The mainstream media and the left (but I repeat myself) are to the point of obsessive over claiming that any questions raised about alleged irregularities in the 2020 presidential election are tantamount to spreading what they call “The Big Lie” over what some view as a stolen election.

But Democrat Stacey Abrams has been perpetuating her own “Big Lie” for over three years now, the lie that says the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election was “stolen” from her by then-Republican nominee Brian Kemp, who at the time was Georgia’s Secretary of State.

And all this time, she’s been doing it against a backdrop of love, admiration, reverence, and deference shown by very same people who after November 2020 told us that it was imperative that the losers in elections be able to “concede gracefully” and move on for the “sake of our democracy” or whatever. Laughably, Abrams herself was sent out by Democrats at one point post-2020 election for interviews instructing people how to accept election results, as though she was an expert on the matter.

But since Abrams declared herself a candidate in the 2022 Georgia governor’s race a month ago, a subtle but noticeable shift has started among her supporters in the press and on the left.

For instance, nowhere in this New York Times piece announcing her candidacy was it mentioned that she refused to concede the 2018 race. There was, however, a lot of mentions of her voter registration efforts and how progressive activists viewed her as a liberal icon and heroine.

It was an extremely odd omission considering the MSM’s heavy emphasis over the last year on how being able to accept defeat in an election and concede with dignity was a “hallmark of our democracy” that should not be abandoned by selfish political actors.

And a little over a month after Abrams threw her hat in the ring again, we now have Democrats with large Twitter followings who are laughably claiming that Abrams did in fact “concede” the race she lost.

Check out the two tweets below from Benjamin Wittes, whose Twitter bio lists him as a “senior fellow” at the Brookings Institution and the editor in chief of the Lawfare blog.

Wittes, who has close to 412,000 followers, wrote that while Abrams “did not concede” that her race “was fair,” she “did concede” the race itself. He even cited an excerpt from the speech she gave at the time as supposed proof that she conceded:

It has become a talking point among Trumpists and some non-Trumpist conservatives that @staceyabrams–like Trump–did not concede the race when she ran for governor of Georgia in 2018.

It's really not true. Abrams did not concede that the race was fair, but she did concede… pic.twitter.com/5sgigkZIVn

— Benjamin Wittes (@benjaminwittes) January 12, 2022

…that under the rules as they were written and understood and implemented, her opponent had prevailed and would become governor. This is significantly more than Trump ever conceded until after the violence of Jan. 6. And he has still never really said this even up to now.

— Benjamin Wittes (@benjaminwittes) January 12, 2022

Except in the very excerpt he used, Abrams literally said she “cannot concede”:

Reading is hard https://t.co/06Kk0wgkPF pic.twitter.com/o3RXKuBB6b

— Mrs. Brassenstein (@MBrassenstein) January 12, 2022

Further, she has never – not once – since her election, said any variation of the words “I concede” – because she doesn’t believe she lost. Her consistent battle cry is that the system was supposedly rigged against her and that Kemp deliberately suppressed the black vote.

Abrams has never been able to supply a shred of evidence to support her claim, nor have her supporters. Yet she’s been allowed to make the statement about a “stolen” election with little to no pushback from supposed “journalists” going back over three years. In fact, in many cases, the same journalists looked upon her with sadness and empathy, as though what she said was the gospel truth.

But because the media and left have invested so much time and energy since November 2020 in proclaiming that it is an affront to democracy – akin to being an “insurrectionist,” even – to question election results, they are having to shift gears now that Abrams is back in the game.

Watching them engage in pretzel logic in an attempt to preserve their “respect democracy!” narrative while Abrams no doubt will continue to amplify her claims of a “stolen election” is going to be interesting, to say the least. The best they’ve been able to do over the last month is largely ignore her claim or sugarcoat it.

But Republicans should use every opportunity they get to remind people of what Abrams has said since she lost in November 2018, because she, too, has done her own juggling act in attempting to paint her race as different from the 2020 presidential election. Abrams’ “Big Lie” is one that should not stand, and her political opposition should respond accordingly with a megaphone every time she says it and every time her apologists in the media and on the left try to camouflage it.

Flashback: Hillary Clinton Committed an Assault on Democracy Last Night With Stacey Abrams and We Need Answers