The Secret Admission of the Shadow Campaign That Stole the 2020 Election
Illustration by Ryan Olbrysh for TIME
TIME - BY MOLLY BALL FEBRUARY 4, 2021
A weird thing happened right after the Nov. 3 election: nothing.
The nation was braced for chaos. Liberal groups had vowed to take to the streets, planning hundreds of protests across the country. Right-wing militias were girding for battle. In a poll before Election Day, 75% of Americans voiced concern about violence.
Instead, an eerie quiet descended. As President Trump refused to concede, the response was not mass action but crickets. When media organizations called the race for Joe Biden on Nov. 7, jubilation broke out instead, as people thronged cities across the U.S. to celebrate the democratic process that resulted in Trumpâs ouster. Reactions Throughout the U.S. After Biden Wins Presidential Race in Unprecedented Election
A second odd thing happened amid Trumpâs attempts to reverse the result: corporate America turned on him. Hundreds of major business leaders, many of whom had backed Trumpâs candidacy and supported his policies, called on him to concede. To the President, something felt amiss. âIt was all very, very strange,â Trump said on Dec. 2. âWithin days after the election, we witnessed an orchestrated effort to anoint the winner, even while many key states were still being counted.â
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 bargainâinspired by the summerâs massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protestsâin which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trumpâs assault on democracy.
The handshake between business and labor was just one component of a vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the electionâan extraordinary shadow effort dedicated not to winning the vote but to ensuring it would be free and fair, credible and uncorrupted. For more than a year, a loosely organized coalition of operatives scrambled to shore up Americaâs 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.
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. They executed national public-awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks, preventing Trumpâs conspiracy theories and false claims of victory from getting more traction.
After Election Day, they monitored every pressure point to ensure that Trump could not overturn the result. âThe untold story of the election is the thousands of people of both parties who accomplished the triumph of American democracy at its very foundation,â says Norm Eisen, a prominent lawyer and former Obama Administration official who recruited Republicans and Democrats to the board of the Voter Protection Program.
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 ârigged.â 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 voteâan intensification of the GOPâs legacy of suppressive tactics. Before the election, Trump plotted to block a legitimate vote count. And he spent the months following Nov. 3 trying to steal the election heâd lostâwith lawsuits and conspiracy theories, pressure on state and local officials, and finally summoning his army of supporters to the Jan. 6 rally that ended in deadly violence at the Capitol.
The democracy campaigners watched with alarm. âEvery week, we felt like we were in a struggle to try to pull off this election without the country going through a real dangerous moment of unraveling,â says former GOP Representative Zach Wamp, a Trump supporter who helped coordinate a bipartisan election-protection council. âWe can look back and say this thing went pretty well, but it was not at all clear in September and October that that was going to be the case.â
Biden fans in Philadelphia after the race was called on Nov. 7 Michelle Gustafson for TIME
This is the inside story of the conspiracy to save the 2020 election, based on access to the groupâs inner workings, never-before-seen documents and interviews with dozens of those involved from across the political spectrum. It is the story of an unprecedented, creative and determined campaign whose success also reveals how close the nation came to disaster. âEvery attempt to interfere with the proper outcome of the election was defeated,â says Ian Bassin, co-founder of Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan rule-of-law advocacy group. âBut itâs massively important for the country to understand that it didnât happen accidentally. The system didnât work magically. Democracy is not self-executing.â
Thatâs why the participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dreamâa 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 systemâs fragility in order to ensure that democracy in America endures.
THE ARCHITECT
Sometime in the fall of 2019, Mike Podhorzer became convinced the election was headed for disasterâand determined to protect it.
This was not his usual purview. For nearly a quarter-century, Podhorzer, senior adviser to the president of the AFL-CIO, the nationâs largest union federation, has marshaled the latest tactics and data to help its favored candidates win elections. Unassuming and professorial, he isnât the sort of hair-gelled âpolitical strategistâ who shows up on cable news. Among Democratic insiders, heâs known as the wizard behind some of the biggest advances in political technology in recent decades. A group of liberal strategists he brought together in the early 2000s led to the creation of the Analyst Institute, a secretive firm that applies scientific methods to political campaigns. He was also involved in the founding of Catalist, the flagship progressive data company.
The endless chatter in Washington about âpolitical strategy,â Podhorzer believes, has little to do with how change really gets made. âMy basic take on politics is that itâs all pretty obvious if you donât overthink it or swallow the prevailing frameworks whole,â he once wrote. âAfter that, just relentlessly identify your assumptions and challenge them.â Podhorzer applies that approach to everything: when he coached his now adult sonâs Little League team in the D.C. suburbs, he trained the boys not to swing at most pitchesâa tactic that infuriated both their and their opponentsâ parents, but won the team a series of championships.
Trumpâs election in 2016âcredited in part to his unusual strength among the sort of blue collar white voters who once dominated the AFL-CIOâprompted Podhorzer to question his assumptions about voter behavior. He began circulating weekly number-crunching memos to a small circle of allies and hosting strategy sessions in D.C. But when he began to worry about the election itself, he didnât want to seem paranoid. It was only after months of research that he introduced his concerns in his newsletter in October 2019. The usual tools of data, analytics and polling would not be sufficient in a situation where the President himself was trying to disrupt the election, he wrote.
âMost of our planning takes us through Election Day,â he noted. âBut, we are not prepared for the two most likely outcomesââTrump losing and refusing to concede, and Trump winning the Electoral College (despite losing the popular vote) by corrupting the voting process in key states. âWe desperately need to systematically âred-teamâ this election so that we can anticipate and plan for the worst we know will be coming our way.â
It turned out Podhorzer wasnât the only one thinking in these terms. He began to hear from others eager to join forces. The Fight Back Table, a coalition of âresistanceâ organizations, had begun scenario-planning around the potential for a contested election, gathering liberal activists at the local and national level into what they called the Democracy Defense Coalition. Voting-rights and civil rights organizations were raising alarms. A group of former elected officials was researching emergency powers they feared Trump might exploit. Protect Democracy was assembling a bipartisan election-crisis task force. âIt turned out that once you said it out loud, people agreed,â Podhorzer says, âand it started building momentum.â
He spent months pondering scenarios and talking to experts. It wasnât hard to find liberals who saw Trump as a dangerous dictator, but Podhorzer was careful to steer clear of hysteria. What he wanted to know was not how American democracy was dying but how it might be kept alive. The chief difference between the U.S. and countries that lost their grip on democracy, he concluded, was that Americaâs decentralized election system couldnât be rigged in one fell swoop. That presented an opportunity to shore it up.
