Useful Idiots at Washington Post Publish Obvious Kremlin Disinfo, Discredit American Journalism Forever

Dear Sir/Madam/preferred gender pronoun,

Do you harbor — deep in your sub-subconscious — impure thoughts, such as a perverse yearning for "isolationism/anti-interventionism" or "support for policies like Brexit" or "opposition to Ukrainian resistance to Russia and Syrian resistance to Assad"?

Then you are definitely suffering from massive brain re-programming by the Russian government, which apparently controls every popular alternative media website — and a bunch of completely random websites that nobody has ever heard of, or cares about — on our beloved Internet.

We know this because the Washington Post asked anonymous "experts" who run an obscure, 3-month-old blog why Hillary Clinton lost the election. Their answer might not surprise you!

As Glenn Greenwald explains, WaPo

promoted the claims of a new, shadowy organization that smears dozens of U.S. news sites that are critical of U.S. foreign policy as being “routine peddlers of Russian propaganda.” The article by reporter Craig Timberg — headlined “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say” — cites a report by an anonymous website calling itself PropOrNot, which claims that millions of Americans have been deceived this year in a massive Russian “misinformation campaign.”

The group’s list of Russian disinformation outlets includes WikiLeaks and the Drudge Report, as well as Clinton-critical left-wing websites such as Truthout, Black Agenda Report, Truthdig, and Naked Capitalism, as well as libertarian venues such as Antiwar.com and the Ron Paul Institute.

The list also includes your very own Russia Insider. (Has there every been a more appropriate occasion to hit that donation button?)

But here's where Greenwald's analysis goes astray:

In casting the group behind this website as “experts,” the Post described PropOrNot simply as “a nonpartisan collection of researchers with foreign policy, military and technology backgrounds.” Not one individual at the organization is named. The executive director is quoted, but only on the condition of anonymity, which the Post said it was providing the group “to avoid being targeted by Russia’s legions of skilled hackers.”

In other words, the individuals behind this newly created group are publicly branding journalists and news outlets as tools of Russian propaganda — even calling on the FBI to investigate them for espionage — while cowardly hiding their own identities. The group promoted by the Post thus embodies the toxic essence of Joseph McCarthy, but without the courage to attach individual names to the blacklist. Echoing the Wisconsin senator, the group refers to its lengthy collection of sites spouting Russian propaganda as “The List.”

Greenwald hints — but never explicitly states — that this obscure blog is somehow connected to U.S. government entities hoping to discredit and silence Un-American Activities, such as "a lack of enthusiasm for World War 3". Glenn is a tinfoil hat Looney Tune. How does slandering 200 alternative media websites, ranging the entire political spectrum, as "Russian propaganda outlets" serve the interests of the United States? Does any aspect of WaPo's thesis sound reasonable or sane? Just read PropOrNot's air-tight methodology for identifying Kremlin stooges: 

Please note that our criteria are behavioral. That means the characteristics of the propaganda outlets we identify are motivation-agnostic. For purposes of this definition it does not matter whether the sites listed here are being knowingly directed and paid by Russian intelligence officers, or whether they even knew they were echoing Russian propaganda at any particular point: If they meet these criteria, they are at the very least acting as bona-fide "useful idiots" of the Russian intelligence services, and are worthy of further scrutiny.

See? If you don't support the "moderate rebels" in Syria, you are a bona-fide "useful idiot" of the Russian intelligence services. (Nobody with a functioning brain cell would believe that.)

Let's be real, here: This is crude Kremlin disinformation, fed to the salivating Washington Post in order to discredit American journalism forever. And it worked. Of course.

This is just too transparent to not be a deliberate attempt to make the Washington Post look like a safe space for paranoid blowhards, butthurt Clinton worshippers and Cold War dinosaurs.

And isn't it telling that roughly 200 websites are blacklisted by this shadowy, dumb blog? Reminds us of that time when a certain Wisconsin senator announced that

I have here in my hand a list of 205 [State Department employees] that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department.”

As the history books tell it, in the following weeks, "The number fluctuated wildly, with McCarthy stating at various times that there were 57, or 81, or 10 communists in the Department of State. In fact, McCarthy never produced any solid evidence that there was even one communist in the State Department."

History doesn't repeat, but sometimes it rhymes. 

In conclusion: The Washington Post is a Russian propaganda outlet which seeks to demoralize the few remaining Americans who aren't actively gobbling Prozac by the fistful.

This is the only logical explanation for such a transparently bullshit article that has accomplished nothing aside from galvanizing alternative media and making American journalism look even more foolish than it already is in our post-election upside garbage world.

Конец.