They're Not Confessing. They're Bragging.

I am on record as saying that the Left was shocked by their loss in 2016 to Donald Trump.  They were so certain of Hillary's inevitability that they didn't bother to turn on the fraud machine.  It was in the bag.  The World's Most Qualified Woman against a reality-TV orangutan.  As Roger Kimball put it in a recent Quote of the Day:

The central fact to appreciate about Donald Trump is that he was elected without the permission, and over the incredulous objections, of the woke oligarchy that governs us. 

I am further on record as saying that in five years or so, someone will complete a highly detailed, meticulously researched and footnoted recounting of just exactly how the 2020 election was stolen - yes, stolen.

Time Magazine has published Chapter 1 already.  The story is entitled "The Secret Bipartisan Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election."  The title alone tells you all you need to know, but the story goes into detail.  The Woke Oligarchy wasn't going to lose again.  

I haven't done one of these in awhile.  Let us Fisk.

A weird thing happened right after the Nov. 3 election: nothing.

The nation was braced for chaos. Liberal groups had vowed to take to the streets, planning hundreds of protests across the country. Right-wing militias were girding for battle. In a poll before Election Day, 75% of Americans voiced concern about violence.

Instead, an eerie quiet descended. As President Trump refused to concede, the response was not mass action but crickets. When media organizations called the race for Joe Biden on Nov. 7, jubilation broke out instead, as people thronged cities across the U.S. to celebrate the democratic process that resulted in Trump’s ouster.

"The response was not mass action, but crickets."  Left unspoken is the fact that, had Trump won reelection, cities would have burned.  You're not supposed to realize that.  What you're supposed to concentrate on is that the "Right-wing militias" didn't do anything.  The Left was prepared to "protest."  "Mostly peacefully" I would imagine.  But "right-wing militias" would have been violent!  The pertinent phrase however, is "Trump's ouster."  They'd been trying for more than four years to achieve that, and now they had.

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

In a way, Trump was right.

Tell me something I didn't know.

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

"...an orchestrated effort to anoint the winner" was not right "in a way," it was completely accurate.  But the pertinent line is this one:  "There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes...."  Conspiracy.  Their word, not mine.  We can officially take off our tinfoil hats now.  Time has admitted there was a conspiracy.  You can argue that the purpose of the conspiracy was to prevent the torching of major cities across the United States, but it was still a conspiracy to ensure Donald Trump did not win a second term.

This next paragraph is where it starts getting really interesting:

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

"...an extraordinary shadow effort dedicated not to winning the vote but to ensuring it would be free and fair, credible and uncorrupted."  Lie #1, admitted to later in the piece.  Everything possible was done to "win the vote," and to hell with fairness, credibility and corruption.  Winning was everything, and you can't count on the voters to do the right thing.  Remember, the goal was to SAVE THE ELECTION.  Conspiracy.  Shadowy groups manipulating things behind curtains.  For our own good, you see.  And it was bipartisan!  Because Orange Man Bad!  But, while they brag about their success, they cannot come out and simply say "We defeated Orange Man!"  No, they have to wrap the conspiracy in wholesome cloth - the thing they were trying to prevent was "an election so calamitous that no result could be discerned at all"! 

So they destroyed the system in order to save it.

Let's take the next paragraph line-by-line:

Their work touched every aspect of the election. 

AKA:  They cheated as hard as they could.

 They got states to change voting systems and laws...

Unconstitutionally, but they didn't care about that.  That wouldn't be decided until AFTER the election was settled.

...and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits,

Hundreds of millions of dollars to steal the election for the conspiracists paid for by the conspiracists and the public coffers.  "Voter suppression lawsuits" is code for "making sure only eligible voters vote."  Can't have that.   But here's the kicker:

...recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. 

"Armies of poll workers."  Poll workers who shared one ideology - Orange Man Bad.  And millions of people voting using a method well known and recognized for its vulnerability to fraud, if the poll workers were so inclined.

They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears. 

"Disinformation" like the Hunter Biden corruption story. demonetizing anyone who didn't toe the Leftist line, cancelling anyone who threatened The Narrative™.

They executed national public-awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks, preventing Trump’s conspiracy theories and false claims of victory from getting more traction. 

Like the story of the Red Wave, of how - at first - it would appear that Trump was winning by a landslide, but after all that mail-in vote was counted, the Right People would ensure that Trump lost!  This is known as Propaganda, and also "laying the groundwork."  See?  We predicted this!  Nothing odd about it at all!

After Election Day, they monitored every pressure point to ensure that Trump could not overturn the result. 

They'd had four years to prepare, after all.