THE ALLIANCE
On March 3, Podhorzer drafted a three-page confidential memo titled âThreats to the 2020 Election.â âTrump has made it clear that this will not be a fair election, and that he will reject anything but his own re-election as âfakeâ and rigged,â he wrote. âOn Nov. 3, should the media report otherwise, he will use the right-wing information system to establish his narrative and incite his supporters to protest.â The memo laid out four categories of challenges: attacks on voters, attacks on election administration, attacks on Trumpâs political opponents and âefforts to reverse the results of the election.â
Then COVID-19 erupted at the height of the primary-election season. Normal methods of voting were no longer safe for voters or the mostly elderly volunteers who normally staff polling places. But political disagreements, intensified by Trumpâs crusade against mail voting, prevented some states from making it easier to vote absentee and for jurisdictions to count those votes in a timely manner. Chaos ensued. Ohio shut down in-person voting for its primary, leading to minuscule turnout. A poll-worker shortage in Milwaukeeâwhere Wisconsinâs heavily Democratic Black population is concentratedâleft just five open polling places, down from 182. In New York, vote counting took more than a month.
Suddenly, the potential for a November meltdown was obvious. In his apartment in the D.C. suburbs, Podhorzer began working from his laptop at his kitchen table, holding back-to-back Zoom meetings for hours a day with his network of contacts across the progressive universe: the labor movement; the institutional left, like Planned Parenthood and Greenpeace; resistance groups like Indivisible and MoveOn; progressive data geeks and strategists, representatives of donors and foundations, state-level grassroots organizers, racial-justice activists and others.
In April, Podhorzer began hosting a weekly 2Âœ-hour Zoom. It was structured around a series of rapid-fire five-minute presentations on everything from which ads were working to messaging to legal strategy. The invitation-only gatherings soon attracted hundreds, creating a rare shared base of knowledge for the fractious progressive movement. âAt the risk of talking trash about the left, thereâs not a lot of good information sharing,â says Anat Shenker-Osorio, a close Podhorzer friend whose poll-tested messaging guidance shaped the groupâs approach. âThereâs a lot of not-invented-here syndrome, where people wonât consider a good idea if they didnât come up with it.â
The meetings became the galactic center for a constellation of operatives across the left who shared overlapping goals but didnât usually work in concert. The group had no name, no leaders and no hierarchy, but it kept the disparate actors in sync. âPod played a critical behind-the-scenes role in keeping different pieces of the movement infrastructure in communication and aligned,â says Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party. âYou have the litigation space, the organizing space, the political people just focused on the W, and their strategies arenât always aligned. He allowed this ecosystem to work together.â
Protecting the election would require an effort of unprecedented scale. As 2020 progressed, it stretched to Congress, Silicon Valley and the nationâs statehouses. It drew energy from the summerâs racial-justice protests, many of whose leaders were a key part of the liberal alliance. And eventually it reached across the aisle, into the world of Trump-skeptical Republicans appalled by his attacks on democracy.
SECURING THE VOTE
The first task was overhauling Americaâs balky election infrastructureâin the middle of a pandemic. For the thousands of local, mostly nonpartisan officials who administer elections, the most urgent need was money. They needed protective equipment like masks, gloves and hand sanitizer. They needed to pay for postcards letting people know they could vote absenteeâor, in some states, to mail ballots to every voter. They needed additional staff and scanners to process ballots.
In March, activists appealed to Congress to steer COVID relief money to election administration. Led by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, more than 150 organizations signed a letter to every member of Congress seeking $2 billion in election funding. It was somewhat successful: the CARES Act, passed later that month, contained $400 million in grants to state election administrators. But the next tranche of relief funding didnât add to that number. It wasnât going to be enough.
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. âIt was a failure at the federal level that 2,500 local election officials were forced to apply for philanthropic grants to fill their needs,â says Amber McReynolds, a former Denver election official who heads the nonpartisan National Vote at Home Institute.
McReynoldsâ two-year-old organization became a clearinghouse for a nation struggling to adapt. The institute gave secretaries of state from both parties technical advice on everything from which vendors to use to how to locate drop boxes. Local officials are the most trusted sources of election information, but few can afford a press secretary, so the institute distributed communications tool kits. In a presentation to Podhorzerâs group, McReynolds detailed the importance of absentee ballots for shortening lines at polling places and preventing an election crisis.
The instituteâs work helped 37 states and D.C. bolster mail voting. But it wouldnât be worth much if people didnât take advantage. Part of the challenge was logistical: each state has different rules for when and how ballots should be requested and returned. The Voter Participation Center, which in a normal year would have supported local groups deploying canvassers door-to-door to get out the vote, instead conducted focus groups in April and May to find out what would get people to vote by mail. In August and September, it sent ballot applications to 15 million people in key states, 4.6 million of whom returned them. In mailings and digital ads, the group urged people not to wait for Election Day. âAll the work we have done for 17 years was built for this moment of bringing democracy to peopleâs doorsteps,â says Tom Lopach, the centerâs CEO.
The effort had to overcome heightened skepticism in some communities. Many Black voters preferred to exercise their franchise in person or didnât trust the mail. National civil rights groups worked with local organizations to get the word out that this was the best way to ensure oneâs vote was counted. In Philadelphia, for example, advocates distributed âvoting safety kitsâ containing masks, hand sanitizer and informational brochures. âWe had to get the message out that this is safe, reliable, and you can trust it,â says Hannah Fried of All Voting Is Local.
At the same time, Democratic lawyers battled a historic tide of pre-election litigation. The pandemic intensified the partiesâ usual tangling in the courts. But the lawyers noticed something else as well. âThe litigation brought by the Trump campaign, of a piece with the broader campaign to sow doubt about mail voting, was making novel claims and using theories no court has ever accepted,â says Wendy Weiser, a voting-rights expert at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU. âThey read more like lawsuits designed to send a message rather than achieve a legal outcome.â
In the end, nearly half the electorate cast ballots by mail in 2020, practically a revolution in how people vote. About a quarter voted early in person. Only a quarter of voters cast their ballots the traditional way: in person on Election Day.
