When the tin foil isn't just for fashion

Photo by NeferJanah Meistrup

Tin foil hats are the internet shorthand for conspiracy theorists. We all know it and we all love it.

However, what do you do when the conspiracy theorists are right?

It’s happened a few times in the last year and I’ve seen a few people get a good laugh over it. Then again, why wouldn’t folks?

But I don’t think it’s ever happened quite so poetically as it did earlier this week.

From The Blaze:

On October 3, the New York Times' Stuart Thompson criticized so-called "far-right election deniers" for a "conspiracy theory" alleging that Konnech, an election software company based in East Lansing, Michigan, had "secret ties to the Chinese Communist Party and had given the Chinese government backdoor access to personal data about two million poll workers in the United States."

Thompson, a "misinformation and disinformation" reporter, suggested that these claims, which allegedly made the CEO of the company cry, were used to "raise doubts about the integrity of American elections."

The NY Times piece ended in a quote from the company's 51-year-old Chinese-born CEO, Eugene Yu: "They had no interest in the truth. ... The truth is inconvenient."

On October 4, Konnech CEO Eugene Yu was arrested on suspicion of theft of personal identifying information and computer hard drives.

In a statement issued after Yu's arrest, Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón said, "Data breaches are an ongoing threat to our digital way of life. When we entrust a company to hold our confidential data, they must be willing and able to protect our personal identifying information from theft. Otherwise, we are all victims"

According to Gascón's office, while Konnech was required to store sensitive election-related data in the United States and only make it accessible to citizens and permanent residents, the company had stored data on servers in China.

Whoops.

Now, remember that businesses in China are still state-owned. That means the Chinese government is who owned those servers.

Can you really tell me there was no way they could access that data?

Gascón notes that the information in question involved the personal information of poll workers and had nothing to do with the tabulation of votes, but it’s important to remember who has the most influence on our elections.

That’s right, poll workers.

Now, I’m not saying the Chinese government actually accessed or used that data, but they definitely had access to it based on these allegations, and the people the New York Times derided as conspiracy theorists weren’t just shown to be right, they were shown to be right the very. Next. Day.

In the matter of timing, this is right up there with the Times declaring man wouldn’t fly for a billion years right before the Wright Brothers took off a Kittyhawk.

So how did this happen?

Well, let’s understand a couple of things. One, of course, is Stuard Thompson isn’t exactly someone who would be in the loop of a criminal investigation. There’s no way he’d be privy to what was taking place, so he also wouldn’t have access to the evidence Gascón had.

But there’s also the fact that the knee-jerk reaction of the leftist media is to automatically mock anyone who has questions about election integrity. He likely didn’t bother to do any deeper research than to reach out to Yu and get his take on stuff.

That’s because the media has gotten so wrapped up in the narrative that the elections weren’t tampered with that they won’t even entertain the possibility that tampering can take place.

So, he experienced a bit of confirmation bias and ran with it.

Now, he looks absolutely ridiculous because the very thing he decried as laughable on Monday was evidence for an arrest on Tuesday.

Honestly, the timing here is what makes this so funny.

Thompson can’t even really convince me that there’s no evidence available for him to find because the people he’s deriding found it. The evidence shows pretty much what they said it would—namely that China had access to that information.

So far, we haven’t seen if the Chinese government used it or not, but if so, it would hardly be the first time a foreign nation tried to influence Americans to work against their nation’s best interests.

If people will spy against their nation, they’ll work to rig elections.

Again, I don’t know that this happened. I saw some very questionable stuff in 2020 that still hasn’t been explained to my satisfaction and I know election fraud happens in every election cycle, but I don’t know that this particular thing happened.

The fact that it could, though, is ample reason enough to demand greater election integrity.

Unfortunately, you have people at the New York Times like Stuard Thompson who seems uninterested in the matter.

In fact, it makes me wonder if he has any ties to China, but I’m sure it’s fine.

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