Our world has changed significantly since the November election, and that raises the reasonable question of whether we have been “played.” Victor Davis Hanson provides a few examples in a recent commentary, and I will add some others.

For example, perhaps you have noticed the disappearance of all the protests. Where is Antifa and BLM? A week or two before the election, the flood of violence in cities subsided, perhaps for fear that it might affect the election. Has systemic racism and excessive force by police just disappeared?

What about all the concerns about the coronavirus vaccines? Not so long ago, Andrew Cuomo, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris expressed their concerns about the Trump vaccine. Now that it looks like it will be successful, they might even decide to call it the Biden vaccine.

Isn’t it interesting that Pfizer only announced their progress on the vaccine AFTER the election. In fact, this summer executives at the company did not update the president or the media about their progress. They only contacted the Biden campaign.

Three months ago, we were hearing from Democratic leaders that it was dangerous to send kids back to school. That’s why we had to shut down the schools and reject the calls from the president and the Secretary of Education to get students back in the classroom. Now it’s time for the kids to go back to school.

Four years ago, many Democratic leaders and the media suspected that voting machines might have been hacked. Even last year, you had Senator Elizabeth Warren concerned about unsecured computer systems and ambiguous rules about matching signatures on ballots. Now, they argue, the electoral system is perfect. Any claims of fraud are either insignificant or nonexistent.

Yes, so much has changed in the last few weeks, and it is tempting to think that all of us have been “played.”

The finance minister for Louis XIV once explained that “the art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing.” Unfortunately, many liberal politicians don’t seem to know where the line is between plucking the Golden Goose and killing the Golden Goose. That is certainly true of political leaders in Seattle and San Francisco.

Two years ago, I wrote how liberals were sleepless in Seattle. There is little rest for progressives who want to invent other ways to extract more gold from the Golden Goose. The city council approved a “head tax” on companies that made over $20 million a year.

It’s not hard to guess how some of the companies around Seattle would respond. You may have noticed that Amazon, Boeing, and a number of other businesses began building outside of the state of Washington. Yes, they may still have their headquarters there, but we have seen these companies look for lower tax venues.

I thought of the Seattle example when I read about the decision by the political leaders in San Francisco to pass a “wealth tax” aimed at corporate executives. The supporters call it the “overpaid executive tax.” You have to give them credit accurately naming it what it is.

The tax is aimed at companies that pay their CEO more than 100 times the median pay of their workforce. In other words, these politicians feel they should decide what companies pay their top executives. We may have some moral questions about the extravagant pay some corporate executives receive, but it makes little sense to use those questions to justify greater taxes.

If the goal is to make a moral statement, perhaps these politicians succeeded. If their goal was to raise more taxes, they will find that it will probably hasten the departure of more businesses from San Francisco.

The mainstream press has done a very poor job of covering the pandemic. That is the conclusion of one research paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Scholars from Dartmouth College and Brown University analyzed the tone of COVID-19-related news articles since the start of this year.

They found a significant difference between the way the US media covered the pandemic compared to how media in other countries covered it. For example, more than nine out of ten (91%) stories by US major media were negative in tone. By contrast, only about half (54%) were negative when covered by non-US media. The US media ran many more stories about increasing COVID-19 cases than stories about decreasing cases even during periods when new cases were actually declining.

The researchers also found a disconnect when it came to reporting the reopening of the schools. While researchers were finding that young students are less likely to catch the virus or become super-spreaders, the mainstream media was overwhelmingly negative compared to major media in other countries.

Finally, the researchers also found that the US media did not accurately report on the development the vaccines. They actually spent more time talking about the president and hydroxychloroquine than they did on vaccine research. The media did very few stories on the vaccines and didn’t even start covering the vaccine development until later in the year.

This research study merely validates what many of us saw during the press conferences with the Coronavirus Task Force, the headlines in newspapers, and news stories on television. Press coverage was routinely negative because the press disliked the president and didn’t want to acknowledge any successes during this election year.

One of the stories that keeps surfacing is how politicians who set down stringent rules for dealing with the coronavirus end up breaking their own rules. This is been standard fare for various conservative hosts.

