October 22, 2021 • 35 mins
What really happened in the 2020 election? Millions of Americans, who experienced the most troubling election of their lives, want answers. In her new book, Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections, best-selling author and award-winning journalist Mollie Hemingway reveals how the left-wing media, Democratic leaders, and Big Tech oligarchs colluded to create an election system designed to defeat President Trump.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
On this episode of Newsworld, what really happened in the
twenty twenty election. Millions of Americans who experienced the most
troubling election of their lives really want answers. In her
new book, national bestselling author an award winning journalist, Molly
Hemingway reveals the stories that affected the outcome of the election.
(00:26):
Her book Rigged, How the Media, Big Tech, and the
Democrats Seized our Elections is a thorough accounting of how
the left wing media, democratic leaders, and big tech oligarchs
colluded to create an election system designed to defeat Trump
and future Republican candidates. And I'm really pleased to welcome
(00:48):
my guest, Molly Hemingway. She's a co author of the
national bestseller Justice on Trial, The Kavanaugh Confirmation, in the
Future of the Supreme Court. She's a senior editor of
the online magazine which I recommend highly, The Federalist, which
she helped launch, and she's a Fox News contributor. Molly,
(01:21):
thank you for joining me. Thank you so much. Speaker Ingrid,
I'm curious you're one of the few members of the
media who was able to obtain multiple interviews with former
President Trump. Can you tell us about some of the
other sources you spoke to in developing this. Yeah, when
I wrote Justice on Trial with my co author Kerrie Saverino,
we interviewed more than one hundred people to get the
(01:43):
story of how that confirmation went down, and I knew
I wanted to do a similar approach with the twenty
twenty election, even as crazed and nationwide and complicated as
it was. And so I did get to interview President
Trump three times, and that was very high helpful. But
also just many people in the campaign, the Republican National Committee,
(02:04):
and then quite a few people at the state level
and local election officials, because so much of what happened
occurred at the state and local level, and it was
important for me to understand what they were dealing with.
And so I found that insight from these people, whether
they were really high level or whether they were local
election attorneys figuring stuff out in Philadelphia, the whole thing
(02:27):
was helpful. Yeah, it's really interesting as I think back
over the years, I think the last time Democrats actually
accepted the legitimacy of losing in a presidential campaign was
in nineteen eighty eight, when George H. W. Bush won
by a huge margin. The fact is that in two
thousand they smeared President George W. Bush and kept saying
(02:48):
that he was selected, not elected. When Bush won reelection
in two thousand and four, many on the left claimed
that voting machines in Ohio had been rigged to deliver
fraudulent votes. And after the twenty sixteen election, the political
and media establishments claimed Russian collusion as to why Trump won,
which I always thought was because nobody could actually walk
(03:10):
in and tell Hillary to her face that she was
a terrible candidate. Why do you see this constant pressure
on the left to not accept election outcomes. Well, this
situation has been bad for a while, as you know
that Democrats haven't fully accepted election results for presidential elections
they've lost. But the twenty sixteen situation really deserves focus.
(03:34):
That was one where they couldn't accept that they lost,
to the point that they spread this completely insane conspiracy
theory that they hadn't lost, that Donald Trump had colluded
with Russia to steal the election. And this wasn't something
that was just a fringe theory that a few people
held to. This was embraced by the entire corporate media environment.
(03:57):
The entire Democrat Party, even some squishy Republicans were buying
into this. They kept that drum beat going for years.
It was based on nothing, and it was very damaging
to the republic. And then these same individuals who did
this four years gave each other awards for how they
spread this conspiracy theory. Then said that in twenty twenty,
(04:19):
an election unlike any one we've ever seen in this country,
with hundreds of changes to laws and procedures, with COVID,
and with the media going from bias to outright propaganda,
with tech companies meddling in the election in so many
horrifying ways. Then they said you can't have any questions
about the election. And it's that combination of how crazed
(04:42):
and conspiratorial they were from twenty sixteen through November twenty twenty,
combined with their refusal to allow any discussion of very
real shenanigans and problems that I think is so striking well.
And their reaction to all this was to write what
they call HR one, which would actually make the whole
election process more corrupt. It's striking to me that both
(05:05):
the Caltech MIT Voting Technology Project back in two thousand
and one said that the greatest fraud problems may lie
in absentee balloting, and in two thousand and five of
bipartisan commission, ironically co chaired by Jimmy Carter, found that
absentee balloting was the largest source of potential fraud in
American elections. And the reaction the Democrat says to maximize
(05:29):
the likelihood of millions and millions of people voting absentee.
What do you ascribe to their underlying passion for trying
to create the maximum opportunity for vote theft? Right up
until about a year ago, everyone acknowledged that mail in
balloting was the largest source of fraud or just other
election irregularities. That was true in the United States, where
(05:52):
the New York Times and the Washington Post used to
say it. It's true in France where they actually banned
mail in balloting because of so many problems with and
then it became Democrats strategy. And I think the strategy
has a few different reasons behind it. One is that
there really is a partisan divide in willingness or eagerness
(06:13):
to vote by mail. I don't fully understand why this is,
but it is very striking that Republicans are extremely hesitant
to trust a vote by mail process, whereas Democrats tend
to have confidence in it. And so if you privilege
vote by mail and its insecurity over other forms of voting,
you're really privileging the Democrat Party. And there is also
(06:37):
the issue that it became strategy just because the chaos
is actually the point. Mark Elias, Who's someone that I
talk a lot about in the book, is this Democrat attorney.
He was at Perkins Coupi, this very big Democrat firm
that was the pass through for the Russia hoax. They're
the ones who hired the people who created the Russia hoax.
(06:58):
They took Hillary Clinton's money, Democratic National Committee money, and
they invented this false and damaging smear that did so
much damage to the country. Mark Elias is also the
guy who ran the strategy to wildly expand mail in
balloting at the same time that scrutiny of mail in
ballots was eliminated or seriously decreased. And I think it's
because that's the point. They want to create chaos. They
(07:20):
want to have uncertainty, they want to have a much
larger sphere of litigation where they can battle things out.
Elias has a history of winning races that he lost,
by which I mean if you remember the Al Franken
Senate election where he lost that race, but Mark Elias
came in and was able to litigate his way into
a victory. That was a significant victory because it gave
(07:42):
Democrats the supermajority they needed to pass Obamacare. And so
it's a feature for them. The chaos, the confusion, the disruption,
the illegality is a benefit. That's what they're going for.
It's fascinating. I mean, Elias himself is one of the
central figures in the corruption of the American system. His
fingerprints are almost everywhere. They were, certainly in Georgia. He
(08:04):
apparently is sort of the chief lawyer for creating corrupt
elections and gem across across the country. Recognize his importance,
and I think that's his focus. It's absolutely his focus.
He has a long history of doing it. He's been
involved on a lot of races. He has no qualms
about taking completely contradictory positions. For instance, when he was
(08:26):
trying to steal Claudia Tenny's victory in a New York
congressional race in twenty twenty, he was claiming that dominion
voting systems were hackable and corrupt, But then he'll mock
people who say that on the other side of things,
because his goal is simply winning for Democrats. If he's
on the upside of a close recount, he will denounce
recount efforts. If he's on the downside of a recount,
(08:48):
he'll be very tenacious in his fight to enable a recount.
