There Is More Than One Big Lie

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

Dinesh D’Souza can always be counted on to have a bespoke conspiracy theory. 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. A slow, mournful rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” plays in the background. 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.

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. But it is not the only version — the Big Lie means different things to different people.

A 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. While no two Big Lie theories are identical in composition, they do share commonality in function. 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.

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. 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. 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. In right-wing chat groups on the messaging app Telegram, these theories are traded as casually as chats about the weather.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/there-is-more-than-one-big-lie/

[Chainfire]

1. There are certainly many "big" lies.

But in American there is one person that is the mother of all liars.