Is It Still a “Conspiracy” if They Say It Was?

Just when you thought that the events of last year couldn’t get any more far-fetched, Time magazine recently published an article outlining the strategy for the ‘Shadow Campaign’ to ‘save’ the 2020 election. Just before you dismiss me as some right-wing, tin-foil-hat-wearing conspiracist, just note the following opening paragraphs:

[An] …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.

So, there was a ‘conspiracy’ after all?! It’s just that, according to Time, the collusion was warranted because Trump was such a tyrant and as such, the very foundations of democracy were at stake. As the article goes on to state:

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 political spin in re-writing history here is enough to impress even Shane Warne. As James Delingpole writes:

Do you see what they just did there?

The Democrats (and their sympathisers) didn’t rig the election. They just fortified it by taking care to ensure the right guy won rather than the wrong guy won, regardless of what those pesky voters might misguidedly have wanted.

Could this have anything to do, you wonder, with President Trump’s upcoming impeachment trial?

To be completely fair, the article from Time understands how this ‘conspiracy’ might be perceived negatively by those who are not as progressive as they could be by arguing:

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.

So, are we truly supposed to believe that the ultimate goal of the polyamorous relationship between Big-Media, Big-Tech™ and Big Business™ was the protection of our democratic freedoms? Because, if so, then someone better quickly inform The New York Post whose bombshell expose article on Hunter Biden’s laptop was more censored than a communist cultivated coronavirus.