There Is No Conspiracy

Once again, fellow Trump haters, please stop with the 2024 election conspiracies.

Many Democrats and associated progressives an socialists are convinced that Donald Trump and Elon Musk cheated in the 2024 presidential election and insist that Kamala Harris is the rightful winner.  Musk, we are told, used his Starlink company to switch enough votes in all seven swing states to elect Trump.  The evidence, we are informed, is that Trump came right out and said it and that Musk said that he will go to jail for what he did for Trump if the Democrats regain control of Congress in November.  

Okay, Trump's comments can be easily discounted, because he's nothing but braggadocio.  No one takes seriously what he says.  As for Musk, he was likely referring to everything he's done for Trump since January 2025, not anything he might have done for him in October 2024.

But the biggest argument against this conspiracy theories is largely circumstantial.  I know of no voting machines that can be hacked by Starlink or by any other tech service.

So why do these theories persist?  Because these people cannot believe that people who stayed home on November 5, 2024 were not part of the problem (polls show that had those people voted, they would have been a bigger problem, Trump would have won by a larger margin).  Or because they can't believe that Harris was unpopular enough to lose every swing state.  Or maybe because these people simply cannot believe that 77 million of their fellow Americans cannot be so vile as to vote for Donald Trump.

They are.

So, please, folks, next time you want to say that Trump cheated to win . . . don't.  Please, don't. 

The Missing Starlink?

Now that the Electoral College has voted, all that's left is to confirm Donald Trump's 312-226 vote victory over Kamala Harris, all that's left is for the Republican Congress, in the presence of Vice President Harris, by a ceremonial count of the votes.  

And yet, many Harris fans claim, still, that Trump stole the election, because they refuse to believe that a majority of people could not be so vile as to vote for someone so horrible (although Trump won a 49 percent plurality of an electorate representing 35 percent of all Americans of voting age).  They suspect that surrogate president Elon Musk rigged the vote with his Internet system Starlink, siphoning votes for Harris and changing some Harris votes to Trump votes, and maybe even using technology to  suppress the vote in precincts of color. 

All this proves is what I said before . . . mainly, that progressives can be just as stupid as MAGA conservatives.   There is literally no municipality, county, or parish (in deference to Louisiana) where the voting booths and the tabulation machines have connections to the World Wide Web.  In short, there's no way Starlink could rig the system.  And the system is so decentralized.  Musk certainly helped Trump by promoting him on X after he bought it, but he didn't rig the vote.  And when progressives claim that the election was stolen through vote rigging and suggest some sort of conspiracy, they're proving that they're no smarter than MAGA people are.    

And to those of you who are promoting false conspiracy theories about how MAGA stole the election by rigging the ballot count . . . just stop.  Just . . . stop.

QAnon and On

Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia won the GOP nomination for the U.S. House seat of her district, and the party establishment happily welcomed her to the team after having previously denounced her for being a follower of the QAnon phenomenon, which is a cult of tin-foil-hat-wearing individuals who believe in an anonymous person known as "Q".  Q claims to be a supporter of Donald Trump who has information linking d many Democratic politicians and politically liberal celebrities to devil-worshipers and an international child sex-trafficking ring. Q has also claimed that Donald Trump pretended to collude with the Russians to get Robert Mueller to investigate him so he could, by "accident," expose a plot by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, among others, to stage a coup d'état against Trump in their quest for world domination.

 

So many Republicans buy this theory, though, that it threatens to dictate policy in Washington and have Republicans go after Democrats in a witch hunt that suggests that Nancy Pelosi is literally a witch.

I miss the Tea Party right now.

Conspiracy theories have been a part of the American body politic for a long, long time, but now it's going beyond the pale, so undereducated and misinformed are Americans today.  Anyone who doesn't take this QAnon thing seriously had best wake up, because if enough of them get into power, they'll snuff out the freedoms that they pretend to be standing up for.

We must look even more ridiculous to the rest of the world than we ever did before, and that's a huge accomplishment.  If Biden wins the Presidency, and if Democrats keep the House and gain back the Senate,  one can only hope that the QAnon caucus is relegated to back benches so far back they'll be sitting in broom closets during congressional sessions.  There may not be enough broom closets in the Capitol to fit them.