THE DISINFORMATION DEFENSE
Bad actors spreading false information is nothing new. For decades, campaigns have grappled with everything from anonymous calls claiming the election has been rescheduled to fliers spreading nasty smears about candidatesâ families. But Trumpâs lies and conspiracy theories, the viral force of social media and the involvement of foreign meddlers made disinformation a broader, deeper threat to the 2020 vote.
Laura Quinn, a veteran progressive operative who co-founded Catalist, began studying this problem a few years ago. She piloted a nameless, secret project, which she has never before publicly discussed, that tracked disinformation online and tried to figure out how to combat it. One component was tracking dangerous lies that might otherwise spread unnoticed. Researchers then provided information to campaigners or the media to track down the sources and expose them.
The most important takeaway from Quinnâs research, however, was that engaging with toxic content only made it worse. âWhen you get attacked, the instinct is to push back, call it out, say, âThis isnât true,'â Quinn says. âBut the more engagement something gets, the more the platforms boost it. The algorithm reads that as, âOh, this is popular; people want more of it.'â
The solution, she concluded, was to pressure platforms to enforce their rules, both by removing content or accounts that spread disinformation and by more aggressively policing it in the first place. âThe platforms have policies against certain types of malign behavior, but they havenât been enforcing them,â she says.
Quinnâs research gave ammunition to advocates pushing social media platforms to take a harder line. In November 2019, Mark Zuckerberg invited nine civil rights leaders to dinner at his home, where they warned him about the danger of the election-related falsehoods that were already spreading unchecked. âIt took pushing, urging, conversations, brainstorming, all of that to get to a place where we ended up with more rigorous rules and enforcement,â says Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, who attended the dinner and also met with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and others. (Gupta has been nominated for Associate Attorney General by President Biden.) âIt was a struggle, but we got to the point where they understood the problem. Was it enough? Probably not. Was it later than we wanted? Yes. But it was really important, given the level of official disinformation, that they had those rules in place and were tagging things and taking them down.â
SPREADING THE WORD
Beyond battling bad information, there was a need to explain a rapidly changing election process. It was crucial for voters to understand that despite what Trump was saying, mail-in votes werenât susceptible to fraud and that it would be normal if some states werenât finished counting votes on election night.
Dick Gephardt, the Democratic former House leader turned high-powered lobbyist, spearheaded one coalition. âWe wanted to get a really bipartisan group of former elected officials, Cabinet secretaries, military leaders and so on, aimed mainly at messaging to the public but also speaking to local officialsâthe secretaries of state, attorneys general, governors who would be in the eye of the stormâto let them know we wanted to help,â says Gephardt, who worked his contacts in the private sector to put $20 million behind the effort.
Wamp, the former GOP Congressman, worked through the nonpartisan reform group Issue One to rally Republicans to the effort. âWe thought we should bring some bipartisan element of unity around what constitutes a free and fair election,â Wamp says. The 22 Democrats and 22 Republicans on the National Council on Election Integrity met on Zoom at least once a week. They ran ads in six states, made statements, wrote articles and alerted local officials to potential problems. âWe had rabid Trump supporters who agreed to serve on the council based on the idea that this is honest,â Wamp says. This is going to be just as important, he told them, to convince the liberals when Trump wins. âWhichever way it cuts, weâre going to stick together.â
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. Protect Democracyâs election task force issued reports and held media briefings with high-profile experts across the political spectrum, resulting in widespread coverage of potential election issues and fact-checking of Trumpâs false claims. The organizationâs tracking polls found the message was being heard: the percentage of the public that didnât expect to know the winner on election night gradually rose until by late October, it was over 70%.
A majority also believed that a prolonged count wasnât a sign of problems. âWe knew exactly what Trump was going to do: he was going to try to use the fact that Democrats voted by mail and Republicans voted in person to make it look like he was ahead, claim victory, say the mail-in votes were fraudulent and try to get them thrown out,â says Protect Democracyâs Bassin. Setting public expectations ahead of time helped undercut those lies.
Amber McReynolds, Zach Wamp and Maurice Mitchell Rachel Woolf for TIME; Erik SchelzigâAP/Shutterstock; Holly PickettâThe New York Times/Redux
The alliance took a common set of themes from the research Shenker-Osorio presented at Podhorzerâs Zooms. Studies have shown that when people donât think their vote will count or fear casting it will be a hassle, theyâre far less likely to participate. Throughout election season, members of Podhorzerâs group minimized incidents of voter intimidation and tamped down rising liberal hysteria about Trumpâs expected refusal to concede. They didnât want to amplify false claims by engaging them, or put people off voting by suggesting a rigged game. âWhen you say, âThese claims of fraud are spurious,â what people hear is âfraud,'â Shenker-Osorio says. âWhat we saw in our pre-election research was that anything that reaffirmed Trumpâs power or cast him as an authoritarian diminished peopleâs desire to vote.â
Podhorzer, meanwhile, was warning everyone he knew that polls were underestimating Trumpâs support. The data he shared with media organizations who would be calling the election was âtremendously usefulâ to understand what was happening as the votes rolled in, according to a member of a major networkâs political unit who spoke with Podhorzer before Election Day. Most analysts had recognized there would be a âblue shiftâ in key battlegroundsâ the surge of votes breaking toward Democrats, driven by tallies of mail-in ballotsâ but they hadnât comprehended how much better Trump was likely to do on Election Day. âBeing able to document how big the absentee wave would be and the variance by state was essential,â the analyst says.
PEOPLE POWER
The racial-justice uprising sparked by George Floydâs killing in May was not primarily a political movement. The organizers who helped lead it wanted to harness its momentum for the election without allowing it to be co-opted by politicians. Many of those organizers were part of Podhorzerâs 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.
