How Mark Zuckerberg’s millions and the Center for Technology and Civic Life turned Wisconsin blue in 2020.

By William DOYLE

Democrats seem to know that they cannot win a national election without employing the same tactics that they used to win in 2020. As Nsé Ufot, CEO of the Stacey Abrams-founded New Georgia Project, said “If there isn’t a way for us to repeat what happened in November 2020, we’re f—ed.”

What happened in 2020 involved a highly coordinated and privately funded “shadow campaign” for Joe Biden that took place within the formal structure of the election system itself. Through the injection of over $419 million of Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s money, laundered through the Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL) and the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR), the professional left presided over a targeted, historically unprecedented takeover of government election offices by nominally nonpartisan, but demonstrably ideological, nonprofit organizations and activists in key areas of swing states such as Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Our research shows that CTCL spending in Wisconsin generated enough votes for Joe Biden to secure him an Electoral College win there in 2020. We estimate that CTCL spending in Wisconsin purchased Joe Biden an additional 65,222votes,without which Donald Trump would have won the state by 44,540 votes.

Although CTCL and CEIR are chartered as non-partisan 501(c)(3) corporations, our research shows that the $419.5 million of CTCL and CEIR spending that took place in 2020 was highly partisan in its distribution, and highly partisan in its effects. Targeted CTCL and CEIR spending played a decisive role in building a “shadow” election system with a built-in structural bias that systematically favored Democratic votes over Republican votes.

Big CTCL and CEIR money had nothing to do with traditional campaign finance, media buys, lobbying, or other costs that are related to increasingly expensive modern elections. Rather, it had to do with financing the infiltration of election offices at the city and county level by Democrat activists and using those offices as a platform to implement preferred administrative practices, voting methods, ballot harvesting efforts, and data sharing agreements, as well as to launch intensive multi-media outreach campaigns and surgically targeted, concierge-level get-out-the-vote efforts in areas heavy with Democratic voters.

The injection of bias into select local election offices through CTCL infiltration introduced structural bias into Wisconsin’s entire 2020 election. This involved favoring certain voters and voting practices over others, and disfavoring other classes of voters and voting practices, giving CTCL’s preferred voters and voting methods an outsized impact on the final election results. The outcome of the 2020 election in Wisconsin is not the outcome that would have occurred if the election had been conducted on the basis of established election laws, equal treatment of voters, and administrative neutrality.

CTCL In Wisconsin: Ground Zero For CTCL’s Nationwide Effort

CTCL’s Safe Elections Project in Wisconsin was not the result of a grass roots clamor for greater election funding among money-starved municipalities desperately seeking additional election funding. It was entirely a top-down endeavor, initiated by CTCL operatives, and funded by a massive inflow of money from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who cultivated connections among “Wisconsin Five” mayors and other city officials, incentivized the first grant applications, and provided funds and advice to aid in their completion.

CTCL involvement in Wisconsin’s election began in Racine. In late May, CTCL issued a $100,000 grant to the southeast Wisconsin city to “recruit other Wisconsin cities to join the ‘Wisconsin Safe Voting Plan.’” Racine Mayor Cory Mason spoke to his fellow liberal mayors in Madison, Milwaukee, Green Bay, and Kenosha about accepting CTCL’s grants—with the proviso that there would be strings attached.
CTCL authorized the City of Racine to distribute from its initial $100,000 grant, $10,000 to each of the four recruited cities (keeping $10,000 for itself), as an incentive for them to participate with Racine in applying for the larger CTCL conditional grants.

Emails obtained through public records requests show Mason’s office in May 2020 setting up numerous virtual meetings with the four other mayors three months before CTCL publicly announced the first round of grants to the “Wisconsin 5” on July 7, 2020. The Wisconsin Safe Voting Plan, and CTCL involvement in Wisconsin’s election was the culmination of a collaborative effort between CTCL’s activist directors and election officials in Green Bay, Kenosha, Madison, Milwaukee, and Racine. These cities would soon come to be referred to in CTCL inner circles as “The Wisconsin 5.”

At least 10 other cities in areas that were important to Democratic efforts to retake Wisconsin would eventually seek to become part of the plan by applying for and accepting significant CTCL grants considerably in excess of the minimum $5,000 offered to non-urban election offices throughout the state.

CTCL And “The Wisconsin Safe Voting Plan” to Infiltrate Wisconsin’s Election System

The Wisconsin Safe Voting Plan—which would emerge out of a collaboration between high level CTCL Advisors, several representatives of the Pierre Omidyar funded National Vote at Home Institute, and Milwaukee’s City Clerk office during Summer, 2020—was the lynchpin of CTCL’s involvement in Wisconsin’s 2020 election. Fulfilling its major objectives was a condition for CTCL funding. City officials among The Wisconsin 5 signed off on “clawback provisions” that allowed CTCL to reclaim their grant money if it was not used to further the objectives contained in the plan.

