Why not ridicule? Scientist and science fiction writer David Brin asks (essentially) that if shame does not work to quash Stop the Steal (and perhaps other mass hysterias), try ridicule:
The Republican voter fraud fraud is over half a century old by now, old enough to be “genetically” passed on within its ranks. Sam Levine at The Guardian recounts its recent hits. But the contagion metastasized with the GOP’s transition to the Party of Trump:
For years, civil rights groups and academics have raised alarm at the way Republican officials have deployed false claims of voter fraud as a political strategy to justify laws that restrict access to the ballot. But the way Republicans have embraced the myth of a stolen election since Trump’s loss in November, is new, they say, marking a dangerous turn from generalized allegations of fraud to refusing to accept the legitimacy of elections.
If things were bad before (ask me about North Carolina), they are worse now.
“We’ve had disputed elections in the past, but we’ve never had the denial of the basic mathematical reality of counting votes.”
“Voter suppression is not new, the battle lines have been drawn over that for quite some time. But this new concern about election subversion is really worrisome,” said Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, who studies election rules.
The willingness to deny election results comes amid heightened concern that Republicans are maneuvering to take over offices that would empower them to block the winners of elections from being seated. Several Republicans who have embraced the idea that the election was stolen are running to serve as secretaries of state, the chief election official in many places, a perch from which they would exert enormous power over elections, including the power to hold up certifying races.
“I do think it’s a relatively new phenomenon, unfortunately, and disturbing,” said Edward Foley, a law professor at the Ohio State University who has written extensively about the history of contested elections in the US. “We’ve had disputed elections in the past, but we’ve never had the denial of the basic mathematical reality of counting votes.”
As Brin’s post observes, the states where “the Steal” is alleged to have occured were Republican-controlled, either wholly (Arizona and Georgia) or by Republican legislatures and Democratic governors (Pennsylvania).
The stolen election narrative is nonsense, and perhaps a form of mass hysteria. But then in Trump world, up is down, black is white, in is out, and wrong is right. And, by the way, Covid vaccines make you magnetic.
“Na-No, Na-No”
This “vaccines magentize you” conspiracy has spread worldwide so fast that the Centers for Disease Control posted a recent bulletin to attempt to knock it down:
The CDC went so far as to insist itemize “All COVID-19 vaccines are free from metals such as iron, nickel, cobalt, lithium, and rare earth alloys, as well as any manufactured products such as microelectronics, electrodes, carbon nanotubes, and nanowire semiconductors.”
As Mork from Ork might say, “Na-No, Na-No.”
The Washington Post’s Alexandra Petri adopted the persona of X-Men villain Magneto. He was as disappointed as someone watching a friend’s amateur magic show:
Nobody, as far as I could tell, was magnetic at all. They also said they would be able to do something involving 5G, but if they could, they never explained what it was, or did it. One nurse who was testifying in Ohio put a key and a bobby pin on herself and they both fell off immediately. “Explain this,” she said, which I could — the surface tension between a flat metallic object and the body’s surface oils that can sometimes hold objects on the body had failed her.
What is really behind the mass hysteria in this country is loss of white-conservative power and something else I mention too rarely:
Demographic changes mean white people may soon (or eventually) be just another minority in this country. These people know how this country treats minorities. They and their ancestors have been doing most of the “treating” for 400 years. As Stephen Stills once said, they’re scared shitless.
But I’m afraid ridicule will not work to snap such people back to reality, satisfying though ridicule may be. Making fun of people’s mental illness as gauche these days as drunk humor. Like other recent mass hysterias, this one may just have to run its course. The question is whether there will be where the United States of America is now a functional democractic republic remaining when the fever breaks.
(h/t/ BF)