Box 4: Hudson’s Version of “The Big Lie”

In national politics, the “Big Lie” refers to a familiar pattern: claim an election was tainted, insist normal procedures are sinister, and let the uncertainty mobilize loyalists. It is not a partisan tactic. Politicians across the spectrum, from America to Brazil and Turkey, have reached for it when cornered, because it buys time, stokes emotion, and blurs the line between fact and narrative.

Hudson just got its own miniature version. In the week between losing the election and finally conceding, Kamal Johnson leaned hard into the same playbook. He hinted at anomalies, and “not conceding until it’s all ironed out,“ floated doubts about the process, and used the resulting fog to redirect anger toward the budget meeting. What was, in reality, a routine request for departments to identify cuts became, in his telling, a plot against children, against equity, against him.

None of it was true. The deficit was real. The cuts were standard. Every department but one accepted them quietly. Yet the outgoing mayor’s claims hardened into grievance, and grievance summoned the Facebook mob that followed.

Hudson does not need imported paranoia. The city has enough real problems. The danger is not that Kamal invented a new tactic, it is that he borrowed a national one, shrunk it to local scale, and proved how easily a small city can be pulled into the same vortex of misinformation.