What happened to Russia?

Until a week ago, the feverish conspiracy theorists whom some people still call "journalists" were in full florid mode, spitballing fragment after fragment of rumor, innuendo, and half-truth to support the wild notion that Vladimir Putin somehow handed Donald Trump the presidency on a silver platter.  (That the American press, which now yelps endlessly about this Kremlin-Trump Tower collusion, was apparently purblind to all of it during the run-up to the election, is a tacit admission of its own journalistic incompetence.  But the reporters don't notice this, either.)  Our national pastime for these past two years has been watching this diseased obsession consume the minds of the press corps.  At any moment, the Post and the Times, NBC, ABC, CBS, and CNN all breathlessly repeated that the Mueller investigation is going to uncover the evidence linking Trump to Russia beyond all doubt.

And then the DOJ inspector general report came out.  Even in this watered down swamp document, one finds damning proof that the real conspiracy was not the Russians throwing the election, but the Deep State quarrying the president.  To the surprise of no one, Washington, D.C., is filled with sanctimonious bureaucrats and thoroughly corrupt officials who truly believe that their feelings do, and ought to, carry the force of law.  The I.G. report joins a long list of other reports over the years that make clear that James Comey, Peter Stzrok, Lisa Page, James Clapper, John Brennan, Barack Obama, Eric Holder, Lois Lerner, John Koskinen, Loretta Lynch, Samantha Power, Cheryl Mills, Hillary Clinton, Paul Combetta, Bill Clinton, Susan Rice, and a host of other progressive evangelists – just about everyone in government, it is safe to say – have turned the nation's capital into a national Tammany Hall.  Democracy does not die in darkness; it was drowned in the Potomac by scheming Democrats.

No sooner had it become impossible to deny that the Mueller witch hunt was a run-of-the-mill D.C. hit job than the national media obsession swung around like a weathervane in a typhoon to point to – you guessed it – Mexico.  

The Democrats simply dropped their Russian mistress and never gave her a second thought.  Throwing over their storyboards filled with A Beautiful Mind-like matrices of Russian photographs and connecting threads, scribbled notes and question marks, the gaggle of "reporters" made a run for the border, where they found another story they had somehow overlooked: the invasion of the United States by Mexico.

...only, true to form, the reporters didn't see what was really going on.  These reporters are products of the American "education" system, let us remember.  Therefore, they know nothing but feel everything.  They found one crying child and decided that she would be the new face of the Resistance.  They found a horde of unwashed invaders sent to reconquer the Southwest for the shade of Santa Anna and decided that, somehow, it was all Donald Trump's fault.

Let us keep in mind the most important thing in all of this.  As the press now gnaws on its newfound bone, what we should remember is that these reporters have thrown away their old one.  The Russia hoax is over.  Robert Mueller, capodecina of the Washington Mafia, is the player who got played.  Like black neighborhoods on the day after Election Day, the Kremlin fantasy is no longer useful to the Democrats.  Mueller, the puppet of the Deep State, has been cast aside with the rest of that worn out tale.

It is still too early to tell how long this latest conspiracy tableau will run.  One thing is certain, though: the Destroy Trump media have moved on.  The Kremlin conspiracy is old fake news – new fake news is aborning.  What happened to Russia?  You'll have to look for it now in the desert in Arizona.

Jason Morgan is assistant professor at Reitaku University in Japan.  He has written for Chronicles, New Oxford Review, Ethika Politika, Human Life Review, Modern Age, and Japan Forward.