Time Magazine says the quiet parts out loud: There really was a vast conspiracy of powerful elites working behind the scenes to change laws

[Deplorable Yankee]

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.

Don't you hate it when your paranoid fever dreams fall short of reality?



It is so embarrassing.



The article goes through the process one by one.


Mod edit: Do not post the entire article, only an excerpt, please.

Time Magazine says the quiet parts out loud: There really was a vast conspiracy of powerful elites working behind the scenes to "change laws" and "control the flow of information" in order to defeat Trump.

Forget the hat, you're going to need a tin foil bodysuit for this one.

notthebee.com

Democwaxy has been saved comrades
Now its time to weaponize the military against the civilian population for everyone's safety.....derp

What fuckin planet am I on ....
Ahhh this ain't gonna end well

 

[BULLDOG]

You sure used a lot of words to say lots of people saw how rump was harming the nation and formed strategys to defeat him in the election. You seem to think it was somehow unfair that so many people just didn't fall for the rump lies like you did. If he didn't want so many people to oppose his bullshit, he shouldn't have done so much bullshit.

 

[EvilEyeFleegle]

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.

Don't you hate it when your paranoid fever dreams fall short of reality?



It is so embarrassing.



The article goes through the process one by one.

THE ARCHITECT
Sometime in the fall of 2019, Mike Podhorzer became convinced the election was headed for disaster–and determined to protect it.

The disaster he feared was that Trump could win.



Podhorzer is senior adviser to the president of the AFL-CIO, and his purported concern was that Trump was sowing doubt about the integrity of mail-in ballots. He wanted to "protect" the election, but what he really wanted to protect was his own power and that of the organization he worked for.

The Fight Back Table,...

Note: Had a conservative written that, the article would already have been flagged for promoting violence.

...a coalition of "resistance" organizations, had begun scenario-planning around the potential for a contested election, gathering liberal activists at the local and national level into what they called the Democracy Defense Coalition.

The coalition grew to include a who's-who of progressive politics from Planned Parenthood to MoveOn to Greenpeace and so on that mobilized a get-out-the-vote campaign targeting Democratic constituencies.



That is all fine and legal and expected, but Ball doesn't frame this part of the program as a mundane partisan project, that doesn't get the clicks. No, Trump was a dictator and might need to be removed from office forcibly.



There was a higher purpose here.

What he wanted to know was not how American democracy was dying but how it might be kept alive.

How do you keep democracy alive?



By snuffing out voices you disfavor.

THE DISINFORMATION DEFENSE
Bad actors spreading false information is nothing new... Laura Quinn, a veteran progressive operative who co-founded Catalist, began studying this problem a few years ago.

"Disinformation," otherwise known as, "things we don't agree with."

The most important takeaway from Quinn's research, however, was that engaging with toxic content only made it worse. "When you get attacked, the instinct is to push back, call it out, say, ‘This isn't true,'" Quinn says. "But the more engagement something gets, the more the platforms boost it. The algorithm reads that as, ‘Oh, this is popular; people want more of it.'"

Ponder this for a moment, because in this venue, a Time Magazine article, their readers are going to skim right through that and nod approvingly without giving it a second thought. But this is what she is saying:



Engaging in the free exchange of ideas makes it worse.



Makes what worse?



Her and her constituency's grip on power.

The solution, she concluded, was to pressure platforms to enforce their rules, both by removing content or accounts that spread disinformation and by more aggressively policing it in the first place. "The platforms have policies against certain types of malign behavior, but they haven't been enforcing them," she says.

I agree there is a lot of nonsense out there, but I don't for a moment hold myself up as some kind of grand arbiter of what is and is not nonsense nor do I think anyone should. One day its Jewish Space Lasers, the next it's "minimum wage hikes create unemployment" or we're in a "Climate Crisis."



Remember this?

"If there be time to expose through discussion, the falsehoods and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence." -- Justice Louis D. Brandeis established it in his classic concurring opinion in Whitney v. California (1927)

Yeah, we're not doing that anymore.

In November 2019, Mark Zuckerberg invited nine civil rights leaders to dinner at his home, where they warned him about the danger of the election-related falsehoods that were already spreading unchecked. "It took pushing, urging, conversations, brainstorming, all of that to get to a place where we ended up with more rigorous rules and enforcement," says Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, who attended the dinner and also met with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and others. (Gupta has been nominated for Associate Attorney General by President Biden.) "It was a struggle, but we got to the point where they understood the problem. Was it enough? Probably not. Was it later than we wanted? Yes. But it was really important, given the level of official disinformation, that they had those rules in place and were tagging things and taking them down."

"Disinformation," again.



Like the Hunter Biden story, uncontested, documented, and corroborated.



That kind of "disinformation."

SPREADING THE WORD
It was crucial for voters to understand that despite what Trump was saying, mail-in votes weren't susceptible to fraud and that it would be normal if some states weren't finished counting votes on election night.

I imagine that was crucial for voters to "understand," as in accept without question or incredulity.

Dick Gephardt, the Democratic former House leader turned high-powered lobbyist, spearheaded one coalition. "We wanted to get a really bipartisan group of former elected officials, Cabinet secretaries, military leaders and so on,

Because of Covid they couldn't meet in person and light cigars with $100 bills which was probably a bummer.

SHOWING UP, STANDING DOWN
Election night began with many Democrats despairing. Trump was running ahead of pre-election polling, winning Florida, Ohio and Texas easily and keeping Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania too close to call. But Podhorzer was unperturbed when I spoke to him that night: the returns were exactly in line with his modeling.

While he was talking,Fox News surprised everyone by calling Arizona for Biden. The public-awareness campaign had worked: TV anchors were bending over backward to counsel caution and frame the vote count accurately.The question then became what to do next.

Yes it did, but was it a "public-awareness campaign" when you work in concert with media outlets to suppress people with inconvenient opinions?



I am less agitated than many regarding the degree of fraud in this election, but I am very agitated regarding free speech and censorship which is where I think the election was indisputably manipulated, and it was right there out in the open.



You can frame the narrative all you want, but if you do it by force, you are no longer working within the confines of a democracy.



And you know those concerns about "mostly peaceful protests" occurring nationwide had Trump won, the potential participants in which had already been inflamed by anti-Trump forces framing the whole thing as a "coup?"



That was ready to be launched with the precision and central control of the D-Day invasion.

The conversation that followed was a difficult one, led by the activists charged with the protest strategy. "We wanted to be mindful of when was the right time to call for moving masses of people into the street," Peoples says. As much as they were eager to mount a show of strength, mobilizing immediately could backfire and put people at risk.

So, they were concerned about "mostly peaceful protests."

Protests that devolved into violent clashes would give Trump a pretext to send in federal agents or troops as he had over the summer.

Which we have right now, occupying the Capital under Biden. But that was not done under a "pretext" mind you, that's just good old solid leadering.

And rather than elevate Trump's complaints by continuing to fight him, the alliance wanted to send the message that the people had spoken.

So the word went out: stand down.

The word went out to the foot soldiers of the left: Stand down.

Protect the Results announced that it would "not be activating the entire national mobilization network today, but remains ready to activate if necessary." On Twitter, outraged progressives wondered what was going on. Why wasn't anyone trying to stop Trump's coup? Where were all the protests?

Why did they think there was going to be a coup? Who told them that? Was that disinformation too? Trump left the White House peacefully exactly as sane people had assumed.



And no, a riot is not a coup, and a Daniel Boone cosplayer in a buffalo hat was not moments away from seizing the nuclear codes.



These people were all ginned up by the left, ready to go, in a coordinated action fed by years of Russian collusion investigations, sham impeachment trials, and endless talking heads likening Trump to Hitler.

Podhorzer credits the activists for their restraint. "They had spent so much time getting ready to hit the streets on Wednesday. But they did it," he says.

They had spent so much time getting ready to hit the streets.



Sounds kind of organized, doesn't it?



Thank you violent leftists for not engaging in an orgy of mayhem and destruction! We know that was hard for you.

"Wednesday through Friday, there was not a single Antifa vs. Proud Boys incident like everyone was expecting. And when that didn't materialize, I don't think the Trump campaign had a backup plan."

In other words, the left's plan if they lost the election was to flood the streets with violent protests, while Trump's master plan was to... counter that?



What?



And Marjorie Taylor Greene is the crazy one.

THE FIVE STEPS TO VICTORY

In Podhorzer's presentations, winning the vote was only the first step to winning the election. After that came winning the count, winning the certification, winning the Electoral College and winning the transition–steps that are normally formalities but that he knew Trump would see as opportunities for disruption. Nowhere would that be more evident than in Michigan, where Trump's pressure on local Republicans came perilously close to working–and where liberal and conservative pro-democracy forces joined to counter it.

The last step, ensuring certification.

It was a perilous moment. If Chatfield and Shirkey agreed to do Trump's bidding, Republicans in other states might be similarly bullied.

The democracy defenders launched a full-court press.

"tHe DeMOrcaCy DEfeNdeRS."



That there might be honest disagreement as to who was defending democracy never occurs to them. They are right and you are wrong.

Protect Democracy's local contacts researched the lawmakers' personal and political motives. Issue One ran television ads in Lansing. The Chamber's Bradley kept close tabs on the process. Wamp, the former Republican Congressman, called his former colleague Mike Rogers, who wrote an op-ed for the Detroit newspapers urging officials to honor the will of the voters. Three former Michigan governors–Republicans John Engler and Rick Snyder and Democrat Jennifer Granholm–jointly called for Michigan's electoral votes to be cast free of pressure from the White House. Engler, a former head of the Business Roundtable, made phone calls to influential donors and fellow GOP elder statesmen who could press the lawmakers privately.

The status quo has been good to these people, it must be protected.

"Of course he's going to try to offer them something," Bassin recalls thinking. "Head of the Space Force! Ambassador to wherever! We can't compete with that by offering carrots. We need a stick."

That stick was intimidation.

If Trump were to offer something in exchange for a personal favor, that would likely constitute bribery, Bassin reasoned. He phoned Richard Primus, a law professor at the University of Michigan, to see if Primus agreed and would make the argument publicly. Primus said he thought the meeting itself was inappropriate, and got to work on an op-ed for Politico warning that the state attorney general–a Democrat–would have no choice but to investigate. When the piece posted on Nov. 19, the attorney general's communications director tweeted it. Protect Democracy soon got word that the lawmakers planned to bring lawyers to the meeting with Trump the next day.

