Frankly, I’m fed up with all the news reports and commentaries about the impact on the 2016 elections of fake news and Russian political hacking.

Seriously, how stupid do these commentators and news organizations believe Americans are?  Such speculation insults our intelligence.

But then the liberal elite in this nation have a long history of palpable disdain for conservatives, Donald Trump supporters and the “rest of America” who live outside their ideological insular corridors of the East and West Coasts. They believe that average Americans can be duped into believing anything. And we were fooled by a bunch of Communists sitting in Moscow who wanted to spread disinformation to rig the presidential election against Hillary Clinton.

If the news media and pundits were to be believed, then millions of us were hypnotized by bogus news stories that made us stumble Zombie-like toward the polling booths and cast ballots for The Donald with blank eyed stares and drool flowing from our mouths.

Russia, so the story goes, wreaked havoc on the collective intelligence of the United States electorate by scrambling our usual rational cognitive processes via hacking into the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and spreading falsehoods about Hillary Clinton.

Affecting the election

Were there forces at work trying to persuade us how to vote?  Of course.  But this has has been true since the founding of our republic.  As Thomas Jefferson noted in 1807, you can’t believe anything in the newspaper.

The most prominent players, however, are the Democratic and Republican Parties themselves. We’ve all been exposed to domestic partisan activists producing misleading political commercials that contain half truths even when the candidates themselves declare “I’m (NAME) and I approve this message.”

Political campaign commercials made here in the USA tend to exaggerate an opponent’s stand on an issue, embellish political accomplishments by our preferred candidate and reduce complex issues to simple solutions that require only a few seconds.

Examples

I know that Donald Trump is a good family man because his daughter says so.  I wouldn’t take the word of Russian President Vladimir Putin for that.

Donald Trump wants to make America Great Again. He said so himself.  I’m not going to be fooled by a propagandist in an apartment overlooking Red Square.

The Donald will lower my taxes, give us childcare tax credits, renew fair and just law and order than enders respect for America. It must be true because this was a made-in-America TV commercial.

We shouldn’t worry about Moscow trying to turn our heads. We have enough snake oil salespeople in our own neighborhoods.

Endorsements

Major media endorse the candidate of their choice a few days before the election. How many of you waited for your local paper to declare its support for Hillary Clinton before you said, “Yup, I’m with her?”

I certainly was afraid to  choose a Republican primary candidate until I was told how to vote by my hometown newspaper.

But Marco Rubio came in third. Why?   Because some apparatchik in the Russian capital persuaded Iowa’s GOP voters to support Sen. Ted Cruz instead?  I hardly think so.

Celebrity endorsements for the Hamilton Electors campaign urge members of the Electoral College on December 19 to choose someone other than Donald Trump.

This sealed the deal for me. I wasn’t sure about the campaign until the end of this commercial when Republican members of the Electoral College were assured they would earn the famous actors’ respect by denying Donald Trump the election.

Remember these famous stars make their living pretending to be fictitious characters in a world of fantasy. And we’re worried about Russians trying to mess with our minds?

Fake News

The question of Fake News has concentrated on the alleged most egregious example. The so-called Pizzagate scandal that purportedly involved a pedophile ring run by Hillary Clinton. Did this story originate here at home or overseas in Russia?

According to Snopes, which attempts to debunk all manner of urban legends and other crackpot notions,  the story arose from the Wikileaks release of emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta.

Other so-called news organizations of questionable credibility such as Reddit were duped and disseminated the lies. And one deluded man reportedly brought a gun to the pizza shop to “self-investigate” the pedophile rumors.

I have no idea where he read this nonsense but others apparently did too and thus we have Pizzagate being synonymous with fake news.

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) earlier this month tackled issue of fake news and conspiracy theories.  The pedophile rumors originated somehow from the Podesta emails then jumped to a site called 4chan,  a notorious message board.  I’ve never heard of it nor would I ever be interested.  But perhaps 4chan was the pizza gunmen’s go-to site for news.

An American contributor to the official Russian Communist newspaper Pravda attempts to dismiss the whole story. Instead she places the blame on disinformation spread by U.S. legacy media like the New York Times and Washington Post.   So it goes.

Conclusion

I have great respect for Americans—especially the commonsense intelligence of most middle Americans.

The so-called political experts eyeing the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans from sky rise apartments and luxury apartments may fear possible foreign meddling in America’s political system. But we have enough domestic miscreants trying to persuade us how to vote by spreading rumors, falsehoods, half truths and lies. Many of these false messages , in fact, were concocted by the very candidates we elected last month.

The Russians are the least of our worries. And fake news too often comes from the mouths of the persons we choose to do the nation’s business.