Crackpot conspiracies alive & well; The Firehose of Falsehood: The stolen 2020 election evidence

The WaPo reports a story about the American radical right crackpot & lies politics segment of the American experiment: 

The story had all the elements of a blockbuster crime saga: burner phones, semiautomatic weapons, silencers and bags of prepaid cash cards. “NOW WE HAVE PROOF!” blared the headline on the right-wing website Gateway Pundit. “Massive 2020 Voter Fraud Uncovered in Michigan.”

The story referenced “thousands of fraudulent ballots” caught by Muskegon City Clerk Ann Meisch. Grateful readers deluged her office with hundreds of calls, hailing her as a hero.

But Meisch knew it wasn’t true.

According to police reports, the Michigan attorney general’s office and an interview with Meisch, an employee of a voter registration drive company had submitted to the Muskegon city clerk thousands of voter registration applications weeks before the 2020 election, some with faked signatures and faulty addresses.

Meisch’s staff spent hundreds of hours weeding out the bad applications. The guns the police found were legally registered to a landlord who had nothing to do with the registration drive. The prepaid phones and cash cards were given to temporary employees to contact new voter prospects.

“There were no fraudulent ballots,” Meisch said in an interview, “not a single one that anyone in my office was aware of.”

But for Gateway Pundit, which is run out of its founder’s home and whose small staff produces stories that help set the agenda for Donald Trump’s most ardent followers, the August story provided weeks of headlines that radiated across right-wing media and were repeatedly amplified by pro-Trump influencers. That’s despite the fact that it was published nearly three years after the election — and after Meisch’s staff had thwarted any fraud.

The outlet’s emphasis on long-debunked fraud claims helps explain why election denial has proved so durable, despite the many efforts to halt the spread of disinformation and impose consequences on those who persist in it.

Like it or not, there usually are no significant consequences for liars and slanderers. Most of it is shielded by free speech law. Defamation law captures maybe about 0.1% of it all, and maybe about 2% of the legally actionable spew ever winds up in court. The demagogues, grifters and radical freaks, e.g., Gateway Pundit, Faux News, etc., who rely on dark free speech are usually worse than immoral. They are evil when (i) their intent is to harm, or (ii) they don’t care about reasonably foreseeable harm. 

________________________________________________________

________________________________________________________

DJT has released what he says is all the evidence showing that the 2020 election was stolen. It is an unsigned 32 page document that lists all the fraud and whatever else happened in GA, WI, PA, MI and AZ that led to DJT actually winning. One of the people cited as having found some fraud, illegality or irregularities is a guy named Kevin Moncla. He is reported to be a convicted pervert. 

The document lists dozens of instances of fraud, illegality or irregularity. There are lots of citations to various details, but important assertions are usually not supported by a citation. For example, there is not citation to the claim: “Not a single ballot purportedly cast during early in-person voting was witnessed to and signed off by poll managers, as required by Georgia election rules.” 

A couple of fact checks of a few assertions indicates that most are lies about non-existent things or gross distortions of actual things. For example, the document asserts that an estimated 289,866 absentee ballots were identified as sent to people who never requested them, “something that would be illegal,” according to the senate committee.

A fact check commented: The Voter Integrity Project, a right-wing group, has said that 289,866 “illegal votes” were cast in Michigan. The report’s authors called 40 people from the group’s list of supposed voters who received absentee ballots without requesting them and found just two who said they had been sent unrequested ballots. One was on the state’s permanent absentee voter list. The other voted absentee in the 2020 primary election and may have forgotten about checking a box then to request an absentee ballot in the general election.

Apparently, DJT has not cited this, or at least most of it, in the lawsuits against him. Presumably doing that would get him and his attorneys sanctioned for lying to the court. Since no one has signed it, no one is available to point fingers at in case this thing generates more lawsuits. This document appears to be part of DJT’s FTZWS* propaganda tactic. 

* Flood The Zone With Shit - a term coined by Steve Bannon

It’s also called the Firehose of Falsehood dark free speech tactic. Wikipedia comments: 

The Firehose of Falsehood is a propaganda technique in which a large number of messages are broadcast rapidly, repetitively, and continuously over multiple channels (such as news and social media) without regard for truth or consistency. An outgrowth of Soviet propaganda techniques, the firehose of falsehood is a contemporary model for Russian propaganda under Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The Russian government used the technique during its offensive against Georgia in 2008, and continued to use it in Russia's war with Ukraine, including the annexation of Crimea, and the prelude to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Politicians, governments, and movements in other countries have since used the same tactics, such as former US president Donald Trump.

I rate this document:

Q: How would America and its government, commerce and society change if, at least rhetorically speaking, liar’s pants really did catch on fire?

I bet they would change a heck of a lot.