Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - The Trump-Russia Conspiracy Theory is Dead

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Feb. 14, 2019 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

19:32

The Trump-Russia Conspiracy Theory is Dead

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	So before I get started on today's video, I just want to go back about two years to a t-shirt competition that I ran back in 2017, and I never actually finished.
	I rolled out all the t-shirts and prizes for the fifth to second place winners, but I actually never got around to doing the first place ones, not because of any particular reason other than administration.
	It took loads of time to set the bloody things up and I just couldn't seem to find the time.
	But thankfully, because now I have a couple of chaps who I can basically get to do this sort of stuff for me, I can actually finish the final number one slot in the competition.
	So now I actually have all of the finalists on my Teespring store, and I guess I'll decide which one won by letting the market decide.
	Whichever one sells the best, well, that can be the winner.
	So I chose from these particular designs, because these were the ones that I personally really liked.
	So the first one I chose was this one, purely because I like the art style, and honestly, I like the fact that he's carrying the head of an SJW.
	I mean, there's a part of me that chose this just because I want to see if any of them whine that he's carrying the head of an SJW in a cartoon on a t-shirt.
	This design was originally for a t-shirt, but the thing is, the way that the Teespring store works and the picture alignment on the shirts, I can't actually make it so the beard goes up to the neck hole of the t-shirt itself.
	So I put it on phone cases instead.
	And I still think it looks pretty good.
	I absolutely adore this meme, but the thing is it's quite hard to see on this t-shirt just because of the way that Teespring generates their thumbnails.
	And weirdly enough, it fit really, really, really well on a towel.
	So as you can see on the towel, you've got Sargon holding a bow with an arrow that's labeled freedom of speech.
	And the feminists, communists, and Islamists are all fleeing from it.
	And there is, of course, some autistic screeching coming in defense of them.
	Honestly, this is such a nice little design, I'm really tempted to just order myself one of these towels anyway.
	And with this one, I just really like this piece of artwork.
	I thought this looked really, really cool.
	In fact, I like this one so much, I changed the icon of my YouTube channel to this one, because I think it looks badass.
	Anyway, links in the description if you're interested in getting any merch.
	And obviously the money that I raise will be going to helping to pay for things that I'm doing.
	Because another thing I wanted to quickly do is give you a brief update.
	I don't know how much I can really say about what it is I'll be doing in the next couple of weeks, but I'm unbelievably busy.
	And I'm going to have to essentially go on a road trip for about five to seven days, something like that, in order to do something for UKIP.
	I think the results will be totally worth it.
	That's the most important thing.
	I think the results will speak for themselves.
	And if they don't, well, then I tried.
	So after nearly two years of an unbelievably complex and detailed investigation into Donald Trump's presidential campaign, we've got to the stage where the Senate Intelligence Committee, a bipartisan committee run by a Republican and a Democrat, have come to the conclusion that there is no direct evidence of conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia.
	Well, you can imagine how pleased NBC News are to have to report that, can't you?
	After two years and 200 interviews, the Senate Intelligence Committee is approaching the end of its investigation into the 2016 election, having uncovered no direct evidence of conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, according to both Democrats and Republicans on the committee.
	If we write a report based upon the facts that we have, then we don't have anything that would suggest there was collusion by the Trump campaign and Russia, said Senator Richard Burr, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a Republican.
	He was careful to note that more facts may yet be uncovered, but the investigation was nearing an end.
	We know that we're getting to the bottom of the barrel because there's not new questions that we're searching for answers to.
	And on Tuesday he said to NBC News, there is no factual evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
	And his Democratic vice chair said that he disagreed with the way that Burr characterized it, but declined to offer his own assessment.
	I'm not going to get into any conclusions I have, he said, before adding, there's never been a campaign in American history that people affiliated with the campaign have had as many times with Russia as the Trump campaign did.
	That might be true.
	But really, how would you know?
	How many other campaigns have ever been subject to this level of scrutiny?
	I personally am not aware of any American election that has been so poorly received by the defeated party.
	I am not aware of any time where the people who lost the vote decided that they couldn't accept that and instead launch into a two-year-long witch hunt, apparently, of the opposition just because they couldn't just get over it.
