Leftist media and the White House are in full damage control mode after Joe Biden said the same kinds of things Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and others have said about past elections, but this time about an election that hasn’t even occurred yet.
During his second press conference in more than a year in office, Biden slipped in several comments about the trustworthiness of American elections similar to those that got Trump and myriad others banned and sanctioned by every major social media platform and pummelled by Republican Party leadership after the 2020 election. Here are a few of the many things Biden said about elections during that Jan 19. press conference (emphasis added):
I’m confident that we can take the case to the American people that the people they should be voting for — who are going to oversee whether your elections, in fact, are legit or not — should not be those who are being put up by the Republicans to det- — to determine that they’re going to be able to change the outcome of the election.
…I’m going to continue to make the case why it’s so important to not turn the electoral process over to political persons who are set up deliberately to change the outcome of elections. …
Q Thank you, Mr. President. Speaking of voting rights legislation, if this isn’t passed, do you still believe the upcoming election will be fairly conducted and its results will be legitimate?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, it all depends on whether or not we’re able to make the case to the American people that some of this is being set up to try to alter the outcome of the election.
…We have significantly beefed up a number of enforcers in the Justice Department, who are there to challenge these unconstitutional efforts, in our view — unconstitutional efforts on the part of the Republicans to stack the election and subvert the outcome. …
Q Thank you, sir. I just wanted to clarify: A moment ago, you were asked whether or not you believed that we would have free and fair elections in 2022 if some of these state legislatures reformed their voting protocols. You said that it depends. Do you — do you think that they would in any way be illegitimate?
THE PRESIDENT: Oh, yeah, I think it easily could be — be illegitimate.
Doing her usual after-the-fact message tightening for the geriatric “world leader,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki essentially said Biden hadn’t said the 2022 midterms were going to be illegitimate, but the midterms are going to be illegitimate.
It’s nothing short of amazing that Psaki has finally realized that elections without transparency and voter protections should be assumed to be “nefarious.” It’s interesting that she and Biden are returning now to this longtime Democrat allegation about elections Democrats lose, however.
This is all the more curious as not two weeks ago, Biden again declared Trump’s objections to the 2020 election’s outcome were scandalously out of bounds: “He [Trump] has done what no president in American history — the history of this country — has ever, ever done: He refused to accept the results of an election and the will of the American people,” Biden said in a Jan. 6, 2022 speech.
Two weeks later, as president, Biden pre-emptively refused to accept the results of an American election. And his press secretary indicated that unless state legislatures keep the least secure form of voting — mass mail-in ballots — voters should not trust election outcomes.
Anyone who was around last year for the aftermath of the 2020 election will add this messaging reversal to their long list of insane things Democrat voters are asked to believe before breakfast, right next to “men can become women” and “it’s okay that the same people who claim to fight discrimination and punch fascists support taking children away from parents who don’t vaccinate them against a disease that poses less risk to them than the seasonal flu.”
Someone who can’t tell a man from a woman is in no condition to exercise power over others, he needs therapy. The same goes for people who aren’t handicapped but can’t manage to show up at a polling location on voting day. If you are able-bodied and don’t care enough to get yourself there at the right time, please don’t vote, okay? My rights are on the line here. Those are important enough for people to take a little effort to respect. I don’t want my rights to be as easy to erase as it is to shout down people on Twitter.
Remember ten minutes ago, when it was effectively illegal to say online just about anywhere that one has doubts about whether elections are secure? It’s still effectively illegal for Trump to say that online. I’d love to see videos on social media, in fact, of people reading the above quotes from Biden’s press conference, and nothing more, and putting them on social media. I bet you $10 it gets people banned by some woke, low-level Twitter censor.
That’s what was happening when Trump said the same sorts of things about the 2020 election. In advance of the count, social media companies worked with the Democratic campaign to choke and censor his and others’ claims about election integrity. He was ultimately banned from virtually all online platforms partly because of his election claims, according to the companies.
Trump’s urging to “stop the steal” was cited as an incitement to violence in hundreds, if not tens of thousands, of not only media reports but also his post-office impeachment. He was famously asked during his presidential debates with Hillary Clinton whether he’d agree the election was legitimate if he lost, and answered, “I’ll look at it at the time,” which earned him massive media condemnation.
But, as the video above shows and my colleague Mollie Hemingway documents in her bestselling book, “Rigged,” the left has spent decades questioning the results of elections they lose, as well as the integrity of voting machines and paper ballots, while not only facing zero sustained blowback over it but in fact being taken seriously by the entire political complex. These are not fringe Democrats we’re talking about, but marquee names like Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Al Gore, and John Kerry.
The cognitive dissonance demanded of people here is brain-breaking. Just remember, for another example, some of the things Willis Krumholz wrote here at The Federalist in the aftermath of 2020: “The same people who ranted about Russia hacking the 2016 election—to the point where almost 70 percent of Democrats falsely believed that Russia had hacked and changed vote totals—tell Trump’s base that it is dangerous and unpatriotic to doubt the results of this election… The same people who think less than $100,000 of Russian social media advertising could sway an election say there is no way the election could be swayed by fraud.”
That was 2020. This is 2022. And we were never at war with Eastasia.
What are we supposed to understand from all of this? At least three things: the left believes people the left hates are not allowed to exercise the same freedoms the left wants for itself; the left thinks they can tell their voters just about anything and they will accept it, even if it contradicts other narratives; and the left believes that they cannot win secure elections.
If Democrats really wanted secure elections, they would be demanding things that actually bring about secure elections. Blanketing the world with blank ballots is not secure, and neither is an election season. The gold standard is one-day, in-person voting with hardcopy backups to all election machines. Anyone who opposes that doesn’t really want secure elections, no matter what he says. And if a politician doesn’t want secure elections, you need to ask why.