“The untold story of the election is the thousands of people of both parties who accomplished the triumph of American democracy at its very foundation,” says Norm Eisen, a prominent lawyer and former Obama Administration official who recruited Republicans and Democrats to the board of the Voter Protection Program.

Norm Eisen wouldn't know "democracy" if it bit him on the ass, developed lockjaw and was dragged to death.  Conspiracies and Shadow organizations have no part in democracy.

For Trump and his allies were running their own campaign to spoil the election.

That is, "not have it stolen from them" by conspirators bent on that very task.

The President spent months insisting that mail ballots were a Democratic plot and the election would be “rigged.” 

And it was.  And Time Magazine is telling us how.  Conspiracies, voting rule changes, massive influx of mail-in voting, recruiting ideologically compatible poll workers, control of the flow of information, and millions of dollars in public and private funds. 

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

I love the Left's control of the language.  Isn't it fascinating that Trump has "henchmen," but the "conspirators" who opposed him were merely people of good intention, pure as the driven slush?  That his lawsuits were "spurious," but here's a list of the lawsuits brought and their results.  Note how very few were decided on the merits, and how many that were were decided in favor of the Republicans. 

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

No explanation of how Trump "plotted to block a legitimate vote count," just the assertion that he did, while this piece details a conspiracy of shadowy oligarchs intent on the very same thing.  Oh, and "violence at the Capitol."

The Capitol, aside from the razor-wire topped fencing and the armed National Guardsmen, looks a lot better than downtown Portland, Oregon.  What, a couple of broken windows and someone appropriated Nancy Pelosi's Speakers lectern?  One unarmed protester was killed by a Capitol cop, several more protesters died of natural causes, and the one cop who died after apparently being struck by a thrown fire extinguisher apparently showed no signs of blunt-force trauma.  Some coup attempt.  How many died in Portland?

The democracy campaigners watched with alarm. “Every week, we felt like we were in a struggle to try to pull off this election without the country going through a real dangerous moment of unraveling,” says former GOP Representative Zach Wamp, a Trump supporter who helped coordinate a bipartisan election-protection council. “We can look back and say this thing went pretty well, but it was not at all clear in September and October that that was going to be the case.”

There's that control of language thing again.  Our heroes were "democracy campaigners."  "Pulling off" the election meaning "making sure Trump loses."  Because they knew if he won there was the strong possibility of "a real dangerous moment of unraveling" as the extremist members of their side would go stark-raving. 

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

Again, who's a conspiracy theorist?  And language once again - saving the 2020 election.  From Donald Trump: "...how close the nation came to disaster."

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

 

They weren't rigging the election!  Oh no!  Changing voting rules, implementing vote-by-mail, recruiting ideologically pure pollworkers, controlling The Narrative, silencing dissent, that's not "rigging the election" it's fortifying it!  

Don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining.

I'm not going to fisk the rest of the story line-by-line - it's far too long for that, but I will comment on excerpts like this one:

The usual tools of data, analytics and polling would not be sufficient in a situation where the President himself was trying to disrupt the election, (Mike Podhorzer, senior adviser to the president of the AFL-CIO) wrote. “Most of our planning takes us through Election Day,” he noted. “But, we are not prepared for the two most likely outcomes”–Trump losing and refusing to concede, and Trump winning the Electoral College (despite losing the popular vote) by corrupting the voting process in key states. “We desperately need to systematically ‘red-team’ this election so that we can anticipate and plan for the worst we know will be coming our way.”

And this is the paragraph that gives lie to the claim that it was "...an extraordinary shadow effort dedicated not to winning the vote but to ensuring it would be free and fair, credible and uncorrupted."  It is also an absolute psychological projection, as he accuses Trump of "corrupting the voting process in key states" when that was precisely what they were doing.  Refusing to concede?  Didn't Hillary tell Biden not to concede under any circumstances?  And winning the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote is how Trump defeated Hillary.  It's why the Electoral College exists.

The chief difference between the U.S. and countries that lost their grip on democracy, he concluded, was that America’s decentralized election system couldn’t be rigged in one fell swoop. 

No, that required that "Their work touched every aspect of the election."  Not just one.

The first task was overhauling America’s balky election infrastructure....

That has worked just fine unless a Republican gets elected.  Especially when the wrong Republican gets elected.

...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. 

TV anchors "bending over backwards" and "framing" is also known as "Controlling the Narrative."  And it's nothing new, but was brought to new levels.

RTWT.  Try to keep your blood pressure down.  For all the high rhetoric, democracy in America is dead.  The Oligarchy is in control, and they're not giving it up.