2020 Election fraud – Mirror of Time article: The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election
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 supported local groups deploying 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 to the effort. “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.
Trump addressed the crowd that afternoon, peddling the lie that lawmakers of 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.
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- Deep State
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- Time Magazine
- Voter fraud
Coca-Cola accused of telling employees to ‘be LESS WHITE’ in training course by critical race theory peddler DiAngelo
Organizational psychologist Karlyn Borysenko, an activist against so-called critical race theory indoctrination, said on Friday that she obtained copies of the training materials from a whistleblower at Coca-Cola who received an email from management announcing the course. The class is administered online, through the LinkedIn Learning platform, and is entitled “Confronting Racism, with Robin DiAngelo,” a top proponent of critical race theory who offers high-dollar corporate seminars on “whiteness, white fragility” and “racial justice.” She is known to charge up to $40,000 for a half-day talk.
A spokesperson from Coca-Cola responded to the images later on Friday, all but confirming they were from a company-endorsed seminar to Blaze journalist Chris Pandolfo, though said it was not the main “focus” of its educational program.
“The video circulating on social media is from a publicly available LinkedIn Learning series and is not a focus of our company’s curriculum,” the spokesperson said, but added that the course is “part of a learning plan to help build an inclusive workplace.”
Top 22 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Take Any Of The Experimental mRNA vaccines for coronavirus COVID-19
Pfizer has been forced to pay out over $4b in criminal and civil settlements for various frauds and immoral acts over the last 20 years, but that only represents about a quarter of their projected 2021 net income. Are we really going to trust them this time around, with no liability and no reason to care?
https://europepmc.org/article/PMC/2875889
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/mobile/business/8234533.stm
https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/pfizer-forecasts-15-billion-covid-144625703.html
Be aware that doctors believe that less than 1% of vaccine damage is ever reported:
“The doctors emphasize how “fewer than 1% percent of vaccine adverse events are even reported. So, theoretically, that 1/39 number [2.6% vaccine damage previously estimated] discovered from the data mentioned above is actually a lot greater given the fact that many adverse events aren’t even reported.
Of all the threats we’re facing right now, I consider the mRNA “vaccine” to be the most pressing and immediate.
Where in all of the MSM is any semblance of informed consent? This wilful ignorance like a spell over it and the people who consume it is sickening and most probably criminal.
While, disappointingly, most still believe in the COVID psyop, I believe there is an instinctual revulsion and mistrust surrounding vaccines in general and the mRNA treatments specifically. Rather like the U.K. and its initial implicit belief that the royal family had a hand in Princess Diana’s death, we KNOW something is wrong with this picture. Most would prefer to wait, despite being told vaccines are the only possible ransom/ parole for their current captivity. Calling this mad scramble “Operation Warp Speed” in the US and “Operation Moonshot” in the U.K., does little to dispel such fears. The former connotes an intense, irresponsible rush, the latter an ”enterprise” with an unlikely and uncertain outcome.
Here are my edited top 23 reasons to avoid the current rollouts:
23) UK citizens going blind and deaf: https://thecovidblog.com/2021/02/16/united-kingdom-12-deaf-five-blind-after-pfizer-mrna-shots
What worries me about these symptoms and the Bell’s Palsy etc is that we hear they are temporary side effects, but this never gets followed up, if reported at all by MSM. Jim Ross of WWE suffered from BP for decades.
22) They’re giving people COVID (there never was any promise of preventing infection or transmission, only perhaps limiting already mild symptoms)
From the official U.K. Yellow Card website:
21) “COVID-19 RNA Based Vaccines and the Risk of Prion Disease” – risk of ALS, Alzheimer’s and autoimmune diseases amongst other long term possibilities. Also posits that the vaccine might be a form of bioweapon. The study has been accepted The Journal of Infectious Diseases and Epidemiology, which is a peer-reviewed publication.
“The enclosed finding as well as additional potential risks leads the author to believe that regulatory approval of the RNA based vaccines for SARS-CoV-2 was premature and that the vaccine may cause much more harm than benefit.”:
https://scivisionpub.com/pdfs/covid19-rna-based-vaccines-and-the-risk-of-prion-disease-1503.pdf
20) MIS-A and -C – “The Centers for Disease Control is investigating if Dr. Barton Williams, an orthopedic doctor, died from Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome.“
“Williams also had been vaccinated for COVID about a month ago and that testing found the two types of antibodies in his system – one type of antibody that results from a natural COVID infection, and a second type of antibody from the vaccine. Threlkeld also said Williams tested negative for COVID-19 while in the hospital.“
Not knowing how many of us us have already had mild or asymptomatic COVID, this is a real concern.
“Threlkeld said one way to avoid MIS-A would be to get vaccinated.
“This is not a reason, not to get the vaccine. It’s a reason to get the vaccine, because only people who have had the infection have had this occur.” Please can someone explain the logic of this statement?
19) “Doctors Link Pfizer, Moderna Vaccines to Life-Threatening Blood Disorder: “A second New York Times article quotes doctors who say the mRNA technology used in COVID vaccines may cause immune thrombocytopenia, a blood disorder that last month led to the death of a Florida doctor after his first dose of the Pfizer vaccine”:
18) Pharma does not consider this a vaccine – it is intended as a platform and an operating system.
“Recognizing the broad potential of mRNA science, we set out to create an mRNA technology platform that functions very much like an operating system on a computer. It is designed so that it can plug and play interchangeably with different programs. In our case, the “program” or “app” is our mRNA drug – the unique mRNA sequence that codes for a protein.
https://www.modernatx.com/mrna-technology/mrna-platform-enabling-drug-discovery-development
I have yet to read a creepier paragraph. I know Pharma has recently redefined vaccine to incorporate mRNA treatments (much like they have for the words ‘pandemic‘ and the phrase ‘herd immunity‘ to suit their purposes, but this should only highlight their subterfuge.
Is this mRNA gene therapeutic called a vaccine so it can be fraudulently covered under the vaccine liability shield? (see point 11))
17) The fact that they have to bribe us to take this trustworthy, perfectly safe solution to all our troubles:
https://www.lonelyplanet.com/articles/brewdog-vaccination-centers
16) AI needed to help reporting of expected high volume of ADR due to ‘vaccine’:
“The MHRA urgently seeks an Artificial Intelligence (AI) software tool to process the expected high volume of Covid-19 vaccine Adverse Drug Reaction (ADRs) and ensure that no details from the ADRs’ reaction text are missed”.
https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4258/rr
15) Threats to fertility via spike protein effects on the placenta. Pharma can’t allay these fears, and are open (in their documentation, at least) about their ignorance on this matter. They’ve recently back-pedalled on discouraging pregnant women and women hoping to become pregnant from taking it though. Below you will see the discrepancy between information given to patients and doctors on this issue:
https://np.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/k7tkri/compare_the_uk_governments_information_pack_for/
https://mattbell.org/mrna-vaccine-blocks-protein-that-helps-formation-of-human-placenta
Edit: This from early February 2021:
14) Antibody-dependent enhancement or pathogenic priming – another still-unproven yet undebunked threat. Does the “vaccine” create a greater threat to the immune system from contact with the wild virus? In the FDA documents, “vaccine enhanced disease” is listed as a possible outcome. (See below). The skipped animal trials might have highlighted this issue.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12725690/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEdVZcp7Lbc
13) The worrying outcomes in Australia, whereby guinea pigs/ cannon fodder somehow tested positive for HIV. MSM claims these are false positives, but it does play into fears of autoimmune disasters predicted in FDA’s/ Pfizer’s own documents (see photo below).