For example, the CTCL contract that Green Bay approved warns that the grant was to be used “only for” safe and secure election administration, “and for no other purposes,” which means under the ambitious terms they set forth in their portion of the WSVP. The grant’s clawback provision stated that “CTCL may discontinue, modify, withhold part of, or ask for the return of all or part of the grant funds if it determines, in its sole judgment, that (a) any of the above conditions have not been met or (b) it must do so to comply with applicable laws or regulations.”

How The Wisconsin 5 Sought to Implement CTCL’s Wisconsin Safe Voting Plan: Bonfire of the Inanities

The Wisconsin Safe Voting Plan lists CTCL’s four major strategic objectives.

• First, to “encourage and Increase Absentee Voting (By Mail and Early, In-Person),” mainly through providing “assistance” in absentee ballot completion and submission, and the installation of ballot drop boxes
• Second, to “dramatically expand strategic voter education & outreach efforts, particularly to historically disenfranchised residents.”
• Third, to recruit new election workers, mainly from among paid young activists who would replace the usual, older election day volunteers.
• A distant fourth, both in emphasis and level of funding, was the funding of Covid-19 related safety measures.

CTCL funded election offices in Wisconsin seemed particularly intent on courting a demographic favored by the activists at CTCL—a loosely defined “New American Majority” coalition—to replace the working-class voters who had abandoned the party in droves in 2016, and who formerly made up a significant part of the old Democratic “Blue Wall” in the industrial upper Midwest.

This coalition encompasses people of color, single women, young people, and is often extended to include members of the LGBTQ community. Two of the non-profits most closely affiliated with CTCL, the Voter Participation Center and the Center for Voter Information, are at the forefront of proponents of this electoral strategy. According to Democracy Docket, “In the 2020 election, VPC and CVI overcame unprecedented challenges to help engage voters from the New American Majority.”

Addressing these challenges would involve a large commitment of financial and human resources in Wisconsin. There was therefore considerable anguish expressed in the Wisconsin Safe Voting plan about the “hand holding” level of assistance that such voters required in order to cast valid votes, even under greatly relaxed absentee ballot standards during Covid-19 afflicted 2020. To meet this need, Green Bay, Madison, Milwaukee, and Racine together budgeted over $540 thousand of their CTCL grant money toward various forms of “non-partisan voter education” alone.

The Wisconsin Safe Voting Plan outlined the prodigious efforts that the Wisconsin Five were willing to make in order to bend the election system from within toward these untapped tranches of low-propensity potential Democratic voters, and thereby increase Democratic votes in their cities, and in the statewide totals. Established by officials of the Wisconsin Five in collaboration with CTCL advisors, it would serve as the general template for CTCL’s efforts in other key swing states nationwide. It is an extravagant wish list of far-left Democratic election concerns and priorities.
Some of the highlights:

