Confronting Revisionist History on the DCCC’s Gibbs Ads

Welcome back to Forgotten Fact-Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we take a closer look at the Democratic ad campaign against Peter Meijer, examine the media response to the border-state busing initiative, and hit more media misses.

The Willful Blindness of DCCC Defenders

Representative Peter Meijer (R., Mich.) lost the Republican primary in Michigan’s third congressional district to John Gibbs, a commentator who worked in the Department of Housing and Urban Development under Ben Carson and purveyor of the conspiracy theory that Donald Trump had the 2020 presidential election stolen from him. Meijer, by contrast, voted to impeach Trump after his supporters stormed the Capitol in an effort to pressure Congress not to certify Joe Biden’s victory.

Gibbs was endorsed by Trump, but his largest financial backer was the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which invested nearly half-a-million dollars in some not-so-negative “attack” ads on Gibbs before he became the nominee.

The late-stage cash infusion was enough to get Gibbs on Michigan’s air waves for the first time in the race, elevating his profile among low-information Republican voters.

Despite his vote to impeach Trump, Meijer still appeared to be favored in the race thanks to its political leanings (Meijer won it by six points in 2020 when Trump won it by three, and redistricting has given it a Democratic lean) as well as Meijer’s financial advantage. The DCCC decided to make an effort to mitigate both of those advantages by emphasizing Gibbs’s conservative credentials during primary season.

Undoubtedly, it is Republican primary voters, first and foremost, who are to blame for Gibbs’s victory – they’re the ones who chose him. 

But it was not, as the Bulwark’s Jonathan Last suggests, a choice they made in part because the DCCC “ran ads explaining to Michigan voters what sort of crazy person Meijer’s opponent was,” or that “accurately described Gibbs’s nuttiness.”

Here’s the ad that the DCCC made. You might notice some differences between it and the one Last invents.

It describes Gibbs as “too conservative,” accuses him of having been “handpicked by Trump,” and having “worked in Trump’s administration with Ben Carson.” It warns that Gibbs will promote a “conservative agenda in Congress,” “hard line against immigrants at the border,” and “patriotic education in our schools.”  

Is there anything in it that could be described as negative to the mind of a Republican primary electorate – much less as evidence to anyone that Gibbs is a “crazy person?” 

The DCCC didn’t help Gibbs by promoting any of the insane or offensive things that he’s said, it helped him by portraying him as a typical Republican with conservative views on border security and education.

He does this not just to condemn Meijer – by characterizing the congressman’s written condemnation against the DCCC’s dirty trick as “crying” in an oddly resentful attack – but to tar Republican voters in the district as one-issue voters compelled to voter for Gibbs because of his support for Trump’s inexcusable post-2020 conspiracy-mongering. 

Last’s dishonesty shares not just the DCCC’s aim in running the ad – to promote and cover for the Democratic Party – but its effect: Making our politics worse.

Headline Fail of the Week

NPR attempted to criticize Texas governor Greg Abbott and Arizona governor Doug Ducey in an article titled, “GOP governors sent buses of migrants to D.C. and NYC — with no plan for what’s next.”

“Texas and Arizona governors continue to send buses full of migrants and refugees to Washington, D.C.’s Union Station, just a few blocks from the Capitol building,” a tweet accompanying the story reads. “Upon arrival no government officials are there to meet them.”

However, as Abbott explained last week, when the first busload of migrants arrived in New York City from Texas, both New York and D.C. have claimed they are “sanctuary cities” that welcome illegal immigrants and vow to limit cooperation with federal immigration agencies. 

“Because of President Biden’s continued refusal to acknowledge the crisis caused by his open border policies, the State of Texas has had to take unprecedented action to keep our communities safe,” Abbott said in a statement.

“In addition to Washington, D.C., New York City is the ideal destination for these migrants, who can receive the abundance of city services and housing that Mayor Eric Adams has boasted about within the sanctuary city. I hope he follows through on his promise of welcoming all migrants with open arms so that our overrun and overwhelmed border towns can find relief,” he added, noting that New York City has right to housing laws that require the local government to provide “emergency shelter for every unhoused person.”

Media Misses

-Alex Stein, a BlazeTV contributor, posted a video of himself berating Vice reporter Tess Owen at CPAC over the weekend. It’s hard to imagine a better way to tell on yourself than treating a woman that way, but Stein’s evident pride in having done so proves it’s not impossible.

-Asked: 

https://twitter.com/rweingarten/status/1556287754765570049?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

And answered:

–Vanity Fair published an interview with Rachel Maddow, which was not only confusingly accompanied by photos of her chopping wood, but also featured a defense of her record on Russiagate.

“Trying to turn the Russia scandal into the dossier, or trying to turn the dossier into the Russia scandal, is a revisionist history designed to intimidate people out of covering stories like that in the future and to try to obscure the seriousness of what Russia did, and what the Trump campaign’s relationship was with what Russia did,” she told the magazine.

Maddow breathlessly covered Russia-related conspiracy theories during the Trump administration, including one in which she suggested Russia could “flip the switch” on U.S. power grids at any time.

Much of the reporting was sparked by a dossier from former British spy Christopher Steele. A number of the allegations included in the dossier have since been discredited and a December 2019 report by the Justice Department inspector general criticized the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane team for failing to communicate key details about Steele and the dossier to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.