The Russian invasion of Ukraine puts Russia-gate into a whole new light and strongly suggests that the proxy-war conflict in Ukraine between Russia and the US/NATO is the culmination.

In all the outrage over Ukraine we’ve been experiencing lately, it’s easy to forget how the narrative that the Kremlin had infiltrated the highest levels of the US government dominated news coverage and political discourse for years on end. But in light of the fact that today’s major headlines now revolve around that exact same foreign government, this fact is probably worth revisiting.

The Russia-gate story fits neatly into a geopolitical strategy that long predates the 2016 election. Since Wall Street and the U.S. government lost the dominant position in Russia that existed under the pliable President Boris Yeltsin, the strategy has been to put pressure on getting rid of Vladimir Putin to restore a U.S. friendly comprador in Moscow. Russia is correct to be extremely worried about American designs for Putin now that loose-lips Biden put an exclamation point on it. “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”

Indeed, it’s fair to state that while Putin is responsible for choosing to launch an invasion of Ukraine, the US empire is responsible for deliberately provoking that invasion with the express goal of removing Putin.

It’s hard to believe that Donald Trump spent four years pouring weapons into Ukraine, shredding treaties with Russia and ramping up cold war escalations against Moscow which helped lead us directly to the extraordinarily dangerous situation we now find ourselves in, and yet mainstream liberals spent his entire administration screaming that he was a Kremlin puppet. Meanwhile, Russia-gate turbo-charged the neocons and their six-year project of ingratiating themselves back into American liberalism with their performative anti-Trump agitprop and deep state machinations.

The most important thing to understand about the Trump-Russia collusion narrative is that it began with western intelligence agencies (read US and UK), was sustained by western intelligence agencies, and in the end resulted in belligerent cold war escalations against a government long targeted by western intelligence agencies. It was the US intelligence cartel who initiated the still completely unproven and severely plot hole-riddled claim that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to benefit Trump. It was a “former” MI6 operative who produced the notorious and completely discredited Steele Dossier which birthed the narrative that Trump colluded with the Kremlin to steal the 2016 election. It was the FBI who spied on the Trump campaign claiming it was investigating possible ties to Russia. It was the US intelligence cartel which produced, and then later walked back, the narrative that Russia was paying Taliban-linked fighters to kill allied occupiers in Afghanistan which was leveraged by Democrats to demand Trump escalate further against Putin. It was even a CIA officer who just so happened to be in the right place at the right time that kicked off the flimsy impeachment narrative that Trump had suspended arms deliveries to Ukraine.

Do you detect a pattern here?

Russia-gate led directly to this point where the US is ready to risk nuclear conflagration with Russia. In sum, the Biden administration is doing exactly that which former President Obama warned in 2016 should never be done: risking war between the world’s two largest nuclear powers over Ukraine. Yet if any dominant narrative defines the last five years of U.S. mainstream discourse, it is that any claim that undercuts the interests of U.S. liberal elites–no matter how true–is dismissed as “Russian disinformation.”

Guilty as charged.

The grave dangers of the world’s two largest nuclear-armed powers facing off over Ukraine extend far beyond any intention by the U.S. to deliberately engage Russia directly. Such a war, even with the U.S. waging it “only” through its proxies, severely escalates tensions, distrust, hostilities, and a climate of paranoia. That is particularly true given that ever since Democrats decided to blame Putin for Hillary’s 2016 loss at least half of Americans have been feeding on a non-stop, toxic diet of anti-Russian hatred under the guise of “Russia-gate.” As recently as 2018, almost 70 percent of Democrats believed that Russia hacked into voting machines and altered the 2016 vote count to help Trump win. This cultivation of extreme anti-Russian animus in Washington has been made even more dangerous by the virtual prohibition on dialogue with Russian officials, which during Russia-gate was deemed inherently suspect if not criminal.

I wrote about this endlessly and it’s infuriating to watch how liberals have been transformed into little Nazi-loving, cold-warriors due to their intense hatred of Donald Trump. The joke was and is on them. It’s clear that Russia-gate was never about removing Trump, it was about making sure Trump played along with neocon regime change plans for Moscow and manufacturing mainstream consent for the escalations we’re seeing today.

During the early stages of Russia-gate I joked that if Hitler were somehow reanimated and denounced Trump he would have been rehabilitated into the liberal fold like so many of the loathsome neocons have been.

Now that liberals have rehabilitated real Ukrainian Nazi’s in their sacred proxy-war against Putin and Russia it’s not that funny.