My marathon of deconstructing the toxic message’s pictures continues with this:
Taken out of context, sure. But in the context of the mail it was sent in, as well as the incessant, unsupported claims of a former President who cannot believe he lost his reelection bid?
Not so much.
This is a classic example of how the Big Lie works: the perpetrator invokes a negative emotion in the target audience, and then, while the audience is wallowing in this emotional reaction, slides the Big Lie out and into the target’s consciousness. The audience is receptive: angry, due to the implicit reference to the election lost by the former President, yet superior, as it’s been invited to admire and share in the analogy of murder to election fraud. And while all this emotion is building up, the Big Lie is hinted at – election fraud. The former President has repeatedly claimed it. Various Republican officials have repeated it. Hell, just today Rep Gosar (R-AZ) repeated the lie in the form of the Maricopa County audit (or “fraudit”, as observers dubbed it) had found evidence of massive fraud. Meanwhile, those who found the time to read the report discovered it found a few more votes for Biden, and a few less for Trump. (Personally, I give no credence to this audit.)
This leads into some simple facts:
- In our legal system, there is an opportunity for the losers of an election to contest the results. Credible evidence must be brought, however; shrieking that a loss is unacceptable, that the election was stolen!, without credible evidence, is the tactics of a five year old, not that of an adult.
- The former President took advantage of that opportunity and filed more than sixty lawsuits. Not all alleged electoral fraud, but all those that did were rejected by judges – including Trump-appointed judges – and some used harsh language in their rejection. Indeed, all but one suit complaining about the distance observers must keep from vote counters were rejected.
- Some of the lawyers Trump used are now being punished for abuse of the legal system. This is an unusual step, and while some might think they can justify an accusation of autocracy on the part of the Biden Administration, the truth of the matter is that Trump-appointed judges rejected the suits, just as did judges appointed by other Presidents, as well as state level judges in conservative States. Taken as a coherent picture, the accusations of tyranny lose plausibility, while judgments accepting the idea that the meritless suits filed by Trump and his proxies was an abuse of the legal system gain in acceptability.
All that said, recipients of this email should be stirred up, should be angry.
They should be angry at those who abuse their faith in their fellow man. This was a critical part of an attempt to manipulate them, and they’re justified in being angry. But not at their fellow Americans, the Democrats, but at whoever wrote this mail, be it a fellow traveler or a national adversary.
They’re the enemy.
