Some Straight Talk about that Crooked Election

(Chuck Muth) – For years – decades, actually – the left has been comparing the right to Hitler and the Nazis.  How ironic, then, that their entire current campaign to legitimize the illegitimate 2020 election is being characterized as a “Big Lie” – a propaganda term coined by no less than Adolph Hitler himself.

The “Big Lie” is, in reality, the real big lie.  Truth is, the 2020 election WAS rigged.  And yes, it WAS stolen from Donald Trump and his millions of voters.

The problem for Republicans is that too many have foolishly focused so much on the “fraud” allegations that – as Mollie Hemingway explains in her new book, “Rigged” – can’t be proven.

“Election lawyers will tell you that fraud is almost impossible to conclusively find after the fact,” she writes.  “It’s exceedingly difficult to convict anyone of voter fraud, and difficult to indict for, because it’s very difficult to find conclusively.”

That said, Hemingway also writes that “If you believe things went terribly wrong in the 2020 election, well, you’re not crazy, and you’re not alone.  But most of all, you’re not wrong.”

“Despite the media and other activists’ saying the that the 2020 election must be accepted without question, strong majorities of Republicans have reason to complain,” she continues.  “From their perspective, they were the victims of an election that was rigged from the day Trump won the presidential election in November 2016.”

“We got them by surprise the first time,” Trump told Hemingway in an interview for the book. “And the second time, they spent four years working on rigging the election.”

Hemingway agrees…

“(T)he political, media and corporate establishments changed election laws and procedures, reduced or eliminated the oversight of the ballots, manipulated the COVID-19 response, stoked violent racial unrest, published fake news, censored accurate news, and did everything in their power to make sure that what happened in 2016 – a Trump victory – could not happen again in 2020.”

Rigged is a masterful, well-written and fully-documented indictment of the “powers that be” who stacked the deck, by hook and by crook, to make absolutely sure Donald Trump was stopped cold in his efforts to drain the swamp and, yes, make America great again.

You really need to read Rigged to get all the gory details, but here’s a 24-count indictment culled from its pages…

Count 1: The Russian Collusion Hoax

If you’re looking for a true “Big Lie,” the Russian Collusion Hoax is it.  The so-called “Steele dossier” was manufactured and paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and launched with a vengeance immediately after Trump won the 2016 election.

The Russia hoax resulted in Trump’s incoming National Security Adviser, Mike Flynn, being “ambushed by the FBI and forced to resign” and “the incoming attorney general being forced to recuse himself from investigations” that later were turned over to “independent” prosecutor Robert Mueller.

That investigation ultimately exposed that certain figures under disgraced former FBI director James Comey – remember lovers Peter Strzok and Lisa Page? – were directly involved in coordinated efforts to promote the hoax and take out Trump supporters with trumped up charges.

That included a pre-dawn FBI raid on Roger Stone’s house that was conveniently leaked to CNN in advance so as to do maximum PR damage to the president and assure the story would be all over the talking-head media for weeks.

The Russia hoax was used non-stop to harass the Trump administration for all four years of his presidency with the desired effect.  Indeed, Hemingway notes that just before the 2018 mid-term elections, 75% of Democrats said they still believed the hoax.

Count 2: Election Deniers

Democrats refused to accept the fact that Trump won in 2016.  And yet today it’s Republicans who are supposedly the “election deniers.”

“You can run the best campaign and you can have the election stolen from you,” Hillary Clinton whined after her loss, adding, “I know he’s an illegitimate president.”

“He lost the election and was put into office because the Russians interfered on his behalf,” declared former President Jimmy Carter.  “Trump didn’t actually win the election in 2016.”

Even before Trump was sworn into office, massive protests, demonstrations and riots occurred nationwide, including in DC on Inauguration Day when “Hundreds were arrested as black-clad rioters set cars on fire, threw bricks and injured police.”

