Hey Everybody, David Klion Needs You to Panic about Russia Right Now--Before It's Too Late!

We're doomed. The neoliberal sky is falling, and the only thing that can keep you from being crushed by neoliberal debris is a neoliberal umbrella.

Yesterday, David Klion released a red-baiting screed entitled "Russia may be meddling in U.S. Politics. Where is the leftwing outrage?" through The Guardian. The purpose of the article is to convince readers that the only way they can protect themselves from the neoliberal corruption in Russia is to embrace the neoliberal fear mongering of the Democratic National Committee and their hired hands in the cybersecurity industry (CrowdStrike).

There are several laugh-out-loud paragraphs in Klion's piece, but the richest is probably this one:

[Contemporary Russia] is better understood as a cautionary tale of unchecked neoliberalism. The US-supported 1990s privatization schemes described in Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine are directly responsible for the rise of Putin and the repressive state he presides over.

See that? Klion has to be a good guy because he knows to blame neoliberalism for bad things, such as Putin's authoritarianism.

But the neoliberalism of the DNC (whose spokespeople and cybersecurity experts are the only folks pushing the narrative that Russia is to blame for the leak) doesn't seem to trouble Klion at all.

Weird.

Klion's first paragraph acknowledges that we still don't know who hacked the DNC: "Russians may have hacked and leaked Democratic National Committee emails via WikiLeaks" (emphasis added). But Klion doesn't like to think in terms of maybe or maybe not. He wants to assume that what the DNC and CrowdStrike have said must be true and that anyone who fails to share his sense of alarm must be a closet Leninist:

[I]t was frustrating to watch many of my friends and allies on the left shrugging off concerns about Russia in my Twitter feed last week. Nearly a century after the Bolsheviks first seized power, the American left’s relationship with Russia is still defined by an abstract nostalgia for a failed socialist experiment that has little relevance today.

Klion carefully sidesteps the possibility that those of us who refuse to get caught up in his hysteria aren't so much waxing nostalgic for the days of "Uncle Joe" Stalin as we are deeply skeptical of claims made by the warmongering DNC and scare-and-sell cybersecurity tacticians:

Reminder: Cybersecurity firms like FireEye & Crowdstrike have a $$ incentive to keep nation-state hacking fears high pic.twitter.com/HIkSAGmEXg

— Trevor Timm (@trevortimm) July 25, 2016

To The Guardian's credit, it balanced Klion's red-baiting hysteria with a calmer, more reasonable piece by Trevor Timm entitled "The rush to blame Russia for the DNC email hack is premature."

So read the Timm piece if you want the boredom of feeling informed, but turn to Klion if you prefer the exhilaration of running around like a chicken with your head cut off.