Suddenly, It’s No Longer ‘Deeply Dangerous’ To Talk About Rigged Elections
It wasn’t long ago that we were told that President Donald Trump’s questioning the legitimacy of the election wasn’t just unfounded, but a serious threat to the future of the nation.
As one commentator put it, by fanning the specter of election fraud, Trump was “sowing doubt not just about the 2020 election, but whether America’s voting system – the foundation of American democracy – is sound … In a democracy, where governing power is rooted in the consent of the governed, this is deeply dangerous.”
Yet here is President Joe Biden, predicting that the next election can’t be trusted, based on far less evidence than Trump had. And the press is celebrating him for it.
“I think it would easily be illegitimate,” said Biden at his marathon press conference last week when asked about the midterm elections (that Republicans are expected to sweep). “The increase in the prospect of being illegitimate is in proportion to not being able to get these reforms passed.”
Biden was referring to a bill push by Democrats that would federalize state elections and make it easy for the left to manipulate vote totals. In the bizarro world of the Democratic-media complex, this is called a “voter rights” bill. And efforts by Republicans to enact prudent requirements such as voter ID, registration roll maintenance, vote harvesting bans, and the like, are described as voter suppression.
Yet, despite zero evidence that Republicans are trying to suppress legal voting, you never see Democratic claims about voter suppression preceded by the obligatory “baseless,” or “false,” “big lie” adjectives attached to every Trump statement. They don’t even get tagged as “misleading.”
You certainly never see complaints about how these false claims are threatening the fabric of our society. Biden isn’t being kicked off social media. Tweets about voter suppression lies aren’t being censored by Twitter.
Instead, the mainstream press is urging Biden on, saying things like, “Democrats believe there’s plenty of evidence that Republicans are trying to steal future elections and feel bolstered by extensive reporting by CNN, NBC, and other media outlets on the state-level machinations of Trump allies.”
“Extensive reporting”? You mean, like this from CNN’s White House correspondent Stephen Collinson, who claims – without evidence – that there is “a nationwide effort by GOP-run states to make it harder to cast ballots and easier to steal elections, which is rooted in ex-President Donald Trump’s voter fraud lies.”
The truth is that Democrats have been undermining the integrity of elections far longer and much more aggressively than Trump has.
Al Gore got this ball rolling when he dragged the 2000 Florida vote all the way to the Supreme Court and then stood silent as the left claimed that George W. Bush stole the election – even after media-sponsored recounts (each hoping to prove that Gore was the legitimate winner) showed Bush won Florida fair and square.
Hillary Clinton picked up the baton in 2016 with claims that Trump colluded with Russia to steal that election. Even now Clinton insists that she was the legitimate winner. “There was a widespread understanding that this election was not on the level,” she said late in 2020. “We still don’t know what really happened.”
As National Review’s David Harsanyi put it, “Democrats have been delegitimizing elections for years.”
He notes, for example, that Nancy Pelosi – when calling for Trump to be impeached – said it was “dangerous” to let the 2020 election decide Trump’s fate, and Rep. Adam Schiff argued that “The president’s misconduct cannot be decided at the ballot box, for we cannot be assured that the vote will be fairly won.”
Stacey Abrams still hasn’t conceded her loss in the 2018 Georgia governor’s race after claiming that election had been stolen, and continues to be celebrated by Democrats and the press.
After her loss, Democrats fell over each other making claims that voting machines around the country were vulnerable to being hacked. And let’s not forget the Democrats’ attacks on the Electoral College every time they lose, further eroding the nation’s trust in presidential elections.
Did any of them get kicked off social media platforms? Did the press call any of them liars? Or insurrectionists? Or a threat to our form of republican democracy? If you can find such an example, please let us know.
We are detecting a pattern here, one where talking about stolen elections is a dire threat to democracy only when a Republican does it.
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