The belief that Trump is the victim of a vast and ongoing conspiracy is a crucial element of the president’s enduring appeal to his supporters. If the allegations against the president are all completely false, then his supporters can continue to back him with a clear conscience, because anything and everything negative they hear about the president must be false. The consistency of that message is more important than the actual details, which frequently end up contradicting complex explanations for the president’s innocence that are often incongruous with each other, such as the insistence that Robert Mueller’s investigation was a “total exoneration” of the president, but also “total bullshit.”

Read: The Russification of the Republican party

The Department of Justice inspector general’s probe into the origins of the Russia investigation, which was released Monday, found no evidence that any of the Trump conspiracy theories surrounding the origin of the investigation are true. The investigation was not launched on Obama’s orders, it was not an effort by pro–Hillary Clinton FBI agents to prevent Trump from getting elected, and it was not predicated on the existence of opposition research gathered by the former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. The president’s defenders have taken to referring to the entire investigation as “the Russia hoax,” insisting that the entire investigation was an effort by “persons within the FBI and Barack Obama’s Justice Department” who “worked improperly to help elect Clinton and defeat Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election.” But the IG report shows that the “Russia hoax” defense is itself a hoax, and a highly successful one, aimed at reassuring Trump supporters who might otherwise be troubled by the president’s behavior.

The inconsistencies and contradictions of the “Russia hoax” narrative appear not to trouble the president’s supporters. Rather, as George Orwell wrote in 1944, “For quite long periods, at any rate, people can remain undisturbed by obvious lies, either because they simply forget what is said from day to day or because they are under such a constant propaganda bombardment that they become anaesthetized to the whole business.” The numbness to every new Trump revelation, no matter how shocking, is in part a product of the president’s success in fatiguing anyone who might be interested in what the facts are.

The IG report knocked down the various claims that Trump and his allies have made, one by one. The report confirmed that the Russia investigation originated, as has been previously reported, with the Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos bragging to an Australian diplomat about Russia possessing “dirt” on Hillary Clinton, which the IG determined “was sufficient to predicate the investigation.” The widespread conservative belief that the investigation began because of the dubious claims in the Steele dossier was false. “Steele’s reports played no role” in the opening of the Russia investigation, the report found, because FBI officials were not “aware of Steele’s election reporting until weeks later.”