This article was first published as a collaboration between ProPublica and Frontline. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
Oh hey, I was interacting with Lewis Sessions around that time. Pleasant guy, perfectly capable of handling himself in day-to-day life. But it seems like the propaganda machine has melted his political brain. Sad.
Oh, hey, ProPublica – that was quite a dissertation on all things Kraken…
In the movie, Kraken was a “good” sea monster. That’s what Powell said she was doing – getting all the “evidence” out to validate the “Stop the Steal” movement.
For further fun info:
Kraken, to me, is also a whole Pacific NorthWest thing:
Interesting factual story—which goes the long way around the barn to tell us what we’ve known for years—Republicans lie with the ease of long practice to get what they want, regardless of what’s legal.
This! They did not really need provable evidence of election fraud.
As with Ukraine and Trump, at a minimum simply the existence of allegations was going to be quite sufficient.
Then, turning the OTHER wheels could be justified: fake slates of electors, halting the January 6th process–by Pence (who wouldn’t go along), by traitorous malefactors such as Hawley and Cruz, etc. (who couldn’t get enough others to go along), “fighting like hell” at the Capitol–as Trump commanded (and which he delighted in on TV, hoping for maximum effect and all that that implies), and even martial law. Every avenue was being pursued. (And I’ll bet Meadows was at the fulcrum of it all.)
The problem, of course, is that people still believe this crap. AND there have been no House hearings yet to put these clowns under the lights and ask them WTF.
The “Big Lie” came from one place; the diseased mind of our Former President. He is so warped that it is impossible for him to believe that he could lose anything! See, e.g., cheating at golf. Ergo, it must have been voter fraud. He has now found a cabal of similar “minds” to propagate this fabrication. Here is an artist’s conception of the moment:
“The rank and file are usually much more primitive than we imagine. Propaganda must therefore always be essentially simple and repetitious.”
— Goebbels
[I]n the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.