“Donald J. Trump and his backers say revelations about the Steele dossier show the Russia investigation was a “hoax.”  That is not what the facts indicate.”

That’s from the latest New York Times effort to rehabilitate Russiagate.

Despite the brief pretense that the media was going to “see what went wrong with Russiagate”, the pretense lasted for about a week. Now it’s back to business as usual.

A smear can be disproven on the facts and even on the sources, but never on the emotions and moral convictions of the smearers.

You can disprove an accusation that Mr. X shot someone on Park Place on the night of August 2nd, 1982. You can’t however disprove the accusation that Mr. X is an evil person who intends to destroy us all because of the evil within him.

The Dem accusations against Trump have always been in the second category, camouflaging them with pretend facts of the first category.

Disproving the facts doesn’t change any of the momentum behind them.

The Left enjoys virtually unrestricted access to the media and with Big Tech’s complicity a growing monopoly over speech. Launching smears of any kind is virtually risk-free and is carried out with the knowledge that it will be able to dominate the information space.

Russiagate was as much about the negative, suppressing opposition speech, as it was about the positive, taking down Trump.

Fast forward to 2020 and the same Russiagate claims were trotted out to shut down revelations about Hunter Biden’s laptop. This is the new normal and it’s not going anywhere because it gives the Left the power to destroy its opponents as individuals and to suppress them as a group.