In addition, Hemingway notes, “Democrats attempted to thwart the Electoral College vote for Trump by having James Clapper, Obama’s director of national intelligence who had previously had to apologize for lying to Congress, brief the Electoral College on Trump’s fitness for office and allege foreign interference in the election.”

Count 3:  Enemies of the people

The fake news media shamelessly manipulated coverage of the election in Biden’s favor.  Over and over and over and over and over and over again.  If it was bad for Biden, it was bad for media coverage.  His unending verbal gaffes went unreported.  His clearly diminished mental state was covered up.

On the other hand, no matter what Trump did; no matter how small, was blown up as a major “scandal.”  And every Trump success, no matter how big, was either ignored, or worse, spun into a failure.  It was so bad and obvious that many a Trump supporter repeated the observation that if Trump walked on water the media would say he couldn’t swim.

White House press conferences weren’t just bantering back and forth bantering.  They were combat.  Talk about a hostile work environment!  No question was too stupid to ask as long as propagandists such as CNN’s Jim Acosta thought it would show Trump in a bad light.

“The media lied about Trump’s successes, made up damaging stories, and worked with anonymous sources to publish fake stories for four years,” Hemingway writes.  “A corrupt media corrupts the integrity of elections, and the constant flow of negative stories from journalists out to get Trump undermined public faith in their ability to report basic facts.”

Count 4: Big Tech

A cabal of social media giants – particularly Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and Google – were all active participants in efforts to rig the 2020 election.  They shadow-banned, suspended and locked the accounts of Trump supporters and even went so far as to censor the President of the United States himself.

Big Tech actively promoted anti-Trump speech while covering up anti-Biden stories, most egregiously how they throttled the Hunter Biden laptop story broken shortly before Election Day by the New York Post.

The Big Tech cabal was led by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who showered the left with millions of “Zuck Bucks” to aid the Democrats in their efforts to rig the election against Trump.

Count 5: Never Trumpers

Establishment Republicans came out of the woodwork just weeks before the 2016 general election to throw Trump under the bus and try to throw the election to Hillary.  For example, former Nevada U.S. Sen. Dean Heller told the media he was “100 percent against Clinton, 99 percent against Trump.”

And after the election, these “Never Trumpers” took any and every opportunity to dump on the president in public and the fake news media gladly handed Never Trumpers a mic as long as they were bashing Trump.

Count 6: The Deep State

“At each major point in the operation,” Hemingway writes, “explosive media leaks were a key strategy in the operation to take down Trump.”

Even before Trump took the oath of office, swamp dwellers in the “deep state” – buried like moles in the behemoth that is the federal government in DC – began leaking, anonymously, of course, the details of phone calls the president made to world leaders.

The most damaging, of course, was the anonymously leaked phone call in 2019 with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that ultimately resulted in the Democrats’ show-trial impeachment in early 2020.

The New York Times also published an “Anonymous” op-ed titled “I Am Part of the Resistance inside the Trump Administration.”  It was inked by a supposed conservative “senior administration official” who, Hemingway reminds, was actually “a low-level bureaucrat who later worked for tech giant Google and gave money to far-left Democrats.”

Count 7: San Fran Nan

Once Democrats regained control of the House of Representatives after the 2018 mid-term elections, Speaker Nancy Pelosi abused her power and let slip the dogs of political war against Trump and his administration.

Unending investigations.  Unfounded accusations.  Hearings.  Obstruction.  Even ripping up Trump’s 2020 State of the Union speech on camera for all the world to see.

San Fran Nan provided all the fodder her accomplices in the fake news media needed to keep hammering away at Trump, his administration and his agenda day after day, night after night.  Non-stop.  All part of the propaganda campaign to rig the election against Trump.

County 8: Burying Bernie

Knowing full well that Trump would beat socialist-Democrat Sen. Bernie Sanders in the general election, the Democrat powers-that-be rigged the Democrat presidential primary to assure that Joe Biden, not Sanders, would get the nomination.