But he has this whole army of help too. It's
kind of easy to win when you have a lot
of money and power behind you. And because he's been
general counsel for so many prominent Democrats and so many
democratic organizations, and he has all of these left wing
groups that are willing to he'll file the lawsuit, but
(09:09):
he'll just take one of their names off the shelf
and get them to pretend that they're the ones who
are actually fighting to decrease election security. And Republicans really
have not done that. Now, partly they haven't done that
for reasons of their own failure, but partly I also
get into this in the book. They've had some legal
challenges that made it impossible for them to do election
(09:31):
day operations and oversight for nearly forty years and I
know you probably are aware of this, but I had
no idea that they were under this consent decree arising
from a conflict in the early nineteen eighties in New
Jersey where they weren't allowed to do any election day
oversight until twenty eighteen. They kept on having this continued
(09:52):
because there was this very lefty judge who kept keeping
them under this consent decree and he even took senior
status where he retained some of his old cases just
so he could keep it going. And it's just insane.
Republicans were fighting with both hands tied behind their back.
They had no ability to do litigation until twenty eighteen.
(10:12):
They almost had it continued even at that point because
Sean Spicer literally was on the wrong floor of Trump
Tower one day and they almost extended the consent decree
even longer. So there just wasn't that muscle memory with Republicans.
There's not the money that Elias and his team of
Democrat attorneys have, and also there was a lack of
creativity and innovation and strategy behind it too. Yeah, I mean,
(10:35):
I'm very struck that the Democratic lawyers tend to be
tougher and more ruthless and more experienced and candidly just
smarter than the Republican lawyers. It's kind of odd. They're
willing to do things that Republicans aren't. That might be
too Republicans credit. But this is warfare and it's politics,
and you have to be tough. Well, I mean in
(11:19):
Georgia where you look at the consent degree there in
the agreement that they got who Stacey Abrams which was
Mark Elias. Again, you have a national level player coming
in dealing with Georgia Republican lawyers who are simply out
of their league. They're not ready to deal with somebody
of his experience and his power. And I talked with
some of them about why they agreed. So what happened
(11:41):
there is Mark Elias came in and sued the Secretary
of State. It's a common strategy Elias and other Democrats use.
All election law changes are supposed to happen through the
state legislature, but sometimes you don't have a friendly state
legislature who will be willing to go along with your plot,
and so he would sue a state official and get
them to settle. Now, usually he was doing that against
(12:02):
Democrat state officials in Georgia. He did it with a
Republican state official, and the Republican agreed to it. And
that was one of many things where Georgia was a
frustrating mess compared to other states. And partly though, it
wasn't just Raffensburger who agreed to that, there were other
Republicans who counseled him to agree to it. Their thinking was,
(12:23):
and I think this really speaks to what you're saying.
If we agree to this, then judges will go easy
on us in later battles. I mean, this is not
an approach that Democrat attorneys take. They go for the
jugular every single time, and then they win. You know,
however many they win. Republicans sort of take this defensive
posture like there's something wrong with election security, when in
(12:44):
fact it actually is very important for the survival of
the republic. They apologize for it, or at least they
did in Georgia. I talked with Florida officials and they
said that when people came after them to weaken their
election integrity and they claimed that election integrity is racist,
they told them all to buzz off. But in Georgia,
for some reason, it worked and they all kind of
(13:05):
coward and decided to agree to a weakening of mail
in balloting verification. I don't think they realized at the
time how many ballots would come out that way. But
then they did other stuff they weren't even being asked
to do, like mailing out to every single address on
the list an application for a mail in ballot. They
didn't need to do that, or if they did it,
they could have combined it with some kind of security measure,
(13:26):
like the applications could have come back if the address
was undeliverable. You know, they were sending them out first
class mail. This should have been something they could have done.
There's just a lot of really weird and frankly stupid
decisions made by the Georgia Secretary of States Office, and
I get into it in great detail in the book.
But it was frustrating because I think they should have
known better. Well, that's what I'm struck with the Georgia.
(13:49):
A series of agreements were like amateur city. I mean,
you couldn't quite figure out why they would agree to
set up to rig a game. I tell people, I
don't believe the election was stole on election Day. I
think the whole election was rigged, and the rigging was
like a year long process. I mean, that's where your
book is perfect and as actually what Trump should pick
(14:10):
up on. I mean, you know, instead of talking about
stealing the election on election Day, he really ought to
be talking about this was the most rigged election in
American history. And I think your book really helps make
that case. And it's not just what we're talking about
with elias and weakening protections. It's so much more and
it was all coordinated. I'd talked in the book about
(14:30):
how Mark Zuckerberg, one of the world's wealthiest and most
powerful men, spent four hundred and nineteen million dollars to
do a private takeover of government election offices. This is
another issue where Georgia plays a huge role, because Georgia
got more funding than any other state relative to its population.
It gets forty five million dollars in what are called
(14:52):
Zuckerberg Bucks or Zuckbucks. And what he did is he
funded these left wing organizations and then they in turn
funded produc dominently democrat counties in swing states. They brought
in an army of people to do voter registration, targeted
voter registration in Democrat heavy areas, ballot design, ballot translation,
(15:13):
ballot counting, ballot harvesting, ballot everything, and they went into
a system that is supposed to be scrupulously nonpartisan. And
you again compare, just because it's easy. Example, you compare Florida,
which got a little bit of Zuckerberg funding but not
nearly as much as Georgia. That state goes two points
to the right for Republicans. Trump won by one, he
(15:34):
wins by three. In twenty twenty. Georgia goes from what
five points for Trump to one point for Biden. It's
a massive change. It doesn't make any sense unless you
understand that they were embedding into the system, that they
were artificially driving up votes in blue areas and not
read areas, and that this was a very partisan takeover
(15:55):
of government election offices. And I just want to say again,
unlike every other state where you see this, it was
the Republican Secretary of States office that thought it would
be a great idea to bring these people in to
run Democrat get out the vote operations from inside the system.
It's just mind boggling. Having been active in campaigns for
(16:16):
a very very long time, I don't understand how somebody
can spend over four hundred million dollars to effect an election,
and it's not a violation of campaign law. So there
were some challenges before the election where people suspected something
was wrong, but judges tended to say, well, they're funding
both Democrat and Republican counties, and that was true. In Pennsylvania.
(16:40):
They funded Republican counties to the tune of like five
thousand dollars literally five thousand dollars, Philadelphia ten million dollars,
so technically bipartisan, but not in any meaningful sense even
when you adjust for population. They were strategic in how
they did it, but it was hard to detect because
a lot of this information only became clear after the election.
(17:04):
And now researchers are looking into what the effect of
this partisan funding was, and they are finding a very
partisan effect. So there was this team of researchers in Texas.
They were really interested because they are Texas based, so
they were interested in how it affected Texas. They did
Bayesian analysis. These economists did a very highly sensitive way
(17:24):
of analyzing the data to determine what the effect of
this funding was and determined that it yielded two hundred
thousand more votes for Biden than if it hadn't happened.
