by Bruce Bawer
Last weekend, it was the American people’s turn to announce they are nobody’s fools.
On Saturday and then again on Sunday, ordinary citizens from all over the United States gathered in Washington, D.C. to demonstrate, in both senses of the word. They demonstrated against the Democrats’ theft of the presidential election from Donald Trump. And they demonstrated that tens of millions of Americans know very well that the election was stolen.
Ice-road truckers in Alaska know it was stolen. Pineapple farmers on Molokai know it was stolen. I wouldn’t be surprised, if I were backpacking in Papua New Guinea or rafting up the Amazon or climbing some Himalayan mountain in Nepal, to encounter a remote tribe whose first question would be: “How are the recounts going?”
The triumph here is that the news about the election theft has been disseminated in spite of the best efforts of the Democratic Party and mainstream media to quash it. Of course, the treason of the Democrats, and the staggering perfidy of the press, have been twin hallmarks of the Trump era.
Still, nothing, not even the media-abetted bid by Barack Obama and company to bring down Trump’s presidency, could quite have prepared us for this historically brazen attempt to steal it – and then lie about it.
Not only are the media lying about the steal, they’re smearing the people who are doing the job they should be doing. They’re casting Rudy Giuliani, who accomplished more real positive change in the lives of more American citizens than perhaps any politician in my lifetime, as some kind of nut. They’d have you believe that Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist of incomparable learning, wisdom, and accomplishment, is some kind of clown.
Meanwhile, they expect us to take seriously the pontifications of idiots whose only achievements are collecting paychecks from AT&T (owner of CNN) or Comcast (owner of NBC) to stare into a camera and pretend to be knowledgeable.
Idiots like the absurd Wolf Blitzer, who proved on “Celebrity Jeopardy” in 2009 that not only is he a colossal ignoramus, he’s too stupid and egomaniacal to realize he’s a colossal ignoramus.
Idiots like Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo, a pair of preening buffoons, each stupider than the other, who, if they were serving up their inanities next to you at a neighborhood bar instead of on a TV screen, would make you decide immediately to settle up and call it a night.
Idiots like the repulsively self-important Christiane Amanpour, whose moral compass is so utterly broken that the other day she compared Trump’s presidential tenure to Kristallnacht.
Then there’s Anderson Cooper, whom I’ve never been able to figure out. Some CNN hacks doubtless worry that they’d end up sleeping under a bridge if they declined to be Jeff Zucker’s lapdogs. But why does a Vanderbilt heir want that job?
One of the stunning revelations of this ever-growing scandal is that there are many more top-ranked politicians and journalists than one ever realized who totally lack a conscience—and whose cravings for power and fame plainly outweigh their need for self-respect.
It’s depressing to realize that so many of the supposed crème de la crème in America are so vomitously unprincipled, but I suppose it’s better to know the truth than to live with an illusion.
In any case, the consequence of this dire situation is that, instead of getting vital news about the vote theft from the broadcast or cable news networks or any of the country’s major newspapers or newsmagazines, we’re getting it from people on YouTube whom many of us had never heard of just a couple of years ago. One of them is the comedian Steven Crowder, who has posted several impressively well-informed videos about the election scandal. Others include reporter Tim Pool, cartoonist Scott Adams, and writer Andrew Klavan.
This is nothing new. During the Antifa and BLM violence, Americans had a right to expect responsible on-the-spot reportage by all the mainstream media. Instead, while MSM talking heads jabbered on from the safety of New York and Washington and Atlanta studios, we had to rely for live coverage on a handful of independent investigative reporters such as Andy Ngo.
Kudos, naturally, to all of these intrepid souls who have done the real work that mainstream journalists no longer deign to do. But who ever imagined, as recently as a decade ago, that we would have to turn to these latter-day versions of the Soviet-era samizdat to get the straight dope on the biggest news stories?
I’ve mentioned that a lot of people in remote corners of the world know that there was vote fraud. Oddly, however, a lot of people in responsible positions in places like Manhattan and L.A. have clung to the media lies and refuse to be shaken loose. Most of these are people who are supposed to be smart. But they seem to have abandoned reason.
So it is that even as all those folks were rallying outside the Supreme Court last weekend, I found myself engaging in (or witnessing) online exchanges with left-wing diehards whose refusal to abandon their mantra that “there’s no evidence of fraud” – no matter how much evidence of fraud was laid out before them – made them sound like denizens of a psych ward.
Of course, the mental debility on display here – namely, Trump Derangement Syndrome – has been around for years. The crucial difference is that until now, manifestations of TDS could be dismissed with relative equanimity as cries of impotent rage by the sore losers of a fair election. Now, however, we’re hearing the vengeful howls of fools and knaves who – no longer impotent, alas – are so blinded with hatred for the president that they’re willing to close their minds to the most obvious facts, to jettison their belief in fair democratic elections, and to wink at a coup.
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Bruce Bawer is the author of While Europe Slept, Surrender, and The Victims’ Revolution. His novel The Alhambra was published in 2017.