In the most egregious example, Sanders got the most votes in the Iowa caucus but was awarded fewer delegates.  Then, one by one, the other candidates dropped out of the race and solidified behind Biden to block Bernie.

Count 9:  Weaponizing COVID

In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, the left and their media mouthpieces poo-pooh’ed the threat.

For example, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi did a major mask-free dog-and-pony-show in Chinatown in San Francisco, urging everyone to go there.  And New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio declared that “This disease even if you were to get it basically acts like a common cold and flu.”

That, however, was before they realized they could use COVID as a political weapon against Trump. The shutdowns weren’t based on “science.”  They were based on “political science” – and part of the overall effort to rig the 2020 election against Trump.

Democrats also intentionally blocked follow-up COVID relief bills throughout the summer and fall of 2020 for no reason other than to deny Trump the ability to take credit for it, the public be damned.

They also used COVID to try to stop Trump from restarting and holding his massive and wildly popular political rallies.  The media claimed they were “super-spreader” events while, in typical hypocritical fashion, refusing to characterize large Antifa and BLM protests the same.

Recall also that when Trump suggested the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine might help battle COVID, Twitter started censoring posts supporting its use, including from doctors.

Worse, the media jumped all over a story out of Arizona that a man died after ingesting fish tank cleaner – chloroquine – wrongly thinking it was the same as hydroxychloroquine.  Naturally, they blamed Trump for his death.

“They used COVID to rig an election,” 45 said in an interview after the fact.  “There was nothing I could do.”

Count 10: The Fauci Follies

It wasn’t long after the COVID shutdowns in March 2020 before it became obvious that supposed viral infection “expert” and media darling Tony Fauci was over his head and all over the map when it came to how to deal with the coronavirus outbreak.

At the start of the pandemic, Fauci declared that it was “a very, very low risk to the United States.”  He also declared that “there isn’t anything going around right now in the community, certainly not coronavirus, that is calling for the broad use of masks.”

But that was before the “political” science changed.  Suddenly Fauci and the media flip-flopped on masks, with Fauci going so far as to say one mask wasn’t enough; you needed to wear two, or even three.

All the “experts,” including Fauci, said it would be impossible to develop a COVID vaccine in less than a year.  But Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed” made it happen by cutting through the bureaucratic red tape.

And even though the vaccine was ready before Election Day, its approval was delayed until just after the election so as not to give Trump credit before voters cast their ballots.

Fauci’s unreliability clearly became an electoral liability as early as April 2020.  But the Democrats and their media allies made it next to impossible politically for Trump to dump the guy.  Fauci was hurting Trump’s re-election chances and had to be protected at all costs.

Count 11:  The Race Card

“Mobilizing black voters was key to the left’s electoral prospects,” Hemingway writes, “and so Democrats spent considerable effort portraying Trump as a bigot – willing to embrace any falsehood to further their political ambitions.”

Most egregiously, the left falsely claimed Trump had referred to neo-Nazis as “very fine people” in the wake of the Charlottesville demonstrations.  Biden even claimed that lie was the reason he ran for president.

Trump’s ban on travel into the U.S. from countries supporting terrorists was called racist.  His ban on travel from China at the start of the COVID pandemic was called racist.  Calling the China virus the “China virus” was racist.

The race-baiting got so bad that Trump supporters started joking that if Trump put cream in his coffee, he’d be accused of being a racist.  And let’s not forget this one…

On January 29, 2019, a largely unknown “actor” named Jussie Smollett went to the Chicago police claiming he’d been assaulted by two white men wearing red MAGA (Make America Great Again) hats. He also claimed they’d shouted racial and homophobic slurs at him and tied a noose around his neck.

It was the lead story all over the media for weeks and part of the left’s effort to portray not only Donald Trump as a racist, but his supporters as well.  By the time the whole thing was exposed as a hoax, the damage was done. Just as they intended.

