The Charlie Kirk Show - How They Did It: The 'Conspiracy' to Defeat Donald Trump
Aired: 2021-02-06
Duration: 01:04:39

[00:00:00]  Hey, everybody.
[00:00:01]  On this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show, I spend this whole episode on one article, The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election by Molly Ball, a time.com article that is so stunning that even in this whole episode, I felt like I could have gone an extra hour.
[00:00:19]  This article is a tell-all of exactly what happened in November from the left's own words.
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[00:00:55]  It was a really good one.
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[00:01:00]  The secret history of the shadow campaign that saved the 2020 election.
[00:01:04]  You won't believe this episode.
[00:01:05]  Buckle up, everybody.
[00:01:06]  Here we go.
[00:01:08]  Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
[00:01:09]  Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
[00:01:12]  I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
[00:01:15]  Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
[00:01:18]  I want to thank Charlie.
[00:01:19]  He's an incredible guy.
[00:01:20]  His spirit, his love of this country.
[00:01:22]  He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created.
[00:01:27]  Turning point USA.
[00:01:29]  We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
[00:01:37]  That's why we are here.
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[00:02:49]  What if I told you that instead of conservatives and journalists having to go through months and years of investigation of what exactly happened in November and the months leading to it?
[00:03:06]  What if I told you all that work was done for us?
[00:03:10]  What if I told you that the people that were behind an orchestrated effort for a desired result in November have now publicly admitted and detailed their efforts?
[00:03:30]  This story was almost too stunning to comprehend after four times of reading it.
[00:03:38]  That's right.
[00:03:38]  I've read this story four times.
[00:03:40]  And it's not even that the details are that stunning.
[00:03:43]  It's the brazen cockiness that they published this story with.
[00:03:52]  The almost Unprecedented double standard it takes to write a story like this.
[00:04:02]  And it says by Molly Ball from Time magazine.
[00:04:05]  See, I didn't know Time really did much writing anymore, which is exactly probably why they decided to do it in Time magazine because they could get written exactly what they want written because Time would want the clicks and Time would want the mentions, so they were probably more open to writing the story they wanted to have written.
[00:04:22]  By Molly Ball.
[00:04:23]  She actually did a pretty good job of writing this.
[00:04:25]  I'm not saying she did a good job of reporting it because some of her word selection and diction is unbelievable.
[00:04:33]  The secret history of the shadow campaign that saved the 2020 election.
[00:04:40]  That's the title.
[00:04:43]  Secret Shadow Saved.
[00:04:46]  Those are the three operative words.
[00:04:51]  I want to go back in the time machine before I even go back, go into this article.
[00:04:55]  Do you remember when there were thousands of articles written specifically by the New Yorker about dark money, shadow operations, secret clandestine efforts, possibly dealing with Russia?
[00:05:13]  The article starts by talking about how after Election Day, there were no protests in the streets.
[00:05:20]  I started reading this article, and the C-word started to creep into thought.
[00:05:29]  I said, is this what I think it is?
[00:05:32]  And then Molly Ball says it for me in about the seventh paragraph.
[00:05:41]  There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes.
[00:05:46]  One that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs.
[00:05:53]  It goes on to say that a pact was formalized in a terse, little notice joint statement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, who I think we went through in great detail this week, and the AFL-CIO, which is a public sector union.
[00:06:08]  Private unions I have no issue with generally, as long as people have freedom to choose to associate public sector unions, I'm a harsh critic of.
[00:06:19]  Publish on Election Day.
[00:06:21]  Both sides would come to see as sort of an implicit bargain inspired by the summer's massive, sometimes destructive racial justice protest.
[00:06:30]  At least she's honest.
[00:06:31]  Good for Molly Ball for that.
[00:06:32]  She didn't say mostly peaceful.
[00:06:35]  In what forces of labor and what forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep peace and oppose Trump's assault on democracy.
[00:06:46]  So let's go back to this sentence here.
[00:06:48]  There was a conspiracy unfolding.
[00:06:52]  Now, only Democrats could have a puff piece written about a conspiracy.
[00:06:57]  Only Democrats could possibly pull that off.
[00:07:01]  She used the C word, conspiracy.
[00:07:04]  Now, I'm going to walk through this 25-page article in great detail because it admits, and it says here, through never-before-seen documents, interviews with dozens of those involved across the political spectrum, access to the inner workings.
[00:07:24]  It is the story of an unprecedented, creative, and determined campaign whose success reveals how close the nation came to disaster, aka Trump winning.
[00:07:35]  And what's so incredible about this article is how all of this had nothing to do with persuasion.
[00:07:47]  This is a 25-page document that involves billions of dollars of resources.
[00:07:52]  The most powerful people on the planet openly admitting that they worked in collusion and conspiracy with each other for a desired objective and goal.
[00:08:04]  All to protect democracy.
[00:08:09]  Now, what's so extraordinary is that is the opposite of a constitutional republic.
[00:08:14]  Powerful people colluding together for a desired outcome and objective is not what representative government is about.
[00:08:22]  That's what kleptocrats do.
[00:08:26]  The handshake between business and labor was just one component of a vast cross-partisan campaign to protect the election, which is code for defeating Trump.
[00:08:35]  An extraordinary shadow effort dedicated to not winning the vote, but ensuring it would be fair, free, credible, and uncorrupted.
[00:08:44]  I want to read this sentence here.
[00:08:47]  The scenario the shadow campaigners were desperate to stop was not necessarily a Trump victory.
[00:08:53]  It was an election so calamitous that no result could be discerned at all.
[00:08:58]  A failure of the central act of democrat self-governance that has been the hallmark of America since its founding.
[00:09:03]  So the thesis statement as this begins is that it wasn't really about defeating Trump.
[00:09:07]  It was just about defeating Trump's desired objective by us getting involved and changing the way we do elections in our country totally completely, but more than just elections.
[00:09:17]  In this document, they detail how they prevented protests from happening, about how they used the threat of the deployment of protests.
[00:09:29]  In this piece, it talks about hundreds of millions of dollars being spent by Zuckerberg for a very specific purpose.
[00:09:37]  In this article, it talks about how, behind the scenes, while we were worried about Trump's approval rating and polls in Battleground States, when we were worried about voter registration numbers, when we were worried about whether or not President Trump was actually managing the Chinese coronavirus, what were they doing?
[00:09:56]  They were at Mark Zuckerberg's home demanding certain accounts get shut down.
[00:10:03]  That's what they were doing.
[00:10:06]  I quote here: their work touched every aspect of the election.
[00:10:12]  And these are not my words.
[00:10:13]  This is Time magazine that says they are shadow campaigners.
[00:10:18]  Again, typically that's a pejorative when you're dealing with representative government.
[00:10:24]  Who wants to be known as a shadow campaigner?
[00:10:31]  Their work touched every aspect of the election.
[00:10:34]  The shadow campaigners got states to change their voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions of dollars in public and private funding.
[00:10:46]  They fended off voter suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers, and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time.
[00:10:53]  They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation, told you, and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears.
[00:11:04]  Norm Eisen, who we mentioned on a podcast with Darren Beattie, you might know that name when we are warning against a color revolution, said, quote, the untold story of the election is thousands of people of both parties who accomplished the triumph of American democracy at its very foundation.
[00:11:20]  Okay, so let me be clear.
[00:11:21]  When Trump won in 2016, that was an assault on democracy.
