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Kari Lake lost the Arizona gubernatorial election by about 17,000 of the votes cast on November 8, 2022.
She lost the election in the public mind when she was summoned by the Associated Press November 14. He officially lost when the election was certified December 5.
He lost the election again on December 24, when a judge dismissed a legal challenge to the results. She lost again February 17 when his appeal was denied. And he lost again Mondaywhen a court rejected his argument that flaws in the absentee ballot counting process warranted reconsideration of the contest.
That’s something like six losses in the same contest, if you’re counting. But Lake is as relentless as he was on Nov. 9, when, after winning Donald Trump’s endorsement by echoing his false claims about voter fraud, he began to claim that his own loss was contaminated In the wake of that most recent legal pushback, he retweeted a meme suggesting that the way absentee ballots were counted was suspect.
But let’s put Lake on the table for a moment. Instead, let’s talk about balloons.
Kandiss Taylor also ran for governor last year, entering third in the Republican primaries of Georgia. On Monday, an excerpt of an interview he did with a flat Earther — someone who claims our planet is not round — circulated online.
In it, Taylor endorses the idea that the Earth is flat, not citing evidence, but pointing to the ubiquity of depictions of a non-flat Earth.
Kandiss Taylor, who is running for governor in 2022 and recently became a Georgia GOP district chair, is a down-to-earth guy: “There are balloons everywhere… and that’s what they do to brainwash.” pic.twitter.com/PEz1sqOTvA
— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) May 22, 2023
“Everywhere, there are balloons. You see them all the time,” Taylor said. “… They’re everywhere. And that’s what they do to brainwash themselves.”
“To me, if it’s not a conspiracy, if it’s real, why are you pushing so hard?” she added.
You won’t be surprised to learn that despite losing the Republican gubernatorial primary last year by 70 points, Taylor also claimed the election was tainted by fraud.
This global argument, however, is revealing. A normal person would assume that the representations of the Earth are round because the Earth is round and, importantly, would probably not even notice many of these representations in their day-to-day life. Sitting here writing this, it’s hard for me to remember the last time I saw a globe.
But Taylor has chosen to notice them (or has chosen to claim to notice them). And in doing so, he has become suspicious (or has chosen to claim that he is suspicious). Why are all balloons balloons, if not to cover up the truth: that the Earth is not a balloon!
Taylor may never have seen one Mercator projection mapbut I digress.
This is how it works. You can always find evidence for your point of view, given two conditions. First, that you don’t see or are willing to ignore countervailing evidence. Second, that you have a reason to invest so much in your point of view.
For Lake, this second element is easy to establish. Lake’s entry into politics was based on the idea that the system could not be trusted. Yes, he would have liked to have won the gubernatorial election, but it wasn’t a hindrance that he didn’t. He maintained the same position on the legitimacy of the election the month before he lost and the month after. The November 8 election was not decisive, it was a data point.
In doing so, he’s done something other losing candidates haven’t: He’s stayed focused. On November 8, 2022, Lake had approx 550,000 followers on Twitter. Now he has it 1.2 million. Part of this is likely a function of Elon Musk inviting conspiracy theorists back to the platform. But part of it is Lake’s campaign against the establishment —and, more broadly, against reality—has continued unabated.
This means that you have met the first of our two conditions: you are eliminating countervailing evidence.
We often think that correcting mistakes or giving context to false statements is pointless. As a member of the mainstream, reality-bound media, I can confirm that it often feels this way. But research shows that’s not the case.
The problem is that many people don’t see fact checks. The fragmentation of the media universe over the past decade, with the expansion of social networks and the emergence of media based on advanced partisan agendas, has made it particularly easy to avoid countervailing evidence.
Lake is immersed in right-wing media. she celebrate and raised funds from his rejection of media such as CNN. She dismisses or ignores the overwhelming evidence that Trump lost in 2020 and that he lost two years later. Then she frames his failure to become governor not as the legitimate verdict of Arizona voters, but as part of a divine plan expose the fraud that obstructed his path.
She and Trump have regularly used the “balloons” argument: If there was no fraud, why is the media so eager to point out that there was no fraud? Thus they advanced, boats against the current of reality, endlessly returned to the past.
On Monday, Lake teased an impending announcement; he is likely to announce his bid for the Republican Senate nomination in Arizona next year. But she’s already running the same campaign she’s been running for the last few years, one in opposition to the elites and the pundits and the fake news media that insist things are the way they are.
