Brunswick Beacon, 04.27.23
Last Tuesday, Fox settled Dominion’s defamation lawsuit and acknowledged the truth: its claim that Dominion’s voting machines stole the 2020 election by switching votes from Trump to Biden was false. That same afternoon, a baseless attack on the integrity of our Board of Elections, driven by the same Big Lie, also fell apart.
Nothing concentrates the mind so wonderfully as an imminent execution. With the jury sworn in, and trial set to begin, Fox faced facts and ponied up. Bigly. Fox paid $787.5 million, the most a media company has ever paid for lying.
Fox repeated Trump’s bogus claim about Dominion, knowing it was false. Privately, Fox Chairman Rupert Murdoch called it “the Trump myth” and “really crazy stuff.” Fox settled because it knew that when jurors heard the truth, it would cost them even more.
Our BoE was attacked by five Republican County Commissioners in a resolution urging it to withdraw from the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence. The resolution baselessly accused the Alliance of partisan election meddling.
Attendance at Tuesday’s BoE meeting was the highest ever. The Brunswick County Democratic Party and the League of Women Voters defended election workers with facts: the bipartisan Federal Election Commission and multiple courts investigated the commissioners’ phony claim and found nothing wrong. PolitiFact also debunked it. Funds went to every election board that asked for help during the pandemic so they could run elections safely. Again, the truth prevailed.
The crowd was stunned to learn that the commissioners forced BoE to slash $350,000 from its roughly $1.2 million budget! We also learned why Republicans underfund elections when a Republican speaker said the quiet part out loud. He warned that making voting easier would “supercharge turnout” and help Democrats!
The Republican attack was never about election integrity. It was about making it harder to vote. Trump said, if more people vote, “you'd never have a Republican elected in this country again." For once, he told the truth.
Michael P. Rush
Leland