How powerful Tories pushed the ‘big lie’ that the 2020 election was fraudulent

Doug Bock Clark, ProPublica:

Thus, the big lie did not appear out of thin air.

There had to be people who dreamed up these ideas, dreamed up the ideas that they would put out to Republican legislatures, to the conservative public itself, and to the White House. And what we found in our reporting was that there was a small group of people very committed to finding what they called evidence of the big lie.

But, during our reporting, we found that in fact they tended to be warned and told that this evidence was not valid, that it was not good, and yet they continued anyway to promote this kind of thing.

And it had a huge impact. Polls show that more than two-thirds of people – two-thirds of Republicans believe the big lie. And more, millions of them believe that ideas like these have been hacked by foreign governments.