Bankers Saved Democracy by Killing It

So, where are all the #Resistance banshees on the “election interference” war-path? Meddling in the “democratic” US election process only counts when it’s done by imaginary Russian oligarchs?

Russia, Russia, Russia. Like that annoying blonde girl from The Brady Bunch said, it’s always about Russia.

As the evidence bore out, CNN and the New York Times’ Russian election meddling conspiracy theory was a hoax. The existence of the Deep State, on the other hand, is now an established fact of reality. It indeed functions – just as the “conspiracy theorists” claim it does — as a permanent and unelected bureaucracy.

How did this happen? Joe Biden finished an abysmal 5^th in the New Hampshire and 4^th in the Iowa caucuses of 2020, the two crucial earliest states to vote on presidential primary candidates. In late 2019 and early 2020, Biden’s campaign was flirting with failure. Most analysts, even friendly ones, agreed it was on the verge of collapse.

So how did a sad two-time presidential election loser like 78-year-old Joe Biden, a rapidly aging white male in an era of über-wokeness, bane of #MeToo, manage to come back from such a huge hole early on?

Biden, in short, is a company man – just the kind of trusted ally that the DNC’s donors could turn to in the face of a threatening Bernie Sanders ascendancy and an even more terrifying specter of a possible Trump re-election. Back in January of 2020, both seemed like probable scenarios.

So — starting at the highest levels with former president Barack Obama orchestrating an emergency power consolidation among the establishment primary candidates — they turned the gears of the political machinery as only a ruling class with full access to the levers of power can:

“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.”

Dismissing Trump and pigeonholing his supporters as backward mongrels is easy; they are not refined enough for the DC cocktail circuit, learned enough for the Ivy League, or hip enough for the Mission District in San Francisco.

Class snobberies aside, though, Trump was right on December 2, 2020 when, in the aftermath of the election, he observed that:

“It was all very, very strange… Within days after the election, we witnessed an orchestrated effort to anoint the winner, even while many key states were still being counted.”

That same day, Dec 2, the corporate media was in the throes – with support from the self-styled “cabal” whose “work touched every aspect of the election” — of full-on, all-hands-on-deck propaganda mode as it decried Trump his followers’ “conspiracy theories.” A Dec 2 MIT Technology Review piece went like this:

“There are so many aspects to the story of misinformation and American power: the companies that built networks incentivizing the spread of misinformation; the impact those narratives have on vulnerable and oppressed communities; the labor of content moderation, often causing trauma to the workers paid to do it; the money that funds the misinformation campaigns; the network of news-adjacent publications and organizations that help spread them; the impact of misinformation on our daily lives and relationships.”

On the contrary, the corporate overlords have — as apparently they now proclaim in Time articles with no fear of repercussions – “built networks incentivizing the spread of misinformation.” CNN? They cause trauma to their hapless viewers. They fund misinformation campaigns.

The government does not represent you. Your interests are not the interests of the ruling class. The policies that you want will never be instantiated into law so long as they run counter to the interests of the ruling class. This is how the system functions:

“Economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.”

No longer satisfied by just dictating to the “people’s” elected representatives what policy positions they will take, the oligarchs – assisted by Silicon Valley – now insist on handpicking those “elected” representatives. Voter preference be damned.

The revelations of Molly Ball via Time serve as prima facie evidence that the current government pressing its weight down on the middle and working class is illegitimate. Politicians at the highest levels are the handpicked puppets of the men behind the curtain.

Beyond illegitimate, Joseph Biden and the people who worked so diligently to thwart the democratic process in the 2020 election are criminal. They stole your birthright as an American citizen. This is not consensual governance; this is the Bad Touch.

No means no.

You live in occupied territory.

They beg for summary judgment and the guillotine.

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Ben Bartee is a Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs. Contact him via his portfolio or on LinkedIn.