Mona Charen: Republicans must confess complicity in the big lie
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If you missed the retraction from the right-wing online magazine The American Thinker, it’s one for the ages. Noting that they had received a warning from lawyers for Dominion Voting Systems, the editors admitted that they had published pieces that “relied on discredited sources who have peddled debunked theories … These statements are completely false and have no basis in fact. … We apologize to Dominion for all of the harm this caused them and their employees.”
Fox News has issued similar retractions. This is the beginning, not the end, of the story. Dominion has sent letters to 20 other entities and individuals, including One American News Network, Newsmax, Lin Wood, White House Counsel Pat Cippolone and Rudy Giuliani.
Sidney Powell, the “Kraken” lawyer in Donald Trump’s orbit, got more than a warning. She was slapped with a $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit for her outrageous and outlandish claims, including that Dominion’s voting machines were designed by Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez to help him rig elections; that the machines contained secret algorithms to change Donald Trump votes into Joe Biden votes; that Dominion had bribed Georgia officials to obtain its contract with the state; and that she had a video showing the company’s founder bragging that his system “could easily change a million votes, no problem.”
It seems that the only means we still possess as a society for holding people to account for vicious and democracy-endangering lies is the tort law system. The only acknowledgment of wrongdoing in the most destabilizing crisis of the past 160 years was that extracted from an obscure website by a private company whose reputation and income took a severe hit.
I wish Dominion every success against the other defendants, but what of the country that has taken a severe hit? Can Dominion also sue Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Mark Levin, Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, The Federalist, the 17 state attorneys general who joined the ludicrous Ken Paxton lawsuit challenging the election results in four states, Kevin McCarthy, the 121 House Republicans and six Senate Republicans who voted to reject the Electoral College ballots of Arizona? Because until we hear confessions and corrections from conservative media, we will continue to inhabit a dark cave as a country.
Unless the propagandists of right-wing media confess and correct the record — unless they forthrightly admit that they spread lies about the election being rigged — the fury they’ve incited among a huge swath of Americans will continue to endanger the lives of public officials and crack the foundations of this republic.
The lie they propagated is what propelled those deluded people to storm the Capitol. Of course, the perpetrators of the violence are fully responsible for their decisions, and some of them were clearly mentally unbalanced or extremists or criminals of various stripes. But there were also thousands of otherwise normal people who were deceived into believing their democracy had been fatally compromised, and millions who now harbor doubts about our system’s legitimacy.
The goons who defiled the Capitol and smashed poles into the heads of police thought what they were doing was righteous. They think of themselves as patriots. The cynical liars like Hawley and Levin and the rest, who took advantage of their ignorance for their own purposes, drape themselves in the flag, too. How dare they? Their little game, which began by indulging the base’s attraction to stories like the birther conspiracy, has matured into stoking insurrection. Is there no point at which they question their complicity? Is there no point at which they say to themselves, “For the good of the country, I need to correct this?”
Dominion Voting Systems might get its reputation restored through the courts. The damage to the nation must be repaired by a chastened Republican Party.