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-55269381
12) Bell’s Palsy – cases of this appearing globally. Reported initially by the MSM as temporary (worrying enough) but predictably never followed up by the MSM. How do we know?
11) Pharma has no financial liability for any damage or fatality resultant from their mRNA treatment. Why should they care about safety, let alone efficacy? No wonder most sensible people are baulking.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/16/covid-vaccine-side-effects-compensation-lawsuit.html
10) The trials skipped crucial steps, such as animal trials, and were only unleashed on the public as a result of governmental fiat emergency powers. None of these treatments has been officially approved, and experimental substances were permitted to be injected into subjects only via emergency powers acts. Crucial stages have been skipped. Every original SARS vaccine trial fifteen years ago ended in animal fatality, especially when confronted by the wild virus.
https://www.eutimes.net/2020/12/moderna-and-pfizer-skipped-animal-trials-on-mrna-covid-vaccines/
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/covid-vaccine-update-pfizer-approval-b1764399.html
9) The “authorities” have been very clear that it is only designed to reduce symptoms and not infection transmission. Masks, social distancing and lockdowns will continue nonetheless, so why bother for a virus with an over 99% recovery rate?
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-19-vaccine-infectious/
from fakesoicansayshit:
“Covid-19 mRNA vaccine is leaky and can accelerate deaths.
Vaccines are ‘perfect’ (stops you from getting sick and getting others sick) or ‘imperfect/leaky’ (reduces symptoms, doesn’t stop you from getting others sick). Imperfect vaccines can make viruses spread farther (host doesn’t die) and become much deadlier (stronger versions survive).
Don’t hang out around vaccinated people, unless you are.”
https://ibb.co/5kr0gQJhttps://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/tthis-chicken-vaccine-makes-virus-dangerous
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4516275/
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6950e2.htm?s_cid=mm6950e2_w
8) The fact that we’ll need 2 doses and the cavalier recommendation (in the U.K. at least) that you can mix and match the treatments from different companies to ensure you get both does not promote confidence. My father was given the first dose from Pfizer and the second from AstraZeneca a month later, one mRNA and one attenuated and apparently still safe and effective, despite zero trials to back up that claim.
7) Before unleashing the treatments, the FDA published this:
And this was BEFORE the public field trials/ rollouts.
Not exclusively related to mRNA treatments (don’t call them “vaccines”) but if they appear in the lists for adverse effects they have already occurred in the trials.
https://www.fda.gov/media/143557/download
6) Possible permanent, unresearched and unpredictable modifications on human DNA. However much we hear in the MSM that it doesn’t and can’t affect DNA, many doctors claim otherwise. Changes to RNA messaging for DNA sounds to me like it will have a definite effect.
Dr Carrie Madej’s work and research on the nano-program/ AI/ Transhumanist Agenda can be found here:
5) The allergic reactions that started immediately. Aren’t all adverse reactions considered “allergic”? Aren’t all adverse reactions “significant”? Subjects with allergies were being told to hold off from having the “vaccine”. Think those proposed delays have now been removed.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/science/breaking-people-who-suffer-significant-23139049
4) It’s meagre weeks of trial testing (sometimes lasting 5 days) on predominantly youngish and healthy subjects can tell us little about their safety and efficacy on the elderly and the vulnerable (yet they’re the first to receive it)
Be cognisant of the fact that the public rollout IS the continuation of the Phase 3 trial. We are the guinea pigs and cannon fodder.
UK authorities explicitly say that under-16s, pregnant women, those with history of allergies (and the elderly) should NOT take the vaccine. Still pushing it on all three though, despite no specific testing at all on these demographics.
“It’s not safe for these 3 groups of people to get a COVID-19 vaccine”:
“We don’t know anything about groups they didn’t study, like children, pregnant women, highly immunocompromised people and the eldest of the elderly,” Dr. Gregory Poland, director of the Mayo Clinic’s Vaccine Research Group in Rochester, Minnesota, said.
3) Almost half of medical professionals are refusing to take it:
https://www.foxnews.com/us/houston-doctor-nurses-covid-19-vaccine-political-reasons
https://www.kpbs.org/news/2021/jan/15/half-caregivers-refusing-covid-19-vaccine/
2) The medium to long term effects which NOONE can predict or debunk, due to the insane, headlong rush to “save us” from this “pandemic”. “No time to test, just get it out there“ is apparently the mantra (though I suspect they have been testing these experimental treatments privately for decades…)
https://www.jpost.com/health-science/could-an-mrna-vaccine-be-dangerous-in-the-long-term-649253
See no.22 above:
“In a new research article published in Microbiology & Infectious Diseases, veteran immunologist J. Bart Classen expresses similar concerns and writes that “RNA-based COVID vaccines have the potential to cause more disease than the epidemic of COVID-19.”
For decades, Classen has published papers exploring how vaccination can give rise to chronic conditions such as Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes — not right away, but three or four years down the road.
In this latest paper, Classen warns that the RNA-based vaccine technology could create “new potential mechanisms” of vaccine adverse events that may take years to come to light.”:
- The deaths throughout the world already. Hundreds already reported but, with the reticence of patients and doctors to report the findings, it’s highly likely to already be significantly higher. That number will of course only rise (over 500 in the US alone as of 18th Feb 2021 – guarantee we never get a single proper investigation and the stories of individual cases quietly slip down the memory hole…)
Here is Dr Vernon Coleman’s list of international COVID vaccine deaths in the media:
http://www.vernoncoleman.com/main.htm
(Click on Health in the left-hand subject bar, then “How Many People Are The Covid Jabs Killing?”)
Another valuable vaccine-damage anthology resource is here:
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- Coronavirus - COVID-19 Tags:
Biden defends dictator and genocide, says Uighur genocide is “different cultural norms”
Joe Biden has appeared to downplay China’s genocide of Uighur Muslims, saying “culturally there are different norms” in every country.
Mr Biden made the comments during a CNN town hall on Tuesday night, where he was asked by host Anderson Cooper about his recent conversation with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
In that conversation, the newly elected President reportedly pressed his counterpart over human rights abuses in Hong Kong and the northwestern Xinjiang province, where more than one million Uighur men and women have reportedly been detained in a sprawling network of “re-education” camps.
