Times Article "The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election"

Thoughts? Clickbait (Shadow Campaign) or cause for concern?

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Pretty much clickbait. Time’s writing has gone downhill. Besides which:

“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.”

I’m not sure how this should be cause for concern for anybody. This is a great thing. Protection of our foundational processes SHOULD be something cross-party. Like, there shouldn’t even be a second thought.

Yeah.

It’s a very sensationalized narrative of “Everybody did their job and things turned out ok.”.

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Which just absolutely makes things worse. I mean, a lot of people reading this won’t understand what the author is ACTUALLY saying and instead will tune into the sensational word choices.

I mean all we need in a year everybody seems to be buying conspiracy theories is a Time article using words like “conspiracy”, “shadow campaign”, “operatives”… Oh my God there WAS a conspiracy!!1!1. It’s bullshit.

Like I said, their writing has gone downhill (along with most other places).

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Yeah.

The other more disturbing part that gets lost in the glossyness is that they are openly admitting to a coordinated effort by all media to sack a standing president to install a more favorable candidate.

Remove the names Trump and Biden and look at the action.

Then they published it!

It could beg the question “Was this really the will of the people?”.

Or was it another rendition of social elite telling the plebes “We’re smarter. We know better, and we have more power than you anyways.”.

So I guess it could be looked at a couple of ways.

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“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.”

Yeah, why the fuck should anyone care about that?

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Like I and SkyzykS said, clickbait sensationalized writing designed to elicit responses of either outrage or virtue

Like you’re a fucking authority. Stop acting like a twat.

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Cool story dude. You asked the question. If you didn’t want me to answer, don’t reply to my post.

I would have thought a damn near 50 year old had that figured out.

A PhD in bio-fucking-physics, and that was the answer you could give? An appeal to authority?

You’re obviously intelligent enough to know that one party wants more to vote and one wants fewer people to vote. And this year, people had to work extra hard to make it easier for more people to vote.

In any given year, the voter suppression that is attempted, and accomplished in a country that presents itself to the world as an example of democracy done right, it’s shocking, and appalling, and profoundly shameful. And this year it was especially so.

If you wish fewer people voted, just say so.

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It is not clickbait that the POS POTUS we had tried to use the power of his office to influence the election. It is not clickbait that he lied about the election for months and used those lies to raise money from rubes, and to get them to then storm the Capitol. It is not clickbait that good people in both parties stood up against that. It is not clickbait that most republicans chickenshitted their way out of voting on impeachment by claiming it didn’t matter anymore. It disgusts me.

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I see it slightly differently. It’s like a politician announcing all the bad shit they did in a tell all book, this allows them to claim they never hid any of it, and control the first publication of the story. I suspect this article is getting out in front of the story so other people are reacting to it rather than revealing it.

Possibly so. To be clear, I think the SUBSTANCE of the article is worth writing about. What I disagree with and called clickbait is the way the author chose to write (word choice, etc.).

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Rather, all of the bad shit they are willing to announce. Imagine if they announced ALL the bad shit. They’ll announce just enough to keep from getting Epsteined.

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Lower the dose man.

You replied to me and then got upset when I answered. I COULD have given a longer answer but based on how you responded to my initial reply I’m glad I didn’t waste the time. I responded, you called me a twat and told me not to respond to a question YOU asked me. As far as I am concerned, I don’t want to waste my time with someone who is going to interact that way.

Now, if you reread what I was talking about in response to the original post of the thread, what I am calling clickbait is the style of writing and headline choices, not the substance of the article.

Yes

I’ve never said that and don’t believe that. You are putting words in my mouth.

Interestingly enough I’ve been articulating the same set of opinions here in this forum for months on end. I assume you’re new to this subforum because otherwise you would have read many of my thoughts on the matter.

Of course you could just ignore all that and call me a twat. I hear that’s a great way to have a useful conversation.

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Clickbait is the headline, cause for concern is the meat of the article where they admit, confirm and boast a conspiracy between trade unions, big business, media, social media & big tech to name a few to ensure that the Democrats would win.

There is not really anything too new here in an American election, except for the scale of it. They did the same thing to a lesser extent, in 2016, mainstream media kept telling us Trump didn’t have a snowballs chance in Hell, yet he won.
. This time they call it" fortifying "the election democracy. That’s a euphemism, for stacking the deck in their favor, with only a transparent pretense of trying to be fair, because they new they probably wouldn’t win fairly.

Voices against Democrats were silenced after being kicked of social media and Youtube. The excuse, the pro Trump people were pushing conspiracy theories. Now the perps admit a real conspiracy.

“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.”

I find it hard to believe that many people on here still refuse to believe there is a potential chance that these same people wouldn’t have gone further and actually tampered with the voting process, when they had recruited armies of poll workers. This tallies with what happened on the day of the election, with Republican observers being shut out from doing their duty.
The same powerful people and industries involved with the admitted conspiracy are the same people that deny there was any election tampering. Sounds like their campaign is still in action. Nothing to see here, move along.

No. They united to ensure a fair and participatory (amidst a pandemic) election. Period. Don’t conflate the eventual result (that you don’t like) with efforts to safeguard the process.

Similarly, stop conflating any after-the-insurrection actions with the actual election itself. Even “mostly peaceful” protests are gonna have consequences.

Of course you neglected to mention our post-election audit process, and our judicial review process… where significant levels of fraud would be uncovered and presented, respectively. So either you were unaware or else your conspiracy needs to run much deeper (and in GOP-run states) than you’ve stated.

Well yeah. In your mind, the campaign (and your self-perceived persecution) will be neverending.

All your arguments can be reversed by saying you are biased because you got the results that you wanted.

How thick are you? They didn’t care the slightest about a free and fair election, they wanted to make sure that Trump lost. They even admit it. If it was free and fair they would have let their opposition say whatever they wanted and instead would refute the claims by proving the argument, wrong

This has got nothing to do with any alleged insurrection actions, on Jan 6 or after, nothing whatsoever. All the work kicking off opponents from social media and youtube was done post the 2016 election through to the day of voting, then during the time when votes were being finalised, and all the MSM were proclaiming Biden as the winner.

I think its funny how in the 2016 the Dem’s cried foul of foreign interferrence, and election meddling. At least then there was a proper official investigation that took years to complete. It eventually found that there was no evidence. You wankers think its fair to dismiss any allegations with the 2020 election, without a proper investigation.

[quote=“chillain, post:17, topic:272161”]
Well yeah. In your mind, the campaign (and your self-perceived persecution) will be neverending.
[/quote] The same people that admitted the conspiracy in the Times article still run the MSM, social media, etc still get to frame the narrative.

We all believe a senile old git, named Joe, was more popular than any other president ever. :wink:

No doubt. The nastiness, calling into question of the process, and eroding of public confidence didn’t start with Trump.

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I think mail in ballots should be banned for any voters who aren’t:
a. Out of the country and applied in advance.
b. In the military
c. Infirm

I also come from a part of the U.K. with mandatory voter ID and we have a higher percentage turnout than the USA.

We also have our electoral boundaries decided by an independent body, but that’s a thing I simply couldn’t imagine happening in the USA.

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