Historian and political scientist Allan Lichtman said Tuesday on NewsNation’s “Cuomo” that conservative media disinformation and billionaire Elon Musk were why his election prediction that Vice President Harris would win the presidency was incorrect.
Lichtman said, “As I said, things could go wrong. There could be unprecedented events that change the pattern of 160 years of history. That’s what happened here.”
He continued, “Number one, disinformation. We’ve always had disinformation, but disinformation has exploded to an unprecedented degree. You talked about a grievance election, but a lot of that grievance was driven by disinformation. It starts with Fox News and conservative media. Conservative podcasters with tens of millions of views. But we’ve seen something brand new this time—the $300 billionaire, Elon Musk, putting his thumb on the scales through his control of X, formerly Twitter. It has been reported that his misinformation has had billions, literally billions of views.”
Lichtman added, “And you know, as scholars have shown, once you dissolve truth, democracy dissolves along with it, the way authoritarian takes hold, and it’s taking hold all over the world, not just here, is not through force, but through the manipulation of information, as George Orwell warned in 1984 you know, in that dictatorship, war is peace, famine is plenty.”
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