Time Magazine have just published a “bombshell article” admitting a massive, coordinated operation by the left that pushed mail-in voting and other measures that have become associated with claims of election fraud.
Molly Ball’s article is entitled “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election,” it describes a “conspiracy” between “left-wing activists and business titans insisting the objective was to “protect and fortify” the 2020 presidential election from anticipated claims of fraud by the Trump team.
She writes the extraordinary shadow effort was dedicated not to winning the vote but to ensuring it would be free, fair, credible and uncorrupted. The effort “touched every aspect of the election”:
They….
- Got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding.
- Fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time.
- Successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against “disinformation” and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears.
- Executed national public-awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks, preventing Trump’s conspiracy theories and false claims of victory from getting more traction.
- After Election Day, they monitored every pressure point to ensure that Trump could not overturn the result.
Ball states the participants want “the secret history of the 2020 election told,”.
A well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, worked together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.”
The participants insisted they were not “rigging the election; they were fortifying it.” They believe the public needs to understand the system’s fragility in order to ensure that democracy in America endures.
THE ARCHITECT
The leader of the “democracy campaigners” was Mike Podhorzer, a senior adviser to the president of the powerful AFL-CIO labor union, which endorsed Joe Biden.
Mike Podhorzer became convinced the election was headed for disaster–and was determined to protect it.
For nearly a quarter-century, Podhorzer, senior adviser to the president of the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest union federation, has marshalled the latest tactics and data to help its favoured candidates win elections.
Trump’s election in 2016–credited in part to his unusual strength among the sort of blue collar white voters who once dominated the AFL-CIO–prompted Podhorzer to question his assumptions about voter behaviour.
He began circulating weekly number-crunching memos to a small circle of allies and hosting strategy sessions in D.C. It was only after months of research that he introduced his concerns in his newsletter in October 2019. 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, he 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.”
It turned out Podhorzer wasn’t the only one thinking in these terms. He began to hear from others eager to join forces. The Fight Back Table, a coalition of “resistance” organisations, began 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.
A group of former elected officials were researching emergency powers they feared Trump might exploit. Protect Democracy was assembling a bipartisan election-crisis task force. “It turned out that once you said it out loud, people agreed,” Podhorzer says, “and it started building momentum.” He spent months pondering scenarios and talking to experts. It wasn’t hard to find liberals who saw Trump as a dangerous dictator.
On March 3, Podhorzer drafted a 3-page confidential memo entitled “Threats to the 2020 Election.” The memo laid out 4 categories of challenges: attacks on voters, attacks on election administration, attacks on Trump’s political opponents and “efforts to reverse the results of the election.”
In March, activists appealed to Congress to steer COVID relief money to election administration
Protecting the election would require an effort of unprecedented scale. As 2020 progressed, it stretched to Congress, Silicon Valley and the nation’s statehouses. It drew energy from the summer’s racial-justice protests, many of whose leaders were a key part of the liberal alliance. And eventually it reached across the aisle, into the world of Trump-sceptical Republicans appalled by his “attacks on democracy”.
Podhorzer worked his network of progressive contacts in the labor movement along with institutional giants such as Planned Parenthood and Greenpeace, resistance groups such as Indivisible and MoveOn, tech experts, donors, foundations, grassroots organizers and racial-justice activists.
The coalition used a “nameless, secret project” to combat “disinformation” on social media. It sought to pressure platforms to enforce their rules, both by removing content or accounts that spread “disinformation.”
Social-media censorship of President Trump and conservative voices became a major issue in the 2020 campaign.
Twitter’s suppression of bombshell New York Times stories revealing evidence that Joe Biden personally profited from his son Hunter’s influence-peddling possibly affected the outcome of the election, according to a survey.
The shadow campaign also worked “to harness” for the election the “momentum” from the violent reaction to the death of George Floyd.
The racial-justice uprising sparked by George Floyd’s killing in May was not primarily a political movement. The organisers who helped lead it wanted to harness its momentum for the election without allowing it to be co-opted by politicians. Many of those organisers were part of Podhorzer’s network, from the activists in battleground states who partnered with the Democracy Defence Coalition to organisations with leading roles in the Movement for Black Lives.
Activists began preparing to reprise the demonstrations if Trump tried to steal the election.
Significantly, the coalition pushed Congress to fund vote-by-mail and persuaded Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to contribute $400 million to “election administration” funding swing states, causing havoc, confusion and lawlessness that tipped the outcome in Joe Biden’s favour.
