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voter fraud
Trump's Latest Big Lie: 'Radical Left Violence'
The GOP is using this lie to censor speech, ban comedians and commentators, prosecute people who’ve spoken out against Trump, violently attack protesters, and to justify the monopolization of our media by right-wing billionaires.
Sep 30, 2025
US President Donald Trump’s assault on our elections system and the GOP’s successful 2024 effort to deny at least (according to official US government statistics) 4.2 million Americans their right to vote (which gave Trump the election and Republicans the House and Senate) was based on his 2020 Big Lie that our elections were corrupted by “millions” of “illegals” voting, along with “massive” voter fraud.
They’re continuing that Big Lie (which the GOP first embraced in the 1960s with Operation Eagle Eye that intimidated mostly Hispanic and Native American voters) going forward, with some observers expecting as many as 10 million Americans being denied their vote in 2028.
But corrupting and stealing elections was just their first effort, starting back in the 1960s, the one that brought them to power. Now, with that power, they’re doing their best to gut the basic guardrails of our 250-year-old constitutional system with brand-new Big Lies.
The newest Big Lie for 2025 is that America is racked by “radical left violence” leading to the disintegration of law and order in our cities and the spread of terror among politicians and anybody else who dares speak out about the issues of our day.
Republican Big Lies have caused enormous damage, from FDR’s era through Joe McCarthy’s witch hunts to George W. Bush lying us into two illegal and unnecessary wars to today.
They’re using this to censor speech, ban comedians and commentators, prosecute people (including lifelong Republicans like Comey, Krebs, and Taylor) who’ve spoken out against Trump, violently attack protesters, and to justify the monopolization of our media by right-wing billionaires.
Most recently, when a Trump-supporting (Trump sign in his yard, Trump “Make Liberals Cry Again” T-shirt) straight, white, self-proclaimed Christian who thought Mormons were the anti-Christ murdered worshipers in a Latter Day Saints church in Michigan, Trump’s first response was to claim it was “anti-Christian violence.”
Instead, it appears this former Marine war vet with PTSD thought he was defending Christianity. But instead of asking if he was “radicalized” by preachers like Trump’s guy “Pastor” Robert Jeffress (who goes on and on about how the LDS Church is a “false religion”) or the algorithms on YouTube, Facebook, or X, right-wing media is today filled with rants about “attacks on Christianity,” blaming “the left” even for this attack.
It echo’s the GOP’s efforts to portray the two people who tried to assassinate Trump, Charlie Kirk’s killer, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) shooter last week, and other political violence as originating from the “radical left.”
Which is really and truly another Big Lie.
First, there’s basically no “radical left” in America anymore. The anti-capitalist pro-violence subset of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) that I knew back in the 1960s when I was part of Michigan State University’s SDS are long gone and well discredited (and a few imprisoned).
Second, the “far left” folks who are still around aren’t violent, by and large. Lefties are more interested in protecting Social Security, getting a national healthcare system into place, raising taxes on the morbidly rich, and getting guns off the streets instead of pointing them at people. The last high-profile “leftie” shooter was the mentally ill guy who took a shot at Republican Congressman Steve Scalise back in 2017.
Even the FBI and the Department of Justice themselves had acknowledged the fact that the vast majority of politically-inspired violence in America was coming from the right, at least until puppy-killer Kristi Noem or one of her lickspittles (or her boyfriend) ordered the reports removed from the government websites.
The independent and nonpartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies analyzed 893 terrorist plots that took place between 1994 and 2020. Their report concluded:
Right-wing attacks and plots account for the majority of all terrorist incidents in the United States since 1994.
But don’t expect to hear that from anybody in the administration or on Fox “News” or other right-wing media outlets. Instead, they’re using “far left violence” as their excuse to dismantle our rights, impose soldiers on cities run by Democrats, and pour your tax dollars into extreme policing and militarization of our society.
