‘Time’ Returns to the Scene of the Crime

Many scammers have been done in because they couldn’t resist boasting. In regard  to Joe Biden’s dubious but now officially endorsed ‘victory’ in November’s US presidential election, this time the boasting takes the form of a giant, 7000-words piece in Time magazine, an impeccably progressive and anti-Trump journal.

Its scoop is headed, The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election, with the chief byline belonging to reporter Molly Ball, who was backed by a team of junior scribblers. Over months they sleuthed out the names and modus operandi of powerful cabals that conspired to ensure that Trump would not, could not, win. From Time’s point of view, the conspirators “saved democracy” from Trump. The participants are heroes, in the fading news magazine’s view, with Ms Ball laying out chapter and verse how the assault on a democratic election was planned, mounted and succeeded.

“They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it,” Time claims, playing semantic games while rewarding the conspirators with attention and, albeit unintentionally, exposing their methods and alliances.

An ominous conclusion — passed off by Time as a good thing —  is that since these cabals succeeded while Trump was in power, their own power will be enormously magnified under the aegis of the Biden presidency. One can be certain America’s “fortified” future elections will be welcomed with official endorsement and all the resources, overt and covert, that the Democrat ruling establishment and “the swamp”can muster.

Ironies abound. Trumpers have been relentlessly mocked for conspiratorial thinking. But Time doesn’t just admit the existence of such a conspiracy, it gloatingly reveals how its architects and participants made sure he could not carry the day on November 3. All this was perfectly justified, according to Time, because Trump was an incipient dictator preparing to launch “an assault on democracy”. As it sings hosannas with the Left choir, the magazine feels no need to provide  evidence for that assertion.

The conspiracy’s goal, in the report’s words, was to ensure that “every vote” was counted. At no point in the magnum opus does Time make the distinction between “every vote” and “every legal vote”.

The key conspiratorial strategy, according to Time, was to shift electors to mail-in voting. The rationale was that COVID-19 would make in-person voting a potentially lethal exercise. Those who are not quite so gullible as Time readers, nor so vainglorious as the magazine’s editors, would be aware that, just as in Australia but more so, those same future electors were thronging supermarkets and maybe even drinking in bars. But marking a ballot or pulling a lever was presented as recklessness. In the event, many tens of millions of Republican voters – maybe 70 million-plus – trooped to the voting stations and nothing I’ve read attributes any COVID super-spreading specifically to stepping into a polling booth. As a result of all that pro-Biden scheming, nearly half the electorate cast ballots by mail in 2020, “practically a revolution in how people vote,” says Time with smug approval. About a quarter voted early in person. Only a quarter of voters cast their ballots the traditional way: in person on Election Day.

Time once prided itself on the expertise of its fact-checkers but that was in its distant glory days. These days, wrangling important facts seems no longer to matter, so nary a mention of  mysterious wee hours “dumps” of tens of thousands (or more) ballots whose various tranches in different states produced miraculously high Biden majorities and did so without without exception — sometimes in the order of 90 per cent or more. Even more curious were turnout numbers in electoral districts that formerly recorded miserable numbers of participating voters; in one Milwaukee black enclave, for example, far more voters purportedly exercised their franchise for Biden than they did Obama.That should raise an eyebrow, but not at Time.

Then there was the counting, which saw the illegal expulsions of Republican scrutineers and synchronised halts to counting, after which avalanches of Biden votes suddenly boosted his running tallies. Many of the anomalies  are laid out at Joanne Nova’s blog, but just two examples give the flavor:

1/ Overhead security cameras at the voting station at State Farm Arena, Atlanta, show that officials got rid of observers on the pretext that counting was over for the night. Then these same officials began pulling out suitcase-sized containers of ballots from their hiding place under covered tables, ready to be added to the tally. The same security cameras also captured wads of those same ballots being run through the scanners time after time after time.

2/ In Pennsylvania, there were 200,000 more votes cast than people who actually voted. That, surely is a hallmark of fraud, but Time prefers to turn a blind eye.

Key points, drawn from Time‘s report, include

# The secret alliance of politicos, hundreds of corporate chieftains, and numerous Republican never-Trumpers “changed rules and laws”. Time does not explain why long-standing rules and laws suddenly needed to be changed.

# They “steered media coverage”

# They “controlled the flow of information” (such as by cutting Trump off from his 88 million Twitter followers).

# An important motivation for large corporations to support Biden was to avert leftist mayhem and arson against the business sector in the event of a Trump victory.

# “They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation [i.e. pro-Trump material] and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears.”

