Over a week has passed since the historic 2020 presidential election, and America is at no shortage of discourse. There is also no shortage of the left’s call to cancel President Trump’s voters, labeling them as racists, infantile and sadistic. The party that claims a search for unity is quick to demonize the other half of the nation’s voters.

Due to President Trump’s planned legal actions against background states to investigate mass voter fraud, Democrats claim that such activities seek to illegitimize our elections’ integrity. Mainstream media outlets continue to spout outrageous claims against the litigations toward states. They say that there is no evidence of voter fraud and voting irregularities that compromise the elections.

Anyone who suggests such claims are a threat to democracy.

However, I am old enough to remember how the left, top Democrats and the mainstream media had never recognized Donald Trump as our legitimate president (with former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton claiming that Trump is “an illegitimate president”).

We spent hours watching Congress impeach the president on claims that could not be supported by factual evidence. Democrats knew that even if they could prove Trump colluded, they would be able to smear him for the upcoming election. Since day one, it had been a ploy to remove President Trump from office simply because they did not get their way in 2016.

The mainstream media have already claimed that Joe Biden is the president-elect without official confirmation from the states — meaning the election is not over yet. There are serious allegations of voter fraud and irregularities in multiple states, but the left and established media say that the allegations are not Democratic and un-American. The media will go so far as to suggest Trump’s enablers and supporters should be arrested and locked up.

They plan to throw out any implications that President Trump won and Joe Biden will not be the president of the United States. It shows that Democrats and Biden supporters have no respect for our legal system. Personally, if the litigation shows there is no voter fraud on a scale that could flip the outcome of the election, President Trump should and has to concede.

The mainstream media have even taken it a step further to claim that Trump’s refusal to concede correlates with Hitler’s rise to power. While this claim is an outright fallacy, the media proves to the American people that they are above the law, believing they are immune to committing the crime of defamation.

These fallacies show that the same media, who claim they are objective and for the American people, fail to practice true journalistic integrity. It seems like the real rigging of the election is the mighty hand of the mainstream media that seeks to shape public opinion rather than reflect it. They praise their so-called virtue and condemn and demonize anyone who disagrees with them.

Dawson Schmitt is a student in agricultural communications at Iowa State University.