Paul Rigby

A brief sketch of what Team Dulles-Angleton would need to have done: Fixed upon the location & nature of the event Settled upon the murder method Established the desired narrative Checked the feasibility of using film to achieve or reinforce the desired narrative Ensured, particularly if niche, the requisite level of photographic-technical expertise Storyboarded, in Hitchcockian detail, the assassination sequence, with variants Despatched photogrammetrists to the assassination scene to obtain measurements, angles etc Amassed and/or procured a library of film footage of Dealey Plaza at the right time of year and in a variety of weather conditions for that time Flooded the assassination scene with camera-armed assets to maximise potentially usable photos and film Note that standard Secret Service practices furnished excellent cover for a number of the above-list. Though little publicized, by 1963 the SS routinely used photography when reconnoitring sites of future Presidential visits; and planted cameramen along routes during presidential parades, both domestically and abroad. (To give you some idea of how long the practice had been established, Scotland Yard undertook a thorough photographic survey of the White House and its environs before an anticipated British VIP visit in the late 1930s.) Thus key elements of the pre-assassination planning could be, and doubtless were, legitimately disguised as pure routine.

Strawmen, guilt-by-association, more obsessing about the moon, the apparent disavowal of the rich history of film fakery, not to mention the rules governing physical evidence in court - oh, and the usual failure of elementary logic - all topped off by the abolition of the eyewitness in the practice of justice and law enforcement. Not bad for one post, Mr Flywheel. Now if the Z fake - and all its buttressing fake films - were genuine, we would expect to find all the closest eyewitnesses identified and questioned in a fair and proper manner. We would, wouldn't we? But because it is a fake, and the Warren Commission lawyers (Specter in particular) knew it was back in '64, the motorcyle escort closest to presidential limousine couldn't be called; and others attesting to the limo halt had to be led somewhat less than subtly. Sylvia Meagher captured this well back in 1967: Apparently the witnesses were mistaken in remembering that the car stopped; motion pictures, according to the Commission, contradicted them. Yet it seems clear from the way counsel led witnesses that the Commission had considerable resistance to inferences which might be drawn from evidence that the car had stopped at the first shot. “Stopped” was transformed into “seemed to stop” and then “into slowed down.” Such leading of witnesses, which would have been challenged in a courtroom, was facilitated by the Commission’s closed hearings… The films of the assassination have not been released for public showing, although it is possible to see the most important one, the Zapruder film…at the National Archives. That film does not seem to support the witnesses who said that the car stopped dead. This being so, it is baffling that counsel conducted the questioning somewhat improperly and why the Report presents this evidence with some lack of impartiality… Sylvia Meagher. Accessories After the Fact: The Warren Commission, The Authorities & The Report (NY: Vintage Books, June 1992 reprint), pp.4-5 PS The attempt to use still photos to buttress claims about the fake films is really quite funny. Keep going with that one.

Any plot, no matter how small or uncomplicated, to kill a sitting President necessarily entails risk, the size of which self-evidently rises or falls based on such factors as, to name but three, location, timing and method. No plot poses greater challenges, in an era of mass camera and vehicular ownership, than one in which the deed is to be committed in a public space lacking minimal access control points. In making this choice, the three great risks to any plot – detection (of one or more element of the plot), prevention (the negation of the whole endeavour), and exposure (actual assassin and masterminds) – rise to their maximum. Yet this is precisely the choice made by the men who removed JFK. That decision, in and of itself, bespeaks of an astonishing confidence. In so choosing, all the usual types of pre-assassination risk reduction – compartmentalization, the use of cut-outs, distractions, and so on - had necessarily to reckon, to an unprecedented degree, with two necessities. First, witness minimization. And this is exactly what we find, from the timely misidentification of the presidential route on the front page of the Dallas Morning News’ assassination day edition, to the location of the assassination site, at the motorcade’s end (with the added bonus of the reduced witness perspective afforded by a sharp decline). Second, post-assassination information management. Here, we have been asked to believe, for the better part of 60 years, that the plotters had planned for the written word – think Hal Hendrix hitting the phones to brief fellow-hacks on the afternoon of November 22 – but had nothing whatever in place for the control of visual information. That veteran intelligence men with vast experience of controlling overseas coup narratives – in Iran, for example, where it was done largely through the Associated Press – either ignored or seriously underestimated, in their pre-coup planning, the potential threat of the photograph and the film. More, that when they belatedly woke up to that threat, the best they could come up with was to prevail upon the Lucepress, not to destroy it, but merely to furnish cover for the Zapruder film’s suppression. Is that really plausible?

Boyczuk takes the case Oh dear, a lawyer who doesn’t read. Still, as Smashie and Nicey, two legendary British disc-jockeys, regularly reminded listeners, “charidee” must always be our watchword. In that spirit, I’m prepared to delete this reply just as soon as you’ve read post twelve in this thread. But only upon payment of a seven-cent nickel.

The problem here, Chris, is that you're approaching history the wrong way round, viewing it backwards instead of forwards. Yes, the film's existence was publicized, but the American people initially had no confirmation of the precise content of the Zapruder film until frames were actually printed. Could a substitution have been contemplated - or even attempted? The very thought seems preposterous. But yet it's true. It happened. For the curious fact is that the first four frames to appear in US newspapers, purporting to be from the Zapruder film, are to be found in a few US afternoon newspapers - the Philadelphia Daily News and the Orlando Evening Star, to name but two - on 26 November, prior to the complete nationwide distribution of Life magazine's edition dated 29 November. And they weren't from Zapruder's film, but rather the film attributed to Mary Muchmore, the lady who denied to the FBI that she had shot any footage of the assassination. As for Life's failure to exploit its purchase of Z fake film rights, David Lifton's essay Pig on a Leash remains unimprovable: “In short, it would appear that Life behaved in a manner that what was most unusual, and peculiar for an institution in a capitalist economy: It laid out the equivalent of some $900,000 for a literary asset and then failed to exploit that asset…Life magazine is not an eleemosynary institution” (p.314)*. He returned to the same theme later in the essay: “Life seemed to behave in a most extraordinary way: It failed to recoup its investment” (p.351). He went on to observe that even though “social mores were different in 1963, human nature does not change. Life had an extraordinary property – a motion picture film, yet, aside from the publication of a select number of frames, it acted to keep it off the market” (pp.351-2)*. * Page references from Jim Fetzer (ed.) The Great Zapruder Film Hoax: Deceit and Deception in the Death of JFK (Chicago: Catfeet Press, 2003).

Let me see if I can help your ailing powers of elementary reasoning. If the Dulles-Angleton faction didn't destroy the Z fake, then we are left with a finite number of options. The most obvious one is because it served their purposes - but only after tweaking and refinements. All of the latter had to be undertaken, mind, within a framework that preserved the exculpation of the Secret Service, their primary proxy in the coup. By the way, the first version of the fake included footage of the left turn. It's presence is attested to in such diverse sources as, to name but three, Dan Rather's four (minimum) descriptions of the film ,on 25 November 1963, to CBS radio and TV audiences; Arlen Specter's questioning of Kellerman on 9 March 1964 (see 2H91-92); and in the AP version of the Warren Report published in September 1964 (try page 41: "The [frame] numbers continue in sequence as Zapruder filmed the Presidential limousine as it came round the corner and proceeded down Elm..."). Mark Lane noted this as long ago as Rush To Judgment in 1966 - anti-alterationists really do need to get up to speed.

You make some interesting points, none of which I agree with. The CIA didn't always act to further the interests of its businesses and industries. Far from it. In the cases of, most obviously, the USSR, Eastern Europe and China (post-1949), the agency's extensive programmes of covert action (assassination and sabotage, to be specific) were designed to achieve precisely the opposite - they sought to close markets to Western countries, the better to starve the Communist "beast." Then there is the case of Cuba which, after the near-extirpation of the country's Communist Party & trade union leadership in the late 1940s, finds the CIA throwing its weight behind Castro's July 25 movement, subsequently destroying extensive US holdings and investments in the country in preference to destroying detente & bringing the Cold War 90 miles off America's shores. This proved, as intended, a massive boon to the US' military and intelligence "communities" & their suppliers, but not, to name but two, its American sugar and beef producers. As for the CIA and the Lucepress, the limited revolt of the latter doesn't occur until US bombers begin striking over the Vietnam border into China in late '65 or early '66. Finally, I really don't believe Helms represented any sort of impediment to Dulles and Angleton - Helms' job was to shield and facilitate them, not impair. McCone, ghastly though he unquestionably proved*, was an irrelevance. *JFK, in a phone call to RFK in March 1963, dismissed McCone as an arsehole and regretted his appointment.

