Democrats will spend the next four years debating why the party suffered a crushing defeat last week. Maybe it was inflation, or the culture wars, or Joe Biden’s hubris, or podcasts, that pushed voters in every swing state toward the Republican presidential candidate. But at least one theory can already be put aside: Elon Musk did not “stole” the election from Donald Trump.

In the weeks and months leading up to the election, Republican officials and operatives designed a second “Stop the Steal” campaign, ready to be deployed if their presidential candidate lost. Musk himself laid much of this groundwork, for example by promote the false narrative that Democrats brought foreigners into the United States to vote illegally, among other things other lies. However, after the election of Trump, it is the left sow doubt: “#donotconcedekamala” and “Trump cheated” both trending on X. One job on Threads, it read: “20 million Democratic votes don’t disappear on their own,” and pointed to Musk, Peter Thiel and Vladimir Putin as likely culprits. “If anyone could finance massive voter fraud, it would be Elon Musk. He also has a motive,” Dean Obeidallah, a progressive radio host, told Topics And X Friday. Such messages were viewed tens of millions of times.

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There is no proof to support these claims – but they remain fundamentally different from the original “Stop the Steal” movement. Democratic leaders, for example, do not repeat these conspiracy theories, nor do they have a coordinated attempt to amplify, validate, or act on them. (Obeidallah himself finally clarified his position, while writing on his Substack yesterday, while skepticism is healthy, “there is currently no credible, objective evidence of fraud or other criminal behavior” to suggest the outcome was illegitimate.) In fact, the 2024 election was, by all accounts, extremely safe. There is no evidence that foreign interference affected the results, and no national conspiracy materially harmed election administration. “Our election infrastructure has never been more secure,” Jen Easterly, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said in a statement. statement on November 6. “We have no evidence of any malicious activity that has materially impacted the security or integrity of our election infrastructure. » Senior officials of Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, NevadaAnd Wisconsinall major battlegrounds, declared the elections secure, free and fair.

That hasn’t stopped some Democrats from suggesting otherwise. Musk, as one of Trump’s most vocal supporters and an extremely online enemy of the extremely online left, became an obvious target. Perhaps the richest man in the world hacked the election with his Starlink satellite network; perhaps Democratic ballots were not systematically counted; although the mechanism is not clear, the math doesn’t matter. Even if such suspicions are raised in good faith, they are counterproductive. Musk, who is now close enough to Trump to have joined him during a recent call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky—East dangerous. His willingness to amplify outright lies in order to help advance the outcome he wanted was evident in the months leading up to the election. But misinformation about him or any major Republican figure who allegedly stole the election obscures and diminishes the real threat: the authoritarian bent of American media, business, and politics that Musk represents has profoundly distorted the political discourse of many Americans, the trust in each other, and grasp reality, all without having to play with the ballots.

Believing that Musk rigged the November results has become, at least for some, easier than accepting the truth: Trump, an openly racist and misogynistic candidate who tried to overthrow the government and who said he wants generals like those of the Third Reich, has just won the Electoral College and is about to win the popular vote in the United States. Yet fantasies about electoral fraud are dangerous this time around, not because they undermine or pose a physical threat to democracy, but because they blunt, or even willfully ignore, reality. It’s Trump’s party now, everyone knows it, the experts should do it know that everyone knows, and the GOP still regained control of the Senate and will likely claim a slim majority in the House of Representatives. On Friday, Trump improved his vote margin by more than nine out of ten counties with nearly complete results, including many progressive strongholds. Focusing on fraud ignores the material factors that led the nation and its citizens to make this choice, and undermines the enormous work that must be done to recover from it.

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And Elon Musk, “hacking” aside, played a substantial role in Trump’s re-election campaign by spreading and normalizing a wide range of hateful rhetoric and conspiracy theories. He spearheaded a growing segment of the ultra-wealthy technocratic class which quickly coalesced around Trump this year. The far-right rhetoric about election fraud that Musk amplified helped spark a wave of protests. death threats against election officials. He tries to replace on its own objective sources of information and reporting with its white supremacist social networkdegrading the American information environment to the point that it has become unclear how, exactly, to change someone’s mind about anything.

It is not surprising that suspicions have arisen about the elections. Conspiracy theories frequently emerge during elections and have done so for decades. These Democrats are not particularly, or even especially, whiny or hypocritical. Before Trump denounced “theft” in 2020, Democrats blamed Russian trolls and Facebook in 2016. (In this case, to be clear, U.S. intelligence officials I found evidence of Russian interference – but there is no evidence that this is what decisively swung the outcome in Trump’s favor.) Four years earlier, Trump had called Barack Obama’s victory a “total deception“, and in 2008, John McCain’s campaign was would have collecting reports on “election day irregularities” before his crushing defeat. Both times, one survey found that about half of Republicans believed the election was stolen. In 2004, some Democrats blame shenanigans in Ohio for John Kerry’s exit poll defeat, and in 2000 the culprit was then-Florida Governor Jeb Bush and the state’s infamous “hangmen.”

Yet Trump’s political enemies should strive to prove that cognitive flexibility, grounded in reality, is possible. Anyone who believes in democracy, whether they are a Democrat or not, should accept the results and, instead of retroactively focusing on polls and data, focus all their energy on the economic, social, political and other aspects of life people who caused this result. and how to improve the lives of these people.