The best way to ensure peopleâs voices were heard, they decided, was to protect their ability to vote. âWe started thinking about a program that would complement the traditional election-protection area but also didnât rely on calling the police,â says Nelini Stamp, the Working Families Partyâs national organizing director. They created a force of âelection defendersâ who, unlike traditional poll watchers, were trained in de-escalation techniques. During early voting and on Election Day, they surrounded lines of voters in urban areas with a âjoy to the pollsâ effort that turned the act of casting a ballot into a street party. Black organizers also recruited thousands of poll workers to ensure polling places would stay open in their communities.
The summer uprising had shown that people power could have a massive impact. Activists began preparing to reprise the demonstrations if Trump tried to steal the election. âAmericans plan widespread protests if Trump interferes with election,â Reuters reported in October, one of many such stories. More than 150 liberal groups, from the Womenâs March to the Sierra Club to Color of Change, from Democrats.com to the Democratic Socialists of America, joined the âProtect the Resultsâ coalition. The groupâs now defunct website had a map listing 400 planned postelection demonstrations, to be activated via text message as soon as Nov. 4. To stop the coup they feared, the left was ready to flood the streets.
STRANGE BEDFELLOWS
About a week before Election Day, Podhorzer received an unexpected message: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce wanted to talk.
The AFL-CIO and the Chamber have a long history of antagonism. Though neither organization is explicitly partisan, the influential business lobby has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Republican campaigns, just as the nationâs unions funnel hundreds of millions to Democrats. On one side is labor, on the other management, locked in an eternal struggle for power and resources.
But behind the scenes, the business community was engaged in its own anxious discussions about how the election and its aftermath might unfold. The summerâs racial-justice protests had sent a signal to business owners too: the potential for economy-disrupting civil disorder. âWith tensions running high, there was a lot of concern about unrest around the election, or a breakdown in our normal way we handle contentious elections,â says Neil Bradley, the Chamberâs executive vice president and chief policy officer. These worries had led the Chamber to release a pre-election statement with the Business Roundtable, a Washington-based CEOsâ group, as well as associations of manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers, calling for patience and confidence as votes were counted.
But Bradley wanted to send a broader, more bipartisan message. He reached out to Podhorzer, through an intermediary both men declined to name. Agreeing that their unlikely alliance would be powerful, they began to discuss a joint statement pledging their organizationsâ shared commitment to a fair and peaceful election. They chose their words carefully and scheduled the statementâs release for maximum impact. As it was being finalized, Christian leaders signaled their interest in joining, further broadening its reach.
The statement was released on Election Day, under the names of Chamber CEO Thomas Donohue, AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka, and the heads of the National Association of Evangelicals and the National African American Clergy Network. âIt is imperative that election officials be given the space and time to count every vote in accordance with applicable laws,â it stated. âWe call on the media, the candidates and the American people to exercise patience with the process and trust in our system, even if it requires more time than usual.â The groups added, âAlthough we may not always agree on desired outcomes up and down the ballot, we are united in our call for the American democratic process to proceed without violence, intimidation or any other tactic that makes us weaker as a nation.â
SHOWING UP, STANDING DOWN
Election night began with many Democrats despairing. Trump was running ahead of pre-election polling, winning Florida, Ohio and Texas easily and keeping Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania too close to call. But Podhorzer was unperturbed when I spoke to him that night: the returns were exactly in line with his modeling. He had been warning for weeks that Trump votersâ turnout was surging. As the numbers dribbled out, he could tell that as long as all the votes were counted, Trump would lose.
The liberal alliance gathered for an 11 p.m. Zoom call. Hundreds joined; many were freaking out. âIt was really important for me and the team in that moment to help ground people in what we had already known was true,â says Angela Peoples, director for the Democracy Defense Coalition. Podhorzer presented data to show the group that victory was in hand.
While he was talking, Fox News surprised everyone by calling Arizona for Biden. The public-awareness campaign had worked: TV anchors were bending over backward to counsel caution and frame the vote count accurately. The question then became what to do next.
The conversation that followed was a difficult one, led by the activists charged with the protest strategy. âWe wanted to be mindful of when was the right time to call for moving masses of people into the street,â Peoples says. As much as they were eager to mount a show of strength, mobilizing immediately could backfire and put people at risk. Protests that devolved into violent clashes would give Trump a pretext to send in federal agents or troops as he had over the summer. And rather than elevate Trumpâs complaints by continuing to fight him, the alliance wanted to send the message that the people had spoken.
So the word went out: stand down. Protect the Results announced that it would ânot be activating the entire national mobilization network today, but remains ready to activate if necessary.â On Twitter, outraged progressives wondered what was going on. Why wasnât anyone trying to stop Trumpâs coup? Where were all the protests?
Podhorzer credits the activists for their restraint. âThey had spent so much time getting ready to hit the streets on Wednesday. But they did it,â he says. âWednesday through Friday, there was not a single Antifa vs. Proud Boys incident like everyone was expecting. And when that didnât materialize, I donât think the Trump campaign had a backup plan.â
Activists reoriented the Protect the Results protests toward a weekend of celebration. âCounter their disinfo with our confidence & get ready to celebrate,â read the messaging guidance Shenker-Osorio presented to the liberal alliance on Friday, Nov. 6. âDeclare and fortify our win. Vibe: confident, forward-looking, unifiedâNOT passive, anxious.â The voters, not the candidates, would be the protagonists of the story.
The planned day of celebration happened to coincide with the election being called on Nov. 7. Activists dancing in the streets of Philadelphia blasted BeyoncĂ© over an attempted Trump campaign press conference; the Trumpersâ next confab was scheduled for Four Seasons Total Landscaping outside the city center, which activists believe was not a coincidence. âThe people of Philadelphia owned the streets of Philadelphia,â crows the Working Families Partyâs Mitchell. âWe made them look ridiculous by contrasting our joyous celebration of democracy with their clown show.â
The votes had been counted. Trump had lost. But the battle wasnât over.
THE FIVE STEPS TO VICTORY
In Podhorzerâs presentations, winning the vote was only the first step to winning the election. After that came winning the count, winning the certification, winning the Electoral College and winning the transitionâsteps that are normally formalities but that he knew Trump would see as opportunities for disruption. Nowhere would that be more evident than in Michigan, where Trumpâs pressure on local Republicans came perilously close to workingâand where liberal and conservative pro-democracy forces joined to counter it.
