RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thefederalist.com/2021/10/20/leftist-shadow-governments-control-a-lot-more-than-our-elections/ 

This kind of tax-exempt political interference is now standard practice for the world’s far-left ultra-rich, and it’s affecting a whole lot more than elections.

Many Americans are awakening to the fact that we seem to have no local control of a lot of local things: public schools, our terms of employment, local governments, local elections. That last one popped again recently with the release of my colleague Mollie Hemingway’s deeply reported 2020 election investigation book, “Rigged.”

That book, and some great corroborating independent reporting, show that 2020 election chaos was part of an effective and well-funded plan to help Democrats win by rigging the playing field. One key strategy deployed to that end has become default on the left yet still often goes unremarked and unchallenged. It’s called “advocacy philanthropy.”

In the 2020 election, Facebook zillionaire Mark Zuckerberg used this strategy to deploy nearly half a billion dollars to help Democrat activists infiltrate local government election apparatuses, literally paying for election equipment and the salaries of partisans who counted ballots. This kind of tax-exempt political interference is now standard practice for the world’s far-left ultra-rich, and it’s affecting a whole lot more than elections. It’s constructed essentially a shadow government that pits elected officials against their voters on behalf of moneyed interests.

How the Rich Influence Politics With ‘Philanthropy’

In the past two decades, large foundations have begun to “engage more directly with the political process by supporting advocacy organizations, investing in the implementation of major policy reforms, and ensuring that their research investments are targeted to advance specifc policy priorities,” document politics professors Sarah Reckhow and Megan Tompkins‐Stange in a 2018 paper. These large foundations are predominantly run by leftists, including Bill and Melinda Gates, Zuckerberg, and George Soros.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/10/14/zuckerbucks-101-how-a-media-mogul-took-over-the-2020-election-and-why-gop-leaders-must-never-let-it-happen-again/

The last election was unacceptable. And before the next one, more Republican leaders must wake up to the mess that was created in 2020 and refuse to accept another sloppy round.

MADISON, Wis. — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis reaffirmed his state’s commitment to election integrity on Tuesday, especially keeping tech giants and their partisan CEOs from corrupting local elections. Given what we know now about how Mark Zuckerberg and other left-wing actors commandeered election operations in blue hubs of swing states in 2020, other states would do well to follow DeSantis’s lead — and Wisconsin is a good case study in why.

No conversation about 2020 election integrity — or about the integrity of future elections, for that matter — is complete without understanding the full picture of how Facebook CEO Zuckerberg strategically bankrolled and staffed local government election offices, which are in charge of voter registration, voting, and vote counting. He did this through two primary front groups, a process Federalist Senior Editor Mollie Hemingway painstakingly outlines in her new book out this week, “Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections.”

The Zuckerberg Infiltration

Here’s how it worked. Zuckerberg gifted nearly half a billion dollars to two left-wing groups that then gave the money to government election offices. One of these two groups was the Center for Technology and Civic Life. By the September before the election, Zuckerberg and his wife had given it $350 million, meaning the small organization’s prior revenues of $1.8 million exploded by roughly 20,000 percent.

The cash, or “Zuckerbucks,” wasn’t an unconditional donation, however. There were strings attached, which amounted to Democrat get-out-the-vote efforts, mass mail-in voting, and ballot “curing,” whereby election workers “fix” mail-in ballot problems after the ballot has been submitted.

These dollars also didn’t flow indiscriminately to needy areas of the country but largely to government election offices in the biggest cities of swing states, where the majority of Democrat voters are concentrated. Those funds were used for Democrat voter outreach, designing and translating ballots, and staffing ballot harvesting, curing, and counting operations.

Make no mistake, CTCL is no apolitical actor. All three of its founders previously worked for the New Organizing Institute, a now-defunct organization that was run by ex-Obama staffer Ethan Roeder and funded heavily by left-wing behemoths such as George Soros to train leftist activists in digital campaign strategy and with war games for election success.

The Washington Post championed the New Organizing Institute as “the left’s think tank for campaign know-how” and “the Democratic Party’s Hogwarts for digital wizardry.” These descriptors aren’t surprising given that its board was also composed of leftist leaders.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/12/your-vote-wont-count/

We’re coming up on another election of national importance—the Virginia governor’s race is November 2. My friends are hopefully suggesting on social media that this will be the election that turns things around, where the full anger of the common folk at being bossed around by autocratic overlords finally manifests itself and we throw the bums out.

Mind you, they were saying the same thing with the same hope about the California recall election. And I said at the time, weeks before the vote was tallied, there was no point in hoping that patriotic anger would outbalance the massive machinery at work behind the scenes: Your votes didn’t matter in the 2020 presidential election, they didn’t matter in the California recall, they won’t matter in the Virginia gubernatorial election, and they won’t matter next year.

