There could be an Election Denier right next door. They could deliver your mail, serve you a cocktail at the airport, sit next to you on the subway, or empty your garbage. They might be a grandma, a wife, or a son. They could be anyone. They could even be me.
Yes, I am an Election Denier. I am someone you’ve been told to fear, someone you probably think has been captured by extremist ideology and THE BIG LIE. You might say that also makes me an “insurrectionist” and “domestic extremist.”
I would say you’ve been watching too much MSNBC. The thing is, I grew up as an Election Denier because I grew up as a Democrat, and we never met an election we didn’t deny. That is, unless we won.
I was a Democrat who should have wanted to win in 2020. I supported Joe Biden; I even voted for him. Yet, coming out of that election, I felt nothing but despair. I could see the strings. And I left the Democratic Party because of it.
I could see how much power the Democrats had and how they orchestrated a fool-proof election win that didn’t need a strong candidate or an engaged citizenry. All they needed was an alliance of power that would go along with their plan and lots and lots of money.
Denying elections was never a thought crime for any of us. It was rewarded. It did not inspire fear. That is, until January 6th, when the Democrats got their enduring crisis, a Reichstag Fire, to assume absolute power using fear.
You have to understand what it was like to be a Democrat over the past several decades. We didn’t have any power until Barack Obama’s rise. With Silicon Valley driving wealth leftward, bad trade deals making the rich richer, and hollowing out the middle class, by the end of Obama’s second term, we’d amassed more power than we had at any time except right before the Civil War.
Letting go of that power has taken Democrats to where they are now, desperate authoritarians who no longer know how to win elections in this country because they don’t understand this country anymore.
That is as true on the Right with the establishment and Never Trump Republicans as it is on the Left. Now we’re seeing an epic battle playing out - it’s the establishment vs. the people.
The OG Election Deniers
I came of age as an adult in the 1980s, thinking my vote didn’t matter. Elections were rigged, and that was that. Nixon? He ratf*cked both elections and rigged them in his favor. Reagan? He made a secret deal with Iran and sabotaged Jimmy Carter.
But none of that could compare to the 2000 election. After Bill Clinton’s impeachment, Al Gore tried to hold a third term, but his sharp turn on gun control, combined with zero charisma, not to mention an electorate that wasn’t exactly engaged, meant Al Gore didn’t earn enough votes to bring home the win.
We decided that the problem wasn’t Al Gore or the Democrats' policies —no, it was DEMOCRACY itself. Giving people a choice was the problem. Now, we had a new enemy - Ralph Nader, the third-party spoiler.
I guess we didn’t stop to consider that Bill Clinton's victory was due to another third-party spoiler named Ross Perot, who had pulled votes from HW Bush, allowing Bill Clinton to pull in a victory.
The problem was much bigger than Ralph Nader; it’s just that our Election Denialism prevented any of us from addressing it.
We clung to the idea that Gore should have won because he won the popular vote, a scenario that would also play out in 2016.
America is still a young country. The last time we had a disconnect between the popular vote and the Electoral College was around the time of the Civil War, when we were as polarized as we are now.
#electiondenier
Believe it or not, the hashtag #electiondenier was started by MAGA, not the Democrats as a tool to shame Hillary Clinton supporters for their refusal to accept the results of the 2016 election.
The term “Election Denier” doesn’t appear in mainstream media in any major way until just ahead of the 2022 midterms. Here is the very first time the New York Times used the term, and they only used it in the subheader of the piece:
Somehow, it became the key to winning the midterms, as it was easy shorthand to scare their voters away from MAGA candidates while at the same time sending millions their way so that they could compete against them. It was low-hanging fruit for the party with money to burn and control the propaganda press.
That they couldn’t win with their own candidates tells you everything you need to know about what they have become. They didn’t need to explain anything. All they had to say was “Election Denier,” and the voters got the message: The Big Lie, the “Insurrection,” “white supremacy,” and “Fascism.”
Wikipedia, hilariously, yet another tool of propaganda for the establishment, even has a page for the “Election denial movement”:
This is all they have on 2016:
While it’s funny that this is an actual Wikipedia page, it’s frightening when you consider that we live in a time when that version is the only acceptable version. It’s like living in 1984. But you can see how normalized it has become in this interview with Rep. Jim Jordan for 60 Minutes:
Lesley Stahl might have been a good journalist once upon a time, but she isn’t anymore. By now, she is nothing more than a White House Press Secretary, doing the bidding of the Biden administration with no curiosity, hunger for the truth, or desire to chase the story.
As it happens, yes, 2020 had questionable results because it was rigged months in advance. They orchestrated everything from the rollout of Trump’s October surprise, the Hunter Biden laptop, to claims Trump would say the election was rigged (it was), to lawyers who might dare to defend Trump, to brand new rules made in various swing states, and worst of all, the $400 million cash infusion by Mark Zuckerberg to “fortify” the election.
