Episode 43: RussiaGate Year 3 -- How Liberals' Martial Posture Harms the Left

Citations Needed

News, Society & Culture

4.8 • 4.1K Ratings

🗓️ 11 July 2018

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For over two years, the U.S. government has been investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election - interference broadly considered to be in favor of candidate Donald Trump. As a result, a bizarre flip has occurred with the Right and Left: Polls show liberals now trust the FBI and CIA, while many right-wingers – though by no means all – suddenly act concerned about the so-called "deep state." Liberals have been turned into even more extreme hawks, not just on the issue of Russia, but anything that shores up support for American intelligence agencies broadly seen, fair or not, as a check on the unhinged Trump administration.

Given that so much of RussiaGate coverage is about the alleged manipulation of Black activists, anti-fracking protesters, the Green Party –and even Bernie Sanders supporters - to attack Hillary Clinton and her campaign, the consequence has been the media, time and again, framing Leftist dissent as de facto Russian propaganda.

Today we ask: what is the collateral damage of RussiaGate on left-wing activists and media? Who does Red Scare 2.0 benefit, and how can we be honest about "foreign influence" without losing our minds over it?

In Part I of this two-part episode, we are joined by Jacobin's Branko Marcetic.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Citations Needed with Nemeshirazi and Adam Johnson.
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0:15.6	I'm Adam Johnson.
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0:32.8	and Adam.
0:33.8	Johnson, all your help is much appreciated and it helps the show keep going.
0:37.6	So for over two years, the United States government has been investigating the Russian interference
0:42.7	into the 2016 election that is broadly agreed by most official quarters to have been favorable
0:49.0	to President Trump.
0:50.0	And as a result of this, something really strange has happened.
0:53.4	There has been a flip in the traditional right center and left perspective about how we
0:58.8	view our intelligence agencies, namely the FBI and the Central Intelligence Agency, where
1:04.0	the left now holds up the FBI and the CIA is kind of fair or not a bulwark against Trump,
1:11.6	not coming from anything below, but as a kind of benevolent permanent state, national security
1:17.0	state.
1:18.0	And the riot increasingly, the more Tucker Carlson wing, less so than you conservative
1:21.3	wing, is now warning about the deep state.
1:24.5	This has created a environment whereby which the highest moral order in liberal circles
	...

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