February 4, 2022 Editor

The making of THE BIG LIE myth

Russell J. Ramsland Jr. sold everything from Tex-Mex food to light-therapy technology. Then he sold THE BIG LIE story that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.

By
Emma Brown,
Aaron C. Davis,
Jon Swaine and
Josh Dawsey

May 9, 2021

photo above: A Dominion Voting Systems voting machine in Atlanta in September 2019. (John Bazemore/AP)

WN: The lengths gone to, to prove U.S. 2020 Election Fraud. All for naught . . . All THE BIG LIE . . .

Thankfully, there still are no such things as “alternative facts,” pace Kellyanne Conway. In the Wikipedia article about Conway’s dream world, we read:

During a Meet the Press interview two days after Trump’s presidential inauguration, Conway used the phrase “alternative facts” to defend statements made by White House press secretary Sean Spicer regarding the inauguration’s crowd size.[75][76][77] Conway’s phrase reminded liberal-leaning commentators of “Newspeak“, an obfuscatory language style that is a key element of the society portrayed in George Orwell‘s dystopian novel 1984.[78] Soon after Conway’s interview, sales of the book had increased by 9,500%, which The New York Times and others attributed to Conway’s use of the phrase, making it the number-one bestseller on Amazon.com.[79]

The Guardian noted that “[a] search of several online legal dictionaries, however, did not yield any results for the term.”[80]

We read in another article, Opinion: Donald Trump and Boris Johnson have much in common, with one vital, deflating difference, by George F. Will, February 1, 2022:

Simon Kuper notes in the Financial Times that [Boris] Johnson’s net favorability rating collapsed from +29 percent in April 2020 to -52 percent in January 2022. “Here, in microcosm,” Kuper writes, “is the uniqueness of American polarisation”: Those who favor Trump are bound to him as with hoops of steel, come what may. This total indifference to evidence is today’s “American exceptionalism.” (Emphasis added)

As to the (long!) article highlighted below, they have certainly amassed some facts! I only excerpt a very little. It bears reading in full to understand some of the backstory to THE BIG LIE.

excerpts:

ADDISON, Tex. — Key elements of the baseless claim that the 2020 election was stolen from President Donald Trump took shape in an airplane hangar here two years earlier, promoted by a Republican businessman [Russell J. Ramsland Jr.] who has sold everything from Tex-Mex food in London to a wellness technology that beams light into the human bloodstream.

Briefings in the hangar had a clandestine air. Guests were asked to leave their cellphones outside before assembling in a windowless room. A member of Ramsland’s team purporting to be a “white-hat hacker” identified himself only by a code name.

The idea that the election was stolen took root and remains persuasive to millions of Americans. Although Trump’s own Department of Homeland Security called the election the “most secure in American history,” polls have consistently shown that about one-third of Americans — including a majority of Republicans — believe that Trump lost because of fraud. An internal poll by the National Republican Senatorial Committee in March found that among Republicans who believed the election was stolen, nearly half said hacked machines were partly to blame and an additional 8 percent said they were the main source of fraud.

The fraud claims have undermined faith in the electoral process, been cited as a motivation for legislation to curtail access to polls in dozens of states and spurred the companies Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic to file billion-dollar lawsuits. Ultimately, the conspiracy-mongering helped inspire the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

The nation’s embrace of electronic voting grew out of the debacle of 2000, when hanging chads and other hard-to-interpret paper ballots muddled the outcome of the presidential race, souring many Americans on the analog technology the country had used for decades.

Two years later, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act, dedicating billions of dollars to modernize U.S. elections. It encouraged jurisdictions across the country to replace their old voting machines with new digital systems.

The result was a massive investment in paperless touch-screen voting machines, also known as direct-recording electronic voting machines or DREs, which states came to view as simpler, cheaper and more accessible to people with disabilities.

Hours after the final votes were cast on Nov. 3, Trump doubled down on the claims he had been making for months. “This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country,” Trump said. “We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election.”

Over the next several weeks, Ramsland and others tied to ASOG [Allied Security Operations Group] played key roles in the full-court press to persuade Americans that the 2020 election had been rigged.

Ramsland and Lewis appeared on Lou Dobbs’s show on Fox Business Network, claiming there was evidence of widespread fraud. The claim that all U.S. voting machines secretly harbored Venezuelan software was repeated by Giuliani and Powell in numerous media appearances. The claim that Scytl servers in Frankfurt could be used to flip votes went viral on the right after it was repeated by [Louie] Gohmert.

On Nov. 12, Gohmert said he had told Trump that data on these servers was critical to getting to the bottom of the fraud.

Please click on: The Making of THE BIG LIE Myth

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Editor

Wayne Northey was Director of Man-to-Man/Woman-to-Woman – Restorative Christian Ministries (M2/W2) in British Columbia, Canada from 1998 to 2014, when he retired. He has been active in the criminal justice arena and a keen promoter of Restorative Justice since 1974. He has published widely on peacemaking and justice themes. You will find more about that on this website: a work in progress.

Always appreciate constructive feedback! Thanks.