	Democratic Senate investigators who spoke to NBC News on condition of anonymity did not dispute Burr's characterizations, but said they lacked context.
	We were never going to find a contract signed in blood saying, hey, Vlad, we're going to collude.
	Obviously not.
	But, you know, evidence of collusion might have been a useful thing for you to find.
	I mean, I realize that you've already assumed that this is happening.
	The problem that you're having, obviously from your perspective, is just can't seem to prove it.
	This series of contacts between Trump's associates, his campaign officials, his children and various Russians suggest the campaign was willing to accept help from a foreign adversary, the Democrats say.
	By many counts, Trump and his associates had more than 100 contacts with Russians before the January 2017 presidential inauguration.
	Do you guys even realize that we're not actually at war with Russia?
	Like, it's okay for people to talk to Russians.
	Not all Russians are the agents of Vladimir Putin.
	Imagine if they were treating any other ethnic group in the way that they are treating Russians.
	Imagine if it was Muslims.
	I mean, hang on, wait a minute.
	No, we know.
	When Trump wanted to ban Muslims from coming to the United States, the left had an apoplectic fit.
	But it's okay when it's Russians because, I guess, they're white.
	But naturally, the Democratic side of the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee is not letting it go.
	They can't just accept that maybe, just maybe, Donald Trump actually won the presidency because he was speaking to a certain demographic in America that the Democrats were just ignoring or outright hostile to, and that maybe there are problems that the Democrats simply aren't trying to address.
	Democratic Senate investigators say it may take them six or seven months to write their final report once they are done with the witness interviews.
	They say they have uncovered facts yet to be made public, and they hope to make Americans more fully aware of the extent to which the Russians manipulated the US presidential election with the help of some Trump officials, witting or unwitting.
	The report Democrats say will not be good for Trump.
	But they have also made clear that they haven't found proof of their worst fear, that the president formed a corrupt pact with Russia to offer sanctions, relief, or other favourable treatment in return for Russian help in the election.
	So the best available evidence from a bipartisan two-year-long investigation shows us that there was no conspiracy or collusion with Russia.
	So when Trump is screaming on Twitter, no collusion between Trump and Russia, that's correct by all of the facts that we can marshal.
	So the last two years of activated almonds, noggins, jogging, and, well, just outright hysteria from the Democratic side has all been for naught.
	And the thing is, it's not like the investigation hasn't turned up a lot of dirt generally on the professional political class surrounding Donald Trump.
	There have been dozens of indictments of campaign aides and other various political actors within Washington that are connected to the Trump campaign, but not for conspiracy with Russia, just for other things.
	And you know what?
	Great.
	Put them through the ringer.
	Just stop saying that Donald Trump is only the president because Russia made it happen.
	Frankly, I'm sure Russia would have loved for that to be the case, but they don't have that kind of influence, you lunatics.
	And I say that because former FBI director Andrew McCabe, the guy who started the investigation, has the same kind of glassy-eyed conviction that Trump could not have won this on his own merits.
	It must have been some kind of interference.
	I was speaking to the man who had just run for the presidency and won the election for the presidency, and who might have done so with the aid of the government of Russia, our most formidable adversary on the world stage.
	And that was something that troubled me greatly.
	Okay, one, Russia is not the US's most formidable adversary on the world stage.
	That's China, as everyone knows, and as Donald Trump won't shut up about.
	But secondly, you did this the day after his election.
	I mean, this is literally like you just can't believe it.
	And therefore, you have to be like, right, well, we have to find some other explanation, because otherwise, it is the political establishment itself that has failed.
	You know, the Hillary Clinton-backing establishment that collectively lost.
	So you can imagine how, you know, left-wing partisan outlets like The Daily Beast have taken this.
	This is the opinion piece that they put out today about it.
	Mueller may find no collusion, but still finds crimes.
	And look at this gif that they have there.
	There was no evidence to demonstrate that there is a conspiracy.
	Therefore, all they have is a conspiracy theory.
	Instead of accepting the results of a two-year-long bipartisan investigation into the Trump campaign, the Daily Beast have instead decided collusion isn't even the right question to ask.
