Source: I.W. Quinn, February 15, 2021
Summary and Commentary of Time Magazine’s arrogant article, “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign that Saved the 2020 Election”
Note: The goal of this summary and analysis of the Time article is to highlight the key actors and organizations who unethically, and in some cases illegally, conspired to alter the election results and manipulate the thought processes of the American voter. As we move forward to a new election cycle, it is incumbent upon us to not only understand the forces working against our democracy, but also to actively seek to dismantle their underground strategies which destroy freedom of speech, open the floodgates of fraudulent activity, and upend the will of the people.
The reader is urged to reference the original February 4th, 2012 Time Magazine article by Molly Ball sited below for a more complete rendering of how the Cabal accomplished its election engineering goals. Another highly recommended source is the opinion article appearing in The Epoch Times on Feb. 10 by Jeff Carlson, entitled “Time Magazine Details the ‘Shadow Campaign’ Against Trump” which takes a broader tone in countering the slant of the presentation of the Time author.
Article Introduction:
From liberal perspective of this piece, the world has been restored. When key state elections were still being counted, the winner had already been called, and corporate America turned its back on Trump. Trump had been predicting that the election was being “rigged.” According to the author of this piece, Trump had it right. He just couldn’t articulate the details of the forces that worked against him; and from their perspective, against all odds, their expansive network was successful in saving democracy.
Behind the scenes, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO produced a joint statement of cooperation. They organized a coalition of operatives whose tentacles extended to every aspect of the election. States changed voting laws and systems through appointed, rather than the required elected officials; they secured millions in public and private funding; they recruited poll workers; and flooded the precincts with vote-by-mail schemes. Under the guise of halting “disinformation,” they pressured social media companies to limit free speech.
We know a few of their names. Norm Eisen, lawyer and former Obama Administration official for the board of the Voter Protection Program declared, “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.”
Ian Bassin, co-founder of Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan advocacy group, stated “It is massively important for the country to understand that it didn’t happen accidentally. The System didn’t work magically. Democracy is not self-executing.”
The participants want the history of this election to be known and understood. In their minds, through their controlling of the flow of information, changing rules and laws, and steering media coverage, they were “fortifying,” not “rigging” the election.
The Architect:
The key name to remember is Mike Podhorzer, senior advisor to the president of AFL-CIO. As a political strategist he has been known to create the most important advances in political technology. He and his associates created the Analyst Institute and the Catalist, companies that apply scientific methods and data to political campaigns. Surprisingly to him, Trump attracted the very blue collar white voters who were the traditional members of AFL-CIO. Podhorzer made a paradigm shift in the way to succeed against a candidate whom he predicted would disrupt the election. He considered the scenarios that he thought would be the most likely outcomes – Trump losing and refusing to concede, or Trump winning the Electoral College by “corrupting the voting process in key states.”
Other organizations voiced the same concerns: Fight Back Table, a group of “resistance organizations,” expanded their reach to other liberal activists, voting rights and civil rights groups, forming the Democracy Defense Coalition. Momentum was building. Podhorzer’s premise was that “American’s decentralized election system couldn’t be rigged in one fell swoop. That presented an opportunity to ‘shore it up’.”
The Alliance:
Podhorzer drafted a memo on March 3rd entitled “Threats to the 2020 Election.” He noted that Trump had already predicted that the election would be “rigged,” and Podhorzer reasoned that upon losing Trump would incite his supporters to protest. He laid out four challenges needing to be addressed: attacks on voters, attacks on election administration, attacks on Trump’s political opponents, and efforts to reverse the results of the election.
Podhorzer built his coalition by holding relentless Zoom meetings with his existing network: the labor movement, the institutional left eg: Planned Parenthood, resistence groups eg: Indivisible and Move On, other progressive strategists, private donors and foundations, and racial justice activists. After solidifying his inner network, he expanded the meetings to larger groups. This group had no name and no acknowledged hierarchy, but they worked in synch. It then extended to Congress, Silicon Valley and state capitals. Many of the summer racial-justice protest leaders also joined the alliance.
Securing the Vote: Election funding and Mail-In Voting
The Leadership conference on civil and Human Rights led 150 government organizations to seek $2 B in election funding. The amount they actually received, $400M for state election administrators, was much less but substantial.
