The irrelevance of the Steele dossier
By One major strategy of MAGA supporters, whether of the straightforward or Intellectual Horse Paste Substack Industrial Complex variety, is to conflate the Steele dossier with Russian electoral ratfucking in 2016. But of course the fact that the Steele dossier contained some stuff that turned out to not be true is neither here nor there when it comes to the question of whether Russia ratfucked the 2016 elections with the help of the Trump campaign, which is a very well-established fact:
Find yourself people to follow who can hold these ideas in their heads at the same time:
-"Steele’s sources were not very good at all"
-There is "clear evidence of the Russian government’s efforts to intervene in the 2016 election on the side of Donald Trump"
Both can be true! https://t.co/f67UeiFVA1— Brendan Nyhan (@BrendanNyhan) November 19, 2021
SSCI report >> Steele dossier. People who talk about one and not the other are telling on themselves.https://t.co/5xvLxyoZQV pic.twitter.com/VBoCQP95fs— Brendan Nyhan (@BrendanNyhan) November 19, 2021
It’s also worth noting that the Steele dossier had no impact whatsoever on the 2016 campaign. The mainstream press ignored it entirely — even the BuzzFeed report wasn’t published until January 2017. Needless to say, no such discretion was shown toward the endless oppo flung at Hillary Clinton. And of course that’s a large part of Russiagate denialism — to pretend the media was biased against Trump when coverage of the 2016 election when (with, of course, the substantial assistance of Russian ratfuckers, Julian Assange, and the reporters who amplified them) was in fact dominated by coverage of Hillary Clinton pseudoscandals:
None of which should be surprising, because Intellectual Horse Paste Web media criticism is strictly a one-way ratchet:
