“Stolen election 2020”. A historically blatant lie lives on.
A few years ago I wrote a column asking this question:
If the 2020 election was “stolen”, why has nobody been arrested? That vast conspiracy would have required hundreds if not thousands of individuals committing federal election law felonies.
Now, here we are almost six years after the election. Still no charges. No arrests. Not even any specific accusations remaining after frivolous and bizarre attempts to get help from friendly judges failed.
This was either the most secretive conspiracy in history, or…it never happened.
Yet, administration officials still appear before congress and find it impossible to say five simple words: “Joe Biden won the election.” Office holding Republicans either repeat the lie or misdirect the question.
The penalty for saying that, apparently, is banishment from MAGA.
Instead, these men and women choose to permanently stain themselves as pathetic bootlickers with no personal or professional integrity.
This “stolen election” fallacy will join other events in our history where ideas were proven to be misguided by facts and evidence. Here are a few random examples of counterfeit history:
Senator Joe McCarthy convinced millions of Americans there were hundreds of Communists in government. He never made his “lists” public and did not ever identify a single communist.
Over 12,000 accusations of “satanic ritual abuse” were lodged during the “Satanic Panic,” starting in the 1980’s, pushed by fundamentalist Christians, therapists, law enforcement agencies, and child advocates. Not a single charge was substantiated.
Also starting in the 1980’s media reports predicted a flood of mentally damaged “crack babies” would become a burden on society as they aged, and it became accepted as valid. Very small studies erroneously warned of this, but it proved to be a myth.
In the news now, “trans men becoming women” are threatening college and pro women’s basketball. There is no evidence of a single “trans” player in either group. None.
About 120,000 USA residents of Japanese descent were interred in camps in World War 2 under the presumption they would be loyal to Japan. Although some real spies were operating outside, forcing those everyday folks into the camps was unnecessary and counterproductive to the war effort. No Japanese spies were ever found, tried, or convicted among the more than 120,000 Japanese Americans imprisoned in U.S. internment camps during World War II.
“Weapons of Mass Destruction” was a mistaken justification for invading IRAQ. Both parties and the public overwhelmingly agreed. Now we know the evidence was thin and manufactured and, of course, no WMD was ever found.
The “Stolen Election” of 2020 will be regarded in history as self evidently bogus just like these examples. Even as time proved them wrong, very few individuals have apologized for the damage they caused by pushing these fictions. They remain shameless.
We have over a decade of examples proving MAGA has no shame (“grab them by the p____!”), and they’ll likely not ever admit how wrong they have been.
Will we ever hear John Thune, Dusty Johnson, Mike Rounds and other elected republicans say this: “Joe Biden won the 2020 election and we were wrong in not standing up for the truth when our leader demanded that we go along with the lie.”
No, not likely; they are too far into the tangled web.
Meanwhile, this perpetuation of counterfeit history is the platform for new claims of fraud sure to come in November.
Mike Levsen is a former mayor of Aberdeen
Photo: public domain, wikimedia commons
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