Bribery, of course, and an investigation. Why not?



Then it got chilling.

Reyes' activists scanned flight schedules and flocked to the airports on both ends of Shirkey's journey to D.C., to underscore that the lawmakers were being scrutinized. After the meeting, the pair announced they'd pressed the President to deliver COVID relief for their constituents and informed him they saw no role in the election process. Then they went for a drink at the Trump hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue. A street artist projected their images onto the outside of the building along with the words THE WORLD IS WATCHING.

We can all have a spirited debate over the efficacy of the Michigan vote. I tend to be skeptical that it was "stolen," but that's just an opinion. There are others. The point is, it's impossible to know if the officials made their decisions based on the merits, or their personal beliefs, because that is impossible when simple self-preservation is at stake in the face of the entire Michigan establishment (and beyond) threatening them.

"It's astounding how close we came, how fragile all this really is," says Timmer, the former Michigan GOP chair.

I wonder, how fragile what is?



Their grip on power? A status quo that keeps them fat and happy while vast swaths of America wither away amid joblessness, opioid addiction, and the sense of powerlessness to do anything about it because of these very people?



Regardless of how the election turned out, it was going to end, and a president was going to take the oath of office. I was always confident of that. The system would work, creaky as it is.



These people weren't defending democracy. They were defending their own interests.



You don't defend democracy by snuffing out voices and opinions that threaten your grip on power. You don't defend democracy by intimidating officials who might make a decision you don't like. You don't defend democracy by getting together with every special-interest group for which the system is working, in a coordinated effort to silence your opposition.



Perhaps the greatest insult here is that they want you to know what they did. They are proud of it.



Worse that than that, they sincerely believe it. They are so insulated from opposing views that they have no idea the amount of contempt with which half the country holds them.



On the plus side, we know exactly what they think

From the Former USAs most trusted news source

Time Magazine says the quiet parts out loud: There really was a vast conspiracy of powerful elites working behind the scenes to "change laws" and "control the flow of information" in order to defeat Trump.

Forget the hat, you're going to need a tin foil bodysuit for this one.

notthebee.com

Democwaxy has been saved comrades
Now its time to weaponize the military against the civilian population for everyone's safety.....derp

What fuckin planet am I on ....
Ahhh this ain't gonna end well

That's quite the cherry picking session you went on--without actually linking the actual article. When you destroy the context in which things are said..you deceptively change the actual meaning..but you know that, right?

Here, lemme help you out:

The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election

For more than a year, a loosely organized coalition of operatives scrambled to shore up America’s institutions

time.com

 

[Deplorable Yankee]

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.

Don't you hate it when your paranoid fever dreams fall short of reality?



It is so embarrassing.



The article goes through the process one by one.

THE ARCHITECT
Sometime in the fall of 2019, Mike Podhorzer became convinced the election was headed for disaster–and determined to protect it.

The disaster he feared was that Trump could win.



Podhorzer is senior adviser to the president of the AFL-CIO, and his purported concern was that Trump was sowing doubt about the integrity of mail-in ballots. He wanted to "protect" the election, but what he really wanted to protect was his own power and that of the organization he worked for.

The Fight Back Table,...

Note: Had a conservative written that, the article would already have been flagged for promoting violence.

...a coalition of "resistance" organizations, had begun scenario-planning around the potential for a contested election, gathering liberal activists at the local and national level into what they called the Democracy Defense Coalition.

The coalition grew to include a who's-who of progressive politics from Planned Parenthood to MoveOn to Greenpeace and so on that mobilized a get-out-the-vote campaign targeting Democratic constituencies.



That is all fine and legal and expected, but Ball doesn't frame this part of the program as a mundane partisan project, that doesn't get the clicks. No, Trump was a dictator and might need to be removed from office forcibly.



There was a higher purpose here.

What he wanted to know was not how American democracy was dying but how it might be kept alive.

How do you keep democracy alive?



By snuffing out voices you disfavor.

THE DISINFORMATION DEFENSE
Bad actors spreading false information is nothing new... Laura Quinn, a veteran progressive operative who co-founded Catalist, began studying this problem a few years ago.

"Disinformation," otherwise known as, "things we don't agree with."

The most important takeaway from Quinn's research, however, was that engaging with toxic content only made it worse. "When you get attacked, the instinct is to push back, call it out, say, ‘This isn't true,'" Quinn says. "But the more engagement something gets, the more the platforms boost it. The algorithm reads that as, ‘Oh, this is popular; people want more of it.'"

Ponder this for a moment, because in this venue, a Time Magazine article, their readers are going to skim right through that and nod approvingly without giving it a second thought. But this is what she is saying:



Engaging in the free exchange of ideas makes it worse.



Makes what worse?



Her and her constituency's grip on power.

The solution, she concluded, was to pressure platforms to enforce their rules, both by removing content or accounts that spread disinformation and by more aggressively policing it in the first place. "The platforms have policies against certain types of malign behavior, but they haven't been enforcing them," she says.

I agree there is a lot of nonsense out there, but I don't for a moment hold myself up as some kind of grand arbiter of what is and is not nonsense nor do I think anyone should. One day its Jewish Space Lasers, the next it's "minimum wage hikes create unemployment" or we're in a "Climate Crisis."



Remember this?

"If there be time to expose through discussion, the falsehoods and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence." -- Justice Louis D. Brandeis established it in his classic concurring opinion in Whitney v. California (1927)

Yeah, we're not doing that anymore.

In November 2019, Mark Zuckerberg invited nine civil rights leaders to dinner at his home, where they warned him about the danger of the election-related falsehoods that were already spreading unchecked. "It took pushing, urging, conversations, brainstorming, all of that to get to a place where we ended up with more rigorous rules and enforcement," says Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, who attended the dinner and also met with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and others. (Gupta has been nominated for Associate Attorney General by President Biden.) "It was a struggle, but we got to the point where they understood the problem. Was it enough? Probably not. Was it later than we wanted? Yes. But it was really important, given the level of official disinformation, that they had those rules in place and were tagging things and taking them down."

"Disinformation," again.



Like the Hunter Biden story, uncontested, documented, and corroborated.



That kind of "disinformation."

SPREADING THE WORD
It was crucial for voters to understand that despite what Trump was saying, mail-in votes weren't susceptible to fraud and that it would be normal if some states weren't finished counting votes on election night.

I imagine that was crucial for voters to "understand," as in accept without question or incredulity.

Dick Gephardt, the Democratic former House leader turned high-powered lobbyist, spearheaded one coalition. "We wanted to get a really bipartisan group of former elected officials, Cabinet secretaries, military leaders and so on,

Because of Covid they couldn't meet in person and light cigars with $100 bills which was probably a bummer.

SHOWING UP, STANDING DOWN
Election night began with many Democrats despairing. Trump was running ahead of pre-election polling, winning Florida, Ohio and Texas easily and keeping Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania too close to call. But Podhorzer was unperturbed when I spoke to him that night: the returns were exactly in line with his modeling.

While he was talking,Fox News surprised everyone by calling Arizona for Biden. The public-awareness campaign had worked: TV anchors were bending over backward to counsel caution and frame the vote count accurately.The question then became what to do next.

Yes it did, but was it a "public-awareness campaign" when you work in concert with media outlets to suppress people with inconvenient opinions?



I am less agitated than many regarding the degree of fraud in this election, but I am very agitated regarding free speech and censorship which is where I think the election was indisputably manipulated, and it was right there out in the open.



You can frame the narrative all you want, but if you do it by force, you are no longer working within the confines of a democracy.



And you know those concerns about "mostly peaceful protests" occurring nationwide had Trump won, the potential participants in which had already been inflamed by anti-Trump forces framing the whole thing as a "coup?"



That was ready to be launched with the precision and central control of the D-Day invasion.

The conversation that followed was a difficult one, led by the activists charged with the protest strategy. "We wanted to be mindful of when was the right time to call for moving masses of people into the street," Peoples says. As much as they were eager to mount a show of strength, mobilizing immediately could backfire and put people at risk.

So, they were concerned about "mostly peaceful protests."

Protests that devolved into violent clashes would give Trump a pretext to send in federal agents or troops as he had over the summer.

Which we have right now, occupying the Capital under Biden. But that was not done under a "pretext" mind you, that's just good old solid leadering.

And rather than elevate Trump's complaints by continuing to fight him, the alliance wanted to send the message that the people had spoken.

So the word went out: stand down.

The word went out to the foot soldiers of the left: Stand down.

Protect the Results announced that it would "not be activating the entire national mobilization network today, but remains ready to activate if necessary." On Twitter, outraged progressives wondered what was going on. Why wasn't anyone trying to stop Trump's coup? Where were all the protests?

Why did they think there was going to be a coup? Who told them that? Was that disinformation too? Trump left the White House peacefully exactly as sane people had assumed.



And no, a riot is not a coup, and a Daniel Boone cosplayer in a buffalo hat was not moments away from seizing the nuclear codes.



These people were all ginned up by the left, ready to go, in a coordinated action fed by years of Russian collusion investigations, sham impeachment trials, and endless talking heads likening Trump to Hitler.

Podhorzer credits the activists for their restraint. "They had spent so much time getting ready to hit the streets on Wednesday. But they did it," he says.

They had spent so much time getting ready to hit the streets.



Sounds kind of organized, doesn't it?



Thank you violent leftists for not engaging in an orgy of mayhem and destruction! We know that was hard for you.

"Wednesday through Friday, there was not a single Antifa vs. Proud Boys incident like everyone was expecting. And when that didn't materialize, I don't think the Trump campaign had a backup plan."

In other words, the left's plan if they lost the election was to flood the streets with violent protests, while Trump's master plan was to... counter that?



What?



And Marjorie Taylor Greene is the crazy one.

THE FIVE STEPS TO VICTORY

In Podhorzer's presentations, winning the vote was only the first step to winning the election. After that came winning the count, winning the certification, winning the Electoral College and winning the transition–steps that are normally formalities but that he knew Trump would see as opportunities for disruption. Nowhere would that be more evident than in Michigan, where Trump's pressure on local Republicans came perilously close to working–and where liberal and conservative pro-democracy forces joined to counter it.

The last step, ensuring certification.

It was a perilous moment. If Chatfield and Shirkey agreed to do Trump's bidding, Republicans in other states might be similarly bullied.

