Will we ever finally get over blaming Russia for what we are doing to ourselves?

The Justice Department dropped its case against the Russian troll farm accused of using social media to propagandize Americans, a key component of the massive campaign to convince us that Trump only got himself in office through the nefarious machinations of a foreign power.

Those convinced that this is true will continue to believe so, just as their Republican counterparts still think Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11. When something has been pounded into you for months and years via once-credible spokespeople like Rachel Maddow and echoed as Revealed Truth on all sides, it’s pretty hard to retain any skepticism.

Remember how hard it was to doubt Colin Powell’s solemn assurances that Iraq was sitting on a stockpile of terrible weapons? Or to dismiss Condi Rice’s ominous invocation of a “mushroom cloud” as the smoking gun we couldn’t afford to await?

DoJ argued in its Motion to Dismiss the case against the St Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency that the meanie Russians had used our courts to dig into U.S. measures to combat their activities. Gosh golly, they responded to the indictments by asking for the evidence! How dare they! And no Harvard-graduate U.S. Attorney could have anticipated they would do that.

Further pursuit of the charges, said the Feds, would have revealed super-secret Sources & Methods that our nation’s safety can’t possibly share in a court of law. Why they decided to use the indictment process, which entails exposing precisely those things, they don’t explain.

I will, though: the indictments were a PR exercise designed to reinforce the narrative that Trump benefited from Russian activities to win the presidency. They fulfilled their purpose, and millions of citizens are convinced that Putin—not Hillary’s lousy politics, terrible campaign, and fatal hubris—shoehorned Trump into the White House.

Few will have read the Mueller report revealing that his three-year investigation did not dump the anticipated juicy string of indictments onto an eager Beltway but instead barely emitted a faint, popcorn fart after successfully distracting us from 45’s real crimes. Trump’s repeated insistence that he did not collaborate with Putin to fix the election turned out to be one of the few actually true things he’s ever said.

Nonetheless, Very Serious People continue to refer to the “Russian hacking” of Hillary’s emails despite the utter lack of any evidence to this effect. Julian Assange sits in a British dungeon facing extradition to the American Star Chamber and disappearance into the deep well of the vengeful security state based on this falsehood while hundreds of journalists—whose core activity is threatened by his prosecution—sit idly by.

For the record, Assange and Wikileaks have insisted from the beginning that the emails came to them via a domestic source, were not hacked, and had nothing to do with Russia. But you’ll never hear a mainstream commentator seriously entertain the possibility that that might be true.

Instead, we’ll continue to get further conspiracy theories from organs like the New York Times, which just Monday published a story with this fanciful headline: “Can Russia Use the Coronavirus to Sow Discord Among Americans?”

We aren’t facing a mammoth public health disaster because of the rolling catastrophe of four decades of neoliberal politics, nor for the dismantling of public health planning, nor because of our dysfunctional and inhumane healthcare system, nor due to the starving and discrediting of government action and the public sphere, nor because of the wholesale shipping of our industrial base to China, nor the seizure of the economy by leeching financiers, nor the complete takeover of greed as the guiding principle of our collective life. Oh no, none of this is at fault: only bad, evil Russians determined to ruin us by stealth.

I have a suggestion: whenever in the future we hear from any source that Russian interference/meddling/hacking/trolling or what-have-you is afoot in the land, let's ask ourselves what entirely home-grown crime is being covered up.

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