patrick.net

Ball identifies Mike Podhorzer, political director at AFL-CIO, as “the architect” of the conspiracy. ...

The story directly echoes The National Pulse reporting from October 6th, though doesn’t credit the article which stated at the time: “The group recently received $250 million from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and the significant majority of the sum has been funneled into Democratic districts.” ...

The death of George Floyd was also cynically leveraged for political ends...

Many of those organizers were part of Podhorzer’s network, from the activists in battleground states who partnered with the Democracy Defense Coalition to organizations with leading roles in the Movement for Black Lives. ...

Then, America’s big corporates stepped in.

While the AFL-CIO and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce pretend to be at each other’s throats, they reality is much of the back and forth is kabuki theater. ...

The stage was set for the conspiracy to be carried out.

In effect, big business, big activist groups, big unions, and big media would collaborate to keep President Trump away from office and keep reporting on the steal off the airwaves and social media.

And while the article continues to claim the activists were not trying to stop Trump winning but rather guarantee a fair election, one line gives the whole thing away.

Ball reveals an 11pm Zoom call on election night wherein – when President Trump was in the lead – Podhorzer stepped in to calm his colleagues down:

“Podhorzer presented data to show the group that victory was in hand.”

And he told Time something very true: “I don’t think the Trump campaign had a backup plan.”

The article even claims that grassroots conservative activists came close to rumbling the plan, especially in Michigan, where observers were locked out of the counting room and placards placed on windows to stop them seeing inside.

Then Time tells you how you are supposed to feel after reading the entire story. The bluntness of it, telling readers that they know how it sounds but they must interpret it differently, is gobsmacking arrogance:

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. And they believe the public needs to understand the system’s fragility in order to ensure that democracy in America endures.

What is described in the entire story has nothing to do with democracy or the consent of the governed. Instead, it represents a bargain between unions, corporations, activist groups, and the political elite. It is a precursor to the triumvirate of unions, big business, and the government becoming more evident every day. Put another way, the political elite, the very wealthy, the bureaucracy, and those willing to subsidize struck a bargain.

JoeFromSJersey
@JoeFromSJersey
16h
Replying to @MaajidNawaz @TIME
They were worried that Trump was going to spin the election as illegitimate because of a vast left wing conspiracy interfering in the election...so they formed a vast left wing conspiracy to interfere in the election.
2:46 PM · Feb 5, 2021

In February 2021, a long article in Time magazine by journalist Molly Ball celebrated the “Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election.” Biden’s victory, wrote Ball, was the result of a “conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes” that drew together “a vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election” in an “extraordinary shadow effort.” Among the many accomplishments of the heroic conspirators, Ball notes, they “successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears.” It is an incredible article, like an entry from the crime blotter that somehow got slipped into the society pages, a paean to the saviors of democracy that describes in detail how they dismembered it.