Tuesday, July 23, 2024

The USA had a color revolution after all

(Another article from the Vault, originally written for RT on February 5, 2021, shortly after TIME published its infamous "fortification" piece explaining how 2020 happened. Reposting here for the "I told you so.")

There WAS a color revolution in the US after all – and its architects now BOAST of how they ‘fortified’ the 2020 election

The 2020 US presidential elections wasn’t “rigged,” oh no, but “fortified” by a conspiracy of activists united in saving “Our Democracy” from the Bad Orange Man, now proud to share their story in a friendly tell-all piece in TIME.

“There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes,” writes Molly Ball – a biographer of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, by the way – in TIME magazine this week, describing it as a “vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election – an extraordinary shadow effort.”

Ball’s article reveals a lot, from why there were no street riots by Democrats either on November 4 or on January 6 – the organizers of this “conspiracy” stopped them – to who was behind the push to alter election rules in key states and set up mail-in voting, who organized “information” campaigns about the results of the election, and who even threatened election officials into making the “right” decision to certify the vote.

While everyone – myself included – was focused on the summer riots as a possible “color revolution,” they turned out to be misdirection. According to TIME, the real action was taking place behind the scenes, as Democrat activists and unions joined forces with NeverTrump Republicans, Chamber of Commerce, corporations, and Big Tech to make sure the 2020 election turns out the way they wanted. They call this a victory of democracy and the will of the people, of course, for no one is ever a villain in their own story.

“Their work touched every aspect of the election,” Ball writes, from getting states to “change voting system laws” and fending off “voter-suppression lawsuits,” to recruiting “armies” of poll workers and pressuring social media companies to “take a harder line against disinformation.” Then, after Election Day, “they monitored every pressure point to ensure that Trump could not overturn the result.” 

Alarmed yet? Maybe you should be.

So who are these shadowy saviors of Our Democracy? One of them is union organizer Mike Podhorzer of AFL-CIO, a traditional Democrat powerhouse. Another is Ian Bassin, associate White House counsel in Barack Obama’s first administration. The roster of his “nonpartisan, rule-of-law” outfit called Protect Democracy includes a lot of Obama lawyers, a John McCain campaign aide, an editor from the defunct neocon Weekly Standard, and someone from SPLC, while among their advisers is the NeverTrump failed presidential candidate and ex-CIA spy Evan McMullin.

Bear that in mind when you read Bassin’s quote that “Every attempt to interfere with the proper outcome of the election was defeated,” (emphasis added) 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.” Chilling words.

A leading member of this effort is Norm Eisen, another White House counsel under Obama. The pro-Trump Revolver News even raised the alarm about Eisen plotting a “color revolution” in September – but by then it was too late, even if anyone had been paying attention.

By then, the National Vote at Home Institute – an organization barely two years old, and part of the effort – had already instructed secretaries of state across the US with “technical advice on everything from which vendors to use to how to locate drop boxes,” and even provided them “communications tool kits,” i.e. talking points.

In November 2019 – a full year before the election! – Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg hosted “nine civil rights leaders” for dinner, one of whom was Vanita Gupta, Obama’s assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. It was part of this shadowy coalition’s campaign for “more rigorous rules and enforcement” on social media platforms – just in case you were wondering how Trump ended up deplatformed, or the New York Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s laptop got suppressed before the election.

Ironically, as part of their pressure on Big Tech, Democrats had whipped up a moral panic about super-targeted “Russian” internet memes that somehow “influenced” the 2016 election – yet Ball’s article says that two groups involved with the conspiracy “created state-specific memes and graphics, spread by email, text, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, urging that every vote be counted.”

Podhorzer’s messaging efforts were informed by Anat Shenker-Osorio, who “applies tools from cognitive science and linguistics in her work with progressive organizations globally,” according to her 2018 fellowship bio from George Soros’s Open Society Foundation.

Though Ball doesn’t mention it specifically, those Twitter and Facebook “pre-bunking” labels about safety of mail-in ballots and the winner not being known on Election Day are also the activists’ talking points.