It was around 10 p.m. on election night in Detroit when a flurry of texts lit up the phone of Art Reyes III. A busload of Republican election observers had arrived at the TCF Center, where votes were being tallied. They were crowding the vote-counting tables, refusing to wear masks, heckling the mostly Black workers. Reyes, a Flint native who leads We the People Michigan, was expecting this. For months, conservative groups had been sowing suspicion about urban vote fraud. âThe language was, âTheyâre going to steal the election; there will be fraud in Detroit,â long before any vote was cast,â Reyes says.
Trump supporters seek to disrupt the vote count at Detroitâs TCF Center on Nov. 4 Elaine CromieâGetty Images
He made his way to the arena and sent word to his network. Within 45 minutes, dozens of reinforcements had arrived. As they entered the arena to provide a counterweight to the GOP observers inside, Reyes took down their cell-phone numbers and added them to a massive text chain. Racial-justice activists from Detroit Will Breathe worked alongside suburban women from Fems for Dems and local elected officials. Reyes left at 3 a.m., handing the text chain over to a disability activist.
As they mapped out the steps in the election-certification process, activists settled on a strategy of foregrounding the peopleâs right to decide, demanding their voices be heard and calling attention to the racial implications of disenfranchising Black Detroiters. They flooded the Wayne County canvassing boardâs Nov. 17 certification meeting with on-message testimony; despite a Trump tweet, the Republican board members certified Detroitâs votes.
Election boards were one pressure point; another was GOP-controlled legislatures, who Trump believed could declare the election void and appoint their own electors. And so the President invited the GOP leaders of the Michigan legislature, House Speaker Lee Chatfield and Senate majority leader Mike Shirkey, to Washington on Nov. 20.
It was a perilous moment. If Chatfield and Shirkey agreed to do Trumpâs bidding, Republicans in other states might be similarly bullied. âI was concerned things were going to get weird,â says Jeff Timmer, a former Michigan GOP executive director turned anti-Trump activist. Norm Eisen describes it as âthe scariest momentâ of the entire election.
The democracy defenders launched a full-court press. Protect Democracyâs local contacts researched the lawmakersâ personal and political motives. Issue One ran television ads in Lansing. The Chamberâs Bradley kept close tabs on the process. Wamp, the former Republican Congressman, called his former colleague Mike Rogers, who wrote an op-ed for the Detroit newspapers urging officials to honor the will of the voters. Three former Michigan governorsâRepublicans John Engler and Rick Snyder and Democrat Jennifer Granholmâjointly called for Michiganâs electoral votes to be cast free of pressure from the White House. Engler, a former head of the Business Roundtable, made phone calls to influential donors and fellow GOP elder statesmen who could press the lawmakers privately.
The pro-democracy forces were up against a Trumpified Michigan GOP controlled by allies of Ronna McDaniel, the Republican National Committee chair, and Betsy DeVos, the former Education Secretary and a member of a billionaire family of GOP donors. On a call with his team on Nov. 18, Bassin vented that his sideâs pressure was no match for what Trump could offer. âOf course heâs going to try to offer them something,â Bassin recalls thinking. âHead of the Space Force! Ambassador to wherever! We canât compete with that by offering carrots. We need a stick.â
If Trump were to offer something in exchange for a personal favor, that would likely constitute bribery, Bassin reasoned. He phoned Richard Primus, a law professor at the University of Michigan, to see if Primus agreed and would make the argument publicly. Primus said he thought the meeting itself was inappropriate, and got to work on an op-ed for Politico warning that the state attorney generalâa Democratâwould have no choice but to investigate. When the piece posted on Nov. 19, the attorney generalâs communications director tweeted it. Protect Democracy soon got word that the lawmakers planned to bring lawyers to the meeting with Trump the next day.
Reyesâ activists scanned flight schedules and flocked to the airports on both ends of Shirkeyâs journey to D.C., to underscore that the lawmakers were being scrutinized. After the meeting, the pair announced theyâd pressed the President to deliver COVID relief for their constituents and informed him they saw no role in the election process. Then they went for a drink at the Trump hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue. A street artist projected their images onto the outside of the building along with the words THE WORLD IS WATCHING.
That left one last step: the state canvassing board, made up of two Democrats and two Republicans. One Republican, a Trumper employed by the DeVos familyâs political nonprofit, was not expected to vote for certification. The other Republican on the board was a little-known lawyer named Aaron Van Langevelde. He sent no signals about what he planned to do, leaving everyone on edge.
When the meeting began, Reyesâs activists flooded the livestream and filled Twitter with their hashtag, #alleyesonmi. A board accustomed to attendance in the single digits suddenly faced an audience of thousands. In hours of testimony, the activists emphasized their message of respecting votersâ wishes and affirming democracy rather than scolding the officials. Van Langevelde quickly signaled he would follow precedent. The vote was 3-0 to certify; the other Republican abstained.
After that, the dominoes fell. Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and the rest of the states certified their electors. Republican officials in Arizona and Georgia stood up to Trumpâs bullying. And the Electoral College voted on schedule on Dec. 14.
HOW CLOSE WE CAME
There was one last milestone on Podhorzerâs mind: Jan. 6. On the day Congress would meet to tally the electoral count, Trump summoned his supporters to D.C. for a rally.
Much to their surprise, the thousands who answered his call were met by virtually no counterdemonstrators. To preserve safety and ensure they couldnât be blamed for any mayhem, the activist left was âstrenuously discouraging counter activity,â Podhorzer texted me the morning of Jan. 6, with a crossed-fingers emoji.Incited by the President, Trump Supporters Violently Storm the Capitol
Trump addressed the crowd that afternoon, peddling the lie that lawmakers or Vice President Mike Pence could reject statesâ electoral votes. He told them to go to the Capitol and âfight like hell.â Then he returned to the White House as they sacked the building. As lawmakers fled for their lives and his own supporters were shot and trampled, Trump praised the rioters as âvery special.â
It was his final attack on democracy, and once again, it failed. By standing down, the democracy campaigners outfoxed their foes. âWe won by the skin of our teeth, honestly, and thatâs an important point for folks to sit with,â says the Democracy Defense Coalitionâs Peoples. âThereâs an impulse for some to say voters decided and democracy won. But itâs a mistake to think that this election cycle was a show of strength for democracy. It shows how vulnerable democracy is.â
The members of the alliance to protect the election have gone their separate ways. The Democracy Defense Coalition has been disbanded, though the Fight Back Table lives on. Protect Democracy and the good-government advocates have turned their attention to pressing reforms in Congress. Left-wing activists are pressuring the newly empowered Democrats to remember the voters who put them there, while civil rights groups are on guard against further attacks on voting. Business leaders denounced the Jan. 6 attack, and some say they will no longer donate to lawmakers who refused to certify Bidenâs victory. Podhorzer and his allies are still holding their Zoom strategy sessions, gauging votersâ views and developing new messages. And Trump is in Florida, facing his second impeachment, deprived of the Twitter and Facebook accounts he used to push the nation to its breaking point.
