The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election

[catbyte]

By Molly Ball
February 4, 2021

A weird thing happened right after the Nov. 3 election: nothing.

The nation was braced for chaos. Liberal groups had vowed to take to the streets, planning hundreds of protests across the country. Right-wing militias were girding for battle. In a poll before Election Day, 75% of Americans voiced concern about violence.

Instead, an eerie quiet descended. As President Trump refused to concede, the response was not mass action but crickets. When media organizations called the race for Joe Biden on Nov. 7, jubilation broke out instead, as people thronged cities across the U.S. to celebrate the democratic process that resulted in Trump’s ouster.

A second odd thing happened amid Trump’s attempts to reverse the result: corporate America turned on him. Hundreds of major business leaders, many of whom had backed Trump’s candidacy and supported his policies, called on him to concede. To the President, something felt amiss. “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. Both sides would come to see it as a sort of implicit bargain–inspired by the summer’s massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protests–in which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy.

snip

https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/

[msongs]

1. most interesting, thanks for posting. hope this article is going viral or something similar nt

[Scurrilous]

2. K&R

[Dark n Stormy Knight]

3. Worth reading!

Thanks for posting.

[malaise]

4. I remember pointing out that once the COC

had spoken it was over for Trump

[PCIntern]

5. Terrific! Thx. Nt

[hedda_foil]

6. What a phenomenal job of reporting. I hope everyone here reads every word.

[SoonerPride]

7. People need to read the whole article. Really!

kick and rec a million times over

[catbyte]

8. It really is an excellent piece of reporting.

[Vivienne235729]

9. Corporate America turned on him bc they could see

It hurting their bottom line in the future. They can’t make money if people are unemployed and the middle class was sinking. They won’t survive on just the elite class’s consumption.

[lindysalsagal]

10. Best.Thing.I've.Read.All.Year. Read it all. Chilling. Like a spy novel.

"Private philanthropy stepped into the breach. An assortment of foundations contributed tens of millions in election-administration funding."


and it was private social media that silenced the treasonous liar.

[lindysalsagal]

12. This is a must-read, everyone, and local civic responsibility saved everyone.

DU is such an important educational tool to keep people informed and involved.

[nam78_two]

11. Please don't flame me

Last edited Mon Feb 8, 2021, 07:22 PM - Edit history (6)

I dislike squabbling and normally I avoid arguments. But I felt too strongly about this to remain silent.

I think this is really overstating the virtues of these corporate titans. These people -especially Facebook and that horrible megalomaniac Zuckerberg - caused many problems for which they have not been held responsible.

The Chan-Zuckerberg initiative is just his attempt to buy his way into a last remaining safe, liberal bastion-the non-profit sciences. The guy is a poisonous cancer. He is mucking around in developing nations trying to exploit poverty, ignorance and backwardness. This style of capitalism is horrifyingly rising the world over. It is so vacuous and fatuously empty-headed - these people talking about education or health.

They are trying to rewrite history while taking no responsibility. This is just sad. It is a blatant attempt to rewrite history and hope our attention spans are so poor we don't remember.

I normally avoid arguments. I could not help myself here.
Shoshana Zuboff is right. Tim Cook is right. The surveillance capitalists are irredeemable.

Aside from the outrageous lunacy of all far right movements and eco-collapse, privacy (which is inextricably linked to human dignity) is one of the most important issues of these times. Surveillance capitalism has also vacuously and indifferently enabled the spread of disinformation. That is a factor which has significantly contributed to rising extremism (if I go by the experts I see commenting on these issues).

These are conscienceless creeps who think history is written by the "winners". This is so lame.

This belated, wishy-washy ass-covering is lame and over-hyped. It is like a pr propaganda push. I could not even read the whole thing-it was too disgusting. It reads in part like a propagandistic push for Facebook and that creepy Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative. They fund good research but it is tainted money for all that. The respectability comes solely from the scientists not from that lousy foundation.

I wish we would talk about the coup that is succeeding:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/29/opinion/sunday/facebook-surveillance-society-technology.html

And god..I am not in Apple's pay or anyone's. The cash flow is the other way around. I am looking for people whose products and services are clean enough that I can buy them. I don't want low-priced or worse free crap that cheapens human life and destroys normal, healthy reciprocities not to mention trust. It is a fraudulent brand of faux populism which that sleazebag Zuckerberg peddles. The worst part is that he is so successful that all these other lame industrialists and small business creeps are following his lead like lemmings.
I would not care if it was just Facebook which is a lame company with entire dispensable crapware. It is what he and Google represent. They are corrupting an entire area of technology by pretending that creepy invasions of privacy are joint at the hip with convenience.

And people of this ilk (usually conservatives but always sleazebags) have a history of smearing, harassing and extorting whistleblowers:
https://www.wired.com/story/facebooks-dirty-tricks-nothing-new-tech/
From the big creeps down to the little creeps and across all types of shady groups and industries. Anyone who wants to take on people like these can be sure of one thing-they can expect harassment, slander and abuse.

And again I would really recommend Shoshana Zuboff's book "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism". Whoever these horrible, unethical and morally bankrupt people are, it lays out the the philosophical groundwork and logical arguments for rejecting their often confusing and deeply unethical/creepy practices.

Seriously when did tech get this trashy? People like these should be nowhere near education. This is why conservatives/libertarians tell people to drop out of school and to just learn to code. They really want everything to be as slum friendly as possible. They don't want people learning critical thinking skills in any broader sense or recognizing the consequences of their actions in context. An ahistorical society helps people of this stamp.

[ansible]

13. Agree, the pro-corporate trend on DU is incredibly disturbing

These people are NOT our friends.

[lindysalsagal]

14. Kick

[peggysue2]

15. Thought this was a really good article, great read

It gives me hope because in the end it's people, Americans from all quarters working together that put Trump down, ensured a fair election, dampened the disinformation poring in and kept on top of every machination that Trump and his enablers were planning.

Kudos to Molly Ball on this one; it's a fascinating behind the scene peek.

The lines that jumped IMHO out were toward the end of the piece:

“It’s like when Wile E. Coyote runs off the cliff–if you don’t look down, you don’t fall. Our democracy only survives if we all believe and don’t look down.”

That pretty much sums up the fragility of it all and the fact that this country works on a persistent idea/ideal of self-governance through our constitutional Republic, a system that relies on the rule of law and equality under that law. It's a messy affair. We've fallen short again and again but it's the belief in the basic idea/ideal, that it's possible, doable that keeps us afloat as a country, that keeps us moving forward.

Joe Biden reiterated this when he said if he had to describe America in one word, it would be . . . possibilities.

We've had a near-death experience over the last 5-4 years. Let's make sure we get this round right.