Elections and Insurrections

One nefarious tactic employed by the media to discredit their opponents on the right is to ask them whether they believe Joe Biden is the legitimately elected president. If the person being asked the question answers in the negative but is unable to point to any specific illegality involved in the 2020 election then he or she is portrayed as some kind of kook.

It's a tactic that works splendidly since casual listeners often don't think to ask why this same question is never asked of Hillary Clinton or Stacey Abrams, neither of whom were willing to grant that they legitimately lost their elections in 2020.

In any case, the question of the legitimacy of Biden's election is a red herring. The problem with the 2020 election is not that anything done was technically illegal, although perhaps some things were, the problem was with how rules were altered and how lies were perpetrated, both to the detriment of Donald Trump.

The rule changes may have all been done legally, the lies themselves may not have been "illegal," but the result certainly cast suspicion on the fairness of the election.

Mollie Hemingway at The Federalist offers a few thoughts on the reasons for this suspicion:

The 2020 presidential election was unlike any in American history.

Hundreds of laws and processes were changed in the months leading up to the election, sometimes legally and sometimes not, creating chaos, confusion, and uncertainty.

Tech oligarch Mark Zuckerberg, one of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful men, spent $419 million — nearly as much as the federal government itself — to interfere in the government’s management of the election in key states.

Powerful tech oligarchs and corrupt propaganda press conspired to keep indisputably important news stories, such as allegations of corruption regarding the Biden family business, hidden from voters in the weeks prior to voting.

Information operations were routinely manufactured about President Trump in the closing months of the campaign, including the false claim that Russians paid bounties for dead American soldiers and Trump didn’t care, and that Trump had called dead American soldiers losers, disputed by dozens of on-the-record sources.

Effective conservative voices were censored by the social media arms of the Democrat Party. And all this was done after the establishment spent years running an unprecedented “Resistance” that falsely claimed Trump was a traitor who had colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election.

The term "stolen" may not be technically accurate, but given these machinations there's no surprise that many Republican voters believe the election was indeed "rigged."

With the exception of a single Time Magazine article admitting there was a “conspiracy” by a “a well-funded cabal of powerful people” who worked to “change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information,” to create a “revolution in how people vote,” corporate media have largely kept silent about or downplayed how the establishment secured its victory for their man Joe Biden.

Time’s article didn’t come out until February 4, 2021, but in the months prior to its publication, Republicans grew increasingly concerned that the rigging it described had, in fact, happened.

Their desire for free and fair elections they could trust, elections that “well-funded cabals of powerful people” weren’t able to rig, resulted in mass protests following the November election. The fact that the election was exceedingly close didn’t help matters.

Media and other left-wing pollsters had put out preposterous suppression polls to help Joe Biden get over the finish line. For example, the Washington Post’s final poll claimed Biden would win the swing state of Wisconsin by 17 points, indicating a nationwide blowout of historic proportions. (He won it by seven-tenths of a percent.)

The actual outcome took weeks to calculate and came down to just 43,000 votes across three states, even closer than Trump’s close victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Nor does it help change Republican voters' minds about the integrity of the election when common sense measures to secure voting integrity are strenuously opposed as "attacks on democracy," when the media is relatively silent on the effect that millions of mail-in ballots had on the fairness of the system or merely shrugs at Mark Zuckerberg's $419 million dollars targeted at getting out the vote for Biden.

Hemingway goes on:

The media and other Democrats have used the January 6 riot at the Capitol as a way to ignore legitimate concerns about what they did to the election system, and as a way to continue the assault on election security.

As part of their political operation, they have used a propaganda technique of redefining efforts to secure the integrity of elections as attacks on democracy.

The 2020 campaign to destroy election security by flooding the system with tens of millions of mail-in ballots was run by Marc Elias, a braggadocious Democrat attorney and former general counsel for Hillary Clinton who also ran the Russia collusion hoax that seriously damaged the country. In fact, one of his partners in the scheme was recently indicted by prosecutor John Durham for lying about his role in the hoax.

Elias and his “well-funded cabal of powerful people” are hoping to make permanent or even expand the weakening of election security.

The propaganda press have also downplayed Zuckerberg’s staggering $419 million expenditure, or falsely presented it as non-partisan help to voters. Independent researchers have shown that the funding dollars overwhelming poured into blue counties, and particularly blue counties in swing states.

The money was used to enable the private takeover of government election offices, erasing the bright red line between campaign operations and government administration of elections.

The massive grants were used to run Get Out The Vote operations through these government offices, in a manner that benefited Democrats in overwhelmingly disproportionate ways. The funds were used mostly to register Democrats to vote, encourage Democrats to vote, harvest Democrat ballots, cure defective Democrat ballots, count Democrat ballots, etc.

No right-wing billionaire could have gotten away with even thinking about such an operation, but had he, the media would be all over it. A few hundred thousand dollars in Russian Facebook ads for both Clinton and Trump generated years of hysterical media coverage from the corrupt press.

Yet Zuckerberg funding the private takeover of elections to secure Democrat victories has barely been mentioned — much less obsessed over — by most of corporate media.

Meanwhile, the media has certainly obsessed over the January 6th, 2021 riot on Capitol Hill, insistently labelling it an "insurrection." Yet in the year since, with all of the investigations that have ensued from this shameful and tragic event, not a single person among the 725 people who've been arrested has been charged with any crime connected to "insurrection."

An insurrection that involved no firearms among the insurrectionists and no suppression by the military is not much of an insurrection. It was indeed a riot, however, and the rioters need to be held accountable, but the media is loath to call it a riot, perhaps because they'd then have to explain why the riots that beset our cities in the summer of 2020 were "understandable" but the January 6th riots were not.

All of this - the hyperbolic labelling, the attempt to portray the riots as something much worse than riots - appears to be a cynical, disingenuous ploy to discredit and malign Donald Trump and his supporters as treasonous because they fear that he'll run again in 2024.

Hemingway concludes:

The media and Democrats’ J6 hysteria is meant as a distraction to keep Americans from properly dealing with the very real problems with how the 2020 election was overseen.

The future of the country rests on the ability of both winners and losers to trust our elections, to make it easy to vote, but difficult to cheat, and to have some reasonable level of confidence that voting is conducted privately and without coercion, harvesting, or undue third-party influence.

The media and other Democrats are cartoonishly overhyping the J6 riot to avoid being held accountable for the many ways in which they destroyed election integrity in the months and years leading up to November 2020.

Wise people are not fooled by their distraction attempt.

Let's hope that there are a lot of wise people.