Yes, the 2020 Election Was Stolen
For two years, the constant shouting of childish epithets at anyone who would dare question Joe Biden’s legitimacy has suppressed a necessary reckoning with an election that was, in every sense, a complete aberration. It’s true Donald Trump and many of his supporters did themselves no favors by embracing some of the more outlandish theories about what happened. But the story we have been told again and again—that the 2020 election was not only fair, but some miracle of democracy—is propaganda, pure and simple.
Despite the media’s heavy-handed narrative, we do not and never will really know what happened in the early morning hours of November 4, 2020, and those chaotic days that preceded Biden’s media coronation. It is disingenuous to dismiss the role of fraud in such an unprecedented scenario: an election with historic turnout that, thanks to the widespread adoption of an unconventional voting method prone to cheating, was not decided until an unusually dilated, shadowy tabulating process had run its course in a handful of heavily partisan jurisdictions.
If an election so strange had gone the other way, we can be sure the Left would not be mocking voter fraud theories but treating them like orthodoxy. In the end, Trump lost the Electoral College by about 50,000 votes in a few swing states. It has never been proven that the election was stolen at the ballot box. But to anybody not blinded by partisanship, it has never been an implausible question.
One thing about which we need not deploy conjecture is the role of information warfare. The release of the so-called Twitter Files confirms what has been clear for two years: The nation’s leading institutions tipped the scales in Biden’s favor before a single ballot had been cast. They accomplished this by essentially rigging public opinion. On one hand, malicious partisans in the media, Big Tech, and the U.S. intelligence community systematically suppressed a major scandal about Biden’s foreign influence peddling with the brazen lie that the evidence was “Russian disinformation.” (Their latest story is that the scandal is really about Hunter Biden’s genitalia, rather than his sleazy overseas business. Seriously.)
This censorship enabled Biden, in the middle of a televised debate, to dismiss the whole story as “garbage.” Even as Biden was granted blanket immunity from scrutiny by the press, Trump was cast as a mass murderer who was personally responsible for every single COVID-19 death because of his ignorance of “science.”
If the Hunter Biden scandal had not been censored, if the avalanche of the media’s lies had been toned down just a little, might Trump have won? We’ll never know, but the election was certainly close enough to warrant speculation. What is certain is that the Left put their collective thumb on the scale in a way that they would never accept—if it were being done to them.
Anyone who expects them to care now that they have been caught is a fool. Still, the Right must not simply forget it and move on. Why? Because the Left’s Big Lie about the 2020 election legitimizes a lawless, counterfeit system. The myth that Biden triumphed against fascists who nearly overthrew our system of government (a classical communist theme, as it happens) has enabled Biden to rule like a tyrant in the name of Our Democracy™. Speaking in the people’s name, he has likened Trump and his supporters to a fifth column and weaponized the state against them.
If the system is not unrigged, if the 2020 election’s legitimacy is not repudiated, then we can kiss any chance of free and fair elections goodbye. Every election going forward will be just like 2020 and 2022: Election Night will be formally replaced with Election Month and lectures from Democrats that “this is how things are supposed to be.”
There are some on the Right who would rather bury their heads in the sand than confront harsh realities, but this is not the answer. The Right must never concede the Big Lie that this nation’s oppressors rule legitimately, nor should we draw conclusions about how to move forward from this false premise. This is no mere matter of personal grievance with a corrupt, child-sniffing tyrant, or the repulsive, smug hypocrites and liars who surround him and cover for him in the press, as disgusting as they may be. It is about the future of our country and its political system.
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