Published February 23, 2024
Michael Shellenberger and Alex Gutentag didn’t miss the recent string of Russian collusion theories that we were subjected to this week. The Russians were using the House Republican majority to interfere in the 2024 election. Nancy Pelosi lobbed the ‘Kremlin is blackmailing’ Trump narrative again—all of which are tinfoil hat material. These theories have long been debunked, with Shellenberger, Gutentag, and Matt Taibbi recently publishing a series about how Moscow wanted Hillary to win, how the intelligence community laid the groundwork for the collusion hoax long before the FBI, and how this community of spooks, overall, has been engaged in a sustained campaign of targeting Trump supporters and trying to shape public opinion. Their illegal spy operations have been exposed, so why are Americans addicted to these Russian narratives? Like Hunter Biden with crack cocaine, they can’t get enough—and Shellenberger knows why.
You could probably guess the answer, too. It’s that a healthy share of Americans remain convinced that Russia tinkered with our election when it was the CIA. Granted, the Kremlin crackpots are fewer in number than they were in 2019, but it’s enough to keep these zombies glued to MSNBC and CNN. Liberals still snort these fake narratives like cocaine, and it makes it easier for Democrats to target and attack their political enemies as traitors. It veers back into the neo-McCarthyism that the Left had embraced since 2012 when Barack Obama mocked then-GOP nominee Mitt Romney for declaring that Russia is a geopolitical foe of the United States. There’s also another reason: Democrats don’t have much to run on in 2024.