Mr Biden answered by relaying Mr Xi’s justification for the abuses, saying the Chinese President “gets it”.
“You know, Chinese leaders, if you know anything about Chinese history, it has always been, the time when China has been victimised by the outer world is when they haven’t been unified at home,” he said.
“So the central – it’s vastly overstated – the central principle of Xi Jinping is that there must be a united, tightly controlled China, and he uses his rationale for the things he does based on that.”
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Race baiting Fast Company: Eating healthy, organic food = white supremacy
The news that Jake Angeli (also known as the QAnon Shaman, whose real name is Jake Chansley) would be fed organic food in jail after being arrested for his involvement in the attack on the Capitol was widely called out as an example of white privilege. After refusing to eat while in custody, a court granted Angeli’s request, though inmates across the prison system have long complained of inadequate food, and Muslim detainees at immigration centers were fed pork—in direct conflict with their religious beliefs.
But Angeli’s request for organic food is not just an example of the way our justice system treats people differently. It’s also a window into a strange confluence of subcultures. While most people associate organic food and farmers markets with progressive politics and cosmopolitan values, they’re also a draw for certain elements of neo-fascist culture.
Part of this connection between organic food and white supremacy dates back to Nazi Germany, where there was a strong ethos about the importance of nature, healthy eating, and natural foods. For modern white supremacists “purity is central,” says Pete Simi, an associate professor of sociology at Chapman University who has spent about 25 years studying right wing extremism and political violence. “Purity is very much the way in which they organize the world, in terms of pure and impure.” That dichotomy is used to describe race. It’s used to describe environments—which is why Trump’s comment about “shithole countries” was so dangerous, Simi adds, “because he was dehumanizing people and acquainting them with impurity.” And it’s used to describe food.
Oregon promotes teacher program that seeks to undo ‘racism in mathematics’ and argues, among other things, that White supremacy manifests itself in the focus on finding the right answer.
An ODE newsletter sent last week advertises a Feb. 21 “Pathway to Math Equity Micro-Course,” which is designed for middle school teachers to make use of a toolkit for “dismantling racism in mathematics.” The event website identifies the event as a partnership between California’s San Mateo County Office of Education, The Education Trust-West and others.
Part of the toolkit includes a list of ways “white supremacy culture” allegedly “infiltrates math classrooms.” Those include “the focus is on getting the ‘right’ answer,” students being “required to ‘show their work,'” and other alleged manifestations.
“The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false, and teaching it is even much less so,” the document for the “Equitable Math” toolkit reads. “Upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuate objectivity as well as fear of open conflict.”
The ODE, led by Colt Gill, confirmed the letter to Fox News. ODE Communications Director Marc Siegel also defended the “Equitable Math” educational program, saying it “helps educators learn key tools for engagement, develop strategies to improve equitable outcomes for Black, Latinx, and multilingual students, and join communities of practice.”
University cancels event for Whites to ‘process’ their ‘complicity in unjust systems’ after backlash
Elon University in North Carolina has canceled an event for White people to process their complicity in injustice, because the meeting would exclude other races, the school told Fox News.
Young America’s Foundation Tuesday revealed the “White caucus” event, publishing an email that specified the event was intended for white and “White-identifying” individuals to speak openly and avoid “retraumatiz[ing] people of color.”
“White caucuses give white people a space to learn about and process their awareness of and complicity in unjust systems without harming their friends of color,” reads the email, which was addressed to School of Education students.
Vice President of University Communications Daniel Anderson told Fox News that the event was organized by a group of students in the School of Education and that it had learned of the event on Tuesday. But according to YAF, the email was sent to all School of Education students by Jennifer Strange, Elon’s coordinator of graduate programs in the school.
“Elon University today learned of a program being organized by a group of students in the School of Education who wanted to hold candid, confidential discussions about racism without victimizing those of other races,” said Anderson in a statement Tuesday.
The incident was just the latest to stir controversy over racialized events that took place in academia and government entities. In September, the University of Michigan-Dearborn similarly advertised an event that prompted accusations of segregation. Like the group at Elon, the University of Michigan similarly expressed concern about White people harming non-White people. It also clarified that the events weren’t intended to exclude certain races.
Biden is happy that 5 out of 6 ads show biracial couples
“I’m going to say something that’s going to get me in trouble…think about it, if you want to know where the American public is, look at the money being spent on advertising. Did you ever 5 years ago think every second or third ad out of 5 or 6 would be biracial couples?”- Biden
Biden’s bigotry of low expectations; says that blacks and Hispanics are too dumb to get online to find out where to get vaccinations
Biden says minorities “don’t know how to use, know how to get online” in order to determine how to get in-line for vaccinations.
MSM Propaganda fluff stories on Biden and his wife – compare to how they critiqued, bemeaned, degraded President Trump and Melania at every turn
- Notice how Biden doesn’t cut, slash, or even reduce the eligibility for stimulus checks. He “narrows” it, “slims it down”, and “scales it back”. If this had been Trump, the MSM headlines would read “Children starve as Trump slashes aid meant to feed the poor”
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- Bias and Double Standards
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- Fake News
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- CNN
- newsweek
Black privilege: Google now identifies “black owned” stores in Chrome and on Maps – and you can’t voice your concerns about this policy
Google officially supports black owned businesses only – highlighting them in maps and in chrome browser. Is this not black privilege? This dispels the myth of “white privilege” or “systemic racism” if blacks get this sort of beneficial treatment.
Black Fragility: UN Women posts “inclusive” diverse picture of people hugging, except a black woman – blacks, Ilhan Omar freak out, UN Women deletes tweet
If this was a white woman, nobody would care. But since she’s black, all hell breaks loose. Where is the white privilege? Where is the systemic racism if this is the reaction to a “wronged” black woman in a picture?
- Category:
- Globalism
- Propaganda
- Systemic Racism
- White Privilege Tags:
- black fragility
- Ilhan Omar
Trump Lawyer Van Der Veen: ‘My Home Was Attacked,’ ‘My Entire Family, My Business, My Law Firm Are Under Siege Right Now’
Following former President Donald Trump’s acquittal on Saturday, defense attorney Michael Van Der Veen relayed his own personal situation for having taken the case during an appearance on FNC’s “America’s News HQ.
Van Der Veen revealed it has come at a cost but would not elaborate beyond personal property damage and threats to his family and well-being.
“My home was attacked,” he said. “I’d rather not go into that. To answer your question, my entire family, my business, my law firm are under siege right now. I don’t really want to go into that, though. What I’d really like to do is talk about the merits of the case.”
Bigotry of low expectations; Minorities treating animals badly is white people’s fault – Being Kind to Dogs Is ‘RACIST’, University Professor Says
Guenther has published a book claiming that “white supremacy” is to blame for non-white people abusing animals.
