Was it simply the bulk-mail ballot fraud? Is that how Joe Biden “stole” the 2020 election from Donald Trump? Or was there something more to it?

Surely that twofold Democrat strategy — which was employed nationwide under the guise of the COVID-19 pandemic, and which involved bulk-mailing votes and authenticating them with an appallingly shoddy “anything goes” approach in Democrat-controlled areas — had something to do with it. But does that tell the whole story? Does that adequately explain how Trump earned 12 million more votes than any Republican candidate in history and handily carried 18 of 19 “bellwether” counties across the nation, and yet still lost the election by seven million votes to an uninspiring 77-year-old career politician who couldn’t draw flies to a rally and spent most of the campaign season hiding away in his basement?

A new book by Mollie Hemingway, Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections, paints a fuller picture of a deeply flawed and undemocratic election that was decided more by money than by traditional theft. In it, she describes how Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg spent a stunning $419 million to get out the vote in critical Democrat areas of key battleground states, and how these efforts overcame what would otherwise have been a resounding reelection for Donald Trump. As political analyst John Daniel Davidson writes:

“Rigged” doesn’t argue or allege that the election was stolen, but that it was corrupted by corporate media, Big Tech censorship, the courts, and Democratic activists. Taken together, it all amounted to heavy-handed election interference of a kind we have never seen before.

What happened, exactly? Hemingway doesn’t point to any one thing, because what happened was the combined efforts of the most powerful institutions in America.

Those efforts … include Big Tech controlling what kind of political reporting voters could see online, Facebook infiltrating the supposedly non-partisan offices that administer our elections, and Democratic Party operatives launching a fusillade of lawsuits to make outrageous changes to election laws in key swing states. Just to mention a few.

As for that unreal and unprecedented avalanche of Zuckerbucks, researcher William Doyle notes that this money “had nothing to do with traditional campaign finance, lobbying, or other expenses that are related to increasingly expensive modern elections.” Instead, he says, “It had to do with financing the infiltration of election offices at the city and county level by left-wing activists, and using those offices as a platform to implement preferred administrative practices, voting methods, and data-sharing agreements, as well as to launch intensive outreach campaigns in areas heavy with Democratic voters.”

Of course, we’re also upon the one-year anniversary of that critical case of Big Tech and Big Media collusion that occurred just before last year’s election, when the New York Post’s bombshell reporting on the Biden family’s influence peddling in Ukraine and China and elsewhere was systematically suppressed by Zuckerberg’s Facebook, Jack Dorsey’s Twitter, and their mainstream media accomplices. Mark Alexander offers some fresh analysis here.

To sum it all up, money can indeed buy elections. And it did in 2020. And our nation is now paying the price of President Joe Biden.

In 2016, while pulling off the greatest election upset in American history, Donald J. Trump beat the Republican establishment, the Democrat establishment, the Clinton machine, the Obama machine, Big Tech, the media, Hollywood, the schools, the colleges and universities, the foundations, the increasingly woke large corporations, and the list goes on.

In 2020, Trump appeared poised to do the same thing — this time against an older, weaker, less compelling, more gaffe-prone candidate than the first woman ever to head a major party’s presidential ticket. And in the early evening hours of that first Tuesday in November, we thought Trump was doing just that.

Somehow, though, as the election results continued to trickle in, he lost. And now, finally, we have a better sense of why. Big Tech colluded with Democrats to buy this election for Joe Biden. It might not be satisfying for those of us who knew in our bones that our guy had won, but there’s no other way around it.