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2020 stolen election time! There's been some rather big developments with my favorite cute little hobby horse. I haven't had the time to make a deep-dive write-up, but it's has already been extensively reported on elsewhere (e.g. this post by Jacob Sullum). To summarize, Dominion voting systems sued Fox News (and Newsmax, and OAN) for defamation. Dominion has been past the discovery stage for more than a year now but their filings only recently became public and, no way to say this lightly, it's been extremely humiliating for Fox. Tons of text messages from the big names (Carlson, Hannity, etc.) either talking shit about how crazy Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani are, or (especially for Lou Dobbs and Maria Bartiromo) credulously accepting and repeating the stolen election theories.
One especially funny example involved Sidney Powell credulously forwarding an email to Bartiromo from a complete rando claiming they had "Election Fraud Info". In that same email, the anonymous rando claimed that they got their information from their dreams, that the wind tells them they're a ghost, and that Justice Scalia was murdered during a human hunting expedition. As evidenced by the filings she submitted to court, Powell's skepticism faculties appear to be basically non-existent, and the fact that so many people took her seriously at first is a good illustration of the pitfalls of siloed reasoning.
Maybe the most damning revelation of how Fox was operating (from both a legal liability as well as a journalistic ethics perspective) is how they treated their fact-checking process. When Fox reporter Jacqui Heinrich tweeted on November 12 that "there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised" Carlson texted Hannity "Please get her fired. It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It's measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke." If Dominion needed to prove the actual malice (and it's not yet clear if they would need to) in a defamation case, they couldn't have asked for better evidence.
There isn't much for me to say that I haven't said before. My operating theory has long been that some people seemed to earnestly believe the crazy theories they were spouting about Hugo Chavez or whatever (e.g. Powell, Giuliani, maybe Dobbs) while many others were just pretending to entertain it because it was in their best financial interests (e.g. Carlson, Hannity, Murdoch, etc.) and the text messages confirm this. To Carlson's credit though, he endured a lot of negative pushback from his criticism of Powell.
I've already done my hand-wringing on how the media seems to love shooting itself in the foot, except it was framed in context of how liberal outlets fucked up the Covington debacle from four years ago. The Dominion lawsuit demonstrates the problem behind audience capture; Fox pundits and reporters had to deal with a credible financial pressure to cater to the crazy fringes of their audience for fear of losing them to their less scrupulous competitors. If so, it would be a demand-side problem. I'm not sure if the problem with liberal media fuck-ups follows the same framework, but I'm open to arguments. My general impression there is that the call is coming from inside the house: liberal journalists too afraid of their fellow cohort to break ranks. I suppose a good test-case scenario would be to see how NYT's current "trans youth reporting controversy" plays out. They obviously already got a severe amount of criticism from the activist fringe, but would a significant portion of their audience care? And if so, where would they go?
One last question: has anyone here changed their opinion on the 2020 stolen election theories?
The election was 100% rigged. It’s a real shame that we’re even talking about dominion machines changing votes and I don’t even know who to blame.
It was rigged because of widespread voting rules being changed unilaterally immediately prior to the election to facilitate mail in voting. I have no doubt that votes were harvested and the spirit of the law behind how voting works was violated in mass.
It was rigged because the media “fortified the election” with a deluge of lies and messaging about trump, as per the Time Magazine article.
It was rigged because intelligence community and deep state spent years lying about Russiagate and using every lever they have to oust trump.
It was rigged because Twitter and Facebook and nearly every other tech company used all of their institutional power to actively influence voters minds and hide relevant information such as the Biden laptop. They don’t even have plausible deniability on this. They actively mislead and lied to people.
Maybe there is no proof that election administrators in deep blue territory like Atlanta and Philadelphai were changing or finding votes at the last minute. And that’s a big maybe because I do believe that these administrators are both curruport and capable of actively rigging the results in their counties. These are true believer Democrats that have been told Trump is an existential threat to democracy and the free world. They have the means, motive, and incentive.
The fact that we’re talking about the dominion machines is a shame.
Yes, it's true that many stolen election advocates engaged in motte-and-bailey acrobatics* [see edit], oscillating between "Italian satellites changed the voting tally" baileys and then retreating into "All we meant was that the rules were unfair" motte. Obviously this wasn't helped by Trump's credulity and proclivity towards surrounding himself with Yes Men who would just repeat whatever flattering theories he preferred. Who else would you blame for the confusion you're criticizing?
Edit: As @Supah_Schmendrick points out below, this was an erroneous application of the motte-and-bailey fallacy. Repost:
I framed the motte/bailey in an erroneous way. It is not true that anyone who had a negative opinion of the 2020 election necessarily wants to believe in Italian satellites. Although inadvertent on my part, it was wrong of me to frame the argument with that insinuation. Some version of what @orthoxerox wrote below is what I should've said:
I don't think "Italian satellites changed the voting tally" is actually the bailey - it's not terrain that everyone wants to occupy; it's not the goal in and of itself. From the stolen-election perspective, the end goal (thus the bailey) is "the election results do not represent a fair vote or a small-d democratic mandate."
The "Italian satellites" and "unfair rules/elite lies" are the various types of argument-soldiers sent out to secure the bailey. If the "Italian satellites" thing were true, it would be extremely good evidence for the bailey position - actually fiddling with vote totals is a very good reason to declare an election void. Unfortunately, the audacity and putative strength of the claim is betrayed by its falsity.
The "unfair rules/elite lites" arguments are much weaker evidence for the bailey position, precisely because they can be pattern-matched to other dirty tricks in American political history that we've just learned to shrug and accept. However, they have much stronger basis, and are harder to dismiss as groundless.
The reason I make this distinction is because the way you phrased it suggests to me that you think anyone who has a negative opinion of the 2020 election would like to or perhaps wants to accept the "Italian satellites"-style arguments, but falls back on the true "election fortification/information suppression/media manipulation/weaponized intelligence community" arguments when they're forced to. This is not true. There are people who believe in the wild conspiracy theories, and there are people who have digested true reportage. That both may arrive at similar conclusions about the election, the media, the Democratic party, or politics more generally, is beside the point.
If that's the bailey for "stolen elections" then every US presidental election ever has been stolen due to the electoral college.
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You are correct, I framed the motte/bailey in an erroneous way. It is not true that anyone who had a negative opinion of the 2020 election necessarily wants to believe in Italian satellites. Although inadvertent on my part, it was wrong of me to frame the argument with that insinuation. Some version of what @orthoxerox wrote below is what I should've said:
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That's the motte. The bailey is "the election results have been tampered with in a felonious way, and if these crimes were successfully prosecuted that would change the winner of the election". That's the territory you want to occupy, to make people think Biden won illegally.
When pressured, you can retreat to the "we have no countermeasures against the cathedral influencing the voters to vote for Biden and influencing the election officials to interpret the legislation in a way that is biased toward helping more Dem voters vote" motte.
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