I’m not an American so I may have a different perspective on it than you, but is Hillary Clinton the left?
From my perspective she sort of make Margret Tatcher look like a socialist.
I do think most of us were fooled by wikileaks because it starter out being against the Iraq war. This was before snowden, back when people weren’t actually being serious when they joked about echelon listening in on us. It was also back when we, at least in Europe, figures that Russia was going to be our friend and it was sort of pre-information war. Apparently the information was was already well on its way, but we didn’t really know, and we didn’t take anyone who warned us serious. Us being the general public.
It was also a world where everything surrounding American politics, and to some extend all western politics, wasn’t always this us/them, left/right, blue/red nonsense that it is today. Anyone, from the most conservative to the most liberal who watched the wikileaks leaks on the journalist and the children being killed by drones (or maybe it was far away airplanes) were appalled by it, because it was simply appalling and back then, people cared more about wrong/right than their “team” looking good.
So I think it is understandable that people bought into wikileaks being genuine but these days… well… let’s just say that the west still hasn’t recovered from in the war on truthful information and that we are still struggling with trust issues and all the wonderful things like flat-earth, anti-vaccine and what not stupidity that’s running ever more rampant in our society. Among other things, because people like Assange showed us why we shouldn’t trust our institutions.