They’ve called the race for Biden, as we knew they would. Vox was among the first at 8:53 a.m. on Friday. Then on Saturday and thereafter the supposedly “less partisan” outlets — NBC, ABC, Fox — followed. If we accept this from them, we are fools.
I’m not saying this because I think Trump will win if all legal votes and only legal votes are counted — although I do think that. I’m saying it because whether a Biden win is crooked as sin or pure as the driven snow, it has absolutely nothing — and I mean nada, zero — to do with how the press has treated this thing and will continue to. The legacy media has proven itself as corrupt as any Democrat city machine this election cycle, and we are going to have to dedicate ourselves to not believing them going forward. This is our first test.
For four years now, Democrats have not so much as begun to concede Trump’s 2016 victory. Hillary Clinton called Trump “illegitimate” as recently as 2019. Former President Jimmy Carter said the same. “Not my president” wasn’t just a hashtag: it was practically the official position of the Democratic Party. All this because of Russian collusion charges that went nowhere, an impeachment that failed utterly, and a trail of oppo research so thin it could have competed on America’s Next Top Model.
If that smorgasbord of nothingburgers was enough to justify an entire first term’s worth of #resistance, then these chuckleheads can wait for a month while we get to the bottom of some very shady election shenanigans.
In Michigan, at least 6,000 votes (and possibly many more) went to Biden when they should have gone to Trump because of a mysterious “glitch.” Arizona was called for Biden early on election day by Fox News despite the fact that (it later emerged) there was still plenty of room for Trump to take the lead at the time. And what in the blazes is up with just full-on stopping the count mid-flow like they did in the major battleground states where Trump was winning?
That ain’t normal, bub. It’s not that the thousands of suddenly emergent Biden votes are impossible, or that every accusation of fraud is credible. It’s that taken together, they represent vastly more than enough to look into and take to the courts.
To say so is not to “threaten democracy.” It is not to “spread disinformation.” It is not “dangerous” or “divisive” or “unpatriotic.” Anyone, Republican or Democrat, who shames a Trump supporter for wanting a thorough investigation of the truth, is simply a shill for this country’s thoroughly discredited ruling class. After years of dedicated and dishonest resistance to a duly elected president, they don’t get to tell us when this election is legitimate. We get to decide that: we the people. We should not back down.
This will be harder than it sounds. The reason our slatternly media outlets have survived as long as they have is because the charm of authority is hypnotic and hard to break. The credibility accumulated by New York Times and Washington Post reporters from days long gone by still lingers, completely unearned, with the disingenuous hacks who are trying to call this election before the legal battle is done. When they tell you the race is won and scold you for suggesting otherwise, it will be hard to stare them down and hold the line with confidence. But we have every reason to do so, and we must insist that our elected representatives do the same—no early concessions from RINOs, thank you very much.
Spencer Klavan is host of the Young Heretics podcast and assistant editor of the Claremont Review of Booksand The American Mind. He can be reached on Twitter at @SpencerKlavan.
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The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.