Scott Rhee's Reviews > The Steal: The Attempt to Overturn the 2020 Election and the People Who Stopped It

A blunderbuss is a gun with a short, flared muzzle. A predecessor of the modern shotgun, the blunderbuss was known to be only effective at short range, causing lots of damage. At long range, the gun was worthless, firing buck-shot in a wide area that ultimately did little damage.

In business and politics, the Blunderbuss Strategy is often used to get people enraged about an issue by throwing out a lot of information, misinformation, and outright lies that sound pretty believable. It's only after stepping back, looking at the whole picture, and fact-checking that the argument falls apart. The intent, however, is not to reveal the truth of the argument but to sow confusion and enmity, thus throwing off the effectiveness of the other side of the argument.

In Mark Bowden/Matthew Teague's 2022 book "The Steal: The Attempt to Overturn the 2020 Election and the People Who Stopped It", journalists Bowden/Teague dissect the attempts by trump and his followers to convince Americans that the election was stolen by a nation-wide conspiracy of Democrats, election officials, the media, and Joe Biden.

Trump's calculated campaign to create a sense of disenfranchisement and hostility toward the electoral process among his supporters was a Blunderbuss strategy, according to Bowden/Teague, employing false theories of "back-room" ballots, thousands of corrupt election workers, and millions of vote fraudsters. Republican legal "experts" like Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell purposefully lied about Dominion voting machines and innocent election workers like Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Shaye Moss, committing illegal ballot stuffing, all without any evidence whatsoever.

But the Blunderbuss Strategy doesn't need evidence to work. You just need to sound like you have evidence, and you need to be extremely loud about it.

The sad thing about Bowden/Teague's book is that---despite all the facts and evidence that the authors uncovered that proved trump to be corrupt, cruel, unconstitutional, and a danger to democracy---half of the country still believe that trump deserves to be president.

I guess the Blunderbuss Strategy works.