Category Archives: Federalist

Comedian and podcast host Joe Rogan railed against the rapid escalation of aggressive wokeism Thursday for spoiling good comedy and silencing those who dont fit the characteristics of favored groups under the progressive mold of victimhood.

On his program with fellow stand-up comic Joe List, Rogan complained comedy today suffers from risk-aversion to cancel culture, where jokes made even ten years ago would be career-ending in todays environment.

Can you make a good comedy movie anymore, or have they made it so dangerous in terms of being canceled, that comedy movies are no longer something you can do? Rogan said, highlighting how films such as Superbad likely wouldnt survive in 2021 without detrimental scrutiny.

You can never be woke enough, Rogan went on.

It keeps going. It keeps going further and further and further down the line, and if you get to the point where you capitulate, where you agree to all these demands, itll eventually get to straight white men are not allowed to talk. Because its your privilege to express yourself when other people of color have been silenced throughout history.

Eventually, Rogan prophesized, highlighting the direction of leftism at breakneck speed, It will be, youre not allowed to go outside, because so many people were imprisoned Im not joking, it really will get there. Its that crazy.

As cable news ratings slide, Rogans podcast was the most listened to in 2020 with more than 190 million downloads every month. Last year, the Austin-based podcast which migrated to the Lone Star State from Los Angeles was acquired by Spotify for $100 million.

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Joe Rogan: 'Woke' Culture Is Silencing 'Straight White Men' - The Federalist

The Washington Post this week published a long hit piece by investigative political reporter Michael Kranish on Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, framed as a profile tracing his path to the insurrection, from elite establishment Republican to dangerous MAGA populist.

Its hard to imagine a more dishonest and condescending piece of journalism. Kranish and his editors obviously blame Hawley in part for the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol (more on that later), and they clearly think hes a dangerous and hateful figure in American public life.

But instead of just running an editorial saying so, Kranish spends thousands of words conveying his contempt for Hawley through selective interviews and quotes. He does a deep dive into Hawleys past, digging up and quoting columns the senator wrote in high school, tracking down and interviewing elementary school classmates, and talking with the mayor of Hawleys small hometown in western Missouri.

He interviews former professors, political associates, and even the University of California at Los Angeles law professor who coined the term critical race theory, who told Kranish that Hawley walks in the footsteps of many demagogues in Americas historical past, whose trajectory into the center of power has been through racialized scapegoating.

But for all this, the piece is not really about Hawley. Its about ordinary Americans who live in small towns, go to church, and believe their country is a decent place worthy of their affection. Kranish despises those people even more than he despises Hawley, and he goes to great lengths to show it.

Take Hawleys hometown of Lexington, Missouri. Lexington is a small town on the Missouri river of about 4,700 people. Like a lot of small towns in the South, it was once home to black slaves and white slaveowners.

It was also the site of two of the largest battles in the western theater of the Civil War, the First Battle of Lexington in 1861 and the Second Battle of Lexington in 1864, and a center of operations for Confederate guerilla forces under William Quantrill, including a young Jesse James, who was wounded by federal troops while riding into town to surrender after the war.

Kranish isnt interested in any of this rich and varied history, though. He just wants his readers to know that Lexington has a racist legacy and insular, ignorant residents. People like Hawley, in other words.

Lexingtons lack of recognition of its role in slavery has meant that the city did not have the kind of introspection about inequality that might have broadened Hawleys outlook, writes Kranish, quoting a random former classmate who declares that Hawley had an insular life in this small town.

Its unclear if the person quoted even knew Hawley, let alone knew him well enough to know whether he had an insular life growing up in Lexington. The point is, according to Kranish, that if you come from an obviously racist, backwards place like this theres a good chance youre a racist, or at least racially insensitive. You know, like Hawley.

Kranish would also like his readers to know that evangelical Christians like Hawley hate gay people. Why else include a lengthy aside about how Hawley in 2015 expressed support for Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who was arrested and jailed for refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples because of her religious beliefs?

We hear from Thom Lambert, a University of Missouri law professor who recruited Hawley but later became alarmed that Hawley began making pronouncements that didnt square with his background in constitutional law but instead appeared designed to attract political support, writes Kranish, citing the Davis case. Kranish quotes Lambert, a gay evangelical Christian, saying that Hawleys support for Davis was him trying to establish his credentials as a religious-freedom warrior. This is where I thought, youre kind of lying here. Youre misrepresenting how the Constitution works.