It has been suggested to me, decidedly tongue-in-cheek, that Dulles & Angleton failed to respond to news of the Z film's existence because they were paralyzed by grief and remorse. This is so outlandish that I find this explanation to be as persuasive as any other yet offered, and thus conclude that the deadly duo could have acted but chose not to. Which then begs the question - why? Was it because the CIA created the film or merely recognized its potential utility? For the purpose of argument, I'll here the assume latter. So, what benefits did the film, suitably manipulated, offer to the plotters? Could it be used to neutralise significant and unwelcome facts observed and recalled by eyewitnesses? I offer two examples of how the Z fake sought to quash corroborated eyewitness testimony which called into question our understanding of the assassination sequence, timings, and events. 1) The presidential limousine in the left lane of Elm Street (and stopping) From in front: i. Railway worker Roy Skelton, who viewed the assassination from the overpass: “then the car [the presidential limousine – PR] got in the right hand lane,” 19WCH496. ii. Policeman J.W. Foster, again situated on the overpass: “immediately after President Kennedy was struck…the car in which he was riding pulled to the curb,” Warren Commission Document 897, pp.20-21. From side on, iii) to the right of the limousine, iv) to the left of it: iii. Policeman James Chaney and other unnamed Dallas officers, as related by fellow motorcycle outrider, Marrion L. Baker: “I talked to Jim Chaney…during the time that the Secret Service men were trying to get into the car…from the time the first shot rang out, the car stopped completely, pulled to the left and stopped…I heard several of them say that, Mr. Truly he was standing out there, he said it stopped. Several officers said it stopped completely,” 3WCH265. iv. Jean Hill: “Murder Charge Lodged,” Dallas Times Herald, 23 November 1963, p.8: “The President passed directly in front of us on our side of the street,” Mrs. Hill said. From the rear: v. TSBD employee Mrs. Donald Baker (Virgie Rachley at time of shooting): Mrs. Baker told Warren Commission attorney Wesley Liebeler that the stray bullet struck the middle of the south-most lane on Elm Street just behind the presidential limousine, 7WCH510: [Mr. LIEBELER. How close to the curb on Elm Street was this thing you saw (<p509 end; p.510 begins>) hit; do you remember? It would have been on the curb side near the side away from the Texas School Book Depository Building on the opposite side of the street; is that right? Mrs. BAKER. Yes. Mr. LIEBELER. How close to the opposite curb do you think it was? Mrs. BAKER. It was approximately in the middle of the lane I couldn't be quite sure, but I thought it was in the middle or somewhere along in there could even be wrong about that but I could have sworn it that day. Mr. LIEBELER. You thought it was sort of toward the middle of the lane? Mrs. BAKER. Toward the middle of the lane. Mr. LIEBELER. Of the left-hand lane going toward the underpass; is that correct? Mrs. BAKER. Yes. vi. TSBD supervisor & board member Roy Truly, who watched the assassination from in front of the TSBD: “I saw the President’s car swerve to the left and stop somewheres down in this area…” 3WCH221. 2) The length of the pause on Elm Street and Kellerman's post-shooting action i) Jack Bell, A Shining Light Goes Out, AP, 18 November 1964: But at almost that instant, a secret service man, riding in the front seat of the presidential limousine, stood up, phone in hand, and waved the preceding police cruiser on. ii) S. M. Holland, responding to questions from Mark Lane, as reproduced on the LP The Controversy, 1967: Q: What were the secret service men in the front of the car doing when this happened? A: Well, he was standing up with his machine gun, pointed in the direction that I saw the smoke come from, and, er, heard the shot come from. Q: And which way did he look? A: He was standing up with a sub-machine gun pointed in the direction of the picket fence. iii) Hugh Betzner, Jr.'s affadavit, 22 November 1963: "I also saw a man in either the President's car or the car behind his and someone down in one of those cars pull out what looked like a rifle." Hugh Betzner, Jr.'s affadavit, 22 November 1963

This transcript is from video tape of the live broadcast seen nationwide on the ABC network at about 2:10pm CST, November 22, 1963. The interviewer, seated on the left, is WFAA-TV program director Jay Watson. On the right, with his hat on the desk, is Abraham Zapruder. WATSON: A gentleman just walked in our studio that I am meeting for the first time as well as you, this is WFAA-TV in Dallas, Texas. May I have your name please, sir? ZAPRUDER: My name is Abraham Zapruder. WATSON: Mr. Zapruda? ZAPRUDER: Zapruder, yes sir. WATSON: Zapruda. And would you tell us your story please, sir? ZAPRUDER: I got out in, uh, about a half-hour earlier to get a good spot to shoot some pictures. And I found a spot, one of these concrete blocks they have down near that park, near the underpass. And I got on top there, there was another girl from my office, she was right behind me. And as I was shooting, as the President was coming down from Houston Street making his turn, it was about a half-way down there, I heard a shot, and he slumped to the side, like this. Then I heard another shot or two, I couldn't say it was one or two, and I saw his head practically open up, all blood and everything, and I kept on shooting. That's about all, I'm just sick, I can't… WATSON: I think that pretty well expresses the entire feelings of the whole world. ZAPRUDER: Terrible, terrible. WATSON: You have the film in your camera, we'll try to get… ZAPRUDER: Yes, I brought it on the studio, now. WATSON: …we'll try to get that processed and have it as soon as possible. WFAA then shows a video tape of the hearse with Kennedy's body leaving the Parkland Hospital driveway. Watson next shows a photograph of the Texas School Book Depository and points to the sixth floor window. http://www.jfk-info.com/wfaa-tv.htm

I enjoy a cop-out as much as the next man. And, boy, what a cop-out. It’s almost, well, lawerly, and certainly one for the collection. Mutually authenticating film is an interesting gambit, but one that rather smacks of desperation, for each link in the chain must hold – and, plainly, they don’t, for film, as with any other physical evidence, stands or falls by such mundane considerations as chain of custody, corroboration (both by its taker and other eyewitness testimony), absence of evidence of alteration and so on and so forth. With all this in mind, let’s briefly revisit the Z fake. Let’s start with its chain of custody. It’s nothing short of a nightmare – so bad, indeed, that proponents of its authenticity are obliged to more or less ignore, for example, the rigorously compartmentalised NPIC viewings, events so sensitive that the high-powered CIA unit backing Clay Shaw chose to withhold all knowledge of them from the latter’s defence team – and the judge. Corroboration by its alleged taker? Zapruder is on record stating that he filmed the presidential limousine rounding the turn from Houston on to Elm; that the shooting occurred at a different point on Elm than that depicted in the black and white stills he was shown by the Warren Commission; and that frames were missing even from the truncated version he was presented with at the Clay Shaw trial. As for events not present in the Z fake attested to by eyewitnesses to the assassination, two will suffice – there’s not a sign of the presidential limousine pulling to the left (attested to by witnesses from all four points of the compass) or stopping completely (even more eyewitnesses). One could drone on in this vein for some time, but the point is made: Z fake compatibility with other films was only achieved by, at bare minimum, extensive editing. Mutually authenticating? My foot. PS I'm delighted to learn that Jonathan Cohen has cleared up the Babushka lady mystery .

Let’s pretend for one moment that the Z fake really was the proof they hadn’t counted on and really did pose the threat to the conspirators which proponents of its authenticity have long insisted. Why, then, did Dulles and Angleton not act promptly to destroy it? Poor pre-planning? Inability to respond quickly enough? Intellectual integrity? Chivalry? “Company” ethics? An exaggerated concern for property rights? Lack of an “in” with Luce’s media empire? The existence of multiple copies? Lack of imagination? (Couldn’t concoct a story explaining the destruction of the above…) A concern not to push absurdity too far? An absence of technical resources? A dearth of competent personnel? The above list is manifestly incomplete, but typed with a straight(-ish) face throughout. I urge potential contributors not to abjure the rich satirical potential the subject offers.

Er, so why didn’t they? You are going to explain this, aren’t you? For decades now, I’ve tried to imagine the conversation between Dulles and Angleton on precisely this issue. “Jim,” solemnly intones Dulles as he extracts the pipe responsible for billowing that famous smoke from behind the picket fence, “we may have successfully orchestrated the murder of the 35th President in broad daylight on an American street - and then had the patsy bumped off in a police station on live TV - but we have a problem, a seemingly insurmountable one.” “And what’s that boss?” Angleton idly inquires while doodling a vastly elaborate diagram directly linking Harold Wilson’s family tree to the foundation of the Cheka and the origins of the Soviet space programme. Dulles shifts uneasily in his chair and begins to sweat. “Some random, socially unconnected nut with a home movie camera filmed the whole damn thing. Our nice little story about the assassin-from-the-rear is blown wide open. What on earth are we doing to do?” Angleton lights his fourth cigarette since the commencement of Dulles’ statement of the problem. “Nothing, boss, the film’s been bought by Luce so there’s no way we can get access to it and in any case, the agency exists to protect and extend the rights of major domestic corporations, not infringe them. More, the agency lacks both the resources and the personnel to contemplate any actions. So that’s that, we can only keep our fingers crossed.” Dulles relights his pipe. “You’re damn right, Jim, we’re truly powerless to act.” Absurd? Absolutely, but that's precisely what we have been asked to believe for over six decades by the proponents of the Z fake's authenticity.

