John Brennan Schools House Committee - And How The 2016 Election Was Tossed To Trump

Former CIA Director John Brenna at yesterday's open Senate Hearing.

"Frequently, individuals on a treasonous path do not even realize they're on that path until it gets to be too late,"   - Former CIA Director John Brennan yesterday before the House Intelligence Committee

Yesterday,  speaking before the House Intelligence Committee, John Brennan offered a frank assessment of Russia's aggressive approach to meddling in the 2016 election and, in the process, complicated Donald Trump's attempts to cast the whole thing as "fake news".  Brennan's statement below put the kibosh on this nonsense:

"I encountered and am aware of information and intelligence that revealed contacts and interactions between Russian officials and US persons involved in the Trump campaign that I was concerned about because of known Russian efforts to suborn such individuals. It raised questions in my mind about whether Russia was able to gain the cooperation of those individuals."

While Brennan would not specifically identify any individuals associated with the Trump campaign who had contacts with Russian officials and would not speculate as to whether there was any collusion or collaboration, he did tell lawmakers why he was concerned about the contacts occurring against the general background of Russian efforts to meddle in the election. Brennan said he'd studied Russian intelligence activities over the years, and how Russian intelligence services have been able to get people to betray their country. "Frequently, individuals on a treasonous path do not even realize they're on that path until it gets to be too late," he said.

Brennan also told the committee he believed that Russia anticipated that Clinton would be the likely winner of the presidential race, and that Russia tried to "damage and bloody" her before Election Day.  Most of this I'd written about in blog posts over the campaign including that Clinton would be the more "warlike" against the Russians. I cited for reference  her saber -rattling AIPAC speech, e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2016/03/as-predicted-hillary-panders-to-aipac.html

HRC delivering her warnings at CA military base last year

Noting in particular, Clinton's  words:

"The best way to help Israel deal with Iran’s growing nuclear capability is to help the people of Syria overthrow the regime of Bashar Assad."

I added in my post at the time: "Seriously? And you think the Russians will just sit by, smile and allow you to do that? (As you think they'd allow you to implement 'no fly' zones)  You have to be kidding. Again, this is what Bernie referred to in the debates as lack of judgment. "

 Of course, this would have sent red alarms to the Russians too. I'd also delivered a number of posts on Clinton regarding her staunch neoconservative position  - more likely to incite a war with the Russians. All of this, btw, would have been known by anyone following Hillary Clinton's speeches and interviews.  All of it is also factual, based on HRC's actual speeches, events - not fake news!  (In the interests of full disclosure I subsequently came to see Hillary as the more responsible candidate, especially after Trump's "pussy grabbing" video with Billy Bush emerged, and the debates - which found Hillary as far more prepared and Trump trying to "wing it".)

The point I'm making is there was more than ample basis for the Russians to 'go for it' in ensuring the 2016 election outcome went to Trump. On one level there is the issue of "collusion" or conspiracy of actual Trump campaign people with Russian intel or other officials. As Brennan voiced his own concerns yesterday:

"I was worried about the number of the contacts the Russians had with U.S. persons in the Trump campaign".

His primary worry was focused on the Russians "suborning" the latter, which means inciting them to "commit wrongful acts".   In his words:

"I know what the Russians try to do. They try to suborn individuals They try to get individuals including U.S. persons to act on their behalf either wittingly or unwittingly."

We do not have the exact plan or what the Trump bunch agreed to with their Russian counterparts, but it is possible to "reverse engineer" what transpired. This is what I call the "second level" or recruiting American voters themselves to act as a weaponized faction against Clinton. Specifically, it seems voters in the three critical states (WI, MI, PA) which tossed the election to Trump had their brains 'jacked' by sophisticated propaganda stories like "pizzagate", e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2016/12/crackpot-pizzagate-bollocks-promoted-by.html

As noted in a recent TIME account, ('Mocking Democracy- Inside Russia's Social Media War On America', May 29, p. 30)  "counterintelligence officials saw evidence of Russia using algorithmic techniques to target social media accounts of particular reporters".  Thereby, false stories could be seeded into media enclaves where - according to one CI official "the specific reporter might be slightly slanted to believing things".

