Shadow Cabal

Democrats admit conspiracy to steal election.

I have already written about how it is obvious that the 2020 election was stolen even if laws were not broken. On February 4, the most audacious piece of subterfuge posing as fair journalism was published by Time. "The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election" details a conspiracy and many associated tampering activities as if they were justifiable acts of protecting the election. The following summary from the article pleads that it looks bad even while painting it favorably.

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.

Prior to this summary, a broader summary outlines the type of things that they did.

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.

Much is self-evident here: some details may be unethical but not illegal. However, I would note a few things. Why do poll workers have to join the cabal? After all, legal maneuvers and deception of voters do not require direct handling of the ballots.

If you filter out the subterfuge perhaps it would read differently:

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 routine election 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 censor conservative viewpoints and unfavorable news, and used data-driven strategies to fight rebuttals. Expecting that the irregularities that they created would be misunderstood by the voters, they communicated that the election count might flip from a win by Trump on election night to his loss after additional votes were counted later in order to counter any complaints against the disparity anticipated from Trump. After Election Day, they spied everything that might reveal the cabal 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.

Whew! And the entire article is clever like this. Read it yourself with caution.

Perhaps the most visible aspect of the theft is the selective censorship done by social media. Does it constitute a crime? First lets cite relevant current law:

Title 47 U.S. Code § 230 - Protection for private blocking and screening of offensive material

(c) Protection for “Good Samaritan” blocking and screening of offensive material

(1) Treatment of publisher or speaker
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

(2) Civil liability
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of—

(A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or
(B) any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in paragraph (1).

Section (c)(1) mostly eliminates any responsibility for users' content on their part. This presumes neutrality and fairness in administering this content for this kind of immunity in spite of some cover for censorship by section (c)(2). Now lets follow some kind of logic to its conclusion. As soon as they are censoring content according to their own ideology, they are not only responsible but are actually indirectly stating their own opinion much as a statement citing many supporting sources. As the argument proceeds, following logic to establish a crime may not be hindered by the indicated civil limitations.

Now that they are communicating a message of manipulation of the election, their message is tampering with a fundamental democratic process. Since they are manipulating millions of people - some of their opinion and others of their vote - they are inciting a unwitting insurrection of these people against the free lawful execution of the election process. They are committing libel in the broadest sense of communications harming persons or property and - because of the attack against a fundamental process of democracy - specifically seditious libel, a well defined crime. For the objection that I am reading much into political free speech, the unethical or illegal censorship is an aggravting factor. Of course, I am not giving legal advice since I am not a lawyer, but the logic is reasonable nonetheless.

¹See related article: Click Your Heels.
²Molly Ball, "The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election," February 4, 2021, Time, time.com, link.

Document History
February 21, 2021. Created.