I used to be a true blue loyalist. My grandmother, an FDR Democrat, and lifelong social worker, kept a signed picture of Bill Clinton on her kitchen wall until the day she died. My earliest memory kicks it all the way back to 1988 when I wore a Dukakis button to work and was mocked for it. “Who would vote for du-Taxus,” one woman said.
Things were different then. Ronald Reagan’s two terms were up and his Veep, HW Bush, was riding on his coattails and would hold the presidency for their third term. That is extremely rare in American politics. But Reagan’s influence was strong, and Dukakis was weak.
I got online in 1994, way before the Great Migration. Around 2000, civilization began moving its culture, corporations, institutions, social relationships, communications, shopping, dating, porn, and entertainment online.
Because the Left got there first, the internet was our domain. That meant when Obama’s star began to rise, and he used Twitter as his base camp for his movement, eventually, much of American society writ large would be sucked into the bubble of the New Woke Order, the New America.
I always believed in the party. I thought I was fighting on the right side. And though I still value many of the policies the Democrats traditionally care about, by the end of 2020, I would abandon many decades of voting blue no matter who.
For the past three years, I’ve been trying to understand what we’ve just lived through - what I’ve just lived through, and what our country has become. Enough time has passed, and I think I have a clearer picture of the big mess that was 2020.
We’ll never get the whole truth, of course. We’re getting it all piecemeal - The Durham Report, the Hoax of the Century, the Columbia Journalism Review’s beatdown of legacy media’s obsession with Trump, and the Twitter Files all point to deep corruption that goes all the way up to the top - yes, even President Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, the FBI, and their complicit media.
The election wasn’t so much stolen from Trump as it was a failsafe plan to keep him and his voters out of the America we now believed belonged to us. But the problem was America never did. We had to share it with the other half of the country.
Electing leaders should remain in the hands of the American people. And no, not by majority, but by the rights of individual states via the Electoral College because New York and California can’t rule this country, even if that’s exactly where we find ourselves today.
Mollie Hemingway’s book Rigged is a more thorough accounting of everything that happened with the election, and it’s well worth the read. I want to look at it from a slightly different perspective, as someone who comes from the Left and understands the other America outside of it.
Motive - V for Vendetta
Lee Smith calls the ongoing Get Trump sabotage campaign The Permanent Coup. It didn’t start with Hillary. It started with Obama. Trump’s accusations that Obama was not born in the United States and, therefore, should be disqualified from running for re-election in 2012 was an affront that Obama, and his entire coalition, would never forget. Obama would exact revenge on Trump for the next decade.
The two locked horns at the Correspondent’s Dinner when Obama mocked Trump publicly:
Obama probably thought he had done away with Trump at the Correspondents’ dinner. Trump was now a joke to the New America under Obama, and he could never recover from that.
But the moment Trump challenged Obama, who had reached god-like status in our New America, it would plant the seed that half the country was full of “white rage,” holdovers from the Civil War, angry that a Black man had won the presidency and was taking power away from The White Man.
The difference between the Left and the Right in terms of what is considered “racist” and what isn’t is a stark divide. A poll from a few years ago in the Washington Post revealed that white liberals talked down to people of color and white Conservatives did not.
The hysteria over racism would spread like a virus throughout college campuses and even public high schools. It would start to be the divider between us and them. The New America and the Old America. Inclusive/diverse/progressive America vs. angry white rage America.
Both Hillary and Obama were humiliated by Trump’s win and would enact emotional blackmail going forward. They began pointing fingers. James Comey’s announcement that they were investigating Hillary’s emails, Putin’s sabotage, Bernie Sanders dividing the party were all named culprits for the Greatest Crime Ever Perpetrated on the Republic.
And, of course, the media. If they had not obsessed on Hillary’s emails for an entire year she wold have won.
All would be made to pay by 2020, with the media becoming a full-blown propaganda arm for the State, refusing to cover any negative stories that would hurt Democrats. James Comey and the FBI would shift into “protect Democrats, target Trump and MAGA,” which would include psyops like the Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping and likely, January 6th.
Bernie Sanders would end his “revolution,” and is now yet another cog in the machine that the Democratic Party has become.
But they were digging in the wrong place. Hillary was always a long shot for the win, that’s what history tells us. Had Joe Biden been Obama’s chosen successor, like HW Bush was for Ronald Reagan, he might have been able to surf the wave of a popular president.
Hillary had nothing to sell and no charisma to sell it. This was supposed to be Obama’s third term, but lacking that high-wattage charm, her campaign had no leverage. Worse, like Biden, she had baggage. The Trump campaign used that baggage to “dampen” the vote in a few key swing states. They didn’t have to bring in more voters for Trump. They just needed less voters for her.
