About Last Week...

Red Redux

It’s funny – for decades Russia was a bit of a darling of the American left.

And it was hated by the right.

Now, the left hates and fears and gives waaaay too much credit to Russia and its power.  On the right, the feeling seems to be “can’t it just go away?”

Nope – that will never happen while Donald Trump is a public figure.

After failing and flailing and lying and lying and deceiving and vilifying and lying for years about Trump’s supposed tie to the now-evil Kremlin, one would think that a lesson would be learned, that not only is that well dry it never existed in the first place.

And – when deep state progressives are talking honestly with one another over a spiked kombucha – they know this and admit it.  But they don’t care about things like that and they also know that it’s such an easy card to play

Hence the Russia 2.0 case, in which the ever-trusted Department of Justice announced sanctions on the state-owned broadcaster RT (you can find it on most cable systems, way up in the channel numbers) for spreading disinformation about the election.

A pair of RT workers were indicted for, um, buying content.  It seems the problem is that is was done through a front company and the “right-wing influencers” they hired did not know exactly for whom they were working.

Here’s the funny bit:  every content creator, some as well-known as podcaster Tim Pool, absolutely controlled their work.  So basically the scheme involved paying people extra money to say what they were going to say in the first place.

What that implies is rather fascinating – that everyone paid by the company was, in the eyes of the government, spreading misinformation.  In other words, the content creators– and not really RT -  were the election interferers, just for speaking their minds.

That’s an even sillier premise than the original Russiagate absurdities.

Speaking of media silliness, Trump running mate J.D. Vance learned last week that it actually really doesn’t matter what you clearly mean when you say something, just that certain words are temporarily next to one another.

Here’s what he said about school shootings:

"I don’t like that this is a fact of life, but if you are a psycho and you want to make headlines, you realize that our schools are soft targets. And we have got to bolster security at our schools. We’ve got to bolster security, so if a psycho wants to walk through the front door and kill a bunch of children, they’re not able."

The AP headline?  "JD Vance says school shootings are a ‘fact of life,’ calls for better security,"

That is literally not what he said.

AP eventually changed the header, but the damage had already been done – the statement went viral, the Harris campaign jumped in, and that was that.

The brazen intentionality of the deception shows exactly what the next two months are going to be like – they aren’t even trying to hide it at all anymore.

Since this is very specifically media-related, I’m posting on both CheckMate and The Point, the comments are open to all – do feel free to chime with your favorite examples!

Not thank you for subscribing epigram, but a piece of questionable curiosity:

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