And you think, well, Texas safely for Trump and Republicans.
Republicans had a great year in Texas. So what's the
big deal. Well, you might remember in twenty eighteen Ted
(17:46):
Cruz won by only just over two hundred thousand votes
a statewide race. Two hundred thousand votes is massive, and
all it takes in Georgia is eleven thousand votes, and
they spent forty five million dollars in Georgia. Do you
think it was enough to have the election go the
opposite way? It's not even in question. It's such a
big effect that this had. Well, and frankly, I'm worried
(18:06):
very much about the governor's race in Virginia for the
same reason. Fairfax County has already announced that they're going
to report late, which means, of course, they'll let the
rest of the state run up Junkin's majority, and then
they'll try to find enough extra votes to offset it,
even if those votes involve people who aren't real I
think Virginia has been a test case for Democrats in
(18:28):
many ways. They have this early off your election, and
so what happened four years ago was they took over
the state legislature through very targeted funding and voter efforts,
and sometimes they're doing it in violation of the law.
There are all sorts of lawsuits flying about right now.
Of course, judges don't like to get involved in election
(18:49):
disputes prior to elections, and then they also don't like
to get involved after elections, and it's creating a complete
mess because again the Democrat strategy is chaos and confusion,
and you need some of the Supreme Court opinions or
you know, when they would decide not to hear an opinion,
sometimes the judges would offer some thoughts on that, and
I think it was Thomas who said that he was
(19:10):
very opposed to not hearing a case. Their grounds were
that it was moot because it wouldn't affect the outcome
of the election in this particular case, and he said,
that's why we should hear it. We should, of course
clarify these issues when it's not going to have a
profound effect one way or the other, because there are
elections coming up where we need to clarify is it
legal to do this or not legal to do that?
(19:31):
And you have counties in states across the country where
you see a disparate reaction to the law. So again
in Pennsylvania, they say you're not supposed to check ballots
before election day, but the Trump campaign figures out that
they are checking ballots before election day in some Democrat counties,
by which I mean they are looking at the outer
envelope to see if everything's filled out correctly and taking
(19:52):
it back to voters if it's not. Republican lead counties
viewed that as illegal. Democrat counties were able to do it,
that disenfranchises the voters in the Republican led counties, you know.
So it's all these problems where you need to clarify specifically,
can you do this or can you not do that?
Sometimes Republicans would be fine with learning that the law
doesn't apply, so long as it's clear so that if
(20:14):
they do it, they don't get in trouble. When I
finally understood the scale of what Zuckerberg had done, it's
a breathtaking assault on the whole system. And it may
be technically legal because he has really good lawyers, but
it clearly goes against the entire spirit of the Constitution
and the entire spirit of American law. But what was
even more visible and obvious and is going on to
(20:37):
this very day. The degree to which the Silicon Valley
oligarchs are enthusiastic about censoring conservatives and censoring people that
they don't agree with. There's one thing when they knocked
Trump off before the election, even though he was the
incumbent President of States and went on to receive well
over seventy three million votes. So the Taliban as a
(21:00):
spokesman on Twitter, but Trump doesn't. If you think about it,
it's kind of astonishing. It's such totalitarian and terrifying stuff
happening there. Again, I think back to the twenty sixteen election,
where the media and other Democrats claimed that the entire
election was in question because Russians had bought like one
(21:21):
hundred thousand dollars in Facebook ads, some of which targeted Trump,
some of which targeted Hillary Clinton. Compare that paltry spending
with what big Tech did when they all openly stated
after the twenty sixteen election that they would never let
what happened happen again. And what they meant by that
was because the media were so corrupt, Donald Trump was
(21:42):
able to take his message directly to the American people
through social media. So they felt guilty that if people
actually were able to hear from a candidate that they
might vote for him. So they said that they would
squash his messaging and they did, and they did it
in multiple ways. They censored and d platformed non leftist voices,
particularly the ones that were effective meme makers and publishers
(22:04):
and people that really are important for freedom of information.
They gained their algorithms to suppress conservative speech and elevate
leftist speech, and they also did that most horrifying thing
or you know, and they're even like censoring the president
himself when he would say mail in balloting has some problems,
and they would censor it, and they would say, this
(22:24):
isn't true, even though it's true. You could have any
kind of crazy conspiracy theory on the left, like you
had prominent people claiming that the Post Office was engaged
in a conspiracy against Joe Biden. That wouldn't get flagged.
Only President tweets would be flagged. And the worst thing
for me was the hunter Biden's story, which is inarguably
something Americans had a right to know about before they voted.
(22:47):
This was about the Biden family business, which near as
we can tell is that foreign leaders and oligarchs give
lots of money to members of the Biden family and
we're really not sure or why, and that should raise suspicions.
You know, why is this crack adduled an income poop
getting so much money from foreign oligarchs? What are they
(23:09):
getting in return for it? That should have been a
major source of journalistic inquiry, and it was either a
minor source or ignored or brutally suppressed. And that alone
affects how many millions of votes by not sharing that information.
The degree to which the Biden families corrupt and the
(23:30):
degree to which the system is corrupt and protecting their
corruption is sort of a real challenge to the whole
basis of America. I think I find by the way,
if we send out pictures, which my wife Callisto, loves
to do, they get really big responses. If we send
out a thought piece, it gets a much smaller response
(23:51):
because it's suppressed. And they apparently for some reason, don't
suppress the pictures, but they do suppress the written material
that's going on right now. And it's a perennial fight
mostly with Google, but then secondarily with Facebook, not much
with Twitter at the present time for some reason, and
they're more powerful than the most powerful government in the world,
(24:12):
the United States. They were able to d platform the
sitting president and face no repercussions. And I think a
lot of Americans look at this. I mean even a
lot of foreigners looked at this and said, this is horrifying.
But they're not seeing an appropriate level of reaction from
the leadership that they think should be there. I understand
that Democrats, because of the way that they handled this election,
(24:35):
won the presidency, the Senate, and the House, but that
doesn't mean that Republicans don't exist anywhere. A lot of
Americans are wondering, why are we not seeing more of
a pushback to some of these totalitarian measures, this dystopic
communication environment that you would associate more with Soviet Russia
than the United States of America. To what each stent,
(25:13):
Are you worried that in twenty two and twenty four
we're going to see the same kind of deliberate rigging
of the election? Well, I think it's important that people
think that way. Thinking forward. People say, oh, you shouldn't
talk about this, it's in the past, it's over. Well
it's not over a lot of the changes that they
made are affecting all elections going forward. And if you
(25:33):
want to have election security and confidence in elections and
a meaningful system where the entire system isn't rigged, you
have to care going forward. But I'm actually somewhat optimistic
about where we are now versus where we were a
few years ago. The awareness people have of how important
election integrity is is just off the charts compared to
(25:54):
where it was a couple of years ago. You're people
more involved, You're people actually working to ban certain practices.
