I’m so sick of reading letters-to-the-editor in our local paper blaming Russia for besmirching our precious democracy and electing Donald Trump.

Why, you’d almost think that there was a propaganda effort afoot to get gullible Americans to believe such a thing.

Oh, wait.

During Russia-gate, all the usual standards of proof and logic have been jettisoned. If something serves the narrative, no matter how dubious, it is embraced by corporate media, like CNN, which – for the past year – has taken a lead role in the anti-Trump “Resistance.”

You would have thought that we’d learned our lesson about trusting the corporate media after their behavior in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. Back then the “fake news” was published by the New York Times and Washington Post. Editors and writers saw that being pro-war was the route to fame and fortune while questioning US motives was a certain career-killer, as Phil Donahue discovered.

I guess that every day is a brand new day in America. Gore Vidal nailed it when he described us as the United States of Amnesia. In a country where critical thinking is seen as some sort of nerdy fashion, I suppose that we deserve to be propagandized.

What’s maddening is that many of the liberals who’ve climbed on the Russia-gate bandwagon aren’t dumb. Many of them are highly educated with professional degrees. The big problem is that all this knowledge is silo-ized. You might be a socialogist or an engineer, but you’re not allowed to have awareness of any other field of study. This makes Americans easy marks for the type of sophisticated propaganda that our country specializes in.

“The answer is that their problem isn’t a lack of intelligence, it’s a lack of self-awareness,” claims iconoclastic blogger Caitlin Johnstone. “You can have a PhD and an exceptionally high IQ, but if you haven’t done enough rigorous self-reflection in your life, you often won’t have enough awareness of your own mental processes to be able to tell the difference between agendaless information and ham-fisted attempts to manipulate you.”

As someone who grew up disbelieving everything I was told, it puzzles me to see how people believe this shit. At times I feel like a geologist who’s fortunate enough to witness not one but two volcanic eruptions. First of all, I got to marvel at how effective American propaganda was in the run up to the invasion of Iraq, and now I get to watch the whole Russia-gate thing unfold.

Is this great country, or what?

Here’s the million-dollar question–why have the Russians become the official enemy again, 25 years after the end of the Cold War and dissolution of the Soviet Union?

Maybe because the Russians have stymied our empire-centric foreign policies?

This process of turning Russia into an enemy and restarting the Cold-War was well underway during Obama’s second term. The election of Trump with his promise to reset relations between the two nuclear-armed powers kicked the campaign into high gear. For the neoconservatives and the security state, the idea of normal relations was anathema. Going back to the first Bush administration, the neocons, led by Paul Wolfowitz, had articulated a belligerent foreign policy that prohibited any challenge to US hegemony.

Long time investigative journalist Robert Parry offers the best account of the sheer hubris of the neocons during the Obama administration, and especially their fury at Russian interference in Syria, where they hoped to overthrow Syrian ruler–Bashar Assad. “There is a “little-old-lady-who-swallowed-the-fly” quality to neocon thinking. When one of their schemes goes bad, they simply move to a bigger, more dangerous scheme.”

What the Russian intervention in Syria exposed and what most American fail to understand is that despite the whole smoke and mirrors trickery around the official war-on-terror franchise, the dirty little secret is that the US deploys terrorists to carry out its nefarious foreign policies.

For instance, Washington has for years given the impression of fighting against Islamist terrorist while actually weaponizing jihadism since the 1980s by deploying it against rival countries like the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, the Iraqi government in 2014, the Syrian state in 2012, and Libya’s Gaddafi in 2011.

The US hit the wall of resistance to their terrorist-friendly policies in Syria. Russia teamed up with Syrian, Iranian and Hezbollah forces to defeat the Sunni-terrorists backed by the US, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Israel. And now, following a two-year Russian intervention in the region, which has resulted in the defeat of the Islamic State in Syria and the preservation of the Assad regime, the Kremlin is moving on to bring together regional and global powers to revive long-stalled efforts to reach a settlement expected to cement the Syrian president in power.

If you want to understand the demonization of Russia, as well as Iran, look no further than this salient development.

The corporate media loves to criticize Russia and North Korea for having state-run media, in the process obscuring from their viewers the reality that they live in the most brilliantly-propagandized nation on earth.

Caitlin Johnstone has a valuable piece of advice to help you recognize this all-American propaganda.

“Always remember that in a corporatist society, corporate media is state media.”