Mollie Hemingway on Her New Book: Rigged

CLAY: We are joined now by Mollie Hemingway, who has got a fabulous book that is coming out, and we’re gonna talk about that, regarding what exactly went on in the 2020 election and beyond. Buck Sexton, I should mention, Mollie — she comes in with us right now. Buck is out sick. I know you know Buck well, Mollie. But I want to start with this.

Your book on Brett Kavanaugh was incredible. The behind the scenes maneuvering associated with how Brett Kavanaugh ended up on the Supreme Court, the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings. It was absolutely riveting. I don’t think I’ve ever spoken to you before, but I wanted you to hear that directly from me. It was so incredibly well done. How much time and research and energy and effort did you put into telling that story in such a compelling fashion as you did?

HEMINGWAY: Well, thank you, first of all. I appreciate that. And I was glad to research and report on both books. For the first book, my coauthor, Carrie Severino, and I interviewed more than a hundred people who were involved in the confirmation of Kavanaugh. You know, that included everyone at the White House, in the Senate, the outside groups.

And it was just fascinating to get their stories and inside details and be able to record for posterity what actually happened ’cause we knew that the media would do what they did with Clarence Thomas which is tell false stories then just keep telling and telling and telling them for decades and then the real history gets lost.

So I took that same approach with Rigged, which tells what happened during the 2020 election, tons of interviews from people on the Trump campaign and RNC — but at the state and the local level, the outside groups — to really get a handle on just what happened in this craziest election of our lifetimes.

CLAY: Okay. So I haven’t read Rigged yet, but I’m encourage everybody out there just based on your last book to read this one, and I will read it as well. Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections. Let’s talk about some of the things that you uncovered during the course of reporting on this book, and I want to start with one that I know all of our listeners are focused on because it was such an egregious example of this overreach.

That was the New York Post basically getting canceled by Twitter and other Big Tech platforms when they came out with what has now basically been confirmed to have been an accurate story about Hunter Biden’s laptop and everything associated with the revelations on that laptop. In the years ahead, will this come to seem even more egregious in your mind than it does now, or is this something that people are gonna pretend on the left just never happened as a result of this now having been proven true and that their censorship was — in many ways — a direct refutation of the truth?

HEMINGWAY: It was shocking and horrifying and one of the worst things I’ve ever seen, more Stalinist than American to watch as all of these powerful entities just decided they were gonna memory hole not just an important story, but one of the more important stories of the campaign. We know the Biden family has a business, and that’s where foreign oligarchs and other powerful people give money to members of the Biden family, and then it’s completely unknown what they get in return.

You know, and because it’s unknown, it’s presumably related to policy and taxpayer dollars. And so, there was no question that this was an important story for journalists to cover. They know covered it, and then when the New York Post did cover it, they did their best to lie about it, claim it was “Russian misinformation,” to deplatform New York Post and anybody who shared the story. It was horrible.

But it was just one of many ways that our corrupt media have harmed the country and harmed civil discourse, harmed the integrity of our elections, because you look at what our country was founded object and it’s freedom of information and the right to pursue the truth. And this is encoded in the First Amendment — freedom of religion, speech, press, all these things — and the media and Big Tech went to war against these founding ideas that predate our actual country. And it was horrifying to go through.

CLAY: If you compare the false allegations of Russia collusion with what we 100% know was Big Tech collusion, isn’t it unbelievable that so many people who spread the big lie of Russia collusion were directly complicit in a conspiracy of Big Tech companies to alter the outcome of the 2020 election after they falsely argued that 2016 had been the collusive-driven election that was outcome-pursuit driven in that way? It’s extraordinary irony.

HEMINGWAY: Yes, Clay, isn’t that very interesting that from 2016 through the next election, it wasn’t like a fringe theory that these conspiracy theorists held to and promulgated? It was massive. It was everybody in the media, everybody in the Democratic Party. They claimed that Donald Trump stole the 2016 election ’cause he was a secret agent of Russia. It was absurd, it was evil, and they did it every day multiple times a day.

And then 2020 happens, we have all these changes to our election laws, we have mail-in ballots flooding the system, we have Mark Zuckerberg engaged in a private takeover of our government election offices, we have the media and tech issues that we talked about. And then all of a sudden these very same people who spread the lie that Donald Trump stole the 2016 election — and spread it maliciously and continuously for years.

All of a sudden, they’re like (laughing), “You can’t talk about any problems with the 2020 election,” and when it comes to down to it, the only thing they can like hang their hat on is that Russia meddled in our elections for like a hundred years — except for 2018 and 2020, apparently. They bought like a $100,000 in Facebook ads, some of which benefited Hillary Clinton, some of which benefited Donald Trump.

Well, compare that with what tech did in 2020. They spent four years gaming algorithms, four years deplatforming corrective conservative voices, four years censoring important stories, four years telling their left-leaning social media users to go register to vote and to go vote but not their right-wing users. Talk about meddling, and on a scale so much beyond a piddly whatever Russia did in 2016.

CLAY: It’s well said, and I think you and I understand this a lot better than your average person would, because we write online — and you mentioned a $100,000 in Facebook ads. That might sound like a lot of money to a regular person, because $100,000 is a lot of money to a regular person. To someone who is buying Facebook ads, $100,000, Mollie, is nothing. I mean, that is such a tiny pinprick of money.