The FBI’s involvement in the Hunter Biden laptop alone is enough to say the election was rigged. But you can go much further than that. The FBI’s involvement in the Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping delivering Michigan for Team Biden, and all of that before you even get to the involvement of the Lincoln Project to sabotage Trump voters in Georgia, the gaslighting over the protests, and COVID used as the excuse for unprecedented early voting.
But even if none of that were true, speech is not a crime in America. Just because they somehow got their Reichstag Fire on January 6th does not give them the right to criminalize our speech, our right to protest or police our thoughts.
#NotMyPresident
Team Trump had a one-in-a-million shot at victory. They just had to win three key swing states. They would spend all of their money and resources on Facebook’s micro-targeting. They offered the same services to the Clinton campaign, but her campaign foolishly turned them down.
Trump’s team knew they didn’t have to bring out new voters; they just had to convince Hillary Clinton voters to stay home. They did this by targeting three key groups: African American males (“Superpredator”), young feminists (“Bill Clinton is a rapist”), and Bernie supporters (“The primary was rigged”).
Because Hillary was chasing a much bigger win, going for Georgia, she ignored the key swing states and lost the election. It did not go well.
Although Hillary conceded, behind the scenes, neither she nor anyone else accepted Trump’s victory, and we would watch, for the first time in the history of the United States, government agencies and spies working for them who would do everything in their power to sabotage, discredit, destroy and remove Trump from power.
In other words, our Election Denialism evolved into a full-blown coup after 2016. There was no “peaceful transfer of power.” It was the beginning of a political movement of Election Deniers who refused to accept Trump as the President of the United States, not for one minute, not for four years.
By then, Twitter had become a powerful tool of state propaganda, with the elitist blue-checks determining the media narrative. The truth no longer mattered. Now, it was war. The #resistance was Election Denialism, as was #notmypresident, #impeachtrump, and every other way we refused to accept that half the country had voted for someone other than Hillary Clinton.
The Consent of the Governed…
“State propaganda, when supported by the educated classes and when no deviation is permitted from it, can have a big effect. It was a lesson learned by Hitler and many others, and it has been pursued to this day.”
― Noam Chomsky
Not only am I an Election Denier, but I am in full support of the Stop the Steal protest at the Capitol on January 6th. Just because there was an unplanned riot that no one saw coming, protesting what happened in the 2020 election was not just the right thing to do, it was the American thing to do.
Let’s read it again:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
It wasn’t a revolution. It wasn’t an “insurrection.” It was a protest by very angry Americans who had every right to show up and let the government know that they did not consent to an election like that or to the treatment of their chosen representative for the four years prior.
This isn’t a monarchy. The media apparatus doesn’t get to decide what we the people should care about. And they certainly do not have the right to infringe on our God-given liberties.
No, we do not consent to a “well-funded cabal” of lawyers, academics, and billionaires deciding long in advance how a free and fair election should go, not without full transparency. That’s called a monopoly, and it has no place in our democracy.
Our government did not have the right to override the American people’s decision to elect Donald Trump in 2016. The FBI did not have the right to spy on Trump before and during his presidency. They did not have the right to radicalize American citizens and entrap them in Federal crimes without full disclosure to the American people.
And they most certainly do not have the right to weaponize our justice system, our courts, and our institutions just to destroy their political enemies. That is not the American way. Trump is the frontrunner for the presidency of the United States, and none of these self-appointed oligarchs have the right to infringe on our right to representation.
If the government assumes power that does not belong to it, then we all have the right and the obligation to protest—yes, even the sitting President of the United States has that right. If they don’t like it, they can offer us a better candidate.
What they did in 2020 was so corrupt that we may never have a fair election again. We need election reform. They can demonize us all they want, but that doesn’t change the fact that we have the right to a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
Doug Wilson has made a strong case that no election can be won until we fix our elections.
Never once has our government, our elected leaders, or the security state put the needs of the people over the needs of the establishment. Instead, they punished them for voting for Trump. They seem to think this is the best long-term strategy without realizing that chasing Trump has completely and utterly destroyed whatever they used to be.
“Election Deniers” is an ugly slur designed to marginalize and disenfranchise the power of the people. Yet they have built a system they do not want to abandon because they have eliminated the problems that have plagued Democrats for my entire lifetime: an absence of good candidates and a lack of enthusiasm.
Yet, that’s the whole point of having elections at all. We elect leaders to represent us. If those elections have become corrupt beyond repair, then it is our job as Americans to fix them.
And if they call you an “Election Denier,” just hit them with a quote by Orwell, “In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
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