WikiLeaks is due to release its mysterious and spectacularly-hyped “Vault 7” drop within hours of this writing. A few hours later we’ll probably all be arguing about its contents, so I figure it’d be helpful to tap out a few of the most shockingly moronic things that people often say about WikiLeaks in online discourse to give my readers some extra tools for debating this stuff. If you can shut a brainwashed CNN watcher down with a simple link or two, that frees up space in the conversation for the grown-ups to kick around real ideas, so I’ll be filling this essay with copious hyperlinks for your reference.
To help dispel the darkness of this inexcusable ignorance, here are seven of the common stupid things that people say about WikiLeaks, and why they’re wrong:
1. “WikiLeaks is fake news/Russian propaganda/forged/unreliable!”
WikiLeaks has a decade-long 100% perfect record of vetting its sources, and has never had to retract anything it’s published due to inaccuracy. That’s why when the DNC leaks first dropped in July of last year, nobody tried to claim they were forged; they just apologized to the Sanders campaign for their impropriety and tendered their letters of resignation. It wasn’t until the Podesta Emails began dropping in October that anyone (namely then-acting DNC Chairwoman Donna Brazile and then-vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine) was dumb enough to try and say the documents were forgeries, and WikiLeaks dropped the hammer on them by publicly posting the emails incriminating them with DKIM verification disproving their allegations.
In 2010 WikiLeaks’ head honcho Julian Assange told Mother Jones that any leak that comes to them through their specialized secure, anonymous drop box is rigorously vetted by a multidisciplinary team of himself plus four others, whose identities he keeps secret. Former UK ambassador Craig Murray writes in his blog that WikiLeaks rejected his government torture leaks because his documents didn’t meet their strict standards for publication. Without their long history of perfectly accurate releases, the reputation of their organization would be ruined, and nobody would have any reason to believe any subsequent releases on their part.
If anyone says WikiLeaks’ releases are untrustworthy, ask them to go googling and see if they can find one single, solitary shred of solid evidence that even one WikiLeaks document has ever been proven inauthentic. They will be unable to.
2. “WikiLeaks has a right-wing bias!”
Really? Then why did they put themselves on the map dropping leaks about the Bush administration? The fact is that before WikiLeaks began releasing documents incriminating the Democrats’ historically awful presidential candidate in 2016, liberals loved WikiLeaks. Assange didn’t suddenly become a Bible-thumping conservative wingnut in 2016 after forever shredding what was left of Dubya’s legacy, he just brought transparency to the obvious establishment power structures using the leaks he was given. Which takes us to our next Profoundly Stupid Thing People Say About Wikileaks:
This one really makes my eye twitch. Firstly, a lot of people seem to be under the inexplicable impression that WikiLeaks is some sort of hacking organization that goes out acquiring secret documents using its own power. This is simply not the case; WikiLeaks is structurally nothing other than an organization which gives people the option of delivering documents anonymously, which it then vets, verifies, publicizes and publishes. It’s a publishing company, like a newspaper but full of stuff the ruling elites don’t want you to know instead of stuff they want you to believe.
In reality, WikiLeaks has solicited Trump leaks on more than one occasion and has criticized Trump’s opacity with his tax returns, but, like all publishing companies, they can’t control who comes to them and who chooses to utilize other publishing services. There were Trump leaks prior to the election, they just didn’t come from WikiLeaks; Trump’s tax information was leaked to the New York Times, and the infamous “grab her by the pussy” audio was leaked to the Washington Post. Since the election leaks have been dropping frequently from anonymous sources in the intelligence community, still primarily through WaPo and the NYT. It isn’t WikiLeaks’ fault that these leakers are choosing to go through other publishers, though given the hundreds of millions of dollars that WaPo’s owner has received from the CIA it’s not exactly surprising that the intelligence community has a preference for that particular outlet.
4. “Assange is Putin’s puppet!”
“Putin’s puppet” is just something that people say to let you know that they have no logical argument and huffed too many household cleaning products in their formative years. In reality, WikiLeaks has published some 800,000 documents relating to Russia and Putin, many of which were critical and some of which have been used in court cases against the Russian government. Assange has stated multiple times that the Russians are not the source of the DNC Leaks or the Podesta Emails, and there is no information anywhere proving him wrong. If someone says otherwise, they are wrong, and you should challenge them. They will not produce any solid proof of their assertion, just a bunch of anonymous claims and empty, authoritative assertions from some factions of the US intelligence community, which has an extensive record of lying to the American people to advance establishment agendas.
People still sincerely make this intensely idiotic assertion, and it’s only because they either (A) haven’t read the DNC Leaks and the Podesta Emails or (B) are hoping the person they’re debating hasn’t read them.
In reality, the conspiring and “us vs. them” language between DNC officials in their leaked emails unquestionably reveals a blatant violation of Article 5, Section 4 of the DNC Charter, which promises the American people that the DNC Chairperson (who was included in and participated in many of these emails) “shall be responsible for ensuring that the national officers and staff of the Democratic National Committee maintain impartiality and evenhandedness during the Democratic Party Presidential nominating process.” This plainly did not happen, as a glance at some of the nastiest emails reveals. The DNC Charter was revised with this promise to prevent a DemExit after the 1968 fiasco in Chicago, and in 2016 they undeniably broke this promise.
As bad as the DNC Leaks were, the Podesta Emails were far more incriminating. From Donna Brazile serving as a mole against the Sanders campaign and passing multiple debate questions in advance to Hillary Clinton, to an email from a CitiGroup executive instructing Obama what cabinet picks (who would then go on the shape policy for dealing with Wall Street crooks after they caused the 2008 global financial crisis) he was permitted to choose from prior to his election in 2008, to the Clintons taking bribes from Qatar and Morocco and knowingly accepting funds from political bodies that arm ISIS, to evidence that the DNC was stacking the deck for Clinton as early as 2014, to a suggestion that the Clinton campaign had some sort of “leverage” over Bernie Sanders, to Clinton promising a group of Goldman Sachs executives that she would lie to the American people for their benefit by assuring them that she understood the importance of having both a “public position and a private position” when it comes to economic matters, there was more than enough shocking data there to rightly hurt Clinton’s approval rating.
This one is especially stupid because it distracts from the undeniable veracity of the WikiLeaks documents themselves, but it’s also easily refuted so let’s go over it real quick. Assange has not even been charged with rape, let alone convicted; here is a breakdown of the facts of his case from justice4assange.com. The pedophilia accusation is vastly more absurd; it was a charge manufactured by a shady individual with connections to Hillary Clinton. When CNN repeated this obnoxious lie on air, it immediately ran a full retraction and an apology when WikiLeaks threatened to sue. And, again, none of this has anything to do with the the importance of WikiLeaks or the truth in its documents.
7. “It’s illegal to read WikiLeaks.”
CNN’s Chris Cuomo is a lying, manipulative turd cannon. Read WikiLeaks. It is not only legal, it is your patriotic duty.
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