It is impossible to present a coherent and forthright analysis of the causes, character, and likely consequences of the misnamed “protests” in the U.S. mainstream media. The same restraint on free speech and thought applies to most of Western Europe, and notably to the Federal Republic in which denazification has led to de-Germanization. It is still possible to do so in most of the postcommunist half of the Continent, however, including my native Serbia. To wit, here are excerpts from an interview I gave last Wednesday to the Russian media network Sputnik.

[Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MbBm4imdJU&t=10s]

On Antifa (6 min. 30 sec.): It is worth asking if “terrorist” is an adequate designation. [Antifa] is not in the same league with Bader Meinhof and the Red Brigades, which were actively sowing mayhem in the ’70s and ’80s. It is a phenomenon more akin to the Black Panther type of violence. Either way, using violence in pursuit of political objectives unobtainable by legal means is tantamount to practicing terrorism.

On the media (10 min. 2 sec.): The manner in which this whole issue [protests] is treated in the U.S. media is almost comical. A priori everything is Trump’s fault, whatever happens and however it happens. This has morphed into a morbidly obsessive Trumpophobia which has nothing to do with journalism.

On the Deep State (10 min. 48 sec.): We had a comparable situation in Ferguson six years ago. It was brought under control and calmed down because the shadowy political forces had no interest in escalation in the middle of Obama’s second mandate. In this case the approach was different. This problem has metastasized and escalated, with active participation of certain elements of the Deep State which has sought to destroy Trump every step of the way. It had tried to discredit him, well before the election, with the Steele dossier, which was ordered by Hillary Clinton’s campaign in early 2016 and prepared by a former agent of the British MI6. Steele used dubious Russian sources to slander Trump, including the completely baseless allegation that he staged an orgy with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel in 2013. Nevertheless, her campaign passed the material to the FBI, which used it to start investigating the Trump campaign. Later on we’ve seen, with the FBI agent Peter Strzok and his mistress who also worked for the Bureau, how its operatives had actively tried to subvert Trump, with Strzok reassuring her that there was no reason to worry, he’d stop Trump… In the same spirit, and with the same intent, the FBI mendaciously set up a trap for Trump’s first national security advisor, Flynn, after his conversation with the Russian ambassador in Washington [Kislyak] in December 2016.

On Russiagate (15 min. 48 sec.): Then they invented the story of Russian meddling and the alleged collusion—effectively a joint criminal enterprise—between Trump and the Kremlin. The Democrats gleefully rubbed their hands when Special Counsel Mueller was appointed to investigate the matter. His investigation was the focus of daily fact-free news and commentary in the leading media, which self-confidently expected that the end result would be a major discovery of Trump’s malfeasance. To their horror, however, after two years Mueller published his report in April of last year in which there was nothing, certainly no grounds to start any proceedings against Trump. That was a shock! MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow was on the verge of hysterical tears. It was a sight to behold: people who are supposed to report on events and to analyze them behaved like deranged partisans.

On impeachment (16 min. 54 sec.): As soon as it became clear that Mueller’s report contained nothing for the Democrats to grab, they started developing the story of Trump’s alleged quid pro quo in the telephone call to Ukraine’s President Zelensky, who was supposedly pressured to start investigating the firm connected with Biden’s son. That was an absurd basis for impeachment. Trump’s enemies, however, do not want to allow him to do his job for one single day, as mandated by the people, without such continuous distractions.

On “Russian meddling” now (17 min. 38 sec.): A person close to the Democratic establishment, Obama’s national security advisor, Susan Rice, declared in a CNN interview on May 31 that the mayhem in the U.S. was “right out of the Russian playbook.” Wolf Blitzer, the presenter, replied with equal absence of evidence that she was totally right. It is interesting that practically all mainstream media go out of their way to try and discredit various statements by Trump as “unsubstantiated,” but nobody has bothered to subject Rice’s remarkable claim to the same stricture. What is missing now is the claim that everything was cooked jointly by Moscow and Beijing. All along, however, the main culprit is Donald Trump.

[Image by Adam Jones from Kelowna, BC, Canada via wikimedia/CC BY-SA]