USA 2020 Elections: Thread

[grarpamp]

History will show that Trump won.



How Media And Tech Elites Seized Control Of Elections

https://mises.org/wire/how-media-and-tech-elites-seized-control-elections
https://www.amazon.com/Rigged-Media-Democrats-Seized-Elections/dp/168451259X

Mollie Hemingway, an editor of the online magazine The Federalist,
calls our attention in this well-researched book to a problem of vital
significance. She is a supporter of Donald Trump, though not an
uncritical one, and writes from this point of view, but whether you
like the former president or not, you cannot ignore her message.

She begins the book with a paradox. Almost all the polls predicted a
decisive win for Biden in the November 2020 presidential election, but
in fact the result, setting aside altogether the allegations of rigged
voting by the former president and his supporters, was very close:

    “The political class, the corporate media, and their pollsters
were all dramatically wrong, and yet Biden would eke out a
presidential victory of just under 43,000 votes across three states,
out of a total of nearly 160 million.” (p.36. All page references are
to the Amazon Kindle edition.)

Why were the polls so inaccurate?

One answer would be mistakes in the way in polls were conducted, but
Hemingway sees something more sinister in the errors. The inaccurate
polls were part of a massive campaign by the government and corporate
elite to ensure Trump’s defeat in the election.

This campaign continued the efforts by the same elite to secure his
defeat in the 2016 election; and, when those efforts failed, to derail
his presidency.

Hemingway stresses especially one tactic used in both the 2016 and
2020 elections. In previous elections, most voting took place on the
appointed day in November, and although some people cast absentee
ballots, these were of minor importance. No longer is this the case,
and voting by mail now predominates.

    “’No excuse’ absentee voting allows citizens to cast their ballots
early. With the widespread adoption of this practice in recent years,
the United States can no longer be said to have an election day in the
strict sense of the term. The country has a months-long voting season.
. .In 2016, absentee and mail-in ballots accounted for roughly 33
million of the 140 million ballots counted. In 2020, more than 100
million of the 159 million ballots counted were cast prior to Election
Day, including by early voting.” (p.222)

This is of great significance, Hemingway says, because fraud is much
easier with this sort of voting: it is much harder to verify
signatures and voters’ addresses.

If voting fraud is to be stopped, this requires vigilant election
officials, and here is where the mass media elites enter the scene.

Far from aiding in efforts to interdict fraud, the elites promote it
through subventions to interested parties. Hemingway highlights the
role of Mark Zuckerberg, who made large donations to private groups
that acted in a partisan way to “help” election officials. “That’s to
say nothing of the widespread privatization of election systems in key
districts thanks to the efforts of leftist outfits funded by Mark
Zuckerberg and other billionaires. Multi-million dollars grants to
public election commissions, and the strings attached to them, were
the means by which the left’s sprawling voting activist arm took over
huge parts of the 2020 election. . .This private interference in the
running of a national election had never before happened in the
history of the country.” (p.xiii)

These efforts to bias election results go hand-in-hand with the
attempt by the same elites to control information that reaches the
public. The media giants, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google,
relentlessly promoted items unfavorable to Trump and suppressed
stories that could have helped him. As an example, damaging news about
Hunter Biden and his corrupt dealing with Chinese officials that
emerged in the final days of the campaign and was published in the New
York Post was banned from Twitter.

    “Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey would eventually tell Congress and
censoring the New York Post and locking it out of its Twitter account
was a ‘mistake.’” (p.36)

Hemingway’s focus is on the presidential campaign, but the censorship
by the statist-corporative elite extends even further. Facebook and
YouTube ban videos that criticize Covid-19 vaccinations and advance
points of view that the proprietors of the platforms deem
“misinformation.”

The author is prepared for the objection that her charges of a leftist
plot to derail Trump reflect the biased perspective of a partisan. In
response, she points to a notable article in Time magazine in which
those involved in the machinations admitted and took pride in what
they had done.

    “Without agony or shame the magazine reported that ‘[t]there was a
conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes’ creating ‘an extraordinary
shadow effort’ by ‘a well-funded cabal of powerful people’ to oppose
Trump. Corporate CEOs, organized labor, left-wing activists, and
Democrats all worked together in secret to secure a Biden victory. . .
Time would, of course, disingenuously frame this effort as an attempt
to oppose Trump’s ‘assault on democracy,’ even as Time reporter Molly
Ball noted this shadow campaign ‘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.’ The funding
enabled the country’s sudden rush to mail-in balloting, which Ball
describes as ‘a revolution in how people vote.’” (p.36)

What if anything can be done about this state of affairs? I do not
think the solution lies mainly in stricter laws about voting and
certainly not in governmental regulation of the mass media, which
would only increase the power of the state. Rather. our aim ought not
to be to make democracy “work better” but to use the example of
corruption she has highlighted as a tool to help us throw into
question altogether its value as a political and social system of
organization, and defend in its stead a genuine free market society,
along the lines set forward by Murray Rothbard and his followers, who
include most notably Hans Hoppe.

Hemingway is an assiduous researcher and, so far as I can discern, an
accurate one. To my regret, I have been able to find only one outright
error in the book. She says, “Five U.S, presidents since 1900 lost
their bid for a second term. . . While each election is determined by
unique factors, all five of these incumbents dealt with internal party
fights or significant primary challenges. “(p.39) This is not true for
Herbert Hoover, one of the five she mentions, who did not get
significant Republican Party opposition in his quest for the 1932
nomination.

By calling attention to what has happened to or political system in
recent years, Mollie Hemingway strengthens our resolve to come up with
something better.