Did Donald Trump ask Russia for help to win the elections?

You’ve got this twisted. He never had to. Vladimir Ilyich Putin has had a longstanding problem with Hillary Clinton, who (regardless of what actually happened) sees her as an instigator and agitator of unrest against his regime. So he was unwilling to let her just traipse into the most powerful office in the world.

So he goes about preventing it. How? Well, the Russians have been masters of espionage and other covert war tactics for a long time. So here’s how the evidence makes me think it went down.

Trump, by his own admission, has a disproportionate number of backers for many of his ventures who are Russian oligarchs. They’re all over his finances, one of the many reasons he won’t release his financials like every presidential candidate for the last 50 years. He’s leveraged like a motherfucker. At some point before the secret service issued him a guard, a Russian agent makes contact. Nothing serious, just a quick chat with an “investor” in his office. In which he’s presented with enough financial documentation to ensure that it’ll look like he is deep in Russia’s pocket (which he kinda is) and the threat that it will be made public. And, the agent would assure him, he has no desire to do that. It would hurt the interests of his other investors. But he will, if Trump doesn’t play along. Knowing he’s trapped, Trump asks him what he wants. Nothing big, he says. Just to hit Clinton hard every chance he gets and not to forget who put him in the White House when he gets there.

Classic unwilling agent manipulation. Obviously, case officers prefer the carrot (typically a big payoff), but blackmail is one of many, many sticks available to them. And the digital age has only made it easier. Now they don’t even necessarily have to get you all the way into a compromising situation. For example, were I the case officer assigned to approach Trump, I’d wear a wire and record the whole thing. Trump has a track record of being simple to manipulate. One can get him to say a pre-arranged set of phrases (through trickery), and if he told me to fuck off, it’d be a relatively simple matter to have an audio engineer edit the tape to make it sound like he enthusiastically agreed and then approach him again, with the evidence before and the (altered) tape.

So that’s one little piggy sorted. The other little piggy is to turn public opinion against Clinton. Which was easy. Their willing tool, Julian Assange, would peddle treason as he does and find a traitor willing to betray. As luck would have it, they lined up just the man. But you can’t just wait for a traitor to emerge, and turning just anybody is a complicated, delicate, and time-consuming process and they didn’t have the time. So they did have to do some actual heavy lifting, through this Guccifer 2.0 clown (rule 1: never get your hands dirty when you could pay or blackmail someone else to do it for you).

So all that remains now is just to package these things in a way that the American public would find digestible. Enter RT.

Okay, so the biggest problem with capitalism is that it promised us constant renewal and reinvention but what we got was oligopoly. Look at the media, insurance, and auto industries. Banks, as well. And people do grow tired of that and yearn for new entrants, but new entrants can’t survive for long on a classically free market in which five companies own the entire market. But the internet age has changed that pretty drastically. I haven’t owned a TV since 2009. Never needed to, I have a laptop and a brain. The internet has given birth and access to a variety of previously inaccessible outlets like Al-Jazeera America, BBC-America (both of which are pretty good on reporting, so long as you cut out the opinion pieces), and the eminent mountain of horseshit that is Russia Today, or RT. It’s 100% a propaganda tool. It’s Radio Free America, but the Russian version. It’s not news, it’s exactly what Russia wants you to hear. Between them and idiotic drivel like Brietbart and InfoWars, it was so easy to get the message out there and leak all this stuff in a way that seemed organic and not forced at all and in a way that a lot of gullible people who think themselves savvy because they don’t go crawling to MSNBC or CNN or Fox for their news gobbled up with the voracity of a goddamn black hole. And because of the vulnerabilities of the 24 hour news cycle, one absolutely MUST run with a story if one’s competitors do. You can’t afford not to. And all that was necessary was to keep the agitprop coming. You noticed how every time people would get bored of Clinton’s latest scandal, something new would come out? Yeah, not coincidence. Twice is a coincidence. Three times or more is a pattern.

I hear a lot of people say “There were no votes tampered with!” as proof that Russia didn’t interfere with our elections. And that’s true. They didn’t have to interfere with the actual votes. Because we ate up the Soviet (if you think Putin is not a Soviet, you’re fooling yourself) propaganda campaign so effectively, there was probably never any serious consideration about having to tamper with the actual vote.

Now, I’m aware of how all this sounds to someone who isn’t familiar with this sort of thing. Yes, it sounds outlandish. Yes, it’s been done before, many times. One of its greatest defenses/deniability tactics is how outlandish it sounds. Because it gives a government official the opportunity to smile and say “Come on, now. You really think we are pulling something like that off?”