This UK reviewer did the film justice:

Beneath a reproduction of the most famous Moorman-attributed polaroid:

During the McCarthy-CIA fight, Dulles organized a group to keep tabs on McCarthy's activities and to feed the senator disinformation. James Angleton and James McCargar, who by this time was out of government, were lunching one day, when Angleton mentioned that he knew of the other's work with the Pond in Hungary. Angleton described his concerns about Grombach and asked McCargar to meet with Grombach from time to time and report back. But Angleton wanted something more. He arranged to provide McCargar with false information, supposedly acquired in France, which would appear derogatory to CIA. Angleton hoped Grombach would pass the materials to McCarthy, who would use them. They could then be discredited, embarrassing the senator and hopefully throwing him off the CIA. In order to provide a pretext for giving this information to Grombach, McCargar was to hint that he wanted back in the intelligence game. — Mark Stout: "The Pond: Running Agents for State, War, and the CIA. The Hazards of Private Spy Operations", Studies in Intelligence, vol 48, no3

Congressional Record, 84th Congress, 2nd Session, V102 Part 5, 11 April 1956, page 6068 1. Barrett 2. Clements 3. Ervin 4. Fulbright 5. Gore 6. Green 7. Hill 8. Humphrey 9. Jackson 10. Jenner 11. Kefauver 12. Kennedy 13. Kerr 14. Langer 15. Lehman 16. Mansfield 17. McCarthy 18. McNamara 19. Morse 20. Mundt 21. Murray 22. Neely 23. Neuberger 24. Pastore 25. Payne 26. Smith, Maine 27. Welker Senate debate and vote in Congressional Record, v. 102, April 9, 1956: 5890-5891, 5922-5939; April 11, 1956: 6047-6063, 6065, 6067-6068. On the April 11, 1956 vote, twelve of the original co-sponsors of S. Con. Res. 2 reconsidered their position and voted against the concurrent resolutions. The Campaign for Congressional Oversight of the CIA: Mike Mansfield and Intelligence Reform By Nolan Franti August 2012 http://exhibits.lib.umt.edu/mansfield/essays/cia Mike Mansfield’s connection to intelligence reform can be traced almost all the way back to the creation of the CIA itself. Following the end of World War II, there arose a need to consolidate the operations of the various wartime intelligence-gathering services under one roof. With the National Security Act of 1947, Congress established both the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council.[1] Congress followed by authorizing many of the clandestine abilities and functions of the CIA with the Central Intelligence Agency Act of 1949.[2] Mansfield voted for both measures. It was through this latter Act that Mansfield, serving in his fourth term as a U.S. Congressman from Montana’s 1st District, was first to involve himself with the idea of intelligence reform. P. E. Delaney, Acting Recording Secretary of the Butte Stationary Engineers Union, wrote to Mansfield on March 25, 1949, expressing the union’s desire “for an explanation of your action on voting on this measure.”[3] An attachment, referencing an interview Mansfield had given shortly before the vote on the bill, detailed the union members’ concern. “This bill (HR 2663),” the attachment read, “contains in it a provision allowing the government to send intelligence agents (spies) into various organizations, including unions.” The interview further stated that the unions had asked Mansfield to vote against the bill, but that Mansfield “felt he had to vote for it.”[4] In his response to the Butte Stationary Engineers Union, Mansfield first reassured them that the CIA would have no authority to act in a domestic capacity. He quoted fellow representative Chester Holifield (D-Ca.), who had served on the committee that originally created the CIA, as saying, “It was clearly brought out at that time that no internal security work of any kind would be done by the CIA.” The new CIA bill would not change this fact, Mansfield contended. Unfortunately, the domestic abuse of power would become one of the key issues in future congressional investigations into the CIA, further involving Mansfield in the issue of intelligence reform Mansfield’s most prominent effort to increase oversight of the CIA came after his election to the Senate in 1952. As a freshman senator from a sparely populated state, Mansfield sought to make a name for himself by addressing the growing—and unchallenged—power of the Agency during the Cold War era. Earlier (contrasting) efforts at CIA reform had included the Hoover commission, chaired by former President Herbert Hoover, and Senator Joseph McCarthy’s claims of communist infiltration of the CIA.[5] Mansfield’s solution to what he perceived as a lack of transparency in the CIA’s relations with Congress was the creation of a permanent Joint Congressional Committee, composed of members of the both the House and Senate, that would oversee the budget and activities of the CIA. Mansfield introduced concurrent resolutions in the Senate in 1953 and 1954 to establish such a committee. Neither of these resolutions passed the Senate Armed Services committee, then chaired by Republican Leverett Saltonstall of Massachusetts.[6] [1] Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, The CIA and American Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 40-1. [2] Ibid, 59. [3] P. E. Delaney to Mike Mansfield, letter, 25 March 1949, Mike Mansfield Papers, The University of Montana, Missoula, Mont., Series 2, Box 39, Folder 14. [4] Attachment, Letter of P. E. Delaney, Mansfield Papers, Series 2, Box 39, Folder 14. [5] Jeffreys-Jones, 58, 74. [6] Ibid, 78.

Time Games Conspiracy Theorists With Cave Wall Distractions

All very sensible: The approach will never catch on.

To Conspiracy Theory or to Not Conspiracy Theory (That is the Question) Posted By Scott Owen On February 11, 2021 @ 12:39 am In articles 2015 | Comments Disabled Ever since the words were first introduced, conspiracy theories have carried the weight and stigma of mysterious enigmas wrapped in multiple layers of intrigue, deception, black-ops and lies. The very notion of conspiracy theories is itself considered by some to be a conspiracy theory. There are those who maintain that the CIA invented the term or at least brought it into our common language as a way of ridiculing those who questioned the Warren Report account of the murder of president JFK. Whether the CIA did or did not intentionally use those words, conspiracy theory, to discredit those who were non-believers of the official Warren Report line, we will never know. And that’s the thing about a conspiracy theory, as to its truth, we may never know. What should be known however, what we would be better to believe, is that in this world of intrigue, deception, black-ops and lies, that there are without a doubt conspiracies. If the CIA ever had the desire to de-legitimize someone or some entire group, then or especially now, this moment is certainly ripe for supplying them with all the necessary ingredients for pulling off a grand conspiracy of mass de-legitimization of those they see as being political rabble-rousers. The group who stormed the capitol on Jan.6th is one such group who follow conspiracy theories but although they are unique in being the ones who stormed the capitol, they are not unique in their beliefs in conspiracy theories. It might be hard, if one were to look, to find someone who does not believe in some conspiracy theory or another and it would be right for that to be the case because surely, one or the other of those theories is true, based on facts and even provable if the right material evidence could be produced. In this world of intrigue, deception, black-ops and lies however, it is sometimes very hard, impossible even for most of us, to get our hands on the right material evidence and those shady CIA operators are loving it. Nothing produces the environment where conspiracy theories thrive like reams of hidden or redacted evidence. Are many of the conspiracy theories we hear nothing but pure bunk made-up by who knows who for no other reason than to confuse and distract? Yes, many of them are. Are some of those theories the result of half understood notions that are used in an effort to understand hidden truth? Yes, many of them are. Are some of those theories true but only the tip of even greater conspiracies that we still haven’t even begun to suspect? It’s likely so. Would it be of some value to the public to keep an open mind where conspiracy theories are concerned? Yes, as it would be one of the tyrants greatest moments in psy-op history if we were not keeping an open mind where conspiracy theories are concerned. Are conspiracy theories currently being down-played and ridiculed as being absurd and the domain of idiots and fools? Yes they are! Is this treatment of conspiracy theories as some form of mental illness or instability, coupled with corporate and government censorship of things that they and they alone deem as being conspiracy theories with no redeeming even harmful value to the public, a smart way to go in societies hoping to retain some shred of truth and freedom? No it is not. Let us ask ourselves then, would we be wise to write off as unacceptable any theories that suggest conspiracy and to then allow government and corporate control of censorship of those theories? I think not. Would you then prefer to live in a society where people are allowed to freely suggest conspiracies where there may or may not be conspiracies or would you prefer to live in a society where no conspiracy theories are allowed even though they may or may not be true? Do you wish to live in a society where you and you alone are allowed to discern truth from fiction according to the evidence you yourself are able to uncover or do you want corporations and government to do that for you? Article printed from CounterPunch.org: https://www.counterpunch.org URL to article: https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/02/11/to-conspiracy-theory-or-to-not-conspiracy-theory-that-is-the-question/

