The corporate media that spent months breathlessly flagging Russia-gate is quiet now that the Durham investigation is close to unraveling it. And Durham’s investigation only just getting started. The key takeaway is that it was a coup, set in motion to overturn the election of Donald Trump. Many of the key figures in the national security state (deep state) had switched allegiance from the GOP after Trump’s takedown of Jeb Bush and were planning on serving in the Hillary Clinton Administration. To wit, they weaponized the intelligence and justice apparatus in order to take Trump down.

Last week, John Durham’s grand jury issued its third criminal indictment in the Trump-Russia collusion hoax. The person who was arrested may be obscure and the news buried after Virginia’s bombshell election results but Durham’s investigation maneuvers are a big deal. It shows that the special counsel’s probe is methodically unraveling a huge conspiracy, seemingly engineered by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and implicating James Comey’s FBI, as willing accomplices. These indictments, interestingly, also illuminate the complicity of the Brookings Institution, a Democratic Party leaning think-tank, in the conspiracy to depose Trump.

The question now is whether Durham will be allowed to go all the way to the top and expose the full extent of this malfeasance and charge those who planned and executed it.

I have my doubts.

What’s truly funny is that Trump, with his clownish incompetence, was never the threat to the national security establishment as they imagined. He was always outside his element as a New York City businessman without a claque of Washington insiders to run his administration. The only danger Trump posed to elite institutions was from his propensity to pull the mask off the face of the American empire.

I remember telling anyone who would listen that Russia-gate was bullshit but all of my New York Times reading friends and family were absolutely convinced that Trump was a Russian secret agent who would be arrested and frog-marched from the White House at any moment. But it was obvious that the whole point of Russia-gate was to hobble Trump’s foreign policy edicts and turbo-charge a new Cold War with Russia. The real impetus for Russia-gate had been Russian efforts to stymie the Ukrainian coup and prevent the US from seizing their naval-base in Sevastopol. Even worse, from the US national security state viewpoint, was the successful Russian intervention into Syria to help defeat the Sunni jihadists the US was using as terrorists proxies to overthrow the government of Bashar Assad. Russia-gate was also intertwined with Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks exposure of Hillary’s emails. Democrats still blame WikiLeaks for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 defeat to Trump because it released verified Democratic Party emails that illuminated the rampant corruption in the party.

Most of this was obvious. Anyone who didn’t know, who was paying attention, was an idiot, but most of those who said otherwise were liars or propagandists.

The problem in America is that we’ve been inculcated to believe authorities that have the “right” shared values and for liberals the New York Times is like the voice of God. This is also a reflection of the hidden nature of power in American society. Liberal or conservative belief is made possible only because every day we face endless propaganda: in our schools, in our places of higher education, in the workplace, and most especially from the corporate media. The propaganda system tightly constrains our understanding of political and ideological realities to make them dependent on the priorities of the national security state.

Thanks to the sources that I have developed over the years, I have a pretty good handle on the corporate media propaganda and how it’s deployed. Hint–the serious propaganda is aimed at elite audiences.

Probably my most important source in debunking Russia-gate was the late independent-journalist Robert Parry and his site Consortiumnews.com, but here were many other brave journalists (all independent) who went against the overwhelming corporate media consensus. Matt Taibbi, Michael Tracy, Aaron Maté, and Glen Greenwald were early to raise serious doubts about Russia-gate.

Greenwald has a new article out where he pillars the Democratic Party’s hypocrisy when it come to justice. “This internal contradiction in Democratic politics was vividly illustrated by the fact that — though they will now deny it — the most revered and admired figure over the last five years in liberal politics was Robert Mueller, named in 2001 by George W. Bush to be FBI Director and then in 2017 by Attorney General Jeff Sessions to be Special Counsel investigating Russiagate. Liberals did not even bother hiding their glee at the prospect that Mueller was coming to arrest and imprison as many of their political adversaries as possible. They sung songs in his honor and danced to their fantasies about the next convictions. Every indictment was cheered, every prosecution applauded, every punishment lamented for being insufficiently harsh, as their favorite cable channels were filled to the brim with the very life-long federal prosecutors their ideology ostensibly opposed. Throughout the Trump years, Democratic politics was driven at its core by a bloodlust to imprison Trump, his family, his aides and his supporters for as long and as harshly as possible. Cravings for punishment and prison, at its core, was what drove the arousal of Russia-gate.”

Now that the Durham investigation is circling back to Hillary Clinton it will be interesting to see how the elite Democrat politicians and their corporate media hand-maidens react. Then there’s the political angle. With Russia-gate exposed as a fraud, and with many of the Democrats campaign promises unfulfilled a majority of midterm voters may well conclude that the Democrats are crooks who don’t deserve their vote. Which, in my humble opinion, is justified. Because here’s the thing–the Democratic Party is the political arm of the US’s establishment’s liberal flank. The New York Times is the propaganda arm of the US’s establishment’s liberal flank. The structural function of both institutions is to make genuine progressive change in America impossible.

As I’ve said before–the Democratic Party needs to go the way of the Whigs.

Burn it down.

Update: It’s good to be able to tell your corporate media-duped friends and family that you were right and their “trusted sources” were lying but so what? Five years too late and still more to go before the principals are on the dock. So what difference does revealing it now make? The coup succeeded: whatever Trump might have done was stymied and Putin was established as The Enemy.