Remember how Republican observers were thrown out of the ballot-counting facility in Detroit? Reports at the time said it was because of overcrowding, but the Time article reveals that a Democrat activist mobilized “dozens of reinforcements” to “provide a counterweight” to them, so eventually “racial-justice activists from Detroit Will Breathe worked alongside suburban women from Fems for Dems and local elected officials.” It was activists who came up with a strategy of denouncing any challenge to Detroit vote counts as racist, too.

When President Donald Trump asked Michigan’s Republican-majority legislators to challenge the results, Eisen called it “the scariest moment” of the election, and the “democracy defenders” sprung into action.

Eisen’s lawyers dug up dirt on the two lawmakers invited to Washington, activists hounded them at airports, NeverTrump Republicans made calls to party friends, and Bassin’s outfit commissioned an op-ed threatening criminal charges by Michigan’s Democrat AG – whose office then retweeted it. The two were even picketed at the Trump Hotel in DC. The brigading eventually worked, as Michigan Republicans agreed to certify the elections – and other contested states followed.

Perhaps the most intriguing part is buried towards the end. Ball reveals that she got a text from Podhorzer – the AFL-CIO organizer – on the morning of January 6, hours before what the Democrats would describe as “insurrection” by Trump supporters at the US Capitol, saying that the activist left” was “strenuously discouraging counter activity” in order to “preserve safety and ensure they couldn’t be blamed for any mayhem.”

How did Podhorzer know there would be “mayhem,” hours before the “storming” of the Capitol that Democrats claim Trump “incited” at the rally outside the White House at noon? It’s a mystery.

What’s not a mystery is the result of the “conspiracy” Ball has revealed: a de facto one-party state in which Democrats hold absolute power at every level of government and seek to prosecute dissent and disenfranchise the opposition.

Last month, with no inkling of the behind-the-scenes operation just revealed in Time, I wrote of a non-kinetic “fifth-generation” civil war that had unfolded as “a battle for hearts and minds, a series of psychological operations that played out on the media, political and economic fronts.” I argued it had successfully swapped the American Republic for something called “Our Democracy,” which maintains the form but has a radically different content.

One of the “heroes” of Ball’s piece, NeverTrump Republican Jeff Timmer, has a quote in the article about how “Our democracy only survives if we all believe and don’t look down,” referring to the cartoon character Wile E. Coyote.

It’s an interesting admission, as the coyote is the villain of those cartoons – and the one actually immune to the effects of gravity is the roadrunner bird. But you’re not supposed to notice this – and besides, in Our Democracy, noticing will soon be a crime.

Monday, July 22, 2024

USA: From Republic to 'Our Democracy'

(This article was originally published on January 14, 2021, on a website since blocked in many jurisdictions of the Globalist American Empire. I'm reposting it in light of the current Emperor declaring he would abdicate in favor of his Grand Vizieress.) 


Fears that the current political situation in the US could spiral into a civil war are off the mark, because that war has already been fought – and the Democrats won. What’s playing out before our eyes now is the aftermath.

Just look at the glamour photos of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California), reviewing the National Guard troops at the Capitol on Wednesday. Does she look scared for her life – as the congressional Democrats have claimed in the aftermath of the “insurrection” last week – or like a leader of the winning faction relishing her triumph?

In voting to impeach President Donald Trump on Wednesday – even though he has but a week left of his term – the Democrats invoked the same language used to outlaw the defeated Confederates in 1865, insisting that those who engaged in “insurrection” and “rebellion” should be barred from public office forever. This doesn’t mean just Trump, but everyone who ever supported him, too.

This rhetoric makes zero sense coming from a political party that supposedly seeks to unite the country, cool the partisan passions and peacefully transfer power. Coming from the winners of a war, however, it’s a whole different story.

Meanwhile, the Republicans who opposed the impeachment – aside from the 10 members of the Liz Cheney caucus, who defected to the Democrats – kept invoking Lincoln, all about “malice towards none” and “charity for all.” Supposedly a plea for unity, it sounds unmistakably as a plea for mercy from the vanquished.

