(Part 1 here.)

Suppose you have a barrel of water, with a dead fish in the water and a bullet hole in the fish. You don’t have the smoking gun, but you know somebody shot that fish. That’s all you need to declare an election illegitimate. You don’t need proof, all you need is doubt. If they didn’t want us to doubt the election, they shouldn’t have conducted it so dubiously, and they should be willing to talk it over now and prove their side of the case. They’re not; they can’t. As the victors, they bear the burden of proof. They have no proof.

That’s all you need, but some people on our side wanted more.

There’s a great book by Stanislaw Lem, called Memoirs Found in a Bathtub. It’s about a guy on a secret mission in The Building, a gigantic underground hive of offices, bureacrats, military men and spies. It starts out kind of light-hearted and satirical; the guy encounters comical bureaucratic resistance, his mission turns out to be so secret that nobody is authorized to brief him on it, so he’ll just have to proceed without orders, etc. But gradually it descends into the profoundest depths of paranoia. Everybody in The Building is an enemy agent, except for the ones who have turned against the enemy, except for the ones who have turned back, etc. Every perception, every thought, is a coded message or a tactic of deception. If you so much as clean your fingernails in The Building, someone is watching you, someone perceives the hidden meaning of it. If the brakes squeal, or the toilet gurgles, it’s trying to tell you something.

And finally the guy realizes his mind has been on rails the whole time. The Building controls everything he sees and feels and thinks, from the robotic fly that lands in his coffee to his attempts to understand the meaning of life. Even knowing that, he can’t get his mind off the rails. He can say, I am a man, but that’s just what The Building wants him to say, expects him to say. Even in asserting his individuality, even in violent resistance, he does the will of The Building. In the end there’s no mission at all, just The Building, consuming agent after agent in exactly the same way.

With that as a preamble, let’s take a little dip in the murky waters of paranoia around the 2020 election.

Lin Wood, who kept a very high media profile and vaunted himself a defender of the right in Georgia, flamed out QAnon style somewhere along the line. Just keep that in mind; we’ll get back to it.

Sidney Powell never disgraced herself the way Wood did, but she made major public claims against Dominion Voting Systems. From memory:

• Dominion voting systems featured a graphical UI that could be used to reassign votes.
• Votes were programmatically flipped from Trump to Biden without need for human action.
• Vote tallies included “fractions” of votes, indicating a vote-weighting algorithm.
• American votes were tallied overseas in Germany or Spain.

Which brings me to Patrick Byrne. At his Deep Capture blog, he wrote a six-part series on how Donald Trump lost the White House. Perhaps the most exciting installation is Part 3.

Byrne is a smart guy, a successful tech entrepreneur, survived three bouts of cancer, rode a bicycle across the continental US more than once. He’s not a trivial fellow and he has no discernible motive to grift. He worked closely with Sidney Powell and Mike Flynn, and he was first-hand witness to some events in the White House. He didn’t prefer Trump as a candidate, but he preferred electoral integrity over beating Trump, which is wise and principled of him. I do recommend the whole series.

Byrne doubled down on every claim Sidney Powell made, and added a couple of his own:

• There was a lot of suspicious internet traffic originating in China, targeting Dominion machines.
• Someone installed a spy transmitter in an internet-controlled thermostat, to remotely control Dominion systems in the room.
• …

Byrne then goes on to speculate that COVID, the Summer of Riots, and the election were all one big psyop, run according to some master plan. Then he presents a stronger form of the same concept, where the psyop was run out of China, and we can look forward to a future where American political and economic life are pretty much under direct Chinese control.

Now, there are some current conspiracies that are trivially easy to debunk. There aren’t any microchips in the vaccine, and 5G radiation won’t make you sick unless you stream a sickening movie or something.

You can’t disprove Patrick Byrne’s wilder assertions and speculations. It really is possible that 2020 was a coordinated psyop; it’s possible China was behind it; it’s possible that China has clandestine control, or at least undue influence, in the US government and on Wall Street.

It doesn’t matter, because you can’t prove these things. The basic arguments to challenge the 2020 election process and result are simple arguments based on facts nobody can deny. Throwing in all these wild allegations, abstruse technical details, and shadowy conspiracy theories dilutes the argument, makes it incoherent, unconvincing, even boring.

When Lin Wood embraced QAnon, it was a huge embarrassment. This guy was leading the charge in Georgia, and suddenly he was revealed as a frothing bug-eyed maniac.

Sidney Powell promised us a Kraken, and failed to deliver so much as a cuttlefish. She is now being sued by Dominion for 1.3 BILLION dollars, and it doesn’t appear her defense is going well. She’ll be represented by…Lin Wood, I guess because Michael Avenatti is under house arrest awaiting sentencing. It all just seems sleazy.

When Sidney Powell first publicly aired the Kraken allegations, several commentators on the right were dismayed that the effort was distracting from more provable lines of inquiry and more applicable principles of law. Angelo Codevilla made the argument forcefully back in November. You don’t need proof of specific crimes, you need probable cause to investigate. Taping up windows at the polling station is probable cause. You don’t need to prove there’s a spy device in the thermostat, and if you can’t prove it, you shouldn’t say it.

Lin Wood and Sidney Powell did tremendous harm to the cause. They helped the opposition conflate legitimate concerns with crackpot gibberish and easily-denied allegations. It doesn’t matter whether that stuff is true; it’s a liability in legal and rhetorical terms and it may have been decisive in losing the election. Wood and Powell massively impaired the credibility of anyone questioning the election result.

Maybe we should pay them back by believing they were working for the other side the whole time.

Which brings us back to Patrick Byrne. It’s not really believable that Byrne is a member of some sinister cabal. His series is definitely worth reading. But Byrne is a bit of a brainiac, a rambling, consilient thinker, and not everyone will have the time to understand him fully. More importantly, I think Byrne led himself astray. He got so hooked on the details and deep patterns that he forgot the fundamentals.

The six-part series is long, and Patrick Byrne has edited it into a single volume you can buy. He touts it as the thing to send to anyone who doubts the election was rigged.

Thumbs down. That book will not convince anyone who is not convinced in advance. I’ve put Patrick Byrne in my blogroll under Cult Leaders and Conspiracy Theories, not because I think he’s a liar or a grifter, but because too many in his audience are likely to take up his more fanciful ideas and run with them. That can only further discredit, by association and conflation, the simple points that need to be made:

FINAL WORD!