[00:11:26]  But when Joe Biden wins after a week of shenanigans, nonsense, tomfoolery, and interference from your conspiracy, that's a win for democracy.
[00:11:35]  When they say that, it's code for our guy won, your guy lost.
[00:11:40]  It's that simple.
[00:11:48]  We don't have to do our own research anymore now about what happened.
[00:11:53]  They publicly admit it.
[00:11:55]  They wrote the book that shows what they did.
[00:11:58]  And I'm telling you, everybody, listen very carefully to stuff we're about to go through because this is about to be some incredibly revealing information.
[00:12:09]  This piece is the most in-depth and detailed article I have read with inside sources and document review about what happened in the 2020 election from the Democrat side.
[00:12:26]  They call themselves the Democracy Campaigners.
[00:12:29]  That was a self-described title.
[00:12:33]  Former GOP representative Zach Womp said, quote, we can look back and say things went pretty well, but it was not all clear in September and October that that was going to be the case.
[00:12:43]  Things went really well.
[00:12:45]  Who is this guy?
[00:12:46]  What is he talking about?
[00:12:50]  This is the inside story of the conspiracy to save the 2020 election, based on access to groups, inner workings, never before seen documents, interviews with dozens of those involved across the political spectrum.
[00:13:04]  If you want to stop people in believing in QAnon conspiracy theories, stop admitting that there are conspiracies on the left.
[00:13:17]  I mean, what do you think people are going to think when they read this?
[00:13:21]  Like, I told you, they're admitting that there was a conspiracy.
[00:13:24]  They use that word time and time again.
[00:13:29]  You remember when conspiracy was a way of attacking the other side?
[00:13:35]  I had to pull this from the memory bank.
[00:13:37]  Remember when Hillary Clinton said this back during the Clinton impeachment trial playtape?
[00:13:42]  The great story here for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president.
[00:13:56]  I remember when conspiracy was a bad word to use.
[00:13:59]  Now, it's how we describe, what do they call themselves?
[00:14:04]  They call themselves the Avengers or something.
[00:14:05]  Oh, yeah, the democracy campaigners.
[00:14:07]  That's what they call themselves.
[00:14:09]  Got it.
[00:14:12]  One step short of the Avengers.
[00:14:13]  Trust me.
[00:14:15]  So as I was reading this, I kid you not, I was thinking to myself, boy, this kind of feels like a cabal.
[00:14:21]  I was like, ah, that's probably too aggressive of a word.
[00:14:24]  Then I got to paragraph 15.
[00:14:28]  Even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream, a well-funded cabal of powerful people, she says it right here in this article.
[00:14:36]  She says it right here.
[00:14:37]  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.
[00:14:48]  Trust us, they were not rigging the election.
[00:14:50]  They were just fortifying it.
[00:14:51]  Yeah, it makes perfect sense.
[00:14:52]  That one sentence makes me feel so much better, Molly Ball.
[00:14:55]  Fortifying.
[00:14:56]  What a wonderful word.
[00:14:57]  I bet that was poll tested.
[00:15:00]  And they believe the public needs to understand the system's fragility in order to ensure that democracy is in America endures.
[00:15:07]  That's a little hat tip to Robin D'Angelo: fragility.
[00:15:11]  I guarantee you that the term fragility, word fragility, has been used more in the last two years than in the last 20.
[00:15:20]  Of course, I'm talking about white fragility written by Robin D'Angelo.
[00:15:24]  I want to reread this paragraph.
[00:15:26]  And yes, we are going to go through the specifics because they even identify an architect behind this multi-billion dollar plan.
[00:15:32]  They identify tactics.
[00:15:33]  They identify how confident they were they were going to win.
[00:15:39]  I want to reread this paragraph.
[00:15:41]  That's why the participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream.
[00:15:53]  Ian Basson says, quote, it's massively important for the country to understand that this did not happen accidentally.
[00:16:00]  The system didn't work magically.
[00:16:02]  Democracy is not self-executing.
[00:16:04]  Oh, so it's not about what people think.
[00:16:06]  It's about powerful people getting in and manipulating, changing laws, getting tech companies to interfere.
[00:16:11]  That's what democracy is.
[00:16:14]  So democracy is not actually what people's perceptions are.
[00:16:17]  You see, while we were focused on persuasion, they were focused on believing that it's not magical, self-executing.
[00:16:25]  No, no, no, it's about interference.
[00:16:30]  They admit it.
[00:16:31]  This guy, Ian Bastion, co-founder of Protect Democracy.
[00:16:35]  So for them, in order to protect democracy, we must destroy democracy.
[00:16:43]  I'm going to read this part again.
[00:16:44]  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.
[00:16:59]  This reads like a February 2017 New York Times piece when they did a diagnostic report on the NRA and Cambridge Analytica and Paul Manafort and Roger Stone and Vladimir Putin.
[00:17:13]  Instead, it gets written about positively.
[00:17:16]  Okay, let's get to chapter one.
[00:17:18]  That's right.
[00:17:18]  We're still only on chapter one of this thing.
[00:17:20]  The architect, Mike Podhorzer.
[00:17:26]  He's the senior advisor to the president of the AFL-CIU, AFL-CIU, which is one of the largest labor unions in the country.
[00:17:34]  It actually is the nation's largest labor federation.
[00:17:38]  He started to bring together liberal strategists.
[00:17:40]  Now, let me be very clear.
[00:17:42]  They are painting him as the mastermind.
[00:17:45]  I don't think he's the mastermind.
[00:17:48]  I think that he's a fill-in for the actual mastermind that they didn't want to put in an article.
[00:17:53]  I think that he was probably involved.
[00:17:55]  I think that he's someone that is very unassuming.
[00:17:58]  He has a big organization to support him in case he came under criticism.
[00:18:02]  And I think that he was instrumental.
[00:18:05]  But if you read about this guy, there's no way that he was able to actually pull the weight together to do what they say he actually did.
[00:18:12]  But I think he was definitely influential.
[00:18:14]  But I already don't like this guy.
[00:18:16]  I'm going to tell you why I don't like this guy.
[00:18:18]  Not because he works for the FL-CIO, not because he tried to create a conspiracy, which is literally what Time magazine calls it, but for a different reason.
[00:18:26]  I'll tell you that in a sec.
[00:18:28]  But he's actually not dumb.
[00:18:29]  He says, quote, my basic take on politics is that all pretty obvious.
[00:18:33]  If you don't overthink it or swallow the prevailing frameworks whole.
[00:18:37]  After that, just relentlessly identify your assumptions and challenge them.
[00:18:40]  He believes that it should be less about political strategy and has little to do with how changes actually get made.
[00:18:46]  He's right.
[00:18:47]  Republicans are always about political strategy.
[00:18:49]  It's about sending direct mail.
[00:18:51]  It's about continually raising capital from certain areas where he's like, you need better tactics.
[00:18:59]  It's exactly what they did.
[00:19:01]  Now, speaking of tactics, the reason why I don't like this guy is it says, quote, Podhorzer applies that approach to everything.
[00:19:10]  When he coached his now adult son's Little League team in DC, he trained the boys not to swing at most pitches, a tactic that infuriated both their opponents, parents, but won the team a series of championships.
[00:19:23]  Okay, this is everything wrong with America.
[00:19:26]  As parents that teach their eight, nine, and 10-year-old kids not to swing.
[00:19:31]  Okay, here's why it bothers me so much.
[00:19:33]  Okay.
[00:19:34]  I couldn't stand this growing up.
