As the Democrat Party licks its wounds following a historic beating, having fallen a second time to the intrepid Donald Trump, the excuse for why a growing majority of Americans is rejecting their political brand has slowly but steadily gained traction among the faithful.

You see, the only reason Americans aren’t voting for Democrats is because those nefariously dishonest and conniving Republicans are duping them. At least that’s what our political “betters” tell us.

Consider the snide remarks of a couple of Hollywood celebrities. Negligent killer Alec Baldwin essentially smeared Americans as a bunch of rubes and ignoramuses. “Americans are very uninformed about reality, what’s really going on — with climate change, Ukraine, Israel, you name it, all the biggest topics in the world,” he explained at a film festival in Italy. “Americans have an appetite for a little bit of information.”

That sentiment was shared by another Hollywood A-lister, Sharon Stone, who characterized Americans as “uneducated.” At that same film festival, Stone opined, “My country is in the midst of adolescence. Adolescence is very arrogant. Adolescence thinks it knows everything. Adolescence is naive, ignorant, and arrogant. And we are in our ignorant, arrogant adolescence." No, she wasn’t talking about herself.

But that’s just the elitist, out-of-touch Hollywood that effectively exists to foment the Democrats’ ideological propaganda via the movies.

The trouble is, Democrats have been saying the same thing for years. Everyone from Barack Obama and his "bitter clingers” to Hillary Clinton and her “basket of deplorables” to Joe Biden calling Trump supporters “garbage” — all of them have the same perspective: Their fellow Americans are dumb.

This is why they’re now insisting that “misinformation” is the only reason that Democrats ever lose elections.

Back in 2016, the excuse for Trump’s win was misinformation. Clinton, to this day, insists that the Russians had a hand in delivering the victory to Trump, and this despite the fact that her own campaign was responsible for seeding the bogus Russian collusion hoax via the Steele dossier. Talk about misinformation.

Then there’s the Charlottesville lie, which Joe Biden repeatedly referenced as the primary reason he decided to run in 2020. Where was the mea culpa from Democrats or the Leftmedia for peddling that piece of misinformation? We’re still waiting.

What of the media’s malpractice in refusing to report on and investigate Hunter Biden’s laptop? They effectively conspired with the Washington deep state and the Biden campaign to quash the story as “Russian disinformation” only months after the election, admitting that it was, in fact, not misinformation at all. Furthermore, the FBI knew it the whole time.

Like complaining about money in politics and coming up with campaign finance reform to “fix it,” the Democrats prove to be the worst offenders. Clinton spent double the amount that Trump did in 2016, and Harris’s campaign was the most expensive in U.S. history, outspending Trump by over a billion dollars.

Both getting the money out of politics and controlling “misinformation” have in common the demand for federal government speech suppression. The truth is that the Democrat Party has, for decades, jettisoned any true and principled commitment to upholding freedom of speech. Democrats are directly attacking it as “the problem,” conflating it with “misinformation” to justify their un-American calls for censorship.

Instead of reevaluating their political and policy agenda following an election loss, the Democrat Party is blaming the voters and the very freedoms those voters enjoy.

Democrats can’t win on the merits of their arguments, so they call for the silencing of their political opponents. They claim to worry about democracy being on the brink and an authoritarian state being on the horizon, and yet they seek an ever-encroaching bureaucratic state that aims to control nearly everything in our lives, from the cars we drive to the stoves we buy.

Misinformation is a problem, but the best solution is more speech, not less. More freedom to express one’s ideas and views, not less. Free speech ensures a playing field where truth and the best ideas win out in the long run. If Democrats want to win elections again, they need to dump their bad ideas and embrace individual liberties once again, starting with freedom of speech.