With such a reporter's mind in the proverbial 'crapper', the mind virus would then easily be disseminated as the fake story - say Pizzagate- was maliciously spread.

But did this throw the election to Trump? It may well have. While the skinny is that the Russians alone sowed false stories, the TIME account identifies two Trump-linked outfits under probe as well: Cambridge Analytica - partly owned by Trump backer Robert Mercer, and Breitbart News, associated with Steve Bannon.   In effect, the collusion would have theoretically been between Russian fake news sources and the Trump-leaning organizations.

Evidence? Well so far it's indirect not direct. Examining the statistics for Google searches in the three states that tipped the election to Trump, Dem operatives found fake news searches (e.g. for "Pizzagate") were disproportionately higher in swing districts. These searches were not found in districts likely to vote Trump. Why would they? If indeed the purpose of the social media assault was to change brain orientations and beliefs against Hillary, it would not have been necessary to waste energy on the already converted. (E,g. Trump voters).

The Democratic operatives, as it turns out, created a package of background materials indicating that "someone had successfully altered the behavior in key voting districts in key states".

The notion that 77,000 voters' minds might have been changed in the 3 key states to toss the election to Trump is therefore not without some basis.

Most disturbing is that all that was needed for Trump to win the electoral vote race, and hence presidency, was for 77,000 brains to be jacked and their voting preferences altered.  Of course, I'm not saying other factors didn't also play a role, including voter suppression used on African Americans in WI who didn't have the "correct" ID and were not allowed to vote. Some estimates (e.g. in The New Republic) put that total as high as 300,000.

But the sadder aspect is how right thinking, intelligent American voter could remotely believe any of the codswallop such as peddled in the fake pedophilia story of Pizzagate. This means that unless Americans get much smarter and more percipient in future elections, we may see this sordid media gaming play out again.  The key threshold that must be crossed is more Americans being able to spot fake news garbage, as opposed to believing it and worse, acting on it.  To that end, readers might wish to circulate the link below to anyone they believe might be susceptible:

http://politics.flackcheck.org/how-to-spot-fake-news-factcheck/

See also:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/douglas-blackmon/73024/russiagate-has-become-a-catastrophic-failure-of-leadership-and-a-debacle-from-which-the-trump-pres

As We Feared: Trumpies Are Hopeless Brain-jacked Zombots- But WHY?

In the wake of Trump's ascension to power, many academics and others have been working overtime to try to explain how so many could fall for this character's codswallop to the extent of allowing him entry  to the most powerful position in the world. The race to understand has ramped up as Trumpies - as we call them - merely shrug their shoulders at multiple outrages, including: Trump's absurd cabinet picks, and especially the release of the declassified intelligence report on the hacking of the recent  election.

Many of us in the reality-based community feared that too many on the other side would yet again shrug shoulders, yelp 'sour grapes' or express contempt. We feared, and it now seems we are proven right, that this country truly is divided across perception lines which bodes ill for its future. Because a house divided against itself - certainly in terms of common perceptions - cannot stand.

A NY Times article from Sunday, exposed the mental, perceptual fault lines clearly, and showed Trump voters exist in a bubble of their own, devoid of historical or political insight.  One is also led to contemplate that their bubble excludes rational thought, though that may not mean they are of low IQ.

Work by Dr. Robert Altemeyer, for example, discloses a subset of humans he calls "right wing authoritarians" whose choices are largely driven by fear. Thus, they are largely immune to rational exchange and any digression from an authority template is violently rebuked, or dismissed. It is not lack of intellect that governs this but fear. Fear of the unknown, of the "liberal" (or Muslim) "other",  As one commentator on this blog has put it: "At heart, these people are afraid to the extent of cowardice and they will accept anything buttressing their conception of safety...no matter how ridiculous or absurd the prophylactic / remedial measure may be."