The democracy defenders launched a full-court press.

"tHe DeMOrcaCy DEfeNdeRS."



That there might be honest disagreement as to who was defending democracy never occurs to them. They are right and you are wrong.

Protect Democracy's local contacts researched the lawmakers' personal and political motives. Issue One ran television ads in Lansing. The Chamber's Bradley kept close tabs on the process. Wamp, the former Republican Congressman, called his former colleague Mike Rogers, who wrote an op-ed for the Detroit newspapers urging officials to honor the will of the voters. Three former Michigan governors–Republicans John Engler and Rick Snyder and Democrat Jennifer Granholm–jointly called for Michigan's electoral votes to be cast free of pressure from the White House. Engler, a former head of the Business Roundtable, made phone calls to influential donors and fellow GOP elder statesmen who could press the lawmakers privately.

The status quo has been good to these people, it must be protected.

"Of course he's going to try to offer them something," Bassin recalls thinking. "Head of the Space Force! Ambassador to wherever! We can't compete with that by offering carrots. We need a stick."

That stick was intimidation.

If Trump were to offer something in exchange for a personal favor, that would likely constitute bribery, Bassin reasoned. He phoned Richard Primus, a law professor at the University of Michigan, to see if Primus agreed and would make the argument publicly. Primus said he thought the meeting itself was inappropriate, and got to work on an op-ed for Politico warning that the state attorney general–a Democrat–would have no choice but to investigate. When the piece posted on Nov. 19, the attorney general's communications director tweeted it. Protect Democracy soon got word that the lawmakers planned to bring lawyers to the meeting with Trump the next day.

Bribery, of course, and an investigation. Why not?



Then it got chilling.

Reyes' activists scanned flight schedules and flocked to the airports on both ends of Shirkey's journey to D.C., to underscore that the lawmakers were being scrutinized. After the meeting, the pair announced they'd pressed the President to deliver COVID relief for their constituents and informed him they saw no role in the election process. Then they went for a drink at the Trump hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue. A street artist projected their images onto the outside of the building along with the words THE WORLD IS WATCHING.

We can all have a spirited debate over the efficacy of the Michigan vote. I tend to be skeptical that it was "stolen," but that's just an opinion. There are others. The point is, it's impossible to know if the officials made their decisions based on the merits, or their personal beliefs, because that is impossible when simple self-preservation is at stake in the face of the entire Michigan establishment (and beyond) threatening them.

"It's astounding how close we came, how fragile all this really is," says Timmer, the former Michigan GOP chair.

I wonder, how fragile what is?



Their grip on power? A status quo that keeps them fat and happy while vast swaths of America wither away amid joblessness, opioid addiction, and the sense of powerlessness to do anything about it because of these very people?



Regardless of how the election turned out, it was going to end, and a president was going to take the oath of office. I was always confident of that. The system would work, creaky as it is.



These people weren't defending democracy. They were defending their own interests.



You don't defend democracy by snuffing out voices and opinions that threaten your grip on power. You don't defend democracy by intimidating officials who might make a decision you don't like. You don't defend democracy by getting together with every special-interest group for which the system is working, in a coordinated effort to silence your opposition.



Perhaps the greatest insult here is that they want you to know what they did. They are proud of it.



Worse that than that, they sincerely believe it. They are so insulated from opposing views that they have no idea the amount of contempt with which half the country holds them.



On the plus side, we know exactly what they think

From the Former USAs most trusted news source

Time Magazine says the quiet parts out loud: There really was a vast conspiracy of powerful elites working behind the scenes to "change laws" and "control the flow of information" in order to defeat Trump.

Forget the hat, you're going to need a tin foil bodysuit for this one.

notthebee.com

Democwaxy has been saved comrades
Now its time to weaponize the military against the civilian population for everyone's safety.....derp

What fuckin planet am I on ....
Ahhh this ain't gonna end well

That's quite the cherry picking session you went on--without actually linking the actual article. When you destroy the context in which things are said..you deceptively change the actual meaning..but you know that, right?

Here, lemme help you out:

The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election

For more than a year, a loosely organized coalition of operatives scrambled to shore up America’s institutions

time.com

Derp

pffft t

I posted that time link to USMB the night before i posted this one...which is America's most trusted news sources take on the rigging part of the election....not the stolen just the riggin part....whats your point


More forbidden takes from unapproved sources

Time Publishes an Astonishing Story About a 'Cabal' and 'Shadow Campaign' That Helped Biden Win

Ace of Spades HQ


https://www.deepcapture.com/2021/01/november-3-december-23-all-the-presidents-teams/

How DJT Lost the White House, Chapter 2: Was there Foreign Interference in this Election? You Make the Call. – Deep Capture

How DJT Lost the White House, Chapter 3: Crashing the White House (December 18-22) – Deep Capture

https://coldfury.com/2021/02/05/a-peek-behind-the-curtain/

 

[Deplorable Yankee]

More wrong think on the most honest and fortified election in human history

As you all know by now, Time magazine recently published an article entitled “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election”, which basically owns up to all the things that “conspiracy theorists” said the Left did to swing the presidential election to Joe Biden.

Yes, it stops short of acknowledging all those hastily manufactured mail-in ballots that were trucked in at the last moment and run through counting machines multiple times. But it describes everything else we deplorables have been saying about what happened — the media manipulation, the alliance between the hard Left and major corporations, etc.

The Mad Dog Election | Gates of Vienna

gatesofvienna.net

 

[Deplorable Yankee]

Feb082021
Precedent for Last Year’s Election Cabal
Patriots gasped in horror when Time gloated over the left-wing cabal, headed by Mike Podhorzer of the AFL-CIO, that effectively rigged the 2020 election. But union types organizing elitist conspiracies to thwart the will of voters is not entirely new. This appeared in RedState in November 2016:

The Democracy Alliance (aka The DA) is a left-wing organization that was founded in 2005 and considers itself “the largest network of donors dedicated to building the progressive movement in the United States.”

The group is filled with about 100 multi-millionaires and billionaires who are required to pony up at least $200,000 each year to participate in the group, according to the Daily Caller.

Although it was originally co-chaired by then-SEIU Executive Vice President Anna Burger, SEIU’s current president Mary Kay Henry now serves as the group’s Vice Chair.

After Hillary Clinton’s defeat, the DA met at the pricey Mandarin Hotel in DC to plot a response.

While the three-day conference began Sunday night and is closed to the press, Politico obtained a copy of the agenda …

Along with the SEIU’s Mary Kay Henry and the AFL-CIO’s Karen Nussbaum presenting at the conference, according to the agenda, sessions are being hosted by the SEIU, AFSCME, UFCW and CWA unions, as well as numerous other left-wing organizations.

The good news is that this country is not run by Joe Biden, or by the condescending propagandists who present us with the “news.” The bad news is, it is run by oligarchs who have to rule from the shadows because they could not withstand public scrutiny without inspiring a rebellion.

Democratic elections are degenerating into theater. The purpose is to stage the illusion that we consent to what is being done to us. Elections are counterproductive if our rulers cannot control who wins. After 2016, they resolved not to tolerate any more backtalk from voters.

Many have wondered why the liberal elitists running Time admitted to the rigging of the 2020 election. As good a theory as any is that they were inspired by the recent Senate runoff elections in Georgia, which allowed them to take full control of the federal government. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, both terrible candidates, likely would not have won if not for conservatives staying home to protest election fraud.

This is what leftists want. The fewer patriots vote, the less interference is required. Short of civil war, there is nothing we can do but remain engaged, no matter how overpowering the smell of corruption.
On a tip from Christine S.

 

[BULLDOG]

Feb082021
Precedent for Last Year’s Election Cabal
Patriots gasped in horror when Time gloated over the left-wing cabal, headed by Mike Podhorzer of the AFL-CIO, that effectively rigged the 2020 election. But union types organizing elitist conspiracies to thwart the will of voters is not entirely new. This appeared in RedState in November 2016:

The Democracy Alliance (aka The DA) is a left-wing organization that was founded in 2005 and considers itself “the largest network of donors dedicated to building the progressive movement in the United States.”

The group is filled with about 100 multi-millionaires and billionaires who are required to pony up at least $200,000 each year to participate in the group, according to the Daily Caller.

Although it was originally co-chaired by then-SEIU Executive Vice President Anna Burger, SEIU’s current president Mary Kay Henry now serves as the group’s Vice Chair.

After Hillary Clinton’s defeat, the DA met at the pricey Mandarin Hotel in DC to plot a response.

While the three-day conference began Sunday night and is closed to the press, Politico obtained a copy of the agenda …

Along with the SEIU’s Mary Kay Henry and the AFL-CIO’s Karen Nussbaum presenting at the conference, according to the agenda, sessions are being hosted by the SEIU, AFSCME, UFCW and CWA unions, as well as numerous other left-wing organizations.

The good news is that this country is not run by Joe Biden, or by the condescending propagandists who present us with the “news.” The bad news is, it is run by oligarchs who have to rule from the shadows because they could not withstand public scrutiny without inspiring a rebellion.

Democratic elections are degenerating into theater. The purpose is to stage the illusion that we consent to what is being done to us. Elections are counterproductive if our rulers cannot control who wins. After 2016, they resolved not to tolerate any more backtalk from voters.

Many have wondered why the liberal elitists running Time admitted to the rigging of the 2020 election. As good a theory as any is that they were inspired by the recent Senate runoff elections in Georgia, which allowed them to take full control of the federal government. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, both terrible candidates, likely would not have won if not for conservatives staying home to protest election fraud.

This is what leftists want. The fewer patriots vote, the less interference is required. Short of civil war, there is nothing we can do but remain engaged, no matter how overpowering the smell of corruption.
On a tip from Christine S.

It was really sneaky of them to get trump to rant about how terrible the election, especially in Georgia was and convince his supporters to not vote. I'm still not clear on how they got him to do that. He would have had to have been a real idiot to do that on his own --- oh wait.

 

[Deplorable Yankee]

Feb082021
Precedent for Last Year’s Election Cabal
Patriots gasped in horror when Time gloated over the left-wing cabal, headed by Mike Podhorzer of the AFL-CIO, that effectively rigged the 2020 election. But union types organizing elitist conspiracies to thwart the will of voters is not entirely new. This appeared in RedState in November 2016:

The Democracy Alliance (aka The DA) is a left-wing organization that was founded in 2005 and considers itself “the largest network of donors dedicated to building the progressive movement in the United States.”