[00:19:36]  When you're a 10-year-old pitcher, you're going to throw more balls than strikes.
[00:19:42]  You're gaming the system.
[00:19:44]  And there was a specific coach, I'm not going to say who, when I was growing up, that's all he did.
[00:19:48]  He would teach his team to just get walks the entire time.
[00:19:54]  And so in response, there was this huge committee meeting.
[00:19:58]  Again, this is probably too much information about what was P-H-Y-B-A.
[00:20:02]  That was the name of my baseball team growing up.
[00:20:06]  So we got a coalition of umpires together to expand the strike zone because it just got to be so ridiculous.
[00:20:13]  So this tells me everything I need to know about this guy.
[00:20:15]  Game the system at all costs.
[00:20:18]  When in reality, why are your kids playing baseball?
[00:20:21]  You might say, oh, yeah, to win.
[00:20:23]  Yeah, when they're 10 years old, they're playing baseball to enjoy the sport, figure it out, get some hand-eye coordination.
[00:20:29]  When they get to 14, 15, or 16-year-old, then, okay, yeah, then it's about winning.
[00:20:33]  And then the pitchers will be throwing more strikes than balls, okay?
[00:20:37]  But when they're 10 years old and they're throwing the ball all over North America, you want your kids to get in the game.
[00:20:45]  You want them to participate.
[00:20:46]  Anyway, that really bothered me, okay?
[00:20:51]  It continues by saying that Trump's election in 2016 is credited in part to his unusual strength amongst the sort of blue-collar white voters who once dominated the AFL-CIO.
[00:21:02]  Podhorzer found that to be a problem.
[00:21:08]  It turned out that Podhorzer wasn't the only one thinking in these terms.
[00:21:13]  I'm reading from the, if you're just tuning in, the conspiracy that won the 2020 election.
[00:21:18]  Their words, not mine.
[00:21:21]  He began to organize a coalition of resistance organizations and what called to be known the Democracy Defense Coalition.
[00:21:30]  It turned out that once you say it loud, people agreed and it started building momentum.
[00:21:36]  He spent months pondering scenarios and talking to experts.
[00:21:39]  It wasn't hard to find liberals who saw Trump as a dangerous dictator.
[00:21:42]  But Podhorzer was careful to steer clear of hysteria.
[00:21:46]  What he wanted to know was not how American democracy was dying, but how it might be kept alive.
[00:21:53]  So how did he do that?
[00:21:55]  Well, he built this alliance alongside others.
[00:21:57]  Again, I don't believe he was the chief architect behind it.
[00:21:59]  I think he was involved.
[00:22:01]  It continues by going to say, in April, Podhorzer began hosting two and a half hour weekly Zoom meetings.
[00:22:09]  It was structured around a series of rapid-fire five-minute presentations on everything from which ads were working to messaging to legal strategy.
[00:22:17]  It continued to say that, quote, at the risk of talking trash about the left, that's not a lot of good information sharing.
[00:22:24]  There's a lot of not yet invented here syndrome where people won't consider a good idea if they didn't come up with it.
[00:22:31]  The meetings became, this is a ridiculous way to describe it, a galactic center for a constellation of operatives.
[00:22:37]  Like be a little bit more dramatic, Molly Ball, okay?
[00:22:40]  Yes, and then they all boarded the Starship Enterprise and traveled at the speed of light until democracy was saved.
[00:22:45]  I got it, okay?
[00:22:46]  They went backwards in time like Superman, and together we're all able to enjoy a Biden presidency.
[00:22:51]  Okay, it's a little bit more dramatic.
[00:22:54]  The group had no name, no leaders, and no hierarchy.
[00:22:56]  Yeah, it sounds like the Paris Commune.
[00:22:58]  It sounds so wonderfully communistically egalitarian.
[00:23:03]  But it kept the distance, actors, in sync.
[00:23:05]  Quote, Pod played a critical role behind the scenes in keeping different pieces.
[00:23:10]  That's who they called Podrozer, of the movement, infrastructure, and communication and aligned.
[00:23:15]  You have the litigation space, you have the organizing space, the political people just focused on the W and their strategies aren't always aligned.
[00:23:22]  He got Greenpeace involved.
[00:23:24]  He got Black Lives Matter involved.
[00:23:26]  And then he got two other actors involved.
[00:23:30]  If you believe he's actually the architect here.
[00:23:32]  So I want to just reinforce this.
[00:23:35]  While conservatives, we were worried about messaging and persuasion and raising money.
[00:23:41]  They were worried about blocking and tackling.
[00:23:44]  They were worried about the way elections are actually conducted.
[00:23:52]  This is chapter three, securing the vote.
[00:23:55]  Yeah, they're just rubbing it in your face.
[00:23:57]  Securing the vote, which they actually was the opposite.
[00:24:01]  I want to just reread this.
[00:24:04]  Read this.
[00:24:04]  I haven't read it.
[00:24:05]  Obviously, I've read it personally.
[00:24:06]  I haven't read it out loud.
[00:24:08]  Understand, is this legal?
[00:24:10]  The first task was overhauling America's bulky election infrastructure in the middle of a pandemic.
[00:24:16]  Are you allowed to overhaul an election infrastructure with private money?
[00:24:20]  Because that's what they did.
[00:24:24]  For thousands of local, mostly nonpartisan officials who administer elections, the most urgent need was money.
[00:24:30]  Of course it was.
[00:24:32]  This is their rationale for why they needed the Zuckerberg money.
[00:24:35]  They needed masks, gloves, and hand sanitizer.
[00:24:37]  I kid you not.
[00:24:38]  That's what they write in here.
[00:24:39]  Hand sanitizer.
[00:24:44]  In March, they appealed to Congress and they got some money.
[00:24:48]  But then Mark Zuckerberg stepped up.
[00:24:51]  The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative chipped in $300 million.
[00:24:56]  We've been through this, the Center for Technology and Civic Life.
[00:25:00]  Quote, it was a failure at the federal level that 2,500 local election officials were forced to apply for philanthropic grants to fill their needs, says Amber McReynolds, a former Denver election official who heads the nonpartisan National Vote at Home Institute.
[00:25:15]  That's right, National Vote at Home Institute, which Jimmy Carter's own coalition shows that vote by mail is the most susceptible for fraud.
[00:25:22]  Her whole organization, funded by big tech centi-billionaires, not just billionaires, but they're worth $100 billion, centi-billionaires, are to make people vote at home.
[00:25:35]  McReynolds' two-year organization became a clearinghouse for a nation struggling to adapt.
[00:25:42]  With all of these hundreds of millions of dollars, the Institute gave secretaries of state from local parties technical advice on everything from which vendors to use to how to locate drop boxes.
[00:25:52]  Local officials are the most trusted sources of election information, but few can afford a press secretary.
[00:25:56]  So the Institute distributed communication toolkits.
[00:25:59]  Basically, private money came into public elections and started to dictate the way elections should be done.
[00:26:05]  Unconstitutional outside of state legislatures, outside of the consent of the local governed.
[00:26:12]  And we did not know a lot of this was happening in real time.
[00:26:15]  Why?
[00:26:16]  Where was the Republican infrastructure calling this out?
[00:26:20]  Where were the people that are dedicated to building secure and stable elections on our side?
[00:26:27]  And the answer is that we were too busy running network television ads, I guess.
[00:26:37]  Because we thought that was the way elections were won.
[00:26:39]  Meanwhile, Podroser, the guy that teaches kids not to swing and just win championships by getting walks, basically that told us they wanted to game the system.
