Not content with peddling election fraud conspiracy theories stateside, Arizona State Senator Wendy Rogers is now exporting her own brand of Nutella to France, which ended its presidential election on Sunday.
That night, Rogers regurgitated a trope about stolen elections on Twitter. That's not news for the first-term Flagstaff Republican, but this time, she wasn’t talking about Arizona or the United States.
[Even though incumbent Emmanuel] Macron defeated right-wing leader Marine Le Pen to become the first French president in two decades to win a second term [and that] Macron won by a comfortable margin of 17 percentage points, securing 58.5 percent of the national vote, Rogers tweeted this:
“Macron stole the election. Dig deeper our fellow French patriots! You guys know how to party like it is 1776.”
It's easy to laugh off this brand of idiocy. But it's important to realize how those who promote unfounded election fraud conspiracy theories are perniciously anti-democratic. Nothing is more fundamental to democracy than the voters' faith in free and fair elections.
Notice that Rogers make no attempt to prove or other any evidence that the Macron stole the election. She knows her constituency and Trump-supporters elsewhere will swallow her assertions without question. That gullibility leads to authoritarianism. As Voltaire once said, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”