The US' 2020 Elections: From Conspiracy Theory To Conspiracy Fact 10 FEBRUARY 2021 By Andrew Korybko https://oneworld.press/?module=articles&action=view&id=1915 The US Time magazine admitted in a report last week that a self-described “conspiracy” run by a “well-connected cabal of powerful people” “got states to change voting systems and laws” and “successfully pressured social media companies” among other achievements aimed at “democratically” toppling Trump, the revelation of which represents an attempt by the Democrats to flex their newfound post-election narrative power over their opponents as well as possibly provoke the most unstable at-risk ones among them to overreact in a violent way that could then be exploited for justifying the next phase of their “conspiracy”. The Cat's Out Of The Bag The Democrats and their supporters previously defamed everyone speculating about secretly concerted efforts against former President Trump in the run-up to and after last year's elections as “conspiracy theorists”, and such individuals even risked being deplatformed from social media for exercising their constitutionally enshrined freedom of speech depending on how they articulated their personal views in this respect. They were told that publicly expressing such an interpretation of events is equivalent to spreading “disinformation” and attempting to “delegitimize” the “democratic” outcome of the US' electoral process. That makes it all the more surprising then that Time magazine admitted in a report last week that a self-described “conspiracy” run by a “well-connected cabal of powerful people” “got states to change voting systems and laws” and “successfully pressured social media companies” among other achievements aimed at “democratically” toppling Trump. In other words, “conspiracy theory” became “conspiracy fact”. Politically Inconvenient Questions This naturally begs the question of why that pro-Democrat media outlet would so proudly brag about “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election”, as its piece is titled. Time can't be “discredited” by the Democrats otherwise they'd inflict the same such damage against the dozens of individuals named in their report who voluntarily cooperated with journalist Molly Ball in order to show, as one of them phrased it, that “the system didn't work magically” and that “democracy isn't self-executing”. Whether they intended to or not, they confirmed this hitherto so-called “conspiracy theory” as a “conspiracy fact”, thereby vindicating every Trump supporter who earlier expressed such sentiments. Not only that, but they also tacitly acknowledged that those who were deplatformed were victims of the same self-described “conspiracy” run by a “well-connected cabal of powerful people”. It's seemingly inexplicable why they'd do this, but deeply reflecting on the deliberate decision to reveal all of this provides some plausible explanations. The Democrats' Post-Election Narrative Power Flex The first is that, since “Every Democrat Is A Wannabe Dictator”, the party wanted to flex its newfound post-election narrative power to humiliate its opponents. The message being sent is simple enough, and it's that they're able to not only get away with literal “conspiracies” such as this one, but are powerful enough to weaponize the institutions under their control (Big Tech, government, mass media, etc.) in order to politically suppress those who dare to call them out on it. As predicted in the author's analysis late last year about how “Biden's America Would Be A Dystopian Hellhole”, the Democrats want to rapidly impose a de facto one-party dictatorship onto the rest of the country in collaboration with their “Republican In Name Only” (RINO) allies. They're drunk enough on power after having successfully pulled off what RT's Nebojsa Malic rightly described as a Color Revolution and thus winning what the author of the present piece earlier called the Hybrid War of Terror on America that they're excited to move full speed ahead towards this goal without any hesitation. Maximum Demoralization Motives The Trump-inspired “Make America Great Again” movement is mired in a political war with the RINOs while simultaneously struggling to purge itself of subversive QAnon elements. This makes it weaker than it ever was at any moment since its inception and thus unable to adequately organize any meaningful political resistance to this scheme. There's never been a better moment for the Democrats to strike in dealing what they hope will be the death blow to their most important opponents' morale, especially since their revelation was disclosed at the time that swamp-captured Trump decided to ally with the GOP Establishment in the likely misplaced hope that the party can regain control of Congress during the 2022 midterm elections. The intense frustration that some of the Democrats' opponents might understandably feel about all of these overwhelming developments happening at once might even incite some of the most unstable and at-risk ones such as the QAnon cultists to overreact in a violent way that could then be exploited for justifying the next phase of this “conspiracy”. Dictatorship Through “Democratic” Motions After all, there's little doubt among the Democrats' opponents that the party is now going all out in its attempt to impose a de facto one-party dictatorship onto the rest of the country, especially after Time proudly bragged about how they pulled off the first phase of their self-described “conspiracy” to “democratically” topple Trump due to the “secret” efforts of a “well-connected cabal of powerful people”. Even though they've made it clear that they'll weaponize their control over institutions to politically suppress others through defamatory attacks, deplatforming, and perhaps worse on the basis of indisputable narrative double standards, they still want to complete their full seize of power by going through superficially “democratic” motions. It would therefore greatly advance their grand strategic goal if an unstable, at-risk, and uncontrollably distressed Trump supporter was triggered by this revelation to plot or even God forbid carry out a domestic terrorist attack. In fact, that doesn't even have to happen in reality since the context is already set to invent that allegation if needed. Confusion Reigns One of the implied supplementary objectives of admitting to the “conspiracy” against Trump by a “well-connected cabal of powerful people” is to make it impossible for anyone to really know what to believe anymore. For this reason, any reports about domestic terrorist attacks or plans by Trump supporters in response to Time's surprising disclosure can't be taken at face value since there will always be the lingering but nevertheless plausible doubt that such allegations are also part of the larger “conspiracy” that was recently confirmed. As such, it wouldn't be surprising if many people suspected that such an attack was a false flag or that those implicated in planning something of the sort were entrapped by the secret police (FBI), if the latter even happened at all that is. The intent in so directly addressing this isn't to automatically extend credibility to those interpretations, but just to draw attention to how likely they are to emerge in the aftermath of Time's scandalous report. “American Solidarity” Is The Only Realistic Solution The domestic political impact would nevertheless be the same whether they really happened as might be reported or not since those incidents would certainly be exploited to advance the Democrats' grand strategic goal of imposing a de facto one-party state onto the rest of the country. Admittedly, there doesn't seem to be anything that dissidents can do to stop this, except perhaps immediately organizing an “American Solidarity” movement modeled off of its historic Polish counterpart, even if it too might take years to have any noticeable effect, if any at all considering the drastically different domestic political conditions in which it would peacefully operate. Not only would any attempt to organize violent resistance be illegal and arguably immoral, but it would simply facilitate the Democrats' plans by providing real evidence of what they'd describe as a domestic terrorist plot for justifying the accelerated implementation of the next phase of their “conspiracy”. For these reasons, “American Solidarity” is the only realistic (albeit possibly long-term) solution to this predicament. Concluding Thoughts The Democrats made a deliberate decision to have one of their most prominent mouthpieces so proudly brag about the self-described “conspiracy” that a “well-connected cabal of powerful people” pulled off against Trump. This was done to humiliate and demoralize their political opponents, as well as likely provoke the most unstable and at-risk ones such as the most radical QAnon cultists into overreacting by committing acts of violence that could then be exploited as the justification for next phase of their “conspiracy”. The messages being sent are several: the Democrats have successfully captured control of all institutions and are now weaponizing them to politically suppress their opponents on the basis of double standards; this revelation was widely known long ago by all sides but only publicly acknowledged by the culprits at this point due to its strategic timing; and nobody can ever take the Democrats' and their proxies' (including institutions') statements at face value any more. In truth, while one Hybrid War on America just ended, another has only begun.

