Several Republican senators told The Hill this week that more and more frequently, they are being “confronted by constituents who buy into discredited conspiracy theories such as the claim that Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election or that federal agents incited the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.” The Hill spoke to at least three GOP senators, including Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), and two others who requested anonymity.
One senator said, “There are an astonishing number of people in my state who believe the election was stolen.”
Another said, “There are people who surprise me — I’m surprised they have those views. It’s amazing to me the number of people, the kind of people who think the election was stolen. I don’t want to use this word but it’s not just a ‘red-neck’ thing. It’s people in business, the president of a bank, a doctor.”
Murkowski is particularly upset by what this is doing to the Republican Party, which she believes “is becoming known as a group of kind of extremist, populist, over-the-top [people] where no one is taking us seriously anymore.” She lamented, “You have people who felt some allegiance to the party that are now really questioning, ‘Why am I [in the party?]’
“Is it going to be a situation of who can be more outlandish than the other?” she asked.
Extremism? Outlandishness? Has she checked out the Democrats lately? The Left is busy gluing themselves to tarmacs to protest climate change, holding drag queen hours for kindergarteners, and contemplating legal action against people who misgender members of the LGBTQ community. But Republicans are “over-the-top”?
Conspiracy theories? Considering the startling number of them that have been proven true, and more specifically, the mounting evidence of election interference by government officials and Biden campaign members, I find their surprise to be, well, surprising.
In April, House Republicans revealed that Secretary of State Antony Blinken, then a top adviser to the Biden campaign, allegedly served as the “impetus” behind the October 2020 letter signed by 51 prominent former intelligence community leaders ahead of the presidential election. The signers, you will recall, claimed that the New York Post’s devastating story about Hunter Biden’s laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
This was no small thing. Their pivotal letter arguably saved Biden’s candidacy. The Biden campaign and the spies who signed the letter knew that the leftist media would pick up their narrative, and they were not disappointed. Politico immediately published the letter with the headline, “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former officials say.”
Just days after the letter was released, then-candidate Joe Biden used it to shut down questions from then-President Donald Trump, who had raised the matter of the Biden family’s alleged overseas influence-peddling operations in a critical debate.
By coordinating this letter to blunt the effects of the New York Post’s accurate report, the former national security officials abused their power to carry out a manipulation of profound proportions, which arguably swayed the outcome of a presidential election.
Polls have shown that had Biden voters been aware of the Post’s story, many would have switched their votes. Could this have changed the outcome of the election? It’s a distinct possibility.
Likewise, the “Twitter Files” revealed a level of corruption most people never dreamed they’d see in America, culminating in an intentional effort by Democrats, the FBI, Big Tech, and the media to influence the results of a U.S. presidential election.
Moreover, we have learned from whistleblowers that key Justice Department officials allegedly downplayed the investigation of Hunter Biden, which has been ongoing since 2018. One report revealed that FBI agent Timothy Thibault was escorted out of the building last August over his alleged mishandling of the Hunter Biden investigation ahead of the 2020 election.
Democrats also found other ways to interfere in the electoral process. According to the Constitution, changes in election law must be ratified by state legislatures. Ahead of the 2020 election, however, the secretaries of state in crucial battleground states bypassed the legislatures entirely and changed rules pertaining to signature requirements and collection procedures for mail-in ballots in the name of the pandemic.
Speaking at the University of Kentucky last fall, the Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles summed up the relationship between conspiracy theories and the truth: “What the Left calls ‘conspiracy theories,’ we usually end up calling ‘the truth’ eventually.”
Indeed. One need not believe every allegation of Venezuelan interference, Dominion machine corruption, or late night ballot box-stuffing floated by Trump’s team to recognize that some of our most powerful institutions deliberately coordinated with each other to get him out of office. If this reality is too upsetting for Murkowski and her colleagues, then perhaps they ought to point the finger at the officials who made it possible, rather than at the voters paying attention.
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