Emerald Robinson tweets: 

@EmeraldRobinson

The corporate media: "People who say there was a shadow campaign to rig the 2020 election are conspiracy theorists!"

Time Magazine: "Read our story on the shadow campaign to rig the 2020 election!"

She’s referring to the most astonishing story of the week, Molly Ball’s article in Time: ”The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign that saved the 2020 election,” a sordid tale of how Big Tech, BLM, organized labor and big business, particularly the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, colluded to defeat Donald J. Trump’s reelection. 

The participants justified their behavior as “saving democracy.” Was this a  “modified limited hangout” in the old Watergate sense? An effort to undo the public perception that the election was illegally stolen with an alternative that there was an unsavory but legitimate perception  management by powerful people and institutions to defeat the man who had captured the angst of the middle class and worked to improve their lives? Or were members of the cabal playing neener neener on the voters they bested to further dispirit them and keep them from tipping over the chessboard they set up to wipe out the pawns? All these theories have merit, but I think  these powerful people -- or most of them -- have been coopted by China and Biden is the perfect puppet to carry the sellout to China and to defeat Trump’s moves to strengthen America and improve the lot of working Americans and their communities.

The Cabal

You must read the Time article to get the full flavor of the brazen admissions of what was done. Here’s a brief summary of the most significant of them, devoid of the leftist spackle of the author. Business, the AFL-CIO, and Black Lives Matter worked together to change voting systems and laws, to get hundreds of millions of dollars to make voting less secure and worked with social media to keep the Biden message upfront, the Trump message buried and the country terrified of widespread violence if the president won re-election. (4.6 percent of people who voted for Biden said in a poll that they would not have done so, had the information about Hunter Biden’s corruption not been scotched by the media.)

The participants see themselves as the protectors of democracy and want their story told, the author explains. Initial moves were coordinated by Mike Podhorzer, senior adviser to Richard Trumka, president of the AFl-CIO. He saw in the  COVID-19  reaction an opportunity to bypass normal, more secure election procedures, and working with Planned Parenthood, Indivisible, and Move On, “progressive data geeks and strategists, representatives of donors and foundations, state-level grassroots organizers, Working Families Party, racial-justice activists and others, to manipulate the election procedures. In time, they persuaded Congress to steer COVID relief funds  for election administration, a feat aided by the Leadership Conference of Civil and Human Rights. When the $400 million grant proved insufficient for their means, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative dropped into their hands another $300 million, which the National Vote at Home Institute used to advise secretaries of state on the new, insecure voting procedures. (Chan is the wife of Mark Zuckerberg -- Facebook’s chairman, CEO and controlling shareholder).

Having altered the rules, the next step was taken by the Voter Participation Center, which sent out ballot applications to 15 million people “in key states” and urged people not to “wait until election day.” ”In the end, nearly half the electorate cast ballots by mail in 2020, practically a revolution in how people vote.”

But rigging election procedures was only a part of the cabal’s work. They also worked at pressuring media platforms to remove content or accounts which in their view “spread disinformation.” Among those pressured to silence opposition views were Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. 

Huge efforts were undertaken to persuade voters that the final results would not be known on election night until 70% of the public was made to believe that Biden won, including media election analysts. 

All this was insufficient to swing the election to the most unqualified candidates -- Biden and Harris. And yet that was insufficient to their ends. Following on the absurd media coverage of George Floyd’s death from a drug overdose and poor health while in police custody, Black Lives Matter was ginned up and the word was out that there would be even more riots if “Trump interferes with the election” (that is, if he won). A coalition tagged “Protect the Results” included "Women’s March, Sierra Club, Color of Change and Democratic Socialists of America.” This while the legacy media was calling the riots “mostly peaceful,” people watched their communities being burnt down and shops looted, and mayors of cities like New York, Portland, and Seattle took no steps to punish those involved. 

A week before the election, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, whose Chief Executive Thomas Donohue resigned days after the Time article was published, approached Podhorzer. They were concerned about threats of riots if Trump were elected, and joined with Trumka, the heads of the National Association for Evangelicals and the North African American Clergy  to “trust in our system,” in effect pre-judging any challenge to the rigged election. 

On election night eve, analysts for the media having been conditioned to expect a late surge, ignored calling it for Trump despite his heavy lead, and Podhorzer then concentrated on winning the certification,  pressuring election boards, GOP-controlled legislatures, state canvassing boards, and Congress.

If you believe, as Time’s author and the participants do, that all these shenanigans were to protect democracy, you’ll have to explain to me why Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit is wrong when she observes how shaky the new administration is: 

Look, guys, any honest person who knew math knows. I know the left and the right who hates Trump loves to lie to themselves that “everyone hates Trump.”

1- This is not true.

2- Most people weren’t crazy about Trump but liked the way he governed.

3-The election wasn’t only dirty, it was submerged in fraud.

4-People who haven’t stolen elections don’t fight having fraud looked into.

5- People who haven’t stolen elections don’t turn DC into occupied territory.

6- People who haven’t stolen elections don’t try so hard to gaslight the country.

7- People who haven’t stolen elections don’t try to turn opposing them into a crime.

8- People who haven’t stolen elections don’t try to destroy the country they just took over.

9- More importantly, people who haven’t stolen the election don’t tell us how they STOLE THE ELECTION.

