RUTHFULLY YOURS

On January 6, the day of the Capitol protest/riot/siege, Rasmussen released a poll that showed only a slight majority of Americans believe Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election fairly. Just 25 percent of Republicans and 52 percent of unaffiliated voters said that Biden’s election was on the square.

The poll’s results largely reflected the mood of the electorate and Republican lawmakers were getting an earful from constituents about congressional inaction. Finally, two months too late, a dozen Senate Republicans concocted a last-ditch plan to “audit” the election results before Inauguration Day, a move backed by most GOP voters and by the president.

It forewarned an ignominious start to the Biden-Harris Administration. Democrats, after suffering unexpected losses in the House and eking out the slimmest majority in the Senate, could hardly claim any sort of mandate with tens of millions of Americans questioning the validity of the national election. A public vetting in Congress, devoid of far-fetched claims peddled by shady operatives, exposing provable evidence of vote fraud, conducted days before the inauguration was the last thing Team Biden and the Democrats wanted.

Further, Republican-led state legislatures in swing states that flipped from Trump to Biden in 2020 also prepared to investigate various abuses tied to the majority mail-in election; lawmakers promised big changes in order to prevent another debacle in future elections.

But all of that likely is off the table, at least for the foreseeable future.

Thanks to a mob of lawless thugs, plans to further expose election illegalities and irregularities have been crushed. What Joe Biden referred to last week as “The Big Lie,” the idea that the election was stolen from Donald Trump, will be a verboten topic of discussion by politicians, journalists, and rank-and-file Republicans.

The totalitarian company line is any suggestion that election fraud exists is tantamount to sedition. Americans who dare doubt the results, a popular political sport for Democrats over the past four years, are now vilified as “insurrectionists” and plenty of our fellow countrymen want it punished accordingly.

The dangerous overreaction to the events of January 6, including another attempt to impeach Trump on an “incitement of insurrection” charge, has stifled the election’s most vocal critics in Washington. Colleagues of Senators Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), whom Biden compared to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels in his latest attempt to unify the country, have not come to their defense. In fact, calls to expel the pair from the Senate have been met with silence.

The outcome is the culmination of a monthslong crusade by the Democratic Party’s oligarchic masters in Silicon Valley to ban any skepticism of the election, particularly related to mail-in ballots.

As I explained last year, Big Tech and the Biden campaign have been in cahoots to censor posts about potential fraud. Twitter issued its “Civic Integrity Policy” in September; dozens of tweets on the president’s now suspended account were flagged for spreading “misleading claims” before November. Twitter fact-checkers, without evidence, assured users that “voting by mail is a safe and secure option.”

Facebook, Snapchat, and Google followed suit; the censorship continued after Election Day. But Big Tech is taking it a step further, equating social media posts to a virtual loaded gun.

Twitter is preventing users from engaging tweets that mention election fraud by insisting the claim is “disputed” and poses a “risk of violence.” Facebook announced it will remove content that includes the words “stop the steal” for the same reason. “We’ve been allowing robust conversations related to the election outcome and that will continue,” the platform’s vice president of integrity wrote Monday. “But with continued attempts to organize events against the outcome of the US presidential election that can lead to violence, and use of the term by those involved in Wednesday’s violence in DC, we’re taking this additional step in the lead up to the inauguration.” Facebook had already announced it would ban the president’s account until at least January 20 because he allegedly was undermining the transition of power.

But the big prize came last Friday when Trump haters finally got what they have long wanted: Twitter permanently suspended the president’s account. The company accused Trump of violating its glorification of violence policy with two relatively innocuous tweets posted on January 8; one lauded the “75,000,000 great American Patriots” who voted for him and another announced he would not attend Biden’s inauguration. “Due to the ongoing tensions in the United States, and an uptick in the global conversation in regards to the people who violently stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, these two Tweets must be read in the context of broader events in the country and the ways in which the President’s statements can be mobilized by different audiences, including to incite violence,” Twitter explained.

The platform laughably concluded that Trump’s use of the term “American Patriots” meant he supported the violence at the Capitol. See how that works? Every Trump voter, according to our Big Tech overlords, is a de facto criminal waiting to rampage.

Donald Trump’s most effective, unvarnished way to communicate with the American people and his fans is gone for good. So, too, are tens of thousands of Twitter users as the company continues to delete accounts supportive of the president while others voluntarily exit in protest.

The much-needed investigation into the 2020 election, one that even Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) last week admitted cannot become the “new norm,” won’t happen. A bipartisan commission proposed by Senator Tim Scott (R-S.C.) will never see the light of day; it’s likely he will pull his bill at the risk of being labeled a seditionist. Major corporations en masse are announcing they won’t contribute to Republicans who supported challenging the election’s final certification.

State lawmakers undoubtedly will be bullied into submission.

But the justified belief held by tens of millions of Americans that the 2020 election was at the very least unfair or at worst stolen, won’t go away. In fact, the incendiary rhetoric about January 6 combined with widespread deplatforming is reason to bolster those fears. The “big lie” is that the 2020 election was on the up-and-up; no amount of unpersoning will persuade half the country otherwise.