The Fascist Cult Behind the Latest “Trump Stole the Election” Claim
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Transcript:
Every now and again, I get a comment on an older video along the lines of “wow, this aged like milk. Like this guy, who thinks my video about how the Shroud of Turin is fake “aged like milk.” Or this guy, who thinks my video about the thoroughly debunked UFO incel “aged like milk,” or this guy who thinks my video about how vaccines are safe “aged like milk.” Each time I happen to notice one of these comments, I do a quick search to see what exciting news came to light, and each time I get nothing. No announcement from heaven that confirms the truth of the Shroud of Turin. No aliens landing on the White House lawn. No billion people suddenly dropping dead from getting the COVID vaccine four years ago.
But sometimes, I suddenly get a LOT of “aged like milk”-type comments all at once, which indicates that SOMETHING MUST have happened. For instance, in February a bunch of mangry commenters posted “aged like milk” on my video about Blake Lively’s claim that Justin Baldoni sexually harassed her and hired the same PR firm as Johnny Depp in order to slander her in the press. So I searched, and sure enough something DID happen: Baldoni had just filed a countersuit against Lively and the New York Times, who originally reported on Lively’s complaint! Wow, I guess my video DID really age like milk. A countersuit means the person who filed it is automatically in the right, even if a judge does dismiss it in its entirety a few months later.
Anyway, the most recent outpouring of “aged like milk” comments have been directed to my video from last November about how liberals were claiming that Donald Trump “stole” the election, with their only evidence being a claim from Stephen Spoonamore, a man who had previously argued that George W. Bush stole the 2004 election, who did not have access to ballots but still insisted that there were hundreds of thousands of people who voted in swing states voted for Trump and no one else, something he literally cannot know and which wouldn’t even be suspicious if it were true.
So, what happened recently to get all these people proudly dunking on my take? Did Stephen Spoonamore come forward with more data? Did someone else validate his claims?
No, and no. It turns out that Spoonamore and his claims from last November have little to nothing to do with the latest drama. In fact, Spoonamore hasn’t even bothered to update his Substack with the latest news. But yes, I’m sure the YouTube commenters are correct and this latest news will turn out to completely vindicate him.
Okay, so what did happen, exactly? Well, much like the excited Men’s Rights Activists in the comments of my video on Justin Baldoni, the BlueAnon army has confused “filing a lawsuit” with “proving something happened”: last month, a “nonpartisan election security” firm called SMARTElections released a press release announcing that they had filed a lawsuit “questioning the accuracy of the 2024 Presidential and Senate election results in Rockland County, New York.”
You may wonder, on what grounds? Did they gain access to ballots revealing that voters who said they voted for Kamala Harris had their votes changed to Donald Trump? Well, no, I guess this is where I must inform you that the lawsuit also has very little to do with Kamala Harris or Donald Trump. In fact, the only part of the lawsuit that mentions Harris and Trump simply repeats the same claims that Spoonamore made but mapped onto New York: surely no one would have voted for Trump but no other candidates down ballot, right? And no one would have voted for a Democratic congressperson but NOT Kamala Harris, right? The answer to both questions is “of course they would, this is a well-known phenomenon and the results in this election are well within the bounds of what we’d expect based on every election for the past thirty years at least.” If you want more information on that, I encourage you to go watch my spoiled milk video from last November.
There’s one thing that isn’t in this lawsuit but I see mentioned alongside it, including by SMART Elections, so I’ll quickly address it before moving on: the idea that the vote must have been rigged because in one district, Ramapo District 35, Kamala Harris received zero votes, yet the Democratic candidate for Senate, Kirsten Gillibrand, won with 331 votes. How could that have possibly happened? Well, as Politifact pointed out back in February, this actually happens in nearly every election, because that district (and three others) are entirely made up of Orthodox and Hasidic Jews, who all vote as a block as recommended by their rabbis, which Gillibrand knows and so she’s spent years building a relationship with those communities and that’s why she wins there. Harris did not give a single fuck about these communities and that’s why they did not give a single fuck about her.
But anyway, all that is just window dressing for the actual thrust of this lawsuit and the “new” “evidence” put forward: in New York District 39, six people signed affidavits saying they voted for Diane Sare for Senate, while the District only showed five people logged as voting for her; and in District 62, three people signed affidavits saying they voted for Diane Sare for Senate despite the District only logging two votes.
This lawsuit is, in fact, alleging that two (2) people said they voted for Sare and didn’t have their votes counted. Two! Two people.
This may not shock you to hear, but SMARTElections is NOT the only petitioner, here: they are joined by Diane Sare and two people who say they voted for her. But don’t worry, because Sare insists that she knows she can find more people who will say that they voted for her, since she managed to find these two “simply by going down her block and asking a few neighbors.”
“Knock knock! Hi it’s me, your neighbor Diane! From two houses down? I brought you these cookies! Hey, dumb question, but you voted for me, right? Yeah, that’s what I thought. Thanks. Oh, you aren’t just saying that to be nice and get me off your doorstep, right? No, I figured. Okay thanks my lawyer will be in touch.”
