"Twitter feed reporting on the collapse of Russia-gate hoax"
by Michael Tracy, Excerpted Transcript (last updated October 13, 2020)
https://twitter.com/mtracey

Michael Tracey @mtracey
Anonymously-sourced conjecture about "Russian interference" frantically trumpeted by the NYT less than two weeks before the election? Who could have ever expected this. Oh, that's right: anyone who hasn't been living under a rock over the past four years

Michael Tracey @mtracey
My shady intel handlers have informed me that I'm on a list that's circulating of Twitter personalities who are undercover CIA... cover finally blown

Michael Tracey @mtracey
As a longstanding Russiagate critic, I nonetheless have to admit that it was one of the most successful propaganda initiatives of all time

Michael Tracey @mtracey
The intricate details of the Biden/Ukraine dealings can be hard to understand (remember how many people just tuned out of impeachment) but what's extremely easy to understand is the wholesale media-led propaganda campaign to instruct the public to not believe any of it's real

Michael Tracey @mtracey
I love this idea that it's some kind of profound metaphysical-journalistic impossibility to verify the contents of a laptop hard-drive. As if you can't simply ask the people whose names appear in the published email correspondences. Insultingly stupid

Michael Tracey @mtracey
And to the extent they DID bring it up, it was to dismiss the entire issue as a GOP and/or Russian sabotage effort. Impeachment further polarized it along partisan lines as something that must absolutely not be discussed, lest you give aid and comfort to Trump and Putin blah blah

Michael Tracey @mtracey
One culprit for the lack of scrutiny of Biden's dealings vis-a-vis Ukraine is that his fellow Democratic primary candidates virtually never brought it up, opting instead at the debates to rehash the same exact points about Medicare For All approximately ten billion times

Michael Tracey @mtracey
They know there would be a mass revolt among NPR listeners and staff if they reported anything that was potentially damaging to the Dem nominee less than two weeks before the election, when it's all hands on deck against Trump. That's the real reason

Michael Tracey @mtracey
Trump may be the first all-powerful authoritarian fascist in world history who has bizarrely allowed himself to get totally swamped by his opposition's unremitting political propaganda operation

Michael Tracey @mtracey · Oct 20
All you need to know about this letter is that the signatories present no new evidence at all to substantiate their innuendos -- which "has all the classic earmarks" of an aggrieved former intelligence official operation

Michael Tracey @mtracey · Oct 20
Propaganda-related tip for the next two weeks: Baselessly throwing around the term "disinformation" to create the false impression that authentic (but politically inconvenient) materials are forgeries is *itself* disinformation!

Michael Tracey @mtracey · Oct 20
A longstanding irony of these hysterical anti-Trump delusions is that they’ve given him an almost unearned mystique, as some kind of all-powerful authoritarian. When the more rational line of criticism would’ve emphasized his ineffectuality and unfocus

Michael Tracey @mtracey · "You don’t even have to think the Hunter Biden materials constitute some kind of earth-shattering story to be absolutely repulsed at the authoritarian propaganda offensive being waged to discredit them -- primarily by journalists who behave like compliant little trained robots."

Michael Tracey @mtracey · "That any journalist who asks Biden questions derived from these "hacked" materials will be immediately denounced as a Russian disinformation agent -- putting their jobs at risk -- is a huge propaganda win for Russiagate hysteria peddlers. They've gotten exactly what they wanted."

Michael Tracey @mtracey · "The real story here is the ease with which politicians, security state officials, tech officials, and compliant corporate journalists can direct huge swaths of the public to instantly discount inconvenient or embarrassing material on the basis of zero evidence."

Michael Tracey @mtracey · "It's a testament to how propagandized and psychologically-trained so much of the US political/media class is that they all began screaming in unison about "Russian disinformation" like this. Their drone-like herd behavior is almost a bigger story than the "hacked" material itself."

Michael Tracey @mtracey · "It's not even clear that "Russia" would necessarily favor Trump in this election. Trump's policy stance toward Russia (contradicting his rhetoric) has been extremely belligerent. START treaty negotiations just fell through. This is all just paranoid partisan speculation, as usual."

Michael Tracey @mtracey · 8h "Again, the Biden campaign and Hunter's reps haven't even claimed that there was any "hack" involved in the dissemination of these materials! Saying the word "hack" over and over, and trying to conjure up bad memories of 2016, doesn't magically make it so."

Michael Tracey @mtracey · "By launching into evidence-free Russiagate hysteria mode -- their default setting over the past four years -- Dem partisans make the Hunter Biden stuff a bigger story than is probably even substantively merited! Idiots."

Michael Tracey @mtracey · "The certainty with which pundits and politicians have proclaimed the Hunter Biden stuff to be "Russian disinformation" is amazing. The authenticity of the materials hasn't even been disputed. If forgeries were going around in your name, isn't that the first thing you'd say?!?!"