The group is filled with about 100 multi-millionaires and billionaires who are required to pony up at least $200,000 each year to participate in the group, according to the Daily Caller.

Although it was originally co-chaired by then-SEIU Executive Vice President Anna Burger, SEIU’s current president Mary Kay Henry now serves as the group’s Vice Chair.

After Hillary Clinton’s defeat, the DA met at the pricey Mandarin Hotel in DC to plot a response.

While the three-day conference began Sunday night and is closed to the press, Politico obtained a copy of the agenda …

Along with the SEIU’s Mary Kay Henry and the AFL-CIO’s Karen Nussbaum presenting at the conference, according to the agenda, sessions are being hosted by the SEIU, AFSCME, UFCW and CWA unions, as well as numerous other left-wing organizations.

The good news is that this country is not run by Joe Biden, or by the condescending propagandists who present us with the “news.” The bad news is, it is run by oligarchs who have to rule from the shadows because they could not withstand public scrutiny without inspiring a rebellion.

Democratic elections are degenerating into theater. The purpose is to stage the illusion that we consent to what is being done to us. Elections are counterproductive if our rulers cannot control who wins. After 2016, they resolved not to tolerate any more backtalk from voters.

Many have wondered why the liberal elitists running Time admitted to the rigging of the 2020 election. As good a theory as any is that they were inspired by the recent Senate runoff elections in Georgia, which allowed them to take full control of the federal government. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, both terrible candidates, likely would not have won if not for conservatives staying home to protest election fraud.

This is what leftists want. The fewer patriots vote, the less interference is required. Short of civil war, there is nothing we can do but remain engaged, no matter how overpowering the smell of corruption.
On a tip from Christine S.

It was really sneaky of them to get trump to rant about how terrible the election, especially in Georgia was and convince his supporters to not vote. I'm still not clear on how they got him to do that. He would have had to have been a real idiot to do that on his own --- oh wait.

I'm only voting for the dumbest retarded leftist possible .....if I ever vote again .....im just gonna hang an watch them starve you to death

 

[Turtlesoup]

You sure used a lot of words to say lots of people saw how rump was harming the nation and formed strategys to defeat him in the election. You seem to think it was somehow unfair that so many people just didn't fall for the rump lies like you did. If he didn't want so many people to oppose his bullshit, he shouldn't have done so much bullshit.

The nation was doing better under trump than under obama before him and Biden now already. Your delusion of this not being so is crazy nonsense. Get a grip.

 

[dblack]

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.

Don't you hate it when your paranoid fever dreams fall short of reality?



It is so embarrassing.



The article goes through the process one by one.

THE ARCHITECT
Sometime in the fall of 2019, Mike Podhorzer became convinced the election was headed for disaster–and determined to protect it.

The disaster he feared was that Trump could win.



Podhorzer is senior adviser to the president of the AFL-CIO, and his purported concern was that Trump was sowing doubt about the integrity of mail-in ballots. He wanted to "protect" the election, but what he really wanted to protect was his own power and that of the organization he worked for.

The Fight Back Table,...

Note: Had a conservative written that, the article would already have been flagged for promoting violence.

...a coalition of "resistance" organizations, had begun scenario-planning around the potential for a contested election, gathering liberal activists at the local and national level into what they called the Democracy Defense Coalition.

The coalition grew to include a who's-who of progressive politics from Planned Parenthood to MoveOn to Greenpeace and so on that mobilized a get-out-the-vote campaign targeting Democratic constituencies.



That is all fine and legal and expected, but Ball doesn't frame this part of the program as a mundane partisan project, that doesn't get the clicks. No, Trump was a dictator and might need to be removed from office forcibly.



There was a higher purpose here.

What he wanted to know was not how American democracy was dying but how it might be kept alive.

How do you keep democracy alive?



By snuffing out voices you disfavor.

THE DISINFORMATION DEFENSE
Bad actors spreading false information is nothing new... Laura Quinn, a veteran progressive operative who co-founded Catalist, began studying this problem a few years ago.

"Disinformation," otherwise known as, "things we don't agree with."

The most important takeaway from Quinn's research, however, was that engaging with toxic content only made it worse. "When you get attacked, the instinct is to push back, call it out, say, ‘This isn't true,'" Quinn says. "But the more engagement something gets, the more the platforms boost it. The algorithm reads that as, ‘Oh, this is popular; people want more of it.'"

Ponder this for a moment, because in this venue, a Time Magazine article, their readers are going to skim right through that and nod approvingly without giving it a second thought. But this is what she is saying:



Engaging in the free exchange of ideas makes it worse.



Makes what worse?



Her and her constituency's grip on power.

The solution, she concluded, was to pressure platforms to enforce their rules, both by removing content or accounts that spread disinformation and by more aggressively policing it in the first place. "The platforms have policies against certain types of malign behavior, but they haven't been enforcing them," she says.

I agree there is a lot of nonsense out there, but I don't for a moment hold myself up as some kind of grand arbiter of what is and is not nonsense nor do I think anyone should. One day its Jewish Space Lasers, the next it's "minimum wage hikes create unemployment" or we're in a "Climate Crisis."



Remember this?

"If there be time to expose through discussion, the falsehoods and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence." -- Justice Louis D. Brandeis established it in his classic concurring opinion in Whitney v. California (1927)

Yeah, we're not doing that anymore.

In November 2019, Mark Zuckerberg invited nine civil rights leaders to dinner at his home, where they warned him about the danger of the election-related falsehoods that were already spreading unchecked. "It took pushing, urging, conversations, brainstorming, all of that to get to a place where we ended up with more rigorous rules and enforcement," says Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, who attended the dinner and also met with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and others. (Gupta has been nominated for Associate Attorney General by President Biden.) "It was a struggle, but we got to the point where they understood the problem. Was it enough? Probably not. Was it later than we wanted? Yes. But it was really important, given the level of official disinformation, that they had those rules in place and were tagging things and taking them down."

"Disinformation," again.



Like the Hunter Biden story, uncontested, documented, and corroborated.



That kind of "disinformation."

SPREADING THE WORD
It was crucial for voters to understand that despite what Trump was saying, mail-in votes weren't susceptible to fraud and that it would be normal if some states weren't finished counting votes on election night.

I imagine that was crucial for voters to "understand," as in accept without question or incredulity.

Dick Gephardt, the Democratic former House leader turned high-powered lobbyist, spearheaded one coalition. "We wanted to get a really bipartisan group of former elected officials, Cabinet secretaries, military leaders and so on,

Because of Covid they couldn't meet in person and light cigars with $100 bills which was probably a bummer.

SHOWING UP, STANDING DOWN
Election night began with many Democrats despairing. Trump was running ahead of pre-election polling, winning Florida, Ohio and Texas easily and keeping Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania too close to call. But Podhorzer was unperturbed when I spoke to him that night: the returns were exactly in line with his modeling.

While he was talking,Fox News surprised everyone by calling Arizona for Biden. The public-awareness campaign had worked: TV anchors were bending over backward to counsel caution and frame the vote count accurately.The question then became what to do next.

Yes it did, but was it a "public-awareness campaign" when you work in concert with media outlets to suppress people with inconvenient opinions?



I am less agitated than many regarding the degree of fraud in this election, but I am very agitated regarding free speech and censorship which is where I think the election was indisputably manipulated, and it was right there out in the open.



You can frame the narrative all you want, but if you do it by force, you are no longer working within the confines of a democracy.



And you know those concerns about "mostly peaceful protests" occurring nationwide had Trump won, the potential participants in which had already been inflamed by anti-Trump forces framing the whole thing as a "coup?"



That was ready to be launched with the precision and central control of the D-Day invasion.

The conversation that followed was a difficult one, led by the activists charged with the protest strategy. "We wanted to be mindful of when was the right time to call for moving masses of people into the street," Peoples says. As much as they were eager to mount a show of strength, mobilizing immediately could backfire and put people at risk.

So, they were concerned about "mostly peaceful protests."

Protests that devolved into violent clashes would give Trump a pretext to send in federal agents or troops as he had over the summer.

Which we have right now, occupying the Capital under Biden. But that was not done under a "pretext" mind you, that's just good old solid leadering.

And rather than elevate Trump's complaints by continuing to fight him, the alliance wanted to send the message that the people had spoken.

So the word went out: stand down.

The word went out to the foot soldiers of the left: Stand down.

Protect the Results announced that it would "not be activating the entire national mobilization network today, but remains ready to activate if necessary." On Twitter, outraged progressives wondered what was going on. Why wasn't anyone trying to stop Trump's coup? Where were all the protests?

Why did they think there was going to be a coup? Who told them that? Was that disinformation too? Trump left the White House peacefully exactly as sane people had assumed.



And no, a riot is not a coup, and a Daniel Boone cosplayer in a buffalo hat was not moments away from seizing the nuclear codes.



These people were all ginned up by the left, ready to go, in a coordinated action fed by years of Russian collusion investigations, sham impeachment trials, and endless talking heads likening Trump to Hitler.

Podhorzer credits the activists for their restraint. "They had spent so much time getting ready to hit the streets on Wednesday. But they did it," he says.

They had spent so much time getting ready to hit the streets.



Sounds kind of organized, doesn't it?



Thank you violent leftists for not engaging in an orgy of mayhem and destruction! We know that was hard for you.

"Wednesday through Friday, there was not a single Antifa vs. Proud Boys incident like everyone was expecting. And when that didn't materialize, I don't think the Trump campaign had a backup plan."

In other words, the left's plan if they lost the election was to flood the streets with violent protests, while Trump's master plan was to... counter that?



What?



And Marjorie Taylor Greene is the crazy one.

THE FIVE STEPS TO VICTORY

In Podhorzer's presentations, winning the vote was only the first step to winning the election. After that came winning the count, winning the certification, winning the Electoral College and winning the transition–steps that are normally formalities but that he knew Trump would see as opportunities for disruption. Nowhere would that be more evident than in Michigan, where Trump's pressure on local Republicans came perilously close to working–and where liberal and conservative pro-democracy forces joined to counter it.

The last step, ensuring certification.

It was a perilous moment. If Chatfield and Shirkey agreed to do Trump's bidding, Republicans in other states might be similarly bullied.