[00:26:51]  They wanted to use whatever apparatus they could to get to their achieved desired outcome.
[00:27:00]  The Institute helped 37 states and Washington, D.C. bolster mail and voting.
[00:27:05]  But it wouldn't be worth much if people didn't take advantage.
[00:27:07]  Part of the challenge was logistical.
[00:27:09]  Each state had different rules for when and how ballots should be requested and returned.
[00:27:13]  The Voter Participation Center, which in a normal year would have deployed canvasers door to door, instead conducted focus groups to find out how people would get to vote by mail.
[00:27:21]  Quote, all the work we've done for 17 years was built for this moment of bringing democracy to people's doorsteps, the Vote by Mail National Home Institute said.
[00:27:30]  National Vote at Home Institute.
[00:27:34]  Hannah Freed said, quote, we had to get the message out.
[00:27:37]  This is safe, reliable, and you can trust it.
[00:27:45]  So you had all these liberal groups working in concert together, forming a conspiracy to their own admission.
[00:27:56]  You had hundreds of millions of dollars from tech companies coming in.
[00:27:59]  You had the way that elections were done actually changed.
[00:28:01]  You had the Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO getting into total and complete handshake agreement with what needs to happen, but didn't stop there, actually.
[00:28:12]  They started filing lawsuits, pre-election litigation, to allow vote by mail to go with looser signature verification standards, to allow new voter registrations to go unchallenged from the Brennan Center of Justice at NYU.
[00:28:28]  In the end, nearly half the electorate cast ballots by mail in 2020.
[00:28:33]  Let me read this again.
[00:28:37]  While we as conservatives and Republicans were worrying about, I don't know what, Democrats said to our, said, how do we get the electorate to vote by mail?
[00:28:46]  Now, what's the significance to that?
[00:28:47]  Well, Jimmy Carter, the Democrat president himself, said that vote by mail is the least secure way of voting.
[00:28:53]  We've been through the practice of granny farming, the practice of ballot laundering, vote interception.
[00:28:57]  We've gone through all of that at length.
[00:29:01]  Half, let me say that again.
[00:29:03]  50% of all votes cast were by mail in 2020.
[00:29:08]  I'm sure in previous elections, it was 10 to 15%.
[00:29:11]  I'm just going off the top of my head, probably at most 20%.
[00:29:14]  I'm just guessing.
[00:29:15]  That's just on a pure inference of just what I know to be true, and we'll get that fact checked.
[00:29:23]  But it gets worse, everybody, because this liberal conspiracy, as described by Time magazine, went even further.
[00:29:31]  The disinformation defense.
[00:29:33]  Now, this is blowing up on social media.
[00:29:35]  So it says, quote, bad actors spreading false information is nothing new.
[00:29:39]  For decades, campaigns have grappled with everything from anonymous calls claiming the election has been rescheduled to flyers spreading nasty smears about the candidates' families.
[00:29:47]  But Trump's lies and conspiracy theories, the viral force of social media and involvement of foreign meddlers, made disinformation a broader, deeper threat to the 2020 vote.
[00:29:57]  The most important takeaway from Laura Quinn's research, who's a veteran progressive operative who co-founded Catalyst, said, quote, when you get attacked, the instinct is to push back, call it out, and say this isn't true.
[00:30:09]  But the more engagement something gets, the more the platform boosts it.
[00:30:14]  The algorithm reads that as, oh, this is popular.
[00:30:16]  People want more of it.
[00:30:17]  The solution, she concluded, is not to actually stand up for truth.
[00:30:21]  No, no, no, no.
[00:30:23]  The solution is to have platforms police that content against certain types of malign behavior.
[00:30:32]  But they haven't been enforcing them.
[00:30:35]  In November of 2019, Mark Zuckerberg invited nine civil rights leaders to dinner at his home.
[00:30:42]  Quote, it took pushing, urging conversations, brainstorming, all of that to get to a place where we ended up with a more rigorous rules and enforcement.
[00:30:48]  Vanita Gupta, the CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said.
[00:30:56]  It was a struggle.
[00:30:58]  We got to the point where they understood the problem.
[00:31:00]  Was it enough?
[00:31:01]  Probably not.
[00:31:01]  Was it later than we wanted?
[00:31:03]  Yes.
[00:31:03]  But it was really important, given the level of official disinformation, that they had rules in place and tagging things and taking them down.
[00:31:13]  They also attended dinners with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and others.
[00:31:18]  Now, of course, Dorsey and Zuckerberg never met with conservatives.
[00:31:24]  Where conservatives were worried about content that very well could be election interference being taken down, our posts being taken down.
[00:31:31]  Why?
[00:31:32]  Because we as conservatives do a very poor job of threatening a boycott if we don't get what we want.
[00:31:41]  What do we do?
[00:31:42]  We say, can you please stop censoring us?
[00:31:44]  I don't like it.
[00:31:45]  Whereas liberals will go in and meet with Zuckerberg and say, if you do not do something about disinformation, we will be relentless in our boycott of you.
[00:31:52]  You'll have employee revolts.
[00:31:54]  You'll have problems like you will not believe.
[00:31:55]  And they listened.
[00:31:58]  And so while we were worried about placing Facebook ads to get Donald Trump reelected, Democrat activist advocacy groups weren't worried about Facebook advertisement.
[00:32:08]  They were instead worried about Facebook interference.
[00:32:11]  And it says it very simply.
[00:32:14]  Why were we as conservatives not doing this ourselves?
[00:32:17]  Why were we as conservatives not using the infrastructure that we control to protect the republic?
[00:32:24]  Why were we not getting unified at least amongst one shared objective and demanding fair, free, and open elections?
[00:32:33]  That is a solution that we must look towards as we see the secret history of the shadow campaign that saved the 2020 election.
[00:32:40]  And if you're listening to this and you're wondering, how did Joe Biden become president?
[00:32:47]  Well, they're now openly writing and admitting how it happened.
[00:32:51]  Powerful people flexed their muscles and they said, we do not want our kleptocracy to be put in jeopardy.
[00:32:58]  And we're going to do it under the disguise, the camouflage of protecting our democracy.
[00:33:04]  We're going to double the amount of mail and votes.
[00:33:07]  We're going to fund hand sanitizer stations, which ends up being financial assistance for heavily Democrat vote counting areas.
[00:33:18]  And most critically, we're going to get involved in the tech companies to shut up the other side.
[00:33:24]  This story is really extraordinary.
[00:33:29]  The secret history of the shadow campaign that saved the 2020 elections.
[00:33:33]  Saved.
[00:33:35]  So let's just focus on the title for a second.
[00:33:38]  Secret, shadow, saved.
[00:33:41]  This is glorifying in a positive narrative light, powerful people changing the way our country is run because you don't actually know how bad Trump is.
[00:33:54]  Basically, that's the thesis of this entire article.
[00:33:57]  It goes through chapter and chapter of disinformation defense of how this group went to the tech companies and demanded they take down conservative voices.
[00:34:07]  It goes down to spreading the word, which is where we'll pick up on this by Molly Ball at Time magazine.
[00:34:13]  They wrote this.
[00:34:17]  Beyond battling bad information, there is a need to expand a rapidly changing election process.
[00:34:23]  It was crucial for voters to understand that despite what Trump was saying, mail and votes weren't susceptible to fraud.
[00:34:27]  And that it would be normal if some states weren't finished counting votes on election night.
