We Are Not the Same

This shit is infuriating.

Stop me if you’ve heard this story before: Partisan claims of fraud in the presidential election. Elaborate statistical analyses. Reports of shadowy, closed-door doings. All of this, they say, points to one conclusion: The results were compromised, and the real winner was kept out of the White House.That sounds like the aftermath of the 2020 election, but it’s also what’s happening right now. Kamala Harris’s loss in last November’s presidential election produced few prominent claims of fraud, and nothing like the concerted effort, using both lawsuits and force, to keep President Donald Trump in office that followed his defeat nearly five years ago. In the past few months, however, spurious allegations that fraud helped Trump win back the White House have been flourishing more online, elections experts told me, though why they’re so popular right now—other than the left’s compounding anger with the Trump administration—is not clear. The parallel to fraud theories about the 2020 presidential election is more than superficial, Justin Grimmer, a political scientist at Stanford who has studied election-conspiracy theories, told me. “The most remarkable thing is the similarity in the analysis that we’re seeing from the bad claims made after 2020 and these similarly bad, really poorly set up claims from 2024,” he said.

Imagine sitting down to write an article about claims of election fraud, and thinking to yourself “wow, these claims happen on both sides!” And then imagine not mentioning that the Democratic candidate in 2024:

1. Conceded
2. Made no claim that the election was fraudulent
3. Made no effort to browbeat the party into supporting that claim
4. Refrained from launching a failed coup d’etat in support of those claims
5. Has yet to spend four years repeating and extending those claims.

Imagine sitting down to write that article, and not talking about any of those things. I consider myself to be an educated and imaginative man, but I’m really struggling to wrap my mind around this one. Or to put this differently (and I apologize in advance for the emphasis) WHAT IN THE EVER LIVING FUCK HAS TO BE WRONG WITH YOU TO THINK IT’S WORTH AN ARTICLE IN THE ATLANTIC COMPARING A FEW FRINGE WHACKADOODLES ON THE LEFT WITH THE CURRENT PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES?

I’ll wait.