Waking up to a news cycle trying to convince you that President Trump does not respect members of the military, or dismisses their sacrifice, should not be viewed as just another poorly sourced hit piece. Even though, according to witnesses, that is precisely what The Atlantic story is. It is the intent of the anonymous sources that should rattle you.
While researching Ukraine around the time of Trump’s impeachment, I came across a bit of research that bothered me. The research was from academic and diplomat Michael McFaul. McFaul served as ambassador to Russia under President Barack Obama and was the architect of the Russian “reset.”
In the early 2000s, he studied the so-called color revolutions in the former states of the Soviet Union. McFaul identified the seven elements of successful revolutions in these countries. Reporting from The Atlantic and The New York Times fits into step number seven. Both publications have run stories highlighting racial, gender, and sexual orientation divisions in the military in the past week.
To understand why this matters, we will go through McFaul’s seven steps one by one. We have seen these steps used during the Arab Spring and the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine. They were weaponized and taught overseas by the State Department under Hillary Clinton in a program called Tech Camps. This program taught activists how to build movements using technology.
The groups were then activated around an invigorating event. Clearly, the event being leveraged now is the 2020 election.
Trump Is ‘Literally Hitler’
The first element of a successful color revolution, according to McFaul, is a semi-autocratic rather than fully-autocratic regime. This narrative about President Trump has been pervasive in the media and echoed by prominent Democrats since before he was elected. Despite all evidence to the contrary, the president is consistently painted as walking the line between constitutional order and authoritarianism. Sometimes he is accused of crossing it.
In the last month, Democrats and the corporate media have resurfaced the narrative that President Trump will not accept the election results if Biden wins. They assert that he will refuse to concede and will have to be forced out of the White House if he loses the election.
The administration’s actions to protect the federal courthouse in Portland were also framed as evidence of Trump’s authoritarian tendencies. Speaker Nancy Pelosi called federal law enforcement officers the president’s stormtroopers. Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan declared it a dress rehearsal for martial law.
Trump’s move to reduce federal funding to cities that fail to protect their citizens and defund police departments is also being framed as beyond his constitutional power. As if the federal government using funding as a carrot and a stick to get states to implement their preferred programs hasn’t been the norm for decades.
None of this is based in reality, and it does not ring true to anyone following politics closely. Those voters are not the target. These narratives are aimed at the Democrat base and persuadable voters.
The Role of Never Trump
According to McFaul, the second requirement is an unpopular incumbent. Where to begin? The constant reminders that the president did not win the popular vote may be a good start. The implication is, and always was, that large swaths of voters nationwide did not like the president. In reality, most of Hillary Clinton’s popular vote surplus came from deep-blue California.
Democrats and the media use disaffected former Republicans as further proof Trump is unpopular within his own party. The DNC highlighted these supporters during their convention. These are the same people who are often on CNN and other networks to represent the typical Republican point of view.
The left also uses identity politics to try and make President Trump unpopular with specific constituencies. Note that Biden still uses the “very fine people” Charlottesville hoax in speeches. The media has also fawned over former Trump associates who have negative things to say about the president, like Michael Cohen, and even family members like Trump’s niece Mary.
Recent Peaceful Protests™ are also to demonstrate there are hordes of citizens who oppose President Trump. The media and Democrats try to frame this unrest as “Trump’s America,” despite all the evidence these riots have been supported by Democrats in power and even financially supported by members of the Biden campaign.
The Role of the Resistance
A third requirement, according to McFaul, is a united and organized opposition. The complete convergence of our institutions in opposing this president is breathtaking. It is so thorough that the Media Research Center has no problem creating extensive montages of media figures pushing Democrat focus-group-tested talking points. Entertainment is full of anti-Trump messaging, and even professional sports are now in the game. Add academia and even portions of the federal bureaucracy, and it is easy to control the narrative.
The opposition even has a name. The Resistance started shortly after the election. Using the hashtag or the phrase is a way to signal you are on the team. Any group can join the broader movement and oppose the president on their own terms.
Polling since the conventions is reinforcing the idea that the president is unpopular. Poorly constructed polls have been pushed out by corporate media outlets for the last week that either oversample specific populations or survey all American adults. With less than two months until Elections Day, polls should be assessing likely voters. At a minimum, registered voters should be the respondents. However, unless people read the poll details, they would not understand the game being played.
The Push for Mail-In Voting
It is not that Democrats are not aware of the problems with mail-in voting. It has caused problems in their own primary in New York City and in an election that has been thrown out in Paterson, New Jersey. It has also been reported that between 2012 and 2018, at least one in five mail-in ballots went missing in elections nationwide. Democrats are counting on this, and it is why they are pushing so hard for it.
McFaul says the fourth ingredient in a successful color revolution is an ability to quickly drive home the point that voting results were falsified. Democrats are setting up 2020 so that either side can make this claim. As the Bloomberg funded group Hawkfish noted in a recent report, Democrat voters will be far more likely to vote by mail than Republicans.
Hawkfish predicts a false landslide for Trump on election night that will erode as mail-in votes are counted. Depending on how this rolls out, it could look very suspicious to Republican voters who understand the fraud potential with mail-in ballots. Likewise, if a large number of mail-in votes are missing or thrown out for technical reasons, Democrats will scream disenfranchisement. Yet, Democrats are the ones setting their voters up to be disenfranchised by pushing COVID-19 panic porn.
This chaos will all impact the way our election typically proceeds as required by law. Local election results will be challenged in court nationwide, and it will make the “hanging chad” controversy in Bush v. Gore look like child’s play. Results will be delayed for weeks and threaten the deadlines to confirm results at the state level. According to one analysis in The Wall Street Journal, entire states could be disenfranchised.
