Former Fox News Military Analyst: I Am Convinced Vladimir Putin Has a Grip on Donald Trump

The evidence that Fox News is nothing but a conduit for pro-Trump propaganda with a blatantly conservative bias is voluminous and undeniable. Nevertheless, they continue to pretend that they are a legitimate news enterprise. Even though they abandoned their “fair and balanced” slogan, they replaced it with “Real News, Real Honest Opinion” in an attempt to mirror Trump’s anti-media rhetoric.

Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin

However, every now and then some truth from behind the Curtain of Lies seeps out. Sometimes it comes from Republicans who are too embarrassed to stand by some ludicraous claim by Fox News and/or Trump. Sometimes it comes from a network guest or host who has diverted from the mandatory talking points (i.e. Shepard Smith). And sometimes it comes from someone who has escaped the Fox gulag and become free to speak unencumbered by Fox’s forced doctrine and threats from their boss.

One of those refugees is Lt. Col. Ralph Peters. He is a staunch conservative who has had his share of repulsive commentaries while he was a Fox New military analyst. But on Wednesday Peters made his first non-Fox television appearance with an interview by Anderson Cooper on CNN. His unrepressed rage and disgust for his former employer was a startling thing to behold. So startling, in fact, that it needs no elaboration. Feast on these remarks by someone who once called President Obama a “pussy” on the air (video below):

“Robert Mueller is as noble — and I use that word carefully — as noble a public servant as you will find. And the assaults upon his character, upon his practices, upon his investigation just betray our fundamental principles.”

“I think [Fox News is] doing a great deal of damage still. We won’t know how bad for years to come when we see the ultimate results.”

“With the rise of Donald Trump, Fox did become a destructive propaganda machine, and I don’t do propaganda for anyone.”

“As a former military officer, you took an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. And I saw, in my view, Fox, particularly the primetime hosts, attacking our constitutional order, the rule of law, the Justice Department, the FBI, Robert Mueller, and, oh, by the way, the intelligence agencies. And they’re doing it for ratings and profit. And they’re doing it knowingly, in my view, doing a grave, grave disservice to our country.”

“I suspect Sean Hannity really believes it. The others are smarter. They know what they’re doing. It’s — it’s bewildering to me. I mean I want to just cry out and say, how can you do this? How can you lie to our country?”

“I think we’re in a constitutional crisis right now. And we’ll end up either, barring unforeseen circumstances, either with impeachment or before the Supreme Court or both.”

“You have a president who believes he is above the law, who does not understand our system of government, does not respect our system of government, and willingly subverts our system of government.”

“I think a lot of Trump supporters are so embarrassed by how it’s all turned out that they just cling to him. They won’t let any facts penetrate their reality. [They insist that Trump] is some sort of messiah.”

“I am convinced that Vladimir Putin has a grip on President Trump. And, Anderson, when I first learned of the Steele dossier, it just rang true to me because that’s how the Russians do things. And before he became a candidate for president, Donald Trump was the perfect target for Russian intelligence. Here’s someone who has no self-control, a sense of sexual entitlement and intermittent financial crises. I mean that’s made to order for seduction by Russian intelligence.”

“When you look at Trump’s behavioral patterns, his unwillingness ever to criticize Vladimir Putin, his slow rolling sanctions, his unwillingness to create problems with Russia, even though, as he attacks NATO, disrupts relations with the E.U., how can you not draw the conclusions that Donald Trump, the president of the United States, is frightened of Vladimir Putin”

“The Mueller investigation is the most important of my lifetime. And I’m 66 years old. I lived through Watergate.”

Everyone will have their favorite quote from those displayed above. Maybe Peters’ characterization of Fox News as a “destructive propaganda machine.” Or perhaps that he thinks Sean Hannity is stupid enough to believe the crap he spews, and the rest are all liars. There is so much to choose from. Fox News was contacted for a comment on this righteous rant. They declined, saying that they stood by the brief statement they made when he left the network two months ago. They never refuted a single thing Peters said. You can watch the entire CNN segment here:

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

How a Crackpot Conspiracy Theory Went From a Flake to Fox News to Trump’s Twitter

The most conspicuous indicator of Donald Trump’s guilt is his own frightened and suspicious behavior. That is generally played out on his Twitter account with panicky outbursts that are never supported by facts and often make no sense at all. He is inadvertently producing a documentation of the decline and fall of an illegitimate American demagogue with utter disregard for the peril he faces.

Donald Trump

Trump’s desperation was on full display Wednesday in a flurry of sweaty tweets that unwound a horror story starring himself as a victim of a “Deep State” cabal determined to roll his doughy body to garlic knots. As you peruse the following eruption of crazy remember that there isn’t a speck of it that’s true, or even sane. So curl up with a pillow to clutch and come along for a ride down Daffy Drive:

Holy Shitake Mushroom. Trump’s Twitter tantrums are well known, but this goes way beyond his ordinary, every day, lunacy. The cerebral spasm above took place over the span of an hour on Tuesday. Isn’t that a work day in Washington?

The most interesting part of this story is how Trump came to the telling of it. ThinkProgress retraced its origins and the path it took to Trump World. It seems the fearsome tale began with an innocent enough bit of bullpucky in an anonymous tweet. The author was stirred by text messages between FBI employees Peter Strzok and Lisa Page that he badly misconstrued as some sort of subversive plot. Never mind that the texts made no mention of Trump or his campaign, or that the Senate released them months ago without controversy.

From there the trail led to the notorious conspiracy crank, Gateway Pundit, who posted a typically lie-riddled account of the non-affair. At around the same time Reddit’s fruitcake forum, r/conspiracy, was spewing nonsensical comments alleging the same misconduct by the FBI gone rogue. And finally, the viral strain hit peak media velocity when Lou Dobbs of Fox News latched onto it. This is undoubtedly where Trump got it from.

The fact that such obviously insane hypotheses can get loose in the mediasphere is a sad reflection on the state of American political discourse. But it’s no surprise that when it does, it’s Fox News that plays the most prominent role in its dissemination. And of course, once it’s broadcast on Trump’s favorite TV network, it can’t be long before it shows up in his Twitter feed.

This is how low the bar is in the Era of Trump. The White House is now challenging Glenn Beck and Infowars for supremacy of psychotic derangement. It’s no longer bad enough that we have climate science deniers insisting that Jesus rode dinosaurs off the edge of the flat Earth. We now have a president who is parroting the fevered dementia of anonymous Twitter goofballs as if it were authenticated journalism. #SAD.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.