AND YET THE ESTABLISHMENT WILL OSTRACIZE YOU NOW IF YOU SAY IT: Democrats don’t trust elections either, only 19% of all voters say Biden and Trump elected ‘fairly.’
After 2016, a deluge of articles and books pointed to Hillary Clinton’s 77,000-vote margin of defeat in three decisive states, blaming, plausibly, James Comey’s late actions or, less plausibly, Russia’s dabblings in Facebook and Twitter. These legends live today and are treated respectfully. The same books could be written about 2020. Mr. Trump’s Electoral College failure was even smaller, 44,000 votes in three states. This legend is not going away either, however much Mr. Trump muddies it with absurd claims. No evidence suggests large-scale vote fraud. The “but for” argument is the one that will endure.
But for late rule changes in many states in defiance of the U.S. Constitution, mail-in votes would have played a much smaller role in the election.
But for the efforts of the mainstream media and Silicon Valley giants, many more voters might have been influenced by the Hunter Biden laptop story.
But for the efforts of 50 retired intelligence officials who suggested the story was Russian disinformation, news organizations would not have had a hook to insist the laptop story was false.
Mr. Biden’s allies were right in seeing the laptop as their James Comey. But the well-sourced laptop story was true. The FBI, we learned almost as soon the election ended, possessed copies of the data since 2018 and was investigating Hunter’s tax and business dealings.
The laptop has now surfaced again to corroborate, with Hunter’s own text messages, a strange story about his lying on a federal background check to obtain a gun, then the improper disposal of the same gun in a public trash can by his then-girlfriend who also happened to be his brother’s widow.
The New Yorker magazine, among a host of impeccably establishment news outlets, once devoted 10,000 words to the topic, “Will Hunter Biden Jeopardize His Father’s Campaign?” Today, the top half of the hierarchy in every newsroom in America knows the gun story is the quintessence of “news,” especially given the current clamor for strengthened background checks. Yet news editors have largely treated the gun story as if it doesn’t exist, likely because they are terrorized by their own bottom half. . . . The role of rule changes in 2020, the role of the media, the role of a “cabal” (in Time magazine’s word) that worked the legal machinery to assure Mr. Biden’s advantage—all this is part of history now and should be spoken of.
Also Related: Republicans regard news media as Democratic tools.