While the media incessantly claims that the 2020 election was completely on the up-and-up and constantly labels any suggestion to the contrary a “conspiracy theory,” there is already enough completely undisputed evidence on the public record to deem last year’s contest the most unfair election in American history.
TIME national political correspondent Molly Ball gleefully tells the story of how “a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, [worked] together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.”
Ball concluded, “In a way, Trump was right. There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes.”
Here are seven indisputable ways the entire national establishment conspired in unprecedented fashion to undermine election integrity and defeat the sitting President of the United States in 2020.
1. The entire manner of voting in the 2020 election (when, where, how, and which ballots were counted) was changed by partisan Democrat actors in key battleground states without the approval of state legislatures as required by law.
The examples are too numerous to catalog. In Pennsylvania, the Democrat-dominated State Supreme Court unilaterally abolished the signature verification requirement for mail-in ballots just 11 days before the election. In Georgia, Democrats led by Stacey Abrams pushed state officials into a settlement agreement that made comparing signatures so cumbersome it was not done. In numerous key states, Democrat officials mailed out absentee ballot request forms or, worse, live absentee ballots to every registered voter on the rolls, often in violation of state law.
Moreover, using hundreds of millions of dollars donated by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, many swing states also deployed hundreds of ballot drop boxes that collected tens of thousands of absentee votes, often concentrated in heavily Democrat areas. In many states, such as Wisconsin, this practice of deploying unmanned drop boxes was clearly a violation of state law.
As Molly Ball admitted in TIME, it is surely not a coincidence that almost every change to election rules in 2020 worked to the disadvantage of Donald Trump.
2. The media was more unhinged and nakedly partisan than in any election in history.
Throughout the course of the Trump presidency, the media served as a propaganda arm for the Democrat Party, manufacturing absurd hoaxes and conspiracy theories about Trump-Russia collusion that consumed his presidency for years.
If it was even possible, negative coverage of President Trump increased further during 2020. One study found that 95% of media coverage of President Trump was negative in the summer of 2020 going into the fall election, causing viewers to hear “150 times more negative comments about Trump than Biden.”
Meanwhile, Biden received glowing coverage of his bike rides and ice cream cones, while the media asked virtually no serious questions about issues, Biden’s health, or why he was failing to campaign.
3. Many polls were apparently designed to suppress Trump’s vote.
Some pollsters and media organizations clearly tried to tilt the playing field toward Biden through blatantly biased polls designed to undermine Trump’s support and obscure how close the race was.
Overall, the polls showed the largest statistical bias toward Democrats in 2020 that they have ever displayed in the history of U.S. elections, ultimately underestimating Republican performance by nearly 5 points on average.
The worst polls for Trump were typically given the most sensational coverage. In the first week of October, NBC published a poll claiming Trump was 14 points down nationally. In the last week of October, the Washington Post-ABC poll had Trump 17 points down in Wisconsin, a state where the two candidates ultimately finished within 0.6% of one another in the official tally.
4. The debates were a set-up.
Perhaps the most under-reported form of bias against Trump in 2020 was the blatant favoritism showed toward Biden during the fall presidential debates. The Presidential Debate Commission was exclusively comprised of known Never Trump Republicans and pro-Biden Democrats. 6 of 10 of the members had made negative comments about President Trump while serving on the Commission. Unbelievably, one of the media moderators the Commission selected was a former Biden intern and staffer for Democrat Sen. Ted Kennedy. Another was an extremely partisan member of the MSNBC staff. Chris Wallace also conducted himself with conspicuous bias, all while Joe Biden told the President of the United States to “shut up” and called him a liar and a “clown.” But supposedly, it was Trump who was misbehaving.
It is hard to imagine it could have gotten more unfair to the President than that, but then the Commission unilaterally chose to change the format of the second presidential debate in a manner that would have been deeply demeaning to Trump and clearly advantageous to Biden (i.e., declaring that it would be the first “virtual” debate in history, for no valid scientific reason). As a result, that debate never happened (as the Commission surely anticipated).
5. Big tech censorship and corporate media coverups.
In the final weeks of a presidential campaign, the New York Post made public smoking gun emails from Hunter Biden that linked the Biden family—including Joe “the Big Guy” Biden himself—to foreign businesses controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. It was perhaps the most significant scandal at that stage in a presidential campaign in history.
Despite the fact that the authenticity of the underlying information was never denied by the Biden campaign, the Post’s reporting was quickly censored by Twitter and Facebook and subjected to a media blackout by virtually all major media organizations. Twitter called the Post’s story “potentially harmful.” Facebook said that censoring the Post’s articles was “part of our standard process to reduce the spread of misinformation.” NPR’s managing editor for news asserted: “We don’t waste our time on stories that are not really stories[.].” CNN purposefully tried to bury any mention of the New York Post’s reporting in the weeks prior to the election and even attempted to prevent members of CNN staff from telling the public about it. CNN anchor Jake Tapper said the story was bogus and “too disgusting” to repeat on air.
The censoring of the New York Post story alone likely had an enormous impact on the results. After the election, a poll found that nearly half of Biden voters in key states said they were unaware of the corruption scandals, and almost 10% of Biden voters said they would not have voted for Biden had they known about those reports.
6. The origins of the virus were hidden from the American People.
In April 2020, President Trump first asserted that he had seen evidence that COVID-19 came from a Chinese lab in Wuhan. The media, aided by the scientific community, blasted the claim as a xenophobic conspiracy theory. Today, we know that Chinese scientists at that lab were experimenting on a coronavirus that was 96.2% similar to the novel coronavirus that caused the pandemic, and we know that multiple researchers at the Wuhan lab were sick with COVID-19 symptoms in the fall of 2019. Now that Trump is out of office, the media, the scientific community, and even Joe Biden are conceding that Trump was most likely correct about the virus’s origins.
As Senator Lindsey Graham recently said, this alone likely “changed the course of the election.” Graham argued: “If Trump was right about the lab leak, it would change the image the public had of President Trump regarding the coronavirus. More importantly, if it came out of the lab in China, he was right that it was the China virus. The 2020 election would have been about who can hold China accountable, Trump or Biden?
7. The public was deceived about the imminence of a vaccine.
President Trump campaigned on the promise that the vaccine would be available before the end of 2020. The media and Democrats scoffed at such statements and assured the public that obtaining a vaccine in less than a year was all but impossible.
The moderators of both presidential debates, as well as Joe Biden, told the American People before massive television audiences that a vaccine would not be widely available until at least the summer of 2021.
Today, we know that Pfizer appears to have deliberately slow-walked the announcement that its taxpayer-funded vaccine was effective until after the November election. The company would have crossed its normal threshold for determining efficacy in September and then passed an even higher bar at some time in October. Yet, they did not make the announcement until November 9.
COVID, and Trump’s handling of it, was one of the very top issues in the 2020 election. Had the public known that a safe and effective vaccine existed and that the pandemic would soon be over, this would almost certainly have resulted in even more votes in favor of the candidate who voters most trusted to launch a rapid economic recovery—Trump.