Good grief, there WAS a conspiracy so immense - and we have the successful plotters word for it The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election BY MOLLY BALL FEBRUARY 4, 2021 5:40 AM EST https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/ 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. The handshake between business and labor was just one component of a vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election–an extraordinary shadow effort dedicated not to winning the vote but to ensuring it would be free and fair, credible and uncorrupted. For more than a year, a loosely organized coalition of operatives scrambled to shore up America’s institutions as they came under simultaneous attack from a remorseless pandemic and an autocratically inclined President. Though much of this activity took place on the left, it was separate from the Biden campaign and crossed ideological lines, with crucial contributions by nonpartisan and conservative actors. The scenario the shadow campaigners were desperate to stop was not a Trump victory. It was an election so calamitous that no result could be discerned at all, a failure of the central act of democratic self-governance that has been a hallmark of America since its founding. 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. For Trump and his allies were running their own campaign to spoil the election. The President spent months insisting that mail ballots were a Democratic plot and the election would be “rigged.” His henchmen at the state level sought to block their use, while his lawyers brought dozens of spurious suits to make it more difficult to vote–an intensification of the GOP’s legacy of suppressive tactics. Before the election, Trump plotted to block a legitimate vote count. And he spent the months following Nov. 3 trying to steal the election he’d lost–with lawsuits and conspiracy theories, pressure on state and local officials, and finally summoning his army of supporters to the Jan. 6 rally that ended in deadly violence at the Capitol. The democracy campaigners watched with alarm. “Every week, we felt like we were in a struggle to try to pull off this election without the country going through a real dangerous moment of unraveling,” says former GOP Representative Zach Wamp, a Trump supporter who helped coordinate a bipartisan election-protection council. “We can look back and say this thing went pretty well, but it was not at all clear in September and October that that was going to be the case.” 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. THE ARCHITECT Sometime in the fall of 2019, Mike Podhorzer became convinced the election was headed for disaster–and determined to protect it. This was not his usual purview. For nearly a quarter-century, Podhorzer, senior adviser to the president of the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest union federation, has marshaled the latest tactics and data to help its favored candidates win elections. Unassuming and professorial, he isn’t the sort of hair-gelled “political strategist” who shows up on cable news. Among Democratic insiders, he’s known as the wizard behind some of the biggest advances in political technology in recent decades. A group of liberal strategists he brought together in the early 2000s led to the creation of the Analyst Institute, a secretive firm that applies scientific methods to political campaigns. He was also involved in the founding of Catalist, the flagship progressive data company. The endless chatter in Washington about “political strategy,” Podhorzer believes, has little to do with how change really gets made. “My basic take on politics is that it’s all pretty obvious if you don’t overthink it or swallow the prevailing frameworks whole,” he once wrote. “After that, just relentlessly identify your assumptions and challenge them.” Podhorzer applies that approach to everything: when he coached his now adult son’s Little League team in the D.C. suburbs, he trained the boys not to swing at most pitches–a tactic that infuriated both their and their opponents’ parents, but won the team a series of championships. Trump’s election in 2016–credited in part to his unusual strength among the sort of blue collar white voters who once dominated the AFL-CIO–prompted Podhorzer to question his assumptions about voter behavior. He began circulating weekly number-crunching memos to a small circle of allies and hosting strategy sessions in D.C. But when he began to worry about the election itself, he didn’t want to seem paranoid. It was only after months of research that he introduced his concerns in his newsletter in October 2019. The usual tools of data, analytics and polling would not be sufficient in a situation where the President himself was trying to disrupt the election, he wrote. “Most of our planning takes us through Election Day,” he noted. “But, we are not prepared for the two most likely outcomes”–Trump losing and refusing to concede, and Trump winning the Electoral College (despite losing the popular vote) by corrupting the voting process in key states. “We desperately need to systematically ‘red-team’ this election so that we can anticipate and plan for the worst we know will be coming our way.” It turned out Podhorzer wasn’t the only one thinking in these terms. He began to hear from others eager to join forces. The Fight Back Table, a coalition of “resistance” organizations, had begun scenario-planning around the potential for a contested election, gathering liberal activists at the local and national level into what they called the Democracy Defense Coalition. Voting-rights and civil rights organizations were raising alarms. A group of former elected officials was researching emergency powers they feared Trump might exploit. Protect Democracy was assembling a bipartisan election-crisis task force. “It turned out that once you said it out loud, people agreed,” Podhorzer says, “and it started building momentum.” He spent months pondering scenarios and talking to experts. It wasn’t hard to find liberals who saw Trump as a dangerous dictator, but Podhorzer was careful to steer clear of hysteria. What he wanted to know was not how American democracy was dying but how it might be kept alive. The chief difference between the U.S. and countries that lost their grip on democracy, he concluded, was that America’s decentralized election system couldn’t be rigged in one fell swoop. That presented an opportunity to shore it up. THE ALLIANCE On March 3, Podhorzer drafted a three-page confidential memo titled “Threats to the 2020 Election.” “Trump has made it clear that this will not be a fair election, and that he will reject anything but his own re-election as ‘fake’ and rigged,” he wrote. “On Nov. 3, should the media report otherwise, he will use the right-wing information system to establish his narrative and incite his supporters to protest.” The memo laid out four categories of challenges: attacks on voters, attacks on election administration, attacks on Trump’s political opponents and “efforts to reverse the results of the election.” Then COVID-19 erupted at the height of the primary-election season. Normal methods of voting were no longer safe for voters or the mostly elderly volunteers who normally staff polling places. But political disagreements, intensified by Trump’s crusade against mail voting, prevented some states from making it easier to vote absentee and for jurisdictions to count those votes in a timely manner. Chaos ensued. Ohio shut down in-person voting for its primary, leading to minuscule turnout. A poll-worker shortage in Milwaukee–where Wisconsin’s heavily Democratic Black population is concentrated–left just five open polling places, down from 182. In New York, vote counting took more than a month. Suddenly, the potential for a November meltdown was obvious. In his apartment in the D.C. suburbs, Podhorzer began working from his laptop at his kitchen table, holding back-to-back Zoom meetings for hours a day with his network of contacts across the progressive universe: the labor movement; the institutional left, like Planned Parenthood and Greenpeace; resistance groups like Indivisible and MoveOn; progressive data geeks and strategists, representatives of donors and foundations, state-level grassroots organizers, racial-justice activists and others. In April, Podhorzer began hosting a weekly 2½-hour Zoom. It was structured around a series of rapid-fire five-minute presentations on everything from which ads were working to messaging to legal strategy. The invitation-only gatherings soon attracted hundreds, creating a rare shared base of knowledge for the fractious progressive movement. “At the risk of talking trash about the left, there’s not a lot of good information sharing,” says Anat Shenker-Osorio, a close Podhorzer friend whose poll-tested messaging guidance shaped the group’s approach. “There’s a lot of not-invented-here syndrome, where people won’t consider a good idea if they didn’t come up with it.” The meetings became the galactic center for a constellation of operatives across the left who shared overlapping goals but didn’t usually work in concert. The group had no name, no leaders and no hierarchy, but it kept the disparate actors in sync. “Pod played a critical behind-the-scenes role in keeping different pieces of the movement infrastructure in communication and aligned,” says Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party. “You have the litigation space, the organizing space, the political people just focused on the W, and their strategies aren’t always aligned. He allowed this ecosystem to work together.” Protecting the election would require an effort of unprecedented scale. As 2020 progressed, it stretched to Congress, Silicon Valley and the nation’s statehouses. It drew energy from the summer’s racial-justice protests, many of whose leaders were a key part of the liberal alliance. And eventually it reached across the aisle, into the world of Trump-skeptical Republicans appalled by his attacks on democracy. SECURING THE VOTE The first task was overhauling America’s balky election infrastructure–in the middle of a pandemic. For the thousands of local, mostly nonpartisan officials who administer elections, the most urgent need was money. They needed protective equipment like masks, gloves and hand sanitizer. They needed to pay for postcards letting people know they could vote absentee–or, in some states, to mail ballots to every voter. They needed additional staff and scanners to process ballots. In March, activists appealed to Congress to steer COVID relief money to election administration. Led by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, more than 150 organizations signed a letter to every member of Congress seeking $2 billion in election funding. It was somewhat successful: the CARES Act, passed later that month, contained $400 million in grants to state election administrators. But the next tranche of relief funding didn’t add to that number. It wasn’t going to be enough. Private philanthropy stepped into the breach. An assortment of foundations contributed tens of millions in election-administration funding. