Anderson Cooper Calls Out GOP’s ‘Self-Licking Ice Cream Cone’ of Election Disinformation and Conspiracies

CNN’s Anderson Cooper called out the Republican Party’s vicious cycle of disinformation about the 2020 election, one that amplifies conspiracy theories pushed by Donald Trump and his legal team only to then cite the MAGA crowd’s blind acceptance of these false claims as justification for discussing them further.

In his opening segment on Wednesday night titled “Self-Licking Ice Cream Cone,” Cooper explored how the Congressional GOP has mostly become willing enablers of Trump’s propaganda campaign to undermine the integrity of an election he lost by seven million votes and 74 electors.

He began by highlighting a disturbing story about a former Houston police captain, who ran an air conditioning repairman off the road and held him at gunpoint because of his delusional belief that the man was carrying 750,000 fraudulent ballots in his work truck. The former policeman, who has now been charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, was working for a private citizen’s group that has bought into the phony election fraud claims by Trump and his surrogates.

“The president was wrong about the ballots, but right on the story being everywhere because repeat after me: He. Was. Spreading. It,” Cooper said. “That what he was doing. So were his enablers and so are enablers and enablers on Capitol Hill. And they were on full display today on Capitol Hill.”

“It’s become, in technical parlance, a self-licking ice cream cone,” Cooper explained. “It’s an old federal government term to describe a self-perpetuating system that exists only to perpetuate itself, which is what the whole election fraud conspiracy theory has become, a toxic and nearly deadly self-licking ice cream cone. Despite a total lack of evidence, a total lack of evidence, the president and his enablers pushing the voter fraud myth, relentlessly, then citing the fact that people are talking about it as justification for pushing it. And so goes around and around until angry mobs filled the streets protest a stolen election that was not stolen.”

Cooper then pointed to the upshot of this circular chain of lies: that a large majority of Republican voters now distrust the outcome of the 2020 election and doubt President-elect Joe Biden’s legitimacy.

The most recent example of this came earlier on Wednesday, Cooper noted, at a contentious Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing that devolved into a chaotic, shouting match between Democratic Ranking Member Sen. Gary Peters (MI) and Republican Chair Ron Johnson (WI), when the former called out the latter for platforming false claims under the fig leaf of “asking questions.”

“And here we are. Again, without any evidence of rabbits,” Cooper pointed out. “Allegations demand evidence and that extraordinary ones demand more. Yet time and again, in court case after court case, it simply has not been there. Ron Johnson can puff up his chest and act tough all he wants, but the evidence isn’t there. No amount of hearings where they’re just airing stuff that does not hold up in court make any sense. Judges have tossed out case after case because of lack of evidence, lack of merit, lack of standing. All the way up to the conservative-dominanted Supreme Court. Attorney General [Bill] Barr has said there was no systematic fraud. Georgia’s top officials, all Republicans have.”

“Millions of Americans have not gotten the message,” Cooper concluded, alluding to Trump as Conspiracist-in-Chief, “because one American, in particular, is feeding them a diet of disinformation and his enablers, like you just saw, are going along for the ride.”

Watch the video above, via CNN.