Speaking to the House Jan. 6 committee on Sept. 29, Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, stood by her contention that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. Thomas and others who doubt the legitimacy of the election results have been convinced to believe the "Big Lie," which refers to an incomprehensible distortion or misrepresentation of the truth as a form of propaganda. The most famous example is the Nazis' big lie about the Jews after World War I, which served to justify the Holocaust for sympathizers. Germany's Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels explained, "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it."
U.S. news media have consistently made analogies to this historical strategy with former President Donald Trump's efforts to spread doubt about the legitimacy of the 2020 election in hopes of overturning its results. They contend that this threatens the viability of American democracy. It does at some level, but to focus on Trump is to miss the forest for the trees. An even greater threat to democracy has long been hyper-partisanship — when people choose party loyalty and wishful thinking over empirical data and election results. Cognitive biases, like confirmation bias, play a huge role in supporting such a fallacious thought process to detrimental ends. As we pointed out in our book "United States of Distraction," Trump is a symptom of this much larger problem.