As to what kind of mercy the conquered can expect, it’s more likely to resemble that of Genghis Khan than of Lincoln. The Mongol conqueror was invoked by none other than Barack Obama, in another sycophantic Atlantic interview back in November. It seemed puzzling at the time, but obvious in retrospect: Obama knew there was a war on.

Instead of physical battlefields, this conflict took place in the narrative space. Violent “but mostly peaceful” protests are the closest it came to the ‘kinetic’ level. Mostly it was a battle for hearts and minds, a series of psychological operations that played out on the media, political and economic fronts, with the general population – and arguably, the Republicans – none the wiser until it was all over. Call it a ‘fifth generation’ (5G) battle, where the objective is to defeat the enemy before they even pick up a gun, convinced that the age of civil wars is over.

The starting point may have been the summer of 2016, when Hillary Clinton commissioned the ‘Steele Dossier’ to accuse Trump of “collusion” with Russia – and blame Moscow for the DNC’s dirty laundry getting aired all over the internet. While it failed to get Clinton elected or prevent Trump from taking office, it opened a battlefront that eventually delivered results.

‘Russiagate’ was used to spy on Trump’s campaign, through the fraudulent FISA warrants against Carter Page. It also served to throw the White House off balance, by ousting General Michael Flynn, and get the Mueller probe launched on behalf of fired FBI director Jim Comey. It was allowed to fizzle out only after the 2018 midterms delivered the House to Pelosi.

Determined to impeach Trump over something, the Democrats then latched on to the Ukraine phone call. That plan, too, hit a snag when only Mitt Romney turned out in the Senate to greet them as liberators. No matter. Within weeks, a novel respiratory virus that emerged in China would present a new opportunity. “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” as Barack Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel once proudly said.

Trump was blamed for both opposing the coronavirus lockdowns and the economic hardship inflicted by them, at the same time. Every single American death was somehow his fault, while governors who sent the infected into nursing homes and killed thousands were celebrated as heroes – so long as they were Democrats. Another hot summer of racial grievances, a replay of 2016, was used to endlessly repeat the tropes painting Trump as a racist, fascist, Nazi dictator.

There was one more thing Russiagate was used for – to neutralize social media, censoring legions of Trump supporters (and in the end, Trump himself) under the guise of fighting “Russian bots” and “misinformation.” In 2016, Trump had been able to leverage the platforms to bypass the mainstream media gatekeepers and communicate with millions of Americans directly. So the Democrats moved to deny him that – and Silicon Valley, already sympathetic to them politically, eagerly delivered.

By the time the New York Post was censored over the Hunter Biden laptop story – openly, brazenly, and without any fallout – the situation on that front should have been obvious. Both social and legacy media had declared, by fiat, that new rules for mass mail-in ballots were “safe and secure” and anyone saying otherwise was a “denier.” Trump and the Republicans protested this was unfair, but did nothing, still believing they were dealing with a political process within the system operating under the old rules.

With their total control of the media, it was trivially easy for the engineers of global ‘color revolutions’ to derail and spin a ‘people power’ event like Trump’s January 6 rally and present it as another Fort Sumter – or better yet, Pearl Harbor. Because, as you might have guessed by now, they believe what happens doesn’t matter, only the narrative they create about it.

The Capitol unrest was way too disorganized to be a coup d’état, but narrative management turned it into a coup de main. And though the Republican Party and Trump himself surrendered in its aftermath, the “impeachment” is supposed to be the coup de grace.

You may complain that it does little to unify the country, or calm the concerns of half the population. They don’t care. They believe might makes right and act as if they just fought and won a war, not against fellow Americans but a group totally illegitimate and irredeemable. Deplorable, if you will.

There is an odd phrase that Democrats and their media allies have used a lot over the past few years: “our democracy.” It’s never explained or defined, but has simply become a stand-in for the United States of America. On paper, the US remains a constitutional republic – just like on the surface, there never was a war. Yet there is no more talk about the Republic, only “Our Democracy,” the same way the US went from plural to singular after 1865.

History never actually repeats itself, but sometimes it does rhyme.