If you’re watching any conservative media, you know there’s quite a build up to whatever evidence the Trump team has to prove massive voter fraud.

The rumblings and rumors include hundreds, if not thousands, of people who’ve come forward to claim their vote wasn’t counted, someone voted in their name, dead people voted, ballots were thrown out, ballots were added, the software was rigged, and GOP poll watchers weren’t allowed anywhere near the vote counting.

Meanwhile, President Trump and his lawyers are slowly starting to appear more and more making claims of significant voter fraud and implying heavily, if not saying outright, that they have the proof.

Conservatives are having conversations amongst themselves about whether or not there was significant enough voter fraud to change the election results and whether or not Trump’s team could actually have enough proof to maintain the presidency.

But while all of that is going on, I don’t hear anyone asking what I think is the biggest question of all: If there was voter fraud, who was behind it?

To have pulled off a job of that magnitude, there would not only have to be one hell of a criminal mastermind in charge, but there would also have to be an enormous number of people who didn’t leak a word of it. Are either of those things realistic?

The right question may be: Do they have to be?

Whenever any uses the phrase “conspiracy theory,” we’ve all been conditioned to roll our eyes in disbelief and automatically discount the notion. However, does there have to be a conspiracy for something like this to happen?

In a recent conversation with a friend, he mentioned that often, when something appears to be a conspiracy, its actually just a situation in which conditions allowed for humans to be human.

As he pointed out, if you throw a bunch of steaks in a room with several german shepards, the german shepards are going to eat the steak. If conditions were right for many individual actors to consider and act on impulses of doing whatever they could to steal this election for Joe Biden, why wouldn’t they act on it?

What events could lead to such a condition? Consider all of the events of the last five years.

During the 2016 campaign, Donald Trump suggested several times that the November election could be rigged against him. In a subsequent Rose Garden press conference, President Obama said “no serious person” would suggest it was possible to rig an American election. This seemingly kicked off two significant trends.

Evidence, including declassified documents, would later confirm that Obama, Biden, and Clinton were all in on efforts to, among other things, spy on the Trump campaign, frame several of his campaign staff, and fake a dossier to set up the argument that Trump colluded with Russia to steal the election.

At the same time, it was the start of a significant media and cultural transition in which the American people would be fed a steady and frequent stream of observations, comments, and “news” that were not only a constant and unfounded attack on President Trump, but also often 180 degrees different from what average Americans were seeing and hearing with their own eyes and ears.

We were told all day, every day, by the media, cultural icons, sports stars, and our friends that Trump was a racist, homophobic, lying Nazi. This took root as many Americans ignored his many accomplishments and success of our economy and focused instead on how much they didn’t like him.

As Trump’s presidency went on, Trump would be involved in several events in which the video would show he said one thing, but the media reported something entirely different. The media knew they could count on most Americans not doing their own research, which allowed the “fine people on both sides” and “inject bleach” hoaxes to live on throughout the 2020 campaign.

Halfway through Trump’s presidency, close observers started to hear rumblings of how the big social media companies were shadow-banning or censoring conservatives and messages that supported conservative ideas or shared conservative news. Google search results illustrated how conservative sites couldn’t make the first few pages of results.

In late 2019, Trump would make a call to the President of the Ukraine that would include him inquiring about the investigation into Joe Biden’s son Hunter, which we’ve since learned was a legitimate concern. As the gaslighting continued to grow ever-present, Trump would later be impeached for supposedly doing what we’ve since learned Joe Biden actually did (including his bragging about it on video to an assembled audience).

Following the impeachment, the coronavirus would hit and turn the entire country upside down. The media and Democrats seized on it to shut down the economy, run a constant death ticker, and berate Trump for his poor handling of the pandemic, without any suggestions of what they would have done differently.

Gathering for any reason was absolutely forbidden, until George Floyd died in police custody. It was then we learned that if you were protesting or attending one of many Floyd funerals, you were immune from the virus. As the year progressed, we also slowly learned that the same government officials, like Fauci, Pelosi, Schumer, and others, were immune from the virus and didn’t have to social distance or wear the very masks they mandated for us.

Our governing officials would look us right in the eyes and tell us the virus was so deadly that we had to shut down businesses and keep children out of schools, despite growing evidence that the survival rate was around 99.8% (depending on your cohort).

To sum it up, four years of constant messaging claiming Trump was the second coming of Adolf Hitler, and constant gaslighting on nearly every subject, from racism to the virus to the rioting we “weren’t” seeing every night in Portland and other cities.

There are countless other factors and examples, but for the sake of keeping this short, all of this led many Americans conclude that absolutely something had to be done. And so it was.

The November election included so many strange and unusual events that many think it’s clear there was fraud and that the election was stolen. But was it a conspiracy and was it coordinated? The environment has been primed to ridicule anyone who would suggest such a conspiracy exists or could be pulled off.

But what if it wasn’t a conspiracy? As Scott Adams rightfully asked (paraphrasing): If you were a leftist, and you were convinced Trump truly was evil and the second coming of Hitler, wouldn’t you have a moral obligation to do whatever you could to get rid of him?

In my opinion, most people play by the rules. But if the environment lended itself to bending rules, cutting corners, or outright fraud, there’s still a decent percentage of people who may just do a little. And if you add up thousands of little acts, perhaps there was enough there to add up to significant, election-changing, fraud.

Add in a few select people who may have had the access, the ability, the support, and the means to commit fraud by the thousands, and suddenly, without any coordinated effort or “Mr. Big,” you’ve got serious fraud.

If you’ve got german shepards in the room, and you throw in a bunch of steaks, at least some of those dogs are going to eat the steak.

Personally, I don’t know how one person could have coordinated such significant fraud, if it did, indeed, happen. But I could see how many with the same idea, the same moral calling, and the same moral compass, could make the rationalization necessary to enact fraud.

We’ll find out soon enough if there was any serious evidence of election-altering fraud. But even if we do, I’m not sure we’ll ever know the names of everyone involved. It may not have even been coordinated.

Whatever happened, we will all see soon enough.