It’s no surprise that the corporate media are defending Liz Cheney in her campaign to help Democrat Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi hurt Republicans, but why is Mitch McConnell, the leader of Senate Republicans, joining them in their efforts?
Last week, the Republican National Committee formally censured Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for serving as tools of Pelosi as she weaponizes the January 6 events for Democrats’ political gain.
Last year, Pelosi blew up the commission to investigate the security breaches and events of January 6 by removing the Republican Party’s picks from the committee. Since then, no Republican-appointed members serve on the committee and it has been used to seize private communications of political opponents of the committee. Even prior to kicking off Republican-appointed members, Pelosi chose rabid anti-Trump extremist Cheney to serve her on the committee.
Cheney had already been ousted from her Republican leadership position. Absolutely obsessed with opposition to Donald Trump and his supporters, Cheney had convinced her colleagues she was unable to perform her actual duties and they took the unusual step of removing her.
Republicans in Wyoming, the state she purports to represent from her home base in Northern Virginia, took the unusual step of voting to no longer recognize Cheney as a Republican. The New York Times even admitted that Cheney has for years snubbed Republican voters in her home state, including a recent decision to instead hang out with the liberal reporters who love her.
Even before her ouster, Cheney — an advocate of unending interventionist wars — had been known for spreading anti-Trump disinformation, such as the false claim that Russians had paid Afghans to kill American soldiers and that Trump knew this and did nothing about it.
The resolution passed by the Republican National Committee last week noted that the primary mission of the Republican Party is to elect Republicans and support their values and that Republicans have an obligation to fight Biden and Pelosi’s agenda, not serve as handmaidens to it. It specifically noted that Cheney and Kinzinger were helping Pelosi obliterate Republican Party rights, traditional checks and balances, due process, and other protocols.
It also noted the committee was going after not just those people who rioted on January 6 but law-abiding Americans who were practicing their First Amendment rights to peacefully assemble and express themselves. “Representatives Cheney and Kinzinger are participating in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse, and they are both utilizing their past professed political affiliation to mask Democrat abuse of prosecutorial power for partisan purposes,” the resolution read.
It’s true. Cheney and her colleagues on the committee have been persecuting people who aren’t in any way accused of having anything whatsoever to do with the riot or any political violence. They’ve seized texts, emails, and other communications from hundreds of people who were simply practicing First Amendment rights. In one case, Cheney went after a person nowhere near the riot who had committed the crime of running a Super PAC to unseat her.
Republican voters are eager for Republicans in positions of authority to fight Cheney and other servants of Pelosi. But that runs in direct contrast to a major effort from corporate media and other Democrats to use Republicans who support the Democrats’ agenda against other Republicans.
Corrupt corporate media figures desperately need to portray Cheney and those like her as having a large constituency of voters. So they lied about what the resolution — very popular among actual Republicans — said. They falsely claimed the resolution said riots were “legitimate political discourse.” Then they went around and asked Republican leaders if they agreed that riots were legitimate political discourse.
All of this is to be expected from the same exact media that spent years lying about the 2016 election, falsely claiming that Trump stole it by colluding with Russia. It’s the same media that smeared Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh as a serial gang rapist. It’s the media that falsely claimed that accurate news regarding the lucrative Biden family business of making deals with foreign oligarchs and agents of Communist governments was “disinformation.”
But what is disappointing is that Senate Republican leader McConnell — after years of such lies from corporate media — did not fight these lies but accepted them and denounced the resolution to censure Cheney.
“Mitch McConnell denounced the RNC for calling the Jan. 6 riot ‘legitimate political discourse’,” wrote leftist outlet The New York Times.
For crying out loud. The RNC did not call any riot “legitimate political discourse.” Why would McConnell accept that obvious lie and say that they did? It is no surprise that McConnell is the least popular politician in the country, somehow even less popular than Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
Far better was House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s response when MSNBC activist Garrett Haake regurgitated the groupthink mantra that Republicans thought riots were legitimate political discourse. With the misleading chyron “”McCarthy Responds To RNC Calling Jan. 6 ‘Legitimate Political Discourse,’” on the screen, McCarthy nicely and knowledgeably pushed back against the propaganda.
“I think anybody — and we all know this — who entered this building, who rioted, is not legitimate political discourse, but that is not what the RNC was talking about. If you watch what the January 6 committee is doing, they subpoenaed people who weren’t here on January 6 but were down in Florida. They have gone after people and their records who weren’t even involved on January 6,” McCarthy said. Then, when asked if he agreed with censuring, he said there was a reason Kinzinger was choosing not to run for office again and Cheney was facing such trouble in her re-election effort.
This is not hard. All Republican elected officials should be working for the Republican Party and against Pelosi, not for her. McConnell not questioning the legitimacy of the committee, which has not a single Republican-appointed member, is insane and inexplicable. No reasonable person thinks the January 6 committee is conducting an inquiry but an inquisition.
Republican voters would like their leaders to meet the simple test of not calling them terrorists for engaging in peaceful political protest. They would like their supposed leaders to meet the simple test of not accepting the media’s routine lies about them but, instead, to fight vigorously against those lies. That McConnell failed so dramatically in this regard does not bode well.
Mollie Ziegler Hemingway is the Editor-in-Chief of The Federalist. She is Senior Journalism Fellow at Hillsdale College. A Fox News contributor, she is a regular member of the Fox News All-Stars panel on “Special Report with Bret Baier.” Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, the Guardian, the Washington Post, CNN, National Review, GetReligion, Ricochet, Christianity Today, Federal Times, Radio & Records, and many other publications. Mollie was a 2004 recipient of a Robert Novak Journalism Fellowship at The Fund for American Studies and a 2014 Lincoln Fellow of the Claremont Institute. She is the co-author of Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court. She is the author of “Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections.” Reach her at mzhemingway@thefederalist.com
