Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
When the Constitution formed this nation, we were a country of around 4 million. But in 2020 at least 74 million Americans have had their votes tossed in the trash along with the Constitution.
More Americans had their votes discarded, stolen, nullified, corrupted, and obstructed in this election than existed in the entire United States when it fought for its independence from monarchy and tyranny, when it brought into being a “more perfect union”, when it expanded westward, and when brother against brother fought in a civil war to preserve that union.
There were more Americans who voted for President Trump than were living in the United States in 1890. The entire nation, as it was in 1890, had its vote usurped by a corrupt oligarchy.
While the battles go on across cable news and social media, these are the forgotten men.
They were the forgotten men and women who rallied to Reagan and to Trump, falling behind in a nation whose elites can’t wait to leave 1787 and 1890, along with old mill towns, steel plants that made a nation’s skyscrapers, rusting factories that once supplied her people, port cities on whose ships cargoes once flowed to the world that are now filled with Made in China junk ships.
They are the coal miners who were told to learn to code, managers dragged into unconscious bias training before being fired anyway, carpenters sidelined by illegal aliens, police officers beaten by grad students chanting Black Lives Matter, IT men whose jobs were offshored, women who were called ‘Karens’ for calling 911 after being attacked in a mall parking lot.
2020 was not just another election. 2016 was an uprising by the nation’s forgotten men and women. In 2020, the empire struck back, outspending the forgotten men, rigging races with ballot harvesting, bypassing legislatures, stealing votes, and then laughing in their faces.
That was a mistake.
It’s the same mistake that was made in Iran, in Venezuela, in Russia, in China, and in countless totalitarian nations that built mass movements out of stolen elections and brutal crackdowns.
Elections can be stolen, but when an election is also an uprising, then the movement grows.
The real question on the ballot in 2016 and in 2020 was who was running the country. The two wealthiest counties in the country, Loudoun County and Falls Church City, are D.C. bedroom communities. Nine of the twenty wealthiest counties in America are D.C. suburbs.
We are indeed a nation of ‘Two Americas’ as Senator John Edwards declared at the Democratic National Convention, and there’s no better proof than Edwards who escaped 30 years in prison after being tried for misusing $725,000 in campaign contributions from a Gillette heiress to hide his affair while his wife was dying of cancer, and relaunched his career as an ambulance chaser, suing the Raleigh police because an officer shot a crazy Iranian man brandishing a knife.
One America voted in 2020. The other ‘America’, call it Un-America, stole the election.
One America raises up statues to the Founding Fathers, while the other America tears them down. One America prays, the other mocks. One America fights, the other betrays. One America works for a living, the other takes its earnings. One America votes, the other steals.
The forgotten America of that seventy million plus does not appear in polls. Products are not pitched to it. Movies and TV shows are not made for its tastes. Its men and women won’t be hired by the oligarchic companies consolidating control over the economy and the country.
The cultural products of the oligarchy tell them that they’re the past and headed for the landfills alongside the statues of Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. Along with the Constitution.
But what every tyranny forgets is that the past is also the future.
“Suppose the Colonies do abound in men,” the head of the British Navy had boasted during the American Revolution, “what does that signify? They are raw, undisciplined, cowardly men. I wish instead of forty or fifty thousand of these brave fellows they would produce in the field at least two hundred thousand; the more the better, the easier would be the conquest; if they did not run away, they would starve themselves into compliance with our measures.”
That earl had made a very bad mistake and, as Patrick Henry once declared, his successors in Loudoun County and the government counties of Washington D.C. may profit by his example.
2016 was an uprising and so was 2020. Not every battle was won in the Revolutionary War, but every battle forged the spirit and steel of those forgotten men whose voices did not count three thousand miles away in London, and now those forgotten men in the rural and working class counties whose voices do not count thousand of miles away in Washington D.C.
Whatever comes of the election, whether right or might win this time, they are a movement.
And that movement has only begun to fight.
The disenfranchised American voter is not going away. He will not be silenced. No amount of media pressure is going to convince him to accept the unacceptable or disbelieve the evidence of his own senses. He knows that this is more than a theft of one election, but the ongoing denial of his right to have a future in a nation whose leaders insist that his kind should not exist.
The forgotten men and women do not forget. They did not come into being in 2016 and they will not vanish in 2020. All that the theft of 2020 did was add momentum to their grievance.
The disenfranchised American voter is the faceless face of a growing movement.
It is the movement whose battles against the leftist oligarchy, the political leviathan of the Left, David Horowitz and the David Horowitz Freedom Center have been fighting since the beginning. But never before has that movement been so vast, encompassing over seventy million Americans who are determined not to let the Left forget them and drive past them to power.
The Left built a messaging machine meant to make these men and women feel small, irrelevant, ashamed, and weak. Instead their numbers have grown more than ever before.
The silent majority is no longer silent. It is stepping out of the shadows and making its stand.
Its members will not accept this theft or take their places at the back of the bus. They will not turn over the country to those who have nothing but contempt for it and for them, or be shamed for refusing to let thieves scold them about election integrity. They have learned to laugh at the hectoring lectures about decency and the references to the Constitution from the radicals toppling the statues of the men who labored over the Constitution and fought to defend it.
Power does not, as Mao once said, come from the barrel of a gun. Nor does it come from documents, agencies, and elections. These are only the means by which power is channeled.
The only true form of power comes from consent. Men may give up their consent to tyrants, but America is a nation of free men and women who do not give consent, but take it through elections. When that consent appears to be taken from them by force, they will still not give it.
And it is that consent, the acceptance of the situation, which though intangible is the force that moves nations, forms societies, and serves as the true basis for all power. The voters who went to the polls, even though the media told them it was hopeless, held on to that power. And they held on to it when they ignored the media’s propaganda after the election. They still hold it.
In a free nation, casting votes determines elections and the leadership of the country. But in every nation, the conviction of the people, their willingness to resist the propaganda, is their power. Over 70 million Americans, the forgotten men and women of the nation, wielded their power and they refuse to give it up no matter how often they are told that they are wrong.
That is why the disenfranchised American voter is the Freedom Center’s person of the year.
In a disgraceful year, the disenfranchised voter took a stand and held it in the face of the elites who believe that by stealing his vote, they can also take his power. Every day, every week, and every month that goes by, the disenfranchised voter reminds them that they are wrong.
The elites can steal an election. But they can’t steal a movement.
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