They’re trying to pull a “weapons of mass destruction” on us.

WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange has unequivocally stated in a must-watch interview with award-winning Australian journalist John Pilger that the Russian government is not the source of the leaked emails that have been rocking America’s election cycle this year. This directly contradicts statements made by both the executive branch of the U.S. government and by Democratic leading lady Hillary Clinton.

“The Clinton camp has been able to project a neo-McCarthyist hysteria that Russia is responsible for everything,” the controversial transparency advocate told Pilger at the Ecuadorian embassy he’s been confined to for the last four years. “Hillary Clinton has stated multiple times, falsely, that 17 US intelligence agencies had assessed that Russia was the source of our publications. That’s false. We can say that the Russian government is not the source.”

When asked about accusations that WikiLeaks hasn’t published any leaks about Russia, Assange pointed out that his organization has published over 800,000 documents which relate to Russia, most of which are critical.

Watch the full version of John Pilger's interview with Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London... https://t.co/iGh07CmT3M — John Pilger (@johnpilger) November 5, 2016

They lied to us in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion, and they’re lying to us now.

Last month, the New York Times reported that the Obama administration had “formally accused the Russian government of stealing and disclosing emails from the Democratic National Committee and a range of other institutions and prominent individuals,” and that Hillary Clinton blamed the Russian government for hacking DNC emails in a debate with Donald Trump.

“We have 17 intelligence agencies, civilian and military who have all concluded that these espionage attacks, these cyber attacks, come from the highest levels of the Kremlin,” Clinton lied in another debate, citing a figure Politfact reports could only be true if you included among those intelligence agencies the Energy Department, the Treasury Department, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Coast Guard.

Clinton is also on record for horrifyingly stating that the United States will treat the imaginary Russian cyber attacks “just like any other attack,” threatening “serious political, economic and military responses” for the entirely made-up offenses.

In an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press, Vice President Joe Biden was asked by Chuck Todd if the United States was preparing to send a message to Russian president Vladimir Putin regarding Russia’s make-believe “cyber attack.”

“We’re sending a message,” the Vice President replied chillingly. “We have the capacity to do it.”

“He’ll know it,” he added. “And it will be at the time of our choosing. And under the circumstances that have the greatest impact.”

Perhaps most frightening of all, Hillary Clinton has been stating with uncharacteristic consistency that she intends to set up a no-fly zone in Syria, where Russian military planes are conducting operations at the request of the Syrian government. This either means that Putin will suddenly bow out of the region in submission to America’s demands, or the U.S. military will be attacking the Russian air force.

Will #WeSurvive a @HillaryClinton that has access to nuke button, war with Russia over Saudi Arabian pipeline? pic.twitter.com/h9dRzQhcRZ — Hillary's Server (@ItsHerTime) October 31, 2016

So who to believe? The people who we already know have been lying to us, or the man who’s been exposing their lies?

From the top down, they are WMDing us. WikiLeaks, which has an untarnished decade-long reputation of perfectly-vetted sources and is now providing DKIM verification for its email releases to prove that they haven’t been altered, has released document after document showing us how the United States government has been lying to its people with the corporate media’s direct assistance. And now we’re seeing the exact same warmongering deception and propaganda from our government that we saw in the lead-up to the evil and unforgivable invasion of Iraq.

Everyone with an ear to the ground knew that the Iraq invasion had nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). We all knew it was about oil. I knew it, my friends and family knew it, everyone who wasn’t suckling from the teat of corporate media propaganda knew it. “No blood for oil!” was one of the most common cries heard at the countless anti-war protests held around the world in those days. It wasn’t a secret. But the government was lying to us about Saddam Hussein having WMDs, and the press helped spread those lies instead of doing their jobs as journalists. So the war had public support.

It’s hard to find an online source that explains in simple layman’s terms the complex way that the U.S. economy is being propped up using the might of its military, but this excellent Counterpunch article by Colin Todhunter does a pretty good job. If that’s too dense for you, check out this simple illustration: This Time article from the end of the year 2000 reported that Saddam Hussein’s regime broke with OPEC convention and stopped selling their oil exclusively in U.S. dollars, beginning to sell it in euros instead. In the spring of 2003, the U.S. and coalition forces invaded Iraq, and according to this FTM article released weeks after the invasion, the conquered nation was back to selling oil exclusively in U.S. dollars again.

The plutocrats who essentially control the U.S. economy have been using America’s neoliberal government to pull off an ecocidal, exploitative juggling act to amass unfathomable wealth while skirting the edge of economic disaster using predatory trade deals along with the carrot of military protection and the stick of military retaliation on key economies to keep the U.S. dollar dominant in the world economy. If you’re unfamiliar with the word “neoliberal” by the way, you should google it right now and get acquainted with it because it affects you personally.

Neoliberal IMF Admits Neoliberalism Causes Inequality https://t.co/fKJL46Rl36 & stunts growth! Oh dear, new report for #Truffles #Morriscum — JD Anthony (@ranterulze) October 25, 2016

As Todhunter explains, America is moving closer to a direct confrontation with Russia and China, who are leading a movement away from the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency, the foundation upon which America’s economy depends. Asian Review reports that both countries are also on a gold-buying spree. Russia is being particularly naughty by holding tight to Syria, which is a key player in U.S. banking, oil and strategic interests.

In simple terms, this means one of four things are inevitably going to happen before long:

The U.S. economy will collapse. The U.S. will find some way to free its government from the corporatist stranglehold of the oligarchs and change the way its economy operates. The whole world will start politely doing exactly as America demands all the time. America will utilize its military might in a very big way to keep its plates spinning.

Now if you’re an oligarch hanging out in your mansion far removed from the sounds of human suffering, there’s only one of these options that can you can both (a) reasonably expect to happen and (b) know won’t inconvenience you any, and that’s lucky number four. Which explains why the U.S. government is lying to its people about Russia right now.

If you doubt that your nation’s leaders would be insane enough to drag us into a military conflict with a nuclear superpower, think again. Hillary Clinton’s entire political career has been one of pushing for catastrophic, disastrous acts of military aggression at every opportunity. Her biography consists of spectacular hawkish blunder after spectacular hawkish blunder. Not only does she love war, she’s also really, really bad at it. She is every bit crazy enough to drag us into that conflict, and her supporters are at this point in time blind enough to let her. Everything about her past and present behavior says she’s going to do it, and everything about the corporate media’s past and present behavior says they’re getting ready to help her.

We’ve seen this before, America. A rising head of state lying to us about a country full of people who have never done us any wrong, who have hopes and dreams and families like the rest of us. Lying to us, slyly dog-whistling to people’s bigotry and xenophobia while the shill press beat the drums of war for them and pass their lies along as fact.

We’ve seen this before, America, and this time, in the information age, we have the opportunity to get it right. So I ask you again: Who do you believe? The ones you know are lying to you, or the man who has dedicated his life to exposing those lies? The ones who lied about weapons of mass destruction and willfully deceived and manipulated the American people to install their corporate crony war hawk candidate, or the one who has been helping to expose corruption wherever it’s found?

It’s time to pick a side.

(Oh, and those four possibilities I described above? The second one is totally doable.)

[Featured Image by Hannah Peters/Getty Images]