Not a week goes by in which America’s ethically bankrupt media aren’t pushing lies about the state of the country’s elections, and their latest attack on Republican voters is no different.
On Wednesday, Stateline joined its fellow leftist “news” outlets in fomenting a Democrat-manufactured conspiracy theory that U.S. election workers everywhere are facing constant harassment from constituents. The insinuation, of course, is that these threats are coming from conservative voters who dared to raise questions about the conduct of the 2020 election.
At the center of Stateline’s hit piece is the recent spate of letters filled with fentanyl and other substances sent to local election offices in states such as Washington, Nevada, and Oregon. Instead of disclosing to its readers the evidence indicating the letters were potentially sent by far-left radicals tied to Antifa, Stateline immediately pivoted from reporting on the issue to advancing the left’s “election workers are under attack” narrative and pinning the blame on former President Donald Trump and his supporters.
“Since the 2020 presidential election, state and local election officials nationwide have been bombarded with threats, as lies perpetuated by former President Donald Trump and his allies around ‘rigged’ elections have fueled conspiracy theories and inspired violent reactions to the bureaucrats and temporary workers who run the United States’ democratic process,” the outlet claimed in hyperbolic fashion.
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As I previously wrote in these pages, Democrat claims that election workers have experienced a spike in threats since the 2020 election are primarily based on “surveys” issued by leftist organizations and unsubstantiated statements from Democrat election officials. In November 2022, for example, The Washington Post published an article containing assertions by Colorado Democrat Secretary of State Jena Griswold’s office that it had “identified hundreds more threats against her since 2020.” Unsurprisingly, the Post gave no indication that it bothered to fact-check these claims.
Just like the Post, however, Stateline was forced to include data from President Biden’s own Department of Justice showing that Democrats’ sky-is-falling elections narrative is total bunk.
In its article, the outlet discloses that, “As of late August, the U.S. Justice Department’s Election Threats Task Force had charged 14 people with making threats to election workers and political candidates since the task force was created in 2021, so far leading to nine convictions that came with yearslong criminal sentences.” August 2022 testimony from a DOJ official and a subsequent agency press release further revealed that out of roughly 1,000 communications directed toward election officials that were deemed “threatening and harassing” by the Election Threats Task Force since the force’s inception, only about 11 percent of those contacts “met the threshold for a federal criminal investigation.”
Got that? In a country with a population of more than 335 million people, only about 100 individuals have been investigated by the DOJ for supposedly threatening election workers, and only 14 of them have been officially charged. That doesn’t exactly sound like a widespread crisis.
For a corporate press that loves to toss around the term “conspiracy theory” whenever reporting on legitimate Republican concerns about the integrity of U.S. elections, leftist media outlets such as the Post and Stateline are perfectly fine with fomenting their own conspiracy theories to dishonestly smear their political opponents. In reality, Democrats couldn’t care less about the “security” of American elections. All they care about is acquiring and maintaining power.
The media-wide effort to cast Republicans as threats to “democracy” isn’t just designed to scare away independents and moderate voters from the GOP. It’s to disincentivize conservatives from partaking in legitimate forms of election oversight, such as poll watching.
From elections to lawfare, Democrats have no interest in playing by the same rules as everyone else. And if that means they have to recruit their media allies to push debunked propaganda about Republicans, then that’s exactly what they’ll do.
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
The House of Representatives’ bid to elect a new speaker ended in another stalemate on Wednesday after 22 Republicans voted against front-runner Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio.
Wednesday’s vote marks the second in which enough Republicans defected to kneecap Jordan’s speakership bid. On Tuesday, 20 GOPers — including Reps. Ken Buck of Colorado, Don Bacon of Nebraska, and Jen Kiggans of Virginia — voted for House members other than Jordan. These members and many others also voted against Jordan in Wednesday’s vote.
As The Daily Caller reported, Jordan needs at least 217 votes to become speaker. Meanwhile, Democrats are casting their votes for House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.
BREAKING: Jim Jordan lost 22 votes on the second ballot for Speaker:
While the speaker’s gavel remains up for grabs, some moderate Republicans are reportedly floating the idea of colluding with Democrats to pass a resolution expanding the powers of the chamber’s interim speaker. According to Fox News, the effort is being spearheaded by Rep. Dave Joyce, R-Ohio, and has gained support from other establishment Republicans, such as Rep. Carlos Gimenez of Florida, and Rep. Nick LaLota of New York.
Gimenez and LaLota are among the nearly two dozen Republicans to vote against Jordan’s speakership bid.
Republicans Hate Their Base
While not perfect, Jordan as House speaker would be a major upgrade for GOP voters. Not only does he sport a more conservative voting record than former Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., he’s also one of the founding members of the House Freedom Caucus.
So why, despite a groundswell of support among conservative voters, have a handful of Republicans decided to tank Jordan’s speakership bid? While anonymously sourced conspiracies are likely to dominate legacy media’s coverage of the issue, the real answer is likely much simpler: Many of these Republicans despise their voters.
Don’t take my word for it. Bacon admitted as much when complaining to reporters earlier this week about the “pressure campaign back home” for him to back Jordan as speaker. The Nebraska congressman went on to say the reason he opposed Jordan’s initial speakership bid was to stick it to the few House Republicans who ousted McCarthy and prevented Scalise from becoming speaker.
“You don’t have a process where I play by the rules and some people can’t — and they get what they wanted, and now I’m supposed to play by the rules,” Bacon whined.
So, to recap: A grown man serving in the U.S. Congress is actively defying the will of his voters to spite some of his colleagues.
As petty and pathetic as his actions are, Bacon is merely a symptom of the greater cancer that’s infected the GOP establishment for years. On the campaign trail, these Republicans make grandiose pledges to stand up for conservative values and “drain the swamp,” only to discard such promises once they get to Washington.
