 So, after more than two years, Robert Mueller's investigation into whether or not the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to interfere in the 2016 election has come to an end. And boy do I have a lot to say about this. There's plenty of implications. However, before I talk about this, before I give you my take, I do think it's important for us to establish the facts of the situation, but keep in mind that we are working with limited information because, at this point, nobody but Robert Mueller himself and Attorney General William Barr has seen the full Mueller report, so I do hope it's released soon. And it does seem like there's a bipartisan consensus that has emerged where both Republicans and Democrats want the report to be released. However, as usual, Mitch McConnell is Mitch McConnell-ing if I'm allowed to use his name as a verb, and he's trying to block the effort to call for the release of the full Mueller report. So, I mean, this could have been predicted, but regardless, what we have currently is a four-page summary of Mueller's findings from William Barr. Now, here's what that states. This is a summary from Marc Mazzetti and Katie Benner of The New York Times, and they report, "'The investigation led by Robert Mueller found no evidence that President Trump or any of his aides coordinated with the Russian government's 2016 election interference, according to a summary of the special counsel's key findings made public on Sunday by Attorney General William Barr. Mr. Mueller, who spent nearly two years investigating Moscow's determined effort to sabotage the last presidential election, found no conspiracy despite multiple offers from Russian-affiliated individuals to assist the Trump campaign, Mr. Barr wrote in a letter to lawmakers. Mr. Mueller's team drew no conclusions about whether Mr. Trump illegally obstructed justice, Mr. Barr said. So, he made his own decision. The Attorney General and his deputy, Rod Rosenstein, determined that the special counsel's investigators had insufficient evidence to establish that the president committed that offense. He cautioned, however, that Mr. Mueller's report states that while this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him on the obstruction of justice issue. So, with that being said, given what we know thus far, I think there are three main takeaways based off of William Barr's assessment. The first takeaway is that he confirms it was Russia that hacked into the DNC's email servers. The second is that Donald Trump did not collude with them to do that. And the third is that Mueller seemed agnostic on this question of obstruction because even though it was obvious to everyone with common sense that Donald Trump fired James Comey specifically because he wanted to shut down the probe, well, the contention here is that since Donald Trump isn't actually guilty of colluding with Russia, then you can't necessarily confirm that he was trying to obstruct justice with the intent to hide his criminality, which is why Mueller seemed agnostic on this particular issue. And he didn't explicitly say that Donald Trump did, in fact, commit obstruction of justice, but he also did not exonerate him. And really the question then went to Attorney General William Barr to make the ultimate decision. And he already came to that conclusion before Mueller reached his conclusion because I think more than a year ago, William Barr released a letter essentially arguing that a sitting president cannot be indicted for obstruction of justice. So because Mueller didn't reach a definitive conclusion there, then William Barr was able to, as one of Trump's lackeys, say, nope, he's innocent, even though America saw him fire James Comey. So I mean, you may or may not agree with everything here, but the point is that the main claim of collusion and treason, that's not there. There's no evidence there. And that's essentially the biggest thing that Donald Trump focused on. But we do have to understand that in spite of that, this was not a witch hunt because it's still unveiled a lot of criminality. George Papadopoulos, Paul Manafort, there were serious crimes that were unveiled here. So to say that this was a witch hunt would still be a stretch, even if the main claim was not validated. And this also does not mean that Donald Trump is innocent when it comes to other acts of criminality and impropriety, because when it comes to illegal hush money payments, bank fraud, tax fraud, violations of the emoluments clause and more. Of course, Donald Trump is guilty of other crimes. Just when it comes to this question of collusion, there's just no evidence to back up that claim. And it makes me feel sad that so many pundits and mainstream media worked people into a frenzy believing that Donald Trump was this Manchurian candidate and was a treasonous traitor, because what they were doing there was ignoring all of the other issues that Donald Trump has that are actually legitimate issues. And they wanted to focus on the aspect of criminality. There's no shortage there, but they didn't do that. I mean, the New York Times report from last year talking extensively about how his family committed tax fraud. I mean, if you want to focus on criminality, why would you focus on collusion when this from the get go seemed like it was going to go nowhere? But by raising the specter of collusion and treason, mainstream media pundits like Rachel Maddow was able to capitalize on that, capitalize on this story for views and ratings. And then the Democratic Party, they were using this to attack Trump for political purposes. And they kind of just kept feeding into one another to where we're living in a Cold War era paranoia political climate, which was just devastating to political discourse. So what people like Rachel Maddow did by consistently speculating about different ways that Vladimir Putin was the puppeteer to Donald Trump and how Russia was covertly controlling the Trump administration, she really harmed political discourse. And she's not alone. She's not the only one who did this, but she's certainly one of the worst offenders. And she would always speculate about how Rex Tillerson, for example, was doing Russia's bidding by hollowing out the State Department and keeping such a small staff. And that was what Russia wanted. And she then moved on to bigger fear mongering, more alarmist fear mongering and, you know, speculated about what would potentially happen if Russia wanted to theoretically cause direct harm to Americans. And she speculated about what would we all do if they shut off America's power grid while the Dakotas were at negative 50 degrees. And all of this Cold War hysteria may have did wonders for her ratings, but meanwhile, it didn't really help the country. And what Democrats like Adam Shift did, for example, by focusing so much on collusion, was they were ignoring the main problem that they were raising, which was election interference in the first place. So they always talked about the prospect of collusion and treason, but they never brought up bills that would increase cybersecurity. They completely ignored Tulsi Gabbard's bill that would move us to paper ballots, which that was one of the worries that people thought. You know, they thought, well, if they're willing to hack into the DNC servers, then what's to say that