Historian Allan Lichtman remarked on NewsNation that his forecast of Vice President Harris securing the presidency was wrong, attributing this to the spread of disinformation by conservative media and the impact of Elon Musk.
He highlighted the unprecedented level of disinformation, particularly from Fox News and Musk’s platform X (formerly Twitter), which has reached billions of views.
Lichtman emphasized that the erosion of truth threatens democracy, echoing George Orwell’s warnings about authoritarianism’s rise through information manipulation.
Lichtman said, “As I said, things could go wrong. There could be unprecedented events that change the pattern of 160 years of history. That’s what happened here.”
He continued, “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. It starts with Fox News and conservative media. Conservative podcasters with tens of millions of views. But we’ve seen something brand new this time—the $300 billionaire, Elon Musk, putting his thumb on the scales through his control of X, formerly Twitter. It has been reported that his misinformation has had billions, literally billions of views.”
Lichtman added, “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.”
