The Washington Post
The alarming downward spiral of the election-fraud conspiracy theory
Philip Bump
One America News has all of the trappings of a legitimate cable-news network — shimmering on-screen graphics, snappily named anchors sitting at Lucite desks, little microphones that say “OAN” on them — save one: a commitment to accurately conveying the news.
Over the past two years, OAN has faithfully upheld its perhaps-unstated mission statement, centering its coverage on the most unfailingly positive presentation of Donald Trump and his evolving cast of frustrations. Or, once-evolving. For the past eight months, Trump has been almost exclusively focused on claims that the 2020 election was stolen, which it wasn’t. He’s trumpeted various moments in which rampant fraud was proved, which it wasn’t. He’s argued for reviews of the vote in various states that he thinks will unearth indisputable evidence of malfeasance, which they almost certainly won’t.
The result has been an ecosystem of delusion that has moved past QAnon in terms of scale. A poll from PRRI released in May found that about 15 percent of Americans believed the unbelievable claims at the heart of that conspiracy theory, the idea that satanic pedophiles controlled the levers of American power — an idea that can't be written or read by most people without some sort of visceral reaction at its bizarreness. Yet polling from Monmouth University released this week shows that the number of people who say they believe the conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was broken by rampant voter fraud is twice as big.
A third of the country thinks that the 2020 election was tainted by fraud, including most Republicans. This despite eight months during which no credible evidence of such an effort has been uncovered or even hinted at, really. This particular delusion predated the election, in fact, with Trump tilling the soil as early as last spring and Trump supporters accepting his presentation that any loss would be a function of fraud even before voting began. On the weekend before the election, I spoke to voters in Scranton, Pa. who told me that they didn't trust polls in the state and planned to volunteer to poll-watch the following Tuesday to uproot expected Democratic saboteurs. Democrats, meanwhile, were turning out voters.
It’s hard from the outside to understand the scale of the appetite for the idea that the election was stolen from Trump. It has the inertia of a boulder tumbling down a mountain, a large dangerous mass that can’t be redirected. Many Trump supporters don’t know any supporters of President Biden (and vice versa). They like and trust Trump, who has actively misled them about the election among countless other things. Many consume media such as OAN, the choir to Trump’s preaching. In the same way that OAN repackages propaganda as news, this media ecosystem provides a veneer of objective analysis to the visceral core of the fraud belief system. It’s emotion-laundering, retrofitting a structure of purported analysis and evidence onto which those nonrational assessments can be hung.
The result is that nuance collapses. Any point at which the reality of the situation is bolstered — that is, that no significant fraud occurred — is pushed away. Those who repeatedly point out that the election wasn’t stolen are recast as themselves biased and anti-Trump. So a state Senate committee in Michigan can release an extensive report detailing how claims of fraud are unfounded, misguided or simply invented (as one did this week) and it quickly becomes evidence of how the system is trying to crush the truth.
That report is particularly pointed in its assessment of a local lawyer named Michael DePerno. He has been at the center of a number of false claims about what happened in the state, elevating, among other things, utterly nonsensical assertions about fraud in the state’s Antrim County — claims that were credibly debunked within hours of the Nov. 3 election.
“The Committee closely followed Mr. DePerno’s efforts,” the report states, “and can confidently conclude they are demonstrably false and based on misleading information and illogical conclusions.”
This is obviously true. DePerno's response to state efforts to assure people that the election wasn't tainted? Here's The Washington Post's Tom Hamburger, reporting on a rally in Lansing last week centered on demanding an “audit” of the election results:
“They are lying,” said Matthew DePerno, a lawyer who is spearheading the petition drive. A small crowd cheered as he denounced Michigan’s secretary of state as a “tyrant” and the state’s Democratic governor as “the Fuhrer” and claimed that county clerks — many of them Republicans — had engaged in racketeering and conspiracy.
“These people have committed crimes,” he said.
Demands for state- or county-level audits have become inescapable in recent weeks. The Arizona state Senate’s authorization of a third-party review of votes in Maricopa County has been a boon to the election-fraud economy, hinting by its very nature at a problem to be rectified and poised to obviously elevate dubious claims of impropriety, as it was designed to do.
The magic of Arizona, though, is the same magic that powers OAN: a veneer of objective analysis that can be used to strengthen unsupported emotional beliefs. It also establishes a trusted authority in a self-fulfilling way. Since any objective analysis that conflicts with the belief system is necessarily tainted, after all, the only acceptable “objective” review must be conducted by a subjective party, with obvious results.
The process also amplifies the post-2020 effort to create as what in Internet terms would be called a denial-of-service attack: a flood of so many specious claims that the ability of objective analysts to rebut them all is nearly overwhelmed. The sheer number of claims means that everyone looking for a tiny hook of evidence on which to hang their beliefs will be satisfied. So we see calls for new audits everywhere.
But we can’t overlook DePerno’s rhetoric. State actors who reflect the real world are “criminals” who are “lying” and equivalent to tyrants and dictators. Over on OAN, correspondent Pearson Sharp followed this line of reasoning to one conclusion.
“How many people were involved in these efforts to undermine the election? Hundreds? Thousands? Tens of thousands? How many people does it take to carry out a coup against the presidency?” he said in a clip that spread quickly on social media. “When all the dust settles from the audit in Arizona and the potential audits in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada and Wisconsin, what happens to all these people who are responsible for overthrowing the election? What are the consequences for traitors who meddled with our sacred democratic process and tried to steal power by taking away the voices of the American people? What happens to them?”
“Well,” he concluded, “in the past, America had a very good solution for dealing with such traitors: Execution.”
This demented presentation is a function of allowing obviously false claims to continue. You say something false and then cast those who correctly rebut you as your enemies. Frame this as a threat to the country and those enemies become traitors.
QAnon researcher Will Sommer noted that followers of the conspiracy theory embraced Pearson's commentary, given that levying mass executions against their opponents is a common component of the Q universe. But this is not about QAnon; it's about election fraud. There's much less of a social tax paid for those who claim the election was stolen than for those who say Democrats torture children and drink their blood.
Earlier this month, the FBI warned that QAnon adherents might start to splinter off and commit acts of violence motivated by their own beliefs of how those “satanic pedophiles” should be treated. It's obviously warranted to similarly worry about individuals who adhere to the false belief that thousands of Americans conspired to steal the 2020 election.
There are twice as many Americans who say the election was stolen as believe in QAnon.
