Well, well, well, turns out the Big Lie that the election was stolen from Donald Trump is bigger than we originally thought.
It just might be big enough to bring down the Fox News corporation and expose Fix News hosts for the frauds they are.
According to court filings by Dominion Voting Systems that is suing Fix for libel, internal emails and deposition testimony reveal a startling truth, that Fix news hosts and Fox executives knew the stories they were peddling about the 2020 election being stolen from Trump were false.
Didn’t make any difference to them. For weeks they told the lies anyway, including the claim that Dominion voting machines were rigged to switch votes from Trump to Biden.
None of these con artists or executives deny Dominion has the goods on them. Instead, they insist that knowingly repeating false claims about the 2020 election on air is protected by the 1st Amendment.
Think about that for a minute.
1st: Fix News hosts perpetuated the “Big Lie” that the election was stolen from Trump and that Dominion machines helped pull it off.
2nd: They knew what they were saying and what the guests they interviewed were saying was untrue, especially since Dominion sent them evidence that it was.
3rd: Their defense is not that they didn’t know they were telling lies, but that telling lies was and is proteced by the right to free speech.
(Now you know why I call Fox network programming “Fix News.”)
But here’s the clincher. The reason Fix News hosts repeated the lies then and continue to do so today is because it’s what their viewers want to hear.
That is stunningly revealing about the kind of people who watch. They get their “fix” from Fox by listening to “news” for which there is incontrovertible evidence what they are hearing is false.
These are people – overwhelmingly white, by the way – who participate in a daily assault on truth. They are willfully listen to propaganda that supports their anti-government views and encourages disrespect and even hatred of leaders who are not like them.
It doesn’t matter if these people sincerely believe the election was stolen. So what? We’re not talking about kids here. They are adults and responsible for anything and everything they believe, say, or do. Moreover, ignoring evidence that proves that what you believe is in fact false is never an excuse. It is, instead, an indictment of your own irresponsibility.
No, the truth is, MAGA Republicans represent a genuine threat to democracy. They are part of the anti-democracy movement around the world, and Fix News is right in there with them.
The threat is not another assault on the Capitol. They themselves know that January 6, 2021 proved they will never be successful through the use of force. I’m not minimizing what happened that day, only that our government has the power to protect itself against a coup.
The real danger is that MAGA Republicans will keep running candidates who will destroy our democratic institutions if they get in positions of power. The number of fraudulent voter suppression laws MAGA Republicans are passing in red states is a perfect example of what they are doing so they have a better chance of electing their own.
So they will keep doing what they are doing, but that’s not even the worst part of the story. Here is what is: We who believe in democracy have to protect their right to run crazy, dangerous, anti-democratic candidates.
We are the ones who have to protect their right to nominate the worst president in the history of our country and the most dangerous man in America when it comes to protecting our democracy, if that is what they choose to do.
It’s a job I wish we didn’t have to do. I wish we could bar MAGA Republicans from voting or running for office, but we can’t and keep our democracy.
Because this is what we must continue to do, there is something else we must do. We must ensure that we stay in the majority and they remain forever in the minority.
That is the only way democracy will endure and all of us – including MAGA Republicans – will continue to have the right to vote and determine our own future. If they become a majority, democracy is lost. They will never protect our rights the way we are protecting theirs.
It’s all on us, then. We protect the power of our vote by protecting the power of theirs. That is the hard truth about American democracy, and not for one minute can we ever forget that, or think that the outcome of elections doesn’t matter.
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