Actually, Hawleys support for Davis was based on Missouris Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which bars the government from compelling or restricting a persons exercise of religion. At the time, Hawley said that Davis should not have been compelled against her conscience to issue the marriage licenses and should not have been arrested, but also that others in her office should have been allowed to issue the licenses, which is what ended up happening. Far from animosity against gay Americans, Hawley was expressing support for individual rights of conscience.

Its ironic, then, that Kranish later tries to paint Hawley as an enemy of conscience and individual liberty by misleadingly summarizing an essay Hawley wrote in June 2019 for Christianity Today on Pelagius, a fourth-century theologian who was declared a heretic by the Catholic Church for his teachings on free will.

Hawley wrote, correctly, that Pelagius believed human beings could achieve perfection without the aid of divine grace, through the exercise of their will. He argues that Pelagianism persists today in the concept of unfettered individual liberty, which in America most benefits powerful and wealthy elites who have embraced what Hawley calls a philosophy for the privileged.

Because if freedom means choice among options, then the people with the most choices are the most free, wrote Hawley. And that means the rich. And if salvation is about achievement, then those with the most accolades are righteous, and that means the elite and the strong.

Hawleys column is really an overview of a larger and more subtle argument, backed by mountains of research, that suggests wealthy and highly educated people tend to thrive in a society that embraces autonomy and unconstrained choice, while less-educated and working class people tend to suffer.But for Kranish, who seems to revel in reducing complex ideas to personal insults, all of this is just more evidence that Hawley finds liberty abhorrent.

But all these meandering and insubstantial attacks on Hawley are really just filler for Kranishs main complaint against the Missouri senator: he dared to object to the certification of the results of the 2020 election on Jan. 6, and therefore bears some responsibility for the ensuing riot at the U.S. Capitol that day.

Unsurprisingly, Kranish misrepresents what Hawley was objecting to. He writes: Hawley focused on Pennsylvania, saying the state had violated its constitution by widening access to mail-in ballots. But it was a Republican-controlled legislature that approved universal mail voting in 2019, and the GOP had encouraged its use.

But of course it doesnt matter whether Pennsylvanias legislature was controlled by Republicans or Democrats. If it violated its constitution, thats a problem, and Hawley understandably wanted to raise the issue.

It also wasnt the only issue in Pennsylvania that Hawley and others raised. About six weeks before the election, the states supreme court had overridden the legislatures rules for counting mail-in ballots, extending by fiat the deadline for when absentee ballots must be postmarked and received in order to be counted. The Pennsylvania legislature had already set down rules for these things, but the court sided with the state Democratic Party, which had sued to push back the deadline in contravention of state election law.

In a Dec. 30 statement announcing his plans to object, Hawley alluded to these issues, saying, I cannot vote to certify the electoral college results on January 6 without raising the fact that some states, particularly Pennsylvania, failed to follow their own state election laws.

Tens of millions of Americans share these exact concerns about the 2020 election, not because theyre conspiracy theorists but because they understand the importance of the rule of law and election integrity. Its one reason why so many state legislatures are trying to pass election reform laws, to ensure that last-minute lawsuits and activist judges or unelected bureaucrats cant change state voting laws by decree.

But for Kranish, who apparently feels free to inject his opinion into what the Post bills as political news coverage, such concerns exist largely because Hawley, Trump and their allies stoked them with false claims.

No, they dont. Such concerns would exist even if Hawley and Trump had never breathed a word about them for the simple reason that Americans saw for themselves what happened around the country on Election Day and the days following, and concluded that something wasnt right. A week after he lodged his objections, Hawley wrote, For months, I heard from these Missourians writing, calling my office, stopping me to talk. They want Congress to take action to see that our elections at every level are free, fair, and secure. They have a right to be heard in Congress.

In other words, Kranish gets the whole thing backwards. Hawley wasnt stoking fears and ginning up the mob, he was responding to concerns that his constituents had raised repeatedly after the election. Those concerns are grounded in real problems with our election system that need to be solved if Americans are going to have confidence in the vote moving forward.