[00:34:32]  The Voting Rights Lab and Into Action created state-specific memes and graphics spread by email, text, Twitter, Facebook, or TikTok, urging every vote to be counted.
[00:34:43]  Now, what's stunning, this was $20 million put behind this effort.
[00:34:48]  Dick Gephardt raised $20 million from his, quote, contacts in the private sector.
[00:34:55]  $20 million for an advocacy campaign to tell people to be patient that votes are going to take a long time to count.
[00:35:02]  How did they know that?
[00:35:03]  Because there was a conspiracy.
[00:35:05]  Not my words, Molly Ball's words.
[00:35:09]  By the way, people are saying, I wonder where all these people think that conspiracy theories are coming from.
[00:35:14]  You're admitting that there's literally a conspiracy.
[00:35:16]  Don't be stunned when people then go to the message boards after they read an article like this.
[00:35:20]  Now, should people go to the message boards?
[00:35:22]  No.
[00:35:23]  Should people believe that what Viking Q-Man Shaman believes?
[00:35:26]  No.
[00:35:27]  Of course not.
[00:35:28]  I'm not validating it.
[00:35:31]  I'm instead saying, don't be surprised when all of a sudden you have a legitimate conspiracy that's written about in positive terms about, again, I'm going to read this.
[00:35:40]  It's actually so.
[00:35:41]  Maybe she just did this to be provocative, Molly Ball.
[00:35:45]  It is the story of an unprecedented, creative, and determined campaign whose success also reveals how close the nation came to disaster.
[00:35:53]  That's why the participants want the secret history.
[00:35:56]  This is it.
[00:35:56]  Apologize for that.
[00:35:57]  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 the rule of laws, steer media coverage, and control the flow of information.
[00:36:10]  Thank you, Connor.
[00:36:11]  I knew it was in there somewhere.
[00:36:13]  Let's continue on their own admission of this report.
[00:36:21]  Spreading the word.
[00:36:24]  The Alliance took a common set of themes from the research Shanker Osorio presented at Podhorser's Zooms.
[00:36:30]  Remember, Podhorser is the guy that teaches his kids not to swing when they're nine-year-olds in Little League.
[00:36:39]  When you say, quote, these claims are fraud of fraud are spurious, what people hear is fraud.
[00:36:45]  But we saw in our pre-election research that anything that reaffirmed Trump's power, cast him as an authoritarian, diminished people's desire to vote.
[00:36:53]  Next chapter, people power.
[00:36:56]  The racial justice uprising sparked by George Floyd's killing in May was not primarily a political movement.
[00:37:02]  The organizers who helped lead it wanted to harness its momentum for the election without allowing it to be co-opted by politicians.
[00:37:07]  Many of the organizers were part of Podhorser's network from the activists in Battleground States who partnered with the Democracy Defense Coalition to organize with leading roles in the movement for black lives.
[00:37:19]  We knew that the BLM Incorporated movement was going to be used against Trump.
[00:37:25]  What we didn't know is that more than 150 liberal groups joined together from Sierra Club to Color of Change to Women's March to the Democrat Socialists of America to the Protect the Results Coalition.
[00:37:41]  400 planned post-election demonstrations were possibly going to happen to be activated via text message as soon as November 4th to stop the coup they feared.
[00:37:52]  The left was ready to flood the streets.
[00:37:55]  So basically what this admits is that at a moment's notice, through an artificial AstroTurf, billionaire-funded Chamber of Commerce constructed program, millions of people could flood to the streets at a moment's notice.
[00:38:10]  But we're supposed to believe it's all organic.
[00:38:11]  People are so upset.
[00:38:14]  They were ready to mobilize in massive numbers.
[00:38:18]  The next chapter, Strange Bedfellows.
[00:38:21]  The Chamber of Commerce, which represents open borders, big tech dominance, and is really the Chamber of China, made great friends with the AFL-CIO because Donald Trump was a threat to both the AFL-CIO because he was actually winning over their membership at great disgust of their leaders, and the Chamber of Commerce is very upset that we have better trade deals, our borders were secure, and American workers finally had a voice.
[00:38:47]  However, the leadership of the Chamber of Commerce and the leadership of the AFL-CIO are actually very similar.
[00:38:52]  They're ruling class people that pretend to represent the needs, wants, and interests of normal people.
[00:38:59]  They sent a, quote, broader and bipartisan message.
[00:39:03]  They chose their words carefully and scheduled the statement's release for maximum impact.
[00:39:09]  The groups added, although we might disagree on desired outcomes up and down the ballot, we are unified in our call for American democratic process to proceed without violence, intimidation, or any other tactics that make us look weaker as a nation.
[00:39:21]  The next chapter, showing up, standing down.
[00:39:24]  Election night began with many Democrats despairing.
[00:39:28]  Trump was running ahead of pre-election polling, winning Florida, Ohio, and Texas easily and keeping Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania too close to call.
[00:39:35]  But Podhorzer, no, no, no, he was unperturbed.
[00:39:38]  When I spoke to him that night, the results were exactly in line with his modeling.
[00:39:42]  How did he know?
[00:39:45]  It's a lot for just an advisor to the FLCIO to know.
[00:39:49]  He'd been warning for weeks that Trump's voters turnout was surging.
[00:39:53]  And as the numbers dribbled out, he could tell that as long as the votes were counted, Trump would lose.
[00:40:00]  He had a Liberal Alliance 11 p.m. Zoom call, and many people were freaking out.
[00:40:05]  He said it was very important for me and my team in that moment to help ground people what we already knew was true.
[00:40:10]  Liberal groups wanted to protest in the street.
[00:40:12]  Podhorzer said don't.
[00:40:15]  So the word went out: stand down.
[00:40:18]  That's weird.
[00:40:18]  Isn't that awfully authoritative?
[00:40:22]  Stand down.
[00:40:24]  Protect the results announced that it quote not be activating the entire National Mobilization Network today, but remains ready to activate if necessary.
[00:40:32]  Podhorzer credits the activists for their restraint.
[00:40:36]  Wednesday through Friday, there was not a single Antifa versus Proud Boys incident like everyone was expecting.
[00:40:41]  And when that didn't materialize, I don't think the Trump campaign had a backup plan.
[00:40:45]  It's ridiculous to say that, as if the Trump campaign wanted some sort of confrontation.
[00:40:49]  It's ridiculous.
[00:40:51]  Activists, though, reoriented the Protect the Results protest towards a weekend of celebration.
[00:40:56]  Now, to credit these guys, to credit Podhorzer and all these guys, it was very smart.
[00:41:00]  Go celebrate, and it's hard to retract public opinion after you're celebrating in the streets.
[00:41:05]  Once you declare victory and the media goes alongside it, it feels as if the race is over and everything you're trying to do is to undo an election, even though votes are still being counted, even though things are still being figured out in the courts.
[00:41:16]  Very smart by Podhorzer.
[00:41:19]  Unethical?
[00:41:20]  Sure.
[00:41:20]  Smart?
[00:41:21]  Yes.
[00:41:24]  Quote, we made them look ridiculous by contrasting our joyous celebration of democracy with their clown show.
[00:41:30]  The votes had been counted.
[00:41:31]  Actually, they hadn't all been counted.
[00:41:32]  Trump had lost, but the battle wasn't over.
[00:41:36]  I hope you understand what you're listening to here.
[00:41:39]  This is an admission that the way we do elections in our country have changed forever.