The Amistad Project of the Thomas More Society released a report documenting the effect of donations by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to private-public partnerships that turned out the vote in key Democratic counties in 2020.
The report, titled “The Legitimacy and Effect of Private Funding in Federal and State Election Processes,” alleges that when Zuckerberg gave money to government institutions to assist with elections during the coronavirus pandemic, the donations were targeted at Democrat-heavy areas in swing states with the specific purpose of tilting the election to Joe Biden.
Amistad Project Director Phil Kline said that Zuckerberg’s money encouraged states to violate their own laws, and act contrary to federal law, in turning out specific groups of voters and suppressing turnout among other groups of voters, violating the Constitution.
Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights also met with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and others. (Gupta has been nominated for Associate Attorney General by President Biden.) “She stated it was a struggle, but we got to the point where they (big tech) 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 rules in place and were tagging things and taking them down.
SPREADING THE WORD
Beyond battling bad information, there was a need to explain a rapidly changing election process. 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.
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, aimed mainly at messaging to the public but also speaking to local officials–the secretaries of state, attorneys general, governors who would be in the eye of the storm–to let them know we wanted to help,” says Gephardt, who worked his contacts in the private sector to put $20 million behind the effort.
STRANGE BEDFELLOWS
About a week before Election Day, Podhorzer received an unexpected message: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce wanted to talk. The AFL-CIO and the Chamber have a long history of antagonism. Though neither organisation is explicitly partisan, the influential business lobby has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Republican campaigns, just as the nation’s unions funnel hundreds of millions to Democrats.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce joined in an unlikely alliance with the AFL-CIO and some Republicans to thwart claims by Trump of election fraud. And the coalition engaged in a behind-the-scenes effort to mobilise unrest on the streets if Trump were to win.
The nation was braced for chaos. Liberal groups had vowed to take to the streets, planning hundreds of protests across the country. In a poll before Election Day, 75% of Americans voiced concern about violence.
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 modelling. He had been warning for weeks that Trump voters’ turnout was surging. As the numbers dribbled out, he could tell that as long as all the votes were counted, Trump would lose.
The liberal alliance gathered for an 11pm Zoom call. Hundreds joined; many were freaking out. “It was really important for me and the team in that moment to help ground people in what we had already known was true,” says Angela Peoples, director for the Democracy Defence Coalition. Podhorzer presented data to show the group that victory was in hand.
A weird thing happened right after the Nov.3 election: nothing. Instead, an eerie quiet descended.
A second odd thing happened amid Trump’s attempts to “reverse the result”: corporate America turned on him.
Hundreds of major business leaders, many of whom had backed Trump’s candidacy and supported his policies, called on him to concede. To the President, something felt amiss. “It was all very, very strange”, Trump said on Dec.2. Within days after the election, we witnessed an orchestrated effort to anoint the winner, even while many key states were still being counted.
In a way, Trump was right.
There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. The pact was formalised 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”.
For more than a year, a coalition of operatives had scrambled to shore up America’s institutions as they came under simultaneous attack from a remorseless pandemic and an “autocratically inclined President”.
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.
The President spent months insisting that mail-in ballots were a Democratic plot and that the election would be “rigged”. He spent the months following Nov.3 trying to steal the election he’d lost–with lawsuits and conspiracy theories.
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.”
Analysis
As you see President Trump was totally wrong to believe the election would be rigged it was purely a conspiracy theory– the Democrats (and their radical supporters) didn’t RIG the election, they FORTIFIED it – they had to ensure the right guy won to protect democracy – you understand that don’t you?
If not it could mean a quick spell in the re-education camp?
https://michaeljlindell.com/?fbclid=IwAR1gkjss2xUXcfDlMFGbjRWmkneZ2A3vCbKL–Phb2xxXnE8XnsUljnkIO8
https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/
.https://nypost.com/2020/12/10/how-media-covered-up-the-hunter-biden-story-until-after-the-election/
I wrote my first article for Unity News Network on 30th December 2019, and I have been writing ever since – my library is now well in excess of 200 articles.
Alternative media is essential in these times of unprecedented censorship and mainstream bias, which has ramped up exponentially during the past 2 years. The overton window of “acceptable opinion” is growing every narrower.
Having a citizen’s log, cataloguing the twists and turns of life during these turbulent times is essential.
Thank you Unity News Network for allowing me a voice on your platform.