Areomagazine.com reports: In her recent book The Lives and Deaths of Shelter Animals, Katja Guenther claims that dogs are being killed because of “capitalism, anthroparchy, white supremacy and patriarchy.” She argues that allowing dogs to sleep inside is a privilege reserved for the white and wealthy and that policies against keeping dogs chained up in backyards are intended to oppress people of color by imposing “middle-class norms of animal keeping in which companion animals are considered family and treated accordingly,” which ignore the fact that people of color “are themselves trapped in poverty, may have few options for legitimate income generation and possibly rely on their dogs for … status.”
Unfortunately Guenther’s misguided book is gaining traction. Shelter director Kristen Hassen opines that Guenther “gets it right” in concluding that “racism, classism and the caste system are at the heart of the broken animal sheltering institution.” Arguing that laws to prevent mistreatment of dogs discriminate against “anyone in the US other than white, middle class and upper-class individuals,” Sloane Hawes, Tess Hupe and Kevin Morris of the University of Denver Institute for Human-Animal Connection cite the book in their proposal to relax enforcement of animal protection laws—a proposal that threatens to reverse decades of hard-won progress.
Lewontin’s Fallacy Explained and Debunked: “More genetic variation within races than between them”
Lewontin is a pretty famous scientist. He’s won lots of awards, held influential positions in academia, and so on. He studied at Columbia University, which was home to the Frankfurt School and the father of race denialism himself, Franz Boas. Columbia was the original Western Marxist indoctrination center in America and was responsible for educating many influential globalists, including leading UN figures.
To claim that a “low” Fst rating invalidates humanity’s distinct subspecies would require us to declare countless other subspecies as “biologically invalid.” But you’ll never hear Marxoid academics arguing in favor of that. Their only qualms are with human taxonomy because it obstructs the race-blind globalism that is central to their ideology.
Lewontin’s methodology was criticized by multiple scientists almost immediately after his paper was published. His Fst analysis used 17 individual genetic markers. However, to paint an accurate genetic picture of human races (or any organism in existence), multiple genetic markers must be used in unison. The more markers you use, the more accurate a picture you paint. Additionally, the more markers you use, the less likely you are to genetically misidentify races. Once enough markers are used, the probability of genetically misidentifying an individual drops to below 1% — almost zero.
- This post about cumulative probability, which addresses the “Two people of European descent may be more genetically similar to an Asian person than they are to each other” bullshit.
Telegony: Your Future Children Could Look Like Your Ex, According To Science
A theory that scientists have been trying to test on flies, and named by German biologist August Weissman in the 1800s, telegony claims that when a sperm manages to reach the uterus, it might fertilize immature ovums, after which it is absorbed by the woman’s organism. Then, after a new mate arrives, this old genetic code might be responsible for the baby to have some of your ex’s features.
With a long tradition that can be traced all the way back to Aristotle, it wasn’t until 1820 when the first scientific articulation of telegony was formulated. Some evidence was documented by the Royal Society of London, when Count Morton confirmed two horse offspring had features of the mother’s old sexual partner.
So, telegony was all but dismissed in the 20th century. However, something happened very recently that turned this whole debate on its head. Evolutionary ecologists A. J. Crean and colleagues reported a seemingly telegonic phenomenon in a fly, a member of the species Telostylinus angusticollis.
“As a first step towards disentangling whether the effect is borne by the sperm itself or by accessory-gland products (ACPs) in the seminal fluid, we mated females initially to a male in high or low condition and then re-mated the female to a new male in high or low condition two weeks later. Interestingly, offspring size and viability were determined by the condition of the first male, with no effect of the condition of the second mate. Genetic tests confirm this result holds even when the second male is the biological father of the offspring. These findings suggest the paternal effect is mediated by ACPs, and provide a compelling case for reassessing the possibility of telegony as a valid phenomenon.” — Crean, Kopps, and Bonduriansky.
One year earlier, Henan University of Science and Technology in Xiangxiang, China, published an article on Gene, in which scientist Yongsheng Liu assured there are several considerations that support the theory of telegony. For example, the hundreds of sperm cells that reach a uterus but fail to fertilize an ovum are regularly absorbed by the woman’s body, thus modifying the baby’s DNA.
Microchimerism of male origin
Male microchimerism, the presence of a small number of male cells, in women has been attributed to prior pregnancies. However, male microchimerism has also been reported in women with only daughters, in nulliparous women and prepubertal girls suggesting that other sources of male microchimerism must exist. We speculate that sexual intercourse may be important but other sources of male cells likely exist in young girls.
Black privilege: Black woman shouts “white bitch”, pushes white woman in front of bus – no hate crime charges, no prison time
40-year-old Amelia Doris had pursued Linda Lancaster, a woman in her sixties, out onto the street after what Judge Sally Cahill QC described as “some slight that [Doris] appeared to have taken” in a Tesco supermarket.
Lancaster was just “shopping, minding her own business” in London when she supposedly bumped the head of Doris’s son with her basket by mistake at the checkout.
Doris rounded on her, railing “you’ve met the wrong woman, you white bitch” and shoving her to the ground, according to a Court News UK report.
Doris then lurked outside the Tesco waiting for Lancaster, shouting “watch what happens when you come out” into the store.
Sure enough, and despite Lancaster’s efforts to avoid her assailant by walking around the back, Doris found her and shoulder barged her into the path of an oncoming bus. Fortunately she did not go under it, instead colliding with the moving vehicle “so that she hit her head against the front doors”, recalled John Livingston, prosecuting.
St John’s Wort – similarly effective as standard antidepressants with fewer side-effects
A total of 29 trials (5489 patients) including 18 comparisons with placebo and 17 comparisons with synthetic standard antidepressants met the inclusion criteria. Results of placebo-controlled trials showed marked heterogeneity. In nine larger trials the combined response rate ratio (RR) for hypericum extracts compared with placebo was 1.28 (95% confidence interval (CI), 1.10 to 1.49) and from nine smaller trials was 1.87 (95% CI, 1.22 to 2.87). Results of trials comparing hypericum extracts and standard antidepressants were statistically homogeneous. Compared with tri- or tetracyclic antidepressants and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), respectively, RRs were 1.02 (95% CI, 0.90 to 1.15; 5 trials) and 1.00 (95% CI, 0.90 to 1.11; 12 trials). Both in placebo-controlled trials and in comparisons with standard antidepressants, trials from German-speaking countries reported findings more favourable to hypericum. Patients given hypericum extracts dropped out of trials due to adverse effects less frequently than those given older antidepressants (odds ratio (OR) 0.24; 95% CI, 0.13 to 0.46) or SSRIs (OR 0.53, 95% CI, 0.34-0.83).
Authors’ conclusions: The available evidence suggests that the hypericum extracts tested in the included trials a) are superior to placebo in patients with major depression; b) are similarly effective as standard antidepressants; c) and have fewer side effects than standard antidepressants. The association of country of origin and precision with effects sizes complicates the interpretation.