So I know what your next question is: who the fuck is Diane Sare? Great question. She ran in that election as an independent under the label of “LaRouche.” Now, I suspect that for at least a quarter of my viewers, that name is enough for you to let out a hearty laugh, go make a cup of coffee and literally never think about this court case or conspiracy theory again. Godspeed. For the rest of you, let me tell you about Lyndon LaRouche and his cult.
Lyndon LaRouche was an old-school radical right antisemite before it was cool, who understood even before most Republicans that you don’t need a lot of voters on your side if you have shit tons of money and questionable moral integrity. LaRouche originally tried gaining ground in leftist circles, but by the ‘60s and ‘70s he had switched over to the far right and built a cult around enacting violence upon leftist groups, possibly because he was a paranoid lunatic who fell for FBI propaganda that claimed leftist leaders were secretly CIA agents and informants. For instance, in 1973 he launched “Operation Mop-Up,” convincing his followers to find Communist groups and beating the shit out of them with nunchucks. Yes, nunchucks.
He was able to convince his followers to do this using classic cult “brainwashing” tactics, but the especially ironic part is that he and his followers were obsessed with being brainwashed by secret agents, as detailed in sociologist Stephen A. Kent’s report on brainwashing:
??”Brainwashing hysteria quickly spread through the LaRouche organization, [former member Paul] Kacprzak says. He attended LaRouche meetings in the United States where there were ‘people writhing on the floor saying, “I’ve been brainwashed, somebody deprogram me!”’
“The account of another former member, however, indicated that the LaRouche group itself might have been doing the brainwashing. Former member Michael Scott Winstead recounted the circumstances that led to his own departure from the movement:
“One day a member of LaRouche’s inner circle of advisors was giving a lecture when he touched upon a favorite topic in the movement—brainwashing. He mentioned a 1957 book on the subject, Battle for the Mind. Curious, Winstead tracked down the book at a library.
“‘Various types of belief can be implanted in people, after brain function has been sufficiently disturbed by accidentally or deliberately induced fear, anger or excitement,’ the author, William Sargant, wrote. ‘Of the results caused by such disturbances, the most common one is temporarily impaired judgment and heightened suggestibility’ (quoted in Witt, 2004:39; see Sargant, 1957:145, 160-168).
“Chinese communists ‘spread their gospel,’ the author noted, through psychological conditioning: inventing enemies, isolating trainees in special locations, keeping them exhausted by performing demeaning tasks and learning difficult new terminology, using informers to keep people tense and uncertain, and forcing them to sever ties with family and friends, even encouraging their recruits, as Hitler had, to denounce their parents.
“‘Winstead felt ill,’ he says. ‘I sat there and read exactly what I had been going through for the last six months,’ he says. ‘It [i.e., his involvement in the LaRouche group] definitely had worked on me quite a bit, more than I’d like to admit to myself then or now’ (quoted in Witt, 2004:39).”
I’ve skipped a LOT of LaRouche lore here for the sake of brevity but here are a few additional facts: he and his supporters went to prison in the mid-’80s for mail fraud, conspiracy to commit mail fraud, and tax evasion, a KKK leader once called him a “racist” (complimentary), he called the Queen of England a drug dealer, and he has inspired far right fascist groups that continue to operate around the world today.
And of course, one of those countries is the United States, where he inspired Diane Sare to represent what the New Republic in 2019 called “one of the country’s most successful homegrown fascist movements” in running for Senate against Chuck Schumer, declaring her main qualification to beher “32-year association with the greatest economist and statesman the United States has yet produced, the late Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr.”
TNR points out that she only got half a percentage of the vote and was “routed by blank ballots. But winning elections was never really the point for the LaRouchies, even in their heyday.”
And so it was inevitable that she would run again in 2024, and with no hope of winning, what was the goal, exactly? And what was the goal of challenging the election results? One can only guess, but considering that she is celebrating Kamala Harris’s loss to Trump, I think we can safely say she isn’t truly concerned that Trump and Elon Musk rigged the election so Harris would lose. And considering that in that same video she complains that the US electoral system silences fringe candidates like herself, I feel pretty confident in stating my opinion that she’s cynically jumping on board BlueAnon’s conspiracy train in the hopes that it will elevate the LaRouche cult on to the national stage where they can finally be taken seriously, win elections, and get a starring role in the current fascist takeover that they laid the groundwork for sixty years ago.
In looking over all of this, I find that the “aged like milk” comments on my previous video about fake election fraud claims to be particularly ironic, because in that video I clearly state that I WANTED this conspiracy to be found to be true, and that even though the “evidence” presented in November was baseless and unconvincing, I would be happy to affirm that it’s all true, or likely to be true, or plausibly true, if the hand counting ended up supporting it (as the conspiracy was spreading before voting was even over and the results certified). The hand count did not support it, and no one has been able to present any evidence that the 2024 election was “stolen” via vote switching and outright fraud. And so, I fall back to my default position: Trump is president because most Americans who were able to vote and interested in voting voted for him.
And that’s fine! Because unlike conspiracy theorists, I actually don’t mind being wrong. I haven’t made my entire personality “the 2024 election was not stolen.” I value critical thinking, and that means acknowledging my own biases, evaluating the evidence, and going where the evidence points regardless of what I want to be true.