This isn’t the first time the GOP has used the Big Lie technique to sway public opinion in a way that demonizes Democrats. On September 23, 1944 President Franklin D. Roosevelt addressed the Teamsters and said:
“he opposition in this year has already imported into this campaign a very interesting thing, because it is foreign. They have imported the propaganda technique invented by the dictators abroad.
Remember, a number of years ago, there was a book, Mein Kampf, written by Hitler himself. The technique was all set out in Hitler’s book—and it was copied by the aggressors of Italy and Japan.
According to that technique, you should never use a small falsehood; always a big one, for its very fantastic nature would make it more credible, if only you keep repeating it over and over and over again.
He then did what Democrats—and what honest news media we have left—need to be doing today: He called out their lies and exposed their technique:
Well, let us take some simple illustrations that come to mind. For example, although I rubbed my eyes when I read it, we have been told that it was not a Republican depression, but a Democratic depression from which this Nation was saved in 1933.
That this Administration—this one today—is responsible for all the suffering and misery that the history books and the American people have always thought had been brought about during the twelve ill-fated years when the Republican party was in power.
He followed that with a list of four other Republican lies, including their assertion that he’d tried to get America into WWII, that he was secretly planning to prevent GIs from leaving the service when the war was over, and even a lie about his dog (Fala, after which his speech was named in the press). He summed it up:
Well, I think we all recognize the old technique. The people of this country know the past too well to be deceived into forgetting. Too much is at stake to forget.
They’re still doing it. Which raises the question: What will be Trump’s and the GOP’s next Big Lie?
They’ve already tried convincing Americans that:
- Immigrants are a major source of crime (when crime rates regarding immigrants are about half that of natural born Americans);
- Democrats are the party of rapists and pedophiles (ahem…Trump’s “best friend” Jeffrey Epstein, E Jean Carroll);
- Democrats want to defund the police (when they’re fighting for more cops in virtually every city in America);
- Are in favor of abortion “after birth”;
- That former President Joe Biden wanted to ban gas stoves and gasoline cars;
- Biden wanted to “ban meat";
- Democrats plan on huge tax increases on the middle class;
- "Antifa” (“Anti-Fascist”) is a domestic terrorist organization;
- Democrats are “deranged pieces of shit"; and
- Liberals want to “force taxpayers to fund transgender surgeries for minors’ nationwide” and, yesterday, Trump said Democrats want to “reopen the wall.“
This after promoting the Big Lie that got three police officers killed and 140 hospitalized on January 6 about the 2020 election was “stolen” and their Big Lie about immigrants voting that resulted in over 4 million citizens being denied their right to vote last year.
Republican Big Lies have caused enormous damage, from FDR’s era through Joe McCarthy’s witch hunts to George W. Bush lying us into two illegal and unnecessary wars to today.
It’s way past time that Democrats and the media start calling these Big Lies exactly what they are, and pointing out that the strategy originated in the modern era with Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Hitler.
Enough is enough.
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The Architects of Project 2025 Are Pushing the Lie of Noncitizen Voting
The Heritage Foundation’s efforts to undermine trust in elections have taken a dangerous new turn—a boots-on-the-ground approach to fish for voter fraud where there is none.
Sep 14, 2024
The D.C.-based Heritage Foundation has long spread disinformation about elections, claiming there is widespread voter fraud despite ample evidence to the contrary. More recently, it has gained attention for its authoritarian and antidemocratic Project 2025 plan for a second Trump administration.
Ahead of this fall’s election, Heritage has been at the forefront of pushing the lie that noncitizens are registering and voting in significant numbers, laying the groundwork for election deniers to use in case the results don’t go their way.
Now its efforts to undermine trust in elections have taken a dangerous new turn—a boots-on-the-ground approach to fish for voter fraud where there is none. In July, men working with Heritage knocked on the doors of suspected noncitizens in an apartment complex outside Atlanta, asking about the residents’ citizenship status and whether they are registered to vote. The pair misrepresented themselves as being with a company that assists Latinos with navigating the election system and secretly videotaped their interactions.