The democracy defenders launched a full-court press.

"tHe DeMOrcaCy DEfeNdeRS."



That there might be honest disagreement as to who was defending democracy never occurs to them. They are right and you are wrong.

Protect Democracy's local contacts researched the lawmakers' personal and political motives. Issue One ran television ads in Lansing. The Chamber's Bradley kept close tabs on the process. Wamp, the former Republican Congressman, called his former colleague Mike Rogers, who wrote an op-ed for the Detroit newspapers urging officials to honor the will of the voters. Three former Michigan governors–Republicans John Engler and Rick Snyder and Democrat Jennifer Granholm–jointly called for Michigan's electoral votes to be cast free of pressure from the White House. Engler, a former head of the Business Roundtable, made phone calls to influential donors and fellow GOP elder statesmen who could press the lawmakers privately.

The status quo has been good to these people, it must be protected.

"Of course he's going to try to offer them something," Bassin recalls thinking. "Head of the Space Force! Ambassador to wherever! We can't compete with that by offering carrots. We need a stick."

That stick was intimidation.

If Trump were to offer something in exchange for a personal favor, that would likely constitute bribery, Bassin reasoned. He phoned Richard Primus, a law professor at the University of Michigan, to see if Primus agreed and would make the argument publicly. Primus said he thought the meeting itself was inappropriate, and got to work on an op-ed for Politico warning that the state attorney general–a Democrat–would have no choice but to investigate. When the piece posted on Nov. 19, the attorney general's communications director tweeted it. Protect Democracy soon got word that the lawmakers planned to bring lawyers to the meeting with Trump the next day.

Bribery, of course, and an investigation. Why not?



Then it got chilling.

Reyes' activists scanned flight schedules and flocked to the airports on both ends of Shirkey's journey to D.C., to underscore that the lawmakers were being scrutinized. After the meeting, the pair announced they'd pressed the President to deliver COVID relief for their constituents and informed him they saw no role in the election process. Then they went for a drink at the Trump hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue. A street artist projected their images onto the outside of the building along with the words THE WORLD IS WATCHING.

We can all have a spirited debate over the efficacy of the Michigan vote. I tend to be skeptical that it was "stolen," but that's just an opinion. There are others. The point is, it's impossible to know if the officials made their decisions based on the merits, or their personal beliefs, because that is impossible when simple self-preservation is at stake in the face of the entire Michigan establishment (and beyond) threatening them.

"It's astounding how close we came, how fragile all this really is," says Timmer, the former Michigan GOP chair.

I wonder, how fragile what is?



Their grip on power? A status quo that keeps them fat and happy while vast swaths of America wither away amid joblessness, opioid addiction, and the sense of powerlessness to do anything about it because of these very people?



Regardless of how the election turned out, it was going to end, and a president was going to take the oath of office. I was always confident of that. The system would work, creaky as it is.



These people weren't defending democracy. They were defending their own interests.



You don't defend democracy by snuffing out voices and opinions that threaten your grip on power. You don't defend democracy by intimidating officials who might make a decision you don't like. You don't defend democracy by getting together with every special-interest group for which the system is working, in a coordinated effort to silence your opposition.



Perhaps the greatest insult here is that they want you to know what they did. They are proud of it.



Worse that than that, they sincerely believe it. They are so insulated from opposing views that they have no idea the amount of contempt with which half the country holds them.


On the plus side, we know exactly what they think

From the Former USAs most trusted news source

Time Magazine says the quiet parts out loud: There really was a vast conspiracy of powerful elites working behind the scenes to "change laws" and "control the flow of information" in order to defeat Trump.

Forget the hat, you're going to need a tin foil bodysuit for this one.

notthebee.com

Democwaxy has been saved comrades
Now its time to weaponize the military against the civilian population for everyone's safety.....derp

What fuckin planet am I on ....
Ahhh this ain't gonna end well

Way tl;dr

 

[BULLDOG]

Feb082021
Precedent for Last Year’s Election Cabal
Patriots gasped in horror when Time gloated over the left-wing cabal, headed by Mike Podhorzer of the AFL-CIO, that effectively rigged the 2020 election. But union types organizing elitist conspiracies to thwart the will of voters is not entirely new. This appeared in RedState in November 2016:

The Democracy Alliance (aka The DA) is a left-wing organization that was founded in 2005 and considers itself “the largest network of donors dedicated to building the progressive movement in the United States.”

The group is filled with about 100 multi-millionaires and billionaires who are required to pony up at least $200,000 each year to participate in the group, according to the Daily Caller.

Although it was originally co-chaired by then-SEIU Executive Vice President Anna Burger, SEIU’s current president Mary Kay Henry now serves as the group’s Vice Chair.

After Hillary Clinton’s defeat, the DA met at the pricey Mandarin Hotel in DC to plot a response.

While the three-day conference began Sunday night and is closed to the press, Politico obtained a copy of the agenda …

Along with the SEIU’s Mary Kay Henry and the AFL-CIO’s Karen Nussbaum presenting at the conference, according to the agenda, sessions are being hosted by the SEIU, AFSCME, UFCW and CWA unions, as well as numerous other left-wing organizations.

The good news is that this country is not run by Joe Biden, or by the condescending propagandists who present us with the “news.” The bad news is, it is run by oligarchs who have to rule from the shadows because they could not withstand public scrutiny without inspiring a rebellion.

Democratic elections are degenerating into theater. The purpose is to stage the illusion that we consent to what is being done to us. Elections are counterproductive if our rulers cannot control who wins. After 2016, they resolved not to tolerate any more backtalk from voters.

Many have wondered why the liberal elitists running Time admitted to the rigging of the 2020 election. As good a theory as any is that they were inspired by the recent Senate runoff elections in Georgia, which allowed them to take full control of the federal government. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, both terrible candidates, likely would not have won if not for conservatives staying home to protest election fraud.

This is what leftists want. The fewer patriots vote, the less interference is required. Short of civil war, there is nothing we can do but remain engaged, no matter how overpowering the smell of corruption.
On a tip from Christine S.

It was really sneaky of them to get trump to rant about how terrible the election, especially in Georgia was and convince his supporters to not vote. I'm still not clear on how they got him to do that. He would have had to have been a real idiot to do that on his own --- oh wait.

I'm only voting for the dumbest retarded leftist possible .....if I ever vote again .....im just gonna hang an watch them starve you to death

You should be used to voting for the dumbest retard possible. Fortunately, that option usually falls on the right wing side, but welcome back to sanity anyway.

 

[Deplorable Yankee]

Feb082021
Precedent for Last Year’s Election Cabal
Patriots gasped in horror when Time gloated over the left-wing cabal, headed by Mike Podhorzer of the AFL-CIO, that effectively rigged the 2020 election. But union types organizing elitist conspiracies to thwart the will of voters is not entirely new. This appeared in RedState in November 2016:

The Democracy Alliance (aka The DA) is a left-wing organization that was founded in 2005 and considers itself “the largest network of donors dedicated to building the progressive movement in the United States.”

The group is filled with about 100 multi-millionaires and billionaires who are required to pony up at least $200,000 each year to participate in the group, according to the Daily Caller.

Although it was originally co-chaired by then-SEIU Executive Vice President Anna Burger, SEIU’s current president Mary Kay Henry now serves as the group’s Vice Chair.

After Hillary Clinton’s defeat, the DA met at the pricey Mandarin Hotel in DC to plot a response.

While the three-day conference began Sunday night and is closed to the press, Politico obtained a copy of the agenda …

Along with the SEIU’s Mary Kay Henry and the AFL-CIO’s Karen Nussbaum presenting at the conference, according to the agenda, sessions are being hosted by the SEIU, AFSCME, UFCW and CWA unions, as well as numerous other left-wing organizations.

The good news is that this country is not run by Joe Biden, or by the condescending propagandists who present us with the “news.” The bad news is, it is run by oligarchs who have to rule from the shadows because they could not withstand public scrutiny without inspiring a rebellion.

Democratic elections are degenerating into theater. The purpose is to stage the illusion that we consent to what is being done to us. Elections are counterproductive if our rulers cannot control who wins. After 2016, they resolved not to tolerate any more backtalk from voters.

Many have wondered why the liberal elitists running Time admitted to the rigging of the 2020 election. As good a theory as any is that they were inspired by the recent Senate runoff elections in Georgia, which allowed them to take full control of the federal government. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, both terrible candidates, likely would not have won if not for conservatives staying home to protest election fraud.

This is what leftists want. The fewer patriots vote, the less interference is required. Short of civil war, there is nothing we can do but remain engaged, no matter how overpowering the smell of corruption.
On a tip from Christine S.

It was really sneaky of them to get trump to rant about how terrible the election, especially in Georgia was and convince his supporters to not vote. I'm still not clear on how they got him to do that. He would have had to have been a real idiot to do that on his own --- oh wait.

I'm only voting for the dumbest retarded leftist possible .....if I ever vote again .....im just gonna hang an watch them starve you to death

You should be used to voting for the dumbest retard possible. Fortunately, that option usually falls on the right wing side, but welcome back to sanity anyway.

Ya call the uniparty sanity

Of course you do

Oy

 

[BULLDOG]

You sure used a lot of words to say lots of people saw how rump was harming the nation and formed strategys to defeat him in the election. You seem to think it was somehow unfair that so many people just didn't fall for the rump lies like you did. If he didn't want so many people to oppose his bullshit, he shouldn't have done so much bullshit.

The nation was doing better under trump than under obama before him and Biden now already. Your delusion of this not being so is crazy nonsense. Get a grip.

You sound a lot like Lou Dobbs, the most North Korean broadcaster America has ever seen.

 

[badbob85037]

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.

Don't you hate it when your paranoid fever dreams fall short of reality?



It is so embarrassing.



The article goes through the process one by one.

THE ARCHITECT
Sometime in the fall of 2019, Mike Podhorzer became convinced the election was headed for disaster–and determined to protect it.

The disaster he feared was that Trump could win.



Podhorzer is senior adviser to the president of the AFL-CIO, and his purported concern was that Trump was sowing doubt about the integrity of mail-in ballots. He wanted to "protect" the election, but what he really wanted to protect was his own power and that of the organization he worked for.

The Fight Back Table,...

Note: Had a conservative written that, the article would already have been flagged for promoting violence.

