Mercifully, the January 6th committee hearings in congress were canceled yesterday, presumably because Hurricane Ian’s landfall would have botched ratings. With midterms approaching, Democrats have a lot riding on January 6th and are growing impatient. New York congressman Sean Patrick Maloney, who runs the party’s campaign arm, even grumbled about a lack of indictments.
“I think it’s going to be very hard for people to understand if there aren’t actions by the Justice Department to hold people accountable,” he said.
As with Ukrainegate and impeachment, and Russiagate before that, polls show January 6th remains low on the list of voter concerns (the cratering economy is first). However, the reason it “may be hard for people to understand,” as Maloney says, is that congress has spent too much time blurring lines between election denial and conspiracy to overturn the result. If they just focused on the latter — and they have produced evidence, like Trump asking Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen to seize voting machines — the hearings might be more effective, even with Republicans.
But they haven’t been, for a reason made obvious by Matt Orfalea’s damning video — which YouTube incredibly has already demonetized — above. Amid sweeping efforts to punish election denial in the Trump context, both criminally and with censorship, an almost exactly similar denial campaign that inspired four-plus years of blue politics has been dropped down a memory hole.
Led by the losing candidate in 2016, Democratic Party politicians along with law enforcement and intelligence officials and media spent years denying the legitimacy of Trump’s presidency, based on an equally specious/dishonest formulation: “The election was hacked.” Moreover, they instigated removal efforts based on the same declare-guilt-now, prove-it-later mentality that gripped figures like Trump and Rudy Giuliani in 2020. How different really is “Just say it was corrupt and leave the rest to me” from “We just have to dig deeper, do the investigation and find it”?
The January 6th hearings ironically are an outgrowth of the Democrats’ own six-year-long election denial endeavor, involving the same people who pushed attempts to remove Trump based on manufactured theories of foreign collusion. There’s an automatic Boy Who Cried Wolf factor built in to hearings that include the likes of California’s Adam Schiff (“I can’t go into the particulars, but there is more than circumstantial evidence now”) or Maryland’s Jamie Raskin (“Donald Trump is the hoax perpetrated on the Americans by the Russians”).
Moreover, congressional Democrats’ successful push for censorship on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube — a campaign that began even before January 6th — reveal that the party considers the act of denial itself illegitimate and ban-worthy, if not criminal. But how can that be if, as the video shows, the party’s own leaders engage in the same behavior? How can declaring the 2020 election illegitimate be prohibited, if saying the same thing about 2016 was and is encouraged?
The two stories obviously aren’t the same. But they’re a lot closer than we’ve been led to believe:
On December 10, 2020, after Joe Biden’s election but before the January 6th riots, Vanity Fair’s Eric Lutz went on CBS to talk about the historic implications of the 2020 race.
“When Joe Biden is inaugurated,” he said, “a huge segment of the country is going view him has an illegitimate president.” He added: “This sets a precedent now.”
Except, as seen above, the precedent already had been set. The most serious form of denial was the narrative that Russian hacking constituted a “9/11-style” emergency rendering Trump’s election illegitimate. This contention, usually phrased in a way that could lead people to believe vote tallies had been changed by Russian operatives, began before Trump was sworn in.
The late congressman Elijah Cummings of Maryland, at the time the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, set the stage on December 16, 2016, when he described opposing Trump’s inauguration as patriotic duty. “This is a 9/11 for us,” Cummings said. “I’ve said it for weeks, this is a struggle for the soul of our democracy,” adding, “We have no time for partisanship.”
Mercifully, the January 6th committee hearings in congress were canceled yesterday, presumably because Hurricane Ian’s landfall would have botched ratings. With midterms approaching, Democrats have a lot riding on January 6th and are growing impatient. New York congressman Sean Patrick Maloney, who runs the party’s campaign arm, even grumbled about a lack of indictments.
“I think it’s going to be very hard for people to understand if there aren’t actions by the Justice Department to hold people accountable,” he said.
As with Ukrainegate and impeachment, and Russiagate before that, polls show January 6th remains low on the list of voter concerns (the cratering economy is first). However, the reason it “may be hard for people to understand,” as Maloney says, is that congress has spent too much time blurring lines between election denial and conspiracy to overturn the result. If they just focused on the latter — and they have produced evidence, like Trump asking Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen to seize voting machines — the hearings might be more effective, even with Republicans.
But they haven’t been, for a reason made obvious by Matt Orfalea’s damning video — which YouTube incredibly has already demonetized — above. Amid sweeping efforts to punish election denial in the Trump context, both criminally and with censorship, an almost exactly similar denial campaign that inspired four-plus years of blue politics has been dropped down a memory hole.
