How Putin Played the Far Left [View all]
Last edited Fri Jan 13, 2017, 03:39 PM - Edit history (1)
The Kremlin didnt just rely on the alt-right to help Trump win. Bernie Bros, Greens, and anti-imperialists got had, too.
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Perhaps the starkest case in point is Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein and her constituency. In December 2015, the Kremlin feted Stein by inviting her to the gala celebrating the 10-year anniversary of Kremlin-funded propaganda network RT. Over a year later, it remains unclear who paid for Steins trip to Moscow and her accommodations there. Her campaign ignored multiple questions on this score. We do know, however, that Stein sat at the same table as both Putin and Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, Trumps soon-to-be national security adviser. She further spoke at an RT-sponsored panel, using her presence to criticize the U.S.s disastrous militarism. Afterward, straddling Moscows Red Square, Stein described the panel as inspiring, going on to claim that Putin, whom she painted as a political novice, told her he agree[d] with her on many issues.
Stein presents herself as a champion of the underclass and the environment, and an opponent of the surveillance state and corporate media, and yet she seemed to take pleasure in her marriage of true minds with a kleptocratic intelligence officer who levels forests and arrests or kills critical journalists and invades foreign countries. Their true commonality, of course, is that both Putin and Stein are dogged opponents of U.S. foreign policy.
Indeed, her pro-Kremlin stance wasnt limited to merely praising Putins amicability. Stein joined the Russian president and Kazakhstani dictator Nursultan Nazarbayev in describing Ukraines 2014 EuroMaidan revolution as a coup, and claimed, bizarrely, that NATO is currently fighting
enemies we invent to give the weapons industry a reason to sell more stuff.
For good measure, she also asserted in September that Russia used to own Ukraine, by way of defending its colonization. She even selected a vice-presidential candidate who, when asked whether the downing of Flight MH17a massacre almost certainly caused by Russian-supplied separatists in eastern Ukrainewas a false flag, responded, [T]hats exactly what has happened.
Green Party officials across Europe slammed a delusional Stein for her views, with leading Russian environmental activists saying they were deeply shocked by her comments during her Moscow trip.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/01/13/how-putin-played-the-far-left.html