The Secret History of the Election

This is the version the winners want told, because they want credit. 

It’s in Time magazine, for now. I linked also to an archive, because I imagine they’ll think better of it. 

12 comments:

douglas said...

It's jaw dropping. They're *bragging* about it.
" “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.”

Holy smokes.

Christopher B said...

There's a definite connection between this and the Thirty Tyrants piece you posted earlier. H/T to Ed D. at Instapundit for this quote

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.

Dad29 said...

Yes, but the conspiracy and vote-rigging went back MUCH further than late 2019--which is when this pack of lies CLAIMS it started.

Clinton lawyers were busy changing Wisconsin election law as far back as 2013 or so, resulting in well over 50,000 ballots for which signature-verification was either totally absent OR extremely loose.

(The 240,000 number is the 'gross.' About 20% of those are seriously suspicious.)

Eric Blair said...

Sure seems that way.

Grim said...

“There's a definite connection between this and the Thirty Tyrants piece...”

Yes. The Time piece is a friendly outlet that was careful not to challenge their frame, nor to ask uncomfortable questions. It’s just an attempt to get out in front and define the narrative about a conspiracy they knew they couldn’t hide forever.

They didn’t confess to any crimes in the article, and the journalist didn’t push them on anything. They didn’t talk about any connections between (say) these Chamber of Commerce titans and the PRC, but those ties are not even secrets. There’s no account of where all these funds came from. There’s no exploration of how the mail in rule/law changes enable fraud, or how they were themselves illegally executed.

It’s just their version of the story. Yet we already know the election was stolen by a confessed conspiracy of the Tyrants faction, at least benefitting the PRC as well.

J Melcher said...

Remember when Trump's man Kansan Kris Kobach (The KKK reference is unfortunate and unavoidable) attempted in 2017 to obtain the same sort of public information from state registrars that every party and every candidate at every level for every election obtains to develop marketing pitches -- for the different purpose of validating eligibility or purging the ineligible -- the various registrars refused. The effort to purge the ineligible failed. In 2018 and 2020 there may or may not have been ineligible voters cast ballots -- but who can now prove it, one way or the other? Investigators were prohibited from investigating.

Grim said...

I do not remember that, but it's no surprise. The fix was in from early, it seems. The question is what to do about it now. We definitely do not, and will not, have the resources to compete against the US Chamber of Commerce in a money-driven fight -- even if they weren't backed by the PRC, which they are.

Elise said...

It's Rashomon, the same story from 3 different perspectives: the article linked here; the article linked by douglas under "Oligarchy in America"; and article linked in the Thirty Tyrants piece.

Texan99 said...

I linked this on the Facebook page that my count constituents go to for local news. I see that some of them have taken up the Chamber of Commerce connection, as part of the local uproar over the outsized role of our local Chamber. In a cozy relationship, the only local newspaper editor is married to the long-time Chamber president. They both seem like nice people, and are quite conservative in national politics, but locally they appear to have no sense of the danger of secrecy and cronyism. Useful idiots in the right context.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

Copied from my comment on another site:
Yes, gaming the system, starting well back in time (even years), is much more the typical Democratic strategy regarding elections. They are much lower risk in terms of people not going to jail than things like the lights going out or having to move a lot of ballots to another place to be counted. Identifying the correct coalitions of who has to be in on it and ignoring everyone else, including lots of their own supporters is also what they have been specialising in for decades. Unions, CEOs, left-wing activists entirely of the racial and socialist strains because they are willing to be violent – that’s the ticket. No point in talking to feminists, immigrant groups, environmentalists, LGBT groups, academics, or the thousands of nonprofits concerned with education or jobs or whatever. Those people will bend over if you just promise them dinner occasionally.

Biden had six times the dark money Trump did. That didn’t come from Antifa or Black Lives Matter.

Conservatives got lucky in 2016 because Trump had an efficient strategy that could barely capture electoral votes even while losing the popular, but such things are vulnerable and unstable. We might hope to win in the courts because most judges are still honest and some of these shenanigans are so blatant. But that will continue to get away from us with every passing year. Hugh Hewitt wrote “If It’s Not Close They Can’t Cheat” years ago, and we still have not absorbed that. We still want to rely on a well-most-folks-are-reasonable and people-will-vote-safety-and-wallets strategies which are a fine foundation but nowhere near enough. By the time the elections are lost it’s too late to yell and scream and cry foul. It just makes it worse.

If you can’t be genial and funny yourself over the next two years, and can’t keep your focus on making fun of the issues the drive-by media wants to suppress then work for candidates or news sources that can. We don’t need purity and foxhole friends – that just cost us elections, including both in Georgia. You all know people who don’t much like Democrats but didn’t show for Trump. Refresh their drinks. Remind them of the latest Biden corruptions when you see them. Tell them how much you like that new young woman who is running for Congress. Learn to tell a joke. Be willing to show up and do the boring work of making phone calls, trying to get signs placed, arranging interviews, coordinating videos to go viral. And if you actually have media talent, make that happen.

If you can’t you don’t really want victory, you just want to complain.

Grim said...

Well, as Hondo said, "A man ought to do what he thinks is best." I haven't decided, yet, what I think is best. We still have much to uncover before we decide how similar the current case is to any previous one. Just this week we found that the gigantic bipartisan conspiracy uniting Republicans and Democrats, Antifa and BLM, the Chamber of Commerce and Big Labor, so long said to be impossible, was not only real but willing -- eager! -- to give interviews.

Christopher B said...

As has often been noted by me and others, where the rubber meets the road in the Electoral College Biden won by somewhere between 50K and 100K votes, depending on which states you pick and if you consider throwing the election to the House to be a win for Trump.

I think we're going to see support for the National Popular Vote initiative drain away. This will be not just because the return of congruity between the 'popular vote' and the EC lessens the perceived need for the project but because the EC is a vital part of the extra-legal strategy outlined in the Time article. The organizers of these extra-legal vote drives could safely take the risk of bring out Trump voters among normally safely Democrat groups because the EC firewalled off additional Trump votes in Texas, for example, so they didn't offset additional Biden votes in Georgia. The ability to control EVs with a slim majority is not only exploitable by conservatives.

I think we'll see redoubled energy in the effort to rehabilitate 'at-large' voting which was legitimately rejected as the way whites maintained electoral control of segregated areas fifty years ago. This time the concept of equitable distribution of representation will be applied to the circumstance where the total popular votes for Democrats, who typically win their districts by huge margins due to voter concentration, is not proportional to the number of representatives they elect in a state. I expect to see more attacks and lawsuits on the concept of *any* geographic division of representation drawn inside a state as enabling gerrymandering, up to and including arguments that the Constitution doesn't require districts.