The idea that you could swing a presidential election for $100,000 when we’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year if not billions of dollars a year on presidential elections is one of the dumbest… Leave aside the dishonesty of it. It’s one of the dumbest arguments that I’ve ever seen made and accepted as a reality by anyone with a functional brain.

HEMINGWAY: And yet, again, it was not fringe.

CLAY: Yes.

HEMINGWAY: It wasn’t on the outer edges of the internet that this was being promulgated. It was every day in the Washington Post, New York Times, you know, CNN, MSNBC, all the major media. And it was too stupid to believe they actually thought that what they were saying was real but caused real damage.

And like you point out, what tech companies themselves did after 2016, they felt responsible for Donald Trump winning because the media had manipulated Trump’s message so that people wouldn’t vote for him. So, he just went with social media to speak directly to the people and the people found that very compelling. So, they decided, “Well, we can’t let him speak directly to the people! We have to control this,” and they did.

They did. They were kind of public about it, but they did all of this game playing with search engines, with the suppression of news stories. If you were a left-wing newspaper like the Washington Post, New York Times — or, you know, even outright like acknowledged leftist media — those were elevated on Facebook and other social media platforms.

If you didn’t hew to corporate media’s party line — if you, for instance, and said that the Russia collusion hoax was a lie (which is true) — they would decrease your reach on social media. Think about the profound complications of how that affected people’s understanding of reality and how they might vote in subsequent elections.

CLAY: There’s no doubt. We’re talking to Mollie Hemingway. She’s senior at The Federalist author of the new book which I would encourage all of you to read: Rigged. Of the Big Tech companies, if you were doing a power ranking of how impactful they were in helping to rig the 2020 election for Joe Biden…

How would you assess Twitter, Facebook, Google, YouTube, all of these different Big Tech companies and essentially the contractions that they were making in favor of Joe Biden? Did any one or two companies stagger you more than others in terms of the decisions they were making? How would you rank them?

HEMINGWAY: Well, of course, they’re all kind of related, sometimes officially, and sometimes they coordinate to deplatform voices together. But I would say the role that Google plays in controlling access to information. They’re more policy than any country on earth. They can deplatform people at will in a way that… They can take sites off line, they can take voices off line, and then they do it a lot with ways that people don’t understand.

So if you’re putting something into a search engine, I think many Americans have this naive idea that what we’re getting back is somehow balanced or impartial. That just simply is not true. They have shown for years that conservative or non-leftist voices are marginalized in these search engines in a way that looks like a psychological experiment on the American people — and, of course, in other countries as well.

CLAY: Is it gonna get better or worse in your mind as we move into 2022 and 2024? Is there any shame? Is there any legal peril that the Googles, the Facebooks, the Twitters of the world now are facing based on regulatory investigations, or do you think they’ve been emboldened now given how much and how impactful they were that 2022 and 2024 could be worse? Where do we go from here?

HEMINGWAY: I think we saw what happened after 2020, and this is partly why the media don’t want people to talk about the election is because they want to continue the operation. Certain things that were done, like Mark Zuckerberg’s private takeover of government election offices, where he spent about as much money as the federal government did to run the election and to embed left-wing activists into it.

Some states have made that illegal. Some states haven’t. So it can either continue or not continue, depending on what the state law is. But in general, I think tech companies do feel emboldened. They might be a little surprised that they’re not receiving more gratitude from the Democrat Party. But be that as it may, I think they feel emboldened.

And you’re seeing Democrats trying to ensconce into permanent law some of the changes that they wrought in 2020 to create more inconsistency and chaos in our election process. That’s kind of a feature for them, even if it’s a bug for most people to look at what happened after 2020 and be like:

“I don’t know if we should have to wait weeks to find out how many people voted, much less who they voted for.” But you’ll see these battles continuing to matter ’cause this wasn’t just about stopping Donald Trump. This is about power of going forward for whole parties and for whole movements.

CLAY: Last question for you. We have President Trump on the show tomorrow in the final hour of the program scheduled to be on with us. I believe you talked with him for five hours or more as a part of your book, Rigged. What did you learn from President Trump, and — based on those conversations — do you think he is inclined to run again in 2024, in your mind?

HEMINGWAY: Yeah, when I interviewed him three times for the book, and the first interview I wasn’t quite sure if he wanted to run again. I almost got the feeling that he didn’t want to have to do it. So, I think three things are arguing in favor of him running. One, I think he’s disappointed that the Republican Party has kind of returned to form, that feckless weakness that frustrated voters so much.

Two, I don’t think he’s getting credit for what he did. He actually achieved quite a bit policy-wise, and I think that he needs to have his legacy affirmed for him not to want to run again. And then, finally, I think the establishment is freaking out so much about him running that it’s signaling to him that he might need to do it again. So, I don’t know if he will or won’t. But it is interesting to see how poorly the establishment responded to his initial run and how poorly they’re responding to this political situation right now.

CLAY: Mollie Hemingway. She is the senior editor at The Federalist. Fantastic author. Go read Rigged — I’m looking forward to reading it myself — all about the 2020 presidential election and the power of Big Tech to rig the outcome of this election. Mollie, keep up the good work. Thank you for your time.

HEMINGWAY: Thank you so much for Clay. Bye.

CLAY: That is Mollie Hemingway.