Monday, February 8, 2021

Out, and proud

ORIGINAL LINK

They had to destroy democracy in order to save it.

Time published a story that provides absolutely astonishing details and framing of activities that took place around the 2020 election. As readers, you deserve a detailed analysis of this story and the people and organizations involved. The recounting of the story in Time is longer than a chapter in many novels. Time says additional details will be provided in a series of articles over the next several days. This article is an introduction.

The title is provocative enough. “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election.” The story goes on to describe in precise detail a coalition of various powerful special interest groups that united, beginning a year before the election, to ensure Joe Biden would win.

I’ll quote as extensively as I like from the Time article, without linking to it. Let the shitlib propaganda pimps find their own way to up the hit count, says I. Here’s the archive.is snapshot instead.

A second odd thing happened amid Trump’s attempts to reverse the result: corporate America turned on him. Hundreds of major business leaders, many of whom had backed Trump’s candidacy and supported his policies, called on him to concede. To the President, something felt amiss. “It was all very, very strange,” Trump said on Dec. 2. “Within days after the election, we witnessed an orchestrated effort to anoint the winner, even while many key states were still being counted.”

In a way, Trump was right.

There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans. The pact was formalized in a terse, little-noticed joint statement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO published on Election Day. Both sides would come to see it as a sort of implicit bargain–inspired by the summer’s massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protests–in which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy.

The handshake between business and labor was just one component of a vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election–an extraordinary shadow effort dedicated not to winning the vote but to ensuring it would be free and fair, credible and uncorrupted. For more than a year, a loosely organized coalition of operatives scrambled to shore up America’s institutions as they came under simultaneous attack from a remorseless pandemic and an autocratically inclined President. Though much of this activity took place on the left, it was separate from the Biden campaign and crossed ideological lines, with crucial contributions by nonpartisan and conservative actors. The scenario the shadow campaigners were desperate to stop was not a Trump victory. It was an election so calamitous that no result could be discerned at all, a failure of the central act of democratic self-governance that has been a hallmark of America since its founding.

Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears.

And now you know just how it was that the Hunter Biden scandal got quashed so handily.

They executed national public-awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks, preventing Trump’s conspiracy theories and false claims of victory from getting more traction. After Election Day, they monitored every pressure point to ensure that Trump could not overturn the result. “The untold story of the election is the thousands of people of both parties who accomplished the triumph of American democracy at its very foundation,” says Norm Eisen, a prominent lawyer and former Obama Administration official who recruited Republicans and Democrats to the board of the Voter Protection Program.

For Trump and his allies were running their own campaign to spoil the election. The President spent months insisting that mail ballots were a Democratic plot and the election would be “rigged.”

Which, of course, they were.

His henchmen at the state level sought to block their use, while his lawyers brought dozens of spurious suits to make it more difficult to vote–an intensification of the GOP’s legacy of suppressive tactics.

By such OUTRAGES AGAINST “DEMOCRACY”!!! as, oh, requiring valid ID to vote; expunging corpses from the eligible-voter rolls; checking to be sure voters hadn’t relocated; etc. Gee, what would we ever have done without these paragons of virtue looking out for us? Apart from perhaps being able to hold a, y’know, free and fair election, I mean?

Before the election, Trump plotted to block a legitimate vote count. And he spent the months following Nov. 3 trying to steal the election he’d lost–with lawsuits and conspiracy theories, pressure on state and local officials, and finally summoning his army of supporters to the Jan. 6 rally that ended in deadly violence at the Capitol.

Deadly violence—wherein a Trump supporter and USAF vet was wantonly, needlessly murdered by a trigger-happy Mordor On The Potomac orc, and the other deaths were basically due to heart attack or stroke.

Deadly violence, forsooth. Hasn’t been near enough of it to suit some of us, bitch. Not yet, anyway. Still early innings, though.

This is the inside story of the conspiracy to save the 2020 election, based on access to the group’s inner workings, never-before-seen documents and interviews with dozens of those involved from across the political spectrum. It is the story of an unprecedented, creative and determined campaign whose success also reveals how close the nation came to disaster. “Every attempt to interfere with the proper outcome of the election was defeated,” says Ian Bassin, co-founder of Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan rule-of-law advocacy group. “But it’s massively important for the country to understand that it didn’t happen accidentally. The system didn’t work magically. Democracy is not self-executing.”

That’s why the participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream–a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information. They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it. And they believe the public needs to understand the system’s fragility in order to ensure that democracy in America endures.

Democracy, along with the Constitution, liberty, and the very concept of unalienable rights, is as dead as America That Was is. It rankles tremendously to be lectured about the system’s “fragility” by the very goddamned filthbags that, over the course of many decades, labored so diligently to weaken its foundation, reducing it to the smashed, smoking ruin it now is.

If, after reading the rest of the thing, you aren’t filled with a blistering rage at the sure and certain knowledge that this is just another example of The Enemy—flush with his ill-gotten triumph, secure in its totality and permanence—openly laughing in the faces of Real Americans, then I really don’t know what more there is to say to you. In another article of which you should read the all, Ace puts it this way:

This is the part of the war where they have shot most of the survivors, and are now engaging in psyops to humiliate and degrade whoever is still alive. They are now admitting they rigged the election so that we understand that there is nothing we can do about it — we are a defeated people, they want us to know, and they intend to rule us.

He’s right, and you know he is. The question now is: what, if anything, are Real Americans to do about it?



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