They used Facebook to target three groups that would most likely be convinced it wasn’t worth showing up on Election Day, especially since the press kept telling us she had it in the bag by 90%. They used Facebook’s powerful ad machine to target Black men (“Superpredator”), young feminists (Bill Clinton’s Me Too mess), and Bernie supporters (the rigged primary).
The Hillary team was offered Facebook’s help, too but declined, falsely believing they would win in a landslide. Everyone said Hillary should have gone to Wisconsin. I don’t think so. She, like Biden, had nothing to sell except NOT TRUMP. But Facebook might have given her a way to scare her own voters to the polls.
Their strategy, which many overlooked, including me, is explained here by Steve Bannon at a Tea Party rally ten years ago:
Understanding the how and why of the 2020 election is one thing. Understanding the bigger picture is entirely another.
Means - The Hoax of the Century
In March of 2020, McKay Coppins warned of a $1 billion war chest with the headline, “The 2020 Election Will Be a War of Disinformation,” writing:
The Trump campaign is planning to spend more than $1 billion, and it will be aided by a vast coalition of partisan media, outside political groups, and enterprising freelance operatives. These pro-Trump forces are poised to wage what could be the most extensive disinformation campaign in U.S. history. Whether or not it succeeds in reelecting the president, the wreckage it leaves behind could be irreparable.
Ironically, this describes exactly what the Democrats and their “well-funded cabal” did to win in 2020.
Coppins’ piece in The Atlantic lays out the supposedly “dis” or “mis” information that led to Hillary’s loss, and talks about the strategy aimed at the three key groups - Black men, young feminists, Bernie supporters. But the trick in the column suggests what they sent wasn’t true. It was true. It was just inflammatory, and negative to Clinton.
The humiliation of defeat for the Obama Coalition at the hands of Hillary Clinton would build what Jacob Siegel called the Hoax of the Century, the idea that disinformation was so widespread, only government intervention could stop it. Now the fears of artificial intelligence are exposing the cracks in the machine that is the beating heart of New America - high-tech surveillance.
As Rand Paul warns:
From Siegel’s piece:
In his last days in office, President Barack Obama made the decision to set the country on a new course. On Dec. 23, 2016, he signed into law the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act, which used the language of defending the homeland to launch an open-ended, offensive information war.
Something in the looming specter of Donald Trump and the populist movements of 2016 reawakened sleeping monsters in the West. Disinformation, a half-forgotten relic of the Cold War, was newly spoken of as an urgent, existential threat. Russia was said to have exploited the vulnerabilities of the open internet to bypass U.S. strategic defenses by infiltrating private citizens’ phones and laptops. The Kremlin’s endgame was to colonize the minds of its targets, a tactic cyber warfare specialists call “cognitive hacking.”
Even though it was supposedly fear of Trump’s “$1 billion war chest” to spread disinformation that built the “well-funded cabal,” as bragged about in TIME, in the end, it was the Biden side that would vastly outspend the Trump campaign, from Open Secrets:
The hotly contested presidential election — both sides called it the most important race in history — was the catalyst for an influx of donations. Biden’s campaign became the first to raise over $1 billion from donors. Biden’s cash advantage over Trump helped him pepper swing states with far more campaign ads. Biden also received more help from super PACs and “dark money” groups.
Trump’s campaign raised $774 million. Trump raised over half of his money from small donors giving $200 or less, a stunning figure no other presidential candidate has matched. Trump continued raising money long after news outlets called the race for Biden, racking up campaign cash he could use to influence the future of the GOP.
And boy, did they spend.
Opportunity - The Fog of War
The New America believed Trump’s rise and win was an invasion of THEIR country. That seemed to give them - Obama, Hillary Clinton, the FBI and everyone else involved - the justification they needed to go to war on half the country and win it by any means necessary.
The TIME magazine piece gives it all away in chilling detail how the elites rigged the game against the working class. Everything they admit to doing, no matter how colorful the writing, benefits the Democratic Party against the opposition party. Never before in the history of this country have we had this level of fascist-like takeover of our laws, our institutions, and our corporations?
For them, COVID was their opportunity to upend voting rules in various swing states and sew chaos and instability as Trump, an inexperienced politician, tried to manage the once-in-a-generation pandemic.
Now, they could crash the economy, which was Trump’s major selling point for his second term, by forcing and enforcing lockdowns, shutting people inside, and locking down schools. Restaurants and businesses faltered. A blanket of fear and paranoia descended.
Probably Joe Biden would have won the election fairly if things had stopped there. But they didn’t. A major shift occurred in the Summer of 2020, an unintended consequence the “well-funded cabal,” the FBI, the Obama/Clinton/Biden coalition did not see coming.
