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I'm Stack columnist Michael Schellenberger joins us now. So we've seen this, we've seen it for years. The media is complicit. Ken Delanian or whatever his name is, the biggest spook on MSNBC, said that this has got the hallmarks of another Russia propaganda election interference plot. Are they really that ignorant that they think this is gonna work? - That's a great question. I mean, you know, you look at the, if you actually believe everything in the indictment, and I read every word of it just now, this is really small ball stuff. There's no evidence that any Russian money changed anybody's opinion. They say in the indictment that two of the influencers that were targeted did not know that it was Russian money. There's no evidence that like really, there was any serious amount of media coverage to influence anything measurable in terms of opinion. You know, all that being said, I mean, the main issue here is that we have this continued, we have this record of the Department of Justice running Russian disinformation hoaxes twice, not once. The first time claiming that the Russians favored Trump when we now know that they favored Clinton. And then the second time, the Hunter Biden laptop, where we now know that the FBI ran a disinformation effort to make people think that it was about the Russians. So there's, I mean, nobody should trust blindly the Department of Justice when it says anything about Russia. - So now we have the United States government interfering in three elections in a row, 16, 20, and 24, on behalf of Democrat candidates, weak Democrat candidates, Hillary, Biden, and Harris. What does it say about the Harris campaign that they need to do this right now? - Yeah, I mean, look, I think it's, this is the best they've got. And I think that says something, that they're having to do this. And like you said, it's like, it's all of the discredited characters with all of the discredited messages from the past. So it's not gonna, I mean, it's clearly not gonna have much impact at all. It's, you know, I think there is some reason for concern, which is it does feel like it's another effort to program people, if we're gonna be, use the crude word, brainwash people, and get them to stop thinking about these issues. And so we should always be concerned when we see situations where there may be the weaponization of the government going on in order to, in this case, because it's always projection, influence the elections. I mean, the timing alone is curious. - You can't have the FBI, and this is probably CIA laundered, and the Department of Justice spilling this out through press conferences and through leaks to mainstream media reporters on the even of election. And then you're gonna have a 24 hour, maybe 48 hour news cycle on CNN, on MSNBC, and it's just gonna wash over the people, even the casual viewers that are just clicking around. That does have an impact. That's more election skullduggery than what the Russians are doing. - Yeah, and I would say too, I think it's important for people to understand why they keep focusing on Russia. It's clearly an effort to undermine the nationalist and populist appeal of Trump, and the MAGA Republicans. They're trying to say that they're not authentically supported in the United States. They're not about America first. They're secretly, secretly, I mean, it's a conspiracy theory, Jesse. The idea that Trump and MAGA Republicans are controlled by Russia is the craziest conspiracy theory of them all, but apparently it works with some people, or it's the best they got. - And you have Harris's number two, literally under investigation for his ties to China. - And the Biden family also under investigation for all the money that poured in from China. It's crazy. - Of course. - You gotta pay attention. You gotta focus. That's what we're doing here. Thank you so much, Mike Shellenberger. Check out his sub-stack.

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