In case you’ve forgotten the high-level overview of the situation, let’s have Time Magazine remind us:

‘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.

According to Time, this was a huge triumph, since the “conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes” (again, their words) was designed to protect “democracy” from being undermined by stupid people like you who believe the wrong things and want to elect the wrong people. You were against the “proper” outcome!

https://spectator.org/va-dems-want-last-minute-voting-rule-change/

Virginia’s gubernatorial contest between Republican Glenn Youngkin and Democrat Terry McAuliffe clearly has supporters of the latter worried. Recent polls show a far tighter race than they expected. Consequently, it was all but inevitable that McAuliffe’s allies would attempt to meddle with election laws using public health as a pretext. Sure enough, the Democrat-dominated Fairfax Board of Supervisors has asked Gov. Ralph Northam to waive the witness signature requirement that Virginia law stipulates for all absentee ballots. Board Chairman Jeffrey McKay insists that the waiver is necessary due to the threat of COVID-19, yet cases are declining.

The New York Times reported Sunday that Virginia’s cases and hospitalizations have declined 17 and 14 percent respectively during the past two weeks.  Moreover, Virginia’s state of emergency expired June 30 as did the numerous executive orders Gov. Northam issued pursuant to the pandemic. The sole Republican member of the Fairfax board, Pat Herrity, voted against asking Northam to issue such an extraordinary waiver, pointing out that voting has already been underway for three weeks: “To do this in the middle of an election process in the name of COVID is nonsensical.” He also emphasized election integrity: “Witness signatures are important as they provide another line of defense against voter fraud.”

Until last year, all absentee ballots cast in a Virginia election had to be signed by a witness confirming that the voter was indeed eligible to vote and legally registered. This long standing statute was temporarily suspended during the 2020 general election pursuant to concerns about the spread of COVID-19. The moratorium ended after the Commonwealth’s state of emergency was lifted, but Fairfax County has refused to give up its emergency powers despite a 21 percent decline in cases. Nonetheless, a recent statement by Virginia’s Department of Elections reiterates that “witness signatures are required on all absentee ballots.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/what-if-fix-was-joseph-hippolito/

A British journalist, writing in one of the world’s most respected newspapers, recently declared something that almost none of his American colleagues dare to utter: Last year’s presidential election was rigged for Joe Biden.

Rod Liddle, associate editor of The Spectator, made that assertion in The Times of London on Sept. 26. In doing so, he also blistered Biden’s incompetence and physical problems, which the leftist U.S. Establishment Media also largely ignores.

“The American public is slowly waking up to the fact that they are being led by an ineffectually devious, senile halfwit,” Liddle wrote. “Soon the public will wake up to something even more unpleasant and sinister: that the last presidential election was a fraud, rigged by big business, the labor unions and, more than anything, the media and the tech companies.

“If that election had taken place in any other country, it would have been called ‘unfree.'”

FrontPage Magazine has previously discussed the possibility of foreign and domestic 2020 election interference in “Beijing is Called For Biden,” “Why Trump Will Win” and “The Serbian Connection.”

But Liddle — who edits a publication with nearly 200 years of credibility as the world’s oldest weekly magazine — ventures beyond possibility. He states his charge as categorical fact.

So far, no American commentator has rebutted his accusation, which attacks the fiber of American political legitimacy.

Liddle made his assertions while Arizona’s Maricopa County was conducting a forensic audit of the November election’s votes. That audit found numerous discrepancies.

For example, 3,432 more ballots were cast than there were people who voted. Nearly 300 dead people voted. There were more than 17,000 duplicate votes. More than 23,000 voters who mailed their ballots did so after the mail-in deadline. Of those, more than 9,000 returned more ballots than they received.

Biden won Arizona by 10,457 votes but the audit showed problems with more than 50,000 ballots in Maricopa County. Other states are considering similar audits.

Liddle’s criticism, however, excludes support for President Donald Trump. He displayed his contempt for Biden’s predecessor when mentioning Trump’s lead in opinion polls. “Imagine how awful a president must be if people would rather that sack of meat with mittens were back in charge,” Liddle wrote.

Yet contempt for Trump, in Liddle’s view, fails to justify what the columnist calls “a grotesque manipulation of democracy,” even if Trump was “unhinged,” with Liddle quoting one of the favorite phrases Trump’s detractors used.

“Was he?” Liddle asked. “I don’t know. He didn’t seem terribly hinged to me, but then Americans rarely do. But more unhinged than your average American — or Joe Biden?