- Category:
- Health and Medicine Tags:
- Depression
Lucasfilm says ‘Mandalorian’ star Gina Carano will not return to show after Instagram post about intolerance spurs cancel campaign
‘Mandalorian’ co-star Gina Carano will not be making another appearance on the hit show, Lucasfilm announced, after she was accused of comparing Republicans to Jews living in Nazi Germany in an Instagram post.
Carano took to her Instagram story on Wednesday with a shared post from another user, referencing the plight of Jews living under the Third Reich and drawing a broader point about the persecution of political opponents.
“Most people don’t realize today that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews,” the post said, adding “How is that any different from hating someone for their political views?”
Jewish privilege – criticize US aid to Israel and get fired from your job
It is widely recognized that critics of Israel, no matter how well-founded the criticism, are routinely punished by both public and private institutions for their speech. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has documented a pattern by which “those who seek to protest, boycott, or otherwise criticize the Israeli government are being silenced,” a trend that “manifests on college campuses, in state contracts, and even in bills to change federal criminal law” and “suppress[es] the speech of people on only one side of the Israel-Palestine debate.” The Center for Constitutional Rights has shown that “Israel advocacy organizations, universities, government actors, and other institutions” have targeted pro-Palestinian activists with a number of tactics “including event cancellations, baseless legal complaints, administrative disciplinary actions, firings, and false and inflammatory accusations of terrorism and antisemitism” and concludes that there is a “Palestine exception to free speech.”
The effort to keep critics of Israel quiet sometimes takes the form of explicit government action—there is an open campaign to criminalize speech critical of Israel and some states even require oaths from government employees promising not to boycott Israel. But as Israeli journalist Gideon Levy notes in the Middle East Eye, it often comes in the form of baseless (and offensive) accusations that criticisms of Israel are definitionally anti-Semitic. In the United States, academic critics of Israel have had job offers rescinded or been otherwise kept from teaching, and CNN fired academic Marc Lamont Hill over his call for a free Palestine. In Britain, there has been a years-long absurd campaign to tar former Labour leader (and critic of Israeli government policy) Jeremy Corbyn as an anti-Semite. Human Rights Watch notes that the United States government has wielded unfounded accusations of anti-Semitism against it and against other human rights groups like Amnesty and Oxfam that have exposed Israel’s shoddy human rights record. Within Israel itself, the free speech rights of Palestinians are brutally suppressed, and even Jews supportive of Palestinian rights are regularly harassed by the state. Abeer Alnajjar of OpenDemocracy wrote last year about how “major, mainstream news media outlets are sensitized against any reference to Palestinian rights or international law, and any criticism of Israel or its policies.”
- Category:
- Bias and Double Standards
- Censorship Tags:
- jewish privilege
- Jewry
Even though whites commit the least amount of crime, whites commit the least terrorism, Biden’s new secretary of defense ordered stand down orders to root out “white supremacy” and “extremism” targeting right wingers
Does this make any sense? Other than this being a war on right wingers and white people. BLM Antifa were allowed to burn down cities, attack police, kill civilians and police officers for MONTHS. The establishment, corporations, politicians supported them. Literally a dozen right wingers went inside the capitol and this is the insane response.
Black privilege and fragility: Liberal mass outrage over man wearing “White Lives Matter” shirt
EDMONTON (CityNews) – Alberta’s Black community leaders are denouncing a photo of a man wearing a “White Lives Matter” t-shirt in Edmonton, calling it “racist.”
The photo, taken at a Walmart in Northgate, shows a man inside the store wearing a white t-shirt with the words “White Lives Matter” in big black lettering on the back.
That slogan is widely considered as the racist response to the Black Lives Matter movement.
“That is a racist sentence and phrase,” said Tiera Williams, a racial justice advocate.
The woman who posted the photo online did not respond to CityNews’ request for an interview. But in her Facebook post, she said she was shocked by what she saw.
Leftist anti-white teacher brainwashing students calling Bernie Sanders mittens, the protest at the capitol an insurrection and white supremacy; white people bad
Three weeks ago I processed the Capitol insurrection with my high school students. Rallying our inquiry skills, we analyzed the images of that historic day, images of white men storming through the Capitol, fearless and with no forces to stop them. “This,” I said, “is white supremacy, this is white privilege. It can be hard to pinpoint, but when we see, it, we know it.”
Across our Zoom screen, they affirmed, with nods, thumbs-ups, and emojis of anger and frustration. Fast-forward two weeks as we analyzed images from the inauguration, asking again, “What do we see?” We saw diversity, creativity and humanity, and a nation embracing all of this and more. On the day of the inauguration, Bernie Sanders was barely on our radar. The next day, he was everywhere.
“What do we see?” I asked again. We’ve been studying diversity and discrimination in the United States; my students were ready. What did they see? They saw a white man in a puffy jacket and huge mittens, distant not only in his social distancing, but in his demeanor and attire.
We took in the meaning of the day, the vulnerability of democracy, the power of ritual, traditions and the peaceful transition of power.
We talked about gender and the possible meanings of the attire chosen by Vice President Kamala Harris, Dr. Jill Biden, the Biden grandchildren, Michelle Obama, Amanda Gorman and others. We referenced the female warriors inspiring these women, the colors of their educational degrees and their monochromatic ensembles of pure power.
And there, across all of our news and social media feeds, was Bernie: Bernie memes, Bernie sweatshirts, endless love for Bernie. I puzzled and fumed as an individual as I strove to be my best possible teacher. What did I see? What did I think my students should see? A wealthy, incredibly well-educated and -privileged white man, showing up for perhaps the most important ritual of the decade, in a puffy jacket and huge mittens.
I mean in no way to overstate the parallels. Sen. Sanders is no white supremacist insurrectionist. But he manifests privilege, white privilege, male privilege and class privilege, in ways that my students could see and feel.
“When you see privilege, you know it,” I’d told them weeks before. Yet, when they saw Sen. Bernie Sanders manifesting privilege, when seemingly no one else did, I struggled to explain that disparity. I am beyond puzzled as to why so many are loving the images of Bernie and his gloves. Sweet, yes, the gloves, knit by an educator. So “Bernie.”
Not so sweet? The blindness I see, of so many (Bernie included), to the privileges Bernie represents. I don’t know many poor, or working class, or female, or struggling-to-be-taken-seriously folk who would show up at the inauguration of our 46th president dressed like Bernie. Unless those same folk had privilege. Which they don’t.
Completely rigged stock market and financial system – how hedge funds bankrupt companies at will with the help of mainstream media
All the tactics Hedge funds are using to crash GME prices were revealed as far back as 2014 in this article:
TL;DR: Ladder attacks to drive the price down, Media assults, Brokers pulling margin, Paid bashers, Diversion attempts – all tactics seen in recent weeks were predicted by this article from 2014
Anatomy Of A Short Attack
Abusive shorting are not random acts of a renegade hedge funds, but rather a coordinated business plan that is carried out by a collusive consortium of hedge funds and prime brokers, with help from their friends at the DTC and major clearinghouses. Potential target companies are identified, analyzed and prioritized. The attack is planned to its most minute detail.
