Elections don’t make democracies; free and fair elections do. Today, in the midst of post-election chaos, we find ourselves in a fight for the latter. In that sense, this election is about far more than Donald Trump the man, or even his policies. The question is this: either democracy survives or one political party will be allowed to bully, lie, cheat, and steal its way into power.

The stakes, at this moment, in this country that we love, could not be higher. Some Republicans are used to losing and habituated to concession, but the President and the largest number of voters for any Republican in American history know that fighting until the end is necessary–and winning is not wrong.

For five years, the Democratic party and their allies in the corporate media, the coddled government bureaucracies, and the Big Tech platforms have fought Trump with every weapon at their disposal.

They uncritically and feverishly repeated every deranged theory that Trump was really a Russian asset operating as Putin’s Manchurian candidate, and then cheered on his impeachment for it. An FBI lawyer altered evidence to spy on a U.S. citizen while texting “viva la resistance” to his colleagues. When, less than a month before the election, Facebook and Twitter outright banned the circulation of a New York Post story involving corruption in the Biden family, media outlets happily did the same.

The New York Times accused Trump of faking his post-COVID White House appearance with a green screen and using secret Twitter code to activate right-wing extremists. CNN is now settling libel suits for its role in instigating a vicious social media campaign and physical threats against a Catholic high school kid—all for the crime of wearing a MAGA hat.

Media outlets that breathlessly ran with a fake story about Trump killing an entire pond of koi fish refused to cover the violent riots that broke out across the country this summer. They stood in front of buildings that were literally on fire, claiming the protests were “fiery, but mostly peaceful.” They told us that border walls don’t stop illegal immigration, riots don’t spread COVID-19 (but schools and church services do), and Joe Biden would win in a landslide.

Congressional Democrats, meanwhile, ran on a platform meant to fundamentally reshape our institutions in order to reshape the country with a permanent Democrat majority. Packing the Supreme Court isn’t about checks and balances. It’s about institutionalizing Democrat power. Adding D.C. and Puerto Rico as states isn’t about benevolence. It’s about adding four additional Democrat senators. Abolishing the electoral college isn’t about some distorted notion of fairness. It’s about cementing an outsized role for coastal urban centers in selecting our presidents.

Yet these are the people—the alliance of mainstream media, Big Tech platforms, and a Democrat party hell-bent on accumulating and permanently fortifying power for themselves—who want you to believe that the unmonitored vote counting of unprecedented numbers of mail-in ballots which mysteriously continue to appear, as though summoned, are completely aboveboard. They want you to listen as they lecture you about “what’s good for the country.” They want you to believe them when they paint every good-faith Republican effort to ensure democratic transparency as fascist tyranny. They want to shame you into meek submission “for democracy.”

Absolutely not. They have not earned our trust, and they do not deserve it. They should be given no political quarter.

This election is about the presidency, yes, but more than any other, it is about who will rule: the militant woke inquisitionists who think “healing America” involves excluding half of it, or Donald Trump, the chaotic TV personality who careened into D.C. guns blazing and accidentally unmasked the stinking institutional rot of Washington’s uniparty corruption. There’s only one option available for the United States Constitution and its supporters.

The fight of this election is as much existential as it is political; it is between a party that will defend our way of life, however imperfectly, and a party that has every intention of crushing it.

Every legal vote must be counted. Every measure must be taken. Not an inch should be given—not just for one side or the other, but to restore a modicum of faith in the mechanisms of America’s election and governance.

The militant Left that has lied to America countless times cannot be trusted suddenly to tell the truth about what’s happening. Open the count, line up observers, ensure every vote cast is a legal one. If there are discrepancies, they must be explained rather than dismissed. Our self-government requires consensus. That consensus is fragile. Without trust at its foundation, it will shatter. The 71 million people who cast a vote for Donald Trump deserve this transparency as much as every other American voter.

This is the fourth quarter and we have no choice but to leave it all on the field. We may lose, but we must do so battle-scarred and bloody, fighting like our ability to live as a free-thinking, free-speaking, free-praying people of one nation depends on it—because these last four years have shown how much it truly does.