Episode Details

Narrated by Eunice Wong

Text originally published May 21, 2023

Run for Your Lives! - by Mr. Fish

There is no report, investigation or new revelation, including the recent release of Special Counsel John Durham’s “Report on Matters Related to Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016 Presidential Campaigns” that will implode the myth that Russia was responsible for the election of Donald Trump. Myths are impervious to facts. They fulfill an emotional yearning. They are a short circuit from reality into a world of childish simplicity. Hard and painful questions are avoided. Thought-terminating cliches are spat out to blissfully embrace a willed ignorance. 

The cynical con the Democratic Party and the FBI carried out to falsely portray Donald Trump as a puppet of the Kremlin worked, and continues to work, because it is what those who detest Trump want to believe.

If Russia is blamed for Trump’s election, we avoid the unpleasant reality of our failed democratic institutions and decaying empire. We avoid facing the inevitable rise of a Christianized fascism borne out of widespread impoverishment, rage, despair and abandonment. We avoid acknowledging the complicity of the Democratic Party in the orchestration of the largest social inequality in our nation’s history, the evisceration of our basic civil liberties, endless wars and an electoral system bankrolled by the billionaire class, which is legalized bribery. The myth allows us to believe that Democratic politicians, like the establishment Republicans who have joined them, are the guarantors of a democracy they destroyed.

Our reality is bleak and frightening, especially given the abject refusal by the ruling oligarchs to deal seriously with the climate emergency. We face a precarious future. The monumental task of restoring democracy outside the confines of a broken electoral system and corporate-indentured institutions is daunting and not guaranteed. We stand on the cusp of tyranny. Blaming Vladimir Putin for the rise of an American demagogue — demagogues are always vomited up from dysfunctional political systems — magically makes the existential dilemma disappear.

The liberal media during the Trump-Russia saga, including The New York Times and the Washington Post, which shared a 2018 Pulitzer Prize for reporting on alleged Russian influence during the 2016 election, provided thousands of stories and reports that falsely painted the Trump administration as a tool of Russia. Their readers, like the viewers of CNN and MSNBC, were fed a comforting myth. When you feed a public consoling myths —  the most absurd being that America is a good and virtuous nation — there is no accountability. Myths make us feel good. Myths demonize those blamed for our self-created debacles. Myths celebrate us as a people and a nation. But it is like handing heroin to junkies.  

Shatter the myths, even if the facts are incontrovertible, and you become a pariah. I found this out when I and a handful of others, including Robert Scheer, Phil Donahue and Michael Moore, denounced calls to invade Iraq. It made no difference that I had been the Middle East Bureau Chief for The New York Times, was an Arabic speaker and had spent seven years reporting in the region, including in Iraq. I was censo