dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

The 2020 election and groyper osmosis

Joseph Simonson 17 hrs ago

The 2020 election and groyper osmosis

In the polite corners of Washington, D.C. conservatism, speaking of a stolen election is akin to expressing anti-Semitism or admitting to voting for former President Barack Obama in 2012. Those who insist that there was a conspiracy to rob President Trump of his reelection must be cynical grifters, dupes who’ve fallen under the spell of alternative media outlets such as Newsmax, or else outright insane.

The conventional wisdom leading up to the election was that Trump was doomed. I believed it. By early 2018, I was placing bets with friends that Trump would not win a second term. As Election Day drew closer, I'd casually check the menu at Morton’s, daydreaming about the extravagant steak dinner a friend was going to buy me after Trump’s defeat.

The week before Election Day, I made a point to ignore any and all polling, figuring the results were essentially predetermined. I had spent nearly two years following this election, and I had resigned myself to the belief that people were simply exhausted by Trump. I thought Joe Biden was inoffensive enough to make even conservative-leaning voters comfortable.

But scrolling through my Twitter feed in the days leading up to the election, I couldn’t help but feel my confidence shaking. I was suffering from what I call “groyper osmosis.” The “groypers” make up an influential segment of the online far-right, named after the green frog (a fatter cousin of Pepe) that some sport as their avatar on social media. The anonymous groypers in my feed were convinced that Trump would win, and they seemed to have data to prove it. Obscure polling firms started popping out of nowhere, showing a neck-and-neck race or Trump gaining on Biden in states such as California. I tried to ignore the groypers, but it was impossible. Their posts entered my brain as if by osmosis.

Turnout models, developed by anonymous groyper-adjacent statisticians and data scientists, showed a path for the president's reelection. No, they didn't have the credentials of Nate Silver, but what makes FiveThirtyEight credible to begin with? I’m a journalist, but I can't think of any topic on which I trust the judgment of the vast majority of other journalists. Why would I trust their predictions about who was going to win the race?

The media were wrong in 2016, after all: wrong about the Republican primary, the Democratic primary, voters’ tolerance for Trump’s flaws, Hillary Clinton’s glaring unlikability. They were wrong about Russian collusion and wrong that the economy would tank, and the United States’s alliances would end, on Day One of Trump’s presidency. Their wrongness persisted after the election. They got wronger and wronger.

The groypers’ pitch to conservatives is essentially this: Why would you believe institutions that hate you, hate what you stand for, hate Trump, and hate this country? A search for "whiteness" on the New York Times's website returns over 630,000 results. Do you think a single person who wrote any of those articles wants your side to succeed? Is it out of the realm of possibility that their polls are wrong, maybe even deliberately wrong? One groyper election forecaster pointed out that Google searches for Trump jack-o'-lantern stencils surged in the last two weeks of October, while searches for Biden-related Halloween decorations remained flat. Was that metric really less reliable than the opaque model the Economist used to predict a Biden landslide?

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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/the-2020-election-and-groyper-osmosis/ar-BB1bPTNO?ocid=msedgdhp

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Remember, too, how public health experts told us not to worry about COVID-19 or wear masks at the beginning of the pandemic. But a good friend of mine bought a stockpile of N95s in January on the advice of an anonymous groyper. And now that we have a better understanding of the virus, we're all supposed to ignore how our expert class is saying that the best way to fight it is through policies, such as racial justice initiatives, that mirror what Democrats already wanted.

As it turned out, the polls were wrong. That much was obvious by 8 p.m. on Election Day, when Trump was dominating in southern Florida and on track to win the state by a larger margin than he did in 2016. Live betting markets saw a massive cash infusion into calls for the president, and the Chinese yuan began to crater. Everything appeared to be falling into place for the groypers. They were set to enjoy another massive vindication, while the media would once again be discredited.

A few hours later, the groypers’ world began to crumble. Fox News called Arizona for Biden, ballots stopped being counted in Georgia, and Biden’s black voter turnout in Milwaukee looked set to best Obama's.

The groypers stuck by their predictions. They said there was no way for Biden to overcome Trump’s lead in Pennsylvania or Michigan and that Fox had called Arizona too early in order to discourage Trump voters still waiting in line to vote.

But Biden kept finding ballots. Now, the groypers turned conspiratorial. They — the powers that be — really were trying to steal this thing, just like they let cities burn this summer and suppressed critical news stories about Biden in the days leading up to the election. The groypers began conjuring elaborate stories about Dominion, the Canadian voting machine and software company many swing states contracted with for the election, that at first glance seemed ludicrous. But, the groypers asked, would you really put it past them? After all, Minneapolis’s mayor must have read George Floyd’s toxicology report before instructing the police not to protect small businesses. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said herself that she deliberately sabotaged stimulus negotiations right before Election Day. And the intelligence community has waged war on Trump virtually since he announced his candidacy.

There's some cynicism here from the groypers. Many have concluded that the Left has succeeded in creating fact-free narratives that advance its policy goals, and they have decided it is time for the Right to do the same. They don’t argue that widespread voter fraud definitely happened. Instead they ask: Is the idea that left-wing activists enabled voter fraud any crazier than the anti-white pseudoscience preached by academics on hundreds of college campuses? If white men are constantly conspiring to oppress the rest of the world, why can't the Left rig an election?

Before I worked at the Washington Examiner, if my savings account drifted into four figures, I simply congratulated myself for my conservative spending habits. But more recently, I’ve been moving my funds into a Robinhood account. I’ve always considered myself a dilettante when it comes to the stock market. I know enough to keep up at cocktail parties, but I’ve always felt intimidated when deciding what to buy on a trading platform.

I generally think that mainstream business publications, such as Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, and the Financial Times, provide sound investment advice. It’s usually unadventurous, with an eye toward S&P trackers and various exchange-traded funds. But I could never kick the lingering feeling that if these financial journalists really knew so much about the stock market, they’d be rich.

To diversify my information portfolio, I decided to take a look at what the finance equivalent of groypers — anonymous day traders on Reddit and posters in various chatrooms and Japanese imageboard forums — were saying. I concluded that I’d set aside around a quarter of my savings to doing whatever they recommended. Sometimes, it was hard to figure out what they were recommending, since it was sprinkled in among conspiracy theories about Israel or jokes about people who gambled away their student loans on Palantir call options. But since I made that decision, my portfolio is up 30%. Maybe the groypers do know something after all.

Joseph Simonson is a Washington Examiner political reporter.

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Original Author: Joseph Simonson

Original Location: The 2020 election and groyper osmosis