As I was reporting this article in November and December, I heard different claims about who should get the credit for thwarting Trumpâs plot. Liberals argued the role of bottom-up people power shouldnât be overlooked, particularly the contributions of people of color and local grassroots activists. Others stressed the heroism of GOP officials like Van Langevelde and Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, who stood up to Trump at considerable cost. The truth is that neither likely could have succeeded without the other. âItâs astounding how close we came, how fragile all this really is,â says Timmer, the former Michigan GOP executive director. âItâs like when Wile E. Coyote runs off the cliffâif you donât look down, you donât fall. Our democracy only survives if we all believe and donât look down.â
Democracy won in the end. The will of the people prevailed. But itâs crazy, in retrospect, that this is what it took to put on an election in the United States of America.
âWith reporting by LESLIE DICKSTEIN, MARIAH ESPADA and SIMMONE SHAH
Correction appended, Feb. 5: The original version of this story misstated the name of Norm Eisenâs organization. It is the Voter Protection Program, not the Voter Protection Project. The original version of this story also misstated Jeff Timmerâs former position with the Michigan Republican Party. He was the executive director, not the chairman.
This appears in the February 15, 2021 issue of TIME.
Time: Valget var rigget av en «kabal av mektige mennesker»
Av: Hans Rustad  6. februar 2021, 08:01
Time magazine publiserte fredag en artikkel som i detalj forteller hvordan valget i USA ble rigget av «en mektig kabal av mektige mennesker som spant pÄ tvers av bransjer og ideologier som arbeidet sammen i kulissene for Ä influere opinionen, forandre regler og lover, styre mediedekningen og kontrollere informasjonsflyten».
Motivet for denne sammensvergelsen var det beste: Det var for Ä styrke valget, ikke pÄvirke det, skriver Mary Ball. AktÞrene er stolte av det de gjorde og vil at Amerika skal vite om innsatsen, slik at de forstÄr hvor sÄrbart demokratiet er.
«They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it. And they believe the public needs to understand the systemâs fragility in order to ensure that democracy in America endures.»
InnrÞmmelsen av og blottstillingen av denne kabalen mÄ sies Ä vÊre det stÞrste selvmÄl i amerikansk historie. Det disse bakspillerne gjÞr, er Ä bekrefte det Trump og hans tilhengere har sagt hele tiden, og som 39 prosent av velgerne tror: Valget var rigget. Det hjelper ikke Ä kalle det noe annet og pÄberope seg edle motiv. Skjulte krefter stjal valget, og de er sÄ fulle av seg selv at de tror de kan stÄ frem med det og bli hyllet.
Denne avslÞringen, siden den stÄr i Time, og ikke et Trump-vennlig medium, vil vÊre umulig Ä ignorere. Den vil rulle i lang tid, og den vil pÄvirke oppfatningen av Bidens presidentskap og utvide klÞften mellom den underlige alliansen mellom Corporate America og venstresiden.
Etter dette sitter Biden lĂžst i salen, og hans drastiske vedtak vil gjĂžre at han sitter enda lĂžsere. Det er ikke sikkert det blir noen Kamala-epoke.
Den som leser dette, vil uvegerlig se en sammenheng mellom kabalen og valgriggingen og den massive militÊre innsatsen og den varslede jakten pÄ «hvite ekstremister».
Kabalen frykter folkets reaksjon, men overreagerer i den grad at den utlÞser den reaksjonen den forsÞker Ä slÄ ned i fÞdselen.
Det er klassisk stupid oppfĂžrsel fra en elite uten kontakt med grasrota.
Hva kan skje? Alt kan skje. Med denne artikkelen har Time revet grunnen vekk under Biden. Han er en illegitim president. PÄ engelsk kalles det usurper, en som sitter urettmessig pÄ tronen. Paradoksalt/ironisk nok oppfÞrer Biden seg som en monark. Det er pÄpekt fÞr denne avslÞringen. NÄ kommer oppfÞrselen i et annet lys: Biden og hans team har dÄrlig tid. De mÄ endre USA fÞr det gÄr opp for velgerne hva som har skjedd.
Med denne avslĂžringen skal det bli langt vanskeligere for Biden Ă„ endre forfatningen, som Ă„ utvide hĂžyesterett eller gi delstatsstatus til Washington D.C. og Puerto Rico. Det vil bli oppfattet som statskupp,
Biden burde trĂ„ varsomt. Men det gjĂžr han ikke. Fredag fikk han spĂžrsmĂ„l om Trump kom til Ă„ fĂ„ etterretningsbriefinger, slik andre avgĂ„tte presidenter har fĂ„tt. â Jeg tror ikke dĂ©t er noen god ide. Man vet aldri hva han kan finne pĂ„ Ă„ si, svarte mannen som denne uken forvekslet 300 millioner med 300. To ganger.
Biden har begynt Ä oppfÞre seg som en hersker som legger seg ut med undersÄttene og viser dem forakt. Et eller annet sted finnes det en visshet om at han er en fraud, en blÞffmaker, og at han sitter i Det hvite hus takket vÊre svindel.
Kabal
Hvordan denne artikkelen er kommet pÄ trykk, er et mysterium. Mary Ball skriver at pÄ en mÄte hadde Trump rett nÄr han sa valget var rigget. For det var en kabal bak scenen som rigget det hele, og de arbeidet systematisk over lang tid. Hun velger til og med Ä bruke ordet konspirasjon:
«In a way, Trump was right,» Ball wrote. «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 â inspired by the summerâs massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protests â in which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trumpâs assault on democracy.»