The plan consists of taking a large short position, then crushing the stock price, and, if possible, putting the company into bankruptcy. Bankrupting the company is a short homerun because they never have to buy real shares to cover and they don’t pay taxes on the ill-gotten gain.
When it is time to drive the stock price down, a blitzkrieg is unleashed against the company by a cabal of short hedge funds and prime brokers. The playbook is very similar from attack to attack, and the participating prime brokers and lead shorts are fairly consistent as well.
Typical tactics include the following:
Flooding the offer side of the board
Ultimately the price of a stock is found at the balance point where supply (offer) and demand (bid) for the shares find equilibrium. This equation happens every day for every stock traded. On days when more people want to buy than want to sell, the price goes up, and, conversely, when shares offered for sale exceed the demand, the price goes down.
The shorts manipulate the laws of supply and demand by flooding the offer side with counterfeit shares. They will do what has been called a short down ladder. It works as follows: Short A will sell a counterfeit share at $10. Short B will purchase that counterfeit share covering a previously open position. Short B will then offer a short (counterfeit) share at $9. Short A will hit that offer, or short B will come down and hit Short A’s $9 bid. Short A buys the share for $9, covering his open $10 short and booking a $1 profit.
By repeating this process the shorts can put the stock price in a downward spiral. If there happens to be significant long buying, then the shorts draw from their reserve of “strategic fails-to-deliver” and flood the market with an avalanche of counterfeit shares that overwhelm the buy side demand. Attack days routinely see eighty percent or more of the shares offered for sale as counterfeit. Company news days are frequently attack days since the news will “mask” the extraordinary high volume. It doesn’t matter whether it is good news or bad news.
Flooding the market with shares requires foot soldiers to swamp the market with counterfeit shares. An off-shore hedge fund devised a remarkably effective incentive program to motivate the traders at certain broker dealers. Each trader was given a debit card to a bank account that only he could access. The trader’s performance was tallied, and, based upon the number of shares moved and the other “success” parameters; the hedge fund would wire money into the bank account daily. At the end of each day, the traders went to an ATM and drew out their bribe. Instant gratification.
Global Links Corporation is an example of how wholesale counterfeiting of shares will decimate a company’s stock price. Global Links is a company that provides computer services to the real estate industry. By early 2005, their stock price had dropped to a fraction of a cent. At that point, an investor, Robert Simpson, purchased 100%+ of Global Links’ 1,158,064 issued and outstanding shares. He immediately took delivery of his shares and filed the appropriate forms with the SEC, disclosing he owned all of the company’s stock. His total investment was $5205. The share price was $.00434. The day after he acquired all of the company’s shares, the volume on the over-the-counter market was 37 million shares. The following day saw 22 million shares change hands – all without Simpson trading a single share. It is possible that the SEC has been conducting a secret investigation, but that would be difficult without the company’s involvement. It is more likely the SEC has not done anything about this fraud.
Massive counterfeiting can drive the stock price down in a matter of hours on extremely high volume. This is called “crashing” the stock and a successful “crash” is a one-day drop of twenty-percent or a thirty-five percent drop in a week. In order to make the crash “stick” or make it more effective, it is done concurrently with all or most of the following:
Media Assault
The shorts, in order to realize their profit, must ultimately put the victim into bankruptcy or obtain shares at a price much cheaper than what they shorted at. These shares come from the investing public who panics and sells into the manipulation. Panic is induced with assistance from the financial media.
The shorts have “friendly” reporters with the Dow Jones News Agency, the Wall Street Journal, Barrons, the New York Times, Gannett Publications (USA Today and the Arizona Republic), CNBC and others. The common thread: A number of the “friendly” reporters worked for The Street.com, an Internet advisory service that short hedge-fund managers David Rocker and Jim Cramer owned. This alumni association supported the short attack by producing slanted, libelous, innuendo laden stories that disparaged the company, as it was being crashed.
One of the more outrageous stories was a front-page story in USA Today during a short crash of TASER’s stock price in June 2005. The story was almost a full page and the reporter concluded that TASER’s electrical jolt was the same as an electric chair – proof positive that TASERs did indeed kill innocent people. To reach that conclusion the reporter over estimated the TASER’s amperage by a factor of one million times. This “mistake” was made despite a detailed technical briefing by TASER to seven USA Today editors two weeks prior to the story. The explanation “Due to a mathematical error” appeared three days later – after the damage was done to the stock price.
Jim Cramer, in a video-taped interview with The Street.com, best described the media function:
When (shorting) … The hedge fund mode is to not do anything remotely truthful, because the truth is so against your view, (so the hedge funds) create a new ‘truth’ that is development of the fiction… you hit the brokerage houses with a series of orders (a short down ladder that pushes the price down), then we go to the press. You have a vicious cycle down – it’s a pretty good game.
This interview, which is more like a confession, was never supposed to get on the air; however, it somehow ended up on YouTube. Cramer and The Street.com have made repeated efforts, with some success, to get it taken off of YouTube.
Pulling margin from long customers
The clearinghouses and broker dealers who finance margin accounts will suddenly pull all long margin availability, citing very transparent reasons for the abrupt change in lending policy. This causes a flood of margin selling, which further drives the stock price down and gets the shorts the cheap long shares that they need to cover.
Paid bashers
The shorts will hire paid bashers who “invade” the message boards of the company. The bashers disguise themselves as legitimate investors and try to persuade or panic small investors into selling into the manipulation. (Click here for Confessions Of A Paid Stock Basher).
This is not every trick the shorts use when they are crashing the stock. Almost every victim company experiences most or all of these tactics.
Analyst Reports
Some alleged independent analysts were actually paid by the shorts to write slanted negative ratings reports. The reports, which were represented as being independent, were ghost written by the shorts and disseminated to coincide with a short attack. There is congressional testimony in the matter of Gradiant Analytic and Rocker Partners that expands upon this. These libelous reports would then become a story in the aforementioned “friendly” media. All were designed to panic small investors into selling their stock into the manipulation.
Planting moles in target companies
The shorts plant “moles” inside target companies. The moles can be as high as directors or as low as janitors. They steal confidential information, which is fed to the shorts who may feed it to the friendly media. The information may not be true, may be out of context, or the stolen documents may be altered. Things that are supposed to be confidential, like SEC preliminary inquiries, end up as front-page news with the short-friendly media.
Frivolous SEC investigations
The shorts “leak” tips to the SEC about “corporate malfeasance” by the target company. The SEC, which can take months processing Freedom of Information Act requests, swoops in as the supposed “confidential inquiry” is leaked to the short media.
