A More Likely Theft

 I don't know anything much about election software and various voting methods.  I can see how mail-in voting could make their security more vulnerable, starting with a family member pressuring someone to vote a certain way, or just taking their ballot and filling it out. But I don't know what kind of numbers are likely, or even possible, from such a problem.  There are also potential irregularities that very quickly went beyond the reach of identifying, as ballots all got put into the same pile when they might have been separate. I believe it possible that Kerry stole Wisconsin in 2004, because it looks like enough votes could have been moved.

Apparently over 90% of people who voted for Trump believe that enough was wrong with enough physical votes in the recent election that whole states were flipped, costing him the election. I acknowledge that such a thing might be, but I have yet to see sufficient evidence that this actually did happen.  Vulnerability and bad motives are not enough to convince me.

I was already composing my own post in my head about where I thought the election really was stolen, and then saw this article, where someone has done the work for me. There may be flaws in the research, but I think the general principle holds. The election was stolen month after month by the suppression of news.  This is something I do understand - understand more than the vulnerabilities of Dominion, anyway. 

I firmly believe that if Biden had to expose himself to reporters with video cameras who kept asking "Did the Chinese send you $10M through your son Hunter, or did that check go to someone else?" then he would not be president-elect. He has not been able to give a decent explanation for any of his son's behavior, and this would have been apparent. If he said he didn't really know about Hunter's doings, then followup questions about investigations would be in order, and he would have had to commit, to make promises. People would start looking into the issues on their own, seeking out the stories to see if they thought they were reliable. It would have become part of the national discussion with even a minimum of acknowledgement from legacy media.  The Streisand Effect may have worked to activate conservatives and bring in a lot of clicks, but I don't see evidence that half the country even heard more than a whisper of it. It was effectively buried. Americans love the myth that the truth eventually comes out, but it doesn't. It doesn't take much examination of any era in our history - including those in our lifetimes - to see that many questions no longer have an answer. The witnesses are gone or defanged, the documents are shredded, a replacement belief has been installed.

And that is only one issue.

More to the point, this is something we can still affect going forward. Outlets like The Washington Post and the New York Times have become diminished over the last few decades, but they and the further outlets they supply retain considerable influence over a large number of Americans who are under the false impression that they are receiving the news.  They are receiving a portion of the news, often in manipulative language.  It is a mutually-reinforcing system certainly, in that this is the news that audience would prefer to hear, and thus calls it forth from the newspapers, which in turn provide the service to their readers of letting them know what the best people think about all this. Repeated exposure of their dishonesty has not had near the effect on their audience that one would expect.

Yet not zero effect. They have required enormous support from the censorship of the new social media platforms to keep them propped up. If you lean on a stone wall long enough, it will fall over. Keep leaning.

Update:  It may be that Trumpism - admittedly an ill-defined term - has succeeded more than Trump himself.  At a minimum, I would say this is an America First baseline approach and a refusal to go along with the media putting the worst possible spin on everything you say.