Is Our Revolution a Step in the Right Direction--or an Aimless Lurch Meant to Dissipate Our Energy?

House parties for Our Revolution were held throughout the country last night. My wife and I hosted one such event attended by seven people:

From left: Liz, Michael, Marnia (hostess), Karina, Amanda, Paul, Amy, & Toni.

We gathered to watch a livestream from Vermont that featured Bernie Sanders and a number of other speakers.

None of us knew what to expect, but the livestream managed to disappoint expectations nevertheless.

Most of us had already heard about the resignations within Our Revolution following the appointment of Jeff Weaver as president of the organization. Weaver's commitment to raising revenue in traditional ways for spending on traditional television advertising troubles lots of folks for various reasons. From my own perspective, it is primarily objectionable because it fails to recognize that grassroots movements in the era of corporate media can only be successful to the extent that they subvert and defy that corporate media. The last thing we need to be doing is pouring millions of our own dollars into the very machine that is stifling our agenda.

Hours before the livestream even began, Debbie Lusignan put together a video in which she asked Our Revolution and Bernie Sanders to get out of the way of those of us who seek the large-scale changes that Sanders advocated throughout his campaign. I thought her video was unjustifiably harsh before the livestream aired.

Afterward, I could only conclude that Lusignan was prescient.

Some of the comments on the livestream from YouTube viewers reflected my own frustration as I watched Sanders rehash much of his stump speech. No one watching needed to be persuaded of the fact that we Americans must transform our nation from a marketplace into a society by seeking social, economic, racial, and environmental justice. We all share a sense of urgency concerning that task, and we need to discuss the best plans for achieving that goal.

Sanders could have explained why hiring Weaver (over the objections of the thirteen leading organizers who opposed Weaver's appointment) would help to achieve that goal. Instead, he told an aw-shucks story about how he had met Weaver.

Although Sanders never stooped to pleading for support of Hillary Clinton, he pointed to the non-binding platform document of the Democratic Party as evidence of some kind of progress. He even went so far as to assert that anyone who thinks that platform will simply gather dust in the coming years is "mistaken."

Color me mistaken.

I didn't need to hear about Republican governors who are suppressing the vote. I didn't need to hear about Democratic candidates who have agreed to advocate free tuition at state institutions of higher learning.

In fact, most Sanders supporters are sick of talking about the wrong things the GOP does and the right things the DNC says.

We're ready for a drastic departure from politics-as-usual. We're ready to knock on doors and pass out fliers. We're ready to phonebank, facebank, and textbank. We're ready to sacrifice our time and energy in the name of getting the right people elected. So what we needed to see from Sanders in the livestream was a demonstration of the vetting method that Our Revolution would be using to steer us towards supporting the right candidates in our local elections.

Instead, we got . . . it's not entirely clear what we got.

But whatever we got, it wasn't very helpful. Our guests stuck around for more than an hour after the livestream to discuss the practical steps we can take to make Austin as progressive as it pretends to be. Nothing that anyone said built on the livestream in any way. When the conversation stopped (a little before 11 p.m.), it was because people needed to get to bed--not because we were finished talking. 

If we had spent more time talking to each other and less time watching the livestream, we probably could have cobbled together a concrete plan of action before dispersing.

We hope to finish our conversation via email. And in fairness, even if the livestream from Our Revolution was largely a waste of time in terms of the content it provided, the house party did at least manage to put Marnia and me in touch with some knowledgeable and energetic people here in east Austin. 

But since it also put us in touch with some reluctant Hillary supporters who continue to bash Jill Stein as an "anti-science" candidate, I want to close this blog post by linking to an article from Counterpunch concerning "media as propaganda." Peter Lavenia's purpose in the article is to refute claims that Stein is "anti-vax" and "anti-wifi," but his larger claim about the propagandizing role of media only makes it harder for me to understand why people like Sanders and Weaver and even Stein herself continue to believe that the best way to reach people with their message is to give millions of dollars to the very organizations that are working overtime to distort and discredit that message.

Trump's Climate Change Denial Plays in the U.S. Because Our Corporate Media Ensures That Voters Value Advertising over Education

The echo chamber of corporate news has completely displaced reality for my parents.

My mother has always been patriotic. When I was a child, she wanted to prove America's superiority to Europe to me, so she showed me pictures of European children my own age who were missing limbs because their mothers had taken Thalidomide while pregnant. "We didn't have birth defects like that in America," she boasted, "because the FDA refused to approve that drug."

