Corporate media are returning to their favorite question to ask of any and all Republicans who care about the integrity of elections: Did Joe Biden win the 2020 election?
A New York Times employee asked Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis the question in Iowa last week. NBC News correspondent Dasha Burns asked a variant of the question, to which DeSantis gave an extended reply about the proper and improper way to run elections. Completely uninterested in his substantive reply, she followed it up with: “Yes or no, did Trump lose the 2020 election?”
The question is never asked in good faith, and you can know that with certainty because none of these reporters even came close to asking it from 2016-2020 when the entirety of the Democrat Party refused to accept the legitimacy of Donald Trump’s election. In fact, they eagerly and actively participated in the Russia-collusion information operation designed to overturn the results of that election. Hillary Clinton was claiming the 2016 election was stolen throughout 2019, and the media generally cheered her on.
But if you need help understanding why the question is never asked in good faith, let’s step out of the realm of politics for a minute and consider the men’s gold medal basketball game of the 1972 Olympics.
The game is one of the most controversial events in Olympic history, with the American men’s team refusing to concede they lost to the Soviet Union. In fact, it’s been more than 50 years and the men on that team have never accepted their silver medals because they still do not believe the game was conducted in a fair fashion. Just last year, the men wanted to have the silver medals donated to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, but the International Olympic Committee demanded the men officially accept them first before they could be donated. On principle, the men will not take the medals or recognize the legitimacy of the outcome, so the medals remain in limbo.
The team, which is the only team in Olympic history to contest an outcome, has an excellent case that the game was rigged. The Americans had dominated the Olympic sport since it first appeared in the 1936 Olympics. They had won seven gold medals and were the presumptive favorites in 1972. Their record before the final game was an astounding 63-0.
However, the Soviets were very good that year and their older and experienced team was winning the game until the final seconds, when the U.S. player Doug Collins was fouled and sank two free throws, putting the team ahead by one point with one second left on the clock.
An official demanded that an additional two seconds be put back on the clock. When that time expired, the U.S. team began to celebrate and their fans swarmed onto the court. But officials said the clock reset had not been done properly so they put three seconds back on the clock and gave the Soviets another chance. The Soviet team also managed to make an illegal substitution of a player who, with the help of a Soviet Bloc referee interfering in the play, passed to another player who scored the winning point.
The Americans were outraged at how the game was conducted and appealed to a basketball court made up of five judges. However, they lost that appeal 3-2. It is perhaps worth noting that all three judges who voted against the Americans happened to be from communist countries.
The Soviet Union men, for their part, are absolutely defiant that they won a free and fair game. Just a few years ago, Russians put out a very popular movie called “Going Vertical” — also known as “Three Seconds” — about their surprise victory over the Americans. It became “the most-successful Russian film of all time,” according to the Hollywood Reporter.
When the American press covers the Olympics issue — including a raft of coverage last year on the 50th anniversary of the game — they never hector the players to concede that they lost. They do not refer to them as “Olympics deniers.” Heck, the Olympics.com news site itself has a story headlined, “Americans refuse silver as USSR steal controversial basketball final.” The Washington Post covered the dispute generously. So did NBC. In 2012, The New York Times favorably reviewed a book that alleged the game was stolen by the Soviets. When power forward Dwight Jones died in 2016, The New York Times gave him an obituary that featured the disputed game. ESPN has filmed round table discussions about the unfair loss. Just last year, The New York Times supported the effort to have the outcome of the game overturned.
Can you imagine if reporters cornered the players or their fans and said, “Yes or no, did you lose the 1972 game?” Can you imagine if they badgered each player to utter an affirmation that the Soviets won fair and square or be called “basketball deniers”? Can you imagine how juvenile and idiotic that would sound? Real journalists wouldn’t do any of these things, particularly if they genuinely wanted to understand or accurately convey why the game was so controversial.
Similarly, there is something downright pathological in the media and other Democrat activists’ attempts to silence any and all genuine discussion about the weirdest election of our lifetimes. I researched and reported a full-length book about all of the verifiable problems with the election. These problems include the effort by the same top Democrat lawyer who ran the Russia-collusion hoax to push for the coordinated change of hundreds of election laws and processes, supposedly due to Covid. The vast majority of the significant changes were done in violation of the Constitution’s requirement that state legislatures handle such rules. The changes led to tens of millions of unsupervised ballots flooding into the system at the same time that scrutiny of said ballots was diminished. Mark Zuckerberg, one of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful men, spent more than $400 million to orchestrate the takeover of government election offices by left-wing activists. This get-out-the-vote effort was overwhelmingly focused on the Democrat areas of swing states.
There is also the issue that corporate media moved from pervasive bias into overt propaganda on behalf of Democrats and against Republicans. They invented fake news that was inserted into national debates, such as the false Aisne-Marne story claiming Trump secretly didn’t like American soldiers and the false claim that Russia was paying bounties for dead American soldiers and that Trump didn’t care. They also suppressed completely true stories about the Biden family business of paying for access to Joe Biden. In fact, a cabal of powerful figures conspired to falsely blame as Russian disinformation a laptop belonging to a key member of the Biden family pay-for-play business.
And that doesn’t even mention the fact that the U.S. government conspired with Big Tech companies to run a massive censorship-industrial complex to suppress news and information advantageous to conservative politicians and issues. This censorship-industrial complex also worked and continues to work to elevate left-wing media with a track record of running false information operations, such as the debunked Russia-collusion hoax and the Kavanaugh rape smear.
But let’s get back to the basketball game.
Did the men’s basketball team of the Soviet Union score more points than the United States in 1972? They did. Did they receive the gold medal? They did. Did Joe Biden receive more Electoral College votes than Donald Trump? He did. Was he inaugurated as the 46th president of the United States? He was.
All of those things are true. It is also true that reasonable people on the losing side of both contests believe — for very good reasons — they were not fair. It is sheer gaslighting to use the immense power of the Democrat media and corrupted Department of Justice to say that people are not allowed to oppose the way election contests were conducted or discuss how the manner in which the contests have been conducted affected the outcome.
Fans of the 1972 Soviet men’s basketball team and the 2020 Joe Biden campaign have every right to say they won a free and fair contest. They should not be jailed or persecuted for that view. Some fans and operatives of the current regime want to make it illegal or unacceptable to question or oppose the censorship-industrial complex, the plot to radically change election laws in an unconstitutional fashion, the private takeover of government election laws by left-wing billionaires, or our propaganda press. It’s something one might have expected to find in 1972 Soviet Russia more than in 2023 United States.