they wouldn't do the same thing and change votes? Now, there's no evidence that they changed the votes. But if you want to ameliorate that fear once and for all, you move to paper ballots, you take action. But none of them did that. They stayed focused on collusion and treason. And what that did was that gave Donald Trump a pass. It distracted all of us from talking about the real instances of criminality. Donald Trump is complicit in a genocide right now because he is refusing to back down from the sale of weapons to Saudi Arabia as they drop bombs on children in Yemen. Trump is ignoring the water crisis in Flint. He botched his version of Hurricane Katrina. When it comes to Puerto Rico, so we're ignoring the policy substance, all because this really, this story itself, it helps the mainstream media get views and ratings and it helps Democrats attack Donald Trump for political purposes while not proposing a real policy alternative to Donald Trump. So the saddest thing about this entire story is that it's going to embolden Donald Trump going into 2020 because now whenever we call out legitimate instances of criminality like the hush money payments, he's going to say fake news. I told you no collusion and Mueller found no collusion. And now he's going to use this as evidence to justify any and everything he does. So what we saw over the past couple of years was the Democratic Party establishment and media elites act in an irresponsible way. And rather than informing us as American citizens, they fearmongered and they got us to worry so we would constantly be glued to our TVs and tune in and give them more ratings so they can explain how we're in danger of Russia attacking us. And it's honestly really sad to see that. And I was one of the individuals who sounded the alarms in the beginning about Russian hysteria, about Keith Olberman saying that we're at war with Russia and Donald Trump is an illegitimate president. Instead, he is a puppet. He's a traitor who was imposed on us unilaterally by Vladimir Putin. And I started out trying to get people to calm down and stop being hysterical about this story. But then I realized that I was also feeding into the frenzy. So I chose to stop talking about this because in trying to constantly debunk hysteria and get people to think logically and not base their political decisions and perspectives of fear and instead on facts. I realized that I was also contributing to the conversation itself. One of the first Patreon chats we had once the Russia story really started to ramp up was us complaining about all the Russia, Russia, Russia stuff. But then I realized, well, I'm still talking about how they're talking about Russia and I'm inadvertently contributing to this Russia, Russia, Russia narrative myself. So I decided to just back off, let it play out. And now after seeing everything that unfolded, it's clear that this I was right all along. This was incredibly damaging to American political discourse. The American people, they don't know about how he's actually breaking the law or all of the horrible policies that he's implementing. Because for two years, we were focused on whether or not he was a Manchurian candidate and Mueller was even deified by the left. You have the Mueller subreddit and he was hailed as basically the only person who could save us from the orange menace when all along we were distracted from the fact that the only ones who could save us from Donald Trump was ourselves and we have to propose an alternative to Donald Trump. So this was damaging overall. I think that the investigation itself was important. But the discourse surrounding this investigation, primarily, you know, because of individuals like Adam Schiff, Ted Lu and Rachel Maddow, they are the ones that really turned this into something that was detrimental to American political discourse and what will ultimately, I think, help Trump. And it pains me to say that because I don't want Donald Trump to feel emboldened going into 2020. He shouldn't. But he will use this and brag endlessly, which is why people like myself, people like Kyle Kalinsky cautioned people. Be careful when it comes to this claim of collusion, because we just don't have the evidence yet. But you see, when you get intertwined in this type of conspiracy theory, anything and everything becomes evidence that your conspiracy theory is valid. Even if he took a harsh stand against Vladimir Putin, well, that was just evidence that he was doing Putin's bidding all along. Oh, what's that? There's NATO troops on the border and we keep saber rattling against Russia and he keeps ramping up with Vladimir Putin. Oh, well, this is all to prove to us that really there's no collusion there. And he's just trying to pretend to be tough. I mean, every single thing was evidence to people who follow this story that Trump was a man sharing a candidate and he was a treasonous traitor. But now the left has to come to grips with the fact that we should never ever get away from what is our biggest strength. And that is policy substance. And I'm not even one to say that we should focus exclusively on Trump's criminality. But if you are, you don't focus on the thing that's not yet proven. You focus on the thing where there's overwhelming evidence like the emoluments clause violations, how he hasn't actually put his businesses in a blind trust and is therefore still in control. Therefore, it's a conflict of interest and he's still profiting off of them. So is he conducting himself on behalf of the US government in a way that helps to enrich himself? Is that how he's crafting policies? These are the real questions that we can ask if we wanted to worry about Donald Trump and, you know, this agenda that he has. But the collusion story, you know, as I predicted, there was no evidence and you shouldn't make these extraordinary claims without having the evidence to back it up. And I'm not saying that you're not allowed to speculate. But if you're going to speculate, then you have to do it in a responsible way. So there's a lot of individuals in the political establishment and in the media class that use their platforms irresponsibly. And what they did for personal gain, ratings, political fame, it hurt the totality of the left. And we've got to come to grips with that. And we've got to figure out a way to actually stop Donald Trump in 2020 based on policy, making a real case against him. But now it's going to be harder because he's going to feel emboldened. So I'm glad that this story is seemingly coming to a close. I will reiterate that we've got to see the full report. But with that being said, the main claim of collusion was not proven to be true. So anyone who contributed to this, I hope that you will acknowledge how this was damaging and detrimental to the left's agenda. And I hope that you are introspective and you'll learn how to improve. That's all that I that I hope that we can not take away from this because, you know, nobody's perfect. There are people who do things that are wrong. I'm always trying to learn how to use my platform more responsibly. But I really hope that just the people who were the most vocal about this try to learn from this and just do better and be responsible because Americans bought into this hook, line and sinker. And now Trump's going to benefit because of it, which is sad.