	When I was in law school, a professor taught us that arguments are often won or lost by the framing of the issue.
	While it may be true that no collusion can be found, is it the same as saying no crimes were committed?
	I really don't give a damn if they were crimes committed by Trump's underlings.
	Throw them all in jail if that's what the punishment requires.
	I don't care.
	But now, Daily Beast, you are moving the goalposts.
	You did not get the answer you wanted after the most thorough investigation in US history.
	Now, what are you going to do?
	Oh, well, you know what?
	I don't even care about the collusion.
	Were there any crimes?
	The question is: did Russia, by conspiracy or collusion with the Trump campaign, manage to get Trump elected?
	The answer must necessarily be no.
	You can't demonstrate that Russia made Trump president.
	Now you have to look at yourselves and go, was there something about us that people were voting against when they were voting for Donald Trump?
	Was this actually a failure of ours and not the consequence of foreign meddling?
	And the answer appears to be yes.
	Get over it.
	The Daily Beast observed that collusion isn't really a word generally found in the US criminal code, so instead Mueller is likely looking at conspiracy.
	And my goodness, did the Daily Beast have a couple of thoughts about that?
	Naturally, the Daily Beast go through paragraphs of what-ifs until we get to these absolute gems.
	If the Russian members of the conspiracy hacked computers and stole emails on their own, but a Trump associate participated in staging the release of these emails, that person could be charged as a co-conspirator.
	What fucking person?
	What fucking conspiracy?
	There is no conspiracy to have a Russian member of, apparently, from the best evidence that the best investigation that you can muster has found, there is nothing.
	So you are making up a story, a hypothetical scenario that has no relation to real life.
	In fact, emails were released on the same day of the disclosure of the Access Hollywood tape, in which Trump could be heard disparaging women, an event that was devastating to his campaign.
	Well, really was it?
	Because at the moment we can call him the pussy grabber in chief.
	I mean, if it was so devastating to his campaign, how did he win?
	I mean, it's not like you can say it was the Russians, can you?
	If a Trump associate suggested to WikiLeaks that emails stolen from Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman be released at the same day to obscure the Access Hollywood story, then he could be charged as a co-conspirator.
	Is that conduct collusion?
	Maybe not.
	Is it conspiracy?
	Yes.
	Do you have any proof that any Trump associate suggested to Wikileaks that they leak certain emails at a certain particular time?
	I don't think you do, otherwise I think you would list it.
	Therefore, nonsense.
	You've just made that up.
	It's just an idea in your head that you want to put out into the world and maybe make people a bit suspicious.
	So when you say, is that conduct collusion, you mean, would that conduct be collusion?
	Is it conspiracy?
	You mean, would it be conspiracy?
	And yes, in the hypothetical example that you've created, that didn't happen, as far as we can prove, and yes, that would be, but that's not reflective of reality.
	You are giving categoric statements as if these things have been proven true, which they haven't, and you know it.
	Of course, Vox.com weren't very happy about this either.
	Trump's tweet that Senate investigators found no evidence of collusion explained.
	Trump wants you to believe that Richard Burr is the final word on Russia.
	He isn't.
	It is both him and Mark Warner who both agree that so far they have found no evidence of collusion or conspiracy, regardless of what else has been found.
	But despite the fact that Democratic investigators have also not been able to find anything, the House Democrats are planning a vast Russia probe.
	Is this really the best use of time and money?
	Have you guys honestly got nothing better to do than pretend forever and ever until the end of time, like it wasn't you guys who fucked up?
	Like it wasn't the establishment itself, the way it's detached from the political reality of the rest of the country.
	So according to Axios, the House Democrats plan a vast probe of President Trump and Russia with a heavy focus on money laundering that will include multiple committees and dramatic public hearings that could last into 2020.
	The aggressive plans were outlined yesterday by a Democratic member of Congress at a roundtable for Washington reporters.
	The member said that Congress plans infusing with new witnesses and may go back to early witnesses who stonewalled under the Republican majority.
	The reporters, many of them steeped in the special counsel's investigation, came away realizing that House Dems don't plan to depend on Robert Mueller for the last word on interference in the 2016 election.
