Refuting Conservative Propaganda: My Reply to 'When will the left finally realize who really colluded with foreign countries to influence the 2016 presidential election?'

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© 2019 Scribner and The Washington Post

On Quora, Trump supporter Jeff Blake asks this insincere question: 
When will the left finally realize who really colluded with foreign countries to influence the 2016 presidential election?
My reply: 
News flash, sweet summer child:
The “left,” the “center,” and the sane, honest members of the “right” are painfully aware that it was the Republican Party and - especially - the Trump campaign team who colluded with the Russians to influence the 2016 general election.
It’s only most of the “right,” particularly the die-hard core of Trump supporters and the craven leadership of the GOP, that constantly bangs on the “No collusion, no obstruction” drum.
The Red Cap Brigade uses several tactics to gaslight the public and hide the modern-day Republican Party’s cozy relations with the Russians. They range from outright denial (“Russia did not intervene in the 2016 election at all.”) to clever deflection (“Russia did intervene, but only to help Hillary Clinton’s campaign.”) to outright defiance (“Okay, so Russia helped the President win. So what? It’s not illegal, and if it is, Obama should have stopped it.”)
The Mueller Report on Russian Interference in the 2016 Elections reveals a disturbing pattern of Trump family members and campaign staffers (including one-time campaign manager Paul Manafort) cultivating links with the Russian government and slyly accepting assistance on finding chinks in Hillary Clinton’s armor in order to win.
The Mueller Report also lays out why Putin’s government wanted Trump to win, and it wasn’t out of the goodness of the Kremlin’s heart in order to have a better relationship with the West. On the contrary: Moscow’s goals were to weaken NATO, the United States, and the European Union in order to consolidate Russia’s aggressive efforts to absorb the Crimean Peninsula and parts of eastern Ukraine without opposition from the West.
Trump supporters will deny all of this, even though Mueller’s report is available for the public to read, either for free online or in low-priced printed editions from bookstores and Amazon.

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