Rasputin vs The Deep State: Why It's Time to Withhold Your Vote
After Two Assassination Attempts and Counteless Banana Republic Trials, the Media's Fearsome Orange Menace is Still Standing
“Rasputin did not die easily. Many stories recount how huge doses of lethal
poison failed to have any effect on him thus forcing his assassins to shoot him
several times. Even the shooting failed to kill Rasputin, so they beat him, tied
up his body and threw it into the freezing waters of the Neva River…”
— DR WILLIAM REVILLE
The Democrats were so enamored with Bush’s torture apologist, Nicolle Wallace, that they made sure she was offered the anchor job at MSNBC. They were unabashedly gleeful after finding an ally in Liz Cheney, and just last week they welcomed deranged war criminal and modern-day Darth Vader Dick Cheney into the fold after he passed their litmus test and endorsed Genocide enthusiast Kamala Harris. To top it all off, Victoria Nuland, wife of Robert Kagan and hero of every Republican NeoCon lunatic in the country, runs our foreign policy.
People have reacted to Trump, our very own Rasputin, by establishing connections with some very strange bedfellows. It’s become, more or less, a digitally connected army dedicated to either killing or discrediting the Beast at all cost.
Normally, a couple of paragraphs like that would make people’s heads spin. At least a couple of decades ago it would have. Now, news like this is common coin in the Empire, as the ruling class has lost all interest in keeping up any facade of democracy, which was made all the more evident by that sham debate last week. I have never seen an exchange like that — moderators fact-checking and even arguing with a presidential candidate in real-time during an official debate. And Harris, when she wasn’t flat-out refusing to respond to straightforward questions, told just as many lies as Trump did. Glenn Greenwald documents this for anyone wishing to do some follow-up.
A shocking spectacle to behold, but it drives home an important point: we don’t live in a democracy. As all of this transpires, we sit here and contemplate participating in an electoral process that any sane human being should immediately recognize as utter madness and folly.
I hear some people say, “There’s no deep state — that’s bullshit conspiracy theory!”
Then call it whatever you like, but we have a far-reaching and unsupervised intelligence apparatus and a host of NGOs operating as cutouts and disseminating State Department propaganda 24/7. That’s been proven time and time again, and it has nothing to do with any conspiracy. Look at Bellingcat, for god’s sake, and what they get away with. They exist for no other reason than to bolster official US foreign policy and gin up support for war. Just investigate their role in disseminating pro-war propaganda before and during the Russo-Ukraine conflict.
Leslie Aul, Vice-President of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), didn’t even know that her organization had been created as a PR ploy by US intelligence. That’s information that even Wikipedia shared. When told that her agency was an FBI cutout, she was flummoxed. Max Blumenthal of the Grayzone called her to follow up on the story. Aul expressed incredulity, promising she would provide him with documentation showing that provisions were in place to prevent undue influence from US intelligence agencies.
She never got back to them because of course there were no provisions. Aul is a classic example of how ideology works, creating unquestioning participants who help the ruling class control the propagation of immoral and unethical policy positions that violate the standards of international law.
What makes this even odder is that liberal Democrats have long had an icy relationship with American intelligence because of its blatantly corrupt and nefarious disregard for democracy, self-determination, and human rights. These are the people responsible for Tuskeegee, MK Ultra, The Golf of Tonkin, and the harassment and assassination of the most important social justice warriors of the last century, including Fred Hampton and Martin Luther King. These are the creeps we can thank for Iran-Contra, for propping up genocidal regimes in Indonesia, for lying us into the Iraq War, for Abu Ghraib, for Russigate, and for every COVID lie that they could think of spinning.
And now the Dems are BFFs with the NSA, FBI, and CIA? Suddenly, the creepiest and most abusive organizations in our government are lauded for “upholding democracy” when they have a history of being this nation’s leading opponent of real democratic change. Then again, my entire blog is a testament to the Democratic Party’s ability to get people to vote against their own interests.
The Republicans are no different.
Both parties and their ghoulish intelligence “heroes” are currently facilitating genocide in Gaza, a nice little bookend to the Yemeni Genocide that Blinken has been so keen on continuing.
It’s funny how the people who insisted Russiagate was real are the very same ones denying the existence of a deep state. But explain to me how it is that Americans are on the verge of electing either a racist celebrity billionaire or a war criminal and bonafide nitwit like Harris?
Judging from the mess we’re in after the last decade of preposterous lies, do you really believe that your information comes to you from good-faith actors intent on telling you the truth?
Can you explain to me why Anderson Cooper can look at Cornel West and say with a straight face that a few thousand Ukranian casualties near the Russian border is an act of brutality worse than the US destroying the entire nation of Iraq, torturing prisoners, and killing upwards of a million people, the lion’s share non-combatants?
We’re talking about cognitive dissonance at Orwellian levels.
This is the result of constant bombardment, incessant ideological messaging coming at you like a freight train, 24/7, every minute of every day. What happens is that we begin to assume that the most insanely wrongheaded move is the best step forward, and that the interests of the ruling class are also what’s best for everyone else.