Count 12: The Not So Quiet Riots

Sowing unrest and racial hatred around the country was all part of rigging the election.  Indeed, in 2018, Democrat Rep. Maxine Waters urged political violence…

“If you see anybody from (Trump’s) Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and create a crowd.  And you push back on them.  And you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”

Leftwing agitators “did just that, attacking Trump officials in restaurants and at their homes.”  A precursor of what was to come in the summer of 2020 when Antifa and the Black Lives Matter insurrectionists launched massive riots, arson and looting which the corporate media downplayed or ignored.

Laughably, CNN actually claimed on-air that the riot in Kenosha he was a “mostly peaceful protest” – with buildings burning in the background!  No lie was too big for Biden’s media Praetorian Guard to tell.

In addition, Trump supporters were regularly harassed, and often physically attacked, for nothing more than participating in an actual peaceful demonstration or getting caught wearing a MAGA hat.  All in an election-rigging effort to intimidate Trump supporters and keep them from showing their support in public.

If the left didn’t promote the violence and riots during the “summer of rage” leading up the general election, at the very least they did nothing to stop it.  It was a calculated effort to rig the election.

Trump was blocked from doing anything to intervene and stop the riots, but the left blamed him for them anyway.  On August 27, 2020, Biden tweeted: “Remember: every example of violence Donald Trump decries has happened on his watch.  Under his leadership.  During his presidency.”

And naturally, while Trump’s campaign rallies were labeled “super-spreader” events, no such label was applied to the riots.  The hypocrisy was as obvious as it was outrageous.

Count 13: Universal Mail-In Balloting

“You never let a serious crisis go to waste,” former Obama apparatchik Rahm Emanuel famously advised back in 2008.  “And what I mean by that, it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”

And, in fact, Democrats used COVID hysteria to enact election reforms they’d spent years trying to get through Congress without success.  They changed the rules in the middle of the game, successfully transforming elections all across the country into “mail-in” elections with few, if any, precautions to protect the integrity of the vote.

On May 26, 2020 Trump tweeted…

“There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent.  Mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed. … This will be a Rigged Election.”

Twitter immediately tagged the tweet and issued a statement that “Trump makes an unsubstantiated claim that mail-in ballots will lead to voter fraud.”  But shortly thereafter it was discovered that in the May mail-in municipal elections in Paterson, NJ, four men, including the vice president of the city council, had committed widespread voting fraud.

Trump was proven right.  Again.

In the end, the number of mail-in ballots went from around 33 million in 2016 to over 100 million in 2020.  Yes, the election was rigged.

Count 14:  The GOP Convention

Republicans spent years, as well as millions, preparing for the Republican National Convention in Charlotte, NC.  But Democrats again weaponized COVID to throw a monkey wrench in all the plans, demanding all manner of untenable requirements for attendees.

It got so bad so late in the game that the GOP and the Trump campaign were forced to move the convention into Trump’s back yard at the White House. Afterwards, Trump supporters were accosted in the street as they walked back to their hotel rooms.

Count 15:  Wisconsin

In a clear election-rigging move, Democrats in the swing state of Wisconsin succeeded in keeping third-party candidates who might have sucked votes away from Biden off the ballot.  Did the same thing in swing-state Pennsylvania.

The Green Party was kicked of the ballot in Wisconsin because their vice-presidential candidate had allegedly listed an incorrect address on the party’s filing statement.  And Kanye West was kept off the ballot for supposedly filing just 14 seconds(!) late thanks to the doors to the clerk’s office being locked so his people couldn’t get in.

Count 16: Bounty-gate

Recognizing Trump’s overwhelming support with the military and their families, the media set out to do something about it.

In June 2020, the New York Times published a story – citing anonymous sources, of course – that the Russians had secretly offered to pay bounties to the Taliban for killing American soldiers in Afghanistan.  The media opined this was further proof that Trump was a Soviet asset for Vladimir Putin.

