Historian and political scientist Allan Lichtman is blaming disinformation and billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk for his incorrect prediction that Vice President Harris would win the presidency.
“Number one, disinformation. We’ve always had disinformation, but disinformation has exploded to an unprecedented degree. You talked about a grievance election, but a lot of that grievance was driven by disinformation,” Lichtman said during an appearance on Chris Cuomo’s NewsNation show.
Lichtman pointed to conservative media platforms and Musk, who poured millions into President-elect Trump’s campaign and has become one of his loudest media cheerleaders, as a factor in his inaccurate prediction.
Musk had helped fuel the spread of false or misleading information online about issues like immigration, hurricane relief and the war in Ukraine, Lichtman said, effectively “putting his thumb on the scales.”
“And you know, as scholars have shown, once you dissolve truth, democracy dissolves along with it, the way authoritarian takes hold, and it’s taking hold all over the world, not just here, is not through force, but through the manipulation of information, as George Orwell warned in 1984 you know, in that dictatorship, war is peace, famine is plenty,” Lichtman said.
Lichtman had correctly predicted nearly every presidential race since 1984 using a formula of 13 true-or-false questions, and this year predicted Harris would win, saying only a major event overseas could still flip the race Trump’s favor.
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