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The Big Lie about ‘The Big Lie’
William Sullivan, at The American Thinker, writes [emphasis mine]:
With only a few days left until the 2022 midterms, Newsweek laments a new poll by Redfield and Wilton Strategies showing that 40 percent of Americans still believe that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged or stolen.”
This is presented as a shocking revelation about the number of Americans who still buy into the “Big Lie,” despite its “being proven false,” according to the article.
Newsweek buries this particular poll’s more interesting observations. For example, only 36 percent of respondents disagree that the 2020 election was rigged or stolen. Of that group, more than one in three find it “understandable” that others might believe that the election was rigged or stolen. Another 15 percent of respondents neither agreed nor disagreed, and 8 percent signified that they “didn’t know.”
One way to characterize these data is the manner in which Newsweek does, which is to suggest that a horrifying 40 percent of Americans believe in what a bipartisan mainstream media blitz has promoted as “the Big Lie” for nearly two years.
A far more accurate way to characterize these data, though, is to recognize that there are more Americans confident that the election was rigged than there are Americans who are confident that it was all on the up and up.
That already paints a different picture of the prevalence of these supposedly fringe “election deniers.” And when we factor in those who believe that the election was not rigged, but understand why Americans are skeptical based upon the facts they’ve observed, we find that over three in four Americans (or 75.2 percent, given Newsweek’s numbers) think the election was rigged, understand why other Americans think the election was rigged, don’t know whether or not the election was rigged, or refused to take a position on the subject of a rigged election while talking to a pollster.
In other words, fewer than one in four Americans is confident that the election was legitimate and is completely flummoxed as to how anyone could question its integrity. That’s a remarkable figure, standing athwart the message being delivered by the senile occupant of the Oval Office, who routinely argues that anyone who questions that election’s integrity is not only a fringe radical, but an enemy of democracy and a potential insurrectionist.
I remain agnostic on whether the 2020 election was “stolen” (though I find laughable the claims that it was “legit” given the number of fraud convictions, irregularities, and other shenanigans that have been (and continued to be) documented). I’ve “moved on,” except in my desire to see things cleaned up to the point where we can trust the process going forward.
I share the article not to rehash the controversies of the election, but simply because I find the numbers cited quite remarkable. Even after years of Big Media outlets banging their propagandist drums about “the most secure election in history,” branding as “Election Deniers” anyone who thinks we ought to take a closer look at some of the things that don’t pass the proverbial smell test, and dismissing tens of millions of Americans as a “neo-fascist fringe group” promoting “The Big Lie” — even after all that — there are still “more Americans confident that the election was rigged than there are Americans who are confident that it was all on the up and up.”
I find that astonishing.
Published in General
Indeed. And what many people seem to miss is that losing chain of custody is not just an “oopsie!” nor does anyone have to prove that the evidence was altered or tampered with as a result.
If I remember correctly, Trump was on the line with lawyers from both sides. This was not a corrupt call, not a bribe or a coercion, but an above board legal matter.
And as I think it turns out, Georgia had a lot more than 11,000 fraudulent votes. They were just unwilling to admit it in time.
Using the full propagandistic force of the establishment, they managed to convince nearly half the country that the 2016 election stolen. They had no evidence, except some evidence they faked.
And now–against the full propagandistic force of the establishment, nearly half the country has been persuaded, based on evidence alone, that the 2020 election was stolen.
You know, I bet some of those people actually did vote for Biden, but refuse to admit it now.
This is a keeper. Strange to consider, but also heartening.
Not before I fix that typo though.