Convinced by Captain K
The Manipulated Election Narrative, As I Now See It
Here I want to restate a crazy theory that I’ve aired now and again. This is that our highly manipulative media environment enjoys some success in suppressing dissent, but at considerable costs that our rulers don’t fully understand. Trump’s success would be inconceivable were it not for the media manipulators…
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The past four years and this new beginning remind me of the words found in Proverbs 28:28 – “When the wicked take charge, people go into hiding. When the wicked meet disaster, the godly flourish.”
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The New York Times instructed me to meet Seth Keshel, the former army intelligence officer who’s been fighting a kind of grassroots pedagogical crusade against bad electoral policy for the better part of a decade-so I did. My conclusion? Once again, we (we, as in the 75% of the country who scoffed at the idea of election interference) have probably been manipulated.
I hate the feeling of being played.
Humans are intensely social animals and so we operate around circumstances of constant status competition and attraction and communication… and deceit. We tend to remember the feeling of being tricked or betrayed, though. A liar is a major liability, in evolutionary terms, and so nature has endowed us with a keen sense of indignation which inflames whenever we’re badly hoodwinked. This is a reliable mechanism. It’s a message from our primordial biology: don’t let it happen again.
In the past five years I’ve experienced a sensation that’s probably familiar to many of my readers: I’ve felt a growing sense that many of the ‘realities’ defined by our legacy media are, in fact, carefully assembled and curated pieces of fiction. There’s a strange grey area here, of course. Most of what the media reports (in terms of factual claims) is probably true… but these facts are collected and arranged (or discarded or suppressed, as the case may be) in such a way as to give a false sense of what’s actually happening. We venture into a narrative-strewn simulacrum of reality when we read the news. The (until recently) dominant falsehoods all trend in a particular direction: they’re all designed to promote progressive policy goals.
The examples are now endless, and fairly uncontroversial, even among independents:
concerned parents being portrayed as ‘anti-LGBTQ+’ because they protested pornographic materials in their kid’s school libraries at school board meetings (isn’t it odd that the materials in question are never displayed? In some cases the images and quotations are literally too explicit for evening television). Climate change.
The crimes of illegal aliens (rapes, murders, sexual abuses of children) being quietly ignored. If white supremacists were committing these crimes do you think the legacy media would be so reticent?
rapes of female inmates by trans-identified male prisoners, who are now housed alongside helpless and neglected women. I’ve personally read of dozens of pregnancies and hundreds of allegations of this kind of event-but never in the mainstream media. That seems curious, considering these are the obvious effects of radical new prison policies. Perhaps these female inmates need more sensitivity training?
These are all pretty clear examples, and they’re all tied to contentious cultural debates. They involve the hallowed victim groups which a large share of which our media is now enamored: queer educators, illegal immigrants, trans convicts. The unwritten stories would be, in many cases, newsworthy and profitable. They remain unwritten for ideological reasons.
Media manipulation is far vaster and more insidious than a simple failure to cover certain sensational progressive-linked crimes, though. The revelations emerging around USAID involve billions of dollars, shoveled to media organizations annually. No one is even bold enough to claim that this secret (and, in many cases, probably illegal) historic slush fund hasn’t affected the valence of our news coverage. The only real question is to what extent.
I have been on a years-long journey into the details of many prominent public policy issues and have come to the frightening realization that the rot is total: for every issue I have dug into (race & police violence, climate change, DEI, homelessness policy) I have found extensive omissions and redirections which amount to lies. The media is lying to you-and they do it using obfuscation and targeted suppression.
Captain K
Earlier this week I drove up to Vero Beach to view a presentation by
. Electoral reform was never one of my cherished issues. It’s fairly dry and data-heavy, for one thing. As a structural issue foundational to our democracy, it could be the most consequential area of political reform of course. But the main reason I didn’t attend to it is because I was fairly convinced by the media’s narrative. I was under the impression that there was a factual consensus on this topic, and that elections were strictly observed, generally fair, and free of (significant) fraud and interference. I’m a political nerd. I spend hours every week reading about policy battles and current events, and I’ve done this for decades. I’m not uninformed. Yet I got played.Before I describe the dynamics of the media’s campaign of targeted muddling, let me examine the media narrative at play here. This is the account which you will read in the New York Times, and the Washington Post, and which you will see on CNN and hear on NPR. Roughly, it is this:
states control elections and so election laws vary by state (so far so good). There is little evidence of widespread electoral fraud (technically true) and every court which reviewed Trump’s claims in 2020 and 2021 basically found them to be meritless. Again: fairly accurate.
