That sound of hoofbeats that you hear, fast and furious, is the sound of the Durham nothing burger assuming gargantuan proportions and charging across the airwaves. If Sidney Powell were here, she would call it The Kraken. Get used to it, it is here with us to stay, a part of our political culture now. It is a necessary thing. Right-wing media needed something to push back against and in the absence of anything else, the John Durham conflicts memo filing has become the new cause celebre.

It’s also the full moon tonight, which makes a lot of sense. Look at what crept out of its lair and went on Fox News to speak.

Isn’t that swell? Josh Hawley fist bumps traitors during the insurrection and he’s just fine with that, he thinks Hillary Clinton has committed sedition, treason, things of that nature and should go to jail.

The Durham filing is like Hillarys emails. It will never end. It’s here to stay. Here is a screenshot of Fox News’ headline. Note that the word infiltrate is in quotes. We don’t know who they’re quoting but it’s not in Durham’s filing. Aaron Rupar, Public Notice:

You have to read all the way to the bottom of the Fox News article to learn that the “infiltrate” line actually comes from former Trump administration official Kash Patel, who told Fox News in an interview that the filing “definitively shows that the Hillary Clinton campaign directly funded and ordered its lawyers at Perkins Coie to orchestrate a criminal enterprise to fabricate a connection between President Trump and Russia” — an explosive allegation that in no way is backed up by the document in question. But Fox News referenced it in the headline to misrepresent the story as worse for Clinton than it really is.

The coverage has only gotten more dishonest from there. On Monday night, both Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity told a fairy tale about the Clinton campaign hacking the Trump campaign and White House, with Hannity describing the Durham revelation as “the biggest election and presidential spying scandal in the history of this great country.”

And then the shock troops came in. Ron Johnson and Marco Rubio showed up and then Josh Hawley after that. Don’t expect it to stop soon, because it absolutely will not.

Over a 24-hour period beginning Monday morning, “infiltrate” was mentioned at least 47 times on Fox News and Fox Business programming. Meanwhile, hosts repeatedly criticized other cable networks for not covering the fake scandal. That talking point made it all the way to a notoriously dishonest RNC Twitter account (and for what it’s worth both CNN and MSNBC did actually cover the filing). […]

…an average of 1.3 million people are plugged in to an alternate Fox News universe where Trump is a victim, Hillary Clinton is a criminal, the Russia investigation was a hoax, and a fake spying scandal is not only bigger than Watergate but validates all of Trump’s lies about being surveilled by Obama and other Democrats. This is the top-rated “news” channel in the country, and Democrats don’t have access to anything like it. (I should note that while it has a much smaller audience than Fox, Newsmax’s Durham coverage has been just as bad.)

These aren’t journalists grappling with complex questions about how best to do their crafts — these are propagandists pulling out all the stops to protect Trump, facts be damned. We should be way past the point of giving them the benefit of the doubt.

And you thought that the 2022 midterm election was going to focus on 2020? Oh, foolish you! How could you be so silly? No, sir, we are going to focus on 2016!. Yes, that’s right. Doesn’t that make all kinds of sense? This is the newest bizarre twist in this Back To The Future subplot we’re in now, that it was Hillary who spied on Trump and did damage to his campaign — and she did it so brilliantly that he won?

What’s that you say? Maybe the best thing that could happen to Trump is that he could use Hillary as his campaign manager in 2024?

Don’t ask me. I don’t know how the Republicans justify any of this and the complete absurdity of it doesn’t seem to get through to them, let alone the hypocrisy. I just know that they were desperate for something to push back on and voila, along came a ditzy little nothing of a piece on a Friday night, RedState picked up on a routine court filing. Say what you will about the people over on that blog, they’re no great journalistic minds either, but they know a piece of red meat when they see one. So their headline was about an “awe and shock” filing, and almost a week later a humble conflicts memo has assumed mushroom cloud proportions.

This is who we are in 2022. We have propaganda channels, Fox News premiere amongst them, cobbling together alternate narratives of reality, which only serve to divide us and poison the political groundwaters — and they get rich doing it.

There is a moral in this, a commentary on human nature, that I can’t quite grasp right now, but it has to do with bread and circus. Life is more complex than it has ever been, and people are generally speaking less educated than they have ever been, and people who know how to manipulate and control masses of people via media are exploiting these conditions to confuse and divide.

 

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9 COMMENTS

  1. The rethugs have been “locking up” the Clintons for more than 20 years now. It’s their favorite bogeyman. Hopefully this all comes to an end this Friday. Durham is supposed to be in court defending his indictment against Sussman. Sussman’s lawyers have made a motion to dismiss and if the judge can read, (s)he’ll grant that motion. That should give Garland cover to end this stupid “investigate the investigators” boondoggle.

  2. I was driving through central Texas this week and hit one of the presets on my car by mistake and ended up on a right wing nut job show. I listened for a few minutes and realized that this fake news thing was the basis of his show. I did not listen for long, but the whole worst scandal of the century was the main talking point (without facts etc). The trumpies are really going to be dug into this for awhile.

  3. I think it’s all just an attempt to distract from the forthcoming main attraction – Don John and family being hauled in to court and being questioned under oath.

  4. Look over here!!! Look over here!!! Look over here!!! OK GODDAMNIT WHADDA GOT? Oh. Nothing. Didn’t u hear? Hillary was gonna sell all the furnishings in the WH to fund a one world government. OK. PROOF? Look over here!!! Look over here!!!

  5. They really have nothing, and this was stuff going on *while Obama was president*. (Also, it’s a good idea to know what Russian-made cellphones are doing in DC.)

  6. Fucking idiots continue their parade. They were lying 20 years ago when they started on the Clinton’s and they are lying now. Trouble is that their actions have killed hundreds of thousands of their supporters and it is harder to keep the dying still listening. No blindfolds, no cigarettes. Just a .308 in the forehead slightly above the eyes. That’s how you deal with traitors.

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