The mainstream U.S. media has done more to divide our nation than Putin could have ever dreamed.

The Russians weren’t trying to help Donald Trump. They weren’t even trying to hurt Hillary Clinton. They were trying to stoke division. But the media has spent 18 months ignoring that reality, claiming instead that the Russians wanted Trump to win and he probably colluded with them in order to make that happen.

The really unfortunate part is that the media know what they’re doing. They know they’re creating more division here in America. They know they’re lying. But they don’t care because consistent with their leftist ideals, they believe the ends justify the means. And so instead of reporting honestly and in good faith on real issues that deserve real coverage, the media are doing Putin’s bidding by pushing fake news that creates distrust and disunity among the American people.

I can hear some of you already doing your best Jake Tapper impersonation: “But the U.S. intelligence community has stated unequivocally that Russia’s goal was to help Trump. Why do you keep insisting that the earth is flat?”

The IC (intelligence community) is far from infallible. And their conclusion that Russia’s goal was to help Trump is based entirely on conjecture. They have no actual evidence of it. They’re guessing. And as evidence continues to mount suggesting that many in the IC are motivated more by politics than by truth, it’s no surprise that their “guess” conveniently conforms to become rocket fuel for the media’s anti-Trump agenda.

Consider the more plausible explanation…

It’s an important distinction, and one that virtually no one is making: Just because the Russians did things that hurt Hillary Clinton, doesn’t mean they wanted to help Donald Trump. What they wanted to do was hurt our nation, and exposing Team Hillary’s confidential communications was just one way that they sought to do that. (Worth noting since a lot of readers might not be aware: The Russians also tried to hack Trump and the Republicans, but failed.)

LET’S TALK ABOUT EVIDENCE

Last week Facebook released 3,517 election ads that Russian operatives ran on the social media site. And now that these ads are in plain sight, even the anti-Trump media can’t hide the reality.

Check out this headline from the far left website Vox…

USA Today, which has spent 18 months pushing Trump/Russia conspiracy theories, was forced to reckon with their own analysis…

Only about 100 of the ads overtly mentioned support for Donald Trump or opposition to Hillary Clinton. A few dozen referenced questions about the U.S. election process and voting integrity, while a handful mentioned other candidates like Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz or Jeb Bush.

So out of 3,517 ads that Russian operatives bought on Facebook, not even 3% were expressly aimed at helping Trump and/or hurting Hillary.

And yet the media have spent 18 months pouring all of their time, energy and resources in to the notion that Russia wanted Trump to win. And they, along with their endless supply of “Former Intelligence Officials” who are now frequent guests (Phil Mudd, Asha Rangappa, etc), insist that their claim is supported by the facts.

It’s not.

When you hear someone claim that the intelligence community determined the Russians wanted Trump to win, ask them what evidence they have.

If they point to the January 6th Intelligence Community Assessment, ask them why that same report is peppered with the caveat that attacks on Hillary were escalated only after it became apparent that she would win.

Take this one:

When it appeared to Moscow that Secretary Clinton was likely to win the election, the Russian influence campaign began to focus more on undermining her future presidency.

Or this:

When it appeared to Moscow that Secretary Clinton was likely to win the election, the Russian influence campaign then focused on undermining her expected presidency.

Or this:

When it appeared to Moscow that Secretary Clinton was likely to win the presidency the Russian influence campaign focused more on undercutting Secretary Clinton’s legitimacy and crippling her presidency from its start, including by impugning the fairness of the election.

Each of these statements, taken directly from the IC’s report on Russian interference, support the far more plausible but entirely ignored reality that the Russians were not interested in helping Trump. They were interested in hurting the presumptive winner, whoever that may have been. And that’s an enormous distinction. If the Russians wanted to help Trump, that’s a big deal. But if the Russians were focused not on Trump but on whoever the front-runner was, it’s a much different ballgame. The distinction destroys the media’s entire Trump/Russia narrative, which is of course why you never hear about it.

How about the Mueller indictment of the 13 Russians? In that document we see another interesting morsel that the media conveniently choose to ignore:

Specialists were instructed to post content that focused on “politics in the USA” and to “use any opportunity to criticize Hillary and the rest (except Sanders and Trump—we support them).”

If they had said “except Trump — we support him,” then you could start to make the case that the Russians expressly wanted to help Trump. But per the indictment they also “supported” Sanders, who is Trump’s polar opposite both politically and socially. So the logical conclusion is that they didn’t actually support either one of them. What they did support were candidates who promised to shake things up; candidates they saw as political agitators who weren’t going to win but still inspired vocal and ferocious supporters often painted as “fringe” by the media. It wasn’t about Trump or Sanders personally. It was about exploiting what the Russians perceived to be our nation’s most vulnerable fractures. And again, that’s an enormous distinction from “They wanted Candidate X to win.”

WHAT THE EVIDENCE TELLS US

The Facebook ads show us that the Russians were more interested in dividing our nation, than in helping one particular candidate or ideology. The Intelligence Community Assessment from January shows us that the Russians didn’t hone their focus on Clinton until it became clear that she was likely to win. And the Special Counsel’s indictment shows us that the Russians “supported” both Trump and Sanders. Taken individually, these facts reinforce the assertion that Russia’s goal was to promote disunity and distrust, not candidates. Taken collectively, these facts cement that assertion.

The Russians didn’t want Trump to win, or Hillary to lose. They wanted to promote distrust and disunity in the United States. And by ignoring that and instead spending 18 months promoting ridiculous Trump/Russia conspiracy theories — an endeavor so contorted that the media now relies almost entirely on an ambulance chaser representing a porn star in pursuit of a frivolous legal grievance — the media have created more distrust and disunity than Putin and his operatives could’ve ever hoped to.

Perhaps even more disconcerting, and ripe for more analysis at a later date, is the revelation that Russia’s greatest tool in trying to hurt America is the exact same as the Democrats’ for trying to win elections: Identity politics. We’ve long known that however well-intended they may be, Democrats thrive off of, and thus create, division and destruction in our country. And now we know that Russian intelligence operatives are using the exact same playbook to literally try to destroy us. It’s just a shame that our media, who have been colluding with the Democrats for decades, lack the integrity or intellectual curiosity to spend any time at all covering that story — which is arguably the most important and landscape-shifting of our time. Instead, they’re fixated on carrying out Putin’s agenda of stoking fear and distrust, all predicated on ridiculous conspiracy theories that are designed to discredit the sitting U.S. President. The only difference is that the Russians were doing it to hurt our nation, while the media are doing it to protect themselves and hurt the man we elected to expose them.

After all, Trump promised to drain the swamp, and the vast majority of Washington media are nothing more than parasites in that swamp. They, like most Democrats and establishment Republicans, cannot survive without the swamp. And so they’ll say and do anything they can to defend it, and destroy the man who promised to drain it. And that includes willfully playing the role of useful idiots on behalf of the Russians.

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