Here's what connects Covid denial and election denial

"Oh, it's CNN, FAKE NEWS!"

There are two core strains of denialism apparent in mainstream America today: that the election was a fraud and that Covid doesn't exist.

We've all heard how misinformation spreads like a virus. But we've watched it in real time over the past months.

What ties these lies together:

1-President Donald Trump won't admit defeat in the election or missteps on Covid, creating a bedrock of inaccuracy
2-The democratization of information on the internet enables everyone to publish their thoughts, even if they're totally made up
3-As the country gets more tribal in its politics, people find satisfaction in blaming villains, regardless of facts.

Either Trump is spinning an alternate reality for followers who agree with him or he is just channeling and amplifying what he hears from them. Regardless, in his four years in office, he has totally normalized bad information.

If it weren't the election or Covid, it would be something else. Climate change, the Russia investigation, his own impeachment, the election he won four years ago, President Barack Obama's birth certificate -- Trump's said so many things are hoaxes or fakes that he may personally not know what is real and what is imagined anymore.

And for each of these things, there are enablers online and in conservative media who fuel the theories. It takes creativity and commitment to see election fraud where there is none and tyranny in public health.

Conspiracy theory coming

Certainly the news Wednesday that President-elect Joe Biden's son Hunter is under investigation by US attorneys in Delaware over his business dealings with Chinese nationals will fuel renewed efforts to smear the President-elect through his son. Misinformation needs a kernel of truth to flourish. Here's what we actually know about the investigation into Hunter Biden.

On Covid, CNN has interviewed nurses who talk about people dying from the coronavirus who still deny it's a threat. Dr. Anthony Fauci complained Tuesday about trying to reach people in communities where hospitals are nearly overrun, but denialists stubbornly reject masks and social distancing.

Just wait until the nation's public health officials are trying to convince people to get a shot in the arm. Vaccines are already a hotbed of denialism.
On the election, Tuesday felt final. The Supreme Court, which is controlled by conservatives, shut the door on Trump's election fraud fantasy and his efforts to get state legislators to bypass the voters have so far failed.

"The fact that the justices issued a one-sentence order with no separate opinions is a powerful sign that the court intends to stay out of election-related disputes, and that it's going to leave things to the electoral process going forward," CNN legal analyst Steve Vladeck said after the ruling.

On Wednesday, West Virginia certified its election results, meaning all 50 states have approved their results and Trump's electoral loss is (still) assured.

But Trump and his followers have already moved to their next Hail Mary. This one, a lawsuit brought by the Texas attorney general, is even more far-fetched than Trump's attempts to get state legislators to overthrow voters.

The idea is that pandemic-related changes to election procedures in swing states violated the Constitution. The most obvious problem with the suit is that nearly every state -- including Texas -- changed procedures.

The Texas lawsuit is concerned only with the ones in key states where Biden won, which has been described as hypocrisy, but that seems like not strong enough a word here.

The attorney general in Texas is a man named Ken Paxton, who has been under indictment on securities fraud charges for years and has been accused by former aides of bribery. It's notable that not all Republicans in the state are backing the suit.

But it's also notable that Trump allies on Capitol Hill are trying to make support of it into kind of a litmus test.

If the Supreme Court's Pennsylvania ruling is any indication, this Texas suit is just the latest in a series of increasingly desperate last gasps as Trump hops from one dead-end lawsuit to the next.

But the Texas suit is also an indication that Trump and his allies are all-in on denying Biden's victory until the bitter end.

Wow! Just WOW!

They're so out of control - They're desperate!

They'll never get over the Phenomenon that is Trump!

That Trump won in 2016, that all their four years of Deceit and Lies couldn't get rid of him, and that he was so loved by a majority of Americans that he won the 2020 Election in a Landslide! That they had to resort to massive, sloppy Voter Fraud scrambling their asses off on Election Night and that Everyone Knows that The Libs Stole the Election!