Democrats and their allies in the media are perfectly willing to destroy our faith in a safe and fair election that leads to the peaceful transfer of power our republic has relied on for more than two centuries. These are the lengths they will go to in order to gain power. They are pushing mail-in voting despite health experts saying in-person voting is safe.
The Role of the Media
It should not surprise you to know that requirement number five is having enough independent media to inform citizens about the falsified vote. As Ben Shapiro noted, the media is simply the PR wing for the Biden campaign at this point. Sharyl Attkisson went a step further and outlined the current information operation regarding the military:
Think what you will but here's what I see based on my experience.
Classic operation described in my book THE SMEAR.
(Preorder my new one: SLANTED.)
Will this operation work any better than the others?
All comments welcome!
Be relatively civil. pic.twitter.com/biTZzrG3ld— Sharyl Attkisson🕵️♂️ (@SharylAttkisson) September 4, 2020
Further, Democrat operatives, including John Podesta, did an election war game. The results were published in The Washington Post, and it advanced the idea that the only way to avoid violence is a Biden landslide. It also laid out the Democrats’ response to a loss in 2020, which included having California, Oregon, and Washington secede from the United States. Then they would wait to see how the military responded.
Whether the corporate media will frame whatever narrative the Democrats need them to is not in question. They are already doing it and have been since 2016. They framed President Trump as an illegitimate leader based on the fiction of Russian collusion then. Now they are eagerly resurfacing that meme based on a leak from a classified briefing. They simply ignore the fact that the same briefing said China and Iran are working hard to get Biden elected and are actually acting in more overt ways.
The media also still carries water for Stacey Abrams, who has never conceded her gubernatorial race in Georgia. The media insists the election was stolen—with no proof and a substantial amount of information to the contrary. At the DNC, they even put Abrams on the governor’s panel. They said the same of Andrew Gillum’s race in Florida until the unfortunate hotel scandal surfaced. The narrative is that red states suppress minority votes so that these results will be questioned.
Role of the Riots
Of course, none of this matters unless large groups of Americans are angry and ready to protest. As McFaul notes, a political opposition capable of mobilizing tens of thousands or more demonstrators to protest electoral fraud is necessary. Think about the riots this summer and put “killing of a black man by police officers” at number four, and the whole pattern still works. The unrest and destruction should be seen as a dry run.
The DNC also partners with two organizations, Act Blue and Action Network, who are allied with one another. Together these platforms allow progressive groups, including antifa, to raise money and organize protests electronically. It gives progressive activist groups the ability to privately and quickly communicate with members of their mailing lists. There is even a degree of list-sharing between the groups. From Action Network’s announcement of the DNC partnership:
We had hoped to announce our partnership with the DNC under much different circumstances, but now, facing an unprecedented crisis that has forced us all to move our organizing from in-person to digital, our partnership to build robust, safe, and trusted technology for the movement is more important than ever.
As COVID-19 affects our collective communities and changes the world around us by the hour, we are working to be as responsive as possible to the needs of you, our partners, and your communities. For months now, in partnership with the DNC and through our non-profit, cooperative development model, we’ve been doubling down on our efforts to make sure the Action Network toolset can be there every moment to get your communications in people’s inboxes quickly and effectively.
Trump and the Military
The last requirement McFaul lists is divisions among the regimes’ coercive forces. This element is the most dangerous and sinister one on the list. It has also been going on for four years. The intelligence and federal law enforcement apparatus were weaponized against President Trump before the election. Leaks from these agencies have been constant and divisive.
Retired generals have come out against President Trump. Former Defense Secretary General James Mattis openly criticized Pentagon officials and the president for their response to the riots this summer. Former law enforcement officials, including attorneys general, U.S. attorneys, sheriffs, and police chiefs have also come out for Biden.
President Trump has generally maintained support from the rank-and-file military as well as law enforcement officers. In fact, several police unions have endorsed him, including the largest, the Fraternal Order of Police.
The recent full-court press is meant to diminish President Trump with the troops. As noted in the war game, Democrats will take drastic action in the case of a loss and wait to see what the military does. This disgusting narrative is meant to encourage them to prefer Biden.
Democrats are actually willing to try and politicize the military, a despicable move, to gain power. You should expect moves to try and ruin his reputation with police officers as well.
All In the Open
Democrats and their allies are not even hiding the ball. Hillary Clinton has openly encouraged Joe Biden not to concede under any circumstances. John Kerry has hinted that we are getting very close to a revolution because of disaffected voters. Other Democrat leaders have endorsed the riots and encouraged violence. The radicals in the street have openly supported violence and actively call for a revolution.
Even the professor is giving the game away. McFaul, who is now a Stanford professor, has been openly tweeting about his theory for days now. He did an entire thread after the RNC about how it was typical of an autocrat and effectively framing the president’s supporters as brownshirts. McFaul also commented on voter disenfranchisement in Georgia and is pushing the Russian interference meme. He also deleted a tweet comparing Trump to Putin for the president’s statements on education. This morning, it was not shocking to see this since-deleted tweet:
The Obama Bros, like Ben Rhodes, amplify him. McFaul appears on MSDNC and CNNCCP. You can also see the lefty blue-check brigade mimic his talking points if you watch closely.
What to Do?
There is no reason to believe this narrative will not continue to be amplified right through Election Day. It is up to each one of us to correct the record with everyone we know and vote in person as if your life depends on it. Ensure others do also. Remind people about early voting, which has slow periods where it is easier to socially distance. If your state is implementing mail-in voting because of the pandemic, petition your county to open polling places and educate your neighbors and communities about how many mail-in ballots get lost.
The only way to head off chaos is to make sure we can have faith in the election process. The only way to do that is to reject the fundamental changes to the system that Democrats are proposing.
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