Democrats and their media satraps are trying to censor anyone who supports what they call the “Big Lie” — the idea that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. But the real “Big Lie” is that the 2020 presidential election was free and fair.
The term “Big Lie” is attributed to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, who is said to have claimed that if you make a lie big enough, and repeat it often enough, people will believe it to be true. President-elect Joe Biden was the first to use the term “Big Lie” with reference to claims that the election was stolen. In a press conference on January 8, he likened Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Josh Hawley (R-MO) to Goebbels. Journalists have dutifully repeated Biden’s bit of propaganda.
We do not know, and may never know, whether the 2020 presidential election was, in fact, “stolen.” Our electoral system is designed to anticipate imperfections and controversies in the voting process, which is why the Electoral College exists.
We should not do what Democrats did after 2016, and spend four years chasing conspiracy theories. As I wrote in my ebook, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election, “There are reasons to consider the 2020 U.S. election ‘legitimate’ — not to cover up its flaws, but because it is impossible to rule out the possibility it produced what voters wanted: an end to the Trump presidency, with checks on the power of a radical Democratic Party to pursue Biden’s ‘progressive’ agenda of “revolutionary institutional changes.”
At the same time, I noted, the 2020 presidential election violated internationally accepted criteria for a free and fair election. “Voters were denied the ‘absolute’ right to a secret ballot [through flawed vote-by-mail systems]. They were denied ‘equal opportunity of access to the media, particularly the mass communications media, in order to put forward their political views.’ They were denied ‘security with respect to their lives and property.’ And they were denied “freedom of movement, assembly, association and expression.’
The 2020 presidential election was deeply flawed for several reasons: voting rules were changed in the middle, at the insistence of one party and over the objections of the other; there was widespread political violence, carried out largely by supporters of one party; and there was media censorship, including on social media, against one side and not the other. Billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg spent hundreds of millions of dollars to turn out the vote for Democrats — alone.
American voters knew, as they went to the polls, that the left would not accept Trump’s re-election peacefully. Left-wing radicals posted online plans to “disrupt” the country in the event that Trump claimed to have won a close election. Stores boarded up in major cities across the nation in anticipation of riots if Trump were the winner. And Biden himself used the implicit threat: “Does anyone believe there will be less violence in America if Donald Trump is reelected?” he asked.
Only after the election did America we learn that Trump’s vaccine program, Operation Warp Speed, had been a stunning success; that Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s troubled son, was under investigation by the Department of Justice, and that his laptop was real; that the coronavirus may indeed have escaped from a laboratory in China; and that Trump never called neo-Nazis in Charlotte “very fine people” — something many of us tried to point out, for months, during the election.
The 2020 presidential election was deeply corrupt. One need not speculate about voting machines or dead voters to know that. We should be looking at ways to ensure that we never endure another election like it ever again. But Democrats and the media are trying to entrench those abuses, relying on the “Big Lie” that 2020 was somehow a victory for democracy.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new e-book, The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it). His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