But after decades of listening to Fox News, she is now convinced that government regulation of the marketplace is the root of all evil.

My father has always been capitalistic. He used to say that climate change was a hoax made up by people jealous of the money raked in by the oil industry.

But after listening to Rush Limbaugh for years, he now argues that climate change is probably for the best because huge swaths of Canada will soon be comfy and warm.

My parents are hardly unique. There are millions of Americans just like them--mostly in their retirement years, mostly nostalgic for the America of their youth (the 1950s), and mostly responsive to Donald Trump's "Make America Great Again" slogan.

But the problem of a worldview warped by disingenuous reporting isn't limited to people like my parents. It includes plenty of people my own age (and younger) who believe that corporate media only distorts the perspective of older people who lean right.

We want to pretend that corporate media doesn't have a toxic effect on younger people who lean left (or at least left enough to think that there shouldn't even be a discussion about restricting abortion rights or LGBTQ rights or any of the other issues that the Democratic Party attempts to conflate with progressive values).

But how many people under 50 remember (or even acknowledge) the critical role that The New York Times played in securing the re-election of George W. Bush by postponing the publication of James Risen's story about warrantless wiretapping?

How many people under 50 object to the fact that our media spends more time covering Ryan Lochte than the flooding of Louisiana? How many of us grasp that corporate news outlets are choosing to focus on Ugly Americanism abroad so as to distract us from how ugly we are to our fellow citizens at home? After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, our professional reporters began calling the American citizens displaced by flooding "refugees." One reason these same media voices have such a hard time talking about the Louisianans displaced by flooding in 2016 is that "refugees" is now being applied to Syrians. The Syria problem stresses our vocabulary because we are temporarily out of words that can refer to poor (and mostly black) Americans without quite acknowledging their American-ness.

And how many people under 50 understand how bizarre it is that here in the U.S., our two major presidential candidates either deny that climate change exists (Trump) or pretend that it's under contol (Clinton)?

Trump and Clinton don't represent alternative solutions to the problem of pollution; they are simply two different brands of the same response. 

How does that happen? Is it really all because of Fox News? Or is it that one so-called journalist after another (in print, on radio, and on television) finds something other than the carbon-poisoning of the atmosphere to talk about?

It's not hard to understand how it happens once we recognize that Americans value advertising over education.

What we learn in school is less important than whatever agenda our advertisers promote via the airwaves. I learned all about the greenhouse effect of carbon emissions as an eighth-grader in public school (even in a state as backwards and oil-dependent as Texas!). But understanding the chemistry behind the problem is irrelevant in a nation in which no one ever talks about it. And we won't talk about it as long as almost every journalist gets a paycheck from an organization that is receiving hush money from the fossil fuel industry.

This is why I think that UK professor Ryan Thomas has no idea what he's talking about in a diatribe he released earlier today.

Thomas thinks MSM-bashing is dangerous because citizen-journalists lack the training/discrimination/critical thinking skills necessary to replace the journalism done by the mainstream media: "I’m unconvinced that rubbishing the BBC and The Guardian and getting your news from some bloke who makes graphs on Twitter is a wise move."

If Thomas confined his anti-MSM-bashing to his own side of the pond, then his article wouldn't be so irritating to me because the BBC isn't nearly as brain-deadening and tunnel vision-inducing as network TV in the US.

But the purpose of Thomas' piece is to stress the importance of entrusting journalism to the professionals--a notion that, if applied in the US, means leaving journalism in the hands of the very people who are being paid to subvert it.

Should I trust some "bloke who makes graphs on Twitter" more than Wolf Blitzer, Chris Wallace, Rachel Maddow, and whatever corporate shill NPR has hired to lecture me for an hour about how the threat of terrorism requires the US to bomb more people who might become terrorists?

The answer obviously depends on the bloke in question because I can't know in advance whether the graph on Twitter might actually be designed to inform me. But I do know in advance that whatever the newscasters are telling me has been designed to deceive and distract me.

I don't mean to suggest that professional journalism is entirely dead. Lee Fang of The Intercept is just one clear example of print journalism being alive and well. Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez of Democracy Now! routinely conduct eye-opening interviews with experts from around the world concerning topics that might otherwise receive zero attention. The idea that we must choose between network propagandists and blokes on Twitter is obviously a false dichotomy.

