MONOLOGUE WRITTEN BY CLYDE LEWIS

When you begin to question everything, you start to wonder if your perceptions and belief about what is going on around you are really true.

Are you beliefs truly your own perceptions or do they belong to someone else?

Believe it or not, most of your beliefs and actions are all mimicry. Conformity to patterns of thought and patterns of behavior are learned through programming.

The education system is there to program children and young people — social media also forces the notion of monkey-see, monkey-do. This explains why the new fad is people eating Tide pods to get attention – it is that old Grandma’s axiom: If Johnny jumped off the bridge, would you jump off the bridge? You probably wouldn’t jump off the bridge, but peer pressure is very hard to ignore or avoid.

So maybe you got a tattoo because all the guys are doing it, or you listen to a certain type of music because your friends do, or you wear your pants down around your knees because you have seen others do it.

I mean people do some amazingly weird things because they have seen other people do them.

Emotional behavior, notions of success, relationships, rules, laws, choices in fashion, hair dos, even choices in words whether you swear all the time or use big words are all ingrained programs.

Take some time and watch people and you will notice that most of them are imitating the examples they’ve seen their whole lives.

Now, it is time to wonder if your outlook is based on the complete picture, or if it is based on a limited understanding and limited knowing. There are others, however, that go through life never questioning why they have a certain bias.

Is this bias based on anything factual or is the bias brought on by relationships you have had in the past? Or are they just a product of programming and habit?

Patterns and programs are what rule everything.

It is with those patterned choices and programmed responses that we criticize anything that goes against the programming.

You can say that what you have or that what you think in the truth – but is it the truth for everyone? Or is it truth that gives you an excuse to exploit prejudice or hate?

The truth is an overused axiom these days, and so are facts, especially when they are said to be reported by the mainstream corporate media.

All it takes is one sound bite, a picture, or a scrap of information and it is usually taken at face value, or it is spun into what the some people call “fake news” or “conspiracy theory.”

Media organizations and propagandists know how to persuade people into doing things they normally wouldn’t, or believe things that aren’t necessarily accurate.

The news is crafted the way it is in order to create something called perception management.

Neil Sanders, the author of the book, Your Thoughts Are Not Your Own, considers mind control, mass manipulation and perception management as a programming tool of carefully framing, suggesting and omitting ideas so as to manage the perceptions of the masses.

Linguistic trickery, group coercion, sensory manipulation and propaganda work so well in changing the minds of the people.

The reason I am pointing all of this out to you is because, today I was watching CNN and the big news was the fear and paranoia that has been unleashed since President Trump has said that the Nunez memo will be released and that it confirms that the FBI abused its surveillance authority with its ongoing probe into whether or not The Trump campaign colluded with Russia to win the election.

Those who have seen the memo says that it exposes a research effort funded by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee ended up playing a role in the FBIundefineds obtaining a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court warrant to spy on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

The research effort was that of former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, who produced a now infamous dossier of lurid allegations against Trump. Steele had been hired for his work by Fusion GPS, an opposition research firm who had themselves been hired by Hillary Clintonundefineds campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

Republicans will probably attempt to use that information to portray the monitoring of Page as a political ploy by Clinton and the Democrats, which they will say casts doubt on the integrity of the Russia investigation.

I suppose that most of you know by now, that I believe that the whole Russian collusion conspiracy – is based on a whole lot of theory, hearsay and circumstantial evidence.

I know this is a statement that generates a lot of fire and anger with those who wish to see President Trump be brought up on charges of obstruction of justice – but the biggest reason that I think this whole controversy is really a nothing burger is because the whole premise is based on whether or not Trump as a candidate colluded with Russia to fix the election in his favor. Many proponents of the “Trump is guilty of collusion” idea also say he does not deserve to be president because he has colluded with an enemy of the United States.

The idea of Russia being our enemy I believe has been nothing more than perception management by the media.

In order to illustrate my point, today it was reported that California congresswoman Maxine Waters spoke at an urban housing event and eventually went into a paranoid tirade about Russia and the Kremlin’s alleged love for President Trump.

At one point, the paranoid Waters declared Trump has committed “obstruction of justice,” and made the case for impeachment, also citing “possible collusion” with Russia.

She theorized Russia wanted to elect Trump so he would lift sanctions to allow Russia to drill for oil in the Arctic.

She even stated that she was a victim of the Russians stating that RT, which is Russian television, absolutely interfered with a speech of mine on the floor of Congress and blocked me out for 10 minutes,” she bellowed, as a woman in the audience gasped, “What?!?”

“They don’t play. They mean business,” Waters declared.

She was referring to an incident last January when C-SPAN briefly showed RT on its Internet feed. The TV broadcast wasn’t affected.

C-SPAN blamed the moment on an “internal routing error.”

When I hear people say that Trump colluded with Russia and they are a sworn enemy of the United States, I often wonder where do they get that information and how is it so ingrained in their consciousness.

I often ask myself, “Are these people still living in the past where the evil communists were said to be under every bed?”

The constant stream of revelations that members of President Donald Trump’s administration and his surrogates had direct contact with Russia during and after the 2016 presidential election provokes a series of questions: Does it matter? And is Russia really our enemy?

I say that Russia is not our enemy – at least not yet.

To call Russia our enemy right now is not exactly accurate. It would be rather more fitting to call Russia our rival.

Some liberals and many of them in the media are under the impression that Russia is somehow a threat to the United States.

I pointed out in a past show about the Deep State that Russia was our ally in WWII in defeating the Nazis. And, contrary to what most Americans are taught, it was Russia that truly helped us the most at winning the war in Europe, having lost over 20 million people to the war and having been responsible for 80 percent of the allies’ Nazi kills.

There seems to be three main forces motivating anti-Russia sentiment.

The “Russians are the enemy dialogue” has been successfully created by the media because of their accusations of meddling. Trump and his staff’s connections and possible criminal ties to Russia are constantly in the news, the public is acutely aware about the latest happenings on the various Russiagate investigations, and many Americans are mobilized, whether via social media or protests against the perceived collusion between President Trump and the Russians.

I wonder if it is more comforting to have an enemy that’s easily identifiable on a map, rather than a stealthy transnational one. Maybe it’s because the cold war era was a period in which the US was clearly an ascendant, dominant power, as opposed to today, a so-called post-American world of US retrenchment and decline.

Maybe it’s because of nostalgia that some have of how the US looked and operated internally during the Cold War.

Keep in mind that making Russia an enemy is good for the Military Industrial Complex.

Neoconservatives and liberal internationalists believe the US is being mocked, pushed around, and bullied by an expansionist and opportunistic Russia. They see Russia as a threat to the expansionist New World Order. This is evidenced most notably by Moscow’s redrawing Ukraine’s borders, its attempts to divide and weaken Europe.

This group is all for ratcheting up the level of tensions, calling for upped sanctions, boosting NATO’s capabilities, and diplomatically isolating Russia, among other things.

But does that make Russia our enemy?

In all of their Russian meddling rhetoric as the media, policy, and academic circles have largely failed to point out that Russia is simply a super power seeking what we seek. It is also important to point out that this type of media programmed hate needs to be stopped before a vengeful US, either now or more likely, post-Trump, begins down the path of assertive confrontation with Russia and perhaps a possible nuclear conflict.

Russia is a rival or challenger to the US for global power and influence. We know obviously that Russia isn’t exactly our friend, but that does not axiomatically mean that Russia is Washington’s enemy.

Instead, it’s more appropriate to see Putin’s Russia as a competitor; albeit, an intense and shrewd one toward the US. What Russia is doing is simply playing, and to this point, playing well — the game of great power politics.