There is that “consent of the governed.” The left doesn’t think they need it anymore. They think they have it all sewn up.

China Was the Real Winner of the Election

In my view, the big winner of this “fortified election” gambit is China. Like Lee Smith, I see that a few at the top were coopted by China and profits to be made in dealing with  China even on its terms, and used their powers to undermine, weaken and ultimately destroy democracy. Drawing an historical parallel with Sparta and Athens, he reminds us how the pro-Sparta oligarchy  worked to undermine the rights of Athenian citizens. The “meritocracy” has decided their bread is best buttered in a globalized world. They see China as “big, productive and efficient” and American workers being displaced as people deserving of punishment, “reactionary racists” all. (Ignoring, of course, the extreme racism of the Chinese government now torturing and eliminating the Uyghar minority, among others.) 

President Trump upended that, ending foreign wars and illegal immigration while returning jobs to Americans was the core of his appeal, and nothing could be more threatening to the oligarchy. This explains Big Tech and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s role. How to explain Labor’s? In my own view, I think it obvious that AFL-CIO head Rich Trumka has determined that the industrial unions are not worth fighting for -- hence no complaints about closing down coal mines (and in Kamala Harris’s words training the miners to reclaim “land mines”) or shutting down the Keystone Pipeline and putting thousands of union workers out of work while impoverishing their communities. He sees the big gain for labor in a vastly increased public sector and rigging the rules to unionize more workers . 

It’s not just labor and big business coopted, the think tanks and universities are also in the Chinese camp, says Smith:

Think tanks and research institutions like the Atlantic Council, the Center for American Progress, the EastWest Institute, the Carter Center, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and others gorged themselves on Chinese money. The world-famous Brookings Institution had no scruples about publishing a report funded by Chinese telecom company Huawei that praised Huawei technology.

The billions that China gave to major American research universities, like $58 million to Stanford, alarmed U.S. law enforcement, which warned of Chinese counterintelligence efforts to steal sensitive research. But the schools and their name faculty were in fact in the business of selling that research, much of it paid for directly by the U.S. government -- which is why Harvard and Yale among other big-name schools appear to have systematically underreported the large amounts that China had gifted them.

Indeed, many of academia’s pay-for-play deals with the CCP were not particularly subtle. In June 2020, a Harvard professor who received a research grant of $15 million in taxpayer money was indicted for lying about his $50,000 per month work on behalf of a CCP institution to “recruit, and cultivate high-level scientific talent in furtherance of China’s scientific development, economic prosperity and national security.”

The China Virus was a boon to them, leading to absurd lockdowns that weakened our economy, kept kids from schools, let Democrats like Cuomo boost casualties and increase panic all to defeat the president, and from the very start of China’s move, the media has played a willing handmaiden in our destruction.

California senator Dianne Feinstein and Silicon Valley as well cemented the Chinese techno-autocracy which played so significant a role in the cabal against Trump. Curious about why the U.S. Chamber of Commerce joined the anti-reelection cabal? Smith explains it. The Chamber no longer represents the interests of main street businesses, it was vehemently opposed to his tariffs on Chinese imports and his efforts to move the supply chains back home: More profits for big domestic business in keeping the cheaper China supply chains open.

The consequences of the oligarchy’s embrace of China is evident, Smith observes in the U.S. Security and Defense analyses fluffing up their reports to bury evidence of China’s aggression at our expense.

Perhaps the most interesting part of Smith’s account is the report that Wuhan was initially astir in fall of 2019 because of a revolt against air pollution and a quarantine was imposed to keep the revolt from spreading. Having found a quarantine a useful means to  stopping a rebellion, they used it again in December of 2019  utilizing as a public health measure -- ostensibly stopping the spread of the virus -- but, in fact, designed to stop news of the government’s blunder  in allowing the release of the virus from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Lockdowns here made the U.S. oligarchs like Bezos much richer while impoverishing Trump’s base. “In imposing unconstitutional regulations by fiat, city and state authorities normalized autocracy.”

He has much more to say and substantial evidence for his point of view, and I strongly urge you to read it all.

I have no simple solution to return us to democracy, though I think Roger L. Simon is correct when he argues that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ lead should be followed by all Republican state legislatures.

• Mandatory opt-outs from big tech’s content filters, a solution to tech censorship first proposed by Breitbart News.
• A private right of action for Floridian citizens against tech companies that violate this condition.
• Fines of $100,000 per day levied on tech companies that suspend candidates for elected office in Florida from their platforms.
• Daily fines for any tech company “that uses their content and user-related algorithms to suppress or prioritize the access of any content related to a political candidate or cause on the ballot.”
• Greater transparency requirements.
• Disclosure requirements enforced by Florida’s election authorities for tech companies that favor one candidate over another.
• Power for the Florida attorney general to bring cases against tech companies that violate these conditions under the state’s Unfair and Deceptive Practices Act.

Almost half the states are fully under Republican control, several others have Republican legislatures, and they have the power to do this. I think it is a better means to preserve democracy than allowing the U.S.-China oligarchy to turn us in an autocracy. Punch back twice as hard, as Instapundit urges. Next, I think set strict limits on gubernatorial emergency powers, and by all means strengthen and tighten election procedures, and dump the cabal’s new rules that maximize the ability to rig the vote.