Now we get into the artful combination of known and incontrovertible facts with highly suspicious assertions and the packaging of the two kinds of claims together, to form a narrative. Here are the never examined, and crucial, questions: do states pass election laws (knowing that they will be bent or broken) when those laws will be politically advantageous (or even crucial) for their pet political party? Is there ever any investigation of ballot-stuffing or electoral fraud schemes, or could there be? Would a Democratic election official or Secretary of State or Attorney General in a blue state ever launch an investigation to pursue allegations of electoral impropriety which benefitted their party? Would NPR or the New York Times ever pursue these stories? Can we find a pattern in electoral laws / results and start to draw conclusions about the real effects of certain laws? Most urgently, for me: has the media honestly dealt with these questions?
Most of you will already suspect that the answer to the last question is “almost certainly no",” but before I describe the picture drawn by
, I must explain the last part of the media campaign. In order to protect the shaky and questionable (yet never questioned) view of reality which has been crafted by malefactors and by fools, there must be a smokescreen. Magic tricks live and die by distraction. For this kind of trick, an intentionally ridiculous cutout is created-a ridiculous and easily dismissed straw man.Example: for climate policy it is “there is no such thing as man-made climate change.” Almost no one believes this-yet the meme then gets linked to advocates of nuclear power and heterodox climatologists and soil scientists. It’s a campaign to instantly discredit as many sources as possible.
Every person who expresses doubt about the issue in question (or even makes sensible inquiries) is then linked to this absurdity. An easily recognizable and derogatory term is coined to dismiss their questions and their counterfactuals. How many gender clinicians and concerned parents were labelled “transphobic” for questioning the surgical mutilation of 13-year-olds? If the campaign is successful, most people will be deterred from listening to the skeptics or the questioners, or even from listening to people who speak to them. These people are identified as the ‘out-group’ and a ruthless campaign of contempt and guilt by association is strongly implied. “Climate change denier,” “anti-LGBTQIA+,” “Russian stooge,” “election denier”.
An ‘election denier’ is narrowly understood to be a person who denies the validity of the 2020 presidential election results-but not the 2016 (or 2024) election results. Whenever you see this kind of unequal application of standards and heuristics, zoom out: you might be stuck in a media simulation.
That is what seems to have happened here. the media has distracted and disdained people and endeavored to convince the majority from looking into the fundamentals of this issue. That is to be expected: elections are key to their political vision, and their partisan survival.
Here is the picture that
described for me, in its broad strokes. The presentation was less than an hour and was given to a general audience and so it was basic and accessible rather than technical and inquisitive rather than declarative. He mostly avoided specific claims about the 2020 (or other) elections and identified some very interesting trends, and policy effects, and queries. Please keep in mind: I’ve spent probably > 10,000 hours reading about politics/current events and a lot of this was news to me. If I lived in a country with a healthy and functional media apparatus that would surely not be the case, but fortunately I’m an American and therefore free to travel and see for myself.The Presentation
(Naturally I encourage you to subscribe to ’s Substack, where you can find a much clearer and more extensive treatment of these things, as well as state-by-state electoral breakdowns and regular updates on electoral policy reform.)
Tracking the registration by party (in the states which register voters by party-I believe 48/50 states do this) is an excellent proxy to forecast and check electoral results.
Voter registration is a huge issue. Automatic voter registration laws allow activists to easily generate ‘extra’ ballots (ballots not cast by an actual voter, but which still correspond to names on the state rolls). This is called ‘ballot harvesting'‘, and it is probably the most extensive and potent form of electoral fraud in our system.
States all have laws against ballot harvesting but blue states often have no penalties for the crime… and that’s academic anyway because they never investigate the matter or arrest anyone. Is it possible that thousands of activists (or wage workers) might knowingly perpetrate mass ballot fraud, secure in the knowledge that there’s no chance of criminal penalty? I’ll put it like this: if one was able to walk into a store and grab anything and walk out, without paying, do you think that kind of behavior might occur? If you doubt it, just visit San Francisco. Incentives matter, and the fact that the possibility of Democrat electoral fraud seems to be studiously ignored is a major red flag.
