Democrat Spokesperson aka Columnist: Election Fraud Is ‘Non-Existent’

In typical far left fashion, a Los Angeles Times columnist has called for fascism. She doesn’t put it that way, of course. But at bottom that’s what she wants. And unsurprisingly, other far left “journalists” can’t praise her enough.

Columnist Jackie Calmes headed her column this way:

Why journalists are failing the public with ‘both-siderism’ in political coverage

She begins, without a trace of irony, saying this:

American politics has changed dramatically since my post-Watergate generation of journalists began covering the story. Political journalism hasn’t kept up.”

If by that she meant the refusal of today’s journalists to investigate the cloud of voter fraud or Big Government overreach or political scandal swirling around President Biden, she would be 100 percent accurate.

But in fact, serious looks at any of these and more are verboten with today’s “journalists” and apparently with Calmes.

To take but one example from Calmes herself, she writes that election fraud is “non-existent.” One can only ask: What planet does she live on? In this space alone I have documented repeated examples of demonstrated voter fraud in my own Pennsylvania. Not to mention that the Philadelphia Inquirer headlined this just days ago:

Feds accuse ex-staffer of Philly Councilmember Mark Squilla in an election fraud case tied to former U.S. Rep. Ozzie Myers

Marie Beren, 67, is the third person charged in an election-fraud conspiracy case prosecutors say was led by former U.S. Rep. Michael “Ozzie” Myers.

Catch that word “charged”? That’s right. Three people have been or are being prosecuted for voter fraud in an “election-fraud conspiracy case prosecutors say was led by former U.S. Rep. Michael ‘Ozzie’ Myers.”

Translation? A former Democratic United States Congressman from Philadelphia was leading — and paying off — Philadelphia election judges to steal elections in Philadelphia. The prosecutors specifically say in their court filings that Myers engaged in “ballot stuffing” and paying cash to those election judges who did it for him. This was done repeatedly in elections in 2014, 2015, and 2016. I also cited specific examples of voter fraud in Pennsylvania elections in 2012, 2008, and in 1994.

But in columnist Calmes’ world, those repeated examples of voter fraud I have cited over the years in Pennsylvania simply don’t exist. Hard fact, documented charges and indictments, you see, are to be ignored by journalists, not investigated in the style of the post-Watergate press she mentions.

Now, Calmes says, “when reporters or pundits use the words ‘both sides’ in regard to some political problem, I stop reading or listening.”

Of course she does. There’s no sense in a democratic-style debate of the issues because, as she clearly illustrates, one side is right and the other side is wrong, and those on the wrong side must be silenced by non-coverage.

Without an awareness of irony, she writes:

Republicans in Congress scandalously opposed a bipartisan commission to investigate the Jan. 6 insurrection, which threatened them as well as our democracy.

Hello? The GOP “opposed a bipartisan commission”? Flatly untrue. As Calmes neglects — deliberately omits? — to say, House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy named two Republicans to the Committee — Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio and Jim Banks of Indiana. What happened? Speaker Nancy Pelosi refused the appointments, installing instead two decidedly Trump-hating Republicans, Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois. That is hardly “bipartisan.” That is a political lynch mob, stacking the deck to come to a predetermined outcome. It is the Pelosi version of Stalin’s infamous head of the Soviet secret police Lavrentiy Beria, who notoriously put it this way: “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.”

A look back at the tactics of Mussolini’s Italian fascists in dealing with the newspapers of the day and the similarity with what Calmes is urging is unmistakeable. Calmes links to this 2012 article from the Washington Post by the Brookings Institution’s Thomas E. Mann and Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute. The headline:

Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem.

And just why are Republicans the problem? Because they had the audacity to oppose the socialist direction of the Obama administration. And what is Calmes urging of the media:

Democrats can’t be expected to deal with these guys like they’re on the level. Nor should journalists cover them as if they are.

Which is to say, whether it’s omitting the real facts of the Pelosi rejection of Jordan and Banks to what Calmes hilariously calls the “bipartisan” commission or demanding that journalists not cover those who disagree with the leftist line of the day, this is how fascism works.

In his biography of Mussolini, Oxford historian Denis Mack Smith writes extensively of Mussolini and the Italian press.

While in opposition, he had condemned censorship of newspapers as shameful and dangerous, and his pledge to maintain freedom of the press received unanimous support in the first fascist party congress; but as a dictator he seized on the fact that anyone who could manipulate the press might be able to change public opinion overnight … [so] he had prepared measures to control the newspapers.

Smith added the fascists were about “gagging criticism.” Which, in suggesting that journalists refuse to cover criticism of President Biden because the critics are not on the “level” is exactly what Calmes is suggesting.

She also calls critical race theory, in which kids are to be taught to judge one another by race, a “faux” problem. Really? No mention from Calmes of the American left’s serious history of racism reaching back 200-plus years to the formation of the Democratic Party by slaveowners and its repeated support for every race-based issue from slavery to segregation to today’s son of segregation known as identity politics.

Again, without the slightest sense of irony, Calmes writes that “democracy is literally at stake.”

It is indeed. And it is under threat from those who believe exactly as Calmes does. And the fact, as reported here at Fox, that “Various journalists or former journalists voiced their support for the op-ed and also condemned an alleged ‘both-siderism’ in reporting”?

Not good.

*** This article has been archived for your research. The original version from American Spectator can be found here ***