Yesterday I received the following from Facebook because I shared a news story from The Federalist:

Content is being seen by fewer people because it was rated Partly False by an independent fact-checker.

Mimsy Were the Borogoves shared information that’s been reviewed by Reuters Fact Check. We’ve added a notice to the post so others can see that it’s partly false.

Fact check: Biden vote spikes and county recount do not prove Democrats are trying to steal the election in Michigan.

To fight false news, Facebook reduces the distribution of misleading content while also showing additional reporting on the same topic.

The Federalist is hardly a hotbed of conspiracy—in saner times it’d be right down the middle of the road. The “false news” Facebook flagged was that fraud has become pretty obvious in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. The “fact check” isn’t that fraud doesn’t exist, but that it doesn’t prove that Democrats are trying to steal the election in Michigan.¹

Michigan is claiming it was a mistake—but not that the mistake didn’t happen.

I’m already seeing others on Facebook denying, not that the lopsided spikes were relevant, or deliberate, but denying that they happened. And why not? Facebook and the rest of the news media is blocking the news that it happened, making the news that it was a mistake irrelevant.

But imagine that the “mistake” went the other way. Imagine Trump votes suddenly appearing on a state’s election site at four in the morning in a red state that Biden had been winning.

If we were seeing the opposite—if it were a red Detroit and suddenly dumps of Trump votes were appearing in the dark hours of the morning, do you really think Reuters would be calling it false, or that Facebook would be using Reuters to deny spreading that news? Of course not.

As Rogan O’Handley put it,

If Wisconsin, Michigan, and PA were bright blue on election night, and Democrats woke up to mysterious chunks of 100,000+ votes that went all for trump, there would be riots.

And justifiably so.

Because that’s the stuff of 3rd world dictatorships.

None of this is new. Back in 2010, in a review of a book about the New York Times, Fit to Print: A.M. Rosenthal and His Times, I wrote that:

We joke now about how the Times continually puts itself in the position of reporting “new” news to its readers, such as resignations of prominent politicians who are having problems that everyone else in the country has known about for weeks. That isn’t new for the Times either. In 1986 Donald Manes, “one of the city’s most prominent politicians”, committed suicide. Why? Because he was also involved in bribes and scams and about to get caught. Times readers didn’t know, however, at least not by reading the Times: the New York Times didn’t report on scandals that reflected poorly on the city. Manes had never had more than a “fleeting” mention in the city’s largest newspaper1 until the Times had to run his obituary.

So when it turns out that the notoriously corrupt Detroit machine has been caught manufacturing votes—again—or that the notoriously corrupt Philadelphia machine has been caught—again—don’t be surprised when the first time you hear about it is the legacy media denying that it’s relevant to the election. Or that the first time you hear about it is through rumors and whispers.

Facebook doesn’t want us to see important news about the election. And they’ve programmed their servers to hide that important news.

When important news is blocked, rumors and whispers are all we have.

“Democracy dies in darkness,” according to the Washington Post. And they, Reuters, Facebook, and the rest of the legacy media, are layering on the darkness as fast as they can.

And when democracy is literally strangled at four in the morning they’re the first in line to tighten the garrote. While Facebook is in the mob cheering.

With a caption at the bottom denying that darkness exists.

What’s new is our ability to get around the blockade. Recently I’ve seen a lot of people I trust moving from Facebook and Twitter to sites like Parler and MeWe. Neither are perfect competitors—although I like Parler’s format quite a bit—but they aren’t strangling Democracy like Facebook and Twitter are.

In the meantime, I’ve found that my text-to-image converter is useful for quoting sites that Facebook would otherwise block. It seems to take them longer to block an image-based meme that a text quote and link, so that’s what I’ll be using in the next few weeks, until they figure that out.

There are times when I’m cynical enough to think that this is all deliberate: that the left wants the fraud to be obvious in order to discourage people who don’t normally vote who came out to vote for Donald Trump. They want the whole election to be a boot in the face, a message to previously apathetic voters, voters who saw no reason to make a choice between Democrat and Republican, that they were right to be apathetic and should go back to never voting.

The last four years, and especially the last nine months, has been about punishing the peasants who dared to vote against the administrative state.

Fraud has been going on forever in the United States—but not everywhere. Fraud in the United States is an aberration in specific, corrupt areas. It is not normal. Let’s stop pretending it is. “As expected,” goes one of Facebook’s explanatory additional reporting, “election results have taken longer this year.” But it is expected only in the sense that:

…the Democratic National Committee and allied groups blanketed swing states with armies of lawyers filing suits to challenge voter ID laws, signature verification laws and, more than anything else, deadlines for mail-in ballots—as if elections should no longer have deadlines but instead be staged as a rolling, never-ending process.

This turmoil is not normal, it is a creation of the left, and it must not be accepted.