Then the Atlantic ran a story falsely claiming Trump skipped a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery in France because it was windy and rainy and he didn’t want to get his hair messed up.  The article also published an accusation – again, fed to them by an anonymous source – that Trump said, “Why should I go to that cemetery?  It’s filled with losers.”

It was a lie.  Trump never said any such thing.  But it didn’t stop the media and the Biden campaign from falsely claiming he did.

Count 17:  Voter Suppression Polls

The media weaponized the use of skewed and fatally flawed polls to demoralize Trump’s supporters by pushing the idea that Trump had no chance to win.

In one of the worst examples, ABC and the Washington Post published polls one week before election day saying Trump was behind in Wisconsin by 17 points.  The New York Times said it was 11 points. Reuters said 10.  CNN and CNBC said 8.

“It’s voter suppression to keep people home,” Trump accurately observed.  In fact, the president only “lost” Wisconsin 49.45% to 48.82%.  Not hard to conclude the media’s poll-rigging cost Trump the state.

Count 18:  Going Postal

The media trumped up a story claiming Trump was trying to tamp down mail-in voting by removing mailboxes in Oregon, complete with pictures of mail boxes being loaded onto trucks.

But it turned out the post office had removed a total of just 30 mailboxes, on its own, as part of its standard procedure for removing boxes that needed repair or were already scheduled to be replaced.  Yet another in-kind contribution to the Biden campaign by the media and Big Tech.

Count 19: Hidin’ Biden

Recognizing that every Biden appearance opened the opportunity for one of his infamous gaffes or a rambling mish-mash of unintelligible mush, his campaign essentially hid the would-be leader of the free world in his Delaware basement and regularly called media “lids” – announcements that Biden was done for the day – at breakfast time.

“The campaign thought the less the people saw of Biden, the better,” Hemingway notes.

The Bidenites essentially outsourced their campaign to a willing media that was all too happy to belch up rosy stories about Biden while simultaneously trashing Trump at every opportunity.

Count 20: Saving Private Biden

In the fall of 2020, the New York Post broke a blockbuster story on Hunter Biden’s laptop – which he’d forgotten to pick up from a repair shop.

Emails revealed that Hunter was being paid $1 million a year to sit on the board of a Ukrainian energy company even though he had no energy sector experience, had received a $3.5 million wire transfer from the wife of a former Moscow mayor, and was involved in a $10 million pay-to-play deal with a Chinese energy company in which 10% of the proceeds were to go to “the big guy” – his father.

The fake news media circled the wagons, immediately claimed the computer had been hacked, and said the whole thing was part of a new Russian disinformation campaign.  And Big Tech throttled the story on social media.

But then one of Hunter’s former business partners, Tony Bobulinski, confirmed, on the record, that he had first-hand knowledge that Joe Biden was, in fact, “the big guy.”  Didn’t matter.  Big Tech and the corporate media buried the explosive revelation.

Hemingway notes that the Media Research Center found that “45 percent of Biden voters were unaware of any financial scandals involving Hunter Biden” and “one in six Biden voters said they would not have voted for Biden had they known the full extent of the financial corruption scandals involving Hunter Biden.”

All part of the collusion to rig the election.

Count 21:  Rigged Debates

The supposedly non-partisan Commission on Presidential Debates went all-in for Biden.

When it became obvious that millions of ballots were being mailed out weeks before the first debate was scheduled, Trump asked for the addition of a fourth debate in early September.  The request was flatly rejected.

In the first debate, media moderator Chris Wallace tag-teamed with Biden to throw Trump off his game.  At one point in the debate, Trump remarked to Wallace, “I guess I’m debating you, not him.”

The commission then unilaterally cancelled the second in-person debate and announced it would be done virtually.  In response, Trump refused to participate.

At the same time, it was revealed that Steve Scully, the scheduled moderator for the second debate, was actually “a former Biden intern and Ted Kennedy staffer” who had been seeking advice from Anthony Scaramucci, a bitter anti-Trump former White House communications director who was fired after just 10 days on the job.

