David Crosby on How Trump Is ‘Under the Control of Russia’

In the 1950s, in the fearsome early days of the Cold War, American baby boomers learned to dive under their school desks in drills that even 8-year-olds knew were not going to do much good in a nuclear war that could end all human life on Earth.

Through the ‘60s and ‘70s, the Soviet Union was very, very powerful, and convinced that its next major war would be with us, even as smaller wars raged from Korea and Southeast Asia to Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America.

Russian generals formulated a plan to charge through the Fulda Gap in Germany with a few thousand tanks and beat their nemesis, NATO. The Western allies developed counterstrategies. But by the 1980s, even though an apocalypse seemed possible, it no longer seemed likely.

And then: the Soviet Union crumbled from within. The Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, the East European satellite nations broke away, and by the autumn of 1991 the Soviet Union had collapsed, tearing apart not only the territories of the communist empire, but the Russian empire dating back centuries.

Demagogues don’t blame themselves, however, and Russia was full of them—including a former KGB spy named Vladimir Putin. The fault, they decided, lay with the United States, which had exploited their internal weaknesses.

When Anthony Bourdain Called Out Putin and TrumpGOOD EYE

Marlow Stern

Russia was no longer the powerhouse the Soviet Union had been, but Putin had a plan: Moscow would erode the Western democracies from within by exploiting their own weaknesses. That’s why it started its current campaign of attacks against us years ago, and why they are still going on.

Basically, the Russians take hold of any division in our society—racial prejudice, class war, fear of vaccines, any division that has two sides—and they work it. They pose as a group of radical people of color and say awful stuff about whites, and then they turn around and play white supremacist KKK crazies and say we should ship all blacks back to Africa. They do it with every issue they can. Their plan is to divide us and thus render us helpless.

In Donald Trump, they saw an opportunity that could not be better for them. Here was a man so ignorant, and so completely unaware of geopolitics, that he could be outwitted and misled before Putin got out of bed in the morning, easily—even without the very real possibility that Putin has incriminating evidence with which to blackmail the president.

It seems clear to me that Russia may well have some kind of info they are using to blackmail Trump with—“kompromat” as the Russians call it. It could be the alleged “pee tape,” could be some truth to the whispers that Trump has been laundering Russian mob money for at least 20 years through his New York real estate deals, stashing illegal money in multimillion-dollar apartments and condos all over town. Could just be the fact he lied about working on a deal for Trump Tower Moscow while he was running to be President of the United States in 2016. This could be why Trump is so completely under the control of Russia and so utterly disloyal to the United States. This could be why the Republican Party is blocking the passage of laws to protect our elections from outside influence, because that’s how they installed Trump, and that’s how they intend to win again in 2020. 

I love this country. I believe democracy is the very best way for humans to live together under the rule of law. This next election involves rescuing our country from racism and greed and hatred, but it also involves saving the future of the whole human race from the horrors of climate change.

Climate change is real and is coming right at us, as months of record-breaking temperatures all over the world demonstrate. We are a great country. We have the brains, the money, and the know-how to lead this fight, and we should be leading it. I can’t just sit by and watch us squander our children’s future now that they, too, face a threat to all human life on Earth.

So here I am again, speaking my mind.