As far as almost all of the mainstream media and the half of the country that voted for Joe Biden is concerned, President Donald Trump and his supporters are sore losers.

The president's refusal to accept the projections of media vote counters that he has lost the election, as well as his claims that the election is being stolen from him, is being put down as more than just poor sportsmanship. He is accused, along with many of the 71 million Americans that voted for him, of spreading "disinformation" about claims of voter fraud about officials in Democratic-run cities and states allegedly wrongly influencing the count and undermining the integrity of the election. They believe Republican reluctance to accept defeat, and their spreading of what Democrats consider conspiracy theories about cheating, is not merely false, but also a threat to democracy.

The Republicans' complaints about the lack of transparency or errors in the counting process in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan deserve to be investigated. The late vote counts may have simply been the product of Democrats being far more likely to vote by mail, while Republicans overwhelmingly preferred to do so in-person. It may not have been fraudulent, but this unusual development not unreasonably struck some on the Right as fishy.

Yet even if Biden won legitimately, does anyone think Democrats wouldn't cry foul if the shoe were on the other foot? Had Biden been leading on election night, but then his supporters were forced to watch in dismay as millions of absentee ballots—which were overwhelmingly cast in favor of their opponent—were belatedly counted and decided the election against them, would Democrats have accepted that without asking questions?

The self-righteous horror at the effrontery of Republicans in pointing out the history of crooked politics in venues like Philadelphia, where the election was slipping out of their hands, or claims that it was racist to point out these facts, were equally unpersuasive.

But even if you think Trump and the Republicans are making a mistake by not gracefully accepting defeat, the hypocrisy of their opponents is staggering. The self-righteous huffing and puffing from CNN anchors about conservatives who won't bend the knee to the apparent outcome and join in the media's celebration of the Biden victory is rich.

It's not just that in the 2020 campaign, liberal media outlets redefined "disinformation" to cover anything that hurt Biden and therefore something no one should discuss, let alone publish. Nor is this solely the product of the kid-gloves coverage Biden got from mainstream outlets during the campaign, or the way the same channels and publications cheered the efforts of the oligarch billionaires who own Facebook and Twitter to censor such stories.

The problem with the liberal critique of Trump and the Republicans lies in the fact that it was the Democrats who refused to accept the presidential election results in 2016. These are the same people who spent the last four years spreading conspiracy theories about the 2016 election and casting doubt not merely on the election they narrowly lost to Trump, but on the patriotism and legitimacy of their opponents.

Hillary Clinton did concede defeat the day after the 2016 election. But that apparent willingness to play by the rules and the outgoing Obama administration's seeming cooperation with the Trump transition team masked something deeply sinister and dangerous for democracy.

Democrats then weren't the good sports they now want Republicans to be. Rather than let the GOP enjoy its triumph, the Left immediately began treating the Trump presidency as illegitimate. In the weeks after the election, a "resistance"—rather than a normal loyal opposition—aimed at forcing Trump out of office set the tone for the next four years. With the help of their media allies, a Women's March protest—led by a group of anti-Semites and radicals—overshadowed Trump's inauguration, something that had never taken place before in American political history.

Within weeks of Clinton's defeat, liberal publications and broadcast outlets also began claiming that the problem wasn't her low favorability ratings or her incompetent campaign. Instead, the country was told that the cause was the leak of the emails of former Democratic National Committee Chair John Podesta, as well as Facebook ads run by bot accounts connected to the Russian government.

The notion that some ineffective Facebook ads that were seen by relatively few Americans changed the outcome makes no sense. Equally ridiculous is the claim that Podesta's emails were decisive in derailing Clinton. The Wikileaks disclosures did little to damage Clinton, whose credibility was in doubt because of her own email scandal. The impact of the Podesta leaks was also overshadowed by the far greater uproar about the publication of the Access Hollywood tape, in which Trump was caught making vulgar comments and boasts of what amounted to sexual assault.

More importantly, during the last months of the campaign and in the aftermath of Trump's victory, the U.S. intelligence community began actively investigating the claim that Republicans were colluding with the Russians. They would not only spy on the Trump campaign, but would specifically and falsely target Gen. Michael Flynn, the man the new president named as his first national security advisor, as a Russian agent. They also set up a perjury trap, which ultimately resulted in Flynn's firing and prosecution.

The Russian collusion charge was largely based on a piece of partisan opposition research—the Steele dossier—that was easily discredited. The attempt to prove what amounted to an absurd conspiracy theory—the notion that Trump and his team were Russian agents—was a complete failure. Yet the willingness of the press to promote leaks about these accusations helped inflate them in the public imagination to being not merely reasonable, but almost certainly true.

When a special prosecutor's office was eventually set up to investigate the charges, led by Robert Mueller, it was widely claimed to be only a matter of time before Trump would be brought down. That aided Democrats in the 2018 midterm elections. Yet when Mueller issued his report after two years of investigations, there were no firm conclusions reached or charges filed against Trump. It had been, as Trump supporters had claimed from the beginning, a conspiracy theory. Yet even after that, the Democrats' belief in this false story persisted.

For four years, Democrats have held onto these myths. Yet now they rush to brand Republicans as liars and conspiracy-mongers for thinking their opponents might have been up to some mischief. GOP doubts about the 2020 results may not, in the end, be based upon provable accusations of fraud. In the absence of convincing proof, Trump may have to acknowledge that he cannot prevent Biden from taking office.

But does anybody really think it's more reasonable to think Trump was a Russian agent than it is to believe that Democratic machine politicians—including Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, who guaranteed that the absentee ballots would ensure Trump's defeat before any of them had been counted—would bend or break the rules in order to help their side win?

Democrats, who have been sore losers for four long years, and who have repeatedly deceived the American public in order to promote the Russian collusion conspiracy theory, have no standing to criticize Trump on this score.

The Democrats' attempts to bully Republicans into silence about any questions about the vote, or to simply shut down the discussion as a conspiracy theory that the media is labeling false in advance of even a cursory examination of the charges, won't help the cause of democracy. Instead, it will only guarantee that angry Trump supporters hold onto this grievance with the same ferocity and determination as Democrats did with their own sore loser routine for the last four years. Copied.