If you read more deeply into the Times story, you get a taste of where Russia-gate is headed next and a clue as to who is behind it:
"Since last month, researchers at the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a bipartisan initiative of the German Marshall Fund, a public policy research group in Washington, have been publicly tracking 600 Twitter accounts -- human users and suspected bots alike -- they have linked to Russian influence operations. Those were the accounts pushing the opposing messages on the N.F.L. and the national anthem.
"Of 80 news stories promoted last week by those accounts, more than 25 percent 'had a primary theme of anti-Americanism,' the researchers found. About 15 percent were critical of Hillary Clinton, falsely accusing her of funding left-wing antifa -- short for anti-fascist -- protesters, tying her to the lethal terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012 and discussing her daughter Chelsea's use of Twitter. Eleven percent focused on wiretapping in the federal investigation into Paul Manafort, President Trump's former campaign chairman, with most of them treating the news as a vindication for President Trump's earlier wiretapping claims."
The Neocons, Again!
So, let's stop and unpack this Times' reporting. First, this Alliance for Securing Democracy is not some neutral truth-seeking organization but a neoconservative-dominated outfit that includes on its advisory board such neocon luminaries as Mike Chertoff, Bill Kristol and former Freedom House president David Kramer along with other anti-Russia hardliners such as former deputy CIA director Michael Morell and former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers.
How many of these guys, do you think, were assuring us that Iraq was hiding WMDs back in 2003?
This group clearly has an ax to grind, a record of deception, and plenty of patrons in the Military-Industrial Complex who stand to make billions of dollars from the New Cold War.
The neocons also have been targeting Russia for regime change for years because they see Russian President Vladimir Putin as the chief obstacle to their goal of helping Israel achieve its desire for "regime change" in Syria and a chance to bomb-bomb-bomb Iran. Russia-gate has served the neocons well as a very convenient way to pull Democrats, liberals and even progressives into the neocon agenda because Russia-gate is sold as a powerful weapon for the anti-Trump Resistance.
The Times article also might have mentioned that Twitter has 974 million accounts. So, this alarm over 600 accounts is a bit disproportionate for a front-page story in the Times, don't you think?
And, there's the definitional problem of what constitutes "anti-Americanism" in a news article. And what does it mean to be "linked to Russian influence operations"? Does that include Americans who may not march in lockstep to the one-sided State Department narratives on the crises in Ukraine and Syria? Any deviation from Official Washington's groupthink makes you a "Moscow stooge."
And, is it a crime to be "critical" of Hillary Clinton or to note that the U.S. mainstream media was dismissive of Trump's claims about being wiretapped only for us to find out later that the FBI apparently was wiretapping his campaign manager?
However, such questions aren't going to be asked amid what has become a massive Russia-gate groupthink, dominating not just Official Washington, but across much of America's political landscape and throughout the European Union.
Why the Bias?
Beyond the obvious political motivations for this bias, we also have had the introduction of vast sums of money pouring in from the U.S. government, NATO and European institutions to support the business of "combatting Russian propaganda."
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