Is that threatened the integrity of the system, like the
private takeover of government election offices or decreased scrutiny for
mail in ballots. So these issues aren't new. You think
about the Democrat Party disenfranchised an entire race of people
(26:16):
in the South Jim Crow laws where they didn't want
black people voting, and so they had all these means
of manipulating the system. And we targeted it and we
worked on it, and we fixed it, and so people
shouldn't despair over it. This is a part of our
history that people with power like to disenfranchise other people
and call it election integrity when it's not. And so
(26:39):
people are aware and working on it, and there's a
lot more interest and even money, because I think money
is required for this battle. I hope the money is
being spent smartly. But Democrats really have a really great
coordinated system in place to weaken election integrity, and it's
important that the rest of the country have resources to
fight it. You look back at the totality of your research,
(27:04):
do you think it's fair to say that the two
twenty election was in fact rigged? I love the title,
and I had actually thought before the election that the
corruption of the media and big tech alone created a
system that was not free your fare. And you look
at international election observers and they say that if you're
(27:24):
in a propaganda environment, if people don't have freedom of information,
if they are threatened physically for their political views, you know,
all things that we experienced in spades in the years
prior to twenty twenty, then you don't have a free
and fair election. Once I actually researched what happened with
the election laws and processes and private funding, I mean,
it's not even close to being in question. It was
(27:46):
no way to run an election. We cannot have a
country survive if we do this in the future, and
it's very important that people do what it takes to
clean things up. I had talked with President Trump about
changing from stone to Rigged before your book came out,
as he talked to you about it. Your book is
the perfect text for what I think he should say,
(28:07):
which is on behalf of the American people. He had
challenged the entire national establishment, and the national establishment literally
from election night on in twenty sixteen set out to
destroy him. I think you have to go back to
Andrew Jackson to see a fight this deep, not counting
the Civil War, which is a different kind of animal,
but a power struggle between the establishment and a genuine
(28:30):
upsurge in populism. And obviously he's not going away. And
I think as people read your book and begin to
really think about you've got to be very angry that
people like Zuckerberg think that they have the right to
dictate to the American people and to rig the game
on behalf of their ideology and their values. It's exactly
(28:51):
the opposite of the American model. So what I found
it interesting about interviewing President Trump is that and I
know you probably know this better than I do, he
actually understands all these issues and talks about them. He
knows in detail what they did, and he knows why.
He understands the big picture that they were willing to
do whatever it took. When that Time magazine article came
(29:12):
out that confessed the crime, you know, they called it
election fortifying, but of course it's election rigging. It was
about the cabal of left wing elites who did everything
it took and threw out every norm in order to
ensure that Donald Trump wasn't reelected. He gets all of that,
He understands the complexity of the situation, and then when
he publicly talks about it, he puts it in terms
(29:33):
of theft. And I understand that he likes to simplify arguments.
And I don't give advice to politicians, that's not my role.
But I think partly the problem is the accurate story
is such a complicated story, but it's actually really important because,
like we're talking about, they're going to keep doing it
going forward. But that's why your book's helpful, because your
book begins to make obvious and begins to have the
(29:56):
factual presentation that you can't had. In a thirty second
television commentary, I'm curious what's your advice to both conservative
activists and publications and to conservative candidates for twenty twenty
two given what you've learned. One of the big problems
right now is that corporate media have successfully kept people
(30:19):
from talking about what really happened, and I personally believe
that's because they want to run the same operation again.
So I think reframing the conversation around what actually happened
and being bold in defense of the idea that elections
have to have security if you have a republic, you know,
democracy depends on the consent not of the winners, but
of the losers. Winners always accept election results. Losers need
(30:43):
to have confidence in the election results in order for
the republic to survive. So I think focusing the conversation
on what actually can be done and getting it done,
and also just reminding people the consequences of not having
election integrity we have because of the way we ran
this election, uniparty control in the country. It has not
even been a year and the country is really suffering,
(31:05):
and so all of these issues are connected and they
need to be thought through in a connected fashion if
people want to save the republic going forward. I just
have to ask you before I let you go, have
you picked a new book yet? I actually just had
this realization after this book. This book is selling well,
and so I thought, oh, I've co authored a book
(31:25):
that was a bestseller, and now I've authored a book
that's a bestseller, and I guess I'm an author now.
It took me two books to realize that I write
books right. Well, for me, it's like after having a baby,
you say I'm never going to do this again, and
then a little while later you're like, one't another baby?
Be nice? So in this case, I'm at the point
of thinking I'll never write another book, but we'll see
what happens. In a year. I wrote a lot on
(31:46):
the Russia collusion hoax. As a reporter. I researched that,
and I'm very proud of the work I did and
the work we did at the Federalist. I kind of
am waiting for that story to conclude so that I
can write a book about the whole thing and make
sense an order of it. But it just dragging on,
so I don't know how long I'm gonna have to wait.
I was gonna say, you could write a book called
the Hoax about the Russian hoax. It really is sort
(32:07):
of a variation on Churchills and enigma wrapped in are riddled.
It is unbelievable that the country endured that it's the
journalistic story of the millennium, and people just aren't covering
it because they were participants in it. And so those
of us who did figure it out pretty early that
it was a hoax and that it was a lie,
we had to do a lot of work with not
a lot of resources, but we were able to get
(32:29):
the true story out and I'm so proud to have
been a part of that. But it reminds you of
how corrupt some government actors are, some politicians are, and
how they engage in this corrupt behavior. It wasn't just
a one off. It's literally the same team that did
that that did to our twenty twenty elections. What they
did right, and the depth of just raising dishonesty by
(32:52):
some of the members of Congress, for example, it's breathtaking
how willing they were to go out and lie and
make no bones about it. Why not have there been
any repercussions. Adam Schiff claimed that he had evidence of
collusion between Trump and Russia that was a lie, and
he has not been held accountable, and the corporate media
still reward him and treat him as if he's a
(33:13):
credible source. There's no downside to lying in this country.
They operate on the premise that the narrative is more
important than the fact. Yeah, it's amazing. They have the
political power to show for it too. Listen, I want
to thank you for joining me if you've done something
really important and really complicated. The fact that you slowed
down actually took apart what happened put it together in
(33:35):
an understandable form. I think everybody who has any doubt
about the twenty election or to purchase a copy of
Rigged how the media, big tech on the Democrats seized
our elections. But we're gonna have a link to the
book on our show page. I look forward to whatever
you write next, and I look forward to everything you
write at the Federalists and seeing you on Fox. So
(33:55):
it's really only a terrific thing that you would come
and be willing to share with us. Thank you so much,
and it's an honor to be here with you. Thank
you to my guest Molly Hemingway. You can get a
link to buy her new book Rigged, How the Media,
Big Tech, and the Democrats seized our Elections on our
(34:19):
show page at newtsworld dot com. Newtsworld is produced by
Gingwish three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Debbie Myers,
our producer is Garnsey Sloan, and our researcher is Rachel Peterson.
The artwork for the show was created by Steve Penley.
Special thanks to the team at Gingwidge three sixty. If
(34:41):
you've been enjoying Newtsworld, I hope you'll go to Apple
Podcast and both rate us with five stars and give
us a review so others can learn what it's all about.
