After spending a year downplaying the risk of Hillary Clinton’s highly vulnerable email server getting hacked — and exposing the classified documents it wasn’t supposed to contain — to foreign intelligence services, Democrats are suddenly very concerned about email hacking. That’s because they desperately need to discredit the devastating leak of DNC emails as a Russian dirty trick to rig the U.S. election.

The Democrats were also very insistent that Russia was our friend now, and anyone who thought otherwise was burdened with a fossilized Cold War mentality. Who can forget Barack Obama’s famous “the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years” crack, from the 2012 debates? The same media sycophants who applauded that line as an awesome “zinger” are now shrieking about Russia trying to rig the 2016 presidential election like… well, like Hillary Clinton and her pals at the DNC rigged the 2016 Democratic primary.

As for Hillary Clinton, remember her famous — and characteristically inept — “reset button” to renew friendly ties with Russia, which were supposedly strained by that neocon warmongering cowboy George W. Bush? It turned out that the “reset button” was actually labeled “overcharge” in Russian, so it was probably the button Clinton and Obama intended to present to U.S. taxpayers.

Flash-forward to 2016, and now that the desperate Democratic National Committee and their equally desperate media stooges need to distract from the DNC leak, they’re suddenly convinced WikiLeaks — which the Left once idolized enough to celebrate in a movie starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Julian Assange — is an FSB front operation that wants to sabotage that noble bear-busting Moscow-fighter Hillary Clinton, so they can put Donald Trumpski in the White House.

“Experts are telling us that Russian state actors broke into the DNC, stole these emails, releasing these emails for the purpose of helping Donald Trump,” declared Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook over the weekend. He didn’t bother naming those experts, which is probably for the best, since Democrat “computer experts” have a habit of taking the Fifth Amendment hundreds of times when forced to answer direct questions.

“I don’t think it’s coincidental that these emails are being released on the eve of our convention here,” Mook added, darkly insinuating that Russia-friendly changes were being written into the GOP platform by the Kremlin.

“This is further evidence the Russian government is trying to influence the outcome of the election,” declared the Clinton campaign in a statement.

Once upon a time, Hillary Clinton thought email hacking was a trivial concern, so she thought nothing of instructing her aides to violate all manner of security protocols by copying classified documents and loading them onto her secret server. Clinton surrogates turned up their noses at every suggestion her system might have been penetrated by foreign intelligence services.

Now we might be just days away from learning that hackers did get into her system… and if they’ve got copies of the thousands of emails she deleted, rather than turning them over to the State Department as she was required to, the Democrat caterwauling about gremlins from the Kremlin will reach ear-splitting volume.

The only thing a patriotic Democrat can do, to fight this new Red menace, is completely ignore everything WikiLeaks is releasing. The mainstream media is doing its level best to steer the Democrat faithful away from thoughtcrime by under-reporting the scandal to a hilarious degree, while the online thought police at Twitter quash one inconvenient Trending Story after another. Just don’t look at anything from insurgent media and you’ll be fine, Clinton serfs!

Things just don’t work that way, in this new online world of ours. The milk of data cannot be unspilled. The basic operating principle of hacktivists around the world is that government and media “gatekeepers” can no longer suppress valid information because they dislike the source. If the Democrats can prove that some of these leaked documents are fake, they would have the raw material for at least a partial pushback, but so far there haven’t been any solid challenges to their authenticity. Even the Clinton spinmeisters and sweat-soaked DNC operatives pushing those Russian conspiracy theories haven’t tried claiming the emails are forgeries, which is very telling. They’re not even putting much effort into the venerable “taken out of context” defense.

Many of us are uncomfortable with the new WikiLeaked world, in which privacy and secrecy have become rare commodities doled out by a few self-appointed whistle-blowers. Distrust for governments is wise, but healthy distrust for the whistleblowers is also advisable, especially when they’re less than fully transparent about themselves.

A world in which no one can communicate privately will not be an improvement over the world where too many secrets were kept, especially since the level of accountability for rogue actors — whether they are sincere activists or puppets of sinister powers – is generally even less than the accountability we can force, with great effort, upon corrupt governments. Hillary Clinton may have been given a political pass for indictable offenses, but at least she might still lose the 2016 election. Where do we go to vote against Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, and company?

While the digital public works to figure those extremely difficult questions out, the fact remains that there is no way to bully people into ignoring valid information by attacking the source.

Frankly, we’re still only in Stage One of the DNC Leak story. Sanders voters are understandably livid, as they learn just how deep the fix for Hillary Clinton was, and how hell-bent their Party’s scamtastic political apparatus was on securing her nomination.

For the rest of America, this is really a story about the media, and its utter, sickening corruption by the Democrat Party. The blast wave from that realization hasn’t struck yet, but it will.

When Sanders voters finish venting their rage at Hillary Clinton for handing Debbie Wasserman Schultz a plum job within hours of her tumble from the DNC chairmanship, the rest of America will have some tough questions about how many news networks are submitting stories to the DNC for review, or letting the DNC write stories for them.

Heads ought to be rolling at those networks, to regain public trust as a crucial election unfolds. That’s only going to happen if the public demands it, loudly.