[00:41:46]  It's now a war game for powerful people to get their desired outcome.
[00:41:50]  The five steps to victory.
[00:41:52]  We are reading from the Time magazine the secret strategy that Shadow campaigned and saved America, whatever the title is.
[00:42:00]  In Podhorzer's presentation, winning the vote was only the first step to winning the election.
[00:42:04]  After that came winning the count, winning the certification, winning the Electoral College, and winning the transition.
[00:42:10]  They were so much more organized than we were.
[00:42:13]  It's unbelievable.
[00:42:16]  I want to go to one example here that's pretty unbelievable.
[00:42:20]  Do you remember when President Trump met with the Republican legislators from Michigan?
[00:42:28]  You remember when he flew them out to the White House?
[00:42:31]  Well, it's mentioned here in the article.
[00:42:34]  There was a perilous moment.
[00:42:36]  If Chatfield and Shirky, which are the two GOP leaders in Michigan, agreed to do Trump's bidding, which is just voter integrity, Republicans in other states might be similarly bullied.
[00:42:50]  Quote, I was concerned things were going to get weird.
[00:42:53]  Describe it as the scariest moment of the entire election.
[00:42:56]  Guys, there was a moment when the left was worried that a widespread investigation might actually clarify what ended up happening.
[00:43:04]  And the state legislators stood down.
[00:43:06]  What this article is telling you is that the state legislatures had the power all along and they refused to use it.
[00:43:14]  That's what the liberals are admitting that they were on defense for a moment.
[00:43:21]  But the democracy defenders, that's what they call themselves, the Avengers, the nice people, the wonderful people that the powerful people that saved our country, thank you, launched a full court press, protect democracy's local context, researched lawmakers' personal and political motives.
[00:43:37]  Okay, so they ran opposition research immediately.
[00:43:40]  Issue one ran TV ads and Lansing.
[00:43:42]  The Chambers Bradley kept close tabs on the process.
[00:43:45]  Wamp, the former Republican congressman, called his former colleague Mike Rogers and wrote an op-ed for the Detroit newspapers urging officials to honor the will of the voters, even though we don't know what the will of the voters are, because there's no investigation.
[00:43:56]  You mean the will of the Biden campaign.
[00:43:58]  That's what you're saying.
[00:44:00]  Three former Michigan governors, John Engler, Rick Snyder, and Democrat Jennifer Granholm, jointly called the Michigan electoral votes to be cast free of pressure from the White House.
[00:44:10]  So what ended up happening?
[00:44:12]  Well, the pro-democracy forces, what unbelievably deceiving framing, Time magazine.
[00:44:17]  The pro-democracy forces, basically the good guys, were up against a Trump, Trumpified Michigan GOP, controlled by allies of Ronna McDaniel, Betsy DeVos, and a member of a billionaire family of GOP donors.
[00:44:33]  Got it.
[00:44:33]  So it was the democracy forces up against the evil Republicans.
[00:44:37]  Unbelievable.
[00:44:38]  To just an untrained eye, this reads is like a good versus evil story.
[00:44:46]  So then they came up with this ridiculous theory that Trump was going to bribe the legislators when they came to the White House.
[00:44:54]  Quote, of course he's going to try and offer them something.
[00:44:57]  Head of the Space Force, ambassador to wherever.
[00:44:59]  We can't compete with that by offering carrots.
[00:45:01]  We need a stick.
[00:45:02]  So then they had this ridiculous op-ed.
[00:45:04]  I remember reading this op-ed and be like, why are they doing this?
[00:45:07]  Well, here's why.
[00:45:09]  Richard Primus was then contacted by Basson, a law professor at University of Michigan, to see if Primus agreed and would make the argument publicly.
[00:45:17]  Primus said he thought the meeting itself was inappropriate, and he got to work on an op-ed for Politico.
[00:45:22]  So let me be straight.
[00:45:22]  You had an activist that called through their tickler file, go through their little tickler.
[00:45:27]  Again, if you don't know a tickler file, it's just an old expression for a Rolodex, okay?
[00:45:31]  Goes through it and finds a professor, contacts the professor without the professor actually being interested in the story, and activates the professor who has a lot of credibility to then go write the op-ed to go confirm their political narrative.
[00:45:48]  That's called a conspiracy, because Time magazine calls it.
[00:45:51]  So you have a professor who's at University of Michigan who's obviously liberal with a lot of credentials, then who gets contacted by an activist, says, hey, do you agree with this?
[00:46:01]  Yeah, sure, I agree.
[00:46:02]  Perfect.
[00:46:03]  Here's Politico.com.
[00:46:04]  Write the op-ed.
[00:46:05]  We'll get on the front page really quickly.
[00:46:09]  The piece posted on November 19th, the Attorney General's Communications Director tweeted it.
[00:46:13]  So then they give it to the Michigan Attorney General to tweet the article from the Michigan professor to then say that these lawmakers might get bribed and they all might go to jail.
[00:46:26]  But no evidence whatsoever to support any of this, by the way.
[00:46:30]  Just like pure gaslighting conjecture.
[00:46:32]  It's like, this might happen.
[00:46:34]  We don't like it.
[00:46:35]  Get the professor, write the op-ed.
[00:46:36]  The attorney general tweets it out, but it gets worse than that.
[00:46:39]  Rea's activists scanned flight schedules and flocked to airports on both ends of Shirky's journey to D.C.
[00:46:46]  I don't even think that's legal, first of all, okay?
[00:46:49]  To underscore that the lawmakers were being scrutinized.
[00:46:52]  After the meeting, the pair announced they pressed the president to deliver COVID relief for their constituents and informed them they saw no role in the election process.
[00:46:59]  Here's what it gets creepy.
[00:47:00]  They then went for a drink at the Trump Hotel, and a street artist projected their images onto the outside of the building along with the words, the world is watching.
[00:47:08]  That only got inserted into the article because the cabal was in favor of that.
[00:47:12]  My goodness, do we have a lot to learn from the left?
[00:47:15]  And I say that non-sarcastically, tactically, strategically.
[00:47:19]  The moment that we started the call for state legislators to get involved in the election integrity process, what happened?
[00:47:27]  They launched ads.
[00:47:28]  They tracked flight logs.
[00:47:30]  They accused potential bribery.
[00:47:32]  They got professors writing articles, state attorney general putting people on notice.
[00:47:36]  So when the state legislators from Michigan who got invited by the president actually visited, they didn't even talk about the election.
[00:47:40]  They just talked about COVID relief.
[00:47:43]  And that was it.
[00:47:43]  And they had lawyers with them.
[00:47:46]  They go to the Trump Hotel for a drink, and a street artist just happens to have a sign that says the world is watching.
[00:47:51]  Oh, so convenient.
[00:47:54]  Like that, the entire liberal infrastructure went into place.
[00:47:58]  Where was our conservative infrastructure defending these lawmakers, putting the equal amount of pressure, praising them to do this?
[00:48:11]  Too busy trying to create plans to invade Burma or something.
[00:48:16]  I don't know.
[00:48:17]  All right.
[00:48:19]  The next part of this is stunning.
[00:48:25]  The secret history of the shadow campaign that saved the 2020 election.
[00:48:30]  The cabal of interests that came together in an unprecedented, creative, and determined campaign to save democracy, as we know it.
[00:48:43]  The one last step, the state canvassing board made up of two Democrats and two Republicans, one Republican, a Trumper.
[00:48:50]  That's how they describe Americans, a Trumper.
