Just days after the November 2020 election, an unnamed senior Republican official asked a Washington Post reporter a rhetorical question about the “downside for humoring” then-President Donald Trump’s false claims about election fraud. “It’s not like he’s plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on Jan. 20,” the official said at the time.
Over a year after an attempted insurrection fueled by those false claims and an explicit admission from the former President that he did seek to overturn the outcome, the dangers of the Big Lie remain manifest. But a set of political leaders and commentators continue to attack the legitimacy of American elections, turning the Big Lie into a persistent alternate reality. Indeed, the danger of this narrative has been taken into account by federal judges handling the prosecution of Jan. 6 defendants. As Politico recently reported, “judges have cited Trump’s continuing false claims to suggest some Jan. 6 defendants are too dangerous to release pending trial. So long as leaders continue to promote those claims, they’ve argued, extremists open to violent action may heed them as a rallying cry to attack the government.”
Earlier this month, the Department of Homeland Security issued an advisory warning that “[s]ome domestic violent extremists have continued to advocate for violence in response to false or misleading narratives about unsubstantiated election fraud,” and that the “months preceding the upcoming 2022 midterm elections...
Pakistani actress and model Ayesha Omar has strongly denied a controversial statement falsely attributed to her on social media. In recent days, a statement circulated online claiming that the act...