After the 2016 election, the media spent years insisting Russia had hijacked American democracy, that President Donald Trump may have colluded with Moscow to steal the White House, that the whole election might not even have been legitimate. That cast a dark cloud over Trump’s first term.
Democrats in Congress insisted he was illegitimately elected. Congress investigated it. Robert Mueller's team spent nearly two years combing through every scrap of evidence available. The verdict came back the same each time: no collusion, no stolen election. Nearly a decade later, many on the left, including Hillary Clinton herself, still claim that the election was stolen from her.
Now flip to 2020. Question that election, even mildly, casually, and the press branded you a threat to democracy. We weren’t asked to accept that 2020 was the most secure election in American history. We were told to. Yet, the election, plagued by irregularities, wasn’t allowed to receive even a fraction of the scrutiny that the 2016 election got. No congressional investigation matched the Russia probe. No special counsel opened a case. No years-long inquiry examined anything. Reporters and officials alike simply ordered everyone to move on.
And if sites like PJ Media dared to question the results, we risked being censored and demonetized. In the end, one election got a multi-year, multi-agency investigation, the other got a Big Tech and media-enforced gag order. Democrats never wanted 2020 examined. You just had to accept the results and move on.
That's the backdrop for Thursday night.
Trump is set to address the nation on his administration's top priorities, including his long-standing claim that the 2020 election was stolen. According to reports, he may use the speech to reveal whether China interfered in that race. Trump has stayed coy about it, saying only that he has "really, really big news" to share with the country.
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You'd think a tease like that would earn wall-to-wall coverage. Instead, some networks have already announced they won't air the address on their prime-time networks. Both are pushing it to streaming instead, with ABC promising its news division will break in if something major happens. CBS News and Fox News hadn't announced their plans as of Thursday. CNN isn't airing the speech live at all. The network says it will treat it as a news event, layering in analysis from its election, intelligence, and FBI reporters rather than letting viewers watch it unfold for themselves.
It's worth remembering that when Trump addressed the nation live about the Iran war earlier this year, prime-time networks carried it without a second thought. Election fraud, apparently, belongs to a different category of speech.
For six years now, the left has been afraid to talk about the 2020 election. So much so that they did everything in their power to shut down discussion and debate about it. Russian interference/collusion was and still is treated as the gospel truth. Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) literally claimed that he had seen evidence of collusion, even though he hadn’t. So this wasn’t about the truth; it was about the fact that Democrats wanted the public to believe the election had been stolen.
If Democrats and their allies in the press were truly confident 2020 was clean, they'd have no reason to keep Americans from hearing what Trump has to say Thursday night. The lengths they're going to in order to silence the discussion say more about their confidence than any denial ever could.