In a way this also dovetails with work by Erich Fromm on the  "Necrophilous personality".  Harvey Hornstein's profile of the necrotic personality (p. 41) is especially chilling ( 'Cruelty & Kindness: A New Look At Altruism and Aggression'):

"(These) intolerant, prejudiced, authoritarian people are ill at ease. The baggage of their youth is filled with inescapable hates and fears. Mistrusting their own impulses, they are wary of others and the impulses they might possess. Their world becomes a jungle which must be carefully scrutinized because it is filled with human beings who harbor the 'evil' that they painfully learned to deny in themselves."

The upshot from this is that their perceptions and political choices are skewed and distorted in much the same way Robert Altemeyer attributes to "right wing authoritarians". That is, they view the outside world  - economic and political - as "a jungle which must be carefully scrutinized" but also rejected if it doesn't comport with their Zeitgeist.

All of this is necessary to grasp the examples illustrated in the Times' piece. Let's look at a few of them, dealing with reaction to the declassified intelligence report (which I have also read and found compelling to the extent we have a national emergency on our hands):

"From the parts of the report I’ve seen,” said Rob Maness, a retired Air Force colonel who twice ran for Senate here as Tea Party favorite, “it seems silly.”

Silly? Really? That a foreign entity is intruding into our elections, something that would have elicited at least overt alarm in 95 percent of citizens even thirty years ago. But his remark shows the extent to which brains -minds have  evidently been twisted toward the authoritarian mindset, likely by decades of PR and propaganda that render them numb to reason, objectivity.

"There are genuine concerns about Russia’s cyberoperations", Maness said, but ""the notion that they changed the outcome of the election was absurd". (The report made no determination on how they affected the election, but this is not the same as Trump's claim that no affect on outcome was concluded.)

Of the comments he had seen from fellow Trump supporters on Facebook and in emails, he added, “90 percent of them are like, ‘What’s the big deal?’”

The Russians may have very well gotten involved, several people said. They added that kind of interference should be combatted. But many assumed that foreign actors had long tried to play favorites in American elections (NOT true) and that the United States had done the same in other countries’ elections (true, as with Chile in the 1970s, and Mossadegh in Iran, overthrown in 1953). 

A most disturbing theme that recurs is "Even if the Russians did do it what difference did it make?" 

And typically, many Trump voters did not need the Russians to make up their minds about Mrs. Clinton.  Hence, blaming her loss on the Russians was, as one Trump supporter said, “ just being sore losers.”

No reference (from the report) that the Russians had ALSO hacked the Republicans, but they simply didn't use what they found against that party.

Incredibly, even among those who were troubled by the hacks, few felt that Russia was a serious threat. That country was “a basket case,” (not true)  or not the powerful foe it once was (false, as they still have nearly 400 more nuclear warheads than the U.S.), Others said that North Korea, the Islamic State and China were the real threats   A claim difficult to reconcile with the fact that Russia has more than five times the nuclear warheads and missiles as all these other entities combined.

That those on the political right seemed to be warming to Russia was not seen as a particularly unusual development to the Trumpies interviewed, though some joked about the incongruity of the left putting such faith in the Central Intelligence Agency..  This, of course, is a variant of the post hoc fallacy, that because the political left may have earlier had issues with the CIA (e.g. during the Church Committee (FISA) hearings of the 1970s) they must have issues in all later years.

Another form of dismissal pivots on Trump's personality, or what Trumpies are confident is his personality.

Thus, one woman insisted “Trump is Trump,” adding “Do I think he’s going to become more of a friend to Russia because of this? No I don’t. I think — I hope — his focus will be on making America great again.”

Again, this reflects the clouded judgment of a right wing authoritarian who is prepared to dismiss obvious character  faults (e.g. lack of impulse control)  in the interest of embracing a faint hope of national betterment ('making America great').

Perhaps the most disturbing reaction of all was this, in response to the issue of the Russians hacking actually affecting the electoral outcome:

“If that’s what it took, I’m glad they did it.”  In the words of one guy from Louisiana.

Sadly, his remark says all we need to know about how our nation is now in the grip of unreasoning authoritarian zombots, inhabiting their own bubble, to the detriment of the nation.