...a coalition of "resistance" organizations, had begun scenario-planning around the potential for a contested election, gathering liberal activists at the local and national level into what they called the Democracy Defense Coalition.

The coalition grew to include a who's-who of progressive politics from Planned Parenthood to MoveOn to Greenpeace and so on that mobilized a get-out-the-vote campaign targeting Democratic constituencies.



That is all fine and legal and expected, but Ball doesn't frame this part of the program as a mundane partisan project, that doesn't get the clicks. No, Trump was a dictator and might need to be removed from office forcibly.



There was a higher purpose here.

What he wanted to know was not how American democracy was dying but how it might be kept alive.

How do you keep democracy alive?



By snuffing out voices you disfavor.

THE DISINFORMATION DEFENSE
Bad actors spreading false information is nothing new... Laura Quinn, a veteran progressive operative who co-founded Catalist, began studying this problem a few years ago.

"Disinformation," otherwise known as, "things we don't agree with."

The most important takeaway from Quinn's research, however, was that engaging with toxic content only made it worse. "When you get attacked, the instinct is to push back, call it out, say, ‘This isn't true,'" Quinn says. "But the more engagement something gets, the more the platforms boost it. The algorithm reads that as, ‘Oh, this is popular; people want more of it.'"

Ponder this for a moment, because in this venue, a Time Magazine article, their readers are going to skim right through that and nod approvingly without giving it a second thought. But this is what she is saying:



Engaging in the free exchange of ideas makes it worse.



Makes what worse?



Her and her constituency's grip on power.

The solution, she concluded, was to pressure platforms to enforce their rules, both by removing content or accounts that spread disinformation and by more aggressively policing it in the first place. "The platforms have policies against certain types of malign behavior, but they haven't been enforcing them," she says.

I agree there is a lot of nonsense out there, but I don't for a moment hold myself up as some kind of grand arbiter of what is and is not nonsense nor do I think anyone should. One day its Jewish Space Lasers, the next it's "minimum wage hikes create unemployment" or we're in a "Climate Crisis."



Remember this?

"If there be time to expose through discussion, the falsehoods and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence." -- Justice Louis D. Brandeis established it in his classic concurring opinion in Whitney v. California (1927)

Yeah, we're not doing that anymore.

In November 2019, Mark Zuckerberg invited nine civil rights leaders to dinner at his home, where they warned him about the danger of the election-related falsehoods that were already spreading unchecked. "It took pushing, urging, conversations, brainstorming, all of that to get to a place where we ended up with more rigorous rules and enforcement," says Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, who attended the dinner and also met with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and others. (Gupta has been nominated for Associate Attorney General by President Biden.) "It was a struggle, but we got to the point where they understood the problem. Was it enough? Probably not. Was it later than we wanted? Yes. But it was really important, given the level of official disinformation, that they had those rules in place and were tagging things and taking them down."

"Disinformation," again.



Like the Hunter Biden story, uncontested, documented, and corroborated.



That kind of "disinformation."

SPREADING THE WORD
It was crucial for voters to understand that despite what Trump was saying, mail-in votes weren't susceptible to fraud and that it would be normal if some states weren't finished counting votes on election night.

I imagine that was crucial for voters to "understand," as in accept without question or incredulity.

Dick Gephardt, the Democratic former House leader turned high-powered lobbyist, spearheaded one coalition. "We wanted to get a really bipartisan group of former elected officials, Cabinet secretaries, military leaders and so on,

Because of Covid they couldn't meet in person and light cigars with $100 bills which was probably a bummer.

SHOWING UP, STANDING DOWN
Election night began with many Democrats despairing. Trump was running ahead of pre-election polling, winning Florida, Ohio and Texas easily and keeping Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania too close to call. But Podhorzer was unperturbed when I spoke to him that night: the returns were exactly in line with his modeling.

While he was talking,Fox News surprised everyone by calling Arizona for Biden. The public-awareness campaign had worked: TV anchors were bending over backward to counsel caution and frame the vote count accurately.The question then became what to do next.

Yes it did, but was it a "public-awareness campaign" when you work in concert with media outlets to suppress people with inconvenient opinions?



I am less agitated than many regarding the degree of fraud in this election, but I am very agitated regarding free speech and censorship which is where I think the election was indisputably manipulated, and it was right there out in the open.



You can frame the narrative all you want, but if you do it by force, you are no longer working within the confines of a democracy.



And you know those concerns about "mostly peaceful protests" occurring nationwide had Trump won, the potential participants in which had already been inflamed by anti-Trump forces framing the whole thing as a "coup?"



That was ready to be launched with the precision and central control of the D-Day invasion.

The conversation that followed was a difficult one, led by the activists charged with the protest strategy. "We wanted to be mindful of when was the right time to call for moving masses of people into the street," Peoples says. As much as they were eager to mount a show of strength, mobilizing immediately could backfire and put people at risk.

So, they were concerned about "mostly peaceful protests."

Protests that devolved into violent clashes would give Trump a pretext to send in federal agents or troops as he had over the summer.

Which we have right now, occupying the Capital under Biden. But that was not done under a "pretext" mind you, that's just good old solid leadering.

And rather than elevate Trump's complaints by continuing to fight him, the alliance wanted to send the message that the people had spoken.

So the word went out: stand down.

The word went out to the foot soldiers of the left: Stand down.

Protect the Results announced that it would "not be activating the entire national mobilization network today, but remains ready to activate if necessary." On Twitter, outraged progressives wondered what was going on. Why wasn't anyone trying to stop Trump's coup? Where were all the protests?

Why did they think there was going to be a coup? Who told them that? Was that disinformation too? Trump left the White House peacefully exactly as sane people had assumed.



And no, a riot is not a coup, and a Daniel Boone cosplayer in a buffalo hat was not moments away from seizing the nuclear codes.



These people were all ginned up by the left, ready to go, in a coordinated action fed by years of Russian collusion investigations, sham impeachment trials, and endless talking heads likening Trump to Hitler.

Podhorzer credits the activists for their restraint. "They had spent so much time getting ready to hit the streets on Wednesday. But they did it," he says.

They had spent so much time getting ready to hit the streets.



Sounds kind of organized, doesn't it?



Thank you violent leftists for not engaging in an orgy of mayhem and destruction! We know that was hard for you.

"Wednesday through Friday, there was not a single Antifa vs. Proud Boys incident like everyone was expecting. And when that didn't materialize, I don't think the Trump campaign had a backup plan."

In other words, the left's plan if they lost the election was to flood the streets with violent protests, while Trump's master plan was to... counter that?



What?



And Marjorie Taylor Greene is the crazy one.

THE FIVE STEPS TO VICTORY

In Podhorzer's presentations, winning the vote was only the first step to winning the election. After that came winning the count, winning the certification, winning the Electoral College and winning the transition–steps that are normally formalities but that he knew Trump would see as opportunities for disruption. Nowhere would that be more evident than in Michigan, where Trump's pressure on local Republicans came perilously close to working–and where liberal and conservative pro-democracy forces joined to counter it.

The last step, ensuring certification.

It was a perilous moment. If Chatfield and Shirkey agreed to do Trump's bidding, Republicans in other states might be similarly bullied.

The democracy defenders launched a full-court press.

"tHe DeMOrcaCy DEfeNdeRS."



That there might be honest disagreement as to who was defending democracy never occurs to them. They are right and you are wrong.

Protect Democracy's local contacts researched the lawmakers' personal and political motives. Issue One ran television ads in Lansing. The Chamber's Bradley kept close tabs on the process. Wamp, the former Republican Congressman, called his former colleague Mike Rogers, who wrote an op-ed for the Detroit newspapers urging officials to honor the will of the voters. Three former Michigan governors–Republicans John Engler and Rick Snyder and Democrat Jennifer Granholm–jointly called for Michigan's electoral votes to be cast free of pressure from the White House. Engler, a former head of the Business Roundtable, made phone calls to influential donors and fellow GOP elder statesmen who could press the lawmakers privately.

The status quo has been good to these people, it must be protected.

"Of course he's going to try to offer them something," Bassin recalls thinking. "Head of the Space Force! Ambassador to wherever! We can't compete with that by offering carrots. We need a stick."

That stick was intimidation.

If Trump were to offer something in exchange for a personal favor, that would likely constitute bribery, Bassin reasoned. He phoned Richard Primus, a law professor at the University of Michigan, to see if Primus agreed and would make the argument publicly. Primus said he thought the meeting itself was inappropriate, and got to work on an op-ed for Politico warning that the state attorney general–a Democrat–would have no choice but to investigate. When the piece posted on Nov. 19, the attorney general's communications director tweeted it. Protect Democracy soon got word that the lawmakers planned to bring lawyers to the meeting with Trump the next day.

Bribery, of course, and an investigation. Why not?



Then it got chilling.

Reyes' activists scanned flight schedules and flocked to the airports on both ends of Shirkey's journey to D.C., to underscore that the lawmakers were being scrutinized. After the meeting, the pair announced they'd pressed the President to deliver COVID relief for their constituents and informed him they saw no role in the election process. Then they went for a drink at the Trump hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue. A street artist projected their images onto the outside of the building along with the words THE WORLD IS WATCHING.

We can all have a spirited debate over the efficacy of the Michigan vote. I tend to be skeptical that it was "stolen," but that's just an opinion. There are others. The point is, it's impossible to know if the officials made their decisions based on the merits, or their personal beliefs, because that is impossible when simple self-preservation is at stake in the face of the entire Michigan establishment (and beyond) threatening them.

"It's astounding how close we came, how fragile all this really is," says Timmer, the former Michigan GOP chair.

I wonder, how fragile what is?



Their grip on power? A status quo that keeps them fat and happy while vast swaths of America wither away amid joblessness, opioid addiction, and the sense of powerlessness to do anything about it because of these very people?



Regardless of how the election turned out, it was going to end, and a president was going to take the oath of office. I was always confident of that. The system would work, creaky as it is.



These people weren't defending democracy. They were defending their own interests.



You don't defend democracy by snuffing out voices and opinions that threaten your grip on power. You don't defend democracy by intimidating officials who might make a decision you don't like. You don't defend democracy by getting together with every special-interest group for which the system is working, in a coordinated effort to silence your opposition.



Perhaps the greatest insult here is that they want you to know what they did. They are proud of it.



Worse that than that, they sincerely believe it. They are so insulated from opposing views that they have no idea the amount of contempt with which half the country holds them.