But when people outside the US pontificate about the dangers of bashing the MSM, I have to assume it's because they don't really understand the extent to which our MSM frames the discussion of everything in this country.

We're never allowed to examine the fact that Hillary Clinton sold influence to foreign governments in her time as Secretary of State because our MSM reporters are always eager to talk about something else--whether it be the latest preseason NFL football game, the "racist" overtones of a picture tweeted by Ellen DeGeneres, or the schadenfreude we can all experience when discussing Ryan Lochte.

Americans are going bankrupt every day because of skyrocketing healthcare expenses, but the lobbyists of our big pharmaceutical companies bribe our politicians to convince us that the only solution is to pass the Trans-Pacific Partnership so that our medications can become even more expensive.

Jimmy Dore is the bloke on Twitter who exposes that faulty logic by asking, "How can Americans possibly afford cheaper medications?"

If I understand Thomas correctly, I should tune Dore out to listen to all the network and newspaper reporters who want to talk about anything and everything in the world that doesn't matter at all so that the exploitative status quo can chug along unimpeded.

On my side of the pond, we almost never use the word "bloke," so I'll leave it to Thomas to determine whether I've used it correctly in this blog post. He can also be the judge of whether I'm correctly employing another idiom I associate with the UK as I say "Bugger off" to him and anyone else who imagines that corporate media in the US is anything less than a sustained and coordinated propaganda campaign by corporate interests that have already transformed the US into a market rather than a society and are intent on doing the same throughout the world.

Go ahead, Professor Thomas. Take your potshots at citizen journalism. Prop up the powers that be. And when the BBC and The Guardian become as manipulable by corporate interests as ABC and The New York Times currently are, you can choose between elected officials who refuse to acknowledge or address any of the issues that matter most to your fellow citizens. Enjoy.

Trump Is the Ruse de Guerre That Justifies Every Other Ruse de Guerre

Yesterday's word-of-the-day from the Oxford English Dictionary was "ruse de guerre," defined as "A stratagem; esp. one intended to deceive an enemy in war. Hence: a justifiable trick or deception."

The idea that deceptions and betrayals are acceptable under certain circumstances is really the defining feature of the Hillary Clinton campaign.

Clinton's supporters aren't just willing to overlook the lies and corruption of their candidate. They're positively eager to do so in the name of defeating Donald Trump.

Do they know that she's lying about her opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership? Yes, but they have to support her anyway . . . because Trump!

But wouldn't they prefer it if she would just be honest about her support for the TPP? No--because honesty might cost her some votes. 

Will they be disappointed when she signs the TPP into law as president? Of course not, since her phony opposition to it is simply a ruse de guerre to defeat Trump.

The same logic applies to every lie Clinton tells, every question from a reporter that she dodges, every vulnerable community that she sacrifices on the altar of "centrist appeal." It's all justifiable--every bit of it . . . because Trump!

As long as Clinton supporters accept Trump as the "existential threat" to the U.S. that he's made out to be, they will feel completely justified about their own betrayals of the democratic process, the Constitution, and their fellow citizens.

But Trump isn't an existential threat to anything.

He's simply the ruse de guerre that makes it easy for the Clinton media machine to justify every other ruse de guerre.

Trump is the neo-fascist strawman that allows Clinton to define herself negatively (as "not-Trump") instead of positively (which would be impossible, since there isn't any "there" there with Clinton).

I've been on the fence about Trump's intentions until today. Sometimes it looks like he doesn't know what he's doing, but sometimes it looks like he's trying to lose.

I considered the rumors that his campaign is a false flag operation for Clinton. I understood why some people believed that, but I never saw evidence that struck me as conclusive.

But when Fortune reported that the Trump campaign hired CrowdStrike to deal with a recent hacking episode, the scales fell from my eyes.

Cybersecurity companies like CrowdStrike can't do what they're hired to do without having access to the computer networks of their clients, so such clients must be willing to trust their data guardians with their most important secrets. 

The fact that CrowdStrike is a high-profile cybersecurity firm with a track record of investigating hacks of political campaigns is perhaps a good reason to trust them.

But the fact that CrowdStrike is already working for the DNC is a much better reason for the RNC candidate not to trust them.

