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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.
I say rigged quite specifically. A game can be rigged without secretly changing the score.
Suggesting that the massive changes to mail in voting is just par for the course is intellectually dishonest. The total vote increasing something like 20 million is evidence that something significant changed in how elections were operated. The fact these were pushed through so quickly is another major problem even if in principle the concept is sound (in opinion, it is not sound).
I strongly disagree that all of my points are just a continuation the same old gaming of the system. But perhaps you are right and I am wrong. If that’s the case, perhaps democracy has always and will always be total bullshit.
Either way, they may have gotten rid of trump, but at what cost. This is not an ingediant for a stable political system.
The idea that massive changes to mail voting that were pushed through quickly had anything to do with the election outcome is a myth that election deniers have been pushing without even looking at the actual facts. While some states did loosen absentee ballot requirements due to COVID, none of this happened in any of the states that were contested. The closest you'll come to finding it is in Pennsylvania, which held its first-ever general election with non-excuse mail voting in 2020. However, the law that allowed that had been passed in 2019 with unanimous Republican support, and the changes would have taken place in 2020 regardless of COVID. In every other contested state, mail voting had been permitted in prior elections without incident. It's certainly true that a lot more people voted by mail in 2020 than in prior elections due to pandemic concerns (except in Arizona and Nevada, which were pretty much all mail by that point anyway), but I don't hear anyone making the argument that legislatures should have rushed back to the statehouses to require in-person voting on the grounds that too many people were going to take advantage of a duly enacted provision of the law.
Wisconsin? Didn't the number of remote votes coming from the "indefinitely confined" (which the state explicitly said they would not check up on) increase by like 5x?
I mean you could Google that and provide a source for it instead of asserting it. Throwing a bunch of half remembered claims out there and expecting others to provide counter evidence is basically gish gallop.
Don't tell me what to do.
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