On the plus side, we know exactly what they think

From the Former USAs most trusted news source

Time Magazine says the quiet parts out loud: There really was a vast conspiracy of powerful elites working behind the scenes to "change laws" and "control the flow of information" in order to defeat Trump.

Forget the hat, you're going to need a tin foil bodysuit for this one.

notthebee.com

Democwaxy has been saved comrades
Now its time to weaponize the military against the civilian population for everyone's safety.....derp

What fuckin planet am I on ....
Ahhh this ain't gonna end well

ARIZONA.

 

[Moonglow]

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.

Don't you hate it when your paranoid fever dreams fall short of reality?



It is so embarrassing.



The article goes through the process one by one.

THE ARCHITECT
Sometime in the fall of 2019, Mike Podhorzer became convinced the election was headed for disaster–and determined to protect it.

The disaster he feared was that Trump could win.



Podhorzer is senior adviser to the president of the AFL-CIO, and his purported concern was that Trump was sowing doubt about the integrity of mail-in ballots. He wanted to "protect" the election, but what he really wanted to protect was his own power and that of the organization he worked for.

The Fight Back Table,...

Note: Had a conservative written that, the article would already have been flagged for promoting violence.

...a coalition of "resistance" organizations, had begun scenario-planning around the potential for a contested election, gathering liberal activists at the local and national level into what they called the Democracy Defense Coalition.

The coalition grew to include a who's-who of progressive politics from Planned Parenthood to MoveOn to Greenpeace and so on that mobilized a get-out-the-vote campaign targeting Democratic constituencies.



That is all fine and legal and expected, but Ball doesn't frame this part of the program as a mundane partisan project, that doesn't get the clicks. No, Trump was a dictator and might need to be removed from office forcibly.



There was a higher purpose here.

What he wanted to know was not how American democracy was dying but how it might be kept alive.

How do you keep democracy alive?



By snuffing out voices you disfavor.

THE DISINFORMATION DEFENSE
Bad actors spreading false information is nothing new... Laura Quinn, a veteran progressive operative who co-founded Catalist, began studying this problem a few years ago.

"Disinformation," otherwise known as, "things we don't agree with."

The most important takeaway from Quinn's research, however, was that engaging with toxic content only made it worse. "When you get attacked, the instinct is to push back, call it out, say, ‘This isn't true,'" Quinn says. "But the more engagement something gets, the more the platforms boost it. The algorithm reads that as, ‘Oh, this is popular; people want more of it.'"

Ponder this for a moment, because in this venue, a Time Magazine article, their readers are going to skim right through that and nod approvingly without giving it a second thought. But this is what she is saying:



Engaging in the free exchange of ideas makes it worse.



Makes what worse?



Her and her constituency's grip on power.

The solution, she concluded, was to pressure platforms to enforce their rules, both by removing content or accounts that spread disinformation and by more aggressively policing it in the first place. "The platforms have policies against certain types of malign behavior, but they haven't been enforcing them," she says.

I agree there is a lot of nonsense out there, but I don't for a moment hold myself up as some kind of grand arbiter of what is and is not nonsense nor do I think anyone should. One day its Jewish Space Lasers, the next it's "minimum wage hikes create unemployment" or we're in a "Climate Crisis."



Remember this?

"If there be time to expose through discussion, the falsehoods and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence." -- Justice Louis D. Brandeis established it in his classic concurring opinion in Whitney v. California (1927)

Yeah, we're not doing that anymore.

In November 2019, Mark Zuckerberg invited nine civil rights leaders to dinner at his home, where they warned him about the danger of the election-related falsehoods that were already spreading unchecked. "It took pushing, urging, conversations, brainstorming, all of that to get to a place where we ended up with more rigorous rules and enforcement," says Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, who attended the dinner and also met with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and others. (Gupta has been nominated for Associate Attorney General by President Biden.) "It was a struggle, but we got to the point where they understood the problem. Was it enough? Probably not. Was it later than we wanted? Yes. But it was really important, given the level of official disinformation, that they had those rules in place and were tagging things and taking them down."

"Disinformation," again.



Like the Hunter Biden story, uncontested, documented, and corroborated.



That kind of "disinformation."

SPREADING THE WORD
It was crucial for voters to understand that despite what Trump was saying, mail-in votes weren't susceptible to fraud and that it would be normal if some states weren't finished counting votes on election night.

I imagine that was crucial for voters to "understand," as in accept without question or incredulity.

Dick Gephardt, the Democratic former House leader turned high-powered lobbyist, spearheaded one coalition. "We wanted to get a really bipartisan group of former elected officials, Cabinet secretaries, military leaders and so on,

Because of Covid they couldn't meet in person and light cigars with $100 bills which was probably a bummer.

SHOWING UP, STANDING DOWN
Election night began with many Democrats despairing. Trump was running ahead of pre-election polling, winning Florida, Ohio and Texas easily and keeping Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania too close to call. But Podhorzer was unperturbed when I spoke to him that night: the returns were exactly in line with his modeling.

While he was talking,Fox News surprised everyone by calling Arizona for Biden. The public-awareness campaign had worked: TV anchors were bending over backward to counsel caution and frame the vote count accurately.The question then became what to do next.

Yes it did, but was it a "public-awareness campaign" when you work in concert with media outlets to suppress people with inconvenient opinions?



I am less agitated than many regarding the degree of fraud in this election, but I am very agitated regarding free speech and censorship which is where I think the election was indisputably manipulated, and it was right there out in the open.



You can frame the narrative all you want, but if you do it by force, you are no longer working within the confines of a democracy.



And you know those concerns about "mostly peaceful protests" occurring nationwide had Trump won, the potential participants in which had already been inflamed by anti-Trump forces framing the whole thing as a "coup?"



That was ready to be launched with the precision and central control of the D-Day invasion.

The conversation that followed was a difficult one, led by the activists charged with the protest strategy. "We wanted to be mindful of when was the right time to call for moving masses of people into the street," Peoples says. As much as they were eager to mount a show of strength, mobilizing immediately could backfire and put people at risk.

So, they were concerned about "mostly peaceful protests."

Protests that devolved into violent clashes would give Trump a pretext to send in federal agents or troops as he had over the summer.

Which we have right now, occupying the Capital under Biden. But that was not done under a "pretext" mind you, that's just good old solid leadering.

And rather than elevate Trump's complaints by continuing to fight him, the alliance wanted to send the message that the people had spoken.

So the word went out: stand down.

The word went out to the foot soldiers of the left: Stand down.

Protect the Results announced that it would "not be activating the entire national mobilization network today, but remains ready to activate if necessary." On Twitter, outraged progressives wondered what was going on. Why wasn't anyone trying to stop Trump's coup? Where were all the protests?

Why did they think there was going to be a coup? Who told them that? Was that disinformation too? Trump left the White House peacefully exactly as sane people had assumed.



And no, a riot is not a coup, and a Daniel Boone cosplayer in a buffalo hat was not moments away from seizing the nuclear codes.



These people were all ginned up by the left, ready to go, in a coordinated action fed by years of Russian collusion investigations, sham impeachment trials, and endless talking heads likening Trump to Hitler.

Podhorzer credits the activists for their restraint. "They had spent so much time getting ready to hit the streets on Wednesday. But they did it," he says.

They had spent so much time getting ready to hit the streets.



Sounds kind of organized, doesn't it?



Thank you violent leftists for not engaging in an orgy of mayhem and destruction! We know that was hard for you.

"Wednesday through Friday, there was not a single Antifa vs. Proud Boys incident like everyone was expecting. And when that didn't materialize, I don't think the Trump campaign had a backup plan."

In other words, the left's plan if they lost the election was to flood the streets with violent protests, while Trump's master plan was to... counter that?



What?



And Marjorie Taylor Greene is the crazy one.

THE FIVE STEPS TO VICTORY

In Podhorzer's presentations, winning the vote was only the first step to winning the election. After that came winning the count, winning the certification, winning the Electoral College and winning the transition–steps that are normally formalities but that he knew Trump would see as opportunities for disruption. Nowhere would that be more evident than in Michigan, where Trump's pressure on local Republicans came perilously close to working–and where liberal and conservative pro-democracy forces joined to counter it.

The last step, ensuring certification.

It was a perilous moment. If Chatfield and Shirkey agreed to do Trump's bidding, Republicans in other states might be similarly bullied.

The democracy defenders launched a full-court press.

"tHe DeMOrcaCy DEfeNdeRS."



That there might be honest disagreement as to who was defending democracy never occurs to them. They are right and you are wrong.

Protect Democracy's local contacts researched the lawmakers' personal and political motives. Issue One ran television ads in Lansing. The Chamber's Bradley kept close tabs on the process. Wamp, the former Republican Congressman, called his former colleague Mike Rogers, who wrote an op-ed for the Detroit newspapers urging officials to honor the will of the voters. Three former Michigan governors–Republicans John Engler and Rick Snyder and Democrat Jennifer Granholm–jointly called for Michigan's electoral votes to be cast free of pressure from the White House. Engler, a former head of the Business Roundtable, made phone calls to influential donors and fellow GOP elder statesmen who could press the lawmakers privately.

The status quo has been good to these people, it must be protected.

"Of course he's going to try to offer them something," Bassin recalls thinking. "Head of the Space Force! Ambassador to wherever! We can't compete with that by offering carrots. We need a stick."

That stick was intimidation.

If Trump were to offer something in exchange for a personal favor, that would likely constitute bribery, Bassin reasoned. He phoned Richard Primus, a law professor at the University of Michigan, to see if Primus agreed and would make the argument publicly. Primus said he thought the meeting itself was inappropriate, and got to work on an op-ed for Politico warning that the state attorney general–a Democrat–would have no choice but to investigate. When the piece posted on Nov. 19, the attorney general's communications director tweeted it. Protect Democracy soon got word that the lawmakers planned to bring lawyers to the meeting with Trump the next day.

Bribery, of course, and an investigation. Why not?



Then it got chilling.

Reyes' activists scanned flight schedules and flocked to the airports on both ends of Shirkey's journey to D.C., to underscore that the lawmakers were being scrutinized. After the meeting, the pair announced they'd pressed the President to deliver COVID relief for their constituents and informed him they saw no role in the election process. Then they went for a drink at the Trump hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue. A street artist projected their images onto the outside of the building along with the words THE WORLD IS WATCHING.

