The truth we don’t want to face

Liberal conspiracy theories about the election

Right after the election, I immediately saw comments on Substack alleging that the election had been stolen from Kamala Harris.

I spent the last week tracking down a lot of these conspiracies and talking to people who believed them or who had relatives that believed them.

Anecdotally, I noticed that these conspiracies were finding a foothold among adult women who had been so sure Harris would win and who were reeling, looking for any explanation for the loss, anyone except the one staring them in the face.

It’s particularly fascinating that these conspiracies would find purchase among Democratic white female voters, those women who were assured Harris would win and that we would save ourselves and America. Because once again, the majority of white women voted for Trump. Female rage cuts two ways. And while women are having their reproductive rights taken away, white women, who have, in the past been the primary beneficiaries of the patriarchy, are struggling to find those marriages and buy those houses that once had been a marker of a good life. The trad wife ideal? They wanted that more than bog witch. 

That truth is hard to face because it requires asking hard questions about ourselves. Which systems are we complicit in? Who is oppressed so we can have the lives we want?

Also, these conspiracies were not being pushed from the top down but were bubbling up through the cracks in our broken media. Substack comments. Reddit threads. TikTok videos. Threads. It makes sense, conspiracy theories are the refuge of the alienated and the disenfranchised. 

I wrote about conspiracies for MSNBC this week.

We don’t need conspiracy theories to explain our collapsing institutions. We don’t need to invoke Starlink to know that grocery store CEOs gouged prices above inflation. We don’t need to believe in tampering with voting machines to know that gerrymandering exists. We don’t need to believe in coordinated misinformation campaigns to know that private equity gutting America’s newsrooms has led to a dearth of good reporting and news.

But facing the reality that the election wasn’t stolen means examining some things about ourselves, our country and our neighbors and family that are deeply uncomfortable. For example, how quickly the Democratic party backtracked on the #BlackLivesMatter movement after the protests over the death of George Flyod in 2020. How swiftly the party moved to be as strict or more strict on immigration as Republicans. How the party refused to push for a ceasefire in Gaza. And the willingness of liberal pundits and politicians to blame pro-trans policies, Black men, and Latino men, anyone except the largest group of voters who backed Trump: White men and women.  

Despite how frustrating the election results are, these conspiracies have been debunked. Poynter has an article debunking the Starlink conspiracy. And no, 20 million votes didn’t disappear. They didn’t. And no, hand-counting ballots is not the solution to the election.

Also, three years ago, I profiled Seth Abramson, a lawyer turned #resistance tweeter, and I think that profile offers us some lessons for how we handle the information and misinformation that’s going to define the next four years.

Since Trump left office, and America has begun to recover from a media cycle that revolved, endlessly, around a cruel and vindictive White House, it’s important to remember how easily we let conspiracy leak into our lives, into our TV shows and our punditry and our thinking. How quickly we smashed the retweet button, how little we thought about it. And how dangerous it is to live in a world built entirely of your own words, with no vetting, no editing, blocking critics, until everything is a mirror shining you back at you.

As

Roxane Gay

wrote, “The biggest challenge of our lifetime will be figuring out how to combat the American willingness to embrace flagrant misinformation and bigotry.”

We aren’t going to post our way through this. The only way to fight fascism is through community involvement and care.