LAST week Time magazine published quite the most extraordinary article of the year to date.
Extraordinary in that it not just puts paid to all that liberal intelligentsia, chattering-class scoffing at the notion of US election theft, but that it openly documents the shadow campaign masterplan to do just that – and boasts about it.
‘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.’
This admission comes at the start of the piece, entitled The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign that Saved the 2020 Election, written by Time’s National Political Correspondent, Molly Ball, that describes a ‘conspiracy’ by a ‘well-funded cabal of powerful people’ who came together and plotted to stop Trump winning and, the irony is not to be lost, then praises it. This was not, you see, an assault on the election, it was – you’ve got it – to protect America from ‘Trump’s assault on democracy.’
You’d be forgiven for believing you were reading about America’s War of Independence or some noble cause so confident is Ball that she and those she owns to be conspirators are on the side of virtue.
This, despite her detailed description of how these 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’. And yes, make no mistake, she calls it a conspiracy, as undoubtedly it was. ‘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’.
No one seems to have denied her account of the alliance of the progressive Left, big labour, big business and the Washington establishment to counter Donald Trump and ‘suppress unwanted elements of US political conversation before and after election day’.
In her own words, Ball refers to this orchestration as a ‘conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and co-ordinated the resistance from CEOs’.
She claims that such efforts weren’t aimed at ‘rigging the election’ – which is nice to know – then damns herself with her next few words of excuse that ‘they were fortifying it’.
Her ‘virtuous’ interpretation of the conspiracy as part of a heroic grassroots movement intent on salvaging democracy and saving the country from Trump and Covid rings more than a little hollow. It betrays someone who has no real respect for the electorate at all, but a scary elitist certainty in a world view that can tolerate no contradiction.
Of the conspirators, she confesses that ‘their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding.
‘They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time.
‘They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smear.’
So it was okay that these groups engaged in a unified legal front to ‘change voting systems and laws’ at state level and that conservative efforts to fight them were euphemistically termed ‘voter-suppression lawsuits’?
Ball’s insouciance is scary. So is this record of the full scale of the forces and the illegality that went into ensuring Trump wouldn’t get a second term. We may have suspected this level of anti-democratic corruption, but seeing it so uncompromisingly set out is shocking. Where is the movie about this?
You can read the full article here and I can recommend two detailed commentaries on it. The first is by Jeff Carlson, a regular contributor to The Epoch Times, and the other is by James Freeman in the Wall Street Journal. who asks was it good for the country, as Ms Ball would have it, or was it just good for Biden? It certainly begs the question of who’s really running America now.