In its quest to convince people that fraud is rampant, the organization has now resorted to unconscionable behavior that puts people at risk of harassment.
Several of the people said they were noncitizens and had registered, which the Heritage Foundation touted as supporting its false claims on the topic—but according to state investigators, The New York Times reported, there is no record of any of these people being registered. At least one of the people recorded told investigators that she was just giving answers she hoped would make the two men go away.
But Heritage posted the videos to its website and claimed that based on a mere seven people, 14% of noncitizens in Georgia were registered to vote—an estimated 47,000 people. It’s a ludicrous assertion. The office of Georgia’s Republican secretary of state dismissed the video as a “stunt.”
Earlier this year, the Heritage Foundation used its social media presence to amplify similar deceptive behavior, which led to online harassment and death threats for the leader of a nonprofit assisting asylum seekers. In April, Anthony Rubin—the founder of Muckraker, an online media website with “very, very powerful” ties to Heritage—and his brother misrepresented themselves as staff members of an immigrants rights organization seeking to volunteer at a nonprofit providing services to asylum seekers in Matamoros, Mexico. Rubin kept trying to get staff at the nonprofit to state they would help migrants vote for U.S. President Joe Biden. In a multi-part thread on social media, Heritage posted a snippet of a conversation between Rubin and the head of the nonprofit, in which she is misconstrued as encouraging noncitizens to vote.
In its quest to convince people that fraud is rampant, the organization has now resorted to unconscionable behavior that puts people at risk of harassment. Secretly videotaping people in conversations under false pretenses is not a way to expose voter fraud,—which itself is vanishingly rare—but it is a way to get false information, risk intimidating eligible voters in violation of federal and state laws, and sow doubt in the integrity of our elections.
The Heritage Foundation is using old scare tactics
While these methods may be new to the organization, we’ve seen them before from others. And it hasn’t ended well for the perpetrators.
Project Veritas, a right-wing activist group, long used unverified, undercover, and deceptively edited recordings to misconstrue the truth, including about supposed voter fraud. In 2020, the group published an unverified video that the campaign of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) had collected ballots illegally, as well as videos falsely alleging voter fraud in one Pennsylvania city. In the Pennsylvania incident, the group ended up settling a lawsuit brought by the local postmaster and publicly apologized, noting that it was not aware of any evidence of fraud in the that city during the 2020 election.
In 2016, a Project Veritas member infiltrated a democratic consulting firm and secretly recorded conversations. The firm claimed the footage was then “heavily edited” to suggest that the firm conspired to incite violence at Trump rallies and promote voter fraud. In a civil lawsuit, Project Veritas was found liable for misrepresentation and violating wiretapping laws, and was required to pay $120,000 in damages. And in 2009, Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe secretly recorded conversations with staff at the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). ACORN was a network of community-based organizations advocating for low and moderate-income families. The deceptively edited videos construed ACORN employees as advising O’Keefe on tax evasion. But the videos set off a political firestorm that led to public funding for ACORN to be cut off, effectively shuttering the organization. Later, O’Keefe faced a civil lawsuit from a former-ACORN staff member and settled for $100,000.
In 2016 and 2017, the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), a conservative legal organization, published two reports purporting to show that thousands of noncitizens were registered to vote in Virginia. The reports included the home addresses and phone numbers of many innocent people, including U.S. citizens. Four of those citizens sued PILF for defamation and voter intimidation. The case settled in 2019, and the leader of PILF was required to issue a written apology.
The disgraceful tactics employed by these groups have failed to hold up in court time and again, and now Heritage looks like it wants to join their ranks.
As for the issue of noncitizen voting—it’s a myth. Noncitizen voting does not occur in any significant manner, and it’s already illegal under federal and state law. The Heritage Foundation’s actions are hurting our democracy, not helping it.
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Electoral Count Act Reform Is Welcome—But Much More Is Needed to Save US Democracy
Trump did not start the myth of voter fraud—that has been a partisan staple for two decades now.