• Concern was expressed about “voters who, understandably, were completely confused about the timeline and rules for voting in the midst of a pandemic and required considerable public outreach and individual hand-holding to ensure their right to vote.”
• Concerns were also expressed that many targeted Democratic voters would have no idea how to cast absentee ballots. WSVP participants lamented the fact that “countless voters” in their municipalities attempted to submit cell phone “selfies” as valid photo ID. Explaining to them that this was not a valid form of photo ID and instructing them on how to properly submit valid ID “took considerable staff time and resources.”
• Green Bay planned to spend $45,000 to employ bilingual “Voter Navigators” to help residents properly upload valid photo ID, complete their ballots, comply with certification requirements, and offer witness signatures.
• Racine wished to create a small corps of “Voter Ambassadors.” Racine officials said they would use their grants to recruit, train and employ paid Voter Ambassadors who would set up at the City’s community centers to assist voters with all aspects of absentee ballot requests, including photo ID compliance.
• Green Bay allocated funds to install secure drop boxes at the city’s libraries, police community buildings, and potentially several other sites including major grocery stores, gas stations, University of Wisconsin Green Bay, and Northern Wisconsin Technical College, in addition to the one already in use at their City Hall.
• In Madison city officials planned to install one secure drop box for every 15,000 voters, or 12 drop boxes total. Madison also planned to provide a potential absentee ballot witness at each drop box, utilizing social distancing and equipped with PPE.
• City officials from all of The Wisconsin Five sought additional funds “to accommodate those who [either do not] want to vote by mail, or go to the polls on election day or to early vote.” Funds were therefore sought to enable absentee “curbside” and “drive-thru voting,” particularly for those with health concerns who could “remain in their cars and have a virtually contact-less voting process.” Each of the five cities asked for significant resources to expand drive-through “curbside” voting for four weeks prior to election day.
• Madison officials sought $160,000 to provide 18 in-person absentee voting locations for the four weeks leading up to the November election. Madison officials also proposed the use of carts for their ExpressVote ballot marking devices for curbside voting so that the use of ExpressVote could be “normalized” to help voters with disabilities feel “less segregated” during the voting process.
• Green Bay sought to motivate potential voters through a CTCL-funded multi-prong strategy utilizing “every door direct mail,” targeted mail, geo-fencing, billboards, radio, television, and streaming-service PSAs, digital advertising, and automated calls and texts. The City guaranteed that these efforts would be undertaken in English, Spanish, Hmong, and Somali. Additional grant funds to fund voter outreach from within Green Bay’s election office would be “distributed in partnership with key community organizations including churches, educational institutions, and organizations serving African immigrants, LatinX residents, and African Americans.” The total amount that Green Bay sought for this initiative alone was $215,000, or about 64 percent of their entire pre-CTCL election budget.
• Milwaukee wanted to develop a broad-based voter outreach strategy that would appeal “to a variety of communities within Milwaukee, including historically underrepresented communities such as LatinX and African Americans, and would include a specific focus on the re-enfranchisement of voters who are no longer on probation or parole for a felony. Additionally, this campaign would include an edgy but nonpartisan and tasteful communications campaign to harness the current [Black Lives Matter] protests’ emphasis on inequity and ties that message to voting.”
• Racine expressed the desire to obtain funds to purchase “a Mobile Voting Precinct so the City can travel around the City to community centers and strategically chosen partner locations and enable people to vote in this accessible (ADA-compliant), secure, and completely portable polling booth on wheels, an investment that the City [would] be able to use for years to come.”
• Madison planned to launch “a robust and strategic poll worker recruitment effort, focusing on people of color, high school students, and college students” to replace older, experienced poll workers.
• Milwaukee promoted a similar plan to increase staffing by launching a recruitment campaign aimed at “a new generation of election workers to sign up and be involved in their democracy.”

Absentee Ballot Chaos Heavily Favors Joe Biden in 2020

CTCL won Wisconsin for Joe Biden, and they did it mainly with absentee ballots. Covid-19 was used as a pretext in many states to put a moratorium on election integrity laws, guidelines and ballot verification procedures that have been long standing and time tested. The result was chaos, especially in states that suddenly moved from very limited absentee voting toward near universal mail-in voting in a very short period of time, such as Wisconsin.

CTCL’s major objective, as set forth in all their internal documents and grant applications, was to promote absentee voting. This involved getting absentee ballots into the hands of reliably Democratic demographics, showing them how to complete them correctly, convincing them to submit them, and providing as many avenues as possible for those ballots to be returned and counted.

CTCL’s involvement in the 2020 election appears exceedingly complex on the surface, at times requiring a program to keep track of the major players, scandals, and institutional relationships that grew out of the CTCL Safe Elections Project. This aspect of CTCL involvement in Wisconsin has been extensively documented by Mollie Hemingway of the Federalist and M.D. Kittle of the Wisconsin Spotlight, among others.

But all of the resources devoted toward ballot curing, drop boxes, vote navigators, partisan activists infiltrating local election offices, and other voter outreach efforts funded by CTCL were aimed at one ultimate end: Seeding an area heavy with potential Democratic votes with as many absentee ballots as possible, targeting and convincing potential voters to complete them in a legally valid way, and then harvesting and counting the results.
While Democrats knew that the radical move toward near universal absentee balloting in Wisconsin and the chaos that would ensue would probably work in their favor, they could not be sure. This is where CTCL performed an invaluable function that could not have been performed from outside the election system, and why infiltration and the injection of large amounts of funding into local election offices was of such importance.

As Hayden Ludwig of the Capital Research Center, an expert on mail-in voting, told us:

The surge of mail-in ballots due to Covid-19 was one of the 2020 election’s greatest novelties and the key to how the election was manipulated in favor of Joe Biden.

Democratic leadership came together behind vote-by-mail in early 2020 as their best shot at overcoming voters’ Covid fears and defeating Trump, in large part because of pressure from election activist groups, such as the National Vote At Home Institute.

The resulting tsunami of mail-in ballots created unprecedented security and chain-of-custody problems in states where vote-by-mail has never been tried on this scale. It strained the U.S. Postal Service’s ability to deliver mail-in ballots both to voters and vote-counters on-time.

It also stressed the budgets of local elections offices, requiring additional personnel and ballot-counting machines even as Covid-19 restricted working conditions. Without a surefire way to get these mail-in ballots first into voters’ hands, and second into ballot-counters’ hands, the Left could not have been confident the outcome would have significantly helped Biden. This is where CTCL proved essential.