Led by the losing candidate in 2016, Democratic Party politicians along with law enforcement and intelligence officials and media spent years denying the legitimacy of Trump’s presidency, based on an equally specious/dishonest formulation: “The election was hacked.” Moreover, they instigated removal efforts based on the same declare-guilt-now, prove-it-later mentality that gripped figures like Trump and Rudy Giuliani in 2020. How different really is “Just say it was corrupt and leave the rest to me” from “We just have to dig deeper, do the investigation and find it”?
The January 6th hearings ironically are an outgrowth of the Democrats’ own six-year-long election denial endeavor, involving the same people who pushed attempts to remove Trump based on manufactured theories of foreign collusion. There’s an automatic Boy Who Cried Wolf factor built in to hearings that include the likes of California’s Adam Schiff (“I can’t go into the particulars, but there is more than circumstantial evidence now”) or Maryland’s Jamie Raskin (“Donald Trump is the hoax perpetrated on the Americans by the Russians”).
Moreover, congressional Democrats’ successful push for censorship on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube — a campaign that began even before January 6th — reveal that the party considers the act of denial itself illegitimate and ban-worthy, if not criminal. But how can that be if, as the video shows, the party’s own leaders engage in the same behavior? How can declaring the 2020 election illegitimate be prohibited, if saying the same thing about 2016 was and is encouraged?
The two stories obviously aren’t the same. But they’re a lot closer than we’ve been led to believe:
On December 10, 2020, after Joe Biden’s election but before the January 6th riots, Vanity Fair’s Eric Lutz went on CBS to talk about the historic implications of the 2020 race.
“When Joe Biden is inaugurated,” he said, “a huge segment of the country is going view him has an illegitimate president.” He added: “This sets a precedent now.”
Except, as seen above, the precedent already had been set. The most serious form of denial was the narrative that Russian hacking constituted a “9/11-style” emergency rendering Trump’s election illegitimate. This contention, usually phrased in a way that could lead people to believe vote tallies had been changed by Russian operatives, began before Trump was sworn in.
The late congressman Elijah Cummings of Maryland, at the time the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, set the stage on December 16, 2016, when he described opposing Trump’s inauguration as patriotic duty. “This is a 9/11 for us,” Cummings said. “I’ve said it for weeks, this is a struggle for the soul of our democracy,” adding, “We have no time for partisanship.”
By the time Biden and future Vice President Kamala Harris went on the 2020 campaign trail, both co-signed the “universal assessment” that Trump was an “illegitimate president” who was in office because “Russia hacked the election.” The losing Democratic candidate in the previous election was a leader in the public relations campaign. Her camp was also responsible for creating a host of fake news stories advancing it, from the smearing of Carter Page as a Russian cutout to the ludicrous Alfa-server tale to the critical, repeatedly leaked narrative that Russia had blackmail material, which led to the “leverages of pressure” story.
This is exactly the kind of behavior we’re now being told is so dangerous that it requires both censorship and official investigation. The chief difference is Trump’s efforts ended in an Airheads-style temporary occupation of the Capitol by MAGA dolts, while Democratic efforts ended in multiple, sophisticated efforts to remove Trump from the White House, either by impeachment or indictment. It can’t be held against Trump that his brand of election denial was dumber and less likely to succeed than that of his opponents. Orfalea’s video shows the double-standard. We either censor and condemn election denial, or we don’t. You can’t have it both ways, but they sure are trying.
Memory Holed, Part II: The "Rigged" Election
Both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton raised doubts about elections in the same way, before and after votes
Matt Orfalea’s follow-up video his “The Russians Hacked the Election” piece rescues for posterity another key piece of history likely to be suppressed: the fact that both Democrats and Republicans raised doubts about the legitimacy of the election process. This took place not only after 2016, but both before and after the 2020 vote.
These campaigns were two sides of the same coin. Trump raised doubts about the reliability of mail-in votes, and admonished supporters ahead of time that a Trump loss should be understood as a fix. Meanwhile, Democrats and media figures — as well as a seemingly endless succession of named and unnamed intelligence sources — argued Russians were bent on corrupting the vote. Hillary Clinton went so far as to say Joe Biden shouldn’t concede “under any circumstances.”
It was not just a Republican-versus-Democrat issue. Both before and during the 2020 Democratic primaries, voters were also told repeatedly that Vladimir Putin preferred Bernie Sanders and was planning to interfere on his behalf. Even GQ did a story: “Why Does Putin Love Bernie?”
Sanders undermined his own campaign by giving these accusations weight, while Trump was criticized for pushing back against them. This video offers a crucial takeaway for anyone looking back to decipher what happened in 2020: both parties, and crucially our own intelligence authorities, worked hard to undermine election results in advance. And, they’re still doing it.