Mea Culpa: The Election Plot That Wasn't

In the spirit of the Pro Truth Pledge, I want to correct something I shared without comment earlier on social media.

I introduced a video from The Jimmy Dore Show with the words, “TIME Magazine exposes a plot to control the 2020 election,” which was a slightly abbreviated version of the title Jimmy Dore gave it. In it he talked about an article describing how an alliance of various individuals and organizations had collaborated behind the scenes to combat misinformation about the election over the months leading up to it, in particular baseless claims about election fraud, in order to head off the possibility of violence and chaos on or after Election Day.

This alliance included tech industry giants like Facebook as well as political activists. Most of the emphasis in the article was on liberal groups like the Leadership Conference for Civil and Human Rights, but it mentioned that Republicans, including strong supporters of Donald Trump, were also involved. So were the AFL-CIO and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

But not all of those details were mentioned by Jimmy in the video. He only showed a few highlighted passages from the article, and made no mention of the involvement of Trump supporters, nor the fact that the focus of the effort was specifically on combatting misinformation about vote fraud so as to prevent civil unrest. The effect was to create the impression that this was a plot to bring down Trump, as confirmed by many of the comments by Trump supporters under the video on its YouTube page, who saw this as confirming what they’d already believed.

Now, I’m inclined to give Jimmy the benefit of a doubt here. It’s quite possible that he didn’t actually read the article himself, and was simply passing on what someone else had shared with him, trusting that they were representing the contents of the article accurately. Unfortunately I likewise trusted his representation, and thereby unwittingly participated in the spread of misinformation. I apologize for having done so, and I’ll share this on the same platforms where I previously shared the video.

This experience is a reminder of the necessity of verifying any information that may serve a political agenda before passing it on, even when it comes from those I don’t expect to be intentionally dishonest.