Opinion: Unhinged liberals are trying to scare people with post office conspiracy theory
[[text stolen from courier-journal dot com]]
There are two ways to win an election — thrill voters by nominating someone exciting and lovable, or, in case you nominate someone who sucks, scare the bejesus out of people so they vote for your guy anyway.
The Democrats have settled on the latter for 2020. Yes, Joe Biden is presently winning the presidential race against President Donald Trump (although CNN’s Sunday night poll had it effectively tied), but most reputable polling indicates little enthusiasm for the former vice president, and Democrats know it.
Therefore, worried about maintaining a shaky lead, Democrats and their conspiracy theory-crazed followers (led by High Conspiracy Priestess Nancy Pelosi) have plunged headlong into a plan to scare people to death in the hopes they will overlook how aggressively mediocre Biden is.
The latest conspiracy theory (following the ones about Russia, Ukraine, and that the Trump tax cuts would cause “Armageddon” and mass death) is that Trump is sabotaging the post office with a Republican donor who apparently has the power to single-handedly stop all Democratic ballots and Social Security checks.
The conspiracy theory went full mainstream Sunday night when House Speaker Pelosi called her chamber back into session to deal with the “crisis.” Immediately, every Democrat and those most severely afflicted with Trump Derangement Syndrome joined in her hoax.
Even former basketball player/turned iPhone thief/turned misinformation purveyor Rex Chapman tweeted a picture of some locked mailboxes in Burbank, California.
“In your entire life have you ever seen a LOCKED mailbox at the USPS? Now you have. A disgrace and immediate threat to American democracy. Shame on them. Shame on the GOP. Where are you [Mitch McConnell]?” Chapman alarmingly tweeted, garnering tens of thousands of retweets and likes.
Rex’s brick was immediately disproven by a reporter named Chuck Ross, who used a highly sophisticated research tool called Google to find a 2016 article explaining why the boxes are locked:
“Turns out that fishing, or stealing mail, has become so common that postal officials have been retrofitting boxes around the San Fernando Valley and other areas to make them more tamper proof, said Richard J. Maher, spokesman for Post Office operations in Los Angeles and Orange counties.”
Set aside for a moment that Chapman is spreading a baseless conspiracy that would make even the most committed Russian operative blush. Does he think that California is a swing state? Or that a Senator from Kentucky controls the mailboxes in Burbank? Or that people can’t mail a ballot from their house?
You may want to get your political news somewhere other than Rex’s twitter feed. But the former Kentucky Wildcat is hardly the only unhinged liberal going on about the post office.
Pelosi herself, in her weekend letter, announced the U.S. House had to convene to, among other things, make sure people can still get their Social Security checks.
Wait… what?
Back to Google, where we find out that President Barack Obama stopped sending Social Security checks in 2010, moving virtually every recipient to direct deposit. We also find that, in 2016, the U.S. Postal Service removed some 12,000 mailboxes during Obama’s second term, another tenet of the “Trump is sabotaging the post office to steal the election” conspiracy theory.
Google also tells you that in 2012, Obama tried to cancel Saturday delivery of the mail, a significant attack on mail access for rural voters (who really disliked Obama, by the way). But no conspiracy theory or national uproar emerged over Obama’s postal moves.
Why? Because it wasn’t a conspiracy! And neither is today’s postal dust-up. Republicans and Democrats have a major policy disagreement over the post office, which boils down to this: Liberals want to give it a bailout, and conservatives want to reform it.
That’s it. That’s all this is about, but Democrats are purposely conflating these issues with disagreements over mail-in voting to scare the bejesus out of people, especially older voters. The post office has plenty of money and capacity to operate the 2020 election, no matter what the Democrats say, and Trump himself has blessed a coronavirus relief bill that would send billions in additional funding to the Postal Service.
While Democrats and the media howl about Republicans embracing conspiracy theorists and misinformation, Pelosi, Chapman and countless others are spreading flat-out lies to freak people out. It is wrong, and voters will hopefully see through it come November no matter which method they choose to cast their ballot.