Mail-in votes create a similar opportunity as automatic registration: the ability to use/generate many extra names on the voting roll easily.
It’s interesting: this issue hasn’t broken open in the same way that the risks/benefits of gender modification surgeries for minors has (as far as I can tell)… but the fact that Joe Biden won ~4 million more votes in 2020 than Trump did in 2024 (when the 2024 population was larger and seemed much more motivated) doesn’t pass the smell test. Everyone I’ve spoken to is highly suspicious, if not convinced.
The issues with same day voter registrations and the possibility of illegal immigrants casting ballots are another matter which the media tries to portray is simply too absurd to be countenanced. Why would a state government ever allow such a thing? Perhaps because it could yield an electoral advantage of millions? Are we really supposed to believe that a political party wouldn’t encourage illegal ballots to be cast (despite it possibly winning them the election) out of principle? Scruple?
Lastly, the issue of prolonged counting is curiously unexamined within the legacy media. The idea that Arizona or California requires weeks to count their ballots when Florida is able to do it in hours simply doesn’t track.
didn’t go into detail about how this might affect electoral outcomes, but I imagine that he has some hypotheses. The media and certain state governments probably want us to simply trust that they’re organized (obviously untrue) and rigorously fair, absent any oversight or inquiry. Do you?
I’m not an electoral expert. In all honesty the issue still doesn’t arouse my passion like many others, but I recognize how crucial it is to the future of our republic. I’m not saying anything definite about the 2020 election, and neither was
. Instead, he identified some very compelling statistical trends and correlations. The states which allow automatic voter registration and extensive mail-in ballots have their own distinct trends. The states that have political cultures which make investigation and prosecution of criminal electoral manipulation extremely unlikely tend to perform much differently than those that don’t, even controlling for their political compositions. has a 4-tier scheme of state ‘election concern’, based almost solely upon the state’s laws and policies.
4-tiers of state election concern
The operative parts of the tables below are the columns on the left (the states and their ‘concern’ level) and the columns on the right (the winning candidate). Obviously every election is different and there are a million variables at play but when you begin to look into the results alongside the registration data and you break the numbers down by county, and include historical election results, you see a very clear and persistent pattern: the states with strict elections laws tend to perform much better (and the states with lax elections laws much worse), even accounting for their political registration data. Is this fraud? I know that it’s incriminating enough that the half-dozen major media companies (just the ones I know of!) which have written about and interviewed
have completely suppressed and misrepresented his real concerns, and his data. What do you think?
The trend above is fairly stark. Is it simply that blue states tend to have looser voting laws? The granular data indicates that this isn’t the case.
Final Thoughts
I don’t know if voter fraud tipped the balance of the 2020 election. I have gone from thinking ‘it most probably did not’ to ‘I think it probably did tip the balance.’ I’m less concerned with what is now history, though, and far more worried about the present, and the future. Election laws are probably the most fundamental structural aspects of our democracy because they allow our system to be democratic. Fair elections go beyond utilitarian benefit and veer into the territory of a collective spiritual right under our Constitution.
The way that the media deflected the questions about this issue, focusing on specific allegations of specific voting fraud and suppressing any interrogation of the larger system, is-as I already wrote-probably familiar to you by now. How convenient it must have been to report on ‘conspiracy theories’ about hacked voting machines and Venezuela and Rudy Guliani, and evidentiary rulings in federal courts, while strenuously refusing to platform the men who were trying to bring attention to the larger shape of the system and its flaws. This obfuscation campaign was artfully done, I must say. Propagandists of the future should take note.
As for myself, I’m happy that I dove a little deeper into this issue. I never scoff at or mock people who disagree with me, because I deeply disagree with earlier iterations of myself. If you’re not changing your mind, then you’re probably either disengaged or you’re ideologically captured, and we already have far too many people in the latter category in this country. I don’t even begrudge the politicians or the activists working this issue. They might be criminals but if you don’t recognize that both political parties will happily commit crimes with impunity when it will benefit them politically then you must be new here.
The only people towards whom I harbor ill will are the journalists. By using their institutional trust and their platforms to blur and conceal, rather than to (honestly) explain and report, they have profoundly betrayed their social function and their integrity. It’s rather sad to live in a democracy with a broken legacy media. Fortunately, we are a dynamic and curious enough people that alternatives are quickly springing up.
