Rigged! How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Took Our Elections
by Mollie Hemingway
Regnery Publishing, 2021, 432 pp.
Mollie Hemingway, an editor of the online publication The Federalist, calls our attention in this well-researched book to an issue of vital significance. She is an advocate of Donald Trump, though not an uncritical one, and writes from this point of view, however whether you like the previous president or not, you can not overlook her message.
She starts the book with a paradox. Nearly all the polls forecasted a decisive win for Biden in the November 2020 governmental election, but in reality the result, reserving altogether the accusations of rigged ballot by the former president and his fans, was very close: “The political class, the corporate media, and their pollsters were all considerably incorrect, and yet Biden would eke out a governmental success of simply under 43,000 votes throughout 3 states, out of an overall of almost 160 million.”(p. 36. All page recommendations are to the Amazon Kindle edition.) Why were the surveys so incorrect?
One answer would be errors in the way in surveys were carried out, however Hemingway sees something more sinister in the errors. The unreliable surveys were part of an enormous campaign by the government and corporate elite to ensure Trump’s defeat in the election. This campaign continued the efforts by the very same elite to secure his defeat in the 2016 election; and, when those efforts failed, to derail his presidency.
Hemingway worries particularly one tactic used in both the 2016 and 2020 elections. In previous elections, most voting occurred on the appointed day in November, and although some individuals cast absentee tallies, these were of minor significance. No longer is this the case, and voting by mail now predominates. “‘No excuse’ absentee voting permits residents to cast their tallies early. With the prevalent adoption of this practice in the last few years, the United States can no longer be stated to have an election day in the strict sense of the term. The nation has a months-long ballot season … In 2016, absentee and mail-in tallies represented approximately 33 million of the 140 million ballots counted. In 2020, more than 100 million of the 159 million tallies counted were cast prior to Election Day, including by early ballot.” (p. 222) This is of fantastic significance, Hemingway says, since scams is much easier with this sort of ballot: it is much harder to validate signatures and citizens’ addresses.
If voting scams is to be stopped, this needs watchful election officials, and here is where the mass media elites go into the scene. Far from aiding in efforts to interdict fraud, the elites promote it through subventions to interested parties. Hemingway highlights the role of Mark Zuckerberg, who made big contributions to personal groups that acted in a partisan way to “assist” election officials. “That’s to say absolutely nothing of the prevalent privatization of election systems in key districts thanks to the efforts of leftist clothing funded by Mark Zuckerberg and other billionaires. Multi-million dollars grants to public election commissions, and the strings connected to them, were the methods by which the left’s stretching ballot activist arm took control of substantial parts of the 2020 election … This private disturbance in the running of a nationwide election had actually never ever before taken place in the history of the country.” (p.xiii)
These efforts to predisposition election results go together with the attempt by the very same elites to manage information that reaches the public. The media giants, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google, non-stop promoted items unfavorable to Trump and suppressed stories that might have helped him. As an example, destructive news about Hunter Biden and his corrupt dealing with Chinese officials that emerged in the final days of the project and was published in the New York Post was prohibited from Twitter. “Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey would eventually tell Congress and censoring the New york city Post and locking it out of its Twitter account was a ‘error.'” (p. 36)
Hemingway’s focus is on the governmental project, however the censorship by the statist-corporative elite extends even further. Facebook and YouTube ban videos that criticize Covid-19 vaccinations and advance viewpoints that the proprietors of the platforms consider “false information.”
The author is gotten ready for the objection that her charges of a leftist plot to derail Trump reflect the prejudiced viewpoint of a partisan. In action, she points to a noteworthy short article in Time publication in which those associated with the machinations admitted and took pride in what they had done. “Without misery or pity the magazine reported that’ [t] there was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes’ creating ‘an extraordinary shadow effort’ by ‘a well-funded cabal of powerful individuals’ to oppose Trump. Corporate CEOs, arranged labor, left-wing activists, and Democrats all worked together in secret to secure a Biden success … Time would, naturally, disingenuously frame this effort as an attempt to oppose Trump’s ‘assault on democracy,’ even as Time reporter Molly Ball noted this shadow project ‘touched every element of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped protect numerous millions in public and private funding.’ The funding made it possible for the country’s abrupt rush to mail-in balloting, which Ball refers to as ‘a revolution in how people vote.'” (p. 36)
What if anything can be done about this state of affairs? I do not think the option lies primarily in more stringent laws about voting and certainly not in governmental guideline of the mass media, which would only increase the power of the state. Rather. our objective ought not to be to make democracy “work better” however to use the example of corruption she has highlighted as a tool to assist us throw into question altogether its worth as a political and social system of company, and safeguard in its stead an authentic free market society, along the lines set forward by Murray Rothbard and his fans, who include most notably Hans Hoppe.
Hemingway is an assiduous scientist and, up until now as I can recognize, a precise one. To my regret, I have actually had the ability to find only one straight-out error in the book. She says, “5 U.S, presidents considering that 1900 lost their quote for a 2nd term … While each election is figured out by unique aspects, all 5 of these incumbents dealt with internal party fights or considerable main difficulties. “(p. 39) This is not true for Herbert Hoover, among the five she points out, who did not get substantial Republican politician Party opposition in his quest for the 1932 nomination. By calling attention to what has actually taken place to or political system in the last few years, Mollie Hemingway enhances our willpower to come up with something better.