The last four years of Russia-gate, the fairy-tale collection of made up connections between Donald Trump and Russia, has been one long process of narrative management.

All the “cool kids” (meaning the elite-corporate media stenographers) settled on a narrative that the Russians colluded with Donald Trump to steal the election from the rightful winner, and internalized the fable that their critical reporting on Hillary Clinton’s e-mails, among other scandals, contributed to her loss. In a crazy, fun-house mirror of McCarthyism, liberals, with their maniacal Russia hysteria, eagerly embraced the CIA and FBI and other deep state actors that engineered a new Cold War against Russia using Russia-gate.

And now the corporate media and elite liberals are determined to manage any story that helps Trump as their reaction to the latest expose of Hunter Biden’s Ukrainian connections demonstrates.

To no ones surprise, the New York Post expose of Hunter Biden’s laptop is being portrayed as another Russian plot to tarnish the nobility of our electoral process. At this point, I’m pretty sure that the Russians are responsible for all of America’s problems. From wildfires in California to the hurricanes in the Gulf to the long voting lines in Georgia. It was the Russians.

Meanwhile, it certainly is convenient for our feral elite that America’s precious democracy keeps getting attacked by states like Russia that they want to absorb into their “liberal world order”, and always in ways that are completely opaque to the American people while the evidence for the attacks is always highly classified.

As I’ve stated before, in America we do our censorship and propaganda through private corporations so our officials can claim with a straight face that we don’t have a government system of control. As Facebook and Twitter are private companies, they can legally do whatever they want, but when the two most powerful social media companies insist on censoring a expose about a presidential candidate’s possibly corrupt son less than three weeks before the election it suggests a more sinister motive.

The New York Times has just straight admitted that they create a narrative that their writers are required to work towards with their reporting. Instead of requiring well checked facts the editors are instead asking for confirmation of preconceived stories.

It’s not like this is a new thing. For those of us keeping score at home, this all sounds a lot like what the corporate media did in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq where they scripted their stories around the narrative they had settled on. Paging Judith Miller? Oh, right, she’s not at the Times anymore. She’s working at FOX NEWS now.

Even in 2002 this was not a new thing. The concept goes back to the early days of the Cold War, when CIA director Allen Dulles was determined to counter Soviet propaganda by controlling the (wait for it) narrative. In order to combat the threat of Soviet propaganda entering the U.S. and seducing Americans, Operation Mockingbird was created as a form of control over information dissemination during the period of McCarthyism. Operation Mockingbird was a CIA program that was started in the early 1950s in order to control the narrative of the news. The CIA was complicit in actually detailing the specific narrative that they wanted disseminated, and often going so far as to write the narrative and have a “credible” reporter’s name stamped on it.

Russia-gate and the the latest actions of the corporate media suggest that Operation Mockingbird never ended, although the narrative management has certainly become more sophisticated. In The Grand Chessboard, written in the late 1990’s, Zbigniew Brzezinski warned his fellow ruling class cohorts that the onset of the information age would require disinformation strategies to mitigate any potential threat from an increasingly politically-aware population.

For the corporate media it appears that anything goes if implicating Russia solves a political problem for the Democrats and keeps the war machine going for the Pentagon and the national security state.

It also defers the moment when the press is exposed for its radically stupid over investment in the Russia-gate fiction. At this point the only way they could win back the full trust of their readers is to admit that virtually every aspect of their reportage over the past four years was inherently false or manipulated by their “sources” who helped manage the narrative.

Think about a New York Times, CNN, New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, Mother Jones, Yahoo News or Washington Post journalist having to write an article deconstructing a foundation of four-years worth of lies they participated in creating.

The essential problem is that there are virtually zero standards when our corporate media want to sell the world on a narrative which benefits the power-elite that owns said media. News stories will be confirmed on an assertion by some anonymous government operative if they are harmful to Russia, Iran, China or any other US-targeted nation.

They lie overtly and by omission because the corporate mass-media within the US-centralized empire functions as the propaganda department for the empire.

The elite managers of our all-American empire understand that whoever controls the narrative controls the world, so they ensure that all points of narrative influence are tightly managed by them.