The conspiracy is now known and admitted. This article in Time Magazine breaks down how “The Swamp” and allies of The Swamp colluded to rig the election against Trump. The conspiracy is real. They call it exactly that but they frame it as if the conspiracy was altruistic to save the country. Instead I think they may have broken the back of our republic.
They changed the method of voting and poured hundreds of millions of dollars for the effort.
Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding.
Time Magazine
Naked admission of a quest to have a “proper outcome” to the election.
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
Time Magazine
Fortifying is the new rigging. You can rig an election as long as you say you’re fortifying it.
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.
Time Magazine
COVID-19 was used to suppress in-person voting and push not only absentee voting but mail-in voting. Mail-in is far different from absentee and this group knew this was the key to beating Trump. $300 million was also funneled into the effort by Facebook… or rather the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Should a person investing that much into the election also be allowed to de-platform the person running for election?
In March, activists appealed to Congress to steer COVID relief money to election administration. Led by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, more than 150 organizations signed a letter to every member of Congress seeking $2 billion in election funding. It was somewhat successful: the CARES Act, passed later that month, contained $400 million in grants to state election administrators. But the next tranche of relief funding didn’t add to that number. It wasn’t going to be enough.
Private philanthropy stepped into the breach. An assortment of foundations contributed tens of millions in election-administration funding. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative chipped in $300 million.
Time Magazine
Progressive operatives figured out they couldn’t argue their ideas online and started their de-platforming campaign. They would use social media companies’ terms of service to find the hammer to smash the nail of wrong think.
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.
Time Magazine
They flooded traditional media to push the narrative that mail-in voting is not subject to fraud.
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.
Time Magazine
They had a feeling Trump’s support was bigger than they feared. So the conspirators shared their data with the media so they would be aware to keep pushing stories that would suppress the Trump vote. They knew votes by mail would be the key to defeating him.
Podhorzer, meanwhile, was warning everyone he knew that polls were underestimating Trump’s support. The data he shared with media organizations who would be calling the election was “tremendously useful” to understand what was happening as the votes rolled in, according to a member of a major network’s political unit who spoke with Podhorzer before Election Day. Most analysts had recognized there would be a “blue shift” in key battlegrounds– the surge of votes breaking toward Democrats, driven by tallies of mail-in ballots– but they hadn’t comprehended how much better Trump was likely to do on Election Day. “Being able to document how big the absentee wave would be and the variance by state was essential,” the analyst says.
Time Magazine
If Trump won they planned to flood the streets with massive protests. Does anyone think these protests would be peaceful? They would have been conducted by the same groups that rioted and burned buildings in all the major cities in the United States.
Activists began preparing to reprise the demonstrations if Trump tried to steal the election. “Americans plan widespread protests if Trump interferes with election,” Reuters reported in October, one of many such stories. More than 150 liberal groups, from the Women’s March to the Sierra Club to Color of Change, from Democrats.com to the Democratic Socialists of America, joined the “Protect the Results” coalition. The group’s now defunct website had a map listing 400 planned postelection demonstrations, to be activated via text message as soon as Nov. 4. To stop the coup they feared, the left was ready to flood the streets.
Time Magazine
“As long as all the votes were counted…” I take this to mean, “As long as they were able to keep counting votes”. Trumps numbers were surging running up to the election and the cabal to defeat him knew they had to manufacture votes.
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. 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.
Time Magazine
“TV anchors were bending over backward to counsel caution and frame the vote count accurately.” Frame the vote count? The word accurately is thrown in there to make it seem legit. But if the vote is accurate and you’re reporting it accurately then there is nothing to “frame”. All you have to do is report.
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.
Time Magazine
They basically threatened GOP leaders in Michigan with endless investigations should they even seem to agree with Trump that there were problems with the vote in Michigan.
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.
Time Magazine
The 2020 election was a shit show. Our elections were not and still are not transparent. All electronic voting machines should have open source code. The tally should be public information and not solely available to the Associated Press and other media outlets. De-platforming and flagging posts should be illegal unless you’re posting illegal content. Social media companies should not be allowed to discriminate content otherwise they are publishers and not platforms and should be regulated as such.
Trump was right. The election was rigged. The powers-that-be, both Republican and Democrat, the “deep state” if you will, all could not stand that an outsider got to the top of their club. They were determined from the moment he won in 2016 to make sure he would be gone and it didn’t matter what they had to do to the fabric of our nation. This “Secret Bipartisan Campaign” wanted the virus of Trump gone and they used COVID-19 as their carrier to push through changes to how we vote. They infected the nation and our republic may die because of it.