Saturday, 6 February 2021
It's so overt, it's covert
Rigged by any other name?
Strolling through the streets of the 1’s and 0’s I came upon an alarming headline.
The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election
The piece was cited with some choice words about how the left aren’t even trying to hide the fact that they stole the election. Now, regardless of my own views on the, shall we say, surprising outcome of the 2020 US Presidential election and the unashamed nature of the extreme left, this piece appeared in Time Magazine which surely still tries to pretend to be somewhere near neutral. Don’t they?
Well it seems that they’ve given up trying.
Whilst I don’t necessarily share other commentators’ views that this is a blatant admission that the election was stolen, there are, in my view admissions made that are far more concerning than some crass fraud. To wit:
“A second odd thing happened amid Trump’s attempts to reverse the result: corporate America turned on him. Hundreds of major business leaders, many of whom had backed Trump’s candidacy and supported his policies, called on him to concede. To the President, something felt amiss. “It was all very, very strange,” Trump said on Dec. 2. “Within days after the election, we witnessed an orchestrated effort to anoint the winner, even while many key states were still being counted.”
In a way, Trump was right.
There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans. The pact was formalized in a terse, little-noticed joint statement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO published on Election Day. Both sides would come to see it as a sort of implicit bargain–inspired by the summer’s massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protests–in which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy.
The handshake between business and labor was just one component of 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. Though much of this activity took place on the left, it was separate from the Biden campaign and crossed ideological lines, with crucial contributions by nonpartisan and conservative actors. The scenario the shadow campaigners were desperate to stop was not a Trump victory. It was an election so calamitous that no result could be discerned at all, a failure of the central act of democratic self-governance that has been a hallmark of America since its founding.
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.
….
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.”
The article then goes on at length and in great detail about how this “cabal of powerful people” went about “fortifying” the election. I checked by the way, and the dictionary doesn’t define “fortifying” as “the act by which a group of people impose their will on an unwilling populace”.
So in essence, people in positions of great influence flouted the US and State Constitutions by amending voting laws without state legislature involvement, actively lobbied/bribed/threatened social media companies to silence dissenting opinions in the lead up to and aftermath of the election, used mainstream media houses as (now) self-confessed propaganda outlets and we’re told this was all in the name of “saving democracy”??? Pull the other one, it’s got bells on!
What is truly harrowing about this confession - like a serial killer finally able to tell the world in grim detail how he went about his business - is not the implication that the election was stolen. No, I don’t think that is the implied threat being made. Rather, what is being shouted out for all to hear and take heed of lest they ever decide to go against the establishment again is this -
We decide what you decide!
News of the day (links to full articles embedded)
Skukuza ‘poaching’ court is back in business.
Bloemfontein 'advocate' who faked degree is jailed for 10 years. Watched too many episodes of Suits methinks…
The US Centre for Communicable Diseases has for this year’s NFL Superbowl recommended people “Avoid chanting or cheering. Stomp, clap, or bring hand-held noisemakers instead”. Starting to wonder whether stupidity can be classified as a communicable disease.
Zuma and Malema enjoyed a cup of tea at Zuma’s family resort, Nkandla. What’s that about the friend of my enemy?
Case of the day
Esau and Others v Minister of Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs and Others
The Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) on 28 January 2021 dismissed the appeal of Duwayne Esau and seven other appellants against the Minister of Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs, the President of the Republic of South Africa and the Minister of Trade, Industry and Competition.
The appellants challenged the validity of certain decisions that they claimed were made by the National Coronavirus Command Council (NCCC), as well as the validity of the level 4 regulations and certain directions given by the Minister of Trade, Industry and Competition. All of these challenges were initially dismissed by the Western Cape Division of the High Court, Cape Town.
The SCA held that only one of the impugned decisions was actually taken by the NCCC, and given the policy-laden nature thereof, the Court refrained from deciding the issue (out of respect for the principle of separation of powers - put plainly, Courts should not prescribe policy to government).
The level 4 regulations were challenged, firstly, on the basis that Minister Dlamini-Zuma, in a public participation process that preceded the making of the regulations, had not afforded members of the public an adequate opportunity to make representations. She had allowed two days within which representations were to be forwarded to her. During that time, more than 70 000 representations were received from members of the public. The SCA held that, in the circumstances (e.g. given the urgency demanded by the pandemic response), this constituted adequate opportunity for the public to be heard on the content of the level 4 regulations.
It was then argued that Minister Dlamini-Zuma could not have applied her mind properly to the representations that she received in the short time between the deadline for representations and the promulgation of the level 4 regulations. Her (Minister Dlamini-Zuma’s) evidence was that teams had been set up to process the representations and that she relied heavily on this input in her decision-making. The SCA concluded that it had not been established that Minister Dlamini-Zuma had failed to consider the representations made by members of the public when making the level 4 regulations.
It was then argued by the appellants that the regulations restricting freedom of movement and those concerning economic activity were invalid because they infringed fundamental rights, and those infringements were not justified in terms of s 36(1) of the Constitution (this is the clause in the Constitution which determines when and how our fundamental rights may be limited by government). The SCA accepted that the impugned regulations infringed the rights to freedom of movement, to human dignity and to freedom of trade, occupation and profession. It concluded however, that, with the exception of two regulations, Minister Dlamini-Zuma had justified the limitation of those rights in terms of s 36(1) of the Constitution.
The SCA found, however, that the regulations restricting the taking of exercise to certain times, places and modes of exercise, and the prohibition of the over-the-counter sale of cooked hot food were invalid.
Accordingly, the appeal was dismissed save to the extent that the exercise regulation and the hot food regulation were declared to be invalid.
So some redemption for our favorite Minister it seems?
Quote of the day
“Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
George Orwell
Meme for your Saturday