No wonder, then, that Kranish cant quite grasp why Hawley is so popular with half the country. Near the end of his 5,000-word hatchet job, Kranish finally gets around to acknowledging how popular Hawley is with Republicans, noting that he raised $3 million in the first quarter of this year and appears to enjoy broad popularity among GOP voters in Missouri, where he was given a standing ovation after speaking in the town of Ozark on April 17.

Kranish notes these things, but he is not the least bit curious why Hawley is so popular. For him, as for the great mass of corporate media, its enough to declare that Hawley has embraced the false claims of election fraud, and leave it at that. Republican voters are stupid, you see, and Hawley seems to have figured that out.

Or so it is according to Michael Kranish, who never met an intelligent and charismatic Republican he couldnt smear as a hypocritical, racist conspiracy theorist if you just give him 5,000 words and a ticket to a place like Lexington, Missouri.

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WaPo Hit Piece On Josh Hawley Is Really A Hit Piece On All Conservatives - The Federalist

On this episode of The Federalist Radio Hour, Federalist Political Editor John Daniel Davidson joins Culture Editor Emily Jashinsky to discuss Austins rampant homelessness problem and how voters united to reinstate the citys public camping ban.

[The city of Austin] wanted to target everyone who wanted to reinstate the camping ban as evil, conservative, elderly, Republican NIMBYs who wanted to lock up all the homeless people. Thats absolutely not true, Davidson said. These were ordinary Austinites, by which I mean, they were Democrats. This is a super-majority Democrat city.

While leftists tried to spin the homeless problem as a humanitarian crisis that only bigots and careless GOP supporters opposed, Davidson said the city allowing camping without public input showed even the overwhelmingly Democrat voters that woke agendas are not realistic.

This was really a case of Democrats, turning on the city because they had to deal with the very visceral, real-world consequences of an ideologically driven policy that was a complete disaster, Davidson said.

Its in cities across the country. Its ordinary, middle-class, working people that have to bear the brunt of these ideological decisions made by progressive leaders who dont have to face the consequences of their policies, he added.

Read Davidsons op-ed, Austin Loses Patience With Camping in the Streets, in the Wall Street Journal.

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How Austin's Homeless Problem Exposes The Failures Of Leftist Agendas - The Federalist

The Intercept released a video report touting lies about the violent riots that broke out over the summer of 2020 and targeting the conservative journalists who reported on them.

By focusing on sensational, graphic images of violence on the margins of protests and entirely ignoring peaceful demonstrators, even members of the Riot Squad who are not as far right as Schaffer have contributed to a political project: the right-wing medias campaign to portray racial justice protests as anarchic and dangerous, Intercept claimed.

In the media outlets video, a narrator details how conservative reporters made up an informal Riot Squad that followed the violence, destruction, vandalism, and arson that occurred in cities all over the U.S. last year. While the riots, 95 percent of which are linked to Black Lives Matter activism, caused more than $2 billion in damages from May 26 to June 8, corporate media organizations, including The Intercept, hold fast to the idea that these protests were mostly peaceful.

the broader picture is that Black Lives Matter protests have been overwhelmingly peaceful, the Intercept claimed without evidence.

Not only does The Intercept downplay the violence that destroyed businesses, cities, and ended in more than 47 riot-related fatalities, but also targets conservative reporters, many of whom were some of the only on-the-ground journalists in ravaged areas, for choosing to cover the destruction. Reporters Elijah Schaffer, Shelby Talcott, Julio Rosas, and Jorge Ventura are slandered as spurring on false narratives in exchange for appearances on Fox News and fueling online conspiracy theories.

These reporters choices to turn their cameras away from peaceful marches over racist policing to the dangerous and violent looting and rioting that occurred, The Intercept claims, is just meant to add fuel to the fire.

The impact of their work is hard to overstate. Even as they remain relatively unknown, this tight-knit group has produced many of the most viral videos of Black Lives Matter protests over the past year. And those images have helped create the false impression, relentlessly driven home by Fox News and Republican politicians, that the nationwide wave of protests that erupted after George Floyd was killed was nothing but an excuse for mindless rioting, The Intercept narrator said.

The Intercept also accused conservative journalists covering the riots of staking out in aggravated areas such as Portland to record and exaggerate.