As part of their vast conspiracy that “touched every aspect of the election,” they amplified and funded the protests in the Summer. There was just one problem. They had no idea what kind of Pandora’s Box they were about to unleash.
Who are these people, so many wondered. Where did they come from? Some of them were legitimate Black Lives Matter protesters, but a good many of them were part of the “Evergreen College Generation,” a group of radical activists birthed from the loins of Tumblr and helicopter parents who were setting up “autonomous zones,” driving through the suburbs demanding residents give their land back.
They were forcing people to raise their fists to Black Lives Matter. They were threatening their friends and family that if they didn’t also “do something” to pledge their allegiance, they would cut them off.
Julie Kelly has written an extensive account of everything that happened that Summer that our Justice Department completely ignored:
Chaos continued throughout the summer with the president, his family, and White House staff under constant threat. Police arrested 11 people at Lafayette Square in July 2020 for various offenses including assault of a police officer. “The Tuesday night incidents that stretched over hours are the latest confrontations to transpire near the White House, where protesters have been gathering daily for more than a month to protest for racial justice after the killing of George Floyd in the custody of Minneapolis police,” the Washington Post reported on July 8, 2020.
After Trump accepted the GOP nomination for president on White House grounds in August 2020, rioters chased Republican lawmakers, including Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and his wife, leaving the event. Some assaulted police in an attempt to get near members of Congress; Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.), who lost both legs and a finger in Afghanistan, was surrounded and shouted down by Black Lives Matter protesters as he tried to get home.
When Trump gave a speech in August of 2020 at Mount Rushmore it was the first time I’d heard any elected official address what all of us were living through and no one was talking about.
Even though the press did its best to gaslight us and hide the truth, Americans could see a bizarre new revolution had overtaken the Left, and it was about to get into government
But it also meant that Trump had a new campaign pitch that worked. After surviving COVID, he did five rallies a day, and made his case to the American people the way candidates are supposed to. They’re not supposed to sit in a basement while the system wins the election for them.
Trump was no longer making the case that his last four years were successful. Now, he was saying, vote for me to stop this madness. It was shifting public opinion, though that didn't mean the media would report it that way.
This would be borne out by how the votes came down, with Trump winning Ohio, Iowa, and Florida, a trifecta that is almost impossible to win and still lose the presidency. The only exception was Richard Nixon in 1960, another election with questionable practices.
Had the election been on Election Day, Trump would have sailed into a second term decisively, even with a crashed economy, even after COVID. But the election was over long before that.
Thanks to the push for mail-in and early voters, most in the swing states had banked their votes before Trump could change their minds, which is why we have political campaigns at all. To make matters worse, they prepped the media for the Hunter Biden laptop story as Russian disinformation, and when the story arrived, Twitter and Facebook censored it.
Now, of course, we know not only wasn’t it “disinformation,” but it was the thread that unraveled an entire web of corruption by the Biden family, not to mention the so-called war on disinformation.
The Sidney Powell “Kraken” and subsequent “Big Lie” narratives were convenient distractions. But that’s all they care about, right? Winning the narrative. Not the truth. Never the truth.
The Aftermath
The Democrats, now the party of war, have fused their Trump hysteria with Putin hysteria. They have Ukraine flags in their bios and see the United States flag as a symbol of white supremacy. They are Ukraine, the resistance. Trump is Putin, the invader.
Here is Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn on Russia and Russiagate:
Biden’s legacy might include wiping both Putin and Trump off the map, which would be, for the Obama/Hillary coalition quite the victory. Not only will they be ruling over a New America, but perhaps now, a New World.
But unfortunately, elections have consequences. We’ve paid a price for installing Biden who did nothing to win our votes with any kind of policy. He was the not-Trump guy who was going to stop racism. But after his botched Afghanistan exit, it destabilized the world. Now, the United States is not regarded as the “good guys” internationally.
Here is Glenn Greenwald:
After World II, and the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, J. Robert Oppenheimer met with President Truman. He was distraught, telling Truman, “I have blood on my hands.”
Truman, of course, was having none of it. He thought Oppenheimer was a big crybaby and ordered his staff never to agree to a meeting with him again. But minds like Oppenheimer’s are rare. He knew what he’d done, even if, in the fog of war it seemed like the right thing to do. In the aftermath, he spent the rest of his life regretting it.
Who will have blood on their hands once we make our way through this fog of war? When will there be the overdue reckoning for what the Democrats did to Trump, to his supporters, to our country?
Perhaps one day, when the fog dissipates, they too will hang their heads in shame.
Flagstaff, AZ, 9:39 am
The 2020 Election and The Fog of War