How the Projectionist Game is Played. Part Two—Election Denialist!

Victor Davis Hanson

Think of any recent leftwing accusation against the Right. Then automatically assume that it is evidence of the accuser’s own culpability for the very charge he levels against others. In other words, the Left projects upon its opponents exactly what it fears is most incriminating among its own ranks. As a general rule, leftwing projectionism is a sign of culpability.

Donald Trump did deny the integrity of the 2020 election and does to this day. While he is probably wrong that the final and “real” popular vote count would have given him a popular vote victory, he is right to lodge legitimate objections to the way the balloting was conducted in some states on the following bases:

a) The Left funded a massive effort to change balloting laws in key pivotal states under the cloak of the Covid pandemic in spring 2020. The effect of liberal state court decisions or administrative edicts was often to nullify the state legislatures’ laws and rights to establish voting procedures. More practically, they changed state laws on the books that governed the rejection rate of non-Election-Day ballots. The result was the rejection rate dropped in many states even as they were flooded with historic numbers of non-Election Day ballots, most of them for Joe Biden.

A normal 3-5 percent rejection rate fell, depending on the state, to between 2.0 and 0.5 percent—despite more than 102 million ballots not cast on Election Day. Ballots that did not match registrars’ lists, that had incomplete or wrong names, that did not have full addresses, or that did not have signatures or signatures that matched the printed names, were often accepted. And there may have been many millions of such ballots that in prior elections would have been summarily rejected.

b) Molly Ball, a Time essayist, in February 2021, wrote a braggadocio and triumphalist article outlining how the rich, sophisticated Left had outsmarted the clueless neanderthal Trump Right. She gushed how it had “conspired” (her word, not mine) to form a “cabal” (her word, again) of big tech money and censorship, corporate pressure, and DNC modulation of the street riots and protests to ensure a Biden victory.

Who knows, had the FBI told the truth about Hunter Biden’s laptop (voters overwhelmingly later said that the truth might have changed their minds) or had Mark Zuckerberg not infused $419 million into preselected precincts to warp the vote (likely illegally so, by funneling the tax-deductible money through tax-exempt non-profits which were clearly partisan operatives and absorbing the roles of state registrars), Trump may have gotten his 40,000–50,000 extra votes in key states to have won the Electoral College?

So, the Left suddenly after the election called Trump and any who questioned any aspect of the balloting an “election denier.”

These were strange charges even for pathological projectionists. After all, the Left created the modern version of election denial in 2000 when Al Gore denied the Florida count for 5 weeks, and later helped spawn the mantra “selected not elected” of George W. Bush’s victory.

In 2004, denialist and then California Sen. Barbara Boxer, and current Jan. 6th committee chair Rep. Bennie Thompson spearheaded an effort to deny the Bush election victory, by falsely claiming the Ohio vote count was rigged.

There is no need to dwell much on the sad figure of Stacey Abrams. Her entire media-created career was predicated on touring the country in late 2018 through 2021, denying the Georgia gubernatorial vote. She serially claimed that she was and is the “real” governor.

Hillary Clinton, however, is the greatest election denialist in history.

She now has denied the results in three presidential elections—one of which hasn’t even taken place yet!

Clinton created the entire Russian-collusion hoax, in part to hide her own collusion of using Charles Dolan and Christopher Steele (remunerated behind three covert Clinton paywalls) to work with Russian sources to fabricate a dossier of lies against her presidential opponent.

Nonetheless, after losing the 2020 election, Clinton lauded third-party surrogate Jill Stein to sue to overturn the election based on faulty/fixed computer tabulation. When that gambit failed, a score of mediocre Hollywood celebrities hit the airwaves with infomercials demanding that electors “do the right thing” in abrogating their constitutional duties to honor their own states’ tallies.

When that denialist desperation didn’t work, Clinton then toured the country touting her membership in the “Resistance” (The implied simile was ridiculous since sycophantic Hillary was a most unlikely French underground fighter, up in the maquis sabotaging SS occupation troops in 1943—given she would more likely have been a Vichy-like figure, playing the odds of when it would be safe and profitable after D-Day to become a “resistor” and thus future politician).

In 2020, Clinton preempted the election by claiming that if Biden lost, it was therefore fixed, and he should not accept the popular vote verdict.

Now she is preempting again by warning America that the 2022 midterms and especially the 2024 vote will likely be illegitimate, given fantasy Trumpist/MAGA efforts to warp the tally.

In sum, when you hear a leftist/progressive/Democrat level the charge of “election denialist,” it is good proof that the accuser or his party is engaged or has engaged in election denialism.