A Response to Tucker Carlson’s Claim the Election was Rigged

Let’s unspin for a minute

First of all, let’s be clear: Tucker Carlson is a self-admitting satirist who should never be taken seriously, but like so many other right-wing white males with a major platform, he’s incredibly dangerous.

What makes this brand of TV personalities (Rush, O’Reilly, Hannity, etc.) so dangerous is not the platform from which they speak but the manner in which they use it. What makes Carlson dangerous is his cunning ability to swim in and out of the waters of truth with aplomb. As he paddles through a fact, he tosses in a dirty lie, and muddies the waters he swims in. His onlookers none the wiser, unable to sort out the difference. This is why comedians have such an easy time skewering these people with videos showing their obvious and blatant contradictions.

His artistry is on full display in his latest Op-Ed where Carlson tries to explain that; indeed, the election was rigged. However, besides the headline which makes his claim, Tucker never actually describes anything that is remotely near rigging, theft, or fraud.

Priming is an important part of making a convincing argument. By priming his readers that the election was stolen in the headline, he is able to make softball arguments that fall flat on their own merits. The current and soon to be former President does the same thing, but this article isn’t about him, so let’s move on.

And now, time to unspin. Let’s breakdown this article:

Electronic voting is not as secure as traditional hand counting. It never will be as secure. Voters can see this, because it’s obvious, and it makes them nervous

When I read stuff like this, my blood pressure rises, and this is the first sentence. This statement is a good example of priming; It’s purpose is to establish a premise without allowing you to believe it’s untrue. Let’s ruminate for a moment. There are no citations of any meaningful statistics that support this supposition in the article, and there’s no particular reason to believe on the face of it that any of this is true. Further, as a computer programmer, I can say with 100% certainty that electronic voting can and will be the most secure way to cast a ballot, even if it is not the case today. Combine open-source software with quantum encryption (a technology that is on the horizon) and this problem will be solved forever. Regardless, the above statement bleeds into the next assertion:

Other countries don’t use electronic voting because they know it undermines confidence in democracy. A system cannot function if no one trusts the vote. That’s true here, too, as we’re finding out. Going forward, we need to find out exactly what happened in this month’s presidential election, no matter how long it takes the investigation to unfold or how much it costs.

Interesting. What countries are we talking about? When he says “because they know it undermines…” that should mean there are quotes from election officials in other countries, otherwise he couldn’t know this. Who says this? When? Under what circumstance? It is true that most EU countries have either abolished or never implemented voting machine technology, but not because it “undermines confidence in democracy”, rather it’s because they simply don’t feel the technology is where it needs to be at this time. In Canada, they have online voting. In Brazil and India they use technology as their primary way of casting ballots and they are reportedly happy with the results.

Once we get answers from that investigation, we ought to revert immediately to the traditional system of voting, the one that served our democracy for hundreds of years.

But only if we uncover a problem, right? Why not leave a little wiggle room for that? Also, mail-in ballots have served our democracy for over a hundred years, so by his own statement, that’s included, right?

What we’re doing now is not working

Isn’t it though?

That’s an understatement. As of Monday night, the state of New York still hadn’t managed to count the votes in five House races thanks to mail-in voting.

Why is that problem? I thought we wanted all legal votes to count.

That’s a disaster, and we should stop pretending that it’s not.

Question: What constitutes a disaster, metrically speaking? Is the disaster that Trump didn’t win, or that more people voted than ever before? What specifically is the “disaster”?

…The 2020 presidential election was not fair, and no honest person would claim that it was.

Not true. I’m man honest person, and it seemed pretty fair. Define ‘fair’. I didn’t like the Republicans maintained control of the Senate, but I’m not acting like a child and saying it’s not fair. Also, to callback to a previous assertion about Carlson being ‘dangerous’, this is where he’s dangerous. If you’re accepting his postulates without questioning how he got to his conclusions at this point, then you are perfectly primed to accept that the election wasn’t ‘fair’, and we know this is true, because an astounding number of Republicans believe the election was stolen.

The system was rigged against one candidate and in favor of another, and not in ways that were hidden from view.

I really can’t wait to hear how he came to this conclusion

The media openly colluded with the Democratic nominees. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris refused to explain what they would do if they were elected. That’s never happened before in any presidential election in American history, but the media allowed them to do it.

This is a joke right? There’s so much to unpack here. First, the very notion that Fox has not been colluding with the current President is beyond insane. Second, define collusion in this instance. What, were they were nice to them? My brain hurts trying to unravel this mystery. Third, “never happened before”? Seriously Tucker? Not only is “refusing to explain” a political tradition that predates our current administration, but Trump spent literally his entire 2016 campaign avoiding questions about his tax returns, what he would do with his businesses, etc. etc. Heck the entire Republican convention this year was a case study in “refusing to explain what they would do.”

Democrats used our public health emergency for nakedly partisan ends. They punished Trump supporters for trying to gather, but they exempted their own activists — rioters and vandals from Black Lives Matter and Antifa — from the COVID lockdowns entirely. The restrictions they did enforce crushed America’s small businesses, the heart of the Republican Party, while making their own donors fantastically richer. Jeff Bezos alone saw his net worth jump by more than $70 billion during the pandemic.

You know what, they can have this one. While there’s plenty to gripe at I’m not entirely in disagreement with conservatives on this topic… but wait!

Then, Democrats used the coronavirus to change the system of voting. They vastly increased the number of mail-in ballots because they knew their candidates would benefit from less secure voting. And they were right.

Actually, everyone benefitted from mail-in voting. I cannot repeat this enough because at the heart of Fox’s attempt to discredit mail-in balloting is a lie they continue to sell to the nation.

First, we want everyone who is eligible to vote, to vote, don’t we? Do you ever notice how the right doesn’t share that opinion? Second, the GOP did better than the Democrats in every major race. They got more house seats, they got more senate seats. What are you babbling about Tucker? And third, the courts he’s referring to are all federal conservatives judges placed there by none other than Mitch McConnel himself. Do better.

They used the courts to neutralize the Republican Party’s single most effective get out the vote operation, which for generations had been the National Rifle Association.

No the NRA did that to themselves, remember? Embezzlement? Do I need to link this?

Not enough has been written about this, but anyone on the ground saw it. Thanks to legal harassment from the left, the NRA played a vastly reduced role in this election, and that made a huge difference in swing states like Pennsylvania and others.

So you are saying that people don’t vote if the NRA doesn’t help them vote? Maybe they shouldn’t have stolen money from their constituents.

But above all, Democrats harnessed the power of Big Tech to win this election. Virtually all news and all information in the English-speaking world travels through a single company, Google. A huge percentage of our political debates take place on Facebook and Twitter. If you use technology to censor the ideas that people are allowed to express online, ultimately, you control how the population votes. And that’s exactly what they did. They rigged the election in front of all of us and nobody did anything about it.

First off, social media doesn’t censor conservatives.

Second, You have the right to speak your mind and not go to jail or be prosecuted for it. You don’t have the right to spread propaganda or patently false information on social media. So the argument Carlson is making here is that the election was rigged because the right wasn’t able to spread lies. Well played TC, well played.

Josh Chudnovsky is no one in particular. He enjoys playing with his dogs and yelling at the TV