The plethora of corporate rules means the SEC may ultimately find minor transgressions or there may be no findings. Occasionally they do uncover an Enron, but the initial leak can be counted on to drive the stock price down by twenty-five percent. The announcement of no or little findings comes months later, but by then the damage that has been done to the stock price is irreversible. The San Francisco office of the SEC appears to be particularly close to the short community.
Class Action lawsuits
Based upon leaked stories of SEC investigations or other media exposes, a handful of law firms immediately file class-action shareholder suits. Milberg Weiss, before they were disbanded as a result of a Justice Department investigation, could be counted on to file a class-action suit against a company that was under short attack. Allegations of accounting improprieties that were made in the complaint would be reported as being the truth by the short friendly media, again causing panic among small investors.
Interfering with target company’s customers, financings, etc.
If the shorts became aware of clients, customers or financings that the target company was working on, they would call and tell lies or otherwise attempt to persuade the customer to abandon the transaction. Allegedly the shorts have gone so far as to bribe public officials to dissuade them from using a company’s product.
- Category:
- Fake News
- Subversion of country and society Tags:
FBI investigates ‘IED attack’ at California church targeted by leftist protesters over anti-LGBTQ views
The FBI is investigating an explosion and vandalism early Saturday at a Southern California church that has drawn protests over its controversial pastor and his anti-LGBTQ views.
A fire and explosion were reported shortly after 1 a.m. at First Works Baptist Church in El Monte, about 13 miles east of Los Angeles. Police responding to the scene saw smoke billowing from windows blown out from the blast and graffiti sprayed on the outside of the single-story brick building.
Trump accomplishments over his term
Unprecedented Economic Boom
Before the China Virus invaded our shores, we built the world’s most prosperous economy.
- America gained 7 million new jobs – more than three times government experts’ projections.
- Middle-Class family income increased nearly $6,000 – more than five times the gains during the entire previous administration.
- The unemployment rate reached 3.5 percent, the lowest in a half-century.
- Achieved 40 months in a row with more job openings than job-hirings.
- More Americans reported being employed than ever before – nearly 160 million.
- Jobless claims hit a nearly 50-year low.
- The number of people claiming unemployment insurance as a share of the population hit its lowest on record.
- Incomes rose in every single metro area in the United States for the first time in nearly 3 decades.
Delivered a future of greater promise and opportunity for citizens of all backgrounds.
- Unemployment rates for African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, veterans, individuals with disabilities, and those without a high school diploma all reached record lows.
- Unemployment for women hit its lowest rate in nearly 70 years.
- Lifted nearly 7 million people off of food stamps.
- Poverty rates for African Americans and Hispanic Americans reached record lows.
- Income inequality fell for two straight years, and by the largest amount in over a decade.
- The bottom 50 percent of American households saw a 40 percent increase in net worth.
- Wages rose fastest for low-income and blue collar workers – a 16 percent pay increase.
- African American homeownership increased from 41.7 percent to 46.4 percent
- Category:
- Trump Accomplishments Tags:
European Whites to become minorities in their own countries in the next 20-40 years
- Category:
- White Erasure / Great Replacement Tags:
COVID Lockdowns Have No Clear Benefit vs Other Voluntary Measures, International Study Shows
Anew study evaluating COVID-19 responses around the world found that mandatory lockdown orders early in the pandemic did not provide significantly more benefits to slowing the spread of the disease than other voluntary measures, such as social distancing or travel reduction.
The peer reviewed study, which was conducted by a group of Stanford researchers and published in the Wiley Online Library on January 5, analyzed coronavirus case growth in 10 countries in early 2020.
Using that model, the researchers determined that there is “no clear, significant beneficial effect of [more restrictive measures] on case growth in any country.”
- Category:
- Coronavirus - COVID-19 Tags:
Adverse reactions to the COVID-19 Coronavirus vaccine; seizures, paralysis, death
Deaths:
- 21-02-08: Man collapses and dies 25 minutes after getting coronavirus vaccine
- https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9111311/Portuguese-health-worker-41-dies-two-days-getting-Pfizer-covid-vaccine.html
- https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/health-experts-investigate-doctor-who-died-weeks-after-receiving-covid-vaccine/2357958/
- https://www.jpost.com/health-science/mexican-doctor-hospitalized-after-receiving-pfizers-covid-19-vaccine-654048
- https://www.timesofisrael.com/240-israelis-diagnosed-after-vaccination-underscore-need-for-continued-vigilance/
Lumps in breasts
- Mammograms are picking up swelling in women’s breasts following the Covid-19 vaccin
- Some women finding lumps after covid shot, but experts say it’s likely not breast cance
- Some women experiencing lumps after getting Covid-10 vaccine
- Mammograms pick up ‘harmless’ breast lumps from the Covid vaccine
- COVID Vaccines Can Cause Worrisome Side Effect But Doctors Say Don’t Panic
Snopes “debunks” female sterilization claim – reality is that it blocks protein that forms placenta
- Category:
- Coronavirus - COVID-19 Tags:
Biden priority will be black, Latino, Asian, Native American businesses and women owned businesses – leaving out straight white males
- Category:
- Anti White Racism / Reverse Racism
- Bias and Double Standards
- Bigotry / Intolerance / Discrimination
- Diversity and Multiculturalism
- Leftist Policies
- Male Privilege
- Race Baiting
- Subversion of country and society
- White Erasure / Great Replacement
- White Privilege Tags:
- Biden
- minority privilege
C.S. Lewis: Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”
- Category:
- Coronavirus - COVID-19
- Totalitarianism Tags:
COVID-19 vaccine may sensitise vaccine recipients to more severe disease than if they were not vaccinated.
Results of the study: COVID-19 vaccines designed to elicit neutralising antibodies may sensitise vaccine recipients to more severe disease than if they were not vaccinated. Vaccines for SARS, MERS and RSV have never been approved, and the data generated in the development and testing of these vaccines suggest a serious mechanistic concern: that vaccines designed empirically using the traditional approach (consisting of the unmodified or minimally modified coronavirus viral spike to elicit neutralising antibodies), be they composed of protein, viral vector, DNA or RNA and irrespective of delivery method, may worsen COVID-19 disease via antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE). This risk is sufficiently obscured in clinical trial protocols and consent forms for ongoing COVID-19 vaccine trials that adequate patient comprehension of this risk is unlikely to occur, obviating truly informed consent by subjects in these trials.
Conclusions drawn from the study and clinical implications: The specific and significant COVID-19 risk of ADE should have been and should be prominently and independently disclosed to research subjects currently in vaccine trials, as well as those being recruited for the trials and future patients after vaccine approval, in order to meet the medical ethics standard of patient comprehension for informed consent.
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- Coronavirus - COVID-19 Tags:
Coronavirus: Peer-reviewed study finds no significant benefits of mandatory lockdowns or business closures.
