The recent Democratic Convention was missing something.

Oh, I know what it was–Russia-gate.

The 4 year investigation of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, which Democrats once thought could topple Trump for obstruction of justice, went unmentioned, even as it was a defining feature of Trump’s nearly four years in office.

Of course, for those of us who were paying attention, Russia-gate was always bullshit.

Instead, Russia-gate flowed from the same impulse as the great anti-populist crusade that our feral elite have waged since the moment Trump was elected. “Populism,” became a synonym for plague or menace. Trump and Bernie Sanders both were depicted as xenophobic, bigoted, emotion-laden, resistant to modernity, susceptible to foreign influence, and captured by “unrealistic” ideas they lacked the expertise to implement.

It was all about finding a scapegoat for the 40 odd years of elite failure, culminating in Hillary Clinton’s disastrous presidential campaign. Trump may not be the “very stable genius,” he claims but he was smart enough to take advantage of the gigantic opportunity that Democrats like Clinton and her husband created by abandoning working-class voters. These voters now sense that economic justice is permanently out of reach. The class war is over and the rich won. Even worse, these working-class voters haven’t forgotten that the Democrats exported their jobs then turned around and labeled them “deplorable”.

And that is indeed why the Democrats saw no need to mention it at their own four-day convention despite dominating news cycles with it for years. Russia-gate was never the “scandal” that the Democrats and the corporate media made it out to be. It wasn’t even actually about getting rid of Trump. Russia-gate was extremely useful in accelerating a new Cold War with Russia, something that the deep state with it’s military/industrial/complex, intelligence and Wall Street actors desperately wanted. Russia-gate was sustained by a deep-state establishment of think-tank planners, the military-industrial complex, security-intelligence careerists, lobbyists and the corporate nexus of Wall Street and big business.

I also know that the original Russia-gate narrative was completely dismantled from the very beginning by journalists like the late Robert Parry. In 2017 Parry documented how the original assessment that Russia meddled in the US election in the first place was put forward without proof by just a couple dozen officers from three intelligence agencies hand-picked by the notoriously Russo-phobic then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Parry also noted how if there had been any solid evidence to find that the Kremlin was blackmailing Trump, or that his campaign had conspired with the Russian government to steal the 2016 election, the US intelligence community would have found some of it and leaked it to The Washington Post long before Trump took office. At this point a new Cold War was already ramping up under the Obama Administration and with Hillary Clinton assumed to be the heir apparent it was assumed to be a foregone conclusion.

Then what happened?

Somehow a novice politician/real estate developer who’d been talking about making nice with Russia got in instead. Trump campaigned promising to reduce the military’s presence abroad, end our wars of adventure, withdraw from NATO, and negotiate with Russia to ameliorate the unnecessary hostilities Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, his Secretary of State, left behind. These positions won him votes perhaps the election.

Can’t have that now can we?

Since then the Empire has struck back, in fact I think the main reason the Democrats didn’t feel the need to mention Russia-gate is that it’s been wildly successful in stymieing any change to US foreign policy, uniting Democrats with neoconservative Republicans in an iron-clad Beltway consensus for continued American primacy and Cold War with Russia and China. It’s the same thing with the war on populism now that the Democrats have beaten back the Sanders insurgency with the nomination of Joe Biden, who gave the game away when he assured his donors that “nothing will change”.

We’ll see.