The Worst Thing about the Fox-Dominion Settlement

The gaslighting will continue until morale improves.

I have not closely followed the Dominion vs. Fox case that was settled yesterday.  But what I see does appear awful.  If Fox did cast aside basic journalism standards to please their audience, that is indefensible.  Of course, MSNBC, CNN, etc. do that everyday, but Fox should be better than that especially when reputations are involved.

But there is something that is worse about this Fox-Dominion situation.

This increases the credibility of those who gaslight that the 2020 election was the cleanest election ever!  It significantly distracts from the case, the fact really, that 2020 was profoundly rigged.

I am not going to go through the whole case for 2020 being rigged here.  I defer to Mollie Hemingway’s well documented and measured book Rigged for that. And I do not presume to know whether the rigging changed the final result (although this former election judge suspects it did).  But the vote-by-mail industry set up in 2020 in violation of basic standards of election security, not to mention several state laws, using COVID as a fig leaf, is evidence of rigging enough to bring the legitimacy of that election into question.  That even before the details of Zuck Bucks, videos of late night ballot box stuffing, ballot harvesting, social media censorship etc. etc.

By the way, Hemingway gave Trump lawyer claims about Dominion short shrift.  Her case not only does not rely on those, but finds them not relevant to the real documented problems with 2020. (p. 320 hardback 2021 edition)

But all that sadly does not diminish the propaganda win the Dominion settlement gives to those who gaslight that 2020 was the cleanest, most secure election ever in American history!!  It makes it that much more unlikely (Admittedly, it was already quite unlikely.) that there will ever be a reckoning for the rigging of the 2020 election.

Instead the rigging of 2020 continues to be rewarded.  Key states, such as Pennsylvania, are still enabling election rigging.  One key state, Wisconsin, is likely to get worse thanks to their recent Supreme Court election. (Yes, some red states have tightened up their election laws, but those are unlikely to be the key battlegrounds in the near future.) And when you reward politicos for bad behavior and enable them, you are almost guaranteed to get more of said bad behavior.  We are therefore in grave danger of 2024 being rigged as well.

God help us if that happens.