Thank goodness Richard Burr is an ex–United States senator — and can no longer promote Big Lies such as that Russia fomented chaos and discord in the 2016 presidential election.  See the text of an August 2018 Senate hearing, which Burr co-chaired, alleging the influence of foreign social media platforms in the U.S., as evidence of lies promoted by the Deep State to cover up its own malign influence on U.S. foreign and domestic policy.

According to a report by a New York University study, cited by The Washington Post and noted by Matt Vespa at Town Hall, the findings of the NYU study include the following: "Only 1 percent of Twitter users accounted for 70 percent of the exposure to accounts that Twitter identified as Russian troll accounts." 

Finally, the truth has been set free: the Russia hoax was...a hoax, perpetrated by the Deep State, apparently.

I will take this finding one step farther, even lacking a scientific basis: my sense is that not one person in a thousand was aware of so-called Russian attempts to sow chaos and discord for the purpose of electing Donald J. Trump, our 45th president.  It was, quite simply, a huge lie, intended, first, to prevent a President Trump — and, hereafter, to make his presidency as untenable as possible, and to make impossible rapprochement with Russia — rapprochement that would have 1) maintained peace between Russia and Ukraine, 2) barred the chaos and discord of our departure from Afghanistan, and 3) stymied the Democrat conspiracy to force Trump from office — making a Trump second term inevitable.

The fact that The Washington Post has acknowledged that assertions of Russian involvement in the 2016 presidential election amounted to "fake news" is tantamount to advising the American people that its media have all the trustworthiness of a mendacious broadsheet in a dictatorship.  Indeed, the so-called leading paper in the U.S. should be renamed The New Pravda Times, with the annual awards called Pravdas, not Pulitzers.

In place of the phony "chaos and discord" trumpeted by the mendacious media (the immediate location of The New York Times in Manhattan should be called "Menda City"), the American people should register shock and dismay that we have been subjected to one political lie after another by the Deep State, its lapdogs in Congress, and the Intelligence Community.

President Reagan famously provided this formula to judge Russian intentions: "trust, but verify."

Thirty-four years after Ronnie left office, we would better be advised: distrust the official line, and trust in ordinary common sense.

Image via Max Pixel.