Facts come and go, and beliefs change with circumstance, but strong feelings are memorable. People tend to remember the feeling of being tricked. I will never trust any of the media companies which were preeminent a decade ago, for anything. To me they’re useful only as sample sources, to be cut up and reassembled into mocking or humorous YouTube compilations, or diss tracks. I know there are millions of my fellow citizens who feel the same. I hate the feeling of being played.
It's coming at it kinda sideways, but here's the approach I found most useful in getting skeptics to at least consider the issue a little more openly:
I am an analyst by profession. One of the first things I look at regarding any claims of a specific event happening is the baseline probability of such an event happening that way.
For example, Credit Karma did a study in 2018 on tax evasion and, of about 2,000 respondents to their survey, about 6% openly admitted to cheating on their taxes. Now, cheating on taxes is a socially undesirable behavior, and social desirability bias tends to distort results on self-response questions like this (some people whose true answer would be socially undesirable will lie about it, even to anonymous surveys), so the actual percentage of tax cheats is almost certainly higher than 6%. Given those facts, what percentage of people would YOU estimate cheat on their taxes? The usual response is around 10%+. For sake of making a minimal estimate, I'll just assume at least an extra 1%, for an adjusted baseline of 7%.
So, we've agreed that, of the population, at least 6%+ cheat on their taxes. Now, different states have different tax laws, so would you expect that rate to be the same across every State? Of course not, IRS estimates show tax fraud much more prevalent in places like California than in places like the Midwest.
Lastly, let's consider the political aspect. The American Economic Association did a study of tax evasion patterns and found that the percentages shifted by 2-4% depending on whether the taxpayer was politically aligned with the current administration (essentially, more people would underreport their income to pay lower taxes when they didn't want those taxes supporting government policies with which they disagreed politically). When a Republican is in office, Democrats are more likely to cheat on their taxes (and vice versa).
Therefore, when a Republican is in office, tax fraud rates in heavily Democrat areas are likely to be at least around 10%+ (adjusted baseline 7% + 2-4% partisan misalignment shift) plus adjusted for State rates (and vice versa for heavily Republican areas when a Democrat is in office). Believe it or not, that's actually a very low estimate in comparison to most foreign countries. Americans are relatively very good about paying our taxes honestly.
Still, tax fraud IS a crime and in many cases the savings from tax fraud are comparatively small. OTOH, tax audits are also relatively infrequent and the penalties even if caught often aren't severe.
Now, what's another crime with very similar characteristics to tax fraud? A crime rarely investigated, even more rarely prosecuted, with relatively minor penalties if convicted, that people might be willing to engage in even for comparatively small benefits? What's another type of fraud that requires nothing more than some creative papershuffling or lying on government forms? What's another type of fraud that might also be particularly appealing to people politically misaligned with the current administration? Vote fraud.
Let me put it this way: we've already agreed that, under a Republican administration, around 10% of Democrats will commit tax fraud (and around 4% of Republicans)... and voter fraud is similar to tax fraud... So, consider for a moment what it would mean if vote fraud is committed at similar rates to tax fraud... That suggests that the party out of power in each election is likely to commit vote fraud at about 6% higher a rate than the party in power. In the 2020 election that margin would be enough to flip 7 States from Biden to Trump. Even a mere 2% fraud rate favoring Democrats would change results for the 4 closest States.
So yes, just by looking at the closest parallel crime for which we have better data, it's plausible to argue that vote fraud likely occurs in American elections at a rate that would be sufficient to change the outcome of particularly close races (and that there were enough sufficiently close State races in the election in question, 2020, that even the most minimal estimated rate of fraud could have altered the outcome for the President and possibly Congress as well).
Is that 'proof'? Of course not, but it certainly seems to me to be a reasonable suspicion and legal predicate for opening investigations into close races within the margin where fraud could be reasonably expected to alter outcomes.
One correction to your very interesting article. It is not fairly true that Trump’s challenges (the vast majority of which were not brought by Trump) to the 2020 election were found by the court’s to be lacking in merit. Almost all were dismissed on procedural grounds - lack of standing, timeliness, etc. The cases decided on the merits included favorable rulings such as certain state officials illegally changing voting standards