Paul Manafort Shared Trump Campaign Polling Data with Russian Oligarch Oleg Deripaska in 2016

[Thomas Eckhardt]

> That said, this is just too nonsensical to let pass without comment.
> I am told that Bob Woodword has seen no evidence of collusion.  And this is supposed to be of interest how?  This is supposed to establish what?

I did not intend to "establish" anything. I am highly sceptical of the 
claims of collusion, obviously, and therefore glad when so-called 
respectable journalists support my view. No, Woodward's (or even 
Isikoff's, for that matter) opinion is not proof for or against 
anything, but neither is the Steele dossier or the intelligence 
community's report.

I did not start this topic. Still, the relevance of what Taibbi I 
believe correctly calls the Putin Derangement Syndrome for Pynchon 
readers should be obvious. In my view, Russiagate is, amongst other 
things, just another instance of the military-industrial-media complex 
declaring "[m]oney be damned, the very life of [insert name of nation] 
is at stake" (see also Hofstadter on the "Paranoid Style"). As always, 
the politics of fear (see BE, p. 328: "The purpose is to get people 
cranked up in a certain way. Cranked up, scared and helpless.') 
translates to rising military expenditure, geopolitical sabre-rattling 
(all in the name of defense against an implacable enemy, of course, cf. 
Ponsonby/Morelli on the ten commandments of war propaganda), domestic 
propaganda (e.g. the Integrity Initiative) and the infiltration, 
marginalization and suppression of dissent at home, a topic of VL 
(COINTELPRO, CHAOS then, the Integrity Initiative, which infiltrated 
Bernie Sanders' campaign, the Atlantic Council, which now "advises" 
Facebook on which accounts to delete, PropOrNot and God knows who else 
today).

And then there is Newsguard, which could be straight out of BE or an 
updated version of "1984":

https://www.mintpressnews.com/newsguardneocon-backed-fact-checker-plans-to-wage-war-on-independent-media/253687/