The left will use narrative-setting tactics including Big Tech censorship, media control, and judicial manipulation to push a political agenda, said Federalist Senior Editor Mollie Hemingway.
“I think there’s reasonable concern about the court and unreasonable concern about the court and that people need to have perspective on all of these things,” Hemingway said in an episode of The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation’s speaker series “Conceived in Liberty.”
She noted that former President Donald Trump’s judicial appointments “are among his greatest achievements of his administration” and despite concerns that “these justices [should] be a little stronger,” she said “these are justices who are not behaving as some of what conservatives had gotten used to for other nominees from ostensibly conservative presidents … when it comes particularly to issues of religious liberty or tackling the administrative state.”
Trump’s appointees for federal courts, Hemingway said, also “really are impressive.”
“There are some excellent judges at these lower levels who have just done really courageous, tremendous work. And when you’re picking someone to be on the Supreme Court, you’re usually working with nominees that your predecessors put on federal courts. And so what I think is really impressive about Trump’s several hundred conservative appointments to these other courts, is that next time you have a conservative as a president, they will be picking from a much better pool than what even President Trump had to work with,” Hemingway said.
While the Biden administration doesn’t seem to “have a great chance of truly packing the court” because that would be “too radical,” Hemingway said, they are employing ways “to control the outcome of certain decisions.”
“And when people have tried to pack the court before they didn’t succeed in increasing the number of justices maybe but they did succeed in bullying members to rule a certain way,” Hemingway noted. “I do think that is something where they would have a much better chance of success and is something that people should be concerned about.”
Propaganda from the corrupt corporate media, Hemingway said, is just one way that political agendas such as swaying a court decision can be pushed.
“I don’t think the credibility of the media can go down much more than it already has. People are not trusting them and I actually think that’s a good thing,” Hemingway said. “I think people thought for a long time that the media were just biased, that they just needed encouragement to do a better job of journalism. What’s different about the moment we’re in now is that I think people realize they’re doing their job. Their job is not journalism, their job is propaganda.”
“That’s good that people have woken up to the reality that the media are that hostile to conservative ideas, founding principles, and so they’re not expecting them to be improved by complaining about bias or pointing out hypocrisy,” she continued. “They actually understand that they are in many ways the primary political opponent of lovers of freedom and the founding principles upon which this country has had so much success.”
Certain reporters can still be trusted, Hemingway said, but the left creates “this massive echo chamber.”
“They control narratives. And people who aren’t part of that leftist media landscape are much less funded, much less supported and so it’s important that people who do want to get good information support those media outlets and reporters who are doing a good job.”
Hemingway concluded the conversation by discussing her new book “Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized our Elections.”
“I didn’t like the way that people were talking about [the 2020 election] so I wanted to dig into it,” Hemingway explained. “I had already thought prior to the election that the way the media had behaved and the way the tech companies had censored discourse, and the way polls were so corrupt, that that was a form of rigging the election and so that’s what I really wanted to look into were the ways that the media, Big Tech, and these fake polls can do so much to harm whether or not we have free and fair elections.”
Hemingway also researched how “left-wing tech oligarchs spent hundreds of millions of dollars to embed into electoral systems.”
“I think it’s important that we all can trust these entities that are supposed to administer elections without partisan bias. By funding in key cities and key states, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, this privatized funding of elections really did a lot to make people feel less confident in the integrity of the election and that’s something that really is a big issue going forward.”
The Bradley Foundation recognized Hemingway as a 2021 Bradley Prize winner in August, noting her achievements help achieve the organization’s goal to “restore, strengthen, and protect the principles and institutions of American exceptionalism.”