Right now, listeners of newts World can sign up for
my three free weekly columns at Gingwidge three sixty dot
com slash newsletter. I'm Newt Gangridge. This is news work.
On this episode of Newsworld, what really happened in the
twenty twenty election. Millions of Americans who experienced the most
troubling election of their lives really want answers. In her
new book, national bestselling author an award winning journalist, Molly
Hemingway reveals the stories that affected the outcome of the election.
(00:26):
Her book Rigged, How the Media, Big Tech, and the
Democrats Seized our Elections is a thorough accounting of how
the left wing media, democratic leaders, and big tech oligarchs
colluded to create an election system designed to defeat Trump
and future Republican candidates. And I'm really pleased to welcome
(00:48):
my guest, Molly Hemingway. She's a co author of the
national bestseller Justice on Trial, The Kavanaugh Confirmation, in the
Future of the Supreme Court. She's a senior editor of
the online magazine which I recommend highly, The Federalist, which
she helped launch, and she's a Fox News contributor. Molly,
(01:21):
thank you for joining me. Thank you so much. Speaker Ingrid,
I'm curious you're one of the few members of the
media who was able to obtain multiple interviews with former
President Trump. Can you tell us about some of the
other sources you spoke to in developing this. Yeah, when
I wrote Justice on Trial with my co author Kerrie Saverino,
we interviewed more than one hundred people to get the
(01:43):
story of how that confirmation went down, and I knew
I wanted to do a similar approach with the twenty
twenty election, even as crazed and nationwide and complicated as
it was. And so I did get to interview President
Trump three times, and that was very high helpful. But
also just many people in the campaign, the Republican National Committee,
(02:04):
and then quite a few people at the state level
and local election officials, because so much of what happened
occurred at the state and local level, and it was
important for me to understand what they were dealing with.
And so I found that insight from these people, whether
they were really high level or whether they were local
election attorneys figuring stuff out in Philadelphia, the whole thing
(02:27):
was helpful. Yeah, it's really interesting as I think back
over the years, I think the last time Democrats actually
accepted the legitimacy of losing in a presidential campaign was
in nineteen eighty eight, when George H. W. Bush won
by a huge margin. The fact is that in two
thousand they smeared President George W. Bush and kept saying
(02:48):
that he was selected, not elected. When Bush won reelection
in two thousand and four, many on the left claimed
that voting machines in Ohio had been rigged to deliver
fraudulent votes. And after the twenty sixteen election, the political
and media establishments claimed Russian collusion as to why Trump won,
which I always thought was because nobody could actually walk
(03:10):
in and tell Hillary to her face that she was
a terrible candidate. Why do you see this constant pressure
on the left to not accept election outcomes. Well, this
situation has been bad for a while, as you know
that Democrats haven't fully accepted election results for presidential elections
they've lost. But the twenty sixteen situation really deserves focus.
(03:34):
That was one where they couldn't accept that they lost,
to the point that they spread this completely insane conspiracy
theory that they hadn't lost, that Donald Trump had colluded
with Russia to steal the election. And this wasn't something
that was just a fringe theory that a few people
held to. This was embraced by the entire corporate media environment.
(03:57):
The entire Democrat Party, even some squishy Republicans were buying
into this. They kept that drum beat going for years.
It was based on nothing, and it was very damaging
to the republic. And then these same individuals who did
this four years gave each other awards for how they
spread this conspiracy theory. Then said that in twenty twenty,
(04:19):
an election unlike any one we've ever seen in this country,
with hundreds of changes to laws and procedures, with COVID,
and with the media going from bias to outright propaganda,
with tech companies meddling in the election in so many
horrifying ways. Then they said you can't have any questions
about the election. And it's that combination of how crazed
(04:42):
and conspiratorial they were from twenty sixteen through November twenty twenty,
combined with their refusal to allow any discussion of very
real shenanigans and problems that I think is so striking well.
And their reaction to all this was to write what
they call HR one, which would actually make the whole
election process more corrupt. It's striking to me that both
(05:05):
the Caltech MIT Voting Technology Project back in two thousand
and one said that the greatest fraud problems may lie
in absentee balloting, and in two thousand and five of
bipartisan commission, ironically co chaired by Jimmy Carter, found that
absentee balloting was the largest source of potential fraud in
American elections. And the reaction the Democrat says to maximize
(05:29):
the likelihood of millions and millions of people voting absentee.
What do you ascribe to their underlying passion for trying
to create the maximum opportunity for vote theft? Right up
until about a year ago, everyone acknowledged that mail in
balloting was the largest source of fraud or just other
election irregularities. That was true in the United States, where
(05:52):
the New York Times and the Washington Post used to
say it. It's true in France where they actually banned
mail in balloting because of so many problems with and
then it became Democrats strategy. And I think the strategy
has a few different reasons behind it. One is that
there really is a partisan divide in willingness or eagerness
(06:13):
to vote by mail. I don't fully understand why this is,
but it is very striking that Republicans are extremely hesitant
to trust a vote by mail process, whereas Democrats tend
to have confidence in it. And so if you privilege
vote by mail and its insecurity over other forms of voting,
you're really privileging the Democrat Party. And there is also
(06:37):
the issue that it became strategy just because the chaos
is actually the point. Mark Elias, Who's someone that I
talk a lot about in the book, is this Democrat attorney.
He was at Perkins Coupi, this very big Democrat firm
that was the pass through for the Russia hoax. They're
the ones who hired the people who created the Russia hoax.
(06:58):
They took Hillary Clinton's money, Democratic National Committee money, and
they invented this false and damaging smear that did so
much damage to the country. Mark Elias is also the
guy who ran the strategy to wildly expand mail in
balloting at the same time that scrutiny of mail in
ballots was eliminated or seriously decreased. And I think it's
because that's the point. They want to create chaos. They
(07:20):
want to have uncertainty, they want to have a much
larger sphere of litigation where they can battle things out.
Elias has a history of winning races that he lost,
by which I mean if you remember the Al Franken
Senate election where he lost that race, but Mark Elias
came in and was able to litigate his way into
a victory. That was a significant victory because it gave
(07:42):
Democrats the supermajority they needed to pass Obamacare. And so
it's a feature for them. The chaos, the confusion, the disruption,
the illegality is a benefit. That's what they're going for.
It's fascinating. I mean, Elias himself is one of the
central figures in the corruption of the American system. His
fingerprints are almost everywhere. They were, certainly in Georgia. He
(08:04):
apparently is sort of the chief lawyer for creating corrupt
elections and gem across across the country. Recognize his importance,
and I think that's his focus. It's absolutely his focus.
He has a long history of doing it. He's been
involved on a lot of races. He has no qualms
about taking completely contradictory positions. For instance, when he was
(08:26):
trying to steal Claudia Tenny's victory in a New York
congressional race in twenty twenty, he was claiming that dominion
voting systems were hackable and corrupt, But then he'll mock
people who say that on the other side of things,
because his goal is simply winning for Democrats. If he's
on the upside of a close recount, he will denounce
recount efforts. If he's on the downside of a recount,
(08:48):
he'll be very tenacious in his fight to enable a recount.