This is what Gramsci meant when he spoke of ruling class hegemony. These are people who own giant tech platforms. They’re weapon manufacturers and finance capital goons. They use the congressional flunkies they bribe to control the dissemination of information. That’s why we can’t read Russian or Syrian newspapers and why the government can censor any social media post that displeases them. You’re not told the truth about Ukraine and Palestine because people have vested economic interests at stake. These are the people deciding what’s evident and logical, even when there’s no evidence or logic behind it, and the authority with which they make these proclamations is as invisible as it is unassailable:
“The Russians blew up their own pipeline!”
Yeah, that makes sense. Just like it makes sense that on January 6th, a few chubby, bored boomers led by a stoner in a Viking helmet threatened to overthrow the most powerful empire the world has ever seen. Even Nancy Pelosi’s daughter, Alexandra, didn’t buy that nonsense. She dismissed the whole thing. She called it hype and said it made her laugh. The people lying to you know exactly what they’re doing.
And they’re laughing at you, not with you.
Much like Lefebvre’s notion of the everyday, Gramsci’s work on common sense explains how culture informs and shapes our political apathy. Every film you watch, every Instagram post you see, every billboard, every trite cliche trotted out by the state department stenographers on cable TV and faithfully repeated by your colleagues at the office — all of it exists to lay a foundation that enables people to maintain the most absurd levels of denial: an all-encompassing cognitive dissonance that allows Americans to ignore a ruling class that cares for them about as much as it does the Gazan children they slaughter on a daily basis.
Yet here we are, deciding on which one of two sociopaths to vote for.
The reason they made Trump into Rasputin is simple: he’s not a product of the Beltway or any party apparatus. He can’t be brought to heel. He can be manipulated, but even that is problematic and won’t always work. He says things that politicians are not supposed to say, for instance when he proclaimed we were going to Syria to steal its oil, which we then proceeded to do. Or just a couple of days ago, when during the debate he claimed that Biden can’t stand Kamala Harris. Trump’s a wild card and can’t be controlled in the way they control a pod person like Harris. It doesn't mean he’s any better than her. He’s of course a megalomaniac and a demagogue who slashed corporate income taxes to 21%. But when he pushed back on war with Ukraine, that was the last straw.
I even saw some Democrats take Bolton’s side, even though he is clearly an insane hawk with an unquenchable bloodlust for regime change and forever war. You don’t defy the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies unless you’re in the mood for a massive smear campaign and endless court cases, which is exactly what happened with Trump. The Ukraine conflict had been in the offing for some time, and the Russiagate narrative, in addition to questioning Trump’s loyalty, also served to gin up support for their dirty proxy war.
This was all confirmed when Chuck Schumer had a momentary lapse and told Rachel Maddow the truth out loud: “The intelligence agencies have six ways from Sunday to get back at you.”
That’s the most powerful Democrat in the Senate, and he threatened the President of the United States with covert and unconstitutional harassment.
As I said, I organized against Trump, took to the streets, and actively opposed him throughout his presidency. But when I state a fact that is unflattering for liberal Dems, I get pilloried by people who did nothing but sit on the couch and complain. I know a lot of people who work freelance like me, writing for some major social media conglomerates and online corporations. Last week, one of them said that their supervisors implicitly, and with a big wink and a nod, told them that moving forward, they shouldn’t write about anything that could be seen as being critical of liberal Democrats or Democratic policy in general. That’s how real the censorship has become and it’s a frightening indication of the lengths to which they’ll go to maintain narrative control.
So why are you wringing your hands and deciding which truly abhorrent human being is going to be your next president? Whether we end up with Trump or Harris, we will continue to see executives faithful to Capital and Empire, with more wealth funneled upward to the already obscenely rich while American dominance is maintained via military supremacy and constant warfare.
Nothing will change.
What exactly are you going to lose by not voting?
Or by voting for Jill Stein or Socialist Party candidate Gloria LaRiva: two candidates who are infinitely smarter, better, and more compassionate human beings than the major party candidates?
The Democrats are already at war, complicit in genocide, and have demolished the First Amendment and the economy. Plus, congress has no backbone and has willingly expanded presidential authority to a level never before seen in this country, even going so far as to destroy habeas corpus.
Yes, people died for your right to vote, but they also died for your right to withhold your vote. When the media stooges pump fear into you, remember what they’re asking of you, because these sociopaths deserve nothing. They must earn your vote.
Do you really think they have?
Let me leave you with this. Occasionally, media lackeys, politicians, heads of NGOs, and billionaires — all part of the non-existent deep state — mess up and tell the truth. Here’s phony tough guy Lawrence O’Donnell being honest for a change. If you’re not willing to withhold your vote, you are powerless:
Chew on this for a while and digest what you’ve heard, because if you’re disgusted by both candidates, you are under no obligation to vote for either. Seeing millions of people defy the duopoly could help spark one of those valuable moments of awareness that point to the possibility of solidarity and change. It could even force a national convention to decide the outcome. By withholding your vote, you’re throwing a gigantic monkey wrench into their machinery.
That’s exactly what we need right now.