But even CNN hosts have been criticizing political leaders who cannot seem to comply with mandated guidelines. Brianna Kellar, for example, came down upon Democratic leaders like California governor Gavin Newsome, New York governor Andrew Cuomo, San Francisco mayor London Breed, and Denver Mayor Michal Hancock.

After listing the politicians’ offenses, she reminded her audience that, “trust is built slowly, but it evaporates faster than reservations at a fancy restaurant.” She said that instead of criticizing a few Republicans who aren’t always wearing masks, perhaps they should “look in the mirror.”

On more than one occasion, I have posted articles and discussed the harsh reality that many Americans are not taking the current pandemic seriously and are all too willing to violate mandates imposed by governors and mayors. One possible reason for that can be found in the obvious fact that many political leaders have been caught breaking their own rules.

Gavin Newsome and London Breed tell us to wear masks and to maintain social distance from others. Then we see them shoveling down very expensive food at The French Laundry in Napa, California with no masks and sitting elbow to elbow. The mayor of Austin, Texas sends a message that we should stay home and try to keep the numbers down. He send that message while he is staying in Cabo, Mexico

Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Dianne Feinstein are both over 80 years of age. They’re in the target demographic group that should wear masks and be especially careful. Then we see them without masks in a number of photos.

If these politicians wants us to follow their rules, perhaps they should stop breaking the rules they impose on u

Two months ago, I interviewed and wrote two commentaries on the book by Rod Dreher, Live Not by Lies. I wanted to revisit this book for a number of reasons. More Christians are making positive comments about the book and encouraging others to read it. John Stonestreet recently did a Breakpoint commentary on it and says it is a vital book for Christians to read. Kelly Shackelford, First Liberty Institute, and his wife are doing a Bible study on the book. For these and many other reasons, I think the book deserves another mention.

He says we are faced with a new totalitarianism that is different from the past. The old totalitarianism was implemented by the state (Nazi German, Communist Russia) and dedicated to the eradication of Christianity. The new totalitarianism is what he calls “soft totalitarianism” and comes from progressive groups. You don’t end up in the gulag by challenging leftist beliefs about race, gender, or sex orientation. But you can lose your social media account, you can lose your job, and you can even lose your opportunity to pursue a degree program on many campuses.

He believes the watershed event took place when Indiana wanted to pass a Religious Freedom Restoration Act. That was not controversial when it was passed in 1993 by the federal government. But much has changed. Corporations shut down offices in Indiana. The NCAA threatened to move the Final Four basketball tournament. Supporters were threatened with boycotts and even physical violence.

In his chapter on woke capitalism, he documents how this set the stage for our current trend in which business and media force their leftist agenda on the American people. He says we can learn from the stories he provides of Christians who endured hard totalitarianism. These are lessons that I think we need to learn.

Earlier this week I talked about a study by Dr. Robert Epstein who documented that Google bias may have shifted at least 6 million votes to Joe Biden. It turns out that this is not the first instance in which technology was used to rig an election. This happened in the 1876 election of Rutherford B. Hayes.

Back then, we didn’t have the Internet. But we did have the telegraph, and Western Union had a monopoly on communications in America. Just before the election, the company manipulated information so that only positive news stories about Hayes appeared in newspapers nationwide. Also, Western Union shared all the telegrams sent by Samuel Tilden’s campaign staff with the campaign staff of Rutherford Hayes.

A recent article in the Washington Post recorded that voter intimidation was rampant in some of the southern states like Louisiana and Florida. Voter fraud was widespread with both parties. Southern Democrats used “repeaters” which were people who voted repeatedly. They also printed fraudulent ballots to trick illiterate Black voters into voting for Democrats.

Voter turnout was the highest ever for a presidential election. In South Carolina, despite voter suppression, the official turnout was 101 percent of eligible voters. The Republicans argued that Hayes would have won easily if there had been honest voting. Does any of this sound familiar?

An Electoral Commission was formed and eventually awarded the needed electoral votes to Hayes who won 185 to 184. Democrats were furious and began a filibuster. There were cries of “Tilden or blood” with a news report that a mob would descend on the Capitol to see that the vote count was done correctly.

We sometimes think we are in uncharted territory. Actually, something similar happened in a presidential election 144 years ago.