Dec 26, 2022
Congress has approved a budget that includes essential reforms to the Electoral Count Act. The updates, which have broad bipartisan support, eliminate ambiguities in the electoral count process that former President Trump and his allies seized on as they tried to overturn the 2020 election. Anyone looking to undermine future election results will have fewer options, and that is a victory for our democracy.
The passage comes on the heels of the January 6 committee’s release of its full report. The panel made news by making four criminal referrals for the former president. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, of all people, put it well in response: “The entire nation knows who is responsible for that day.”
In the wake of the committee’s extraordinary work, an important remaining question is not who caused the insurrection but rather what caused the insurrection.
First, let’s take a moment to appreciate the panel’s achievement. It made clear through riveting hearings and careful leaks that this was not just a rally that got out of control but a vigorously pursued plot to overthrow American democracy. The committee documented extraordinary crimes. We thought we knew it all, but it was gripping.
Such congressional investigations once regularly commanded headlines. The most famously effective was the Senate Watergate committee in 1973. That — together with the Church Committee, which exposed wrongdoing by the FBI and CIA — dominated the news but also led to reforms, from the federal campaign finance laws to the establishment of the joint congressional intelligence committee.
Reform sometimes follows scandal. And there has been no greater scandal than Donald Trump’s effort to block the peaceful transfer of power.
But putting the blame squarely and exclusively on Donald Trump is not enough to protect our democracy. Trump did not start the myth of voter fraud — that has been a partisan staple for two decades now. His attempt to subvert the 2020 election exposed vulnerabilities in our legal and electoral systems. Most of them remain, waiting for a second Donald Trump to come along and exploit them again. Those weaknesses are what caused the January 6 insurrection. The committee’s work could have even longer-lasting benefits if its revelations help spur reform.
It starts with fixing the Electoral Count Act. Trump’s loony reading of the creaky and outdated 19th-century law provided the foundation for his pressure campaign against Vice President Mike Pence. The newly passed reform makes clear that vice presidents have a merely ministerial role and makes it harder for members of Congress to object to duly cast electoral votes. These changes cement that the reading of the electoral votes is a ceremony, nothing more. They and other important fixes to the Electoral Count Act are included in the budget bill.
That bill also includes federal funding to upgrade election infrastructure and keep election officials safe, though not nearly enough. We should never forget that Trump’s pressure campaign did not stop with Pence. Trump personally called state election officials, urging them — without any cogent rationale — to overturn his defeat. Trump’s counsel, Rudy Giuliani, falsely accused local election workers of fraud. As a result of Trump’s campaign against these public servants, election workers in several states were harassed, threatened, and chased from their homes. Going forward, Congress must act decisively to protect election officials in their homes and in their offices, providing a reliable source of funding for much-needed security.
Other changes will require sustained pressure from the American people. National baseline standards for federal elections should be high on that list. For example, Trump’s team argued for the invalidation of Pennsylvania’s slate of electors, on the theory that state officials should not have complied with a state supreme court ruling requiring them to count mail votes received several days after the election but postmarked by Election Day. A spurious argument, but the silence of federal law on when and how mail ballots should be counted gave it unnecessary fuel. With 50 states conducting the election with almost 50 different procedures, close elections will lead to similar claims in the future.
The Constitution unquestionably gives Congress the power to fix this problem. With every state playing by the same rules, there would be less room for allegations of impropriety.
These are just the beginning of the necessary reforms. There should be guaranteed funding for states to conduct reliable post-election audits. Congress should fund state efforts to combat election-related disinformation and restore the protections of the Voting Rights Act to prevent racial discrimination in voting — Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election primarily targeted voters of color. The list goes on.
The January 6 committee performed a vital service. It left us with indelible images. But now that its work is over, focusing solely on Trump himself would be a major mistake. Mending weak points in our election system should be a bipartisan priority. It starts with the Electoral Count Act, but I hope it will not end there.
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