I am sick and tired of hearing about Russia. I’m sorry, really I am, but it is so hard for me to care about something that, in my personal opinion, is so manufactured. If there is one thing all of us should know by now about how American media operates it is that, if they are unified in delivering a specific message, that message is most certainly a lie. Calling it a lie is almost too generous, it is an orchestrated assault on our ability to access truthful information. The point of this post is not to absolve Donald Trump of wrongdoing or somehow change your opinion on him or the Russian narrative, only to point out what it is… a narrative.

In today’s world, we are constantly bombarded with all sorts of information and our mainstream news services only have one setting (BREAKING BOMBSHELL MEGA-IMPORTANT NEWS!!!!!), making it difficult to step back and really analyze and digest news as it comes to us. I say this because, as far as I can tell, we stopped getting news entirely and now we are being fed (forcefully I might add) a 24-hour hysteria cycle with the goal of doing one thing. HALT TRUMP.

‘But Sal,’ you plead. ‘He brought this on himself with all his shady dealings with Putin.’

Yea. Here is my problem with that. The origins of the Russian meddling scandal can be traced back to the Democratic Primary where the Clinton campaign accused Bernie Sanders and his supporters (of which I was one) of being useful idiots to the grand regime of Vladimir Putin. This was rightly laughed off (because it was ridiculous). When the DNC and subsequently John Podesta had damning information stolen and leaked to the public domain the 'Left' needed a way to distract voters from the CONTENT of that information. The tactic chosen by the Clinton campaign and the Obama administration to combat this onslaught of terrible news was to shift focus on Russia, casting them as the agent behind these breaches. That assertion, up until the typing of this piece, has NEVER been proven to be true by any individual or agency (in fact there are strong cases against this claim). Yet, it gets recited ad nauseum as if it were the literal word of God.

It is on THIS CLAIM that the entire Russia-Trump collusion theory depends. The intelligence agencies have already told us that there is no evidence of votes being changed, they have stated that no voting machines were compromised. The entirety of Russian meddling is boiled down by our own intelligence agencies as a dis-info-propaganda campaign through media outlets like Sputnik and RT. Forgetting for a second the simple fact that the viewer/readership of those two outlets is practically negligible, it is hard to see how Donald Trump plays into that type of "meddling" at all.

‘Well, Trump told Russia to hack us and they did.’