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Right-Wing Media Struggle To Embrace Early Voting In Wake Of New York Defeat

Right-Wing Media Struggle To Embrace Early Voting In Wake Of New York Defeat

Right-wing figures are sounding the alarm that Republicans must mobilize their supporters to embrace early voting in the wake of last night’s special election, in which Democrats won the U.S. House seat formerly held by scandal-plagued ex-Rep. George Santos (R-NY). The problem for them, however, is that this would require undoing the propaganda campaign that former President Donald Trump and his right-wing media allies waged against early voting and voter access initiatives in their failed effort to steal the 2020 election.

Early on election night, Democrats boasted that their nominee, former Rep. Tom Suozzi, had already built up a 14,000-vote lead over his Republican opponent, Mazi Pilip. Republican get-out-the-vote efforts on Election Day might also have been hindered by a snowstorm on Long Island, which led to a Republican super PAC hiring private snow plows to clear areas around Republican-leaning precincts. Suozzi won the race by an almost 8-point margin and it is unclear whether the snow made a difference in the result, but the situation highlighted a problem for Republicans: Many Democratic voters had actively banked their ballots before Election Day, while Republican voters largely put off casting theirs until the last day of the campaign.

Conservative media face tough choices after this election loss, which may have hinged on the GOP's abrupt abandonment of bipartisan immigration reform legislation in the final days of the campaign, and in turn been exacerbated by the party and its media allies distancing themselves from early voting over the past four years.

  • Former Trump 2016 campaign aide Rick Gates said, “My No. 1 takeaway is for Republicans: early voting, early voting, early voting.” Gates further touted the campaign’s successful work in 2016 at mobilizing early voters in Florida and North Carolina. “Why the Republicans haven't been able to, you know, basically replicate that process, I don't know, but we've got to fix it and fix it soon,” Gates said, failing to acknowledge at all that Trump himself spoke against early voting throughout the 2020 election, plus his continued denial about the 2020 election in the years afterward. [Newsmax, Wake Up America, 2/14/24; Business Insider, 2/14/24]
  • Former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway declared on Fox News: “Bank your vote early, getting that early vote and making Republican voters comfortable, center-right voters comfortable with voting early, is incredibly important.” Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer thanked Conway for her political analysis of the race, “especially the early voting, we’ve yet to see whether or not the RNC can pull that off.” [Fox News, America’s Newsroom, 2/14/24]
  • Right-wing radio host John Fredericks told opponents of early voting, “If you continue to push game-day voting because of algorithms, servers on Mars, CCP people flying around in flying saucers changing algorithms in the middle of the night, we will never win an election.” A crucial fact here is that Fredericks himself previously spent years spreading claims of vast election fraud. Following the 2022 midterms, however, he reversed course and declared, “I’m out of the convincing business, the narrative business. I’m in the ballot business, I just want to put ballots in boxes.” [Real America’s Voice, Outside The Beltway, 2/14/24; Real America’s Voice, War Room, 11/30/22]
  • Dairy Wire co-founder Ben Shapiro castigated Trump for his past statements against early voting and said that he “better flip on that right fast, because use every method at your disposal to win.” “In the Republican Party, who would’ve suggested that mail-in ballots are stupid and you shouldn’t use them?” Shapiro asked rhetorically. “Who would’ve proposed such a foolish proposition that you should — you know, it’s somehow morally bad to vote early if you’re a Republican? Thus losing two Senate seats in Georgia, and maybe his own presidential election.” [The Daily Wire, The Ben Shapiro Show, 2/14/24]

Unfortunately for Republicans, not everyone the right-wing media echo chamber is getting onboard. Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, a key figure in spreading Trump’s election lies leading up to the January 6 insurrection and in promoting Big Lie candidates in 2022, asserted Wednesday that “they stole this election in New York,” and reiterated his old election lies: “Like I said in 2020, they're stealing it by mail-in ballots and with these bad voter rolls and you can't get away from that.”

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Muslim Americans Continue To Struggle With Islamophobia

Almost 10 years have passed since Sept. 11, 2001, but many Americans still regard Muslims among us much as they did in the emotional days immediately following the attacks. For millions of Muslims living in the United States, the ramifications of 9/11 and the subsequent “War on Terror” have become very personal, as the most hostile observers continue to put them in the same category as extremist jihadists. As the U.S. government has sought to prevent future domestic attacks with sometimes controversial surveillance, Muslim Americans feel stigmatization and discrimination.