It was no accident that Rosas and Ventura chose to spend Inauguration Day this year in Portland. The liberal citys strong anti-fascist protest culture, in a metro area surrounded by ultraconservative exurbs, has for years provided right-wing video journalists with a steady stream of skirmishes to record and exaggerate, the narrator stated.

Reporters were faulted for their coverage of the shooting by Kyle Rittenhouse in Kenosha, Wisconsin and The Intercept even speculated that the Daily Callers Chief Video Director Richie McGinniss refused to release video of the shooting right away because he decided to suppress or delete footage that could be used to convict the young right-wing vigilante.

That fueled speculation that McGinniss might have withheld incriminating visual evidence to shield Rittenhouse, who quickly became a heroto many of the Daily Callers far-right readers and wasdefended by the sites founder, Tucker Carlson, the narrator continued. McGinniss, however, told The Intercept that while he thought he had recorded video of the shooting, he discovered later that he had accidentally hit the wrong button on his iPhone and it did not start recording until after the shots were fired.

Even the one reporter in the so-called Riot Squad who does not work in conservative news faced scrutiny from Intercept for attendingat least 24 Trump rallies before the 2018 midterms and describing them as exhilarating on his video blog. And despite almost all of the reporters coverage of the Capitol riot and pro-Trump thugs, The Intercept still blamed the journalists because all this video evidence of right-wing violence was not used to vilify the rioters the way that clips of far less significant events at left-wing protests were last summer.

The Intercept concluded by scolding Scriberr field reporter Kalen DAlmeida and other reporters for contributing to an atmosphere of paranoia and mistrust, making assaults on journalists more frequent.

Violence against journalists, even ones operating in bad faith, is inexcusable. Unfortunately, videographers like DAlmeida have contributed to an atmosphere of paranoia and mistrust, making assaults on journalists more frequent. And this has also made the work of scrupulous and fair reporting on the politics that plays out on our streets much harder, and more dangerous, The Intercept concluded.

The narrator ends the video with a propagandist statement lamenting the fact that attention on the riots has taken away from criticizing law enforcement.

Its been a year since the horrifying cellphone video of George Floyds murder drove millions of Americans to the streets to demand justice, he said. But its important to keep in mind that the conservative media has been working almost nonstop to undercut the movement for black lives by spreading the lie that the nations main problem is the protesters, not the police.

Some journalists targeted by The Intercept report responded to the outlets attacks on Twitter.

Jordan Davidson is a staff writer at The Federalist. She graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism.

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Intercept Touts Lies About Riots While Maliciously Attacking Conservative Journalists For Reporting On Them - The Federalist

On this episode of The Federalist Radio Hour, OutKicks Bobby Burack joins Culture Editor Emily Jashinsky to discuss the politicization of sports, sports news, and how corporate media outlets are missing opportunities to meet the demand for non-woke news.

Whether its ESPN, The Washington Post, The Ringer, all these major outlets that cover sports, they covered those social issues they cover that as if most Americans agree, Burack said. I think all these issues right now are 50/50. If amajor outletlike ESPN covers it where only one side is presented, do the math. That leaveshalf the country without a voice represented in that discussion.

This same principle applies to Hollywood, TV, and other pop culture, Burack said.

We ignore our consumers and try to appeal to our critics, Burack said. That is poor business because you will never appeal to these guys because their job is to bring you down,be critical of you. And your most hardcore loyal fans are being pushed to the side because their voice is not loud, influential. I cant think of a bigger disservice to viewers than shows no longer caring about them.

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Why Woke Sports And The Media Outlets That Cover Them Don't Understand Viewers - The Federalist

The same day a troubling national jobs report showed businesses cant hire workers partly because politicians have risked inflation to make everyone welfare recipients in the name of COVID relief, Wisconsin Democrats put out a video calling for people to show us your stimmy shimmy. After an outcry on Twitter, the Democrat account deleted the video, but another user saved it:

The video shows people dancing about getting a stimmy, or stimulus check, and having $$$ in the bank and $$$ in the pocket. Thank you POTU$, reads one caption.

Approximately 83 percent of American tax filers were sent the latest round of stimulus checks Congress approved after Joe Biden took office, including tens of millions who never lost jobs in the past year of rolling government lockdowns. Couples could earn as much as $160,000 per year and still get one of the deficit-funded checks that totaled up to $1,400 per person.