Most of us are aware of how pervasive social media censorship has become over the last few years. But a recent commentary by Daniel Gelernter illustrates how bizarre some of the censorship has become.

He talks about a Facebook post about World War II that was appended with the “false information” tag. His comment was about the impact of gun control policies in Germany and how that could have led to the Holocaust. He had these relevant comments about the fact-checking on Facebook.

First, is the “touchingly naïve idea that a complex question, over which historians continue to argue, could be stamped true or false as though it were a fact you’d simply been too lazy to look up.” This fact-check label was placed on a Yale graduate who has written for the Wall Street Journal, Weekly Standard, and National Review on numerous topics including military history.

Second, is the problem that the “fact-checking article is full of factual errors. But that’s not surprising when such articles are generally written by a twenty-something journalism school graduate who became an expert in World War II that afternoon after her supervisor told her to research a meme on the Internet.”

His experience parallels what so many other people have found. Often the fact-checker knows less about the subject than the person who posted the comment on social media. John Stossel recently documented that his YouTube video was slapped with a false label because the fact-checking group didn’t like one of the expert he interviewed.

The biggest problem with all of this is “that Facebook had decided that this question—remote and unimportant as it might be in our daily lives—was not something you should be allowed to think about.” We aren’t talking about quack medicine or false information that could affect an election. The fact-checkers are going after any post they don’t like. This is censorship greater than any of us would have imagined.

This year of 2020 has been full of chaos. Therefore, it’s not surprising that Victor Davis Hanson wrote about “A Time of Chaos Upon Chaos atop Chaos.” And he wasn’t even talking about the chaos of the pandemic and lockdowns. He focused merely on the political chaos we have endued for months.

He is more optimistic about our future than most of us might be. He opens with the statement, “America will weather its current hysterias.” I’m not so sure. The political landscape has given us the Steele dossier, charges of Russian collusion, an impeachment of a sitting president, weaponization of FISA courts and the FBI, CIA, and Justice Department. And all of that happened before the election and the current claims and counterclaims about election interference.

He also talks about the media that “poorly prepared the nation for their envisioned Biden presidency. To foster that agenda, journalists have done enormous damage to the country.” Just looking at the bias now being uncovered from social media platforms in Silicon Valley should be enough to understand his concern about how this bias will affect our future.

He also notes that “Joe Biden was never fully vetted. Rather, he was protected and sheltered by the media.” We will now see “whether cognitively he is up to impromptu press conferences, 18-hour days, tough negotiations with opportunistic foreign leaders, and the demands of traversing the country to rally both the country and his party adherents.”

I might also add, that since he was never fully vetted, even people who voted for him aren’t exactly sure of what will be his agenda next year. Many are already expressing surprise at some of his proposed cabinet picks. How will he deal with China? Will he try to ban fracking and embrace the Green New Deal?

We really don’t have good answers to such questions, because the media failed to do its job in this last election.

Yesterday I talked about a study documenting that Google bias may have shifted at least 6 million votes to Joe Biden. Today I would like to feature one more study that demonstrates the impact of media bias on the elections by failing to report key facts.

The Media Research Center asked The Polling Company to survey 1,750 Biden voters in seven swing states (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin). They tested the voters’ knowledge of eight news stories that liberal news media failed to report properly.

They concluded that this lack of information proved crucial. They discovered that one in every six Biden voters surveyed (17%) said they would have abandoned the Democratic candidate if they had known the facts in one or more of these news stories.

The eight news stories surveyed included three stories that reflected poorly on Joe Biden or Kamala Harris and five stories about Trump administration successes. For example, they found that more than a third (35.4%) didn’t know of the Biden sex assault allegations. Nearly half (45.1%) did not know about the scandals involving Hunter Biden. And a quarter (25.3%) of them did not know that Senator Kamala Harris had the most left-wing record of any Senator in 2019.

When they surveyed the Trump successes, they found that anywhere from four in ten to five in ten did not know about economic growth, the creation of 11 million jobs, the Middle East peace deals, energy independence, and Operation Warp Speed.

A total of 17 percent said they would have changed their vote if they had been aware of these issues. This would have moved every one of the swing states into Trump’s column and given him 311 electoral votes. This study is illustrative of the impact the mainstream media had on the 2020 election.