When is it OK to talk about election integrity and security? When a Republican wins the White House, of course.
When is it not OK to talk about election integrity and security? In the wake of the chaotic, free-for-all vote-by-mail extravaganza that was the 2020 election, which was nothing less than the safest and securest and fairest election in history you hideous denier where’s the “report to Facebook” button?
Yes, apparently, the Democrats have forgotten all about their election denial in 2000, 2004 and 2016 and are dead set on forcing Republicans to hem and haw and say that, yes, our elections are fair. At least for the moment.
Outspoken comedian Russell Brand is having none of it; on a viral clip from his show that was posted earlier this month, he ripped into a 20-minute clip of Democrats sounding the alarm about election malfeasance — coincidentally just after their favored candidates had lost to former Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump.
The clip was tweeted by a user known as KanekoaTheGreat, with this humorous caption: “BREAKING: Explosive video surfaces of FOX News stars Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Sean Hannity slamming Trump’s ‘insane’ voting machine fraud allegations as ‘absurd,’ ‘ridiculous,’ and ‘complete BS’!”
Needless to say, the video features none of them, but instead a cavalcade of Democrats who, at one point, believed election security was important:
?BREAKING: Explosive video surfaces of FOX News stars Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Sean Hannity slamming Trump’s “insane” voting machine fraud allegations as “absurd,” “ridiculous,” and “complete BS”! pic.twitter.com/Ot9TZQKSLh
— KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) April 18, 2023
Conspiracy theorists, all of them — particularly the first.
So, as Brand noted on his podcast last week, “Tucker [Carlson] is gone, and now we can get on with a proper democracy that functions well, where everyone accepts the results of elections, particularly now that Fox has had to pay out to those brilliant Dominion machines, because no one else has ever complained about electoral fraud ever before in the history of democracy,” Brand said.
“Oh no — they always do, both sides,” he added:
WARNING: The following video contains graphic language that some viewers will find offensive.
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Brand went on to note how there were plenty of Democrats “who have been saying there are rigged elections, problematic machines, problems with voting systems for a long time now — but who are you going to believe, the mainstream media or your own lying eyes?”
Then there was Hillary Clinton, noting how “Virginia just stopped using touch-screen computer voting because it’s so vulnerable,” adding that “we need to look at all the voting machines, every secretary of state needs to be, you know, assisted in making sure they are not being hacked and attacked.”
And then Reps. Adam Schiff of California, Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas and Val Demings of Florida, no shrinking violets in the liberalism contest, share their concerns about election fraud, too. At least they’ve never contested the outcome of their own elections, unlike Hillary; this probably has something to do with the fact they’ve never lost any major ones:
Here is ten straight minutes of Democrats denying election results.pic.twitter.com/bJRbzEcIO2
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) September 4, 2022
Brand went on to note that “in the event we lose, we complain about the system. The Republicans do it and, plainly, as you just saw, the Democrats do it. I don’t think the Democrat Party are sufficiently different from the Republican Party or the right to be able to complain in this way.”
But now, of course, you get scenes like this one from Wednesday’s CNN town hall with former President Trump:
Collins: “There’s no evidence of that election fraud”
Trump: “You’re supposed to say that”
Collins: “It’s the truth, Mr. President” pic.twitter.com/RVE4yRvDYE
— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) May 11, 2023
Do you see a CNN reporter — or anybody — pushing back on the Democrats’ conspiracy theories about 2000, 2004 and 2016? Is there anyone at CNN or MSNBC who’s willing to step up and say, “Look, if you want to find the genesis of election fraud claims, go no further than talk of hanging chads, Diebold machines or Russian interference”? No, of course not.
Brand is late to this party and gets it about half-right, but that’s typically the case with him — and better late than never, one supposes. If only the rest of the media would catch up to him and either concede 1) that election security and integrity is something both parties have touted, but only Republicans have consistently pushed for tighter security and integrity audits, and/or 2) that there are “deniers” of legitimate election results all over the political map. Alas.
“Why don’t they just accept that some people vote for Donald Trump because they’re disillusioned with the political class, and why don’t we all accept, more broadly, that the problem is deeply systemic and is a result of the ability of powerful deep state and corporate interest to manipulate the congressional and democratic process to the point where democracy is sort of a facade?” Brand asked. “That’s the actual problem.”
Well, that’s simple: because the people in a position to talk about accepting those facts are the people involved in pushing the counter-narrative. Of course, pointing that out is the easiest way to become a denier. Rest assured, Brand will find himself off YouTube in a hurry — or have his clips algorithmically replaced in searches by links to AI-generated Brian Stelter ASMR videos in which the former CNN host coos about how “2020 was the most secure election ever” repeatedly for several hours straight — if anyone at Google ever finds out he’s given the game away.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