Nine million net jobs were lost due to COVID shutdowns, while so far 161 million Americans have gotten checks. In addition to repeatedly sending nearly everyone checks, Congress also boosted unemployment benefits so that many Americans can currently make more money not working than by going back to work.

Studies have found that while most used some stimulus money to pay bills and maintain their pre-pandemic levels of spending, recipients are also spending a significant amount of stimulus checks on restaurant takeout, discretionary spending, paying down debt, boosting savings, and investing not exactly items required to keep people alive. Half of those ages 24 to 35 reported on one survey that they were spending half the stimulus on the stock market.

Explosions in government spending and constant bailouts that have flooded state, local, and individual budgets with unneeded and unearned cash have brought the national debt to approximately $28 trillion, and unfunded federal liabilities (the amount Congress has promised to pay out in the future above what it has required welfare programs like Social Security to take in) to the unfathomable level of $148 trillion.

Contrary to claims that government debt isnt a major problem, abroad rangeof facts show that it can have serious negative consequences, such as lower wages, weak economic growth, increased inflation, higher taxes, reduced government benefits, or combinations of such results. These, in turn, impair peoplesquality of lifeand can reduce theirlife expectancy. Some of these impacts may have already begun, writes James Agresti for the Foundation for Economic Education.

Agresti notes that the Government Accountability Office warns that the costs of federal borrowing will be borne by tomorrows workers and taxpayers, which may reduce or slow the growth of the living standards of future generations. Economists also note that governments overwhelmed with debt at these levels almost always use inflation to steal from citizens more than they tend to notice when governments take that money directly through higher taxes.

Completely ignoring all of these factors, Wisconsin Democrats instead chose to celebrate the fact that Congress has encouraged people to take money from the nations future and lose the self-support, self-respect, and job skills that accrue from employment.

This is so disrespectful to all the people who lost their livelihoods and their businesses to lockdowns, noted Federalist Senior Contributor Georgi Boorman. Its not a jackpot at a Vegas slot machine, its money our great-grandchildren will be paying back.

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Wisconsin Democrats Try To Hide Shameful Video Celebrating Welfare - The Federalist

Former President Donald Trump said comparing former President Jimmy Carters presidency to the Biden administration is unfair.

I see that everybody is comparing Joe Biden to Jimmy Carter. It would seem to me that is very unfair to Jimmy Carter. Jimmy mishandled crisis after crisis, but Biden has CREATED crisis after crisis, Trump wrote in a statement Wednesday.

Trump then listed off all of Bidens self-inflicted crises.

First there was the Biden Border Crisis (that he refuses to call a Crisis), then the Biden Economic Crisis, then the Biden Israel Crisis, and now the Biden Gas Crisis, Trump wrote. Joe Biden has had the worst start of any president in United States history, and someday, they will compare future disasters to the Biden Administrationbut no, Jimmy was better!

Trump isnt the only one to notice the similarities between the two Democratic presidencies.

Joe Biden is the new Jimmy Carter: -Stagflation -Higher taxes -And rising gas prices 2021 meet 1979, Republican Rep. Jim Jordan tweeted on Tuesday.

President Biden has been in office for nearly four months and is already having his Jimmy Carter moment. This is crushing for our country and U.S. leadership around the globe, said Rep. Mike Waltz in a statement. As Jimmy Carter put it best, there is a crisis of confidence and President Biden is lost in the wilderness.

Biden isnt the next FDR hes the next Jimmy Carter, Donald Trump Jr. wrote on Twitter last week.

Twitter used Trump Jr.s tweets to spin the topic and claim that Carters presidency was marked with successes such as the former Democrat presidents Nobel Peace Prize.

Jordan Davidson is a staff writer at The Federalist. She graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism.

Photo The U.S. National Archives/Falconer, David

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Trump: Comparisons Of Biden And Carter Are Unfair ... To Carter - The Federalist

U.S. Department of Health & Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra falsely claimed there is no law banning partial-birth abortions on Wednesday.

When asked whether he would uphold a law banning partial-birth abortions during the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Health Subcommittee hearing, Becerra denied there was a law against it.

There is no law that deals specifically with the term partial-birth abortions, Becerra told Republican Rep. Gus Bilirakis.