It’s not that they forget what they promised. It’s that they never intended to fight for their voters in the first place. Whether on religious freedom, illegal immigration, or federal spending, conservatives can always count on the Republican establishment to sell them out.
If Republicans like Bacon spent as much time fighting Democrats as they did stabbing their own voters in the back, the battle for America’s soul would look more like a fight between two rivals than the one-sided shellacking Democrats are dolling out on a weekly basis.
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
Legacy media claim so-called ‘election deniers’ are constantly threatening and harassing election workers throughout the country. But the facts say otherwise.
It didn’t take long after the 2020 election for legacy media to conjure up a new smear to use against conservatives. For two years, leftists have employed the malicious term “election denier” to silence any American with legitimate concerns about the integrity of U.S. elections.
But in the lead-up to and following the 2022 midterms, media began incorporating this smear into their next phony narrative, which is that these so-called Republican “election deniers” are constantly threatening and harassing election workers throughout the country. Prior to the Nov. 8 election, for example, left-wing outlets ran hit piece after hit piece warning that Republicans were secretly plotting to disrupt local precincts on Election Day.
And while their doomsday predictions (unsurprisingly) never came true, that hasn’t stopped Democrats from attempting to convince the public there’s a widespread conspiracy of Trump supporters threatening local election officials. Within the past several weeks, NBC News and The New York Times have run exposés highlighting election officials in Virginia and Texas, respectively, who recently resigned amid confrontations with fellow Republican officials.
When it comes to the Times’ reporting, however, the article’s headline distorts the reasoning behind the Texas official’s resignation. While the headline reads, “After Threats and Clashes With Republicans, Another Texas Election Official Quits,” the article tacitly admits that Heider Garcia, the elections director for Tarrant County, resigned due to the county’s “creation of an election integrity task force” — not because of the alleged threats against him.
Other outlets to publish similar articles in recent weeks include The Hill and USA Today.
The Facts Tell a Different Story
While there are certainly cases of threats being made against election workers, the relentless narrative pushed by the corporate press that it’s a widespread problem is not true. But you don’t have to take The Federalist’s word for it. President Joe Biden’s own Department of Justice (DOJ) has all but admitted so.
Back in July 2021, the DOJ launched a task force designed to address this alleged “rise in threats against election workers, administrators, officials, and others associated with the electoral process.” According to an agency press release, the task force would “receive and assess allegations and reports of threats against election workers” and work with U.S. attorneys’ offices and the FBI “to investigate and prosecute these offenses where appropriate.” As part of the initiative, the DOJ also launched an election worker hotline, where individuals can report “suspected threats or acts of violence against election workers” to the agency for review and potential investigation.
Predictably, the DOJ did not include any data to justify its claim that there was a “rise in threats against election workers.”
On Aug. 3, the Democrat-controlled Senate held a hearing, titled “Protecting Our Democracy’s Frontline Workers,” in which Judiciary Committee members heard testimony from various federal, state, and local election officials about their experiences working in recent elections. Testifying in the hearing’s first panel was Kenneth A. Polite Jr., the assistant attorney general for the criminal division of the Department of Justice.
In his opening statement, Polite Jr. claimed the DOJ’s Election Threats Task Force had reviewed and assessed roughly 1,000 allegedly “threatening and harassing” communications directed toward election officials, including one incident of physical violence against an election worker. Two days prior, however, the DOJ issued a press release revealing that only about 11 percent of those 1,000 contacts “met the threshold for a federal criminal investigation” and that the “remaining reported contacts did not provide a predication” for such an inquiry.
“In investigations where the source of a reported contact was identified, in 50% of the matters the source contacted the victim on multiple occasions,” the press release reads. “These investigations accordingly encompassed multiple contacts. The number of individual investigations is less than 5% of the total number of reported contacts.”
The DOJ also claimed the task force had charged five individuals at the time, a number Polite Jr. confirmed during his Aug. 3 Senate testimony.
So, to recap: In a country of roughly 331 million people, the DOJ — in the span of a year — received roughly 1,000 calls alleging threats toward election workers, in which only about 11 percent of cases warranted a federal investigation. On top of that, only five individuals had been charged with any type of crime as of the DOJ’s August 2022 press release.
The Verdict
So why are legacy media continuing to push the lie that election workers everywhere are under constant attack, despite publicly available data showing otherwise? And why are Democrats in states such as Nevada and New Mexico advancing legislation based upon this lie, even when there are federal statutes prohibiting the harassment of election workers?
For Democrats, the strategy is two-fold. The first reason is to further the narrative perpetuated by Biden that “MAGA Republicans” represent an existential threat to democracy and Democrats are the party of virtue, “voting rights,” and normalcy. The left hopes that by painting their political opponents as extremists, they’ll be able to sway moderates and independents to their side, even as their political allies use the justice system to target former presidents, chemically castrate children, and collude with Big Tech to censor dissenting voices online.
The second reason is to discourage conservatives with legitimate concerns about election integrity from partaking in completely legal forms of electoral oversight. Ahead of the 2022 midterms, for instance, the Republican National Committee recruited more than 70,000 new poll watchers and workers ahead of Election Day to “help deliver the election transparency that voters deserve.” And of course, Democrats went ballistic, parroting the same “threat to democracy” talking point.
Unlike Democrats, Republicans actually welcome transparency in the electoral process. The attempt by legacy media and leftist politicos to spin a false narrative about conservatives threatening election workers on a grand scale is an attempt to avoid accountability at the ballot box and cast their political opponents as enemies of democracy. It’s a strategy steeped in falsehoods and smears, which for Democrats is nothing new.
Shawn Fleetwood is a Staff Writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He also serves as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
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American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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