It is an internet battle cry: Stop the Steal has swept across inboxes, Facebook pages and Twitter like an out-of-control virus, spreading misinformation and violent rhetoric -- and spilling into real life, like the protest planned for DC this weekend.
But while Stop the Steal may sound like a new 2020 political slogan to many, it did not emerge organically over widespread concerns about voting fraud in President Donald Trump's race against Joe Biden. It has been in the works for years.
Its origin traces to Roger Stone, a veteran Republican operative and self-described "dirty trickster" whose 40-month prison sentence for seven felonies was cut short by Trump's commutation in July.
Stone's political action committee launched a "Stop the Steal" website in 2016 to fundraise ahead of that election, asking for $10,000 donations by saying, "If this election is close, THEY WILL STEAL IT."
Stop the Steal briefly resurfaced around the midterms in 2018 -- with Republicans employing the hashtag during a recount in a neck-and-neck Florida race for U.S. Senate -- but it wasn't until 2020 that it really caught fire.
A Stop the Steal Facebook group was managed by a loose coalition of right wing operatives, some of whom have worked with former Trump adviser Steve Bannon. The group amassed hundreds of thousands of followers in little more than a day before Facebook shut it down on November 5 -- the day after it was launched.
Also on November 5, Bannon started his own "Stop the Steal" Facebook group; he changed the name to "Own Your Vote" the following day. It was not removed by Facebook, but the social media company did later remove several other pages affiliated with Bannon.
"We've removed several clusters of activity for using inauthentic behavior tactics to artificially boost how many people saw their content," said Andy Stone, a Facebook spokesman. "That includes a group that was originally named Stop the Steal, which later became Gay Communists for Socialism and misled people about its purpose using deceptive tactics."
Spinoff pages sprung up soon after like brush fires, with Facebook struggling to quickly snuff out the spreaders of bogus information.
All the while, Roger Stone and Bannon have been in full disinformation mode. Stone has appeared on the show of far-right radio commentator Alex Jones to trumpet groundless claims that Biden is trying to steal the election; Bannon is echoing similar conspiracy theories on his podcast, calling the election "a mass fraud."
"We're calling it a fraud or we're calling it a steal -- stop the steal," he said on a November 4 episode.
Sammy Sofa wrote:That is indeed a photo of some real horsefeathers heads, but it's not from today's marching horsefeathers heads:
CyHawk_Cub wrote:ER nurse in South Dakota
javy knows my name wrote:Ding Dong Johnson wrote:This guy is sooooo Alabama
Irrelevant Dude wrote:I am so tired of the "We want all LEGAL votes counted" talking point. Take a simple statement that nobody can disagree with and use it over and over to imply that there is reason to believe that it is not the case. Whenever someone tries to counter the statement, the response is "What, you don't want all legal votes counted?" Then, when everything is over, and nothing changes, they will just say "All we ever wanted was to make sure that votes were counted legally," when that isn't what they wanted at all.
There are just so many enablers, and so many otherwise very intelligent people working so hard to push a false narrative. It is exhausting and infuriating.
WrigleyField 22 wrote:Irrelevant Dude wrote:I am so tired of the "We want all LEGAL votes counted" talking point. Take a simple statement that nobody can disagree with and use it over and over to imply that there is reason to believe that it is not the case. Whenever someone tries to counter the statement, the response is "What, you don't want all legal votes counted?" Then, when everything is over, and nothing changes, they will just say "All we ever wanted was to make sure that votes were counted legally," when that isn't what they wanted at all.
There are just so many enablers, and so many otherwise very intelligent people working so hard to push a false narrative. It is exhausting and infuriating.
Mostly it's a lost cause probably worth ignoring.
I think there's probably a way to try and frame it as there's no such thing as "illegal and legal votes", you process all ballots and part of processing is discarding invalid ballots, which is basically means ballots which had some sort of user error. Any systmetatic effort to submit ballots completed with the intent to change results is fraud and has a separate process to investigate and prosecute. But you end up in this kind of technical answer that no one really will listen to so it's back to "best to just ignore"
Thurman Merman wrote:WrigleyField 22 wrote:Irrelevant Dude wrote:I am so tired of the "We want all LEGAL votes counted" talking point. Take a simple statement that nobody can disagree with and use it over and over to imply that there is reason to believe that it is not the case. Whenever someone tries to counter the statement, the response is "What, you don't want all legal votes counted?" Then, when everything is over, and nothing changes, they will just say "All we ever wanted was to make sure that votes were counted legally," when that isn't what they wanted at all.
There are just so many enablers, and so many otherwise very intelligent people working so hard to push a false narrative. It is exhausting and infuriating.
Mostly it's a lost cause probably worth ignoring.
I think there's probably a way to try and frame it as there's no such thing as "illegal and legal votes", you process all ballots and part of processing is discarding invalid ballots, which is basically means ballots which had some sort of user error. Any systmetatic effort to submit ballots completed with the intent to change results is fraud and has a separate process to investigate and prosecute. But you end up in this kind of technical answer that no one really will listen to so it's back to "best to just ignore"
The simplest response should probably be "they are", and don't bother getting into the nuance. Don't engage further than that.
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