TIME is suddenly relevant again for the first time in many years. You see, the one-time icon of news reporting, now a routinely progressive propaganda online ghost, decided it was time for the Axis of Unethical Conduct-–the “resistance,” the Democrats, and TIME’s slice, the biased news media—to get credit for making sure Donald Trump was defeated by the weakest ticket ever to be offered by a major party in a Presidential election.
So the magazine’s editors admitted it. And they are proud. And gloating.
I had part of this figured out. Remember this post? I wrote,
the almost complete media embargo and denial of the Hunter Biden laptop story in the days approaching the election was the latest and, arguably, the final and most effective embodiment of the degree to which the deck was unethically stacked against President Trump.
I also quoted conservative pundit (and NeverTrumper) Conservative pundit Jim Treacher, who wrote in part, beginning by quoting himself from October:
“This isn’t about an election, or at least it isn’t for me. It isn’t about who you think should be president for the next four years (or as long as Joe holds up). It’s about national media outlets blatantly refusing to tell you the truth because they think they know who should be president. They don’t think you can make that decision for yourself.”
Well, they did it. They swept the story under the rug because they knew it was bad for the guy who wanted to replace Trump, and they didn’t care about anything but replacing Trump. They weren’t worried about integrity, reputation, professionalism, or anything else that might have kept them from lying.
To which I added,
How can anyone honest disagree with that conclusion? This is an integrity test for your Trump Deranged social media friends and relatives. Any response to this other than the per se ethically bankrupt, Bill Maher-style, “Yeah, well, I don’t care. Anything to get Trump out of the White House, even news manipulation, public deception and more, is fine with me” proves they are either incredibly gullible or too stupid to flee approaching lava.
Well, I was wrong about that last part. A disgusting number of my Trump Deranged social media friends are just corrupt now. They realize the election was rigged, or fixed, or manipulated—pick your favorite word—and they don’t care. They are glad. Like TIME, they believe the ends justify the means.. Even if the means involves undermining democracy.
Ace of Spades, who is usually too much the conservative commando for me, does a nice job explicating what TIME’s exposé means. (His comparing the story to Jack Nicholson’s villainous colonel admission on the stand that he did order the Code Red in “A Few Good Men” is spot on.)
Leftwing “journalist” — really, a Democrat operative with a press pass — Molly Ball brags about how she and her friends rigged an election to ensure the “proper outcome,” as one of her buddies says.
“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 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 protestsin which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy.”
The Establishment of the GOP takes all of its cues — and a lot of money, coincidentally — from the Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber of Commerce wants absolute corporate sovereignty with zero accountability, and the GOP takes their paychecks and gives them their political payoffs.
“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.“
Here’s what they did before the election, according to Time:
“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.“
Lie.
“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 smears.“
Like censoring the Hunter Biden story.
“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.”
No, this “public awareness campaign” was designed to prep the public for the key Democrat cities to go dark for five hours and then suddenly discover tens of thousands of Biden votes. They prepped the public to believe this was normal and legal — and inevitable.
“After Election Day, they monitored every pressure point to ensure that Trump could not overturn the result.“
They mean: They made sure Trump could not bring their election-rigging to wide public attention.
“For Trump and his allies were running their own campaign to spoil the election. The President spent months insisting that mail ballots were a Democratic plot and the election would be “rigged.”
You literally just crowed about how smart the left was (along with its corporate allies on the pseudoright) to rig the election.
“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.“
By “suppressive tactics,” you mean checking signatures, which the left turned off for this election. They mean illegally accepting ballots without a signature. They mean illegally accepting ballots without a postmark, and illegally accepting ballots with a postmark past the legal deadline.Any effort to screen out illegal votes is, to the left, “suppressive tactics.”
It is astounding that Trump and Republicans weren’t better prepared for this, and in some respect their loss was a failure of political skill. Trump’s lack of rhetorical precision was fatal: he sensed that something hadn’t been right and that he lost on an uneven playing field. But the only description he could come up with was “voter fraud,” while claiming that he had in fact won. As TIME’s story makes clear, the “cabal” had succeeded before a vote was cast.
The nice thing is that it’s part of the cabal telling the story now, so it can’t be dismissed as another “right wing conspiracy theory.”
Ethics Alarms 
You know, it is one thing to have a feeling and sit there wondering if you’re going crazy. Are you really buying this conspiracy talk? Every conservative outlet was spreading it, but the evidence doesn’t quite seem to be there, and there’s possibly reasonable explanations as to why everything transpired the way it did, but it still feels really, really wrong…
And then you have the confirmation that it did happen, and you still sit there stunned, because surely the Left wouldn’t be so foolish to just out and out say it. Right?
Just when it seemed that conservatives were about to hunker down and plot their way forward for the next 4 years, this drops. Cue the outrage and the cannons in 5… 4… 3…
I never believed in an outright “rigging” (outside of the expected amount of cheating and sloppiness likely to occur in places like Atlanta) but I told everyone Biden would probably win, due to just too many thumbs on the scale. There is hard evidence of Google manipulation that let to an untold (but undoubtedly large) number of Hillary votes in 2016, as well as some attempts at manipulation in Hillary’s favor on social media platforms. But it wasn’t enough that time. Just reading the room would tell you that, this time, it was going to be a full court press, with the Left using all the tools at their disposal, to drag Biden over the finish line. And that’s what happened.