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative chipped in $300 million. “It was a failure at the federal level that 2,500 local election officials were forced to apply for philanthropic grants to fill their needs,” says Amber McReynolds, a former Denver election official who heads the nonpartisan National Vote at Home Institute. McReynolds’ two-year-old organization became a clearinghouse for a nation struggling to adapt. The institute gave secretaries of state from both parties technical advice on everything from which vendors to use to how to locate drop boxes. Local officials are the most trusted sources of election information, but few can afford a press secretary, so the institute distributed communications tool kits. In a presentation to Podhorzer’s group, McReynolds detailed the importance of absentee ballots for shortening lines at polling places and preventing an election crisis. The institute’s work helped 37 states and D.C. bolster mail voting. But it wouldn’t be worth much if people didn’t take advantage. Part of the challenge was logistical: each state has different rules for when and how ballots should be requested and returned. The Voter Participation Center, which in a normal year would have deployed canvassers door-to-door to get out the vote, instead conducted focus groups in April and May to find out what would get people to vote by mail. In August and September, it sent ballot applications to 15 million people in key states, 4.6 million of whom returned them. In mailings and digital ads, the group urged people not to wait for Election Day. “All the work we have done for 17 years was built for this moment of bringing democracy to people’s doorsteps,” says Tom Lopach, the center’s CEO. The effort had to overcome heightened skepticism in some communities. Many Black voters preferred to exercise their franchise in person or didn’t trust the mail. National civil rights groups worked with local organizations to get the word out that this was the best way to ensure one’s vote was counted. In Philadelphia, for example, advocates distributed “voting safety kits” containing masks, hand sanitizer and informational brochures. “We had to get the message out that this is safe, reliable, and you can trust it,” says Hannah Fried of All Voting Is Local. At the same time, Democratic lawyers battled a historic tide of pre-election litigation. The pandemic intensified the parties’ usual tangling in the courts. But the lawyers noticed something else as well. “The litigation brought by the Trump campaign, of a piece with the broader campaign to sow doubt about mail voting, was making novel claims and using theories no court has ever accepted,” says Wendy Weiser, a voting-rights expert at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU. “They read more like lawsuits designed to send a message rather than achieve a legal outcome.” In the end, nearly half the electorate cast ballots by mail in 2020, practically a revolution in how people vote. About a quarter voted early in person. Only a quarter of voters cast their ballots the traditional way: in person on Election Day. THE DISINFORMATION DEFENSE Bad actors spreading false information is nothing new. For decades, campaigns have grappled with everything from anonymous calls claiming the election has been rescheduled to fliers spreading nasty smears about candidates’ families. But Trump’s lies and conspiracy theories, the viral force of social media and the involvement of foreign meddlers made disinformation a broader, deeper threat to the 2020 vote. Laura Quinn, a veteran progressive operative who co-founded Catalist, began studying this problem a few years ago. She piloted a nameless, secret project, which she has never before publicly discussed, that tracked disinformation online and tried to figure out how to combat it. One component was tracking dangerous lies that might otherwise spread unnoticed. Researchers then provided information to campaigners or the media to track down the sources and expose them. The most important takeaway from Quinn’s research, however, was that engaging with toxic content only made it worse. “When you get attacked, the instinct is to push back, call it out, say, ‘This isn’t true,'” Quinn says. “But the more engagement something gets, the more the platforms boost it. The algorithm reads that as, ‘Oh, this is popular; people want more of it.'” The solution, she concluded, was to pressure platforms to enforce their rules, both by removing content or accounts that spread disinformation and by more aggressively policing it in the first place. “The platforms have policies against certain types of malign behavior, but they haven’t been enforcing them,” she says. Quinn’s research gave ammunition to advocates pushing social media platforms to take a harder line. In November 2019, Mark Zuckerberg invited nine civil rights leaders to dinner at his home, where they warned him about the danger of the election-related falsehoods that were already spreading unchecked. “It took pushing, urging, conversations, brainstorming, all of that to get to a place where we ended up with more rigorous rules and enforcement,” says Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, who attended the dinner and also met with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and others. (Gupta has been nominated for Associate Attorney General by President Biden.) “It was a struggle, but we got to the point where they understood the problem. Was it enough? Probably not. Was it later than we wanted? Yes. But it was really important, given the level of official disinformation, that they had those rules in place and were tagging things and taking them down.” SPREADING THE WORD Beyond battling bad information, there was a need to explain a rapidly changing election process. It was crucial for voters to understand that despite what Trump was saying, mail-in votes weren’t susceptible to fraud and that it would be normal if some states weren’t finished counting votes on election night. Dick Gephardt, the Democratic former House leader turned high-powered lobbyist, spearheaded one coalition. “We wanted to get a really bipartisan group of former elected officials, Cabinet secretaries, military leaders and so on, aimed mainly at messaging to the public but also speaking to local officials–the secretaries of state, attorneys general, governors who would be in the eye of the storm–to let them know we wanted to help,” says Gephardt, who worked his contacts in the private sector to put $20 million behind the effort. Wamp, the former GOP Congressman, worked through the nonpartisan reform group Issue One to rally Republicans. “We thought we should bring some bipartisan element of unity around what constitutes a free and fair election,” Wamp says. The 22 Democrats and 22 Republicans on the National Council on Election Integrity met on Zoom at least once a week. They ran ads in six states, made statements, wrote articles and alerted local officials to potential problems. “We had rabid Trump supporters who agreed to serve on the council based on the idea that this is honest,” Wamp says. This is going to be just as important, he told them, to convince the liberals when Trump wins. “Whichever way it cuts, we’re going to stick together.” The Voting Rights Lab and IntoAction created state-specific memes and graphics, spread by email, text, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, urging that every vote be counted. Together, they were viewed more than 1 billion times. Protect Democracy’s election task force issued reports and held media briefings with high-profile experts across the political spectrum, resulting in widespread coverage of potential election issues and fact-checking of Trump’s false claims. The organization’s tracking polls found the message was being heard: the percentage of the public that didn’t expect to know the winner on election night gradually rose until by late October, it was over 70%. A majority also believed that a prolonged count wasn’t a sign of problems. “We knew exactly what Trump was going to do: he was going to try to use the fact that Democrats voted by mail and Republicans voted in person to make it look like he was ahead, claim victory, say the mail-in votes were fraudulent and try to get them thrown out,” says Protect Democracy’s Bassin. Setting public expectations ahead of time helped undercut those lies. The alliance took a common set of themes from the research Shenker-Osorio presented at Podhorzer’s Zooms. Studies have shown that when people don’t think their vote will count or fear casting it will be a hassle, they’re far less likely to participate. Throughout election season, members of Podhorzer’s group minimized incidents of voter intimidation and tamped down rising liberal hysteria about Trump’s expected refusal to concede. They didn’t want to amplify false claims by engaging them, or put people off voting by suggesting a rigged game. “When you say, ‘These claims of fraud are spurious,’ what people hear is ‘fraud,'” Shenker-Osorio says. “What we saw in our pre-election research was that anything that reaffirmed Trump’s power or cast him as an authoritarian diminished people’s desire to vote.” Podhorzer, meanwhile, was warning everyone he knew that polls were underestimating Trump’s support. The data he shared with media organizations who would be calling the election was “tremendously useful” to understand what was happening as the votes rolled in, according to a member of a major network’s political unit who spoke with Podhorzer before Election Day. Most analysts had recognized there would be a “blue shift” in key battlegrounds– the surge of votes breaking toward Democrats, driven by tallies of mail-in ballots– but they hadn’t comprehended how much better Trump was likely to do on Election Day. “Being able to document how big the absentee wave would be and the variance by state was essential,” the analyst says. PEOPLE POWER The racial-justice uprising sparked by George Floyd’s killing in May was not primarily a political movement. The organizers who helped lead it wanted to harness its momentum for the election without allowing it to be co-opted by politicians. Many of those organizers were part of Podhorzer’s network, from the activists in battleground states who partnered with the Democracy Defense Coalition to organizations with leading roles in the Movement for Black Lives. The best way to ensure people’s voices were heard, they decided, was to protect their ability to vote. “We started thinking about a program that would complement the traditional election-protection area but also didn’t rely on calling the police,” says Nelini Stamp, the Working Families Party’s national organizing director. They created a force of “election defenders” who, unlike traditional poll watchers, were trained in de-escalation techniques. During early voting and on Election Day, they surrounded lines of voters in urban areas with a “joy to the polls” effort that turned the act of casting a ballot into a street party. Black organizers also recruited thousands of poll workers to ensure polling places would stay open in their communities. The summer uprising had shown that people power could have a massive impact. Activists began preparing to reprise the demonstrations if Trump tried to steal the election. “Americans plan widespread protests if Trump interferes with election,” Reuters reported in October, one of many such stories. More than 150 liberal groups, from the Women’s March to the Sierra Club to Color of Change, from Democrats.com to the Democratic Socialists of America, joined the “Protect the Results” coalition. The group’s now defunct website had a map listing 400 planned postelection demonstrations, to be activated via text message as soon as Nov. 4. To stop the coup they feared, the left was ready to flood the streets. STRANGE BEDFELLOWS About a week before Election Day, Podhorzer received an unexpected message: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce wanted to talk. The AFL-CIO and the Chamber have a long history of antagonism. Though neither organization is explicitly partisan, the influential business lobby has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Republican campaigns, just as the nation’s unions funnel hundreds of millions to Democrats. On one side is labor, on the other management, locked in an eternal struggle for power and resources. But behind the scenes, the business community was engaged in its own anxious discussions about how the election and its aftermath might unfold. The summer’s racial-justice protests had sent a signal to business owners too: the potential for economy-disrupting civil disorder. “With tensions running high, there was a lot of concern about unrest around the election, or a breakdown in our normal way we handle contentious elections,” says Neil Bradley, the Chamber’s executive vice president and chief policy officer. These worries had led the Chamber to release a pre-election statement with the Business Roundtable, a Washington-based CEOs’ group, as well as associations of manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers, calling for patience and confidence as votes were counted. But Bradley wanted to send a broader, more bipartisan message. He reached out to Podhorzer, through an intermediary both men declined to name. Agreeing that their unlikely alliance would be powerful, they began to discuss a joint statement pledging their organizations’ shared commitment to a fair and peaceful election. They chose their words carefully and scheduled the statement’s release for maximum impact. As it was being finalized, Christian leaders signaled their interest in joining, further broadening its reach. The statement was released on Election Day, under the names of Chamber CEO Thomas Donohue, AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka, and the heads of the National Association of Evangelicals and the National African American Clergy Network. “It is imperative that election officials be given the space and time to count every vote in accordance with applicable laws,” it stated. “We call on the media, the candidates and the American people to exercise patience with the process and trust in our system, even if it requires more time than usual.” The groups added, “Although we may not always agree on desired outcomes up and down the ballot, we are united in our call for the American democratic process to proceed without violence, intimidation or any other tactic that makes us weaker as a nation.” SHOWING UP, STANDING DOWN Election night began with many Democrats despairing. Trump was running ahead of pre-election polling, winning Florida, Ohio and Texas easily and keeping Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania too close to call. But Podhorzer was unperturbed when I spoke to him that night: the returns were exactly in line with his modeling. He had been warning for weeks that Trump voters’ turnout was surging. As the numbers dribbled out, he could tell that as long as all the votes were counted, Trump would lose. The liberal alliance