Michael Tracey @mtracey · "Like for example how can you not be astronomically embarrassed, as someone who self-identifies as a journalist, to just blithely assert -- on the basis of no evidence at all, none -- that "Putin's hackers" have anything to do with this. It never ends."

Michael Tracey @mtracey · There's a ton of evidence that the Hunter Biden materials are authentic, zero evidence that they're Russian disinformation, but if you just baselessly repeat the phrase "Russian disinformation" over and over again, that's all that's required in today's deranged media environment

Michael Tracey @mtracey · Oct. 17
The "hacked" materials presented thus far aren't even that revealing, but the campaign to discredit them using the standard Russiagate playbook is highly revealing of how the corporate media/security state nexus has functioned over these past few years

Michael Tracey @mtracey · Relaying that the President supposedly "wants" things is meaningless at this point. The strategy of tweeting ill-defined, half-orders that don't get operationalized through the chain-of-command has not been successful

Michael Tracey @mtracey · The traditional formula of the Commander-in-Chief issuing an order and the Generals then executing that order seems no longer operative

Michael Tracey @mtracey · How come the formulation here is never, "hope it was worth it for Democrats to pre-determine their primary election process four years ago and nominate one of the most uniquely despised candidates in modern American history." Wait, don't answer that

Michael Tracey @mtracey · These kinds of anonymous analyses are largely worthless, but why would Russian leadership welcome a return to power by an opposition party which has spent the past four years demonizing Russia to deflect from their own political failings, and promising to impose severe punishment

Michael Tracey @mtracey · Sept 26
Deep

Michael Tracey @mtracey · But the funniest portion was when McMaster was asked to comment on who started an extremely dangerous Twitter hashtag calling for his ouster. The alleged culprits: a terrifying tag-team of Russians and "bloggers"

Michael Tracey @mtracey · HR McMaster received a predictably glowing tribute on "60 Minutes" last night. Of course he was cast as an "Adult In The Room" whose task was to curb Trump's most dangerous instincts, namely to prevent him from withdrawing troops from "complex problem sets." (Whatever that means)

Michael Tracey @mtracey · This latest Mueller revisionism is just another attempt to shift blame, rather than acknowledge that the investigation was always predicated on a boatload of hysterical fallacies and security state paranoia -- and therefore destined to fail

Michael Tracey @mtracey · Mueller spent two years with the full resources of the US Treasury, an incredibly broad investigative mandate, and a media desperate to cheerlead his every move. But now we're supposed to believe he ignored the collusion smoking gun because he was scared of making Trump mad. OK

Michael Tracey @mtracey · It's never even considered, apparently either by Packer or Weismann, that the legal/ideological premises underlying the investigation might have been flawed. Hence the investigation's "failure." It's just written off as a series of procedural errors. So here comes the memory-hole.

Michael Tracey @mtracey · Packer adds that Mueller prosecutor Andrew Weismann "came close to establishing a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russian government." Gee whiz. You "came close" to delivering the mother of all possible bombshells, but decided to just give up. Sure.

Michael Tracey @mtracey · This article is really something. "The whole constitutional superstructure of checks and balances rested on Mueller and his team," writes George Packer. So what happened: did the "superstructure" collapse after Mueller's failure? Or are you just hysterical?

@mtracey So much of the media got absolutely snookered -- or WANTED to get snookered -- by Russiagate that it's almost useless to isolate any specific culprits. Yes, the most cartoonish wrongdoers were Maddow & co. But the entire US media ecosystem failed, spectacularly. An utter disgrace

@mtracey The "counter-intelligence investigation" of Mike Flynn for engaging in routine diplomatic activity had no legitimate basis, and therefore neither did the "unmasking" of his phone communications -- a wildly invasive infringement on civil liberties that liberals now absolutely LOVE

@mtracey The real "scandal" of Russiagate was never "collusion" or any of that nonsense, but the machinations of security state officials -- using aggressive propaganda and surveillance tactics -- to manufacture the appearance of a fake "scandal"

@mtracey The real "scandal" of Russiagate was never "collusion" or any of that nonsense, but the machinations of security state officials -- using aggressive propaganda and surveillance tactics -- to manufacture the appearance of a fake "scandal"

Rania Khalek @RaniaKhalek Also fascinating how it’s officials from our closest allies that have aided al qaeda, while our supposed adversaries like Iran and Hezbollah and Iraqi PMF have been the ones fighting al qaeda

@mtracey May 12 Franklin Foer propagated a massive journalistic fraud by positing that Trump illicitly communicated with Russia through an Alfa Bank server. That story has now been definitively debunked. But Foer is still treated as an authority on these issues, because the elite media is a joke