They pursued private funding. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative kicked in $300M.
Amber McReynolds, former Denver election official who founded National Vote at Home Institute, a clearinghouse for election officials, focused on dropbox locations and vendor choices, and advocated for absentee ballots. The Voter Participation Center, analyzed how to best convince people to vote by mail and then encouraged mail-in voting.
They worked on countering skepticism among black voters, distributed “safety kits” of masks, etc. Wendy Weiser, voting rights advocate at Brennan Center for Justice at NYU, was part of this network of activists. Democrat lawyers, though fighting a deluge of pre-election litigation from the Trump campaign, made considerable headway in shifting the voters to mail-ins as opposed to in-person voting. The final outcome was impressive: 50% voted by mail, 50% in person, with only 25% voting in-person on election day – a huge shift.
Disinformation Defense:
Laura Quinn, a progressive, co-founded The Catalist as well as another yet nameless secret project that tracks online “disinformation” and the methods to combat it. She fed information to media regarding investigating and exposing the sources of (from their perspective) conservative “disinformation” and pressured social media platforms to remove both content and accounts with the use of more aggressive tracking. Ultimately, Zuckerberg became involved.
Vanita Gupta, part of Quinn’s group, who leads the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, involved Jack Dorsey of Twitter. (Gupta is now Associate Attorney General for the Biden administration.)
Spreading the Word: Additional mail-in voting advocates
Dick Gephardt, former Democrat House Leader turned lobbyist, successfully advocated for getting high level government officials on board for this effort. His private sector contacts yielded $20M to this project. Former Congressman and Trump supporter, Zack Wamp, worked to develop bi-partisan support. As a lobbyist, he presented to his contacts that the National Council on Election Integrity was an honest organization. His efforts resulted in 22 Democrats and 22 Republicans producing ads, making statements, and writing articles alerting election officials of potential “problems.”
The organizations, Voting Rights Lab and IntroAction utilized Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok to disseminate information. They advocated for “every vote” to be counted and primed voters to expect to not know the election results immediately. This scheme was put in place to counter Trump’s claim that he was ahead until mail-in votes came in, and then cry fraud. This also would contribute voter expectation ahead of Nov 3rd.
People Power:
Organizers of the racial justice movement sparked by George Floyd’s death became part of Podhorzer’s coalition. They organized “happy” polling places which were to become street parties. Black organizers recruited thousands of poll workers. The Protect the Results coalition, a website now removed, listed 400 planned post-election demonstrations which would pour into the streets if they deemed it necessary, and could be activated quickly through text.
Strange Bedfellows: U.S. Chamber of Commerce & AFL-CIO
The Chamber of Commerce was concerned that more unrest similar to that which occurred all summer would be a negative issue for business owners. Evangelical leaders and National African American Clergy Network joined the network with Chamber and AFL-CIO. They issued a joint statement urging media and citizens to be patient for the results and to stand united whether or not they were in agreement with the outcome.
Showing Up and Standing Down:
Podhorzer’s predictions of how election would play out held. The activists were ready to initiate their strategy for mass protesting if necessary, but he signaled them to “stand down” and show restraint.
Trump had lost.
The Five Steps to Victory:
The five steps to victory according to their scheme was to: 1. Win the vote 2. win the count 3. win the certification 4. win the Electoral College and 5. win the transition. Any and all of these steps carried with them the risk for disruption. Michigan was a hotspot example. In Detroit, counter-watchers and activists suddenly appeared by the scores using intimidation techniques against the poll-watchers. Art Reyes III, of We the People, Michigan Network accomplished this quick rallying through the use of text and Twitter.
How Close We Came:
Podhorzer urged his leftist network to not attend the January 6th rally in Washington, but to stand down, in order to distance themselves from any accountability should disruption break out.
Their alliance has now dismantled. Democracy Defense Coalition has disbanded,
Fight Back Table is still in force, and Protect Democracy has shifted its focus to congressional reforms. Podhorzer and his network are currently strategizing and developing new messages.
The article concludes with the author’s deluded revelry that democracy has won, but only with Herculean effort on the part of many noble people.