In a new Pew Research Center poll, a majority of Muslim Americans say they feel targeted by government anti-terrorism policies — an accurate perception based on the recent news that the NYPD has been spying on Muslim communities in the greater New York City area, one of many similar covert efforts. A majority of respondents, 55 percent, say being a Muslim in the United States is more difficult since 9/11.

Significant numbers report being looked at with suspicion (28%), and being called offensive names (22%). And while 21% report being singled out by airport security, 13% say they have been singled out by other law enforcement. Overall, a 52% majority says that government anti-terrorism policies single out Muslims in the U.S. for increased surveillance and monitoring.

This contrasts with the poll’s findings that there is no evidence of increased support for Islamic extremism among Muslim Americans. Muslims in the United States actually reject extremism by much larger margins than Muslims living elsewhere, according to a comparison with another Pew study.

However, the poll found no indication of increased alienation or anger among Muslim Americans, and most respondents say they are satisfied with the United States and their local communities. According to the Associated Press,

“This confirms what we’ve said all along: American Muslims are well integrated and happy, but with a kind of lingering sense of being besieged by growing anti-Muslim sentiment in our society,” said Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Washington, D.C.-based Muslim civil rights group.

While most Muslim Americans are content, the study revealed a disconnect between their actual feelings and outside assumptions about the community.

A significant minority (21%) of Muslim Americans say there is a great deal (6%) or a fair amount (15%) of support for extremism in the Muslim American community. That is far below the proportion of the general public that sees at least a fair amount of support for extremism among U.S. Muslims (40%). And while about a quarter of the public (24%) thinks that Muslim support for extremism is increasing, just 4% of Muslims agree.

The reasons for these ill-founded outside perceptions might be partially the result of Islamophobic networks that donate huge sums of money toward spreading misinformation about Muslims.
A new report by the Center for American Progress “reveals not a vast right-wing conspiracy behind the rise of Islamophobia in our nation but rather a small, tightly networked group of misinformation experts guiding an effort that reaches millions of Americans through effective advocates, media partners, and grassroots organizing.” The study found that over the past 10 years, seven foundations had spent more than $40 million on spreading misinformation about Muslim Americans.

One of the most obvious recent examples of such manipulation of facts was last year’s “Ground Zero Mosque” controversy. Even though the proposed building was simply a cultural center, the project rapidly became the center of an intense national debate. The leaders in the movement against the “mosque,” who spouted anti-Muslim rhetoric on national television, were Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, the co-directors of the group Stop Islamization of America. Their efforts were able to create a mainstream, national issue out of an otherwise uncontroversial building.

The Center for American Progress’ report, “Fear, Inc.,” lists Spencer and four other “experts” who generate misinformation and spread Islamophobia: Frank Gaffney at the Center for Security Policy, David Yerushalmi at the Society of Americans for National Existence, Daniel Pipes at the Middle East Forum, and Steven Emerson of the Investigative Project on Terrorism. These people, along with a few powerful Islamophobic think tanks, have significantly contributed to misinformation about Muslim Americans, painting them all as terrorists — a portrayal that directly contradicts the realities found in the Pew Research Center’s poll.

Given the fact that Muslim Americans are up against a $40 million campaign to misrepresent them, it’s no surprise that most think life in the United States is more difficult since 9/11. As the anniversary of the attacks approaches, both of these new studies serve as a reminder to resist generalizing Muslim Americans and to critically evaluate Islamophobic messages in the media.

Pentagon, Scarred By 9/11, Adapts To New Fight

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Sept. 11 attacks transformed the Pentagon, ravaging the iconic building itself and setting the stage for two long and costly wars that reordered the way the American military fights.

Compared with a decade ago, the military is bigger, more closely connected to the CIA, more practiced at taking on terrorists and more respected by the American public. But its members also are growing weary from war, committing suicide at an alarming rate and training less for conventional warfare.

