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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?
What was Zuckerberg buying with his $400,000,000 donation to a couple of NGOs administrating US elections under the pandemic? Are we to believe that these NGOs are truly politically impartial? I had a quick look at The Center for Tech and Civic Life board of directors - these do not look like people who'd greatly like Trump or even be evenly split on him. That one of their members is supposedly a Republican is not sufficient - she founded a non-profit management consultancy company! A non-profit based in Chicago - I think it's clear that they're left aligned at the board level and probably employ even more left-aligned people on the rank-and-file level. (edited to make clearer that I think the above non-profit is left-leaning)
I personally believe the US election was rigged. It's already been admitted by the media, they only use the word 'fortified' instead of rigged. I'm sure everyone is aware of that article.
What exactly were these people doing, if not projecting influence and power such that Biden would be elected? Is that not rigging? If you can quietly threaten that there'll be riots, suppression, endless legal warfare, career implications against officials who don't use their leeway to come to the correct procedural/administrative conclusions, is that not rigging? Or perhaps the vast donations to election-administration groups from left-wing billionaires will disappear if the correct conclusions aren't found.
And why would the election not be rigged? It is enormously important to control who is in power in an extremely powerful country like the US. It's like papal elections pre-Reformation. The Papacy was very influential, they had immense wealth and could give out all kinds of sinecures. The College of Cardinals was immensely seedy and corrupt as a result.
Was the media impartial? No, obviously not. Why would the election officials be impartial? There are methods to influence outcomes. The US has a long history of machine politics in urban centres. There's nothing you can easily point to that proves this election was rigged, yet it stands to reason. That we can easily find articles 'debunking' the various claims of election fraud is not sufficient to show that there wasn't election fraud. Nobody would buy a 'debunking' from a bank saying that they did not embezzle user's funds, that it's just misinformation. Or say the CIA debunks the claim that they were involved in regime-change, is that believable? A bank would only admit its embezzlement if it thought it would be revealed anyway, the CIA only admits decades after the event.
There is no trustworthy party that could be relied upon to show that these elections are rigged, or not rigged for that matter. The information environment is so bad we should only operate from first principles. Logically, if the entrenched institutions of the NGO-bureaucracy-media apparatus are opposed to a candidate, they can flex their muscles against him covertly. There is no outside supervisor who can oversee elections in the most powerful country in the West. In a time of chaos and confusion under COVID, the blob has more and better opportunities to interfere than in 2016, when most were very comfortable that he wouldn't win. This time they knuckled down, coordinated and got to work on the fortifications. Dominion might've been involved or it might not. Who knows?
Rigging involves everything from stuffing votes, ballot harvesting, procedural manipulation to media manipulation. A more expansive definition would include education and demographic policies, which do not favor the right. Even a narrow definition is more than satisfied by the 2020 elections with overt media manipulation in the Hunter story and vast opportunities for procedural manipulation. I cannot believe that Zuckerberg's hundreds of millions don't buy him influence.
That Trump's people can't find evidence of election interference only shows they're incompetent and outclassed. This isn't new information! They didn't manage to do much during the presidency, the administrative machinery ran rings around them. They clearly didn't have the necessary influence to get results and impose pressure - in what universe would we expect a weak administration like Trump's to overpower a stronger administrative base in a test of influence and 'prove' that the election was rigged against them?
I am not aware of that article. Could you link it, please?
Groups "projecting influence and power" to get someone elected is called an election campaign. It's part of every election. What is the dividing line between legitimate campaigning and "election rigging"?
I doubt many people were going to vote for Trump but ended up voting for Biden because they were afraid of riots.
I'm not sure what you mean by "suppression".
Trump, having lost the election, is now the one engaging in "endless legal warfare".
What "career implications" would there be, for which officials, and for what kind of "procedural/administrative" decisions?
My understanding of the word "rigging" only includes ballot stuffing and similar practices such as destroying or just not counting certain ballots. I believe this is the common understanding of the word, and broadening it as you do is a motte-and-bailey.
I hadn't heard of "ballot harvesting" before. Having looked up an explanation, it doesn't seem to be inherently fraudulent, but it probably does make certain kinds of "rigging" as described above easier. Do you have any reason to believe ballot harvesting had a significant effect on the outcome of the 2020 election?
I'm not sure what you mean by "procedural manipulation".
If by "media manipulation", you mean biased media coverage, then yes, that clearly did happen, but I don't think many people would classify it as "rigging". If biased media coverage is a form rigging, has there ever been an election that wasn't rigged?
Wouldn't that encompass literally all of politics, given that obtaining votes is ultimately a politician's biggest concern and any policy they implement or support is designed to increase their chance of re-election?
https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/
There's a distinction between making an argument about why you should lead the country and using resources to ensure the right outcome. Left-aligned NGOs controlling the actual mechanics of elections (in this case funded by left-aligned billionaires) is effectively election rigging. How could anyone know that they actually oversaw it properly? From the above link, these people seem to think that Trump was assaulting democracy, so they could conceptualize themselves as defending democracy by ensuring that Trump lost the election. The changes in rules regarding mail-in ballots just prior to this particular election are also significant.
Say people find evidence that the election is rigged against Trump. This evidence has to go through a judge before any kind of actual action can happen. The judge has the freedom to decide it's inconclusive, or that they don't have jurisdiction or find some technical reason against it. That's what the Supreme Court did with Texas. Likewise, the officials who are in charge of reporting these things have careers and aspirations that could be snuffed out if they make the wrong choices. You don't find many Chinese officials willing to criticize Xi Xinping, he has a very high level of control over the bureaucracy. There were vast legions of officials and judges coming out to attack Trump through his whole term, he had a very low level of control over the bureaucracy. 92% of DC voted Biden, 5% Trump.
These lawyers got harassed, for example. There are all kinds of informal methods that can be used. If you don't like someone's politics, you can refuse to hire them or get rid of them for unrelated character reasons. It could be made known that there are grants or generous donations that will become available for those who make the right decision.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/aug/26/michigan-judge-sanctions-pro-trump-lawyers
For example, Pfizer could delay the results of its vaccine development plan (accelerated by Trump under Operation Warp Speed) such that their positive results would only be apparent after the election:
https://www.statnews.com/2020/11/09/covid-19-vaccine-from-pfizer-and-biontech-is-strongly-effective-early-data-from-large-trial-indicate/comment-page-7/#comment-3047884
Adjusting mail-in ballot rules such that fraud becomes easier. Or making it such that voters can vote without showing ID.
Donald Trump lost Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin by a tiny margin, a few tens of thousands. Biden won Michigan by 3% but Michigan is dominated by 95% Democrat voting Detroit, where ballot harvesting was made legal and Republicans were very angry about it: https://www.detroitnews.com/story/opinion/2020/09/23/opinion-judges-ballot-decision-threatens-election-integrity/3506593001/
Detroit is probably the most corrupt city in the US, or at least in the top 5 for machine politics. 95% Dem? Really? The big swing in the middle of the night that moved everything away from Trump is also pretty dubious.
You can persuade people that you're right, or you can indoctrinate them when they're young and impressionable, or you can bring in new people who semi-automatically become part of your patronage network, or you can cover up any evidence that you're wrong. There are more or less appropriate methods to ensure your re-election.
I mean, yes. That sort of voting pattern has been consistent in Detroit for decades. It seems people don't really get there can be very red and very blue areas in this country. Like, there are countries in the rural part of Texas, et al that vote 90%+ Trump. I don't think there's any fraud there.
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https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/
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This is the article in question: https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/
I do not know if it had been edited since publication, do you might check some archives.
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