There is a sort of elegant tone set by certain Trump-averse, skilled but supercilious journalists at NR. Wonder what they made of the Times article.
Then there are the salt-of-the-earth, much less refined information pushes, such as those of Mike Lindell. Not so beautiful, but those efforts are getting traction under cover of night. Stronger and harder to ignore. If you can last all the way through.
This is why people are embracing conspiracy theories. There are, in fact, conspiracies being planned and carried out by the elites. They now even admit it.
Once you know there are conspiracies being carried out, and you know that you are being lied to daily, nothing seems implausible anymore. How are you supposed to determine where the conspiracies end, and the conspiracy theories start. Lies and truth become impossible to distinguish.
If the government, media, and corporate elites are willing to conspire to rig an election by rigging the laws, rigging the news, censoring people who speak out about the rigging of the laws and the news…why should I believe they would balk at rigging the machines? Why? I cannot prove that they did, but they are unwilling to prove that they didn’t. Why are they unwilling to prove that they didn’t rig the counts and the machines? Why did they throw out all the republican poll watchers? If they knew they were going to win, why did they muddy the waters even further by aggressively preventing transparency?
Why have the elites militarized Washington D.C.? Why are the elites pushing legislation to remove the second amendment? Why are the elites shutting down Parler and talking about outlawing conservative news media? Why are the elites declaring that, due to coronavirus, we will never be able to leave our houses without masks or gather in large groups again, even with a vaccine? Why are the elites destroying small businesses? Why are the elites destroying energy independence, killing tens of thousands of jobs in process, and flippantly telling those who lost their livelihoods that they can go dismantle land mines in foreign countries instead?
Once you look at everything going on in the country, conspiracy theories do not seem crazy anymore. When no one is a trustworthy source of information, then untrustworthy sources of information that cater to your personal set of fears and anxieties become your source of information. You listen to the people who tell you that the things you are worried about are real and important.
Not all of the above questions matter to everyone, and not everyone has the same reason for asking the question. Maybe you are a devout Christian who has been prevented from visiting your house of worship, so religious persecution is your main worry. Maybe you are a young adult who wants to party and have fun, so being locked down is your primary concern. Maybe you are a hypochondriac who is petrified of being exposed to germs and want everyone forced to walk around in hazmat suits. Maybe you are a conservative who thinks rigging elections leads to tyranny and totalitarianism. Pick the things you fear, the issues that are important to you, and find a matching propaganda outlet. If there is no one trustworthy to believe, you go farther and farther down the propaganda rabbit hole until you hit conspiracy theory.
Peddling lies is profitable and effective for the elites, so ethics be damned. The elites couldn’t care less that they are destroying livelihoods, lives, and democracy.
So what if the country is torn apart? If the peasants get too unruly, the elites can always take Swallwell’s suggestion and drop a couple nukes on the uppity citizens to shut them up. Seems implausible, but…
What aren’t the elites willing to do to get what they want?
The questions don’t end there:
Why are the elites ginning up racial resentment, then encouraging the aggrieved to act as a de facto militia a la the SA?
Why are the elites attempting to turn local law enforcement into pariahs in their own communities, but pushing the use of their own law enforcement – only when they are in charge, of course?
Why are the elites attempting to push guilt on the most productive sector of society?
Why are the elites attempting to make a nation ashamed of its own history?
Why are the elites trying to destroy conventional patriotism and create a new loyalty to them?
Why are the elites attempting a purge of those who don’t agree with them from the military?
Why are the elites refusing to help ordinary people in difficulty, except if they can be the ones doing it?
Why are the elites so eager to import new, often unskilled, citizens and give them a vote immediately?
Why are the elites putting up children, in some cases children with mental health challenges, as spokespeople or examples to emulate?
Why are the elites so bent on destroying the previous president who opposed them, even after he is out of office?
Why are the elites pushing the idea that anyone not in favor must constantly say and prove that he is not a racist?
Why are the elites perfectly ok with standing back and watching cities get ruined?
Why are the elites pushing cancel culture, where one word, one time, not meant for the public to hear, can ruin someone’s career?
Well?
Great comment, and a Comment of the Day.
I’m having to wrestle my fingers to the ground to stop another post wondering where certain exited commenters here are now, after they left because I asserted over two years ago that the the news media was working with elements in our society to undermine democracy. This proved to them, one prominent participant here wrote in an insulting exit, that I had “drunk the Kool-Aid.” Yes, I’m a pro-Trump wacko.
Not only have these commenters and ex-commenters proven themselves dupes and fools, but they have demonstrated spectacularly how bias makes us stupid—by accusing me of bias.
