By Jim Geraghty
Wednesday, December 02, 2020
Yesterday afternoon, U.S. attorney general William Barr
addressed the contention of the president, and many of his supporters, that the
2020 presidential election had been stolen, through vote fraud and voting
machines that changed Trump votes to Biden votes. He
sees nothing to support their accusations:
Disputing President Donald Trump’s
persistent, baseless claims, Attorney General William Barr declared Tuesday the
U.S. Justice Department has uncovered no evidence of widespread voter fraud
that could change the outcome of the 2020 election.
Barr told the AP that U.S.
attorneys and FBI agents have been working to follow up specific complaints and
information they’ve received, but “to date, we have not seen fraud on a scale
that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”
. . . Barr didn’t name [Sidney]
Powell specifically but said: “There’s been one assertion that would be
systemic fraud and that would be the claim that machines were programmed
essentially to skew the election results. And the DHS and DOJ have looked into
that, and so far, we haven’t seen anything to substantiate that.”
Back on November 9, Barr specifically “authorized
federal prosecutors across the U.S. to pursue ‘substantial allegations’ of
voting irregularities, if they exist, before the 2020 presidential election
is certified, despite no evidence of widespread fraud.” President
Trump appointed the U.S. attorneys for Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, and
Pennsylvania. There is no rational argument that these prosecutors would
turn a blind eye, or help cover up, credible and serious allegations of vote
fraud on a massive scale.
Many Trump supporters appeared genuinely shocked that
Barr said his department has not found any evidence of fraud on a scale that
could change the election’s outcome, and that there wasn’t any evidence to
substantiate the claims of voting machines altering the outcome. Rudy Giuliani
and Jenna Ellis issued a statement that “with the greatest respect to the
attorney general, his opinion appears to be without any knowledge or
investigation of the substantial irregularities and evidence of systemic
fraud.” (With the greatest respect, mind you.)
Apparently, some Trump
supporters on Parler came to the conclusion that Barr had been a “Deep
State” operative all along — including
the president’s longtime friend, Roger Stone. Fox Business Channel host Lou
Dobbs fumed, “For
the attorney general of the United States to make that statement, he is either
a liar or a fool or both. He may be, uh, perhaps compromised. He may be
simply unprincipled. Or he may be personally distraught or ill.” Tom Fitton of
Judicial Watch declares that Barr is “protecting
Hillary Clinton” and trying to shut down all of his organization’s
lawsuits. And over at Gateway Pundit, Jim Hoft declares: “The
only people the FBI and DOJ target are patriotic conservative Americans who
want things better for their country and for their children’s future . . .
AG Barr had a good scam going but now it’s over. We now know definitively what
he is all about. He is just another crooked swamp creature.”
They’re talking about Attorney General William Barr. The
William Barr. The nation’s chief law-enforcement officer who has been described
as the president’s “champion and
advocate,” who’s been tough on illegal immigration, suggested the Russia
probe was unfair to Trump, who described the Mueller report as a complete
vindication of the president, who House Democrats held in contempt of Congress
for failure to cooperate with probes, who reinstated the death penalty for
federal crimes, who ordered the streets around Lafayette Square cleared, who defended
law enforcement against congressional critics, who attacked
“militant secularists” who “seem to take a delight in compelling people to
violate their conscience,” who changed
the sentencing recommendation of Roger Stone from its original, excessive call
for a sentence of seven to nine years, the man whom 20
progressive groups are trying to impeach, who sent a
surge of federal law-enforcement agents to cities that were plagued by
skyrocketing violent crime, and who allowed
federal lawyers to defend President Trump against a lawsuit from E. Jean
Carroll alleging sexual assault.
That William Barr.
The man who is arguably the president’s most loyal and
probably most effective cabinet official is, in the minds of some Trump fans,
now revealed as a sleeper agent for the Deep State all along.
