The Blockbuster Book of 2021

That is what Mollie Hemingway’s forthcoming Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections promises to be. The Federalist has a lengthy description of the book by Mollie herself. You should read it all. Here are some quotes:

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 Trump’s surprising defeat of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
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“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 he’s 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 didn’t 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 Trump’s 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.
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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 didn’t 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.
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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.
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And then 2020 happened.

With the snap of their fingers, America’s 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.
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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.
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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 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.
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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.”

Mollie says that she has interviewed many of the principals involved in the 2020 election, including President Trump, and her book will explore, among other things, “what went wrong during the electoral challenges in battleground states, and who was responsible for them.” She concludes with a prediction that no doubt will come true:

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 don’t care. The story has to be told.

You can preorder Rigged here. Publication date is September 21.

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