We entered a dystopia and so many, too many are embracing it. An astute observer, Padme Amidala, noted, “So this is how liberty dies . . . with thunderous applause.” The triumph of empire over democracy,
The most frightening aspect…admitting that the Left-Wing cabal controlled the “mostly peaceful” protesting mob that they were perfectly willing to unleash on Wednesday had Trump won – even if he’d won by a landslide – and was able to hold them back.
They aren’t nascent totalitarians. They are totalitarians.
Back on December the 4th, I wrote the following and shared it again on December 11th…
I’m still mired in how I can actively support this kind of tit-for-tat behavior without becoming morally bankrupt like so many in the political left have become. As far as I’m concerned, the political left has been actively involved in direct persecution against the political right since November 2016. This persecution is continuing today and will not stop until the political right does something significant to stand up against it.
The sign in that photo says “Jews are not wanted here”. There are many other signs from that early 1930’s period of time when it was perceived as being politically correct to actively persecute the Jews. From history we all know how that populist persecution turned out. We must all remember with open eyes how this kind of persecution started and how it grew.
Persecution, intimidation and violence are tyrannical ways of destroying the liberty of those that you oppose/hate. The rise of tyrannical totalitarianism in the USA is deepening the divide and going to destroy the USA if something is not done. Others are still hanging on to hope as an underlying foundation to build change upon but with the way the ideological leanings of the United States have changed over the last four years that foundation of hope is building upon loose and I can no longer do that. Change requires action and action may require personal change.
Leadership requires some things from those that want to be “leaders”. Don’t roll your eyes too much when reading the following…
Again, if you want changes in your life or the world around you, the changes must begin in you.
The political left has chosen action to push their agenda, what do you choose?
Make wise choices.
All that is missing from this article is the evil “Bwahahaha!”
It’s instructive to see the truth, some of which we didn’t really know. For example that the Big Business community has abandoned the Republicans and switched their loyalty to Democrats, because they came to believe Trump’s populism threatened their profit margins more than the Democrats’ taxes.
In a way, it’s cleansing. The Chamber of Commerce crowd was always a double-edged sword that cut Republicans as often as their donations helped them. Now, the Democrats are beholden to them 100% and Republicans have not only no reason to pursue their dollars, but also no reason to trust them at all after this transparent betrayal.
Watching the left turn and rend the business community should be fun to watch for me. Not so much for people who are in the prime of their working lives, but then again, most of them (if we are to believe the Democrats) voted for this. You get the government you deserve.
What isn’t fun is realizing that the most of the Democrats fears of the Big Business community turned out to be true — they were untrustworthy, beholden only to the bottom line, have the integrity of an amoebic parasite and the ethics of a Great White Shark. They are now wholly-owned subsidiaries of Democrats Inc. “Please sir, may I have more?”
I’ve got a good supply of popcorn on hand, though probably not enough. It would be incredibly droll if the Republicans wound up being the party of the working guy instead of big business, wouldn’t it?
I know the President of the Chamber pretty well. He’s a lifetime Democrat, and the Chamber was never partisan. It always picked its issues were the money led.
I note the past tense here. I suspect that was intentional for more than one reason.
No matter, of course, your point is still likely valid. The Chamber’s behavior appears to reflect a calculation of cost vs. benefit, which is what you would expect of a business organization.
The Chamber is showing us what we all knew deep down — despite their insistence that the support all businesses, the reality is that they consider big businesses more equal than others, again a reflection of pure business thinking (in this case, the 80% rule). The Democrats’ priorities may well be more manageable from a bottom-line standpoint than those of a Republican party led by Trump.
However, Trump’s policies are manifestly better for the vast majority of business, especially small and medium organizations and entrepreneurs looking to start a business. Big business dislikes successful smaller companies unless it is able to buy them up, and any organization that is willing to favor them in regulation as well as drive down the cost of labor by allowing unregulated immigration has a chance to earn their favor.
It seems likely that chamber members have calculated that the impact of mass immigration when set against higher corporate taxes and a possible $15 minimum wage is a net positive. Big business can more readily absorb the $15 minimum if it is offset by a job market that favors them, allowing lower wage growth for skilled positions by providing less-skilled alternatives that can be trained on the job. Likewise, they have plenty of lobbyists, lawyers, and accountants to ensure that corporate tax increases will disproportionately impact smaller organizations.
The fact that this will mostly affect minority lower-skill and middle-management workers is irrelevant to them. Franchise owners and mom and pop stores can go fish — from a big business standpoint, they fewer of them, the better. Plus, they can more easily reap the benefits of virtue-signalling if the Democrats write policies favoring minority hiring. They are totally okay with replacing a mostly-white workforce with lesser-paid favored minorities and immigrants and patting themselves on the back for their commitment to “social justice” in their commercials.
Which brings us full circle. For years, the Chamber has claimed it yearned for a business-friendly government. Yet when one of their own became president and advocated for a fairer business environment for all, they found they had to drop the mask and reveal their true agenda — big business first and always.
Sunlight, as they say, is the best disinfectant. Trump’s superpower is that he had forced so many hidden agendas out of the shadows.