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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 4, 2023

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https://abcnews.go.com/Business/worried-meta-decision-allowing-2020-election-denial-ads/story?id=104985165

So Meta the parent company of Facebook and instagram is now allowing users and advertisers to post claims about election fraud in the last election but not the soon to be held 2024 elections. I’ll lay my cards out here and say I’m personally a skeptic of the claims that the 2020 elections were stolen. I don’t see why that should prevent other people from making such arguments.

But my question for you guys is whether these claims are going to really erode trust in future elections. To me the issue that erodes that trust is that the official government structures never bothered to look into the claims that such fraud might have happened and instead opted for the COVID style full court press of “nobody should bother to take it seriously, and if you do it’s clear that you’re falling for misinformation.” To me nothing erodes trust faster than an official response of “nothing to see here.”

To me the issue that erodes that trust is that the official government structures never bothered to look into the claims that such fraud might have happened

They did though, there were plenty of state level election officials like Raffensperger who went through point by point on at least some of the issues, and many claims literally had their day in court were addressed by the courts. A big problem though was that the election fraud claims were a massive gish-gallop so it was hard both to refute everything, and to take the overall claims of fraud seriously. The people claiming fraud really should have coalesced around one or two of their strongest allegations that 1) were well-evidenced, and 2) could have made a material impact in the results for at least one state.

many claims literally had their day in court.

This is rewriting history. The vast majority of cases were dismissed for lack of standing, and no evidence was ever heard. There was no fact-finding mission or hearing. The press declared that Biden won, all questions were treated as ipso facto ridiculous, and what debate there was was contained to (censored) conversations on Facebook and Twitter.

Thank you. These claims have not been judged on their merits, the people raising them have been judged on their standing.

And then after the fact, courts are unwilling to do anything about it anyway, so they judge that there can be no relief, either.

It’s not just courts. You have to explain why various investigative authorities and prosecutors, including in conservative locales, either declined to pursue various theories or tried to and couldn’t find good evidence.

The simple reason is that no one could find good evidence and various courts rejected bad attempts.

Trump lost the popular vote both times after consistently polling that way.

Trump lost the popular

But he is white, so there is that.