On The Left Hook, John Knefel explains how MAGA media ties election denial to the “great replacement” theory
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From the July 22, 2026, edition of The Left Hook with Wajahat Ali
WAJAHAT ALI (HOST): But you see them, especially Donald Trump, he has tied everything to the SAVE Act. He goes, affordability, it's a made up word. Affordability housing, big yawn. I'll only do it if you attach the SAVE Act. So the SAVE Act is one big component, right? SAVE Act, essentially voter suppression. All right, so we got one act right there. Why the obsession with mail-in ballots?
JOHN KNEFEL (MEDIA MATTERS): Well, this has been a long-running fascination amongst the election denier movement. As I see it, there are two central pillars of MAGAism. One, is election denial around the 2020 election. Really to be MAGA, you have to believe that the 2020 election was rigged. There are all sorts of activists, right-wing activists, anti-voting activists who spent years saying that they had found evidence of ballot stuffing. There were documentaries that ended up being later totally debunked about people acting as mules to stuff ballots. And really what that started as was a backlash, a reaction to pro-voting measures that emerged when a big thing happened in 2020 which was the pandemic. And so, it was harder to go to the polls. People were stuck at home. Congregating in poll sites was going to be riskier. And so all sorts of states and municipalities around the country enacted measures to make it easier to vote, either absentee or early voting or through the mail.
And all of those are anathema to people who want to make it harder to vote. And so, those pro-access measures were sort of transmuted into this broad conspiracy to steal the election from Donald Trump. And so, that’s one basically constant pillar of the MAGA movement.
And the other one is being anti-immigrant, which goes back to Trump's coming down the escalator. And although these things may seem like disparate issues, they are in fact intimately linked through the racist “great replacement” theory that was popularized by Fox News for a very long time and now has become just a given on the right.
Yeah, it's everywhere. And for people who aren't familiar, the “great replacement” theory posits that Democratic or liberal elites, sometimes coded as Jewish people, are quote-unquote importing foreigners, typically understood as brown or black-skinned, from places that Trump and others refer to in ways that I’m not going to repeat here. And that those liberal elites are bringing in foreigners to, quote unquote, replace white people by giving them the vote.
And so these two pillars that seem disparate are, in fact, intimately braided together. And that's why you can understand Trump's twin obsessions with saying that the 2020 election was rigged and unleashing ICE on all these cities throughout the country. These are not separate issues. They are absolutely one in the same. And that is also why you hear people like Steve Bannon saying that we need to have ICE and Border Patrol at polling sites for the coming midterms because they see these as the same issue just looked at in slightly different ways.