Mediene er sÄ blindet av sitt eget Trump-hat at de tror de kan skrive at «fagforeningstopper og kapitaleiere gikk sammen om Ä opprettholde fred og motsette seg Trumps angrep pÄ demokratiet».
Hvem ga disse kreftene rett til Ă„ tilsidesette demokratiet?
Trump-hatende medier har forledet seg selv til Ä tro at det er Trump som tilsidesetter demokratiet. Men de pushet en Russland-konspirasjon i fire Är som viste seg Ä vÊre et falsum, skapt av Hillary og e-tjenestene. Trump sa han ble overvÄket. De lo ham ut. SÄ viste det seg at han ble overvÄket. De folkene som overvÄket ham, er nÄ tilbake ved makten. NÄ vil de overvÄke ikke bare Trump, men ogsÄ hans velgere.
Det er i et slikt perspektiv man mÄ forstÄ den febrilske riksrettssaken. Demokratene er hysteriske ved tanken pÄ at Trump kan stille til valg i 2024. De frykter folkets vrede. De vet at valget ble stjÄlet. De vet at de har bedratt velgerne.
Polariseringen i USA gÄr nÄ over i en ny fase. Den ene siden har innrÞmmet Ä ha lurt den andre.
Time har nettopp gitt Trump en megabombe.
Russia collusion viste seg Ä bygge pÄ en lÞgn, men den fikk ingen konsekvenser for dem som spredte den.
NÄ har de stjÄlet valget og skryter av det. Det kommer ikke til Ä bli godtatt av velgerne.
Ball forsÞker Ä ikle dem som hun med en dubiÞs betegnelse kaller shadow campaigners edle motiver: Det var ikke en Trump-seier de ville forhindre, men et kaotisk valg. Etter all volden i gatene var det en frykt for hva som ville skje ved en Trump-seier. Det var derfor en Trump-seier de ville avverge nÄr de ville avverge kaos.
«The scenario the shadow campaigners were desperate to stop was not a Trump victory,» Ballâs report later alleged. «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.
Dette trer enda tydeligere frem nÄr detaljene kommer pÄ bordet: Arbeidet med Ä pÄvirke valget begynte allerede i oktober 2019. FÞr George Floyd, fÞr covid-19.
«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. They executed national public-awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks, preventing Trumpâs conspiracy theories and false claims of victory from getting more traction. After Election Day, they monitored every pressure point to ensure that Trump could not overturn the result.»
«Arbeidet deres berÞrte alle aspekter av valget. De fikk stater til Ä endre stemmesystemer og lover og bidro til Ä sikre hundrevis av millioner i offentlig og privat finansiering. De avverget rettssaker mot undertrykkelse av stemmer, rekrutterte hÊrer av avstemningsarbeidere og fikk millioner av mennesker til stemme via post for fÞrste gang. De presset med suksess sosialemedieselskaper til Ä innta en hardere linje mot desinformasjon og brukte datadrevne strategier for Ä bekjempe viral negativ omtale. De gjennomfÞrte nasjonale kampanjer for offentlig bevissthet som hjalp amerikanerne til Ä forstÄ hvordan antall stemmer ville utspille seg over dager eller uker, og forhindret Trumps konspirasjonsteorier og falske pÄstander om seier i Ä fÄ mer trekkraft. Etter valgdagen overvÄket de hvert presspunkt for Ä sikre at Trump ikke kunne velte resultatet.»
Denne informasjonen stiller Twitter og Facebooks undertrykkelse av historien i New York Post om Hunter Bidens laptop i et annet lys: Sensuren kom ikke ut av det blÄ. Jack Dorsey og Mark Zuckerberg hadde en konspirasjon i ryggen. Laptop-storyen var likevel sÄ alvorlig at et femtitalls tidligere e-sjefer forfattet et opprop hvor de pÄsto at det trolig var russisk desinformasjon. SÄ mye sto pÄ spill at de var villig til Ä risikere sin profesjonelle prestisje. Den dype staten trÄdte frem pÄ scenen. Der hÞrer den ikke hjemme, og nÄr den viser seg Äpenlyst, mister den noe av sin makt.
Et eksempel pÄ dette er alle soldatene i Washington, hysteriet i Kongressen og e-sjefer og journalister som roper pÄ «jakt pÄ hvite ekstremister» pÄ samme mÄte som jihadister i MidtÞsten.
Det var den politiske lederen for den amerikanske fagbevegelsen, AFL-CIO, Mike Podhorez, som tok initiativet til kabalen. Podhorez tror de reddet demokratiet og vil gjerne hĂžste heder og ĂŠre.
Den konservative siden trodde ikke sine egne Ăžyne: Trump har hatt rett hele tiden.
«Dear God, did they just validate what Trump was saying the whole time??» asked journalist Andray Domise.
«So the election wasnât rigged. There was only a secret cabal of powerful elites and corporate interests that worked together to overhaul election laws, influence media coverage, and convince big tech to crush dissent,» The Daily Callerâs Greg Price concluded.
«Turns out many of Trumpâs «conspiracy theories» about how the countryâs most powerful forces conspired to remove him wereâŠtrue,» GOP strategist Blair Brandt tweeted.
JUKSET FOR Ă REDDE DEMOKRATIET - Av Rainer Prang
SĂ„ var jukset altsĂ„ sant allikevel:â
Det har vakt betydelig oppmerksomhet i USA at Time Magazine nylig presenterte hele konseptet for valgjukset, som fant sted i USA knyttet til presidentvalget den 3. november i fjor, hvem som samarbeidet og hvor lenge planleggingen har pÄgÄtt. Dette er sÄ s t o r t at det er nÊrmest ikke til Ä fatte.Time er et ukentlig amerikansk nyhetsmagasin. Det ble grunnlagt i 1923 og er verdens stÞrste ukentlige nyhetsmagasin med et opplag pÄ ca. 3 millioner (2015). Time-redaksjonen er erklÊrte Trump-hatere.
