and he too could not stand it. Still can’t. Now he’s made it his mission to bring down the entire Democratic party as his last-gasp bucket-list revenge. His supporters play right along, thinking once again that they’ve a right to seek retribution. In their minds the DNC unfairly “chose” Hillary over Bernie and boy are the Democrats going to pay for jilting them.

Putin also wanted to humiliate Hillary and as it turned out, so did Julian Assange. The DNC email leaks were designed to do maximum damage to Hillary Clinton and they undoubtedly did. Not because they revealed any sort of compromising or illegal information about her, but because the selective spin was carefully calibrated to infuriate the demoralized Bernie Sanders supporters who watched Hillary defeat their one true god in the primary. They’d been led to believe that last summer would be the moment their revolution’s wings took flight, with Susan Sarandon strapped to the prow of their ship as bare-breasted figurehead — revolution at last!

It was such a stroke of hellish brilliance by lifelong manipulators like Vladimir Putin, Robert Mercer, Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, Jared Kushner and their ilk to realize when Bernie fell into the mix that he was tailor-made for use as a weapon against Hillary. Much of the destruction of Hillary Clinton was a scavenger hunt to prove how impure she was, how corrupt she was — the opposite of the purity generation’s choice to lead a pure nation.

So they set up the myth and planted the seeds of suspicion that Hillary was going to rig the elections against both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. Yes, she was THAT much of a powerful witch, that she could rig the entire system to block both of them. Their strategy was to convince enough Bernie supporters that Trump was the better, more pure, less corrupt option because, after all, it was Hillary and her minions that had rigged the primary. Those who bitterly voted for Jill Stein, and those who flipped to Trump felt justified — even warranted and deputized — as the posse to bring her to justice. They felt as though they were doing the honorable thing — voting for the other poor guy whose win was about to be unfairly sabotaged by evil Hillary and her evil emasculating powers.

It would turn out that the election was rigged. But we know now it was rigged against Hillary Clinton. Is it any wonder neither the Bernie side nor the Trump side are making a big deal about Russian interference? Because what would that say about them? It would be proof that whatever they achieved was done with nefarious help. It would mean their men didn’t do it alone, and never could have, not without the multi-pronged attacks originating in Moscow. Both Sanders and Trump got so much invisible help that they even fell for their own artificially inflated opinions of themselves.

But even Team Trump and the Kremlin mastermind probably had no idea just how deep and long-lasting the hatred they provoked would become, so much so that they’ve now completely and for the foreseeable future played the Democrats off the table. What they pulled off was nothing short of the most calamitous ratfuck in the history of ratfucking.

Some have mastered this dark art better than others. It’s no surprise that Roger Stone was involved in the ratfucking by Nixon’s dirty tricksters and 40 years later that sick wizard was revived for the Trump campaign. Ratfucking is all about destroying the strongest pillars of the opposition by turning factions of the opposition against each other, by any means necessary. Here’s a classic example from Nixonland describing Roger Stone’s very early days as a ratfucker:

Nixon’s strategy was to eliminate through sabotage all the most formidable contenders who posed the greatest threat to challenge him in the election — and to leave standing the one guy he knew would be easiest to beat, George McGovern. Next time you watch All the President’s Men listen for them to mention the Canuck letter and its relationship to Muskie. Edmund Muskie was disgraced out of the race — that skulduggery strategy was nothing but sabotage:

The final move of the greatest ratfuck in the history of ratfucking would be for Bernie to become the Democratic nominee 2020 and for Trump, or maybe Pence, to beat the lefty pontifical shit out of him. That would be checkmate for them: to put Democrats in a position where they are so fractured and desperate they put an actual Castro-era socialist in charge of our party. Almost 80 years old, a socialist non-Christian (atheist would be an easy sell) who promises to raise taxes and grow government to twice its current size by handing out free rides to everyone except to the so-called backbone of America (those who don’t think they need a free ride because they never plan to go anyplace).