I don't know what this hire looks like to the rest of the world, but to me, it's a plain signal that the data networks of the Clinton campaign and the Trump campaign have now been fused through CrowdStrike.

And when we later learn that CrowdStrike was able to coordinate Clinton's coronation through an analysis of data voluntarily provided to them by Trump's campaign, the Clinton supporters will smile at the impoverished and imprisoned people of a toxic, smoldering planet and say that merging the campaigns was a ruse de guerre. 

Crony Conspiracy Mongering: Getting in on the Ground Floor of the "Blame Russia" Industry

U.S. government officials have been reluctant to blame Russia for hacks of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC). We should expect the same reluctance from them in response to recently reported hacks of the Clinton Foundation.

But private cybersecurity firms have spent months echoing (as shrilly and stridently as possible) the hysterical accusations of the DNC (whose former head, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, casually invoked "Russian spies" to divert attention from her own professional failings in a recent debate with Tim Canova).

The most clear-headed and technologically competent analysis of the (mis)attribution of the cyberattacks to Russia is Jeffrey Carr's "Can Facts Slow the DNC Breach Runaway Train." However, my own summary of connections between various private cybersecurity firms remains relevant to the discussion.

One of the first companies to "corroborate" CrowdStrike's assertion of Russian involvement was FireEye/Mandiant. The Washington Post accepted Mandiant's conclusion as "independent" even though it was based on data provided to Mandiant not by the DNC itself, but by CrowdStrike as an intermediary.

Earlier today, The Daily Caller reported that FireEye has now been retained by the Clinton Foundation (CF) to investigate a suspected hack of that organization. We shouldn't expect FireEye to waste any time before assuring us that the same Russian fingerprints from the DNC hack are all over the CF hack.

This hire is significant for the Clinton media machine in two ways.

In the first place, it addresses the chief rhetorical weakness of the DNC's exclusive reliance on one private company (CrowdStrike) to diagnose the breach. Wherever we used to see "CrowdStrike" in stories about hacks relating to the Clintons and the Democrats, we'll start seeing "the cybersecurity industry" invoked as a whole.

But the second (and more insidious) development we should be able to foresee is that more and more cybersecurity firms will begin to issue press releases of their own in support of whatever CrowdStrike and FireEye have to say. Any such firms that have been paying attention have just learned that those who chime in with the appropriate take on the "blame Russia" campaign (as FireEye did back in June) will be first in line to receive consideration for contracts from the various outfits connected to Hillary Clinton's candidacy.

I predict that the next few months will show us that the Clinton media machine can play cybersecurity experts in exactly the same way that it currently plays journalists. The Clintons don't have to pay people to say whatever magic words they want to hear; they simply allow potential shills to observe that the easiest way to get a seat on the Clinton gravy train is to parrot whatever is being said by the people who are already on board.

With Enemies Like Donald Trump, Does Hillary Clinton Need Friends?

Short answer: No.

Long answer:

Every politician in history has intuitively grasped the importance of kissing babies and sympathizing with the grieving parents of young veterans who died in the service of their country.

So either Donald Trump is a new kind of politician--or he's not a politician at all.

Many of us are betting on the latter option at this point because Trump does not appear to be trying to win.

Instead, his role appears to be to distract as much attention as possible from the glaring flaws of Hillary Clinton's candidacy by making one outrageous political blunder after another. The nonsense isn't even limited to Trump. It extends to his supporters (such as Rudy Giuliani, who conveniently forgot the 9/11 attacks in a recent speech in which he contended that there were no successful terrorist attacks in America during the presidency of George W. Bush).

Trump has already won the GOP nomination, so at this point he should be working to build a coalition with independent voters outside his party--if he is trying to win.

But he isn't trying to win, so he's focused strictly on shoring up the support of voters who are already behind him (the evangelical Christians, homophobes, and anti-immigration zealots who were never going to vote Democratic in any case).

As I've observed previously in this blog, Trump has already gone over as a heel with the American electorate, but Clinton has yet to go over as a face.

What I haven't fully appreciated until now is that the DNC doesn't care whether Clinton goes over as a face or not. As long as Trump is sufficiently repugnant, the Democrats expect voters to settle on Clinton by default.

Considering the stranglehold the two-party system has on Americans, this strategy from the DNC will probably work.

