“hat happened on election night? Trump was surging to victory. “Wait till 3am on election night and lots of mail in ballots and dead people voting.”īrian Cates, a writer for the far-right publication The Epoch Times, was less morbid and more focused on the levers of power when he posted to his nearly 80,000 followers on Telegram earlier this week. “What’s going to be any different this time?!” a user in a QAnon Telegram chat wrote about the midterm elections this past Tuesday evening. In right-wing chat groups on the messaging app Telegram, these theories are traded as casually as chats about the weather. Each individual who believes the Big Lie has their own suspicions about what took place, a personal recipe of different conspiracies to nourish their belief that the election was illegitimate. The Big Lie is an à la carte conspiracy theory - a bit like QAnon in that respect - where adherents pick and choose what sounds right to them and disregard what doesn’t. There’s a mountain of baseless overlapping claims piled up inside the stultifying biodome of the Big Lie: voters casting multiple ballots, dead people voting, ballot-counting machines flipping votes, foreign nations hacking systems to swap totals.
In-depth polling and academic research reveal belief in the Big Lie is incredibly resilient and incredibly influential, swaying the creation of new voting laws and shaping election campaigns for 2022 and beyond. While no two Big Lie theories are identical in composition, they do share commonality in function.
But it is not the only version - the Big Lie means different things to different people.Ī third of Americans - and a majority of Republicans - believe the Big Lie, but the disparate theories include the flawed-but-plausible, the unlikely and the illogical. This is D’Souza’s version of the Big Lie, the unfounded claim that widespread voter fraud plagued the 2020 presidential election and that President Joe Biden’s win was illegitimate. And that’s when D’Souza, a pro-Trump conservative personality who was pardoned by the former president after being convicted of making illegal campaign contributions, drops the (totally unproven and false) bombshell: Thousands of “mules” stuffed ballot boxes to steal the election for President Biden. A slow, mournful rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” plays in the background. In the trailer for his “2,000 Mules” “documentary,” faux static flickers across the screen over footage of what appears to be people voting at ballot drop boxes. Dinesh D’Souza can always be counted on to have a bespoke conspiracy theory.
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