There’s been no shortage of misinformation, propaganda, and outright lies about the 2020 election over the past two weeks, with Donald Trump doing much of the dissemination of “fake news” on his Twitter feed, claiming (erroneously) that Republican election watchers weren’t allowed into the rooms where votes were being tabulated (they were), dead people voted (even Fox News host Tucker Carlson has debunked that one), and that a computer program used in some states destroyed votes cast for the incumbent president. (Again, there is no evidence to support such a claim.)
And now we have what may well be the most patently absurd allegation yet when it comes to how Trump actually “won” the election, and did so by a landslide. CNN explains:
“The basic idea of the most extreme belief around this theory is this: The US Army or maybe the intelligence community raided (there was no raid) the Frankfurt, Germany offices of a company (that has no Frankfurt offices) that tallies all votes in US elections (it does not do any tallying of votes, much less conduct any official tally of all votes in the US, which no single company does).
“Data on a server seized in that raid (no server was seized, there was no raid) showed that votes were switched (they weren’t) and that Trump had secured a massive landslide of 410 Electoral College votes, winning California (which hasn’t gone for a Republican since 1988 and which Hillary Clinton won by 30 percentage points in 2016) and Rhode Island (which has gone for a Republican only once since 1976) but somehow not Colorado (which was considered a swing state as recently as 2008).”
This bogus theory got lots of play on one of Trump’s favorite right-wing channels, One America News Network (OANN), which breathlessly informed viewers they had been duped and didn’t even know it. Here, take a look:
OAN is telling their viewers that the US military has seized a secret server abroad which shows Trump won by 410 electoral votes. pic.twitter.com/cZV5DArK0Q
— ChangeAbout (@ChangeAbout1) November 18, 2020
Fact-checking website Truth or Fiction quickly unraveled and destroyed the OANN assertion that Trump had won in a landslide:
“Social media users Saturday were sharing reports published by conservative websites claiming servers that would reveal wrongdoing in the U.S. election had been confiscated by U.S. military forces in Germany. Most posts said the servers belong to the software company Scytl, which is based in Barcelona, and some suggested the servers housed information from Dominion Voting Systems.
“(That claim is) NOT TRUE.”
As is usually the case with extreme right-wing media, stories are fabricated from rumors and never sourced or sourced to completely unreliable (and usually unnamed) people. All it takes is a little imagination and a willingness to lie to the gullible conservative masses who are still convinced there’s no way Trump could have lost because, after all, he had so many people at his campaign superspreader rallies.
But bullshit is bullshit, no matter how you try to coat in tinfoil so it has an alluring shine to it. And right-wing crap is among the most ridiculous on the planet.