Talk about election denialism! A whiny columnist for The Chicago Tribune is trying to convince herself that the only reason President-elect Donald Trump won the 2024 election was because of disinformation. Yawn.

Sabrina Haake, a freelance columnist for Post-Tribune, a local subsidiary of the Chicago newspaper, wrote one of the dumbest takes on why the American people repudiated the media’s incessant leftist propaganda and elected Trump. “As I see it, Trump didn’t win this election. Disinformation did, demonstrating that the world’s richest men, by funding disinformation, will stop at nothing to end government regulations and taxes, or to defeat democracy itself,” she wrote. Wow, how terrible that people want to limit government overreach! After scolding Americans for making an allegedly “terrible mistake,” the writer advocated for a restructuring of the First Amendment in order to suppress free speech online.

Haake equated Trump to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and railed against Americans for embracing “a known monster, someone who sells political violence and hatred, and who tried to overthrow the last election.” 

But rather than reflecting on how well each candidate campaigned or the policies they ran on, Haake pinned blame on the social media landscape for spurring the supposedly misinformed right to turn out in droves to vote. “Trump supporters in the U.S. consume right-wing propaganda far more than the rest of the country, which means they were either not informed about Trump’s sinister plans, or Fox and Twitter/X succeeded in scaring them with a firehose of Kamala Harris disinformation.” 

Haake even argued for a censorship-friendly interpretation of the Constitution. “First Amendment law needs to catch up with an altered media landscape,” the supposed lawyer screeched. “The First Amendment protects ‘core political speech’ above all other forms of expression. But Musk purchasing Twitter, the world’s town square, only to weaponize it to support his own agenda, and Fox admittedly lying to viewers nonstop to promote Trump, isn’t political speech presumptively entitled to legal protection.” 

Ah, so in Haake’s world, those whom she disagrees with don’t necessarily get a guaranteed right to free speech.  Got it.

What was revealing about Haake’s mish-mosh of leftist brouhaha was that she ended up spreading disinformation herself while simultaneously claiming to be some sort of truth gatekeeper against disinformation. Nothing made that more clear than her complete gaslighting about the truly decrepit state of the U.S. economy under Biden:

We aren’t a hateful nation; we’re a nation that’s been lied to. By Fox, by Russia, by Musk. We have the strongest economy in the world, we recovered post-COVID better than any other advanced economy, unemployment is low, and the Biden stock market hit more records than Trump’s, yet Fox, Musk and Russia convinced half the country that we’re in economic peril. According to AP VoteCast’s sweeping survey and other network exit polls, most voters were focused on a ‘crumbling’ economy, and they broke hard for Trump.

Of course, Haake mentioned nothing about how the majority of Americans are struggling to pay their bills, suffering from record credit card debt, and spending thousands of dollars more a year just to maintain the same standard of living they had in January 2021. 

She also conveniently left out the crucial factoid that inflation is “also making stock markets appear stronger than they really are and cutting into returns for everyone, including those with retirement accounts,” as Heritage Foundation Senior Research Associate Alexander Frei noted in an Oct. 31 column. In addition, Economist Dan Mitchell’s September 2024 analysis of a Census Bureau report on U.S. income concluded that “families are still worse off than they were before the pandemic.”

But Haake, true to form, tried to dismiss any discontent with the current Biden economy as the voters just being stupid. “Economists have observed that the gap between voters’ positive perceptions of their own financial health, compared to their negative perceptions of the country’s economic health, is mainly explained by what they are being told by the media,” she condescended.

So who’s doing the lying again, Haake?

Conservatives are under attack. Contact the Post-Tribune at 312-222-5998 and demand it distance herself from Sabrina Haake’s outrageous call for censorship.