[00:48:54]  That's in Time magazine, the word Trumper, not Trump supporter, not someone who voted for Trump, not Republican, but this one Republican, a Trumper employed by the DeVos's family political nonprofit.
[00:49:09]  That's it.
[00:49:09]  This guy's entire life is now just being called a Trumper.
[00:49:14]  Don't try to tell me that's not meant to try to be a pejorative.
[00:49:17]  When the meeting began, Reyes' activists flooded the live stream and filled Twitter with their hashtag, quote, all eyes on MI, all eyes on Michigan.
[00:49:27]  A board accustomed to attendance in the single digits, suddenly faced an audience of thousands.
[00:49:32]  In hours of testimony, the activists emphasized their message of respecting voters' wishes and affirming democracy rather than scolding the officials.
[00:49:39]  I thought that tech companies had rules against mass mobilization of coordinated messaging.
[00:49:44]  Tech companies seem to not like that when conservatives do that.
[00:49:49]  Tech companies actually have banned conservative accounts for massive mobilization of unified messaging.
[00:49:54]  Art Reyes III.
[00:49:56]  Reyes, a Flint native who leads the We the People, Michigan.
[00:50:01]  For months.
[00:50:03]  Okay, he's a left-wing activist.
[00:50:05]  So Reyes admits that he just violated tech companies' terms of service, which, again, doesn't mean anything.
[00:50:12]  I mean, if you're a leftist, you're allowed to do that.
[00:50:15]  The vote was 3-0 to certify.
[00:50:17]  The other Republicans abstained.
[00:50:20]  After that, the dominoes fell.
[00:50:21]  Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, the rest of the state certified their electors.
[00:50:24]  Republican officials in Arizona and Georgia stood up to Trump's bullying, and the Electoral College voted on the scheduled day of December 14th.
[00:50:32]  The final chapter of how the powerful people saved our country.
[00:50:38]  How close we came.
[00:50:40]  The last milestone was January 6th.
[00:50:47]  Remember, we mentioned how curious it was that there were no counter protesters to all the people that were in D.C. that day.
[00:50:54]  Remember, that was something that we mentioned on the day of The certification.
[00:51:01]  We were sitting right here denouncing what happened at the Capitol.
[00:51:04]  And we saw that, we were like, that's kind of strange how there's no counter protesters.
[00:51:07]  It was there for a reason.
[00:51:08]  It was that way for a reason.
[00:51:10]  Podhoser said: quote, we strenuously discouraged any counteractivity.
[00:51:21]  It was planned not to go.
[00:51:25]  Left-wing activists are pressuring the newly empowered Democrats to remember the voters who put them there, while civil rights groups are on a guard against further attacks on voting.
[00:51:34]  Business leaders denounce the January 6th attack, and some say they'll no longer donate to lawmakers who refers to certify Biden's victory.
[00:51:40]  Podhorser and his allies are still holding their Zoom strategy sessions, gauging voters' views, and developing new messages.
[00:51:47]  That's the biggest takeaway of this whole article.
[00:51:50]  This is not written looking historically.
[00:51:55]  It's still going on.
[00:51:58]  Podhorser, who is being called the architect of this entire thing, which is very hard to believe, is still holding his meetings.
[00:52:08]  And now they're continuing to go.
[00:52:09]  They're not going to give up.
[00:52:10]  They have cracked the code in their mind.
[00:52:13]  Ah, we control every institution: academia, attorney general's offices, the civil service, the bureaucracies, the corporations, the media, the tech companies.
[00:52:25]  Now let's use them and make America in our image.
[00:52:29]  That's what Podhorser is focused on.
[00:52:36]  To not actually ever be interested in governing, but under the camouflage, under the disguise, under the vapor, under the mirage of protecting democracy.
[00:52:55]  They are going to continue to bully companies.
[00:52:58]  They're going to continue to pressure social media companies.
[00:53:02]  They're going to continue to try to change the way we do elections to keep themselves permanently in power.
[00:53:07]  This is not a one-off.
[00:53:10]  This is now a blueprint.
[00:53:13]  This is now a playbook.
[00:53:15]  The secret history of the shadow campaign that saved the 2020 election.
[00:53:21]  This is not something where they just are going to disassemble this.
[00:53:24]  This is how they're going to do it from this point forward.
[00:53:27]  So, what are the big takeaways?
[00:53:29]  Number one, the left is just now realizing how much power they really have over us.
[00:53:37]  I think they're still learning how to use that power.
[00:53:43]  Number two, the left is willing at almost all costs to sacrifice truth for power.
[00:53:53]  Number three, persuasion means very little when the other side is actually concerned of how the election is going to be conducted.
[00:54:02]  You know, we joked around throughout the last couple, the first couple weeks after early November, after the election, we said it doesn't matter how people vote.
[00:54:09]  It matters who counts the votes.
[00:54:10]  Remember, we joked about that.
[00:54:12]  Well, they say here, in Podhorzer's presentations, winning the vote was only the first step to winning the election.
[00:54:22]  After that came winning the count.
[00:54:24]  Winning the count.
[00:54:25]  Can you believe it?
[00:54:27]  Not just what people think, but actually how the votes are counted.
[00:54:31]  Winning the certification, winning the Electoral College, and winning the transition.
[00:54:37]  This is now going to be how they will handle every single election from this point forward.
[00:54:46]  Vote by mail is here whether we like it or not.
[00:54:49]  We have to push back against HR1 at all costs.
[00:54:52]  They're going to try to make nationwide vote by mail the new standard and the new norm.
[00:55:00]  We're still worried about political strategy and all that sort of stuff.
[00:55:05]  While they are now focused on raising hundreds of millions of dollars from the private sector for corporations, which is nothing more than pseudo-extortion, to change the way elections are done, to supplement local and state election protocols, and to say that anyone that dares say that if you should not be able to vote by mail on MAS, then you actually hate the country and you're a racist.
[00:55:27]  This, as Time magazine calls it, the unprecedented, creative, and determined campaign is now going to become a pattern.
[00:55:35]  So, what do we actually do about it?
[00:55:39]  Well, we still control a lot of these state legislatures.
[00:55:44]  But let me tell you the real reason why this article was written.
[00:55:49]  The real reason wasn't just about pride.
[00:55:51]  It wasn't just about victory lapse.
[00:55:53]  That's part of it.
[00:55:55]  The real reason is that this article is only about 10% of the story.
[00:56:01]  The real reason is that they're trying to set the narrative early, trying to admit that there was a clandestine aspect of it, take the little bit of the mockery and the hit from the right, and move on.
[00:56:12]  This article is not a mistake.
[00:56:15]  This was written by Molly Ball and Leslie Dickenstein, Maria Espada, and Simone Shah.
[00:56:21]  What I'm saying here is that the people behind this are worried that if they don't tell the story, somebody else will.
[00:56:31]  The people behind this, from Pod Horror to Reyes to the social media people, there's more to this than just this Time magazine.
[00:56:43]  There's a lot more to voting practices, to communications, to flow of information, to how this was not about protecting democracy, it was about destroying Trump.
[00:56:55]  And I guarantee you that text messages, emails, documents illustrate that boldly and clearly.
[00:57:02]  What this is right here is no different than Andrew McCabe writing his book before other people were able to tell his story for him.
[00:57:11]  That's what this is.
[00:57:13]  It is a common tactic by the left where you do something shadowy, shadow campaign.
[00:57:22]  And it's a PR strategy that is employed only if you own the instruments of communication.