We can all have a spirited debate over the efficacy of the Michigan vote. I tend to be skeptical that it was "stolen," but that's just an opinion. There are others. The point is, it's impossible to know if the officials made their decisions based on the merits, or their personal beliefs, because that is impossible when simple self-preservation is at stake in the face of the entire Michigan establishment (and beyond) threatening them.

"It's astounding how close we came, how fragile all this really is," says Timmer, the former Michigan GOP chair.

I wonder, how fragile what is?



Their grip on power? A status quo that keeps them fat and happy while vast swaths of America wither away amid joblessness, opioid addiction, and the sense of powerlessness to do anything about it because of these very people?



Regardless of how the election turned out, it was going to end, and a president was going to take the oath of office. I was always confident of that. The system would work, creaky as it is.



These people weren't defending democracy. They were defending their own interests.



You don't defend democracy by snuffing out voices and opinions that threaten your grip on power. You don't defend democracy by intimidating officials who might make a decision you don't like. You don't defend democracy by getting together with every special-interest group for which the system is working, in a coordinated effort to silence your opposition.



Perhaps the greatest insult here is that they want you to know what they did. They are proud of it.



Worse that than that, they sincerely believe it. They are so insulated from opposing views that they have no idea the amount of contempt with which half the country holds them.



On the plus side, we know exactly what they think

From the Former USAs most trusted news source

Time Magazine says the quiet parts out loud: There really was a vast conspiracy of powerful elites working behind the scenes to "change laws" and "control the flow of information" in order to defeat Trump.

Forget the hat, you're going to need a tin foil bodysuit for this one.

notthebee.com

Democwaxy has been saved comrades
Now its time to weaponize the military against the civilian population for everyone's safety.....derp

What fuckin planet am I on ....
Ahhh this ain't gonna end well

Really, you break TOS with this crap? What a long winded whine over losing the election...

 

[Eric Arthur Blair]

Feb082021
Precedent for Last Year’s Election Cabal
Patriots gasped in horror when Time gloated over the left-wing cabal, headed by Mike Podhorzer of the AFL-CIO, that effectively rigged the 2020 election. But union types organizing elitist conspiracies to thwart the will of voters is not entirely new. This appeared in RedState in November 2016:




After Hillary Clinton’s defeat, the DA met at the pricey Mandarin Hotel in DC to plot a response.



The good news is that this country is not run by Joe Biden, or by the condescending propagandists who present us with the “news.” The bad news is, it is run by oligarchs who have to rule from the shadows because they could not withstand public scrutiny without inspiring a rebellion.

Democratic elections are degenerating into theater. The purpose is to stage the illusion that we consent to what is being done to us. Elections are counterproductive if our rulers cannot control who wins. After 2016, they resolved not to tolerate any more backtalk from voters.

Many have wondered why the liberal elitists running Time admitted to the rigging of the 2020 election. As good a theory as any is that they were inspired by the recent Senate runoff elections in Georgia, which allowed them to take full control of the federal government. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, both terrible candidates, likely would not have won if not for conservatives staying home to protest election fraud.

This is what leftists want. The fewer patriots vote, the less interference is required. Short of civil war, there is nothing we can do but remain engaged, no matter how overpowering the smell of corruption.
On a tip from Christine S.

Back in the day when I was a union rep at a California convention of government workers in Sacramento we had a speaker that looked like kindly old Grandpa Walton and who blithely told everyone that they (union
organizers) would flood Texas with "the right kind of voter" and steal it from the right and the Bush family (this was before George Bush became a sort of anathema on the right).

That set off alarms in my head though I doubt many there picked up on those words. And we see how
even Texas can be chipped away bit by bit, over years of plotting.

The point is, the left plans decades ahead and lays down a filthy oily infrastructure to accomplish their
goals (which is, as we can all see, a socialist coup).
Which is why the bolder speakers talk about the
necessity of doing away with free speech because of "disinformation" and other forms of "fascism".

Freedom of speech is the freedom to lie and hypnotize the sheep out there, so they explain.


Without people pushing back, hard, they will define anything they don't like as disinformation
and dangerous and therefore it will be banned. Comrade Lester Holt explains:

NBC News’ Lester Holt Says News Media Should Not Provide “An Open Platform For Misinformation”

NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt warned that the news media providing "an open platform for misinformation," pushing back against the notion that outlets should always be giving two sides of a story equal weight.

deadline.com

You are perceptive and wise. Don't let the little fascist pygmies drag you under.

 

[Dragonlady]

Don't you hate it when your paranoid fever dreams fall short of reality?



It is so embarrassing.



The article goes through the process one by one.






The disaster he feared was that Trump could win.



Podhorzer is senior adviser to the president of the AFL-CIO, and his purported concern was that Trump was sowing doubt about the integrity of mail-in ballots. He wanted to "protect" the election, but what he really wanted to protect was his own power and that of the organization he worked for.






Note: Had a conservative written that, the article would already have been flagged for promoting violence.






The coalition grew to include a who's-who of progressive politics from Planned Parenthood to MoveOn to Greenpeace and so on that mobilized a get-out-the-vote campaign targeting Democratic constituencies.



That is all fine and legal and expected, but Ball doesn't frame this part of the program as a mundane partisan project, that doesn't get the clicks. No, Trump was a dictator and might need to be removed from office forcibly.



There was a higher purpose here.






How do you keep democracy alive?



By snuffing out voices you disfavor.






"Disinformation," otherwise known as, "things we don't agree with."






Ponder this for a moment, because in this venue, a Time Magazine article, their readers are going to skim right through that and nod approvingly without giving it a second thought. But this is what she is saying:



Engaging in the free exchange of ideas makes it worse.



Makes what worse?



Her and her constituency's grip on power.






I agree there is a lot of nonsense out there, but I don't for a moment hold myself up as some kind of grand arbiter of what is and is not nonsense nor do I think anyone should. One day its Jewish Space Lasers, the next it's "minimum wage hikes create unemployment" or we're in a "Climate Crisis."



Remember this?






Yeah, we're not doing that anymore.






"Disinformation," again.



Like the Hunter Biden story, uncontested, documented, and corroborated.



That kind of "disinformation."






I imagine that was crucial for voters to "understand," as in accept without question or incredulity.






Because of Covid they couldn't meet in person and light cigars with $100 bills which was probably a bummer.






Yes it did, but was it a "public-awareness campaign" when you work in concert with media outlets to suppress people with inconvenient opinions?



I am less agitated than many regarding the degree of fraud in this election, but I am very agitated regarding free speech and censorship which is where I think the election was indisputably manipulated, and it was right there out in the open.



You can frame the narrative all you want, but if you do it by force, you are no longer working within the confines of a democracy.



And you know those concerns about "mostly peaceful protests" occurring nationwide had Trump won, the potential participants in which had already been inflamed by anti-Trump forces framing the whole thing as a "coup?"



That was ready to be launched with the precision and central control of the D-Day invasion.






So, they were concerned about "mostly peaceful protests."






Which we have right now, occupying the Capital under Biden. But that was not done under a "pretext" mind you, that's just good old solid leadering.






The word went out to the foot soldiers of the left: Stand down.






Why did they think there was going to be a coup? Who told them that? Was that disinformation too? Trump left the White House peacefully exactly as sane people had assumed.



And no, a riot is not a coup, and a Daniel Boone cosplayer in a buffalo hat was not moments away from seizing the nuclear codes.



These people were all ginned up by the left, ready to go, in a coordinated action fed by years of Russian collusion investigations, sham impeachment trials, and endless talking heads likening Trump to Hitler.






They had spent so much time getting ready to hit the streets.



Sounds kind of organized, doesn't it?



Thank you violent leftists for not engaging in an orgy of mayhem and destruction! We know that was hard for you.






In other words, the left's plan if they lost the election was to flood the streets with violent protests, while Trump's master plan was to... counter that?



What?



And Marjorie Taylor Greene is the crazy one.






The last step, ensuring certification.







"tHe DeMOrcaCy DEfeNdeRS."



That there might be honest disagreement as to who was defending democracy never occurs to them. They are right and you are wrong.






The status quo has been good to these people, it must be protected.






That stick was intimidation.






Bribery, of course, and an investigation. Why not?



Then it got chilling.






We can all have a spirited debate over the efficacy of the Michigan vote. I tend to be skeptical that it was "stolen," but that's just an opinion. There are others. The point is, it's impossible to know if the officials made their decisions based on the merits, or their personal beliefs, because that is impossible when simple self-preservation is at stake in the face of the entire Michigan establishment (and beyond) threatening them.






I wonder, how fragile what is?



Their grip on power? A status quo that keeps them fat and happy while vast swaths of America wither away amid joblessness, opioid addiction, and the sense of powerlessness to do anything about it because of these very people?



Regardless of how the election turned out, it was going to end, and a president was going to take the oath of office. I was always confident of that. The system would work, creaky as it is.



These people weren't defending democracy. They were defending their own interests.



You don't defend democracy by snuffing out voices and opinions that threaten your grip on power. You don't defend democracy by intimidating officials who might make a decision you don't like. You don't defend democracy by getting together with every special-interest group for which the system is working, in a coordinated effort to silence your opposition.



Perhaps the greatest insult here is that they want you to know what they did. They are proud of it.



Worse that than that, they sincerely believe it. They are so insulated from opposing views that they have no idea the amount of contempt with which half the country holds them.



On the plus side, we know exactly what they think

From the Former USAs most trusted news source

Time Magazine says the quiet parts out loud: There really was a vast conspiracy of powerful elites working behind the scenes to "change laws" and "control the flow of information" in order to defeat Trump.

Forget the hat, you're going to need a tin foil bodysuit for this one.

notthebee.com

Democwaxy has been saved comrades
Now its time to weaponize the military against the civilian population for everyone's safety.....derp

What fuckin planet am I on ....
Ahhh this ain't gonna end well

Boy you sure are triggered. We can't lie with impunity. Unfair. People are banding together to vote Trump out of office. Unfair.

"Disinformation" is NOT "things we disagree with". "Disinformation" are lies, conspiracy theories and bullshit. Hunter's Laptop was not "proven" or verified to be anything other than a Russian plant.

You can't go around the country telling people the election was stolen when it was not. That's not "opinion" or protected speech. That's just a flat out lie. You're entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.