Peer-reviewed study finds no significant benefits of mandatory lockdowns or business closures. In fact, in 75% of the comparisons, the interventions actually increased contagion, 1 in 5 significantly. [Study link]
- Category:
- Coronavirus - COVID-19 Tags:
UK coronavirus: Women on exercise trip ‘surrounded by police’, fined £200
Two women have described how they were surrounded by police, read their rights and fined £200 each after driving five miles to take a walk.
The women were also told the hot drinks they had brought along were not allowed as they were “classed as a picnic”.
Guidance for the current lockdown says people can travel for exercise as long as it is in their “local area”.
- Category:
- Coronavirus - COVID-19
- Totalitarianism
- United Kingdom Tags:
Stolen 2020 US Election – Chronological list evidence of voter fraud, statistical anomalies, media lies, propaganda and gaslighting
Chronological coverage of the 2020 election outlining the bias, double standards and lies. Trump wins on election day, mail-in ballots come in over the next few days and Biden is crowned the winner by the MSM while they gaslight about how there is no voter fraud. [Large crowdfunded election fraud database]
- A compilation of twenty alleged election ‘facts’ that don’t pass the smell test
- Vegas Oddsmaker Says, “The Fix Was In, Trump Was Robbed, This Election Was Stolen”
- Reasons why the 2020 presidential election is deeply puzzling
- The Case for Decertification of Michigan Election Results
- According to Gorsuch, the key word in these constitutional provisions is “Legislature.” He claims that the word “Legislature” must be read in a hyper-literal way. “The Constitution provides that state legislatures — not federal judges, not state judges, not state governors, not other state officials — bear primary responsibility for setting election rules,” he writes.
- ONE VOTE MATTERS – How Weighted Race Distribution and One California Vote Brings Entire 2020 Election into Question
Voting anomalies in Michigan Wisconsin Georgia can give election to trump
A day before election Pennsylvania AG josh shapiro says trump will lose after votes added up
Biden – the “most popular” president scared of his own inauguration needs 30k troops – Trump walked alone into North Korea
Time magazine outlines how they stole the election, not even hiding it: The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election. Time report touts ‘cabal of of powerful people’ behind ‘conspiracy,’ ‘shadow campaign’ to shape election. [mirror of the time article here]
Leftist reaction to the 2020 election protest on January 6 2021: MSM propaganda, democrats, brands, public figures call peaceful protesters “domestic terrorists”, “mob” and a peaceful demonstration an “insurrection”, dehumanization campaign, censorship, bans
Aftermath of the worst act of terrorism since 9/11 vs a peaceful BLM antifa protest for justice and equality
Biden – the “most popular” president scared of his own inauguration needs 30k troops to secure him – Trump walked alone into North Korea
Ruthless dictator leaves quietly, as democratically elected successor is sworn in with massive military presence and begins to stifle opponents speech and crush the rights of political foes
But when a handful of right wingers break a few windows, ALL Trump supporters and conservatives are blamed, dehumanized, banned, censored and hated.
- Category:
- Anti Trump
- Anti White Racism / Reverse Racism
- Anti-conservative Hate, Gaslighting, Propaganda
- Bias and Double Standards
- Big Compilations
- Censorship
- Deep State
- Fake News
- Propaganda
- Totalitarianism
- Violence and hate Tags:
- CNN
- false flag
- Los Angeles Times
- New York Times
- Wall Street Journal
- Washington Post
Twitter – leftists claim #SayHerName hashtag should be reserved for black women only and not for white Ashli Babbitt who was murdered by cops
No anti-white hatred here.
With no lockdown or mask mandate, Florida has roughly same hospitalization level as 2018 flu season
HHS tracks total daily hospital levels in all the states dating back to Jan. 1, 2020. If you take the average daily total hospitalization levels in Florida for the fourth quarter of 2020, you will find an average (some days are more, some are less) of 43,150.
Naturally, I wondered what the levels were in previous years, because the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration publishes quarterly data of hospital censuses for several recent years. I started with the first quarter of 2018, which included the harshest flu season we had in a decade. If you average the total hospital census over the 90 days from Jan. 1 to March 31, it works out to 41,094 people in the hospital on an average day. Adjusting for the population at the time, that would be 1,972 hospitalizations per 1 million people. That is compared to 1,998 per 1 million for this past quarter of 2020 with COVID as the predominant illness.
As you can see, although the hospital numbers for the fourth quarter of 2020 were about 6%-8% higher than in the fourth quarter of the previous two years, it was barely higher than the first quarters of every year. The reason it is fair to compare to the worst months of previous years is because it has become clear that the flu is gone for this year and that COVID-19 is this year’s version of the flu. Thus, with flu cases down 98.8%, it is reasonable to assume that the January census will not grow as it typically does during peak flu season.
- Category:
- Coronavirus - COVID-19 Tags:
Coronavirus coverage: Fake news propaganda media spin negative coverage of republican Florida’s Ron DeSantis with low deaths vs positive coverage of democrat controlled Cuomo’s New York with extremely high deaths
By the most critical metric, deaths per capita, DeSantis has outperformed Cuomo enormously. Cuomo’s led one of the most disastrous crisis responses in US history. If NY were a country it’d have the highest death per capita IN THE WORLD. And yet look at the biased coverage:
MSM Propaganda takes Trump’s words out of context re: Veterans with PTSD
- Category:
- Anti Trump
- Fake News
- Propaganda Tags:
- ABC News
- CNN
- NBC
Black privilege: Canadian government will spend $40 million building 200 new homes for black Canadians
Ahmed Hussen, Minister of Families, Children and Social Development and Minister responsible for Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), Marci Ien, Member of Parliament for Toronto Centre, Evan Siddall, President and CEO of CMHC, and Julia Deans, President and CEO of Habitat for Humanity Canada, announced a new investment of $40 million to create 200 home ownership opportunities across the country for Black Canadians.
- Category:
- Anti White Racism / Reverse Racism
- Canada
- White Privilege Tags:
- black privilege
White privilege, male privilege don’t exist; Asian women and immigrants from Syria, Korea, Indonesia, Taiwan, Philippines out-earn white men
Full-time working Asian women earned $1,224 in median weekly earnings in the third quarter of this year compared to $1,122 earned by their white male counterparts.
Newly released statistics from the US Department of Labor for the third quarter of 2020 undermine this narrative. Asian women have now surpassed white men in weekly earnings. That trend has been consistent throughout this past year—an unprecedented outcome. Full-time working Asian women earned $1,224 in median weekly earnings in the third quarter of this year compared to $1,122 earned by their white male counterparts.
According to the latest data from the US Census Bureau, over the 12 months covered by the survey, the median household incomes of Syrian Americans ($74,047), Korean Americans ($76,674), Indonesian Americans ($93,501), Taiwanese Americans ($102,405), and Filipino Americans ($100,273) are all significantly higher than that of whites ($69,823).
- Category:
- White Privilege Tags:
- male privilege
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