gathered for an 11 p.m. Zoom call. Hundreds joined; many were freaking out. “It was really important for me and the team in that moment to help ground people in what we had already known was true,” says Angela Peoples, director for the Democracy Defense Coalition. Podhorzer presented data to show the group that victory was in hand. While he was talking, Fox News surprised everyone by calling Arizona for Biden. The public-awareness campaign had worked: TV anchors were bending over backward to counsel caution and frame the vote count accurately. The question then became what to do next. The conversation that followed was a difficult one, led by the activists charged with the protest strategy. “We wanted to be mindful of when was the right time to call for moving masses of people into the street,” Peoples says. As much as they were eager to mount a show of strength, mobilizing immediately could backfire and put people at risk. Protests that devolved into violent clashes would give Trump a pretext to send in federal agents or troops as he had over the summer. And rather than elevate Trump’s complaints by continuing to fight him, the alliance wanted to send the message that the people had spoken. So the word went out: stand down. Protect the Results announced that it would “not be activating the entire national mobilization network today, but remains ready to activate if necessary.” On Twitter, outraged progressives wondered what was going on. Why wasn’t anyone trying to stop Trump’s coup? Where were all the protests? Podhorzer credits the activists for their restraint. “They had spent so much time getting ready to hit the streets on Wednesday. But they did it,” he says. “Wednesday through Friday, there was not a single Antifa vs. Proud Boys incident like everyone was expecting. And when that didn’t materialize, I don’t think the Trump campaign had a backup plan.” Activists reoriented the Protect the Results protests toward a weekend of celebration. “Counter their disinfo with our confidence & get ready to celebrate,” read the messaging guidance Shenker-Osorio presented to the liberal alliance on Friday, Nov. 6. “Declare and fortify our win. Vibe: confident, forward-looking, unified–NOT passive, anxious.” The voters, not the candidates, would be the protagonists of the story. The planned day of celebration happened to coincide with the election being called on Nov. 7. Activists dancing in the streets of Philadelphia blasted Beyoncé over an attempted Trump campaign press conference; the Trumpers’ next confab was scheduled for Four Seasons Total Landscaping outside the city center, which activists believe was not a coincidence. “The people of Philadelphia owned the streets of Philadelphia,” crows the Working Families Party’s Mitchell. “We made them look ridiculous by contrasting our joyous celebration of democracy with their clown show.” The votes had been counted. Trump had lost. But the battle wasn’t over. THE FIVE STEPS TO VICTORY In Podhorzer’s presentations, winning the vote was only the first step to winning the election. After that came winning the count, winning the certification, winning the Electoral College and winning the transition–steps that are normally formalities but that he knew Trump would see as opportunities for disruption. Nowhere would that be more evident than in Michigan, where Trump’s pressure on local Republicans came perilously close to working–and where liberal and conservative pro-democracy forces joined to counter it. It was around 10 p.m. on election night in Detroit when a flurry of texts lit up the phone of Art Reyes III. A busload of Republican election observers had arrived at the TCF Center, where votes were being tallied. They were crowding the vote-counting tables, refusing to wear masks, heckling the mostly Black workers. Reyes, a Flint native who leads We the People Michigan, was expecting this. For months, conservative groups had been sowing suspicion about urban vote fraud. “The language was, ‘They’re going to steal the election; there will be fraud in Detroit,’ long before any vote was cast,” Reyes says. He made his way to the arena and sent word to his network. Within 45 minutes, dozens of reinforcements had arrived. As they entered the arena to provide a counterweight to the GOP observers inside, Reyes took down their cell-phone numbers and added them to a massive text chain. Racial-justice activists from Detroit Will Breathe worked alongside suburban women from Fems for Dems and local elected officials. Reyes left at 3 a.m., handing the text chain over to a disability activist. As they mapped out the steps in the election-certification process, activists settled on a strategy of foregrounding the people’s right to decide, demanding their voices be heard and calling attention to the racial implications of disenfranchising Black Detroiters. They flooded the Wayne County canvassing board’s Nov. 17 certification meeting with on-message testimony; despite a Trump tweet, the Republican board members certified Detroit’s votes. Election boards were one pressure point; another was GOP-controlled legislatures, who Trump believed could declare the election void and appoint their own electors. And so the President invited the GOP leaders of the Michigan legislature, House Speaker Lee Chatfield and Senate majority leader Mike Shirkey, to Washington on Nov. 20. It was a perilous moment. If Chatfield and Shirkey agreed to do Trump’s bidding, Republicans in other states might be similarly bullied. “I was concerned things were going to get weird,” says Jeff Timmer, a former Michigan GOP executive director turned anti-Trump activist. Norm Eisen describes it as “the scariest moment” of the entire election. The democracy defenders launched a full-court press. Protect Democracy’s local contacts researched the lawmakers’ personal and political motives. Issue One ran television ads in Lansing. The Chamber’s Bradley kept close tabs on the process. Wamp, the former Republican Congressman, called his former colleague Mike Rogers, who wrote an op-ed for the Detroit newspapers urging officials to honor the will of the voters. Three former Michigan governors–Republicans John Engler and Rick Snyder and Democrat Jennifer Granholm–jointly called for Michigan’s electoral votes to be cast free of pressure from the White House. Engler, a former head of the Business Roundtable, made phone calls to influential donors and fellow GOP elder statesmen who could press the lawmakers privately. The pro-democracy forces were up against a Trumpified Michigan GOP controlled by allies of Ronna McDaniel, the Republican National Committee chair, and Betsy DeVos, the former Education Secretary and a member of a billionaire family of GOP donors. On a call with his team on Nov. 18, Bassin vented that his side’s pressure was no match for what Trump could offer. “Of course he’s going to try to offer them something,” Bassin recalls thinking. “Head of the Space Force! Ambassador to wherever! We can’t compete with that by offering carrots. We need a stick.” If Trump were to offer something in exchange for a personal favor, that would likely constitute bribery, Bassin reasoned. He phoned Richard Primus, a law professor at the University of Michigan, to see if Primus agreed and would make the argument publicly. Primus said he thought the meeting itself was inappropriate, and got to work on an op-ed for Politico warning that the state attorney general–a Democrat–would have no choice but to investigate. When the piece posted on Nov. 19, the attorney general’s communications director tweeted it. Protect Democracy soon got word that the lawmakers planned to bring lawyers to the meeting with Trump the next day. Reyes’ activists scanned flight schedules and flocked to the airports on both ends of Shirkey’s journey to D.C., to underscore that the lawmakers were being scrutinized. After the meeting, the pair announced they’d pressed the President to deliver COVID relief for their constituents and informed him they saw no role in the election process. Then they went for a drink at the Trump hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue. A street artist projected their images onto the outside of the building along with the words THE WORLD IS WATCHING. That left one last step: the state canvassing board, made up of two Democrats and two Republicans. One Republican, a Trumper employed by the DeVos family’s political nonprofit, was not expected to vote for certification. The other Republican on the board was a little-known lawyer named Aaron Van Langevelde. He sent no signals about what he planned to do, leaving everyone on edge. When the meeting began, Reyes’s activists flooded the livestream and filled Twitter with their hashtag, #alleyesonmi. A board accustomed to attendance in the single digits suddenly faced an audience of thousands. In hours of testimony, the activists emphasized their message of respecting voters’ wishes and affirming democracy rather than scolding the officials. Van Langevelde quickly signaled he would follow precedent. The vote was 3-0 to certify; the other Republican abstained. After that, the dominoes fell. Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and the rest of the states certified their electors. Republican officials in Arizona and Georgia stood up to Trump’s bullying. And the Electoral College voted on schedule on Dec. 14. HOW CLOSE WE CAME There was one last milestone on Podhorzer’s mind: Jan. 6. On the day Congress would meet to tally the electoral count, Trump summoned his supporters to D.C. for a rally. Much to their surprise, the thousands who answered his call were met by virtually no counterdemonstrators. To preserve safety and ensure they couldn’t be blamed for any mayhem, the activist left was “strenuously discouraging counter activity,” Podhorzer texted me the morning of Jan. 6, with a crossed-fingers emoji. Incited by the President, Trump Supporters Violently Storm the Capitol Trump addressed the crowd that afternoon, peddling the lie that lawmakers or Vice President Mike Pence could reject states’ electoral votes. He told them to go to the Capitol and “fight like hell.” Then he returned to the White House as they sacked the building. As lawmakers fled for their lives and his own supporters were shot and trampled, Trump praised the rioters as “very special.” It was his final attack on democracy, and once again, it failed. By standing down, the democracy campaigners outfoxed their foes. “We won by the skin of our teeth, honestly, and that’s an important point for folks to sit with,” says the Democracy Defense Coalition’s Peoples. “There’s an impulse for some to say voters decided and democracy won. But it’s a mistake to think that this election cycle was a show of strength for democracy. It shows how vulnerable democracy is.” The members of the alliance to protect the election have gone their separate ways. The Democracy Defense Coalition has been disbanded, though the Fight Back Table lives on. Protect Democracy and the good-government advocates have turned their attention to pressing reforms in Congress. Left-wing activists are pressuring the newly empowered Democrats to remember the voters who put them there, while civil rights groups are on guard against further attacks on voting. Business leaders denounced the Jan. 6 attack, and some say they will no longer donate to lawmakers who refused to certify Biden’s victory. Podhorzer and his allies are still holding their Zoom strategy sessions, gauging voters’ views and developing new messages. And Trump is in Florida, facing his second impeachment, deprived of the Twitter and Facebook accounts he used to push the nation to its breaking point. As I was reporting this article in November and December, I heard different claims about who should get the credit for thwarting Trump’s plot. Liberals argued the role of bottom-up people power shouldn’t be overlooked, particularly the contributions of people of color and local grassroots activists. Others stressed the heroism of GOP officials like Van Langevelde and Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, who stood up to Trump at considerable cost. The truth is that neither likely could have succeeded without the other. “It’s astounding how close we came, how fragile all this really is,” says Timmer, the former Michigan GOP executive director. “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.” Democracy won in the end. The will of the people prevailed. But it’s crazy, in retrospect, that this is what it took to put on an election in the United States of America. –With reporting by LESLIE DICKSTEIN, MARIAH ESPADA and SIMMONE SHAH Correction appended, Feb. 5: The original version of this story misstated the name of Norm Eisen’s organization. It is the Voter Protection Program, not the Voter Protection Project. The original version of this story also misstated Jeff Timmer’s former position with the Michigan Republican Party. He was the executive director, not the chairman. This appears in the February 15, 2021 issue of TIME. https://www.bitchute.com/video/kM1hysHIPWEa/ https://www.bitchute.com/video/ah3z8rJuiv3v/ https://on.rt.com/b176