The commission dismissed the collusion, repeating Scully’s claim that he was “hacked.”  A week later, Scaramucci admitted he lied.

The final presidential debate was supposed to focus on foreign policy – a strong suit for Trump, especially with peace deals breaking out all over the Middle East and the southern border being secured for the first time in memory.

The issue was also known to be an Achilles heel for Biden, who was characterized by former Defense Secretary Robert Gates under Obama as having “been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”

The debate commission unilaterally changed the debate topic from foreign policy to general issues.  And once again the media moderator went easy on Biden while putting Trump through a ringer.

Count 22:  Georgia

On Election Night, there was a delay in counting ballots in Fulton County, GA.  Initially, the delay was blamed on a broken water main.  Later it was characterized as a simple burst pipe. Eventually they’d claim it was an overflowing urinal.  All of which was a harbinger of things to come.

At 10:30 pm, poll watchers were told to leave the counting facility and come back the next morning to continue the work.

It was then discovered that four election workers had not left and the counting continued with no observers – other than a camera which later showed that “a small remnant of about four workers began pulling trunks containing thousands of ballots from underneath a table with a long tablecloth and running ballots through machines.”

Despite the video, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger went on 60 Minutes and declared, with a straight face, “We had safe, secure, honest elections.”  The media, naturally, echoed his claim that nothing untoward took place in Georgia and no court would touch the dispute with a ten-foot pole.

The Peach Tree state was successfully rigged to go for Biden.

Count 23: Arizona

FOX News raised eyebrows and fueled anger by calling Arizona for Biden well before the results were clear and well before any other network did the same.  Serious questions about the election’s integrity were immediately raised.  Fortunately for Biden, he had an ally in the Secretary of State’s office.

Democrat Katie Hobbs was a well-known Trump hater.  She once tweeted that Trump was “more interested in pandering to his neo-nazi base than being @POTUS for all Americans.”  And she fought tooth-and-nail against every effort to get to the bottom of the problems discovered, especially in Maricopa County.

Count 24: SCOTUS Punts

The U.S. Supreme Court had multiple opportunities to weigh in on the constitutionality of the Democrats’ efforts to change election laws and procedures.  It refused, claiming “there wasn’t sufficient time to review before the election or because no harm could be shown as the election hadn’t happened yet.”

Then in February 2021, the Court punted again, declaring a challenge by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, joined by 17 other AG’s, was dismissed by the Court for lack of “standing.”  Which got Justice Clarence Thomas rather hot under the collar.

“One wonders what this Court waits for,” he wrote in a blistering dissent.  “We failed to settle this dispute before the election, and thus provide clear rules.  Now we again fail to provide clear rules for future elections.  The decision to leave election law hidden beneath a shroud of doubt is baffling.  By doing nothing, we invite further confusion and erosion of voter confidence.”

The fix was in.  And SCOTUS stood by and let it happen.

“So, yes,” Hemingway concludes, “millions of American citizens have reason to be concerned about the integrity of the 2020 election.”  Unfortunately, “Republican voters had no idea what had been done until it was too late.”

Now, here’s the thing…

What’s done is done.  You can’t put the genie back in the bottle.  You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube.  But the jig is up now.  As Chief Engineer Scotty of the USS Enterprise so famously put it, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”

Quitting and refusing to vote in future elections without an “audit” of what happened in 2020 is fighting the last war and just plain stupid.  The elections in 2021, especially in Virginia and even New Jersey, prove Republicans can still win if they’re vigilant in protecting election security and don’t forfeit the game without playing.

We CAN save the nation.  We CAN make America great again…again.  But as the saying goes, the world belongs to those who show up.  Get thee to the polls in 2022!

Mr. Muth is president of Citizen Outreach, founder of CampaignDoctor.com and political director for Ahern PAC.