It was obvious to anyone paying attention that the elites were never going to let Donald Trump have another crack at the White House. And that they, meaning Democrats, Wall Street, legacy media, insider operatives and DC’s political law-firms believed nothing was too sketchy to end Literal Hitler’s residency on Pennsylvania Ave, even if it left millions of American voters wondering what actually happened.
Russia collusion, Ukraine impeachment, constant smear campaigns orchestrated by media with help from retired spooks and hysterical academics were Trump-removal gambits that traumatized the nation while preventing their target from fully governing. But even with never-ending distractions, Trump had the country in reasonably good shape (until COVID) — which was perhaps the most dangerous thing he could do. Peace and prosperity, God forbid.
Allowing him another four years was never going to happen. If you doubt the lengths to which otherwise sane and decent people would go to end The Trump Era behold yesterday’s psychotic reveal from Sam Harris, a respected American thinker.
It landed in my Twitter timeline and I gasped as I hit the replay button. It was as close to an election-rigging justification we have had so far. No, I’m not suggesting Harris personally tampered with the 20/20 election but rather that his hatred, perfectly exposes the elites casus belli for the undeclared but ongoing war against Trump.
According to Harris, rhetorically, investigating even the deaths of children was less important than keeping Orange Man Bad out of the White House. It is a reference to legacy media and Big Tech’s election interference in the form of hiding the Hunter Biden laptop story from voters.
Harris’ comments illustrate the get Trump at any cost mindset that seems to have overtaken all of America’s democratic pillars, including the courts and the FBI.
Prior to succumbing to a super-sized case of Trump Derangement Syndrome, Harris was one of the country’s most interesting public intellectuals, a lefty willing to criticize dumb ideas. But his hysterical hatred of Trump has badly tarnished him. What he says in this recent interview could be a career-ender, in my view. Harris is totally exposed and not even aware of how dangerous is his own anti-democratic thinking. That he has been right and courageous on many tough issues makes this all the more bizarre.
As I’ve said many times on my podcast, my take on Trump is that he is a massively flawed human, with extreme narcissistic tendencies and a history of dodgy business deals. This is not an unusual profile for most of our elected overseers, these days. The difference; most of our pols get rich while they are in office, grifting off insider stock deals and favours to donors. Who better to expose and eliminate the DC swamp than a NYC developer who’d made a fortune swimming around in his own.
Given what his enemies allege, getting rid of Trump fairly and democratically should have been a slam dunk but they are still at it as the now widely criticized raid on Mar -a-Lago suggests.
In the meantime, democracy itself was being dismantled brick by brick but not by Trump. Anyone who questioned Joe Biden’s win was slandered and de-platformed. Merely publicly spitballing a stolen election was treated by the media as an assault on America.
Gad Saad appeared on an earlier episode of my podcast explaining how Harris seemed to lose his mind over Trump and it is well worth a listen. They used to be friends.
So, back to the not-stolen-election. If smart, otherwise rational people like Harris were driven mad by Donald Trump, is it a stretch to question the validity of the election? It was riddled with new procedural quirks, including non verifiable mail-in ballots that provided opportunities for a steal. If the elite and its media had convinced themselves that Trump was an existential threat who would start a nuclear war and rescind all civil rights, was it not a civic duty to do whatever it took to save the world? Why would that not include election fraud?
And never forget — it’s not like the Dems haven’t cheated before.
And if you haven’t read Time Magazine’s round-up of collusion against a Trump win, you should. It reports in plain site what has mostly been denied for two years.
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.”
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.
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. “The untold story of the election is the thousands of people of both parties who accomplished the triumph of American democracy at its very foundation,” says Norm Eisen, a prominent lawyer and former Obama Administration official who recruited Republicans and Democrats to the board of the Voter Protection Program.
So, there was a secret election history, a conspiracy even. But how far did it go? Were machines rigged? Were ballots stuffed and fake signatures ignored? The truth is, we will never know because the people charged with looking for it think like Sam Harris.
Media and Big Tech refuse to platform a mainstream discussion. They convinced themselves that manipulating the system to ensure Trump lost was a victory for Democracy itself; that working together to defeat the will of millions of American voters saved the 2020 election. You see, in the age of Orange Man Bad, democracy is only working if your candidate is elected.
To follow Sam Harris’ train of thought; why inform the voters of Biden family corruption and depravity when you can keep the country safe for democracy by doing whatever it takes to make Joe Biden president.
Unrelated to this post. I was just listening to your podcast about the evil booster mandates at Western University. You do such fantastic work, Trish, you really do. While I found myself in agreement with most points you and your interviewees made, I took issue with one thing. That concerned the comparison of today's students standing up for their rights NOT to be given forced injections of a substance (that we all now know to be ineffective therapeutics with highly adverse KNOWN side effects) with the students of the sixties and seventies protesting the Vietnam War. While I was admittedly not around then and so cannot vouch for the character of all the students (now elderly people) from that era, I think the more appropriate comparison there is between them and the contemporary students who seek to silence and deplatform those they disagree with, particularly those they think have conservative or right-wing opinions. Like I said, I cannot vouch for all the students of the sixties and seventies, but there seems to be a direct line between their narcissism and penchant for fashionably progressive views and the more active, designing, turbulent, and seditious students of our age who champion the latest leftist trends and despise traditional values. This passage from Christopher Caldwell's excellent book, The Age of Entitlement, is worth quoting here in full, as it pertains to the matter:
They were protesting as much to keep themselves out of the war as to end it. In a diary he kept in 1966, the Harvard undergraduate Steven Kelman recorded the misgivings of a friend, who had said:
I’m against the war, I guess, but I wouldn’t want to fight in any war. . . . My brother had a friend who tried to get a four-F by eating a lot of sugar two days before he went for his physical and not pissing—so they’d think he had diabetes. They gave him the four-F, but that afternoon he fell into a sugar coma and died. . . . I could try freaking out—you know, coming in high on pot or doing the homo routine. But they put that kind of rejection on your record, and that can screw you up for life.
Years later Kelman’s Harvard contemporary James Fallows would recall traveling on a bus to the Boston Navy Yard with draft-eligible classmates, who shouted pro–Viet Cong chants and threw their urine samples into the faces of orderlies. The Harvard students hoped that the “undesirable character traits” they manifested would keep them out of military service. Fallows himself got a medical exemption by dieting down to 120 pounds. As they left, a bus arrived with more draftees, whom Fallows described as “boys from Chelsea, thick, dark-haired young men, the white proles of Boston. Most of them were younger than us, since they had just left high school, and it had clearly never occurred to them that there might be a way around the draft.”
Harris is reckless and foolish as well as criminal with his words. I have no question that Trump is a flawed person, too be kind and he has destroyed many lives. I only wish I could point to anyone in politics that is not self serving and will govern completely free from corruption. The crimes that occurred in the 2020 Biden/Trump election is very well documented in the film "2000 Mules" and even though they have video evidence of the mass drop off of mail-in ballots, It seems we collectively, will never know that truth. Like so many truths we will never know for sure although the evidence is difficult to dismiss as easily as the media and their owners have. Sad for the spirit of democracy, Socrates called it too easy to fail because there was too many stupid people eligible to vote. We are what we read and tune into.