As the ruling class threatens to plunge the United States into a major war that could reconfigure the world order, Tucker Carlson noted how Washington’s current conflict with Russia started with Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the 2016 Democrat presidential nomination.
“The war in Ukraine began a year ago today, on February 24, 2022, when the Russian military rolled across the eastern border of their country,” Tucker said Friday. “But in many ways, the Russian invasion of Ukraine was the endpoint of a much longer story. The propaganda campaign designed to convince Americans to take sides in this conflict — a conflict that has nothing, strictly speaking, to do with them or with America — that effort began many years earlier.
“We’d peg it to July 22, 2016. That’s the day that WikiLeaks published thousands of emails from the servers of the Democratic National Committee in Washington. Those emails proved that party officials had rigged the Democratic process, the primary process, in favor of Hillary Clinton, and against the insurgent populist candidate that year, Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Within days, the chair of the DNC, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, resigned in disgrace. The WikiLeaks scandal broke on the same day that Hillary Clinton chose her running mate, Senator Tim Kaine, and it overshadowed the nominating convention that followed.
“But, more significantly, the WikiLeaks scandal threatened to split the Democratic Party into pieces. More than 13 million Bernie Sanders voters, many of them young people, learned that the process they had always believed in, was in fact a sham. They had been cheated.
“Democratic leaders had to act quickly in the face of this, to deflect blame from themselves onto someone else. The DNC’s servers, they claimed, had been hacked by the Russian military. The goal was to hurt Hillary Clinton, whom the Russians feared for her strength and wisdom, and to help Donald Trump, whom they controlled. Russia hacked the servers, in order to hack the election. That was their story. The Washington Post ran with it the first day, as if it were true.
“But there was never any evidence that it was true,” he noted. “Almost seven years later, there is still no evidence. The DNC’s story about its servers is a lie. But, as a political strategy, that lie worked flawlessly. Russia made the perfect villain. It was a White, Christian country with a traditional social structure. It was everything the Democratic Party already opposed. The foreign policy apparatus in Washington was happy to hate Russia again. After 40 years of Cold War, hating Russia was muscle memory.
“So, soon the leaders of both parties in Washington signed on to the Russia collusion hoax. It had the twin benefits of paralyzing the Trump administration, which it did, and justifying the expansion of the national security state. As the years passed and the rhetoric intensified, hysteria set in. After awhile, anyone with a heterodox opinion — from right-wingers to avowed-socialists — could be accused of working secretly for Vladimir Putin. Many were accused, and some were destroyed by it. It was a textbook witch-hunt, far more effective than McCarthyism.
“And unlike McCarthyism, it never ended. Russia remained America’s greatest enemy, even as China emerged as America’s greatest threat. Over time, the lie that Democrats told to hide their crimes in the 2016 primaries, came to dominate America’s foreign policy, and then to imperil America itself. For generations, statesmen and diplomats worked to prevent other great powers from aligning as a block against the U.S. The idea was pretty straightforward: You might be able to beat one strong country, but if a couple of strong countries ever got together, you would lose. This is why Richard Nixon went to China: to make sure the Chinese government didn’t align with Brezhnev, with the Russians.
“Donald Trump understood this very clearly: ‘Russia will never be our closest ally,’ he said. ‘But if Russia ever becomes China’s ally, we’re in deep trouble.’ The combination of natural resources, military and economic power — and sheer population — would make the Russian-Chinese alliance the most powerful force in the world. The United States would soon be dethroned, we’d be taking orders. As Trump put it, there is no reason to make Russia our enemy and there are many reasons not to.
“It was a sound case, but official Washington ignored him,” he continued. “Their response, shouted in unison: ‘Shut up Putin stooge.’And then they set about trying to provoke a war with Russia. Now they have succeeded.
“But the war we are fighting in Ukraine is not against Russia alone, but also against Russia’s newest ally, the People’s Republic of China,” he said. “What Donald Trump predicted has happened, and in the worst way. If the war in Ukraine continues, we will lose no matter how it ends. The world order is being reshuffled as we watch, and by the time it’s over, the U.S. will no longer be at the top of the deck. That is very obvious to the rest of the world.”
“But what’s fascinating is how few Americans seem to understand what’s happening or its consequences,” he continued. “But how would they know? No one in American politics or media will tell them the truth.”