A large part of CTCL’s grants paid for private ballot collection bins outside of USPS’s jurisdiction and with questionable oversight. CTCL also funded additional poll workers and vote-by-mail equipment to count incoming ballots, favoring large, Democratic-leaning cities in battleground states.

How CTCL’s Promotion of Mail-In Voting Favored Democrats in Wisconsin

In Wisconsin, absentee ballots can be submitted by mail or “in person.” The majority of absentee ballots in Wisconsin were submitted via mail or deposited in private drop boxes whose contents were then harvested and delivered to the City Clerk. The Wisconsin 5 ended up having the highest rates of mail in voting in the state. All were well above the statewide average of 59.8 percent, with the highest being Dane County (Madison) at 74.4 percent and Milwaukee County at 70.6 percent. This was a major contributor toward increases in Democratic votes among Wisconsin’s CTCL funded counties.

By September 2020, the Wisconsin Election Commission (WEC) had already approved a proposal to fund the mailing of all registered voters absentee ballot request forms, and then assisted further increases in mail-in voting by refusing to intervene in a campaign to convince voters to prevaricate about their absentee ballot status to avoid ID and signature matching requirements.

This campaign veers toward actual election fraud. Clerks in liberal bastions Dane and Milwaukee counties in March 2020 advised voters that anyone could use the threat of Covid-19 as a reason for claiming “indefinitely confined” status for absentee voting, which excuses them from voter ID requirements. This message reached hundreds of thousands of Wisconsin voters, and spread beyond Dane and Milwaukee counties. The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that, while this advice may have been ill advised, it was ultimately up to each voter to determine their status. Ultimately, about 215,000 voters claimed this status, four times more voters than had claimed to be “indefinitely confined” in 2016.

Absentee voting by mail has a well-known partisan bias that favors Democrats. According to the Election Lab at MIT, the partisan differences in voting by mail increased substantially in 2020. The number of Democrats voting by mail increased by more than 200 percent, while the number of Republicans utilizing vote by mail increased by only 50 percent compared to 2016. In total, they estimate that nearly 60 percent Democrats cast their ballots by mail in 2020, compared to just 30 percent for Republicans. Mail-in ballots are therefore twice as likely to be cast by Democratic voters as Republican voters.

This is well known, and is one of the reasons that Democrats advocate so strongly for universal mail-in voting, but it is far more than a matter of tailoring voting practices to their voters’ preferences. What they fear is that a significant portion of their coalition will not vote at all without mail-in ballots.

Table 1 shows the breakdown of absentee voting among the Wisconsin 5 counties and the other five counties that received significant CTCL grant money.

• Prior to 2020, the rate of absentee voting in Wisconsin was 4.6 percent on average in 2016, and 5.5 percent in 2018. Wisconsin had no experience with widespread absentee voting in 2020 when the statewide absentee voting rate suddenly soared to 58.9 percent.
• The vast majority of votes in the top 10 CTCL counties were absentee votes in 2020. Among the Wisconsin 5 counties, 70.6 percent of all ballots were absentee ballots.
• For the top 10 CTCL counties, the average rate of absentee voting was 67.5 percent, considerably above the state average of 59.8 percent.
• There is strong correlation between high absentee voting rates and counties that generated the most excess votes for Joe Biden compared to 2016, which is the hallmark of a successful get-out-the-vote effort.
• Biden’s vote margin in Milwaukee and Dane counties, which each had absentee voting rates above 70 percent, was a staggering 267,652 votes, over 25 times his statewide margin of victory.
• Four out of the five counties that experienced the largest Democratic shift in 2020 were the four counties with the highest absentee voting rates.

Financing Wisconsin’s Shadow Election System: The Myth of Underfunded Local Election Offices

While we cannot attest to the particular strains on election budgets caused by Covid-19, we do know that by July 2020 the federal government had already distributed over $470 million in CARES Act election grants. The state of Wisconsin received $7,362,345 from the Federal Government and provided state matching funds of $1,472,469 for a total of $8,834,814 to deal with Covid related election expenses.Due to Wisconsin election law, CTCL grants were actually made to cities and not to counties, as in many other states. CTCL marketed its Safe Election Project as an attempt to address the needs of underfunded local election offices in the face of Covid-19 related election challenges. CTCL characterized the problem as “A chronic pattern of systemic underfunding of elections – made more acute by a pandemic.”

To give some idea of the scale of CTCL funding of Wisconsin’s election, this is almost exactly equal to the $8.8 million that CTCL ultimately provided to the Wisconsin Five alone, even though those cities contain less than 20 percent of the state’s population. If they were “underfunded” before CTCL appeared, they were certainly not underfunded afterward by any statewide standard.

But an examination of the election budgets published by the state’s most populous