Why is Julian Assange echoing Donald Trump’s campaign rhetoric verbatim?

On the eve of the American presidential election, Julian Assange has conducted an interview with Jonathan Pilger in which he not only attacks Hillary Clinton, but does so sounding a lot like an intellectualised version of Donald Trump. The worst Trumpism he has repeated is that the up coming election will somehow be rigged in Clinton’s favour:

“My analysis is that Trump would not be permitted to win. Why do I say that? Because he has had every establishment off his side. Trump does not have one establishment, maybe with the exception of the Evangelicals, if you can call them an establishment. Banks, intelligence, arms companies, foreign money, etc. are all united behind Hillary Clinton. And the media as well. Media owners, and the journalists themselves.”

The question this begs is: does Assange actively want Trump to win? Or does he just hate Clinton that much? Or better still, is he doing the bidding of the Kremlin here?

The last query there was slightly tongue in cheek – but only slightly. Assange seems to have a certain blind spot for Putin that many other “progressives” share. If he is against large overbearing governments stomping all over its citizens basic rights, how can he tolerate never mind celebrate the Kremlin’s way of doing things? The interview with Pilger was done independently but then offered to RT, and given almost everyone has seen it via RT they might as well have just done it as an official RT production.

It seems to me that in Assange’s moral universe what an individual or a government does is much less important than the degree of secrecy the relevant things are done under. In other words it is much worse to commit minor wrongs and cover them up than it is to do really, really awful things out in the open. It is like Assange doesn’t understand democracy or its affect on a society at all – in liberal democracies, all sorts of things are done under a veil of secrecy for fear of reprisals from the electorate. Now, Assange can detest that and seek to be a champion against such things, but it seems to me the only rational explanation for doing so is because he believes that in a democracy accountability should be full, and that autocracies are automatically bad. Yet in the Pilger interview, Assange decries anti-Kremlin talk as “whipping up xenophobia”.

So does Assange believe that all democracies should be overthrown and replaced with autocracies because then at least things won’t be done in secret? I am assuming not, yet this is the only logical way to square his behaviour (barring him being a paid up stooge for the Kremlin, which I’ll discount as a possibility here). His almost religious mission has been to undermine the establishment. Why he can’t see that a famous,  rich hotelier who has been funding different political candidates in the US for years, and a man in control of the second largest nuclear arsenal in the world are undeniably parts of that very same global establishment confuses me.

It is beginning to come across that Assange is just another leftie hater of all things American, which leads him to pick Trump over Hillary simply because Putin likes Trump, and Putin is the only large explicit counter-power to America going. How vile.