Becerra also claimed that there is no medical term like partial-birth abortion.

Roe v. Wade is a very clear, settled precedent and a woman has a right to make decisions about her reproductive health, and we will make sure that we forced the laws protect those rights, Beccera said.

Despite Becerras assertion, there are laws that define partial-birth abortions. Not only does the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003 characterize it, but the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the law and its definition in Gonzales v. Carhart.

According to the law, partial-birth abortion is an abortion in which a physician deliberately and intentionally vaginally delivers a living, unborn childs body until either the entire babys head is outside the body of the mother, or any part of the babys trunk past the navel is outside the body of the mother and only the head remains inside the womb, for the purpose of performing an overt act (usually the puncturing of the back of the childs skull and removing the babys brains) that the person knows will kill the partially delivered infant.

Becerra previously dodged questions about his stance on partial-birth abortions during his Senate confirmation hearing in February

You voted against a ban on partial-birth abortion. Why? Sen. Mitt Romney asked.

I understand that people have different deeply held beliefs on this issue. We may not always agree on where to go, but I think we can find some common ground, the former California attorney general said.

Susan B. Anthony List President Marjorie Dannenfelser condemned Becerras comments and said the HHS Secretary works hand-in-glove with the White House to expand abortion on demand.

Becerra can hardly plead ignorance on this topic. As a freshman congressman, he voted against the ban. This shameless lie is standard for the most radical pro-abortion administration in history. It should not be hard to recognize that partially delivering a baby and then suctioning his or her brain is not only illegal, but utterly inhumane, Dannenfelser said.

Jordan Davidson is a staff writer at The Federalist. She graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism.

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HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra Claims There Are No Laws Banning Partial-Birth Abortions - The Federalist

In aftermath of a cyberattack shutting down the Colonial Pipeline causing gas shortages up and down the East Coast, President Joe Biden said the solution is to educate people.

When asked what words he had for Americans worried about climbing fuel prices and shortages, Biden said that he thought a better-educated workforce is the answer.

Id also point out that, I think what this shows is that I think we have to make a greater investment in education, as it relates to being able to train and graduate more people proficient in cybersecurity, Biden said. I think that one of the most important things we have to do to really claim our place as the leading innovator in the world is to have a better-educated workforce.

A skilled, educated workforce and cybersecurity, Biden claimed, is part of the long-term answer because Fortune 500 companies told him that while he was vice president.

Its important that we do this and the cybersecurity piece is one I think youre gonna see where we need significantly larger number of experts in the area of cybersecurity, working for private companies as well as private companies being willing to share data as to what how theyre protecting themselves, Biden said. I think thats part of the long-term answer not just in terms of energy but across the board.

Biden also touted his administrations efforts to lift restrictions on fuel transportation.

In the meantime made it easier for us to have lifted some of the restrictions on the transportation of fuel, as well as access to the United States military providing fuel and with vehicles to get it there were places where its badly needed, Biden said.

Jordan Davidson is a staff writer at The Federalist. She graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism.

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Biden Claims Education Is The Key To Solving Gas Shortages - The Federalist

If questioning the results of a presidential election were a crime, as many have asserted in the wake of the controversial 2020 election and its aftermath, nearly the entire Democratic Party and media establishment would have been incarcerated for their rhetoric following the 2016 election.In fact, the last time they accepted the legitimacy of a presidential election they lost was in 1988.

After the 2000 election, which hinged on the results of a recount in Florida, Democrats smeared President George W. Bush as selected, not elected. When Bush won re-election against then-Sen. John Kerry in 2004, many on the left claimed that voting machines in Ohio had been rigged to deliver fraudulent votes to Bush. HBO even produced and aired Hacking Democracy, a documentary that added fuel to the conspiracy theory fire of conversations about the 2004 results. But nothing holds a candle to what happened in 2016 after Donald Trumps surprising defeat of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Rather than accept that Trump won and Clinton lost, the political and media establishments desperately sought to explain away Trumps victory. What they settled on was a destructive conspiracy theory that crippled the government, empowered Americas adversaries, and illegally targeted innocent private citizens whose only crime was not supporting Hillary Clinton.

With baseless claims of hacked voting totals, illegal voter suppression, and extensive media manipulation, the Russian collusion hoax had it all. But more than anything, the belief that Trump stole the 2016 election had the support of the most powerful institutions, individuals, and even government agencies in the country.