It’s been unnerving in the past few weeks to watch
seemingly sane people — in some cases friends, allies, former colleagues —
appear to get devoured and replaced by pod people. They look like the people we
knew before, but this strange replacement starts spouting that the voting
machines were hacked, that Governor Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad
Raffensperger are in on some secret plot to steal the election in Georgia from
Trump or turning a blind eye to massive voter fraud, that “these charts” prove
that Biden couldn’t possibly have won, that turnout amidst a giant pandemic
couldn’t possibly have been so high, that Biden couldn’t have won more than 80
million votes, and so on.
We may just be witnessing something very basic about
human nature — the search for scapegoats in the aftermath of failure, and the
preference to believe in the fantastical instead of the mundane.
Some people who work in politics say the most accurate
portrayal of life in government is not The West Wing or other shows and
movies that offer a more glamorous, noble, or generally competent portrait. No,
they say the most realistic show is the HBO series Veep, where the vice
president and her staff stumble from one mess to the next, and almost all of their
efforts result in disappointment, if not humiliating disaster. Reality is full
of drudgery, complicated details, incompetence, miscommunication, mundane
mistakes, and misjudgments. There’s no sinister conspiracy that’s trying to
paint Vice President Selina Meyer and her staff as bumbling incompetents. That
conspiracy would be redundant. Their biggest enemy is themselves.
In short, reality is boring and often
disappointing. We rarely watch dramatic or serious TV shows or movies that
portray all this. We watch shows that are full of action, twists, and turns,
and often with conspiracies of shadowy forces pulling the strings from behind
the scenes. We see government conspiracies, corporate conspiracies, military
conspiracies, media manipulation, double agents, sleeper agents, brainwashing
and mind control . . . a huge portion of our entertainment is based upon the
concept summarized by the title character in Blade: “You better wake up.
The world you live in is just a sugar-coated topping! There is another world
beneath it: the real world. And if you wanna survive it, you better learn to
pull the trigger.” More classically minded folk might think of Plato’s cave —
what we see determines our understanding of the world, whether or not it is the
full picture. If all we see is only part of the picture, we end up with some
seriously flawed ideas of how things work — and we never know that we’re wrong.
The vision of Trump — and Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell
and Alex Jones — is a much more exciting world, and also a simpler one. There’s
a big shadowy conspiracy that is trying to steal the election, impeach the
president, hype the pandemic, brainwash our children, take over and throw
people into jail for thought-crimes, open the borders to gangs and cartels,
replace the current American population with foreigners, steal kids for
celebrity sex-abuse rings. . . . It’s “Flight 93” not only in every election,
but in every moment and every political fight. Every problem has a human face
and is driven by the malevolence of powerful political foes. Whatever we’ve
done wrong is inconsequential compared to the endless wickedness of “them”
pulling the strings behind the scenes.
In this worldview, the conspiracy theorist is not just
Joe Schmo, with a boring daily life, limited career prospects, and limited
ability to find meaning in his life. In this worldview, the conspiracy theorist
is Fox Mulder or Neo or Sherlock Holmes or Batman connecting the dots and
finding the clues. They’ve found the glasses from They Live that show only
the truth. When they buy into all of this, they become one of the select few
who can see through the illusion; they’re no longer among the “Sheeple.”
They’re doing something by posting about it on social media. In their own
minds, they’re greater investigators than Woodward and Bernstein. They’ve
discovered their own “Deep Throat” sources — usually some guy who’s posting
anonymously on the Internet. But in this mindset, paranoia and rage aren’t
problems; they are forces that give life meaning.
We might think that the futility of this kind of
existence — always believing in the vast conspiracy, always finding more clues,
but never exposing and unraveling it all — would make people eventually drift
away from it, finding it unsatisfying. But perhaps this is how some people
prefer it; on some level, they like the fact that the conspiracy is
never fully exposed and the sheeple never wake up. If the “sheeple” ever woke
up, then the enlightened few who recognized the conspiracy wouldn’t be special
anymore. And if the conspiracy was ever exposed and torn down . . . there would
be only “normal” life to go back to — and that’s frustrating and boring.
No matter how the transition to a new administration
works, no matter what President Trump does after January 20, no matter what
decisions are made at the news desks in the years to come, we are probably
going to be stuck with an increasingly vocal, paranoid, conspiracy-minded
subculture for a long time.
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