But he has this whole army of help too. It's
kind of easy to win when you have a lot
of money and power behind you. And because he's been
general counsel for so many prominent Democrats and so many
democratic organizations, and he has all of these left wing
groups that are willing to he'll file the lawsuit, but
(09:09):
he'll just take one of their names off the shelf
and get them to pretend that they're the ones who
are actually fighting to decrease election security. And Republicans really
have not done that. Now, partly they haven't done that
for reasons of their own failure, but partly I also
get into this in the book. They've had some legal
challenges that made it impossible for them to do election
(09:31):
day operations and oversight for nearly forty years and I
know you probably are aware of this, but I had
no idea that they were under this consent decree arising
from a conflict in the early nineteen eighties in New
Jersey where they weren't allowed to do any election day
oversight until twenty eighteen. They kept on having this continued
(09:52):
because there was this very lefty judge who kept keeping
them under this consent decree and he even took senior
status where he retained some of his old cases just
so he could keep it going. And it's just insane.
Republicans were fighting with both hands tied behind their back.
They had no ability to do litigation until twenty eighteen.
(10:12):
They almost had it continued even at that point because
Sean Spicer literally was on the wrong floor of Trump
Tower one day and they almost extended the consent decree
even longer. So there just wasn't that muscle memory with Republicans.
There's not the money that Elias and his team of
Democrat attorneys have, and also there was a lack of
creativity and innovation and strategy behind it too. Yeah, I mean,
(10:35):
I'm very struck that the Democratic lawyers tend to be
tougher and more ruthless and more experienced and candidly just
smarter than the Republican lawyers. It's kind of odd. They're
willing to do things that Republicans aren't. That might be
too Republicans credit. But this is warfare and it's politics,
and you have to be tough. Well, I mean in
(11:19):
Georgia where you look at the consent degree there in
the agreement that they got who Stacey Abrams which was
Mark Elias. Again, you have a national level player coming
in dealing with Georgia Republican lawyers who are simply out
of their league. They're not ready to deal with somebody
of his experience and his power. And I talked with
some of them about why they agreed. So what happened
(11:41):
there is Mark Elias came in and sued the Secretary
of State. It's a common strategy Elias and other Democrats use.
All election law changes are supposed to happen through the
state legislature, but sometimes you don't have a friendly state
legislature who will be willing to go along with your plot,
and so he would sue a state official and get
them to settle. Now, usually he was doing that against
(12:02):
Democrat state officials in Georgia. He did it with a
Republican state official, and the Republican agreed to it. And
that was one of many things where Georgia was a
frustrating mess compared to other states. And partly though, it
wasn't just Raffensburger who agreed to that, there were other
Republicans who counseled him to agree to it. Their thinking was,
(12:23):
and I think this really speaks to what you're saying.
If we agree to this, then judges will go easy
on us in later battles. I mean, this is not
an approach that Democrat attorneys take. They go for the
jugular every single time, and then they win. You know,
however many they win. Republicans sort of take this defensive
posture like there's something wrong with election security, when in
(12:44):
fact it actually is very important for the survival of
the republic. They apologize for it, or at least they
did in Georgia. I talked with Florida officials and they
said that when people came after them to weaken their
election integrity and they claimed that election integrity is racist,
they told them all to buzz off. But in Georgia,
for some reason, it worked and they all kind of
(13:05):
coward and decided to agree to a weakening of mail
in balloting verification. I don't think they realized at the
time how many ballots would come out that way. But
then they did other stuff they weren't even being asked
to do, like mailing out to every single address on
the list an application for a mail in ballot. They
didn't need to do that, or if they did it,
they could have combined it with some kind of security measure,
(13:26):
like the applications could have come back if the address
was undeliverable. You know, they were sending them out first
class mail. This should have been something they could have done.
There's just a lot of really weird and frankly stupid
decisions made by the Georgia Secretary of States Office, and
I get into it in great detail in the book.
But it was frustrating because I think they should have
known better. Well, that's what I'm struck with the Georgia.
(13:49):
A series of agreements were like amateur city. I mean,
you couldn't quite figure out why they would agree to
set up to rig a game. I tell people, I
don't believe the election was stole on election Day. I
think the whole election was rigged, and the rigging was
like a year long process. I mean, that's where your
book is perfect and as actually what Trump should pick
(14:10):
up on. I mean, you know, instead of talking about
stealing the election on election Day, he really ought to
be talking about this was the most rigged election in
American history. And I think your book really helps make
that case. And it's not just what we're talking about
with elias and weakening protections. It's so much more and
it was all coordinated. I'd talked in the book about
(14:30):
how Mark Zuckerberg, one of the world's wealthiest and most
powerful men, spent four hundred and nineteen million dollars to
do a private takeover of government election offices. This is
another issue where Georgia plays a huge role, because Georgia
got more funding than any other state relative to its population.
It gets forty five million dollars in what are called
(14:52):
Zuckerberg Bucks or Zuckbucks. And what he did is he
funded these left wing organizations and then they in turn
funded produc dominently democrat counties in swing states. They brought
in an army of people to do voter registration, targeted
voter registration in Democrat heavy areas, ballot design, ballot translation,
(15:13):
ballot counting, ballot harvesting, ballot everything, and they went into
a system that is supposed to be scrupulously nonpartisan. And
you again compare, just because it's easy. Example, you compare Florida,
which got a little bit of Zuckerberg funding but not
nearly as much as Georgia. That state goes two points
to the right for Republicans. Trump won by one, he
(15:34):
wins by three. In twenty twenty. Georgia goes from what
five points for Trump to one point for Biden. It's
a massive change. It doesn't make any sense unless you
understand that they were embedding into the system, that they
were artificially driving up votes in blue areas and not
read areas, and that this was a very partisan takeover
(15:55):
of government election offices. And I just want to say again,
unlike every other state where you see this, it was
the Republican Secretary of States office that thought it would
be a great idea to bring these people in to
run Democrat get out the vote operations from inside the system.
It's just mind boggling. Having been active in campaigns for
(16:16):
a very very long time, I don't understand how somebody
can spend over four hundred million dollars to effect an election,
and it's not a violation of campaign law. So there
were some challenges before the election where people suspected something
was wrong, but judges tended to say, well, they're funding
both Democrat and Republican counties, and that was true. In Pennsylvania.
(16:40):
They funded Republican counties to the tune of like five
thousand dollars literally five thousand dollars, Philadelphia ten million dollars,
so technically bipartisan, but not in any meaningful sense even
when you adjust for population. They were strategic in how
they did it, but it was hard to detect because
a lot of this information only became clear after the election.
(17:04):
And now researchers are looking into what the effect of
this partisan funding was, and they are finding a very
partisan effect. So there was this team of researchers in Texas.
They were really interested because they are Texas based, so
they were interested in how it affected Texas. They did
Bayesian analysis. These economists did a very highly sensitive way
(17:24):
of analyzing the data to determine what the effect of
this funding was and determined that it yielded two hundred
thousand more votes for Biden than if it hadn't happened.
And you think, well, Texas safely for Trump and Republicans.
