Joe Biden and ‘The Big Lie’
By NBP Editorial Board | January 17, 2022, 15:06 EST
Democratic politicians and the progressive media used the term “big lie” ad nauseam to describe many of President Donald Trump’s statements. Their final recent cry of “the big lie” came on the heels of the 2020 presidential election, which Trump alleged that the Democrats had stolen.
Where does the phrase “the big lie” come from? The expression was coined by Adolf Hitler in his 1925 book Mein Kampf. He used the term “big lie” or “great lie” (grosse lüge in German) in his book to describe the use of a lie so colossal that no one would be willing to believe that someone could be so audacious as to distort the truth so colossally. (For that reason, the future great manipulator wrote, “the great masses of people … will more easily fall victims to a great lie than a small one.”)
The big lie, of course, has been used often as a propaganda technique in both fascist and communist countries. One of the techniques of the big lie is to repeat it everywhere as frequently as possible so that the big lie comes to be believed by the general public.
President Joe Biden’s recent speech in Georgia is a classic example of the big lie. Speaking about voting rights, Biden compared those who favored the voting rights law passed in Georgia to be on the side of Bull Connor rather than John Lewis; on the side of Jefferson Davis rather than Abraham Lincoln; and George Wallace as opposed to Martin Luther King.
Now, the point of the Georgia statute is to make sure that every vote comes from an actual voter, and that every actual voter who votes does so one time and not more than one time and in the timeframe provided for by law before the vote.
In other words: The point is to ensure a free and fair election.
So how could someone stand at a podium and claim, as President Biden did on January 11, that such election integrity laws amount to “Jim Crow 2.0”?
How could someone claim, as President Biden did on January 11, that trying to provide an accurate vote count amounts to exercising “the kind of power you see in totalitarian states, not in democracies”?
After making such false and outrageous statements, how could someone, as President Biden did on January 11, say: “It’s not hyperbole; this is a fact.”
Keep in mind that this is a leader who has a 42.5 percent approval rating and 52.1 percent disapproval rating, amid inflation the highest in 40 years and a dim outlook for the economy. His party is bracing for a beating in November 2022.
This Big Lie of Biden appears geared to try to persuade that portion of the electorate who may assume that the chief executive officer of the federal government will not say and repeat an outrageous falsehood just to win an election – that perhaps there is something to this attack on the character and motives of Republican state lawmakers passing such laws.
Yet the United States still lags far behind other democracies in efforts to ensure election integrity.
In a speech last year at Hillsdale College, John Lott Jr., an expert in voter fraud, told the audience that the United States is an outlier among the world’s democracies in not requiring voter IDs. Some 46 of the 47 countries in Europe today require government-issued photo identification to vote. Even our neighbors, Canada and Mexico, require a photo ID to vote.
Why should the United States be different in this matter? Why do Biden and the Dems so strenuously oppose photo IDs to vote and label those who call for it “racists”? Surely it is because there is indeed voter fraud in this country, and primarily in Democratic-leaning and tossup states. In blowout elections, such fraud may not matter; in close elections, it does.
How about the question of absentee voting? The great majority of European countries don’t even allow it unless a citizen of the country is living out of the country; and most of the countries that do require voters to show up in person and present a photo ID to pick up their ballots. That’s much different from most states in the United States, where absentee ballots are simply mailed to anyone who requests one.
Election integrity in the United States is a problem. Some legislators in right-leaning states are trying to improve it. In doing so, they are acting like patriots, not villains. Even if you disagree with their methods, it is inaccurate and wrong to accuse them of bigotry.
President Biden was elected in large part because he was supposed to be a moderate – a president who would unite the country after the divisiveness that President Trump personified.
Instead, we find a man who has thrown fuel onto the fire again and again. His speech in Georgia last week will go down as one of the most despicable public statements by an American president in history.
One writer in the Wall Street Journal has called our country in the midst of a “civil war without rifles.” Biden’s speechwriters, who appear totally out of touch with the 76 million citizens who voted for Trump, need to craft a speech for President Biden in which he apologizes to the nation for the slanderous rhetoric in the Georgia speech and puts forth a vision which will help bridge the huge divide in the body politic.
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