The whole Russia thing went deep into conspiracy theory territory even before the 2016 election. The part that astounded me was the conspiracy theory about Trum

The whole Russia thing went deep into conspiracy theory territory even before the 2016 election. The part that astounded me was the conspiracy theory about Trump being in secret communication with a Russian bank (and, for some reason, a US healthcare provider) via DNS. It was rejected by multiple outlets before a partisan rag ran with it, and made no sense on multiple levels - we were supposed to believe Trump got some subcountractors of subcontractors who he had no reason to trust to set up a communication channel so poor he'd need another, better communication channel just to agree what the messages meant, giving them the ability to blow the whole scheme and tying those communications to himself for no reason in the process, and they somehow went along with it and kept their mouths shut, and that this made more sense than email servers doing DNS lookups as the result of having received ordinary marketing emails for Trump hotels like you'd pretty much expect them to do. And yet, this didn't stop the Clinton campaign demanding the FBI investigate it from her official Twitter account, and that demand going viral. Not only that, when the New York Times pushed back against this nuttery in the weakest way possible by reporting that the FBI had looked at the claims and concluded all the evidence pointed to it being the result of ordinary junk emails, their reader's editor pushed back, there was a boycott, and they eventually admitted it was a mistake and they wouldn't do it again. People are probably still holding this against the New York Times even now, and the theory got resurrected later by publications which should know better.