Republicans had a great year in Texas. So what's the
big deal. Well, you might remember in twenty eighteen Ted
(17:46):
Cruz won by only just over two hundred thousand votes
a statewide race. Two hundred thousand votes is massive, and
all it takes in Georgia is eleven thousand votes, and
they spent forty five million dollars in Georgia. Do you
think it was enough to have the election go the
opposite way? It's not even in question. It's such a
big effect that this had. Well, and frankly, I'm worried
(18:06):
very much about the governor's race in Virginia for the
same reason. Fairfax County has already announced that they're going
to report late, which means, of course, they'll let the
rest of the state run up Junkin's majority, and then
they'll try to find enough extra votes to offset it,
even if those votes involve people who aren't real I
think Virginia has been a test case for Democrats in
(18:28):
many ways. They have this early off your election, and
so what happened four years ago was they took over
the state legislature through very targeted funding and voter efforts,
and sometimes they're doing it in violation of the law.
There are all sorts of lawsuits flying about right now.
Of course, judges don't like to get involved in election
(18:49):
disputes prior to elections, and then they also don't like
to get involved after elections, and it's creating a complete
mess because again the Democrat strategy is chaos and confusion,
and you need some of the Supreme Court opinions or
you know, when they would decide not to hear an opinion,
sometimes the judges would offer some thoughts on that, and
I think it was Thomas who said that he was
(19:10):
very opposed to not hearing a case. Their grounds were
that it was moot because it wouldn't affect the outcome
of the election in this particular case, and he said,
that's why we should hear it. We should, of course
clarify these issues when it's not going to have a
profound effect one way or the other, because there are
elections coming up where we need to clarify is it
legal to do this or not legal to do that?
(19:31):
And you have counties in states across the country where
you see a disparate reaction to the law. So again
in Pennsylvania, they say you're not supposed to check ballots
before election day, but the Trump campaign figures out that
they are checking ballots before election day in some Democrat counties,
by which I mean they are looking at the outer
envelope to see if everything's filled out correctly and taking
(19:52):
it back to voters if it's not. Republican lead counties
viewed that as illegal. Democrat counties were able to do it,
that disenfranchises the voters in the Republican led counties, you know.
So it's all these problems where you need to clarify specifically,
can you do this or can you not do that?
Sometimes Republicans would be fine with learning that the law
doesn't apply, so long as it's clear so that if
(20:14):
they do it, they don't get in trouble. When I
finally understood the scale of what Zuckerberg had done, it's
a breathtaking assault on the whole system. And it may
be technically legal because he has really good lawyers, but
it clearly goes against the entire spirit of the Constitution
and the entire spirit of American law. But what was
even more visible and obvious and is going on to
(20:37):
this very day. The degree to which the Silicon Valley
oligarchs are enthusiastic about censoring conservatives and censoring people that
they don't agree with. There's one thing when they knocked
Trump off before the election, even though he was the
incumbent President of States and went on to receive well
over seventy three million votes. So the Taliban as a
(21:00):
spokesman on Twitter, but Trump doesn't. If you think about it,
it's kind of astonishing. It's such totalitarian and terrifying stuff
happening there. Again, I think back to the twenty sixteen election,
where the media and other Democrats claimed that the entire
election was in question because Russians had bought like one
(21:21):
hundred thousand dollars in Facebook ads, some of which targeted Trump,
some of which targeted Hillary Clinton. Compare that paltry spending
with what big Tech did when they all openly stated
after the twenty sixteen election that they would never let
what happened happen again. And what they meant by that
was because the media were so corrupt, Donald Trump was
(21:42):
able to take his message directly to the American people
through social media. So they felt guilty that if people
actually were able to hear from a candidate that they
might vote for him. So they said that they would
squash his messaging and they did, and they did it
in multiple ways. They censored and d platformed non leftist voices,
particularly the ones that were effective meme makers and publishers
(22:04):
and people that really are important for freedom of information.
They gained their algorithms to suppress conservative speech and elevate
leftist speech, and they also did that most horrifying thing
or you know, and they're even like censoring the president
himself when he would say mail in balloting has some problems,
and they would censor it, and they would say, this
(22:24):
isn't true, even though it's true. You could have any
kind of crazy conspiracy theory on the left, like you
had prominent people claiming that the Post Office was engaged
in a conspiracy against Joe Biden. That wouldn't get flagged.
Only President tweets would be flagged. And the worst thing
for me was the hunter Biden's story, which is inarguably
something Americans had a right to know about before they voted.
(22:47):
This was about the Biden family business, which near as
we can tell is that foreign leaders and oligarchs give
lots of money to members of the Biden family and
we're really not sure or why, and that should raise suspicions.
You know, why is this crack adduled an income poop
getting so much money from foreign oligarchs? What are they
(23:09):
getting in return for it? That should have been a
major source of journalistic inquiry, and it was either a
minor source or ignored or brutally suppressed. And that alone
affects how many millions of votes by not sharing that information.
The degree to which the Biden families corrupt and the
(23:30):
degree to which the system is corrupt and protecting their
corruption is sort of a real challenge to the whole
basis of America. I think I find by the way,
if we send out pictures, which my wife Callisto, loves
to do, they get really big responses. If we send
out a thought piece, it gets a much smaller response
(23:51):
because it's suppressed. And they apparently for some reason, don't
suppress the pictures, but they do suppress the written material
that's going on right now. And it's a perennial fight
mostly with Google, but then secondarily with Facebook, not much
with Twitter at the present time for some reason, and
they're more powerful than the most powerful government in the world,
(24:12):
the United States. They were able to d platform the
sitting president and face no repercussions. And I think a
lot of Americans look at this. I mean even a
lot of foreigners looked at this and said, this is horrifying.
But they're not seeing an appropriate level of reaction from
the leadership that they think should be there. I understand
that Democrats, because of the way that they handled this election,
(24:35):
won the presidency, the Senate, and the House, but that
doesn't mean that Republicans don't exist anywhere. A lot of
Americans are wondering, why are we not seeing more of
a pushback to some of these totalitarian measures, this dystopic
communication environment that you would associate more with Soviet Russia
than the United States of America. To what each stent,
(25:13):
Are you worried that in twenty two and twenty four
we're going to see the same kind of deliberate rigging
of the election? Well, I think it's important that people
think that way. Thinking forward. People say, oh, you shouldn't
talk about this, it's in the past, it's over. Well
it's not over a lot of the changes that they
made are affecting all elections going forward. And if you
(25:33):
want to have election security and confidence in elections and
a meaningful system where the entire system isn't rigged, you
have to care going forward. But I'm actually somewhat optimistic
about where we are now versus where we were a
few years ago. The awareness people have of how important
election integrity is is just off the charts compared to
(25:54):
where it was a couple of years ago. You're people
more involved, You're people actually working to ban certain practices.