The partly gutted Pentagon was restored with remarkable speed after the hijacked American Airlines Boeing 757 slammed through its west side, setting the building ablaze and killing 184 people. But recovering from the strain of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan will take far longer — possibly decades.

The Pentagon’s leaders will have to adjust to a new era of austerity after a decade in which the defense budget doubled, to nearly $700 billion this year.

The Army and Marine Corps in particular — both still heavily engaged in Afghanistan — will struggle to retrain, rearm and reinvigorate their badly stretched forces even as budgets begin to shrink. And the troops themselves face an uncertain future; many are scarred by the mental strains of battle, and some face transition to civilian life at a time of economic turmoil and high unemployment. The cost of veterans’ care will march higher.

As Robert Gates put it shortly before he stepped down as defense secretary this summer, peace will bring its own problems.

The problem was not peace on 9/11. At the time, the military was focused almost entirely on external threats. Air defenses kept watch for planes and missiles that might strike from afar; there was little attention to the possibility that terrorists might hijack domestic airliners and use them as missiles.

That changed with the creation of U.S. Northern Command in 2002, which now shares responsibility for defending U.S. territory with the Homeland Security Department.

Terrorism was not a new challenge in 2001, but the scale of the 9/11 attacks prompted a shift in the U.S. mindset from defense to offense.

The U.S. invaded Afghanistan on Oct. 7 in an unconventional military campaign that was coordinated with the CIA. That heralded one of the most profound effects of 9/11: a shift in the military’s emphasis from fighting conventional army-on-army battles to executing more secretive, intelligence-driven hunts for shadowy terrorists. That shift was important, but it came gradually as the military services clung to their Cold War ways.

Still in debate is how the Taliban, which had shielded Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaida figures prior to the U.S. invasion and was driven from Kabul within weeks, managed to make a comeback in the years after the U.S. shifted its main focus to Iraq in 2003. That setback in Afghanistan, coupled with the longer-than-expected fight in Iraq, showed the limits of post-9/11 U.S. military power.

It also pointed up one of the other key lessons of the past decade of war: It takes more than military muscle to win the peace. It takes the State Department, with its small army of diplomats and development specialists, and other government agencies working in partnership with the Pentagon.

The military grew larger over the past decade, but the growth was uneven. The Army expanded from about 480,000 in 2001 to 572,000 this year, and the Marine Corps grew from 172,000 to 200,000, although both are to begin scaling back shortly. The Air Force and Navy, by contrast, got smaller. The Air Force lost about 20,000 slots since 2001 and the Navy lost about 50,000.

In percentage terms, the biggest growth in the military has been in the secretive, elite units known as special operations forces. They surged to the forefront of the U.S. military’s counter-terror campaign almost immediately after the 9/11 attacks, helping rout the Taliban in late 2001 and culminating in May 2011 with the Navy SEAL team’s raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan. And even though al-Qaida’s global reach has been diminished, the increased role of special operations forces is likely to continue.

“It’s the most interesting and important change that’s likely to endure,” Michael O’Hanlon, a defense analyst at the Brookings Institution, said in an interview. “I haven’t heard too many people suggest that we can scale back to where we used to be.”

The Marines, who had never before fielded forces of this kind, now have 2,600 under U.S. Special Operations Command. The others include the SEALs, the Army Green Berets and Rangers and the Air Force special operators.

In all, those special operations forces grew from 45,600 in 2001 to 61,000 today, according to Special Operations Command.

A decade of war also has produced its military stars. Army Gen. David Petraeus served in command three times in Iraq and once in Afghanistan before accepting President Barack Obama’s offer to succeed Leon Panetta as the next CIA director.

Former Iraq commander Army Gen. Raymond Odierno is about to become the Army’s top general, and the current Army chief, Gen. Martin Dempsey, who served twice in command in Iraq, is due to replace Navy Adm. Mike Mullen as the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The military as a whole is viewed more favorably by the American public. A Gallup poll in June found that the military is the most respected national institution, with 78 percent expressing great confidence in it. That is 11 points higher than its historical Gallup average dating to the early 1970s.

The new technological star is the drone aircraft, like the Predators that surveil the battlefield and fire missiles at discrete targets. Their popularity has spawned an effort to field unmanned aircraft to perform other missions, such as a long-range bomber and even heavy-lift helicopter