The Eruption of the Shills

shill: A person paid to endorse a product favorably, while pretending to be impartial.

If ever you wanted confirmation that ruling structures are biased toward conflict, you got it over the past two days.

If ever you wanted confirmation that public intellectuals jump to obey power, you got it over the past two days.

As much as I avoid the bullhorns from New York and DC, I couldn’t escape them this time. Evidently Donald Trump had a summit with Vladimir Putin and uttered unspeakable words. After Putin denied interfering in the 2016 election, Trump said this:

He just said it’s not Russia. I will say this, I don’t see any reason why it would be.

And from that, all hell broke loose.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell quickly held his own press conference and said:

I have said a number of times, I’ll say it again: The Russians are not our friends. And I entirely believe the assessment of our intelligence community.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, in bizarre form, reported that Trump looked like “a little wet noodle.”

Former CIA Director John Brennan raged that “Donald Trump’s press conference performance in Helsinki… was… treasonous… he is wholly in the pocket of Putin.”

On and on it went, including shills from both the Blue and Red teams.

At first I tried to verify exactly what it was they were all freaking out about, with limited success. And then I saw that the words themselves were a secondary factor, as George Will explained:

What, precisely, did President Trump say about the diametrically opposed statements by U.S. intelligence agencies (and the Senate Intelligence Committee) and by Putin concerning Russia and the 2016 U.S. elections? Precision is not part of Trump’s repertoire: He speaks English as though it is a second language that he learned from someone who learned English last week. So, it is usually difficult to sift meanings from Trump’s word salads. But in Helsinki he was, for him, crystal clear about feeling no allegiance to the intelligence institutions that work at his direction and under leaders he chose.

I could go on, but there’s no point. You’ve doubtless seen this yourself. The key takeaway is that saying anything the military-security complex doesn’t like is considered treasonous. And let’s be clear: All Trump did was say a few words. There was no policy change, only a short comment that he didn’t see why the Russians would do such a thing. That’s almost trivial. But it set the military-security complex into hysterics. So much so that even such a person as Donald Trump was forced to issue a lame retraction.

So, how much pressure can the “forever war” complex place on even the highest officials? Evidently quite a lot.

And by the way, the evidence is clear that the Russians did not hack the Democratic National Committee.

So…

What this means is that the system – the dominating structure of our time – is fully committed to threat, fear, and war. Peaceful overtures are not acceptable.

The high and mighty are drunk on power. Again.

So be clear on this: These structures, by their very nature…

will always draw the corrupt and corruptible,

will always reward sycophants and shills,

will always be obsessed with control and threat, and

will always send children to kill and die.

This is what they have been for 6,000 years.

This is what they are.

This is what they will remain, so long as we feed them.

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As it turns out, history was never too hard to understand; they just told you the wrong story.

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Paul Rosenberg
www.freemansperspective.com