Why Time Magazine’s Shadow Campaign Story Is Frightening

Are we living in a democracy or an oligarchy?

Photo: Cameron Smith via Unsplash

Does democracy die in darkness?

Apparently, the perception of it thrives.

After reading Time magazine’s article The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election, I’m second-guessing if we’re even living in a democracy today. Maybe it’s a post-democracy America. I don’t know what’s next, but it ain’t right.

If you’re late to the conversation, this article was a doozy — even for hard-core apolitical people like me. Basically, the journalist Molly Ball revealed how the 2020 presidential election in America was really won: through a secret plot to help Biden. Now that there is no chance of overturn, it’s safe to tell-all.

Citizens have a right to know the complete unvarnished picture.

Ball candidly explains what went down:

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. [emphasis mine]

This was the first of many shocking revelations in this article. “A well-funded cabal of powerful people” sounds like something out of a spy novel. But it’s real.

Now let’s look at the facts: The voting rules were changed, the flow of information was compromised, the media was complicit, and a secret alliance was made on Biden’s behalf.

The Ringmaster

Americans that thought something didn’t sit right with this election — on either side — were right.

I always knew that campaign compromises and corruption were a part of every election. Cat and mouse smear campaigns are par for the course. But this level of manipulation was unprecedented.

The brains behind this operation was Mike Podhorzer, a successful political strategist. Knowing what I read about him, I can imagine a tattered and torn copy of Eric Hoffer’s book The True Believer and Edward Bernays’ book Propaganda sitting on his bedside table. Both books are so full of notes and slips of paper, they’re about to fall out.

I say this not to slight Podhorzer, but to say that he clearly understands political influence and strategy. Based on his success, he could have written both books himself.

If you haven’t read Bernays famous book, the first lines are quite dystopian:

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. [emphasis mine]

Podhorzer is the one that organized this “cabal” and worked tirelessly to make sure all the right elements aligned. For him, the writing was on the wall a long time ago. He took action over a year in advance to stitch this dream team of influencers and donors together. He knew what would need to happen at the administrative level and voter level.

In fact, he helped get the CARES act passed that provided $400 million in grants to state election administrators. In addition, Ball writes that “Private philanthropy stepped into the breach. An assortment of foundations contributed tens of millions in election-administration funding. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative chipped in $300 million.”

Part of this money was used to push citizens to vote by mail. They set up clean stations and voter kits that made it convenient and natural to vote this way, even though most people never voted this way in the past. COVID-19 helped this effort, and it made sense to vote by mail, but I didn’t realize how much money was put into this.

I always thought that these government officials were just reminding people that a mail-in vote is another handy option to get your ballot in. But it was more than that. Democrats preferred you voted that way. According to Ball’s article, there was a suspicious amount of money, people, and influence involved in prodding people to vote by mail and it wasn’t all for health safety reasons.

My stance is if people can protest in person, they can vote in person.

Protesting opens you up to getting COVID-19 way more than the safe voting haven democrats afford people. I never saw why mail-in voting was such a big agenda. Now I know.

The Art Of Misdirection

So was the election bought for a billion dollars?

Possibly, although that might be stretching it since Donald Trump could have done that too. At the very least it explains a lot of sketchy events that happened along the campaign trail.

What the Democrats bought was the right infrastructure for Biden to skate into first place right out of his basement (where they kept him as much as possible).

Remember the now-famous clip of Biden talking about voter fraud? He actually said:

We have put together, I think, the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization.

Of course, subsequent left-leaning news organizations fixed the slip (and the dozens of others he made), while conservative outlets exploited the gaffe. Or was it a slip? Politicians are known to occasionally not lie.

Who was right, the conservatives or the democrats?

A billion dollars thrown at skewing a democratic win doesn’t seem like a conspiracy theory now. The magician has openly revealed the secret to his tricks.

Big Tech Gets Involved

I find it disturbing that the CEO of Facebook was this involved, both on a funding and information access level.

As Ball writes,

The Voting Rights Lab and IntoAction created state-specific memes and graphics, spread by email, text, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, urging that every vote be counted. Together, they were viewed more than 1 billion times.

Even great sites like Ground News that show where the news bias is can be duped if an event never gets covered.

So we get full censorship on one party and no censorship on the other. In fact, Hunter Biden’s true stories about his incredibly compromising “laptop from hell”, the China deals, doing crack with a prostitute all ended up as nothing burgers in the eyes of the news. The media never let these stories become big.

Where were those memes? All is fair in love and politics, right?

For all the terrible things you can say about the Trump family, this news is equally disturbing. Citizens have a right to know the complete unvarnished picture.

Moreover, a recent survey revealed that 4.6% Biden’s voters wouldn’t have chosen him had they known about all of his son’s egregious mishaps. That’s enough for Trump to have won.

Leveraging big tech and the media was a smart move on the Democrat’s part. They learned that Clinton’s 2016’s email scandal cost her the race because of the Muller Report. (What innocent person uses a private server then wipes it?)

The media and tech giants helped prevent another Democrat scandal by suppressing any bad information that might disrupt the set narrative and agenda — that’s all clear now. In fact, when the New York Post broke the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, they froze their account!

As we’ve seen lately, big tech is bigger than the government. I have always wondered what the worst-case scenario for them was. Would our government stand up to them? Or when push goes to shove, would tech companies pick up and move to the actual country where they route their money to so they can avoid US taxes?

Now that’s techonomic colonialism.

As Ball points out, it was a deft move to have dinners with tech giants to get them behind this. All of this conspiring makes me look at House of Cards as more of a documentary than a tv show. There really are “invisible governors” that “organize chaos” as Bernays suggests.

The movers and shaker behind this initiative astound me. Molly Ball pulls no punches as she names all the key players such as the former Democratic House Leader Dick Gephardt with his $20 million backing. There are more key players listed in this theater operations, but after a while it all becomes too surreal. It’s like Ocean’s Eleven: Government Edition. So slick, so efficacious.

I don’t want to believe any of this, but it fills the gaps of so many things I’ve read about in the news from both sides. Overall, I guess I’d say that I’m impressed with Podhorzer and his team for pulling it off. It really was the greatest show on earth.

Too Governmental To Fail

The most disturbing thing for me about this article is what it implies. I’m curious what other operations these shadow leaders are planning. What other agendas are at hand to manipulate a preferred outcome not decided by a citizenry? Do they think we’re too dumb to make our own decisions so secret chiefs have to make them for us? Or at least, do they think it’s ethical to create an ill-informed society to make the choice they pre-planned? (I’ll spare you the hackneyed Orwellian analysis here, but you get the picture.)

If so, how is that a democracy?

It sounds more like an oligarchy. I can hear the conspiracy theory groups growing in number by the second since the publication of Molly Ball’s article.

When the elite get what they want, it doesn’t always mean the main street people get what they want. That is obvious. What’s not obvious is the type of country we’ve become.

My whole notion of transparency and fairness has been thrown out the door. We now see that this cabal not only framed the Overton Window, but they also rebuilt the entire estate! [See what I did there? The 4th and 5th estate.]

“The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best.”
― Thomas Sowell

Afterthoughts

In all, this was an eye-opening read. Though it is clearly left-leaning, it makes me wonder about the working title of the story: The Secret Bipartisan Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election. That actually sounds better, but less attention-grabbing. And for the most part, did it save anything? It might have saved the Democratic Party, but it did not save our time-honored sense of real democracy.