By ‘viral smears’, Time must be thinking of Hunter Biden’s laptop, with its references to kickbacks to “the Big Guy”, plus corrupt deals in Ukraine and with Chinese influence seekers representing CCP-controlled entities. As to those home videos of a naked First Son doing drugs and having sex with females of tender years, those were extensively explored and published only by Taiwan’s media, which no longer figures in Google search results. Need it be said that Google was an active participant in the conspiracy, or that Facebook donated  $300 million to hire, train and “educate” poll workers?

What, are we to surmise, is Time‘s definition of ‘a smear’? Apparently it translates as anything that reflects badly on Democrats.

Here’s another example of Time‘s spinning . See if you can spot the inconsistent logic:

PEOPLE POWER: The racial-justice uprising sparked by George Floyd’s 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.

Along with fact-checkers, Time appears also to have dispensed with competent editors, for how can the BLM riots be “not primarily a political movement” when, in the very next sentence, organisers are said to have been intent on harnessing “its momentum for the election”?

Excerpts from the Time piece follow (emphases mine):

This is the inside story of the conspiracy to save the 2020 election, based on access to the group’s 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. “Every attempt to interfere with the proper outcome of the election was defeated,” says Ian Bassin, co-founder of Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan rule-of-law advocacy group. “But it’s massively important for the country to understand that it didn’t happen accidentally. The system didn’t work magically. Democracy is not self-executing.”

Rather than being merely underscored, this paragraph deserves to be bolded in full.

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….

…“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…

What Time minimises as “sometimes destructive” Black Lives Matter protests actually involved damage running to $US2 billion  and at least 25 deaths.

… 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 … 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 Trump’s 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.

Time puts trade union AFL-CIO apparatchik Mike Podhorzer at the apex as “The Architect” of the election-winning machinations.

Trump’s election in 2016–credited in part to his unusual strength among the sort of blue-collar white voters who once dominated the AFL-CIO–prompted Podhorzer to question his assumptions about voter behavior.

The article continues that Podhorzer was concerned that even if the blue-collars who lifted Trump to victory in 2016 failed to swing the 2020 election, Trump would seek to negate the Biden win by foul means. Apparently, like Time‘s redefinition of ‘smear’, a candidate complaining about fraud and petitioning the courts to intervene is nothing short of a scoundrel.

Time relates with admiration how vast corporate efforts and money went into “improving” state and local electoral governance. Once again spurning the grim details, Time neglects to mention that those alleged improvements were implemented not by state legislatures, as the law demands, but by appointed electoral boards with more than their share of party clubhouse hacks. When lawsuits were lodged with state supreme courts, most dominated by Democrats, as in Pennsylvania, they were refused hearings for “lack of standing”.

It turned out Podhorzer wasn’t the only one thinking in these terms. He began to hear from others eager to join forces. The Fight Back Table, a coalition of “resistance” organizations, had begun scenario-planning around the potential for a contested election … The chief difference between the U.S. and countries that lost their grip on democracy, [Podhorzer] concluded, was that America’s decentralized election system couldn’t be rigged in one fell swoop. That presented an opportunity to shore it up…

… 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…

…As 2020 progressed, it stretched to Congress, Silicon Valley and the nation’s statehouses. It drew energy from the summer’s 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.

Keep in mind that the entire Time article, of which there is much more other than what has been excerpted here, is written by and for Biden supporters. In parts, there is open bragging about undemocratic tactics and strategies, such as changing state and local voting laws and procedures at the last minute, with COVID-19 as the pretext. There is also much crowing about how the conspirators controlled the political information flow to voters to suppress pro-Trump news and social media items. This extended, incredibly, to muzzling the President himself by denying him access to his Twitter and Facebook. Time takes it for granted that the mainstream US media was complicit in that strategy. In Australia, that goes not just for the Nine media but the once-respected Australian, with its relentless anti-Trump coverage led by US correspondent Cameron Stewart, who found nothing untoward about Trump being gagged.

But what Time omits is the last piece in the jigsaw – how the mail-in votes were tampered with. Maybe when the players start boasting about that aspect of coup, we will learn from Time what went on.

(editor’s note: it is not Quadrant Online’s wish that readers visit porn sites, but the deeply curious can still find the videos Google deep-sixed by searching for ‘Hunter Biden Sex Tape smoking crack’. It is a sad day when pornographers do a better job of presenting evidence than the mainstream media.)

 Tony Thomas’s new book, Come To Think Of It – essays to tickle the brain, is available here as a book ($34.95) or an e-book ($14.95)