Watching a House of Cards Collapse

A segment of the right-wing public has morphed into a conspiracy theory machine that is—in ...

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A segment of the right-wing public has morphed into a conspiracy theory machine that is—in David’s words—propagating baseless voter fraud allegations at “a geometric rate that [bears] increasingly no relationship to the real world at the same time as the actual claims in court are just evaporating.” Why are people on the right and the left so susceptible to electoral conspiracy theories? After David and Sarah play catchup on the latest developments involving election litigation, they dive into a 1st Circuit race-based admissions case at Harvard, the latest updates on DACA, and The Mandalorian.

Show Notes:

–Andrew Fleischman thread on election lawsuits

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  1. Michael.Shermanbklyn

    My daughter and I are huge fans of Sarah (sorry, David). We both are great fans of The Dispatch and I always listen to AO, too. We have a request. As both of us are registered Democrats and tend to travel in Progressive circles, my daughter, in particular, hears from all of her friends that Stacey Abrams, in fact, had her election stolen from her. Could you please spend a moment on a future AO explaining what, exactly, Abrams claims and why it is false. Given Abrams’ increasing importance in the Democratic Party and her relevance during the Georgia Senate runoffs, this would be of great value.

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    Ethan Cordray

    The Baby Yoda thing is just a classic example of the typical social media histrionic deathspiral.

    Reasonable feminist Star Wars fans on Twitter (like my wife, which is why I know about this) started a discussion about how the egg eating thing seemed to be a joke maybe in poor taste, with some implications about fertility that the writers of the show perhaps didn't think through.

    Then one person called it genocide, and that's what Vanity Fair picked up.

    Then Pablo Hidalgo, one of the official writers in the Lucasfilm Story Group (not a writer on The Mnadalorian though) decided that it would be a good idea to mock *everybody* who had expressed any issues with the egg thing as being crazy SJW pro-lifers or something, as well as joking that "Frog Lady is just having tadpoles to get government money," which is a racist welfare queen joke that's way worse than what anybody else was saying on any side of the discussion. Which apparently he thought was a prvate joke since he's locked his own Twitter account, not apparently knowing that any of his 500 followers could screenshot his tweets and post them publicly.

    So now we've gone from "Hey, maybe treating this one thing as a joke was a little bit over the line" to "It's genocide" to "Look at all these crazy fangirls calling this genocide" to "Lucasfilm writer makes racist joke while laughing at crazy fangirls."

    And honestly, this is pretty much a normal day on Star Wars Twitter.

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    Michael Berkowitz

    The quote Mr. French was looking for was “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” It's from Arthur C. Clarke.

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    David V

    Apparently I don't think that much of David's morality or something. When he started a sentence with "Baby Yoda is the name of my primary wi-fi" I thought he had said that was the name of his primary WIFE. Yikes.

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    Nina

    Guys, I listened to this whole episode just for the Mandalorian discussion and you only talked about the egg thing and didn’t tell me what I really want to know, which is, whether you’ve started watching Clone Wars or Rebels yet. 🧐

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    Aylene Wright

    I think the parallels between Abrams and Trump are that it's not as if their claims have 0% merit. Voter suppression and voter fraud both DO happen to some extent. The problem is with the allegation that fraud or suppression was so systematically widespread, that they accounted for losses by hundreds of thousands of votes, to the point to actually flip the whole election to a "winner" who only won because of the nefarious misdeeds of their lackeys, and so aren't legitimate winners of their elections. So far I have not seen any evidence of that.

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  7. Bob Simrak

    In the months and years leading up to the election, why didn't the President help make voting more secure? Instead of strengthening our election process, it seems all he did was work at tearing it down. With his suspicion of election irregularities and fraud, I thought he would devote his time in office to improving voter confidence. Funny how that worked out.

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    Rev Snow

    "If you don't like Title VI, amend it!"

    What constitutional options would Congress have when making such amendments?

    Option 1: Just repeal it. Let private institutions discriminate as they freely choose, for aims good, evil, or benign.

    Option 2: Keep the language as it is, and somehow cast a spell on the courts to make them stop lying about what its plain text means. No discrimination on race.

    Is there an option 3? I have trouble imagining what racial parsing the Congress would have within its equal-protection-limited powers to legislate.

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    Rev Snow

    How much does it matter that to rule against Harvard admission policies would be to rule against the system that recognized and accepted these Justices themselves? They're not all Harvard alumni, but they all passed through similar systems of selective admission.

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    Old guy named Bill (OGNB)

    Enjoyed the podcast. Your link of vote fraud conspiracy to Skynet was inspired!

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