	Despite the two-year non-stop attempt, combined with the rest of the media smear campaign against Donald Trump, to make people think that the Russians had made Donald Trump the president, most people don't actually think that.
	And I'm of the opinion that the people who think that Russia did interfere to make Donald Trump president really think that because of the way that the media has covered this.
	Look at this article from CNN's resident gremlin Brian Stelter today, how a single poll question illustrates America's divide of Trump and Russia.
	Among adults, 43% said special counsel Robert Mueller had proven the Russian interference plot.
	Another 43% said he had not proven it.
	The remaining 14% had no opinion.
	I mean, I don't even know what they mean by Russian interference, but it's certainly not collusion or conspiracy, is it?
	And if you're going on Facebook adverts, how on earth do you prove that they're responsible for getting Donald Trump elected?
	How do you do that?
	But this is how the subject of the conversation subtly shifts.
	Apparently there was substantial forensic evidence of Russian interference even prior to election day in 2016.
	The US intelligence community concluded with high confidence that it occurred.
	Trump's own national security advisors have affirmed this, and some of Mueller's indictments have contained even more evidence of Russian information warfare efforts.
	So now we have meandered miles away from Donald Trump.
	He's not involved in this.
	He didn't orchestrate this.
	He didn't collude with the Russians on this.
	And I mean, if we're going to start pointing fingers about propagandizing the public in different countries in order to vote one way or another in their elections, are we really in a position to start throwing stones in that glasshouse?
	But since we're on the subject of meddling with the elections, let's talk about how Silicon Valley meddles with elections, shall we?
	And how all of those left-wing, anti-Trump, pro-Russia conspiracy theory outlets are now going to get absolutely tanked by YouTube.
	On their official blog on January 25th, 2019, they said that they were going to reduce recommendations of borderline content and content that could misinform users in harmful ways, such as videos promoting a phony miracle cure for a serious illness, claiming the earth is flat, or making blatantly false claims about historic events like 9-11, or perhaps historic events like the two-year-long investigation into Trump's candidacy that turned up absolutely nothing,
	that half the public still think that Russia was responsible for.
	Are they going to downrank all of those CNN videos that are basically saying, oh, Putin and Trump are in bed together and we don't have proof, but we're going to have some very soon?
	Are they all getting downranked?
	No, of course not.
	Because it's only election meddling when someone's doing it in Trump's favor.
	Am I right?
	Two days ago, Quillette published an article called It Isn't Your Imagination: Twitter treats conservatives more harshly than liberals.
	Until now, conservatives had to rely on anecdotes to make their case.
	To see whether there was an empirical basis for such claims, I decided to look into the issue of Twitter bias by putting together a database of prominent politically active users who are known to have been temporarily or permanently suspended from the platform.
	Yeah, hi, how's it going?
	Of 22 prominent politically active individuals who are known to have been suspended since 2005 and who expressed a preference in the 2016 US presidential election, 21 of them supported Donald Trump.
	Wait a minute, I'm not even on this list?
	God damn it!
	I was getting like 80 million impressions a month, thank you very much.
	I was doing my part, where's my citizenship?
	Compared to some of the people I guess that I would be appearing beside, maybe it's safer to not be on this list.
	But since we're so bothered about foreign interference, why is it that nobody ever talks about the foreign interference that happened with the Democrats?
	All of this information is public now anyway, it's just no one's paying attention to it.
	In 2016, we knew that Hillary Clinton's campaign and her foundation were taking tens of millions of dollars from some of the worst people on the planet.
	According to the New York Times, Saudi Arabia had been a particularly generous benefactor.
	The kingdom gave somewhere between 10 and 25 million to the Clinton Foundation.
	But I'm sure it's just because the Saudis are so interested in doing philanthropic work around the world that they were donating to Clinton's foundation.
	And the fact that the Clinton Foundation lost over half of its revenue in a single year after her defeat is in no way indicative that these donations were pay-for-play.
	So this would be two years wasted for the Democrats.
	No evidence of collusion or conspiracy.
	Two-year-long investigation.
	Constant non-stop negative media coverage of Trump.
	And he is more popular than the Democrats.
	He is more popular than the media.
	And they have nothing on him.
	An economic miracle is taking place in the United States.

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