VEKKER OPPSIKTDet er artikkelen âThe Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Electionâ (se lenke) som vekker den enorme oppmerksomheten, uro, sinne og hat i USA, og den bare understreker det Donald Trump har sagt hele tiden, nemlig at "valget ble stjĂ„let fra oss".
Time: https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/
I artikkelen, som av mange kommentatorer oppfattes som et sjokkerende bevis for medienes absolutte presseetiske og moralske forfall, slÄs det ettertrykkelig fast at konspirasjonen mellom enorme pengekrefter og den politiske venstresiden har pÄgÄtt over flere Är.Da inkluderer dette voldelige demonstrasjoner, spesielt i byer der demokrater har hatt styringen, negativ omtale i radio- og tv-kanaler av Trump, en flom av avisartikler med minusfortegn for Trump og lÞgner om ham, massive annonsekampanjer for Biden, endringer av staters valgregler som ga stÞrre muligheter for juks, pÄvirkning av domstolene, granskning, etterforskning, trakassering og fengsling av Trump-medarbeidere og alt dette med et eneste formÄl:"à redde presidentvalget og det amerikanske demokratiet".
Hvordan en slik artikkel kunne havne i Time er helt ufattelig, og den  bygger altsÄ fullt og helt opp under alle uttalelser om "Deep state-konspirasjon" og legg merke til: Artikkelen er ikke fjernet fra nettet (se lenke ovenfor) etter Ä ha ligget ute siden 4. februar.
DE FARLIGE MEDIENE
Du har trolig i likhet med meg blitt angrepet verbalt og skriftlig av folk pÄ din Facebookside eller andre steder, for at du stÞtter Trumps pÄstander om at valget var rigget. For egen del har jeg mÄttet fjerne mennesker/ blokkere folk, som jeg presumptivt trodde var mentalt friske fra Facebook, men som viste seg Ä vÊre sykelig forfÞrt av norske mediers pÄstander rundt Trump.Disse menneskene har ment at "litt valgjuks og avvik fra demokratiske prinsipper mÄ man tÄle for Ä bli kvitt rasisten Trump" osv. osv.Det er altsÄ ikke "litt avvik fra demokratiske spilleregler" Time beskriver. Det er et gjennomfÞrt komplott pÄ ekstremt mange nivÄer vi her fÄr oss presentert.
For meg er det blant annet helt ufattelig at tidligere borgerlige ordfÞrere i min hjemby, som selv har vÊrt forfulgt av hatefulle pÄstander og sverting i en lokal Arbeiderparti-avis og de lokale sosialistpartiene, og har mÞtt lÞgner pÄ nÊrt hold, sÄ til de grader har kunnet se bort i fra den sykt ekstreme omtalen Trump har fÄtt som privatperson, mens politikken han har fÞrt nÊr sagt ikke er nevnt i amerikanske og norske medier siden han ble valgt i 2016.Her i landet har Trump ligget som nr. 1, 2 eller 3 pÄ omtaletoppen i alle disse Ärene som president i tv, radio og aviser og i all hovedsak med negativ omtale.NÄr Time skriver denne historien er ikke dette forfattet over et par flasker rÞdvin hjemme pÄ pikevÊrelset til skribenten Molly Ball en sen nattetime, og det hele har plumpet ut ved et uhell.
Time "leker ikke redaksjon" og en sÄ kontroversiell sak som dette har selvfÞlgelig vÊrt underkastet redaksjonell vurdering fÞr den er publisert.Detaljene i Time-artikkelen er skremmende, og det blir ikke mindre skremmende at Molly Ball med en viss stolthet skriver at all konspirasjonen og alle lÞgnene "bare var for Ä hjelpe det amerikanske demokratiet" og "Ä unngÄ at det ble brÄk rundt valget, dersom Trump ble gjenvalgt."NÊrmere 75 millioner amerikanere stemte pÄ Trump, og de har et langt stykke pÄ vei klart Ä holde seg i skinnet etter valgnederlaget. SÄ er det altsÄ venstresiden, BLM, Antifa, Demokratene og alle kapitalistene i megastÞrrelse i USA Molly Ball frykter skulle gÄ bananas og mer enn det, dersom Trump ble gjenvalgt.
Har du hÞrt, sett eller lest sÊrlig mye om dette hos NRK, Aftenposten, VG, Dagbladet eller noe fra Fredrik GrÊsvik i TV2 om Time-artikkelen?Nei, norske medier har i likhet med amerikanske MSM-medier kastet all troverdighet overbord, og hvis du innbiller deg at dette kun dreier seg om Trump og USA tar du skammelig feil, for dette pÄgÄr hver eneste dag innpakket som "happy go lucky-saker" om klima og behovet for "grÞnn industri" og ikke minst alle de indoktrinerende og belÊrende sakene om hvor godt det gÄr med innvandrere og integrering her i landet, som i all hovedsak er ren lÞgn.
Jeg kan aldri fÄ sagt dette mange nok ganger, og etter Ä ha finlest artikkelen i Time og fÄtt pÄfyll via Document.no, sÄ gjenstÄr det bare Ä si atter en gang:For Ä fÄ et stabilt og ryddig Norge mÄ vi kvitte oss med de finansieringsordningene som holder liv i NRK, TV2 og avisene via din og min skatteseddel. Den absolutt eneste mÄten Ä fÄ ryddet opp i dette pÄ er Ä velge helt andre politikere inn pÄ Stortinget kommende hÞst, som vil fjerne disse ordningene og dermed bidra til at vi sitter tilbake med en presse som i kraft av Ä selge oss etterrettelighet og sannhet overlever.
Og det aller viktigste vil vÊre at vi slipper Ä oppleve at venstresiden i politikken, sammen med sine fotsoldater i gatene og i mediene sammen med pengesterke folk vi vet har globaliserings-syndromet i blikket, rotte seg sammen mot det samfunnet vi har vÊrt stolte av Ä ha til nÄ.
COPYRIGHTS
Copy & Paste the link above for Yandex translation to Norwegian.
WHO and WHAT is behind it all ? : >
The bottom line is for the people to regain their original, moral principles, which have intentionally been watered out over the past generations by our press, TV, and other media owned by the Illuminati/Bilderberger Group, corrupting our morals by making misbehavior acceptable to our society. Only in this way shall we conquer this oncoming wave of evil.
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