You can run the best campaign, you can even become the nominee, and you can have the election stolen from you, Clinton told her followers in 2019.

I know hes an illegitimate president, Clinton claimed of Trump a few months later. She even claimed during an interview with CBS Sunday Morning that voter suppression and voter purging and hacking were why she lost.

Former President Jimmy Carter agreed.

[Trump] lost the election and was put into office because the Russians interfered on his behalf, he told NPR in 2019. Trump didnt actually win the election in 2016.

Their view was widely shared by most prominent Democrats in Congress. Rep. John Lewis of Georgia, for example, said he was skipping Trumps inauguration in 2016 because he believed Trump was illegitimate, and that the Russians participated in helping this man get elected. Lewis also skipped the inauguration of President George W. Bush, claiming that Bush, too, was an illegitimate president.

A few members of Congress joined him in 2001. In 2017, one out of every three Democrats in the U.S. House boycotted Trumps inauguration. Many said they refused to take part in the installation of an illegitimate president.

Not only did corporate media not condemn leading Democrats refusal to accept the results of the 2016 election, the media were also super spreaders of wild conspiracy theories about how Trump and Russia colluded to steal the election from Clinton. They dutifully regurgitated false leaks from corrupt intelligence officials suggesting that Trump and his staff had committed treason. They ran stories suggesting that Republicans who didnt support their conspiracy theory were insufficiently loyal to the country.

Some even suggested Russia may have hacked voting machines and vote totals in a bid to steal the election from Clinton. It was all nonsense. Even Robert Mueller, who ran a multi-year and multi-million-dollar government investigation into claims that Trump personally colluded with Russian President Vladimir Putin to steal the election from Clinton, found there was no evidence to support the claim.

Rather than being shunned by their peers for peddling leaks and lies that had no basis in reality, the reporters who pushed this conspiracy theory were lauded by their peers, received raises and promotions, and were given Pulitzers for reporting that turned out to be detached from reality.

From 2016 through 2020, the easiest way to achieve stardom on the political left was to loudly proclaim your belief that 2016 was an illegitimate election stolen by the Russians on behalf of a corrupt traitor. Dissent, up to and including the assertion that the President of the United States was a secret Russian spy, was the highest form of patriotism.

And then 2020 happened.

With the snap of their fingers, Americas electoral system went from irredeemably corrupt and broken in 2016 to unquestionably safe in 2020. Voting methods that were allegedly used to steal elections in 2004 and 2016 suddenly became sacrosanct and impenetrable in 2020. Whereas so-called election experts repeatedly warned pre-2020 about the pitfalls of electronic voting and widespread mail-in balloting, by November of 2020, any discussion about the vulnerabilities of those methods was declared to be verboten.

If, as I believe, concerns about election integrity were valid in 2000, and 2004, and 2008, and 2012, and 2016, then surely those concerns were even more valid in 2020, an election unlike any other in American history due to the COVID-19 pandemic that gripped the world and radically altered Americas electoral system.

Across the country at the state, local, and federal level, hundreds of significant structural changes to the manner and oversight of elections were instituted, resulting in what Time Magazine called a a revolution in how people vote. Some of these changes were enacted by state legislatures, some by courts, and others by county and state election officials. Many changes were allegedly justified by the global pandemic, although Democrats had long advocated for them and now seek to make them permanent.

The bedrock of the American republic is that elections must be free, fair, accurate, and trusted. Election lawyers will tell you that fraud is almost impossible to conclusively find after the fact, and that to fight it, strong rules and regulations are needed on the front end. Thats why Democrats and Republicans fight so bitterly about the rules and regulations that govern the process.

What happened during the 2020 election deserves to be investigated and discussed. It must be investigated and discussed, not in spite of media and political opposition to it, but because of that opposition. That is why I am writing a book about what happened before, during, and after the 2020 presidential election.

The American people deserve to know what happened. They deserve answers, even if those answers are inconvenient. They deserve to know the effect of flooding the system with tens of millions of mail-in ballots. They deserve to know how and why Big Tech and corporate political media manipulated the news to support certain political narratives while outright censoring stories they now admit were true.

