Thank you for graciously entertaining my ideas. If you don’t have any empathy for the people who fall for the ‘meaningless dribble’, you’ll have a hard time understanding why they may vote for someone like Donald Trump, who so often pushes the these counter-narratives. The point of your article was an explanation of why people voted for Trump and my explanation differs from yours, thus this chain of debates.
The idea that the media was vocally skeptical of the dossier from the beginning falls flat when you google search and see CNN’s own description of the dossier’s impact. “When it came to light in January 2017, just days before Donald Trump took office, the so-called Steele dossier landed like a bombshell and sent shockwaves around the world with its salacious allegations about Trump and his supposed ties to Russia.” Perhaps you can understand that how a cynical person could see these ‘shockwaves’ as a narrative that exploded during the most opportune time for the Democrats.
Contrast the shockwave with NPR’s response to the Hunter Biden laptop: “We don’t want to waste our times on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are pure distractions.” This isn’t just a conservative caution made by an editor who might wait for the facts to come in, this is an effort to change the perception of the story. But to those who believe the laptop story is ‘dribble’, this is acceptable reporting. After the election and after the admission that the laptop was real, one poll showed that 16% of Biden voters would have changed their vote. This bias has consequences.
You may think it’s dribble. And that’s fine, but at least understand the effect of those who wonder why Hunter worked for Burisma, why he got paid so much, why he and his father share a bank account, and why Vice-President Biden threatened to withhold funds from Ukraine unless a prosecutor was fired. If you take any time to try and understand those who don’t trust the corporate media (yes, even Fox), then you’ll always falsely lay the reason for Trump’s victory on crazed evangelicals and bullies, which ignores the distrust of the media as an even larger factor.