Is that threatened the integrity of the system, like the
private takeover of government election offices or decreased scrutiny for
mail in ballots. So these issues aren't new. You think
about the Democrat Party disenfranchised an entire race of people
(26:16):
in the South Jim Crow laws where they didn't want
black people voting, and so they had all these means
of manipulating the system. And we targeted it and we
worked on it, and we fixed it, and so people
shouldn't despair over it. This is a part of our
history that people with power like to disenfranchise other people
and call it election integrity when it's not. And so
(26:39):
people are aware and working on it, and there's a
lot more interest and even money, because I think money
is required for this battle. I hope the money is
being spent smartly. But Democrats really have a really great
coordinated system in place to weaken election integrity, and it's
important that the rest of the country have resources to
fight it. You look back at the totality of your research,
(27:04):
do you think it's fair to say that the two
twenty election was in fact rigged? I love the title,
and I had actually thought before the election that the
corruption of the media and big tech alone created a
system that was not free your fare. And you look
at international election observers and they say that if you're
(27:24):
in a propaganda environment, if people don't have freedom of information,
if they are threatened physically for their political views, you know,
all things that we experienced in spades in the years
prior to twenty twenty, then you don't have a free
and fair election. Once I actually researched what happened with
the election laws and processes and private funding, I mean,
it's not even close to being in question. It was
(27:46):
no way to run an election. We cannot have a
country survive if we do this in the future, and
it's very important that people do what it takes to
clean things up. I had talked with President Trump about
changing from stone to Rigged before your book came out,
as he talked to you about it. Your book is
the perfect text for what I think he should say,
(28:07):
which is on behalf of the American people. He had
challenged the entire national establishment, and the national establishment literally
from election night on in twenty sixteen set out to
destroy him. I think you have to go back to
Andrew Jackson to see a fight this deep, not counting
the Civil War, which is a different kind of animal,
but a power struggle between the establishment and a genuine
(28:30):
upsurge in populism. And obviously he's not going away. And
I think as people read your book and begin to
really think about you've got to be very angry that
people like Zuckerberg think that they have the right to
dictate to the American people and to rig the game
on behalf of their ideology and their values. It's exactly
(28:51):
the opposite of the American model. So what I found
it interesting about interviewing President Trump is that and I
know you probably know this better than I do, he
actually understands all these issues and talks about them. He
knows in detail what they did, and he knows why.
He understands the big picture that they were willing to
do whatever it took. When that Time magazine article came
(29:12):
out that confessed the crime, you know, they called it
election fortifying, but of course it's election rigging. It was
about the cabal of left wing elites who did everything
it took and threw out every norm in order to
ensure that Donald Trump wasn't reelected. He gets all of that,
He understands the complexity of the situation, and then when
he publicly talks about it, he puts it in terms
(29:33):
of theft. And I understand that he likes to simplify arguments.
And I don't give advice to politicians, that's not my role.
But I think partly the problem is the accurate story
is such a complicated story, but it's actually really important because,
like we're talking about, they're going to keep doing it
going forward. But that's why your book's helpful, because your
book begins to make obvious and begins to have the
(29:56):
factual presentation that you can't had. In a thirty second
television commentary, I'm curious what's your advice to both conservative
activists and publications and to conservative candidates for twenty twenty
two given what you've learned. One of the big problems
right now is that corporate media have successfully kept people
(30:19):
from talking about what really happened, and I personally believe
that's because they want to run the same operation again.
So I think reframing the conversation around what actually happened
and being bold in defense of the idea that elections
have to have security if you have a republic, you know,
democracy depends on the consent not of the winners, but
of the losers. Winners always accept election results. Losers need
(30:43):
to have confidence in the election results in order for
the republic to survive. So I think focusing the conversation
on what actually can be done and getting it done,
and also just reminding people the consequences of not having
election integrity we have because of the way we ran
this election, uniparty control in the country. It has not
even been a year and the country is really suffering,
(31:05):
and so all of these issues are connected and they
need to be thought through in a connected fashion if
people want to save the republic going forward. I just
have to ask you before I let you go, have
you picked a new book yet? I actually just had
this realization after this book. This book is selling well,
and so I thought, oh, I've co authored a book
(31:25):
that was a bestseller, and now I've authored a book
that's a bestseller, and I guess I'm an author now.
It took me two books to realize that I write
books right. Well, for me, it's like after having a baby,
you say I'm never going to do this again, and
then a little while later you're like, one't another baby?
Be nice? So in this case, I'm at the point
of thinking I'll never write another book, but we'll see
what happens. In a year. I wrote a lot on
(31:46):
the Russia collusion hoax. As a reporter. I researched that,
and I'm very proud of the work I did and
the work we did at the Federalist. I kind of
am waiting for that story to conclude so that I
can write a book about the whole thing and make
sense an order of it. But it just dragging on,
so I don't know how long I'm gonna have to wait.
I was gonna say, you could write a book called
the Hoax about the Russian hoax. It really is sort
(32:07):
of a variation on Churchills and enigma wrapped in are riddled.
It is unbelievable that the country endured that it's the
journalistic story of the millennium, and people just aren't covering
it because they were participants in it. And so those
of us who did figure it out pretty early that
it was a hoax and that it was a lie,
we had to do a lot of work with not
a lot of resources, but we were able to get
(32:29):
the true story out and I'm so proud to have
been a part of that. But it reminds you of
how corrupt some government actors are, some politicians are, and
how they engage in this corrupt behavior. It wasn't just
a one off. It's literally the same team that did
that that did to our twenty twenty elections. What they
did right, and the depth of just raising dishonesty by
(32:52):
some of the members of Congress, for example, it's breathtaking
how willing they were to go out and lie and
make no bones about it. Why not have there been
any repercussions. Adam Schiff claimed that he had evidence of
collusion between Trump and Russia that was a lie, and
he has not been held accountable, and the corporate media
still reward him and treat him as if he's a
(33:13):
credible source. There's no downside to lying in this country.
They operate on the premise that the narrative is more
important than the fact. Yeah, it's amazing. They have the
political power to show for it too. Listen, I want
to thank you for joining me if you've done something
really important and really complicated. The fact that you slowed
down actually took apart what happened put it together in
(33:35):
an understandable form. I think everybody who has any doubt
about the twenty election or to purchase a copy of
Rigged how the media, big tech on the Democrats seized
our elections. But we're gonna have a link to the
book on our show page. I look forward to whatever
you write next, and I look forward to everything you
write at the Federalists and seeing you on Fox. So
(33:55):
it's really only a terrific thing that you would come
and be willing to share with us. Thank you so much,
and it's an honor to be here with you. Thank
you to my guest Molly Hemingway. You can get a
link to buy her new book Rigged, How the Media,
Big Tech, and the Democrats seized our Elections on our
(34:19):
show page at newtsworld dot com. Newtsworld is produced by
Gingwish three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Debbie Myers,
our producer is Garnsey Sloan, and our researcher is Rachel Peterson.
The artwork for the show was created by Steve Penley.
Special thanks to the team at Gingwidge three sixty. If
(34:41):
you've been enjoying Newtsworld, I hope you'll go to Apple
Podcast and both rate us with five stars and give
us a review so others can learn what it's all about.
Right now, listeners of newts World can sign up for
my three free weekly columns at Gingwidge three sixty dot
com slash newsletter. I'm Newt Gangridge. This is news work.
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