The American people deserve to know why courts, without the consent of the accountable legislative bodies charged with writing election laws, were allowed to unilaterally rewrite the rules in the middle of the game. Voters deserve to know why so many in government so vociferously fought to avoid audits and recounts and hide the vote-counting process from the public.

Republicans began sounding the alarm about how difficult it might be to trust the outcome of the 2020 elections long before November. They talked about how widespread changes in the manner the country conducts elections would lead to uncertainty, confusion, and delays. They were worried about universal mail-in balloting, which led to some addresses getting a half dozen ballots for previous residents who had once registered to vote at the address.

They knew that a bipartisan commission co-chaired by Jimmy Carter himself found that absentee balloting was the largest source of potential fraud in United States elections. They were worried about how lowering, or in some cases outright eliminating, standards for signature verification on mail-in ballots could make it impossible to challenge fraudulently cast ballots.

They were worried about unsupervised drop boxes that enabled third-party ballot harvesting becoming vectors for voter fraud. They worried about how ballot management in some areas was privately funded by corporate oligarchs who are overtly hostile to the Republican Party. They continued their complaints about how lack of updates to voter rolls would cause worse problems in an election based on mail-in balloting.

Republicans also screamed bloody murder about tech censorship of conservative voices and news stories about Democrats that the public had a right to know. They were horrified by a media complex that moved from extreme partisan bias to unabashed propaganda in defense of their preferred political party. They watched as a completely legitimate story about international corruption involving the Biden family business and implicating Joe Biden himself was crushed by media and tech companies colluding to suppress it.

None of those problems went away after the election. If anything, the concern grew as tens of millions more Americans saw the problems associated with sloppy elections in which it takes days to find out just how many people voted, much less how they voted.

They saw how difficult it was to maintain independent oversight of the counting process, whether in Atlanta, where observers were told that counting had stopped for the night but hadnt, or in Philadelphia, where observers were kept so far away from the ballot counting that a court had to intervene. They began to see the significance of the mad rush to change voting laws, sometimes surreptitiously or otherwise outside the purview of the state legislatures. And they saw how the media didnt even bother investigating before dismissing all concerns about how the election was run.

The fact of the matter is that the elite powers did whatever it took to make sure that Trump lost re-election in 2020. They admitted as much in a victory lap masquerading as a news article in Time Magazine that referred to the individuals and institutions behind the efforts to oust Trump as a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.

The story of how these institutions worked to rig the 2020 results needs to be told, and I plan to tell it. My book, entitled Rigged: How The Media, Big Tech, And Democrats Seized Our Elections, tells the story of how the political, media, and corporate establishments changed election laws and procedures, reduced or eliminated oversight of ballots, manipulated the COVID-19 response, stoked the violent racial unrest, published fake news, censored accurate news, and did everything in their power to make sure what happened in 2016 a Trump election victory would never happen again in 2020.

The book will include interviews from lawyers, campaign activists, and election officials who were on the ground in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, and other swing states. It will include discussions with elected lawmakers from across the country, including senators and members of Congress, about the importance of election integrity.

My book will contain never-before-told eyewitness stories about what really went down in 2020, not just in the presidential race, but in tight House and Senate races as well. The book will contain analysis of how media and Big Tech oligarchs used their power to control information on the Internet to manipulate peoples behavior before and after the 2020 election. My book will contain not just interviews about the election with top officials from the Trump White House and presidential campaign, but also interviews with Trump himself.

It will give a behind-the-scenes look at election night at the White House, and at pivotal moments in the campaign, such as the planning and execution of the surprisingly successful Republican National Convention. It will answer which of the many fake news stories published about Trump bothered him the most, how the Democrats caught Republicans flat-footed on mail-in balloting, what the Trump administrations biggest COVID mistake was, and who the Trump campaign thought was Bidens best media representative. (Hint: Its not who you think.) And it will show what went wrong during the electoral challenges in battleground states, and who was responsible for them.

Rigged: How The Media, Big Tech, And Democrats Seized Our Elections will be published by Regnery Publishing and is available for pre-order now. I have no doubt that the same powers that worked to oust Trump in 2020 will do everything they can to suppress this book in 2021, but I dont care.The story has to be told.

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Mollie Hemingway Writes 2020 Election Book Media Don't Want Read The ruling class did everything - The Federalist