A Democratic myth has arisen that former President Donald Trump’s denial of the accuracy of the 2020 vote was “unprecedented.”
Unfortunately, the history behind U.S. election results is often one of legitimate and illegitimate election denial.
All of the 1800, 1824 and 1876 elections were questioned. In some of these cases, the winner was determined by the partisan House of Representatives.
Al Gore, the 2000 presidential candidate, did not accept Florida’s popular vote results. He spent five weeks futilely contesting the state’s tally—until recounts and the Supreme Court certified it.
The ensuing charge that former President George W. Bush was “selected, not elected” was the Democrats’ denialist mantra for years.
In their unhinged attempts to overturn the election, the 2004 Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer, D.Calif., and 31 Democratic House Members voted against certifying the Ohio election results. The current sanctimonious chairman, Rep. Benny Thompson, D.Miss., was one of those denialists.
After 2016, crackpot Democratic orthodoxy for years insisted that Trump had “colluded” with Russia to “steal” certain victory from Hillary Clinton. Clinton herself claimed that Trump was not a “legitimate” president. No wonder she joined #TheResistance to block his presidency.
Clinton, a serial denialist and skeptic, later urged Joe Biden against conceding the 2020 election if they lost.
Jill Stein, left-wing third-party candidate for the left and denialist Jill Stein, unsuccessfully sued courts to disqualify voting results in preselected states.
In 2016, a Hollywood C.-list actor hosted denialist television commercials begging members the Electoral College to disregard their oaths in order to flip the election to Clinton.
Clinton had herself hired Christopher Steele, a foreign national, to create a dossier full of lies to denigrate her 2016 opponent, Trump.
The FBI took up Clinton’s failed efforts. It likewise paid in vain her ancillaries like Christopher Steele to “verify” the dossier’s lies.
The bureau further misled a FISA court about the dossier’s authenticity. A document was altered by an FBI lawyer as part of a government attempt to disrupt a presidential transition.
The Clinton-FBI Russian collusion hoax was just one part of the progressive effort that aimed to rig the 2016 election results.
The Washington Post boasted about the various groups that were formed to impeach Trump during his first days in office. This was under the pretext that he was illegitimately reelected.
Rosa Brooks, an Obama administration Pentagon lawyer, less than two weeks after Trump’s inauguration wrote a long denialist essay in Foreign Policy outlining a strategy to remove the supposedly illegitimate president. She discussed the options of impeachment, the 25th Amendment—and even a military coup.
Madonna, who dreamed of blowing up Trump’s White House, famously shouted to a crowd after rioting broke out in Washington, D.C.
Is that not the most violent type of election denialism you can imagine?
Stacey Abrams was a left-wing media idol and a denialist of the election. Abrams monetized her ridiculous denialism (“voter suppression”) by stumping the country from 2018 to 2021 claiming—without evidence—that the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election was rigged. She lost by more than 50,000 votes.
Time magazine’s Molly Ball in a triumphalist essay bragged that in 2020 a combination of Big Tech money from Silicon Valley—fueled by Mark Zuckerberg’s $419 million infusion—absorbed the balloting collection and counting of several key voting precincts weighed to help Biden.
Ball claimed that Big Tech had carefully censored the news in order to prevent them from being elected. Most notably, that effort spread the lie that the Hunter Biden laptop scandal was “Russian disinformation.”
Left-wing interest organizations modulated the often-violent Black Lives Matter, and Antifa protests of 2020 to aid the Biden campaign.
Ball summed up that left-wing election engineering effort as “a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes” and called it “the secret history of the 2020 election.”
So, who exactly were those “secret” warpers of the 2020 election?
As Ball put it: “A well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.”
It is entirely permissible and legitimate to question whether or not these left-wing efforts in key state capitals are legal. They aim to overturn long-standing voting laws that have been passed by state legislatures.
The next step was to make Election Day a non-existent event for the first time ever in American history. More than 100 million ballots were not cast for Election Day. The vast majority (and by design), were Biden votes. Somehow, customary ballot-disqualification rates of mail-in ballots in some states plunged—even as their numbers exploded.
The scariest form of election interference was the 2020 “cabal.” The FBI, Silicon Valley, street protesters, and the media all conspired to work for the “right result.”
Apparently, that “conspiracy” was the denialists’ response to the 2016 victory of Trump that they never accepted.
COPYRIGHT 2022: TRIBUNE CONTENT AGCY LLC
The Daily Signal offers a variety perspectives. This is not intended to be taken as a representation of the views or opinions of The Heritage Foundation.
Are you a fan of this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Be sure to include the article’s URL, headline, and your name.