We return, serene, from the first snows in the North Country
to find "fake news" blanketing the region.
What is "fake news"? The short definition is, Anything that doesn't advance the Left/Establishment agenda. It has rapidly become the falsest term of art, a mere slogan, much like "war on women," that masquerades as a dire warning label against our very grasp on reality. Did Donald Trump win 31 states on November 8, thus becoming president-elect of the United States?
Yes, but ... "fake news." Don't you know?... Russian influence on the election. CIA and all that ... hush hush.
No one in the propaganda business (formerly known as MSM) even tries to connect these disjointed dots, doubtless because doing so requires filling in with the grotesque depth and breadth of corruption and malfeasance involving Democrat political and media machinery as (partly) revealed in the (uncontested) DNC and Podesta emails published by Wikileaks. Instead, a fervent belief that the public's right to know resulted from a "Russian hack," as anonymous officials keep underscoring in the Jeff Bezos Post, etc., now blowing up into the Kremlin winning the election for Donald Trump, thus expiates all Clintonian/Democrat sins, cancels any and all criminal or political investigations into said sins and crimes, and delegitimizes the Trump presidency forever.
Or so goes "fake news" defensive/offensive strategy.
The main counter-narrative, which, notably, has names on it, rejects the Russian connection.
Wikileaks' Julian Assange has stated that the emails did not come to Wikileaks from the Russian government.
More sensationally, former UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray this week dismissed the anonymous claims attributed to the CIA regarding Russia as Wikileaks' source to swing the election for Clinton as "bullshit," telling the Guardian: "They are absolutely making it up. I know who leaked them. I've met the person who leaked then, and they are certainly not Russian, and it's an insider. It's a leak, not a hack; the two are different things."
NSA whistleblower William Binney has also suggested that a US insider is the source, telling Aaron Klein on the radio that "a disgruntled U.S. intelligence worker" is behind the breach; Andrew Napolitano concurs, as reported by Zero Hedge [links in the original]:
According to the Judge, “members of the intelligence community simply do not want [Clinton] to be president of the United States.”
“She doesn’t know how to handle state secrets,” Napolitano continued. And since “some of the state secrets that she revealed used the proper true names of American intelligence agents operating undercover in the Middle East,” some of these agents were allegedly captured and killed, prompting NSA agents to feel compelled to act.
Certainly, this insider leak theory is at least as plausible as the Russian hack theory, both meriting further cogitation/investigation.
Another theory from a very experienced intell expert I asked (and who, in this evidence-less state of debate, remains agnostic) goes like this: Because there is little chance that a sophisticated state actor like Russia would leave cyber-fingerprints unless it wants to, the appearance of Russian fingerprints would probably tell us Russia wants them there as the evidentiary basis of the current cycle of "fake news." Such a classic disinformation campaign -- the spreading belief that Russia interfered in the US election on Trump's behalf -- becomes Moscow's underhanded (natch) way of benefiting Clinton and the Democrats, with whom they have long enjoyed a highly productive relationship (Uranium One, Skulkovo, "flexible" Obama, just for starters).
After all, why would they ever want that relationship to stop?