The only thing that can stop what appears to be a scripted coronation of Clinton is a sudden surge by a third-party candidate. so the Democrats are (predictably) dedicating themselves to smearing the candidacy of Jill Stein. They don't really care if they offend left-leaning voters by wrongly accusing Stein of being opposed to vaccinations.

What a lot of people concerned with social, economic, racial, and environmental justice fail to see is that the Democrats don't care if they alienate us in 2016. They don't need friends as long as Trump has a sufficient number of enemies.

For a sample of how deaf the Democrats have become to the cries of their own progressive base, please treat yourself to this analysis of how a purportedly progressive talk show host (Thom Hartmann) bullies and berates a caller who dares to express how tiresome that Democratic deafness has become:

My favorite bit is when Hartmann claims that Clinton "isn't half bad" as a candidate.

This is the same Clinton who just appointed Ken Salazar to head her transition team for the White House, which is only a red flag for anyone concerned about the habitability of our planet. Salazar has contended that "there's not a single case where hydraulic fracking has created an environmental problem for anyone."

Hartmann would never serve as an apologist for the Trump campaign. How could he associate himself with the likes of Giuliani, who claims that there were no terrorist attacks in America during the Bush presidency?

But Hartmann is eager to serve as an apologist for the neoliberalism of Clinton. It's not "half bad" for him to be on the same team as a politician/lobbyist who denies that fracking poses any danger at all to the environment.

Wise up, progressive voters. 

Clinton doesn't need to be your friend. She only needs to turn folks like Trump and Hartmann into your enemies to persuade you that there's no place left on the political spectrum for your point of view. If Trump is your enemy and Hartmann is also your enemy, then you and your movement don't exist. And now that you realize progressivism doesn't exist, you should find something better to do with your time than to oppose the TPP, the carceral state, perpetual war, and the fact that Americans are dying every day because they can't afford medications that are readily available to ordinary citizens throughout the rest of the industrialized world. 

Game. Set. Match. Inevita-Hillary.

The Unblackening of Clinton Critics: Why the Voice of Larry Wilmore Had to Be Silenced

The biggest lie of the 2016 presidential election is the whopper Democrats routinely tell about their appeal to minorities.

These minorities are supposed to include the Latino population, but that's obviously not true--since Barack Obama earned the title Deporter-in-Chief by ordering the deportation of 7,000 immigrant children without so much as a court hearing on the subject. Even though some of those children came from countries savaged by Hillary Clinton's anti-democratic policies throughout Latin America, the Democrats like to pretend (without a scintilla of evidence) that America will treat Latinos at home and abroad better under Clinton than we have under Obama. (We won't.)

Minorities are also supposed to include Muslims, but it's hard for a president who uses drone strikes for extra-judicial assassinations of Muslim civilians (whether they are American citizens or not) to make the case that Democrats are as mindful of Muslim rights as they pretend to be. Clinton's unwavering commitment to interventionism should lead Muslims to expect her foreign policy to boil down to three sentences: "We went to the Muslim world. We saw the Muslim world. The Muslim world died." [Laughter.]

Minorities are also supposed to include the LGBTQ community--a community that is protected within the U.S. by laws and customs, not the presidency. Outside the U.S., if you want to torture, imprison, or execute people for their sexual orientations/identities, you'll need to make significant donations to the Clinton Foundation.

So who are these minorities that are so drawn to the Democrats? The way the Clinton media machine tells the story, there's only one minority community that really matters: the African-American community.

A central component of the DNC narrative in 2016 has been that Hillary Clinton appeals to "diverse" communities, but when Clinton was trounced by Bernie Sanders in Hawaii (the most ethnically diverse state in the country--with whites comprising less than 25% of the population), Clinton's surrogates refused to budge from their position that Sanders had no appeal in "diverse" communities. 

So when the Democrats accused Sanders of failing to appeal to diverse populations, what they really meant was that he wasn't appealing to black Americans.

But is that true?

The Clinton media machine doesn't care what's true. It doesn't care what Michelle Alexander has to say or how many people are listening to her (both inside and outside the black community).

It doesn't care what critics from the black left (such as Benjamin Dixon and others associated with Black Agenda Report) have been telling us for decades about how the Democratic Party shamelessly exploits black Americans for the political power it then uses to exploit those voters as citizens.

It certainly doesn't care if a Hindu from Hawaii (Tulsi Gabbard) wants to make a speech on Sanders' behalf at the Democratic National Convention.

