"Mark my words, they are rigging this thing."
Eric Trump tweet
"The fix is in. . .AGAIN."
Donald Trump, Jr. tweet
"This delay in reporting results is just the Iowa Dem party trying to figure out how to snatch this away from Bernie Sanders, right?"
Bernie Sanders supporter
These quotations are from February, 2020.
They were about the Iowa caucuses. A lot of Democrats agreed.
A vast dark conspiracy had an eager audience among many disappointed partisans in the aftermath of the Iowa caucuses. This was especially true of Bernie Sanders' supporters, who considered it obvious that their guy had actually won the Iowa caucuses by a landslide, not the 26% of the vote he supposedly shared with Pete Buttigieg.
Sanders was robbed--he must have been. Everyone in the Twitter/Facebook silo of Sanders supporters agreed that there was no possible way on earth that that skinny White Boy meritocracy corporate establishment twerp, Pete Buttigieg, could have tied Sanders. So there had to be cheating. And they knew just who did it, the same group of people who cheated Bernie in 2016, Hillary Clinton, the DNC, Democratic donors, corporations, the establishment media, and now Pete Buttigieg, the chief beneficiary of the fraud.
Many readers are dismayed by President Trump's current claims of election fraud. They consider it undemocratic. A coup. They are frustrated with Republican voters who seem willing to believe the nonsense, including yesterday's Guest Post author. They believe something belied by expert testimony, by the judicial system, by reporters, by Republican partisans, by hand count audits. What is wrong with them?
I write here to remind readers of the political conspiracy environment immediately following the Iowa and New Hampshire contests ten months ago. There was an app that was supposed to allow precinct captains to log in results in real time on election night. The app crashed. People called in results and phone lines were jammed.
It was evident from the sizes of crowds that Pete Buttigieg did approximately as well as Sanders. This was a giant surprise and disappointment to Sanders' supporters who had counted on a wave of young, radicalized voters turning out for him. Sanders supporters disliked Buttigieg. He was getting political traction saying "Medicare for all who want it" not "Medicare for all." Sanders' supporters were primed to believe only fraud could explain the disappointing mere tie, with Buttigieg of all people.
The conspiracy circulated in February parallels the conspiracy being advanced now. Indeed, President Trump promoted both. People on the left consider the current conspiracy talk by Trump dishonest, ridiculous, self-serving. Ten months ago, the parallel conspiracy sounded reasonable to many on the left.
Then and now, a computer program had suspicious connections and origins. In February, the faulty app was created by a company named "Shadow," and in its past it did some contract work for the DNC and Pete Buttigieg--the corrupt connection. The link to the DNC meant darker origins involving George Soros, Hillary Clinton and "establishment" Democrats--the cross-town rivals of the Progressives. The current conspiracy involves "Dominion" with supposed corrupt financial ties to Venezuela, China, foreign dictators, corrupt foreign elections, and, again, to George Soros and Hillary Clinton.
In both cases, a multi-year, well-planned, massive conspiracy involving hundreds of people including those who support rival candidates, was carried out secretly, right before our eyes. In Iowa, Democrats were alleged to have intentionally botched election night vote reporting so Pete Buttigieg could stride to TV cameras and say it looked like he won, thus supercharging his campaign in New Hampshire. Sanders, meanwhile, might wait until his victory was better confirmed, and might only be second to go to the cameras. It was all planned!!
The November computer fraud conspiracy involves hidden mechanisms to change a certain number of votes from Trump to Biden, a hack installed in multiple counties, invisible to forensic examination, and belied by the paper ballots used to do hand recounts which show no evidence of tampering. It changed just enough votes to give Biden victory in the key states, Trump's lawyer said. Clever. Diabolical.
This is a caution for Democrats who expect that eventually Republican election doubters will "come to their senses." Conspiracies are not falsifiable. Lack of evidence that they exist is not proof that they don't exist.
In February and again now, comments by the media did not dampen conspiracy talk; they amplified it. It proves the fake, corporate media is in on it, which people suspected all along.
The denial of the conspiracy by Republican officeholders and by judges appointed by Trump himself prove the conspiracy goes higher and is more powerful even than expected. In February, the assurances by DNC and Iowa Democratic Party officials had the same effect, proving the complicity of the suspected villains. Of course the DNC would claim innocence. That is what guilty people do.
People believe what they want to believe, and what seems obvious to their own eyes and ears. People inside a partisan news silo and getting cues from like-minded friends presume nearly everyone agrees with them, so losing an election seems impossible. For both left and right, in February and again now, it is easier to believe that George Soros and Hillary Clinton and the DNC executed a massive election theft involving thousands of people, and kept it secret, than it is to believe that people actually voted for the other guy.
2 comments:
It’s easier to believe that the election was stolen than to believe that you hold a minority opinion.
I think that many people feel overwhelmed by the complexities of life and, faced with a plethora of things they don't understand, are unable to accept their own shortcomings. It may be, probably, that they don't even recognize them, the result being a superstitious belief in powerful forces that exist against them. This belief is so strong that they will invent these forces even if they can't identify them otherwise.
Primordial man was terrified by lightning and mystified by the wind, and attributed them to invisible and powerful gods. Somewhat ironically, the evolution of intelligence has brought us to a clearer understanding of reality, but unfortunately random selection has shortchanged many among us.
You may have seen the report that of all the elected Republicans in Congress, only 25 will admit privately that President-elect Biden won the election (6 have publicly). Two claim Trump actually won and 220 did not respond.
Crickets...
Personally, I think the whole Iowa caucus process is an anachronism, and should be abandoned. If this election proved anything it's that we need to have a national vote by mail system. Nevertheless, comparing a computer glitch and a few whining Bernie-ites to an entire party supporting a fake conspiracy delegitimizing the foundation of our Democracy is hardly equivalent.
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