[00:57:28]  It's a PR strategy that only works if you have complete control over almost every single sentence and paragraph.
[00:57:35]  The PR strategy is this: don't admit fault, but expose the potential attack against you, which then invalidates the future criticism and pose yourself as the hero where the ends justified the means, and therefore people will protect you.
[00:57:59]  So, for Pod Drozer here, yeah, Podhorser, he might be a little worried that some of the activity that he was coordinating might not look very good when the entire story is actually told.
[00:58:14]  So, how do you get up against that?
[00:58:15]  How do you actually deflect against that future criticism?
[00:58:19]  How do you push back against what might be a multi-month, multi-year investigation?
[00:58:23]  Well, you admit that there was something shadowy going on, but it was actually awesome and it saved the country.
[00:58:27]  That's what you do.
[00:58:30]  You invite Time magazine right into your inner circle.
[00:58:33]  You convince them that, yes, it was shadowy.
[00:58:35]  Yes, it was secret.
[00:58:37]  Yes, it was a cabal.
[00:58:38]  Yes, it was multi-pronged interests.
[00:58:40]  But if you tell the story the way we want you to tell it, people will actually get behind it because we're actually the secret society that saved America.
[00:58:51]  This is only more reason to investigate.
[00:58:55]  This document is not the end of the conversation.
[00:59:00]  It should be the beginning of one.
[00:59:04]  Because there's a million questions to be asked about every single aspect of this.
[00:59:10]  The coordination, the potential deployment of activists that could be violent in the streets, all of it.
[00:59:19]  But they wanted to tell the story.
[00:59:21]  Because they're worried there might be something that might be found out that won't fit their preferred narrative.
[00:59:27]  Speaking of typical liberal PR strategies, whenever they come under fire or accusation, immediately the entire left-wing infrastructure from the media to academia comes in and protects their own.
[00:59:39]  That's what Peter happened to Peter Strzok, gets a job at Georgetown Law.
[00:59:42]  It's what happened to James Comey.
[00:59:44]  It's what happened to Lisa Page.
[00:59:45]  Andrew McCabe gets a contributorship at CNN.
[00:59:48]  No different than Hunter Biden.
[00:59:50]  And I would like to congratulate Hunter Biden for now being the number one best-selling author in Chinese biographies on Amazon.com.
[01:00:00]  Not joking.
[01:00:00]  It is a real thing.
[01:00:02]  He is a number one bestseller in Chinese biographies, Amazon.com.
[01:00:07]  I'm not exactly sure how that ended up happening.
[01:00:09]  But yes, Hunter Biden is coming out with a book, a memoir.
[01:00:13]  And just how the media has not demanded the laptop and questions and follow-up and Tony Bobulinsky.
[01:00:20]  I feel bad for Tony Bobulinsky.
[01:00:22]  He's going to be audited every single year for the rest of his life.
[01:00:25]  And he's going to have the entire full weight of the government come after him in every way, shape, or form.
[01:00:30]  But Hunter Biden, as it came out that he was under investigation for tax issues back in December, all of a sudden now he comes out with a memoir that says beautiful things, a memoir by Hunter Biden.
[01:00:46]  Beautiful things.
[01:00:46]  I wonder if he'll talk about the beautiful Chinese deals that he did with his father.
[01:00:52]  That's the strategy left, and that's exactly the strategy that was in this article of Time magazine, the Secret History of the Shadow campaign that saved the 2020 election.
[01:01:00]  They want to tell their story first before the facts actually come out and might look them a little less favorably.
[01:01:05]  That's what McCabe did.
[01:01:06]  It's what Page did, what Strzok did.
[01:01:07]  Comey, didn't Comey write a book?
[01:01:10]  That's what Andrew Cuomo did.
[01:01:11]  Andrew Cuomo wrote a book.
[01:01:13]  Meanwhile, we're finding out there's all this nursing home stuff.
[01:01:15]  Cuomo writes this long meandering.
[01:01:17]  It is a typical Democrat strategy, which is to get ahead of the narrative.
[01:01:22]  The gated institutional narrative will protect you insofar that you do one very simple thing.
[01:01:30]  Obey.
[01:01:31]  Don't challenge.
[01:01:32]  Don't be disruptive.
[01:01:34]  And all the power structure will defend you.
[01:01:37]  Why is it that Simon  ⁇ Schuster is okay with publishing the book for Hunter Biden, but not Josh Hawley?
[01:01:44]  Is that right?
[01:01:46]  So Josh Hawley, domestic terrorist, Timothy McVay, keep him away from us.
[01:01:51]  Hunter Biden, sure, come on in.
[01:01:55]  That's the way the systems of power work in our country.
[01:02:00]  And that's all the more reason why we must look into this article that's now been written at Time magazine.
[01:02:05]  Let me tell you very clearly.
[01:02:07]  They're worried that as these state legislatures start looking into things, they're worried as more and more documents start to come to the surface that the story is not going to be told as glamorously as the democracy defending Avenger squad.
[01:02:21]  They're worried that there might, and I don't want to speculate.
[01:02:24]  I'm just saying there is no reason why they would grant this kind of access just to try to get credit.
[01:02:30]  The only reason they would try to grant this kind of access and grant these kind of interviews is that there's a press liability that they're worried about.
[01:02:39]  And I think this article spiraled out of control more than I think they would have wanted, where Molly Ball revealed the entire playbook of the Democrat technocratic left.
[01:02:50]  Not about persuasion, not about polling, not about trying to change people's minds.
[01:02:55]  Instead, it's how do we use the instruments of power to accomplish our goal?
[01:02:59]  How do we silence our opponents?
[01:03:00]  How do we kick them off social media?
[01:03:01]  How do we change the way elections are done?
[01:03:03]  How do we make sure no one asks questions?
[01:03:05]  How do we harass the lawmakers that might want to actually look into this?
[01:03:08]  How do we use professors and state attorney generals to publicize unfounded theories around this?
[01:03:15]  And what does she call it?
[01:03:16]  A conspiracy.
[01:03:20]  Forget message board conspiracy theories.
[01:03:22]  We got one right in front of us that they're admitting.
[01:03:25]  We don't need the Q Shaman thing.
[01:03:27]  We don't need the Viking man.
[01:03:29]  We got this right here.
[01:03:31]  And what's going to be stunning about this is how the media will now categorize this.
[01:03:35]  Either they're going to ignore it, or if my prediction is right, they are going to elevate the democracy defenders and put them on television.
[01:03:45]  The crew of people that helped save the country from Trump's attempted coup d'état, which is all nonsense.
[01:03:54]  This article right here shows that these investigations must continue.
[01:04:00]  These questions must persist.
[01:04:03]  The secret history of the shadow campaign that saved the 2020 election.
[01:04:09]  The real title should be The Secret Plan of the Shadow Operation That Silenced Your Voice.
[01:04:18]  That's the article that should have been written.
[01:04:20]  Everyone, check out the Charlie Kirk Show podcast.
[01:04:22]  We have an exclusive interview that just dropped with Professor Alan Dershowitz.
[01:04:26]  You're not going to want to miss it.
[01:04:27]  Email your questions to us as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
[01:04:31]  We have more content coming up on our podcast this weekend.
[01:04:34]  We post every single day.
[01:04:35]  Only podcast that does it.
[01:04:37]  Check it out.
[01:04:37]  Have a great weekend.
[01:04:38]  Charlie Kirk here.
[01:04:39]  God bless.