What Happened to JFK and a Foreign Policy of Peace? By Rick Sterling Global Research, January 27, 2021 https://www.globalresearch.ca/what-happened-jfk-foreign-policy-peace/5735544 * Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc. Rick Sterling is a journalist based in the SF Bay Area. He can be reached at rsterling1@protonmail.com

Excellent post - this seems to me pretty obviously what transpired. And I have yet to see a single equivalent example disfavouring Biden as can be found, for example, at this link: https://coosavalleynews.com/2020/11/nearly-3000-additional-votes-discovered-in-hand-recount-in-floyd-county/?fbclid=IwAR2ol-86PN5aUyh302w4nNGquAHeycYuCUVNMfETEX0fA1nknyaWqWkdX6M One of the many jokes currently available to connossieurs of this sort of thing resides in the fact that the Democratic elite, unnoticed by its base but not by foreign observers, has embraced Trumpism, albeit minus the man. Sensitive Dems should be aware that the link to follow has Putinoid tendencies and thus clicking on it could result in certain death by Covid-19, Novichuk, and/or intelligent reflection: https://www.stalkerzone.org/clinton-publishes-americas-plan-for-peace-good-news-for-russia/ CLINTON PUBLISHES AMERICA’S PLAN FOR THE WORLD: GOOD NEWS FOR RUSSIA November 16, 2020 Hillary Clinton – the “grey cardinal” and failed US President – published a program text in the authoritative American magazine “Foreign Policy”, which can and should be considered a real strategy of the American “deep state” in restoring American world hegemony. The throne speech of the future zombie president Biden can no longer be listened to or read: Mrs. Clinton formulated everything in the most clear and unambiguous terms, and – given the place of the “Clinton clan” in the real table of ranks of American politics – the chances of this strategy being implemented are very, very high. The most paradoxical thing about the text of the failed “Madame President” (as she called herself) is that this program is a holistic, large and thorough recognition that Donald Trump was right. Donald Trump, even if he ends his life behind bars (and this is a very likely scenario), can write down an incredible achievement for himself – he broke the historical course of the US, and even those who are most likely to come to power using the votes of American cemeteries are already forced to build their foreign and even domestic policy, focusing, among other things, on those reference points that the eccentric New York billionaire has hammered into the American political discourse. Despite the ritual (and rather emotional) criticism of the 45th President of the United States, Mrs. Clinton draws attention to the problems that before Democrats preferred not just to ignore, but to deny: “Administrations of both parties have long underappreciated the security implications of economic policies that weakened strategically important industries and sent vital supply chains overseas. The foreign policy community understandably focused on how new trade agreements would cement alliances and extend American influence in developing countries. Democrats should have been more willing to hit the brakes on new trade agreements when Republicans obstructed efforts to support workers, create jobs, and invest in hard-hit communities at home,” Clinton writes. If it weren’t for the jab at the Republicans, who were really quite irresponsible about the consequences of economic globalisation, you would think that this passage was written by one of the speechwriters of Donald Trump, who built his entire political career on accusations against both Democrats and Republicans that they deliberately took American jobs and production facilities to China, which led to a situation in which Beijing can compete with Washington in the battle for the status of a leading world power. Globalisation in the American way has died, because it was killed by Trump, and now even the leading politician of the Democratic Party inserts Trumpian cliches in her program text and points to China as a threat to US national security — not only military, but also (above all) economic. It is worth noting that Hillary Clinton’s program pays more attention to the fight against China than the fight against Russia, although in many cases the mention of the main enemies of the US in its text is separated by commas. At least, at the level of goal setting, there can be no question of any “concentration of all forces on Russia”. The whole discussion is based on the need to move away from the cold war cliches and find the right way to strangle China first, and Russia — for company. However, pointing to certain “Trumpian” changes in the democratic political discourse, it is impossible not to note the iron consistency in terms of maintaining a focus only on confrontation — judging by Mrs. Clinton’s text, the idea of peaceful coexistence with China and Russia, not to mention any substantive cooperation or detente, simply does not occur to her. Even diplomacy is perceived by the former head of the State Department primarily as a tool that provides a more convenient opportunity for forceful pressure. For example, when criticising the Trump administration for failing to work with allies, she cites the following example of proper diplomacy: READ: Next In Line - Liberal Fascism “A renewed commitment to diplomacy would strengthen the United States’ military position. U.S. alliances are an asset that neither China nor Russia can match, allowing Washington to project force around the world. When I was secretary of state, for example, we secured an agreement to base 2,500 U.S. marines in northern Australia, near the contested sea-lanes of the South China Sea.” By and large, the world will see a reformatting of the tribute that the US is trying to shake out from its vassals, and if Trump (as a real businessman) preferred payment in the form of money (which is why Clinton accuses him of turning NATO into a “racketeer” business), the more refined approach of the Democratic establishment is that vassals will pay both in money and, so to speak, in kind – in the form of actions that can help the US gain some military advantages over China or Russia. However, there is good news: at least at the declarative level, the “grey cardinal” of the Biden administration advocates to avoid “accidental” nuclear war with China or Russia, which against the background of the presence in the Biden administration of a certain number of completely crazy “hawks” cannot but rejoice. Speaking about the need to create new conventional weapons systems, Clinton emphasises that “these capabilities must be accompanied by mechanisms that allow for consultation with China and Russia to reduce the chances that a long-range conventional attack is mistaken for a nuclear strike, which could lead to disastrous escalation”. Of course, it is good that Washington is likely to make efforts to make such a mechanism work, but the fixation of the American establishment (speaking to us in the voice of an former Secretary of State) on promoting its geopolitical interests with the help of missile and bomb attacks (even non-nuclear ones) cannot cause positive emotions. A return of the American “deep state” to the levers of a American political, military and diplomatic machine will not be a global apocalypse, but there will definitely not be peace on the planet: the US will try to return some production capacity to its territory, and will actively try to pressure geopolitical opponents via military and diplomatic methods. And if there are serious doubts about the ability of the Biden administration to return the US economy to an industrial production orientation, then there can be no doubt that the American military machine will gladly return to the continuation of bloody escapades around the world. Ivan Danilov

Hi Micah, I have the original article, with the front cover of the issue prefacing it, in a colour PDF (which means the scan is big). If you want a copy, let me have an email address & I'll forward it to you. Paul

Meet the Press, 3 December 1961: Edmund Gullion https://youtu.be/JKwrqbhpf3c