Bernie would be the Republican’s golden goose. Every solid gold egg he squeezed out would look exorbitant to those who don’t want to pay for it and indigestible to those who see a free college education as nothing but bookwormy librul brainwashing. The GOP knows that 90% of Americans will run screaming from large portions of that agenda, liberals, moderates, and conservatives alike. But the hardcore Sanders left can’t see that angle. He’s their guy, and they bristle violently at any attempt to persuade them otherwise. This scenario is probably something no one can stop, unless Joe Biden runs.

Contrary to the narrative that got hammered into the national psyche, Hillary Clinton was not a weak candidate at all. She was one of the strongest candidates in Democratic history. That’s why it took such a massive campaign of targeted Russian interference, sophisticated cyberpowered ratfucking, and a body blow by Team Bernie to take her down — and she still won the popular vote and she still only lost the election by 77,000 in three carefully selected voter-suppressed areas where — guess what — angry white dudes got stroked by relentless pandering. Shocking, isn’t it?

No doubt Putin has devastating kompromat on Trump, most likely enough to ruin him beyond repair. There is no reason by now to doubt the Steele dossier, much of which has already been confirmed, considering the way Putin’s thugs in the FSB and GRU swiftly and systematically removed anyone suspected of leaking the information it revealed — god help them, wherever they are. Trump will do anything now to keep whatever Putin’s got on him a secret. He can’t be the one humiliated, not now. Nothing matters to him more than salvaging his own ego and pride. No doubt the United States is now, thanks to Trump, in Russia’s pocket. In six spiraling months we have watched America fall so far that we are no longer the leader of the free world — we are owned by a Russian dictator who murders journalists and activists who challenge him.

Years from now students of history will wonder why there was such a muted reaction from the left. And from those in our government who have the tools of checks and balances at their disposal to stop this steep descent into madness. After all, here is a man who has conspired with and likely assisted a foreign adversary that was actively hacking and breaking apart US democracy for the sole purpose of destabilizing and weakening America. All to enable a handful of Russian kleptocrats, and give them free reign to pillage their own country. Can you imagine what Ronald Reagan would think? What Nixon would think?

You would think, given all of that corruption, Trump’s sinking approval numbers, and an unprecedented assault on everything Democrats should hold dear, that the Bernie left would choose to unite with the Democrats to take down Trump. You would think that but you’d be wrong. Swathed in their self-affirming security blankies, the enemy for far too many of them is STILL THE DEMOCRATS. So much so that the presumed “frontrunner” for the Democrats is the guy who recklessly alienated the Obama coalition, totally written them off as unnecessary. Some try to tell us that Democratic frontrunner is the guy who couldn’t win the black vote in the South, and never will. That, my friends, is what any ruthless ringleader would call a high-quality ratfucking.

Breaking up one of the most powerful movements the left has ever seen, the Obama coalition

Far left liberal seeking to turn the clock all the way back to the 1940s before civil rights and the women’s movement and somehow that’s supposed to amount to a win?

Focusing exclusively on the white working class voters, all in the name of forcing voters to choose between Bernie’s socialist revolution and Donald Trump? Rural voters will be told Bernie will raise their taxes to put city kids in college, and that will be the end of that

Eliminating the power of the black vote — how can Democrats not represent people who lost their lives for the right to vote?

Aiming for purity in the age of Citizens United so that any Democrat who raises money is suddenly impure and therefore not worth supporting? One false move in the Senate and you’re primaried?

That is where Democrats are right now. We can’t win with Bernie Sanders but his bitter band of revolutionaries claim we can’t win without them. And that, my friends, is ratfucking, taking us all the way back to 1972, when Democrats tried to force their isolated ideology on all of America, focused only on making their party pure without looking over their shoulder at what the Republicans were doing. After that idea failed to fly with voters, Democrats wouldn’t regain any real power until 1992, twenty pitiful years later. As Roger Stone himself once said, “losers don’t legislate.”

Here we go again. CHECKMATE.