But it cares a great deal about whether a black woman from Cleveland (Nina Turner) wants to do the same thing.

In fact, in Turner's case, the DNC cared enough to interfere by scrapping her speech at the last minute--because the worst sin that can be committed by corporate media in 2016 is to devote airtime to black voices that dare to be critical of Hillary Clinton (even if that criticism boils down to nothing more than supporting an alternative to her).

Accordingly, Larry Wilmore's The Nightly Show had to be canceled.

The official story from Comedy Central is that Wilmore's show was canceled because of poor ratings. Wilmore's show inherited the time slot that used to belong to The Colbert Report and is down to just over half as many viewers as the Colbert vehicle claimed.

By that logic, however, The Daily Show with Trevor Noah should also have been canceled, since Noah has retained just over half of the viewers who used to tune in to The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

Ratings aren't the issue. The issue is that Wilmore dares to be critical of Hillary Clinton and DNC hypocrisy while Noah dares nothing and does nothing.

When Clinton first announced her candidacy, Wilmore brilliantly compared her to Khaleesi from Game of Thrones and suggested (based on a line of dialogue from the series) that Clinton's campaign slogan should be: "Hillary for America. I will take what is mine with fire and blood. I WILL TAKE IT."

At the White House Correspondents' Dinner, Wilmore created anxiety among white liberal elites by observing: "Bernie's been hanging out with Killer Mike, or as Hillary Clinton calls him, Superpredator Mike."

If Wilmore were white, he would be able to get away with this kind of schtick because the corporate media has done everything possible to accommodate the DNC myth of the Bernie Bro. White males can make cutting comments about Clinton because their criticism fuels the argument that the only people opposed to warmongering corporatism are white, privileged misogynists.

But when Clinton is criticized by one of the people who is supposed to be part of her firewall (a black man working in corporate media, no less!), that is cause for alarm.

It's hard to say that Clinton is a friend of African-Americans when she does everything possible to prop up the school-to-prison pipeline.

It's hard to say that Clinton is a friend of African-Americans when her response to Black Lives Matter is less political (i.e. supporting reform of police departments throughout the country) than politically expedient (i.e. co-opting Black Lives Matter though a cynical manipulation of Mothers of the Movement).

It's hard to say that Clinton is a friend of African-Americans when her closest political allies include Rahm Emmanuel (who has essentially sold out Chicago's minority communities to Wall Street) and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (who advocates for the payday lending industry that exploits minorities throughout Florida).

In fact, it's so hard to say that Clinton is a friend of the African-American community that the only way the networks can manage to say it with a straight face is to ensure that NO black voices of criticism are ever heard in response.

If one such voice ever got through, then the balloon of Clinton's arrogance about her firewall might pop.

And we can't have that--so take a long walk off a short dock, Mr. Wilmore.

Guccifer 2.0 Uses Doxing in a Curious Call for Curation

Guccifer 2.0 leaked a series of documents from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) on Friday, August 12, 2016.

Since the hacker's blog entry for the 12th was later censored by WordPress, the hyperlink above allows readers to view the original post via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.

Of all the posts from Guccifer 2.0, this one is likely to seem the most schizophrenic to readers because it couples a callous exposure of private information (including unlisted phone numbers) with a respectable plea to journalists for help with curation.  

In his preamble to the hacked data, Guccifer 2.0 wantonly singles out a particular DCCC worker (Nirali Amin) as the source of various passwords that enabled him to access much of the leaked data.

It's certainly a failure on the institutional level for the DCCC to have kept "the user name and password the same" in so many cases, as Amin indicates in one email--but I'm not sure that many people would blame Amin herself for the oversight. And since Amin's specialization appears to be accounting (rather than cybersecurity), most people will be reluctant to fault her for responding by email to various emailed requests for passwords. (Should she have known better? We all know better on some level, but those of us who work at computer screens all day also know how customary it is to respond to requests for information without wondering who might be spying on our correspondence.)

Beyond singling Amin out for blame, however, the Guccifer 2.0 blog post goes on to provide readers with private phone numbers and unlisted email addresses for many Democrats serving in (or campaigning for) the House of Representatives.

Representative Nancy Pelosi, for example, complained of receiving "obscene and sick" messages on her private number after the blog post appeared. (Incidentally, that's about as close as any Democrats have come to confirming the authenticity of any documents leaked by Guccifer 2.0.)

In an article for Newsweek, Nicholas Loffredo explained why ordinary Americans (and not just those whose information was compromised) might question the integrity of the Guccifer 2.0 project:

[I]t's difficult to identify what public interest is served by sharing cellphone numbers and contact lists from within the DCCC, as Guccifer 2.0 did, or what truth is being uncovered by the release of a program from a political fundraiser. Despite Guccifer 2.0's gleeful tone, Friday's release is a minor footnote to the hack of the DNC, which showed committee officials arguably conspiring against former Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders and which lead to the resignation of DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz. 

On the one hand, our political representatives are so difficult for ordinary citizens to contact that there is something to be said for releasing their private contact information. But on the other hand, they are still private citizens (at least part of the time), and those of us who seek to protect the Fourth Amendment should respect their right to privacy as much as anyone else's.

And this is precisely what makes the blog post from the 12th so tricky: Clearly Guccifer 2.0 is concerned, on some level, with releasing information in a responsible manner. After sharing lots of personal information and passwords, he ends his blog post with a curious request for assistance from journalists:

Dear journalists, you may send me a DM if you’re interested in exclusive materials from the DCCC, which I have plenty of.

That's a strange move for a completely reckless hacker to make. If bringing information to light is all Guccifer 2.0 cares about, then why does he need to bother with journalistic middlemen? Why didn't he just post all the hacked documents directly to his WordPress site?

In other words, why should a hacker who doesn't mind doxing Democratic Congresspeople suddenly show scruples about exposing their internal documentation willy-nilly? 

Depending on what one assumes about the identity of Guccifer 2.0, there are lots of different ways to answer that question. But if we assume for the moment that the hacker is who he says he is (a lone cyber warrior attempting to expose the failure of democracy in the U.S. to the entire world), then his decision is a predictable result of anxiety over document curation.

He seeks to expose all of the publicly sensitive information that warrants exposure, but he doesn't want to expose it without professional guidance. Unfortunately, professionals won't give him guidance until they realize that he should be taken seriously--so releasing the privately sensitive information must seem (from this perspective at least) like an efficient way of demonstrating the validity of the hack.

Concerns about how Julian Assange would curate information leaked to him by Chelsea Manning led to persistent problems in his working relationship with The New York Times and Der Spiegel back when journalistic hacktivism was first establishing itself as an important 21st-century phenomenon.

Edward Snowden's asylum in Russia is indisputably a product of his relationship with Assange and WikiLeaks, but many people forget that Snowden reached out to Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald--not Assange--for help in disseminating his information, in part because of his concerns about how his sensitive materials would be curated.

The tension between Greenwald's journalistic approach to curation and Assange's increasingly strident commitment to exposing pristine documents is perhaps best illustrated by this tweet from Snowden:

Democratizing information has never been more vital, and @Wikileaks has helped. But their hostility to even modest curation is a mistake.

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) July 28, 2016

I don't believe Guccifer 2.0 is who he says he is, but if he is, then it makes sense for him to be somewhat bewildered by the same questions that led to disagreements between luminaries such as Snowden and Assange.

Guccifer 2.0 does not appear to have broken any laws by publishing the contact information in the DCCC leaks. According to Thomas Fox-Brewster of Forbes, the hacker's entry from the 12th was censored by WordPress because it violated the website's "policy on sharing private information"--not because of a specific federal statute that forbids the sharing of such data.

Fox-Brewster also reports that the Guccifer 2.0 Twitter account was temporarily suspended, but it's not clear what justification Twitter used for the suspension. In any case, the account has been restored as of this writing, and the hacker used it to promote a new batch of leaked documents made available today (August 15th):

#DCCC Internal Docs on Primaries in #Florida #Guccifer2 #dccchackhttps://t.co/09gjLXLK25

— GUCCIFER 2.0 (@GUCCIFER_2) August 15, 2016

Those documents have not been censored by WordPress, and they don't seem to warrant censorship.

Complex questions about curation and censorship are too difficult to be resolved in a single blog post, but if we assume that there is only one bad actor in this scenario (the Democratic Party as an institution), then the seemingly schizophrenic behavior of Guccifer 2.0, Twitter, and WordPress is easy to explain as an attempt to process confusion and anxiety about how information should be regulated when the government that was supposed to be in charge of regulating it can no longer be trusted to do its job.