Reflections on this Brazen Report:
The author is right about one thing – democracy is fragile. If the will of the people can be so easily overthrown by a super board-of-directors compiled from disparate corners of the business, technology, and media worlds, then we have now embarked upon a dystopian era previously only imagined in Orwellian novels.
This scheme is rather like the 2020 version of the Good Ol’ Boy network, where corpulent men sit around their exclusive club, smoke cigars, and cut deals. Only now the Good Ol’ Boys are the titans of the media industry, technology moguls, and the secretive leaders of under-cover movements. The “club” is transformed into the genius of the technology network.
We have the names of a few of the schemers, and it should not take much to parse out which of their actions are flat illegal. They need to be called to account for their brazen interference with this election. For whatever reason, they have given us their playbook, at least the part they want us to know. They seem to have great pride in their sleights-of-hand in their dark-shadow counter-campaign. They have learned a lot through this cycle, and their scheming and networking and manipulating will only become more brazen in future election cycles if they are not held accountable now, and where appropriate, punished to the fullest extent of the law. We need to insist that our representatives pass bills ensuring the tightening of voter regulations so that this shameless underhanded ploy can never happen again. We owe the American people the assuredness that each of their legal votes count and that the integrity of our republic remains intact.
Questions for the Dark-Shadow Campaigners:
Is it OK for a handful of billionaire oligarchs and political strategists to collaborate to control the minds of American citizens through information they choose or refuse to make public?
Is it OK to conspire with appointed judges to change laws in opposition to what is clearly spelled out in the constitution?
Is it OK to change voting laws in the middle of the game and to blithely discard traditional ballot regulations in opposition to constitutional guidelines?
(Contrary to the premise put forth in this article, voting regulations are not synonymous with voting suppression. The right to vote must be taken seriously. Lax voting regulations simply invite the possibility of fraud. Since we are required to produce ID for such things as boarding an airplane, driving, simply cashing a check, then we must take voter requirements as seriously.)
Were the right wing conspiracy theories that developed planted by this cabal as false flags in order to discredit their perceived enemies?
This may well be the conspiracy of the century. The collaborators all knew they were risking catastrophe. Risking having the common voter know instinctively that something was amiss. Risking a violent uprising. Risking death. But they did it anyway.
Organizations & Individuals Revealed by Author:
As we evaluate election integrity and move forward to strategize election reform, we need to be mindful that the members of this collusion were so proud of their efforts that they desired for their names to be included in the Time Magazine article. It is by their own revelations and hubris, that the shadow cabal is no longer secret.
Mike Podhorzer – Architect of the scheme to take the election former AFL-CIO advisor to president, strategist, analyst Founded Analyst Institute – undercover political data firm Co-founded Catalist – progressive data firm Protect Democracy – bipartisan crisis taskforce U.S. Chamber of Commerce/AFL-CIO – pact Voter Protection Program –
Norm Eisen – lawyer, former Obama official
Ian Bassin – founder of Protect Democracy – non-partisan, rule of law advocacy group
Zach Wamp – former GOP Representative & Trump supporter Fight Back Table – coalition of liberal organizations Democracy Defense Coalition – liberal coalition of local & national activists Planned Parenthood, Greenpeace – liberal groups recruited by Podhorzer Indivisible, MoveOn – strategists recruited by Podhorzer
Anat Shenker-Osorio – close Podhorzer associate – part of Podhorzer’s inner force Working Families Party –
Maurice Mitchell – part of Podhorzer’s inner force Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights – sought govern. funding for mail-in voting
Chan Zuckerberg Initiative – private foundation – contributed to mail-in effort
Amber McReynolds – founded National Vote at Home Institute – mail-in voting Voter participation Center – mail-in voting & analysis
Wendy Weiser – voting rights advocate at Brennan Center for Justice, NYU
Laura Quinn – co-founded Catalist & another project – connected with Zuckerberg
Vanita Gupta – Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights – connected Dorsey
Dick Gephardt – now a lobbyist – yielded $20M Zack Wamp – lobbyist Voting Rights Lab
IntroAction Protect the Results coalition – website now taken down National African American Clergy Network Art Reyes III – We the People, Michigan network
Link to original Time article:
The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election, By Molly Ball, February 4, 2021
Contact I.W. at: iwquinn@yahoo.com
