The 2020 election is over, but the feeling that former President Trump was cheated out of a second term will remain fresh in the minds of GOP voters. They’re not moving on from this — it could become a 2022 campaign issue. Republicans will have to navigate that very carefully, however, as these allegations led to the January 6 riot on Capitol Hill. Voter integrity should be something that all sides can agree on; only the GOP seems to care about enforcing such matters, though.
Yet, this lengthy Time Magazine piece goes into detail about how the shadow campaign anti-Trump forces conducted an all-out effort to ensure the 45th president of the United States was defeated. It’s an oddball grouping too. Left-wing activists and big business, with squishy Republican operatives. It was a war waged on multiple fronts. From social media platforms to election laws, this cadre of folks made sure to “fortify” the election to ensure a Trump defeat.
Yeah, the piece said this wasn’t a rigged election, it was merely "fortified." I’ll let you debate that in the comments section, but it does give Trump some validation in the sense of the anointing aura that engulfed the nation, especially its news media. As ballots were still being counted, this was permeating the media coverage.
"Within days after the election, we witnessed an orchestrated effort to anoint the winner, even while many key states were still being counted," said the now-former president, which the article concedes, "in a way, Trump was right."
Here are some of the excerpts [emphasis mine]:
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…
[…]
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.
Is this rigging or fortifying? You have to love the linguistic gymnastics here. It’s pretty much that, I’d say. It’s manipulation at its best, but not all manipulation is illegal. It’s shady. It’s toeing the line of felonious activity, but as we saw on Wall Street recently, it’s not always illegal, slimy as that may sound. So, that being said, this is even more disturbing. It further reinforces what we already know regarding institutional bias. In fact, it’s one that could kill us as a movement. Big business and the far Left, who then get a massive layup from the social media giants, working with government institutions is the type of army that can carpet bomb to death any movement they feel is against their agenda. You could argue it’s happening right now.
According to Time the election was “Fortified” but not rigged. Definitely not rigged. This is insanity, but everyone should read to learn exactly how bad it was. https://t.co/dPbXhvGGcx
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) February 5, 2021
If you had said this out loud on Twitter a few months ago, it would have gotten you banned. https://t.co/hub7XtzKfh
— Mark Hemingway (@Heminator) February 5, 2021
They didn't rig the election they "fortified" it
— Tim Pool (@Timcast) February 5, 2021
Holy fuck I can't believe Time just ran this storyhttps://t.co/RvTT0Kx8IX pic.twitter.com/gpgjiSHvVt
You're damn right we ordered the Code Red on the election https://t.co/dn97wyiGzs
— John Hayward (@Doc_0) February 5, 2021
government of the tech overlords, by the tech overlords, for the tech overlords pic.twitter.com/Xon1jImyer
— Logan Hall (@loganclarkhall) February 5, 2021
conservatives better wake up before it’s too late. corporate power and government power working together is the true threat. they share the same goals now. pic.twitter.com/F65Ss0ArBg
— Logan Hall (@loganclarkhall) February 5, 2021
Controlling the flow of information is stuff the Soviets did. In this case, it was suffocating the Hunter Biden story, one that might have made almost 20 percent of Biden voters think twice before pulling the lever for him. That’s the election right there.
A bunch of wealthy and powerful fat cats doling out cash, hiring operatives to control the media landscape, making sure the spigot is turned off on stories they don’t like, changing the election laws, executing what sounds like a subliminal messaging effort, and making social media companies do their part in all areas on this list. Yeah, that’s definitely not rigging. Also, again, why are people shocked that populism is on the rise? Well, when the game is fixed, that sort of is the byproduct.
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