It’s been amply established that a lot of people who either promoted the pernicious lie that Donald Trump had a second term stolen from him, or at least gave succor to it, knew that the Big Lie was, well, a lie. For instance, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy joined the bonkers amicus brief challenging Joe Biden’s victory, and also objected to certifying Biden’s win, even after telling Cook Political Report House editor Dave “I’ve seen enough” Wasserman that he knew Biden had won.
Plus, there is ample evidence from the published record that Trump himself knew at some point in November 2021 that he had lost—as early as Nov. 12 (when he was told he couldn’t win enough legal challenges to overturn Biden’s lead in Arizona), or Nov. 14 (when his own campaign team debunked the most pernicious conspiracy theories about Dominion Voting Systems), and certainly by Nov. 20 (when the Republican leaders of Michigan’s state legislature told him he had no chance of overturning Biden’s lead there).
The fact that Trump himself damned well knew he lost should be enough by itself to put the Big Lie to rest—or at least, it would be in a halfway sane world. But even more evidence came to light as this past weekend began, when Rep. Dan Crenshaw of Texas revealed that a number of chest-beating election deniers know that there’s no evidence that the 2020 election was stolen.
Daily Kos staff member Walter Einenkel diaried about this here, but there’s another angle to consider. Who are the people who admitted behind closed doors that the Big Lie was a lie? Crenshaw needs to tell us who they are, and now.
It is impossible to overstate the implications of Crenshaw’s revelation. There are people out there who knew damned well that every single claim about Trump having the election stolen from him was false—and they didn’t do a damned thing about it. With apologies to Politifact, they knew all the talk of fraud, hacking, ballots being trucked in, etc. was Pants on Fire wrong—and they kept their mouths shut despite almost certainly knowing that innocent people were being harassed, trolled, and threatened as a result of these claims. And that’s before we consider the centrality of the Big Lie to the horrors of Jan. 6.
These evil bastards need to be named. They need to be shamed. And they need to be sued into poverty. You read right—these are evil bastards. There is literally no other way to describe people who know damned well that pernicious lies are pernicious lies and don’t say a damned thing about it.
Every single person who knowingly spread this dreck deserves the same treatment that large portions of the deplorable fever swamp are getting from Dominion executive Eric Coomer, as well as from Dominion and Smartmatic. They deserve the same treatment that the Hoft brothers of Gateway Pundit infamy are getting from Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss for falsely accusing them of helping steal Georgia for Biden.
Simply put, these bastards stole two or three years from the lives of a lot of innocent people, and there needs to be legal hell to pay. If Alex Jones was essentially driven out of business for stealing a decade from the Sandy Hook survivors, how do these election deniers not get the same treatment?
So here’s the $64,000 question—if Crenshaw had the guts to reveal that these election deniers knew they were lying, is he willing to reveal who these people were? Crenshaw already took a big step in speaking up, knowing full well that he risks being primaried in 2024 for doing so. For those who don’t know, Crenshaw’s north Houston district was one of many Republican-held districts shored up by the Texas Legislature in its brutal gerrymander of the state. He lost some of his more Democratic-trending territory around Rice University while picking up some congested-red territory to the north like The Woodlands. While Trump only carried the old TX-02 by a 50-49 margin, he would have won by a punishing 61-38 margin in the new district.
Granted, Crenshaw fended off three MAGA-oriented primary challengers in the 2022 primary with almost 75 percent of the vote. One would think that would allow him to summon the political will to reveal which of these election deniers knew that they were lying. But this is one time where your oath to defend the Constitution “against all enemies, foreign and domestic” should take precedence over covering you political hide. If Reps. Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney could do it, why can’t Crenshaw?
As one of the lawyers for the Sandy Hook families said, “Speech is free, but you have to pay for your lies.” It’s long past time for these election deniers to pay for those lies—and pay through the nose.