So here’s Elise Stefanik, a woman with a very unattractive personality, ranting this week about how Twitter’s 2020 “election interference” by temporarily limiting the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story cost her Orange God Emperor reelection in 2020 based on the findings of a survey conducted two months ago by trashy UK tabloid Daily Mail and legitimate-ish pollster TIPP.

The 53 percent number she cites in one of comes from the question of “Would Knowing The Laptop Contents Were Real And Not ‘Disinformation’ Have Changed Your Vote?” in which, of their sample of 501 “adults” (not registered voters), 28 percent answered “Very Likely” and another 25 percent said “Somewhat Likely,” which of course this battle axe turns into “53 percent would have changed their vote.” By self-identified party, “Very” and “Somewhat” were tied among Democrats by 31 percent, so 62 total. Among independents 17 percent said “Very Likely” and 23 percent “Somewhat.”

Also 52 percent of Republican respondents – 32 percent “Very likely” and 20 percent “Somewhat likely” – said the laptop would have changed their vote, which is, uhhh… Shouldn’t that be somewhere in the neighborhood of 0 percent? What the fuck would have happened? How would the Republican respondents’ votes have changed in the 2020 presidential election? Were they going to vote extra enthusiastically for Trump than just the somewhat enthusiastically they did?

Sure, plenty of Republicans voted for Biden, probably a few million, and we’re sure at least some of them regret it and are looking for an excuse, for which this Twitter bullshit provides a fine enough permission structure. However there’s no fucking chance the sample contained that many Republican Biden voters who would now say they would have voted for Trump instead if they knew the laptop was actually “real” to make up more than half of the total respondents.

So don’t look too closely or think too hard if you want this poll to do its job of working backward from the conclusion it was supposed to reach with its headline screaming “EXCLUSIVE: If only we’d known: three quarters of survey respondents say voters lacked ‘critical’ information about Hunter Biden’s laptop during the 2020 elections, and half would have voted differently.”

Otherwise you might end up questioning why Trump and Stefanik are citing it as “proof” the 2020 election was rigged. And you definitely shouldn’t look at Stefanik’s past statements on why she believed her Orange Allah was cheated out of a second term of his incompetent and malevolent rule.

“Tens of millions of Americans are rightly concerned that the 2020 election featured unprecedented voting irregularities, unconstitutional overreach by unelected state officials and judges ignoring state election laws, and a fundamental lack of ballot integrity and security. To the tens of thousands of constituents and patriots across the country who have reached out to me in the past few weeks – please know that I hear you. The most precious foundation and covenant of our Republic is the right to vote, and consequently, the faith in the sanctity of our nation’s free and fair elections,” Stefanik wrote in a statement on January 4th, 2021, two days before she objected to certifying the election.

Twitter and Facebook are engaging in illegal election interference.

They are censoring, suppressing, and taking down factual front page content from one of the most widely read newspapers in the US.
The most read newspaper in #NY21.

— Elise Stefanik (@EliseStefanik) October 14, 2020

There’s no mention of Hunter Biden’s laptop or Twitter in there. And it’s not like she didn’t have any polling to cite at that time either, as just five weeks earlier some shitty right wing “media watchdog” called “Newsbusters” had conducted a survey allegedly finding that 17 percent of Biden voters in the six swing states would have voted for Trump if they’d known more about Hunter’s laptop and the similarly fake Tara Reade sexual assault allegations (which probably says more about the MAGA media’s failures than the mainstream media and Big Tech, but let’s avoid what would be a very long tangent here). The outrage over Twitter squashing the laptop story was still very fresh at the time and the best Stefanik had was “unprecedented voting irregularities, unconstitutional overreach by unelected state officials and judges ignoring state election laws, and a fundamental lack of ballot integrity and security,” a rationale maddeningly non-specific by design.

Here she is in May 2021, decrying Democrats for thinking the Bamboo Ballot hunt “audit” by the “CyberNinjas” in Arizona was a bunch of bullshit. Again, no mention of Twitter interfering in the election. It had to be Chinese meddling or some sort of malfeasance by local election officials.

The next year Stefanik spoke to a New York Times reporter and refused to acknowledge Biden was the legitimate President. “Joe Biden is in the White House right now – the American people understand that – but they do have questions. In my district, I still get questions about it. I think there are constitutional questions on the unconstitutional overreach of unelected individuals in states like Pennsylvania.” Once again, nothing about Twitter or Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Months later Stefanik was on a virtual town hall with constituents, one of who asked about Dinesh D’Souza’s “2000 Mules,” which presented a very specific (and complete bullshit) theory about how the 2020 election was stolen. Stefanik just gave a boilerplate “We need to pass legislation to strengthen our elections” answer but didn’t get into it about the shitty D’Souza movie and its lame theory based on fucking cell phone GPS data – or anything about Twitter or Hunter’s laptop.

Our House Republican Majority WILL get to the bottom of the FBI’s troubling relationship with Twitter.

Accountability is coming.https://t.co/kKiWXwF7h2

— Elise Stefanik (@EliseStefanik) December 19, 2022

And now, after the “Twitter Files” circlejerk it’s Hunter’s laptop that stole the election.

From a million miles away it’s obvious that Stefanik doesn’t actually believe any of this shit, it’s all just performative outrage to play to the MAGA base who would be calling her a hideous shrill pig if she were a Democrat talking about abortion rights or climate change. She’s no Mike Lindell, Kraken, Mike Flynn, Lin Wood, Doug Mastriano, Scott Perry – those fuckers are true believers.

Stefanik is simply a cynical nihilist bereft of principle and for whom the end justifies almost any means. But in not being more deluded she loses the plot. Sure, it’s not like for your average MAGA troll that believing Twitter’s incompetent “interference” was mutually exclusive with believing that some dogshit country like Venezuela was able to build an AI supercomputer that used Italian satellites to hack into Dominion tabulators and whatever the fuck the story was. They were just separate prongs on the Satanic Deep State pitchfork aimed at the “Real America.”

To be fair if you voted for Hillary in 2016 you wouldn’t say that Trump successfully burying the Stormy Daniels story is mutually exclusive with the Comey letter about the goddamned emails investigation in what tipped that election to the fat orange fuck. They can both be true – as it was true that Russian trolls spewed a shit ton of propaganda on American social media that year.

But the way Stefanik just flips a switch here – from that “moderate” position “that the 2020 election featured unconstitutional overreach by unelected state officials and judges ignoring state election laws. In Pennsylvania, the State Supreme Court and Secretary of State unilaterally and unconstitutionally rewrote election law eliminating signature matching requirements” and blah blah blah like she did on January 6th, 2021 (after the Capitol riot) to now saying Twitter and the FBI unilaterally rigged the election, based on one shitty poll – is impressive.

Set aside how Stefanik is a Republican politician and a particularly cynical and malevolent one at that, how all 2020 election deniers are full of shit whether they know it or not (she knows it), how we should’ve already expected this because of course this is how it would fucking go after the “Twitter Files” wank session “exposed” the “collusion.” Stefanik wasn’t alone saying this kind of shit this week. Plenty of Republicans in Congress were spinning the same yarn. Trump changes the reason for why he was cheated out of the win depending on the day of the week.

It always still ends with the election getting stolen from him, no matter what evil Soros plot happened beforehand. But if Republicans were collectively smarter they wouldn’t let themselves get distracted by the latest shiny objects and self-generated outrage. You could say “2000 Mules” was smart in the sense that at least it had a point – drive political opposition to ballot drop boxes and thus make it harder for Dems to win elections. If there’s a similar policy goal that can be found in spewing bullshit at Twitter execs in a hearing – we’d love to see how that story ends.