Hey, Little Liberal. We know you’re probably feeling pretty betrayed right now, and maybe you feel like you can’t express those emotions because they’re too big and scary. Especially because it didn’t just happen to you - most of your friends and family were right there with you hanging on every twist and turn of the Russiagate story for four whole years. What’s even worse is most of them still have a relationship with your abuser. How can you save yourself without confronting them?

So, you stay silent even as The Maddow walks around free, never taking any responsibility for what she and her friends did to you. You try to move on with your life, but with every new arrest of the people ultimately responsible for turning you into a drooling McCarthyite troll, your feelings of shame, worthlessness and stupidity keep on getting bigger. You try to distract yourself by obsessing on 1/6, but your heart just isn’t in it. When people bring it up you want to scream, “Are we really going to do this again!? Really?!”

Now I’m going to tell you something huuuuuge, and it’s important that you listen: there’s nothing wrong with you. Your reaction is a perfectly healthy response to being lied to and gaslit by corporate media for fun and profit for your whole entire little life. Because the truth is, it didn’t start with Russiagate, did it? That’s what made you finally notice the abuse. But it started waaaay before, didn’t it?

WMD’s were the thing that first made you think that maybe something wasn’t right about the relationship. But then they told you it wasn’t the whole media that lied to you, it was just that one Judith Miller woman, and that made it all better.

Then they told you Donald Trump would never be the President. Never, ever, never. Not ever. They promised you that he’d lose in a landslide and that your absolute favoritist boss bitch Hillary might even take Texas. Texas! Boy, would that be something!

On the day of the election, The New York Times told you Hill had an 84% chance of winning. You were soooooo excited that you never saw it coming. You felt so betrayed when Trump won. Finally, you were ready to walk out on your abuser.

But then they explained it in a way that made total sense: Russia! It was all Russia’s fault, just like in those old movies from the 80’s. And it was time to go all Rambo on their Commie asses! So not only did you stay in the relationship, you committed to it harder than you ever had before. Because Democracy Dies in Darkness, or something.

For four long years Maddow and her buddies passed you around between them. And the worst part is, you let them. It didn’t matter how many Russiagate stories turned out to be total bs, or how little sense it made that Russia was able to change an election outcome with $100,000 worth of ads on Facebook, or how the same media that was filling up your little head with all this stuff had also gifted Donald Trump with $5B in free advertising, something they never seemed to want to talk about.

You didn’t ask questions, because it was too scary to ask them, and you were hooked. And the truth is, on levels that you’re ashamed to admit, you stuck around because you liked what they were doing to you. It gave you a sense of purpose and meaning. It made you feel like part of a club - like you were one of the good people fighting against absolute evil. Like Star Wars, only with pussy hats instead of lightsabers and sick burns instead of X-wings. Take that, Darth Putin!

Then came the Mueller report. You tried to swallow the “well, he might not have said there was collusion, but he didn’t say there wasn’t either” spin, but it just made you feel cheap and dirty. After that, when you’d see your friends hunkered down in a dark room, letting Bob Acosta, or Joy Ann Reid, wash all over them, you felt the urge to save them. But it was all you could do to save yourself. You stopped watching. You stopped listening. You tried to move on with your life.

But now with the arrest of Michael Sussman for lying to the FBI about his work for the Clinton campaign and Igor Dachenko for basically inventing the Steele dossier, it looks more and more like it was all made up. . .By the Clinton campaign! Even your fav boss bitch lied to you. You feel so used. So ashamed. Why didn’t you do something? Why didn’t you stop them?

Listen little liberal, that’s just stinking thinking. None of this was your fault. There’s no one to blame for what happened but the people who took advantage of your trusting nature. You were brought up to believe that reporters were trustworthy grownups who based their reporting on this thing called objectivity, and that because of it they’d never lie to you. That made you an easy target. There was nothing you could have done to stop them.

Now is the time for you to reclaim your power. Now is the time for you to look them all in the eye and say, “I am strong! I am powerful! I am not going to go down the rabbit hole of your obsessive 1/6 coverage, not even when the committee hearings start!”

Go ahead! Say it! Say it loud and proud!

Now, don’t you feel better? It’s going to be a long road to recovery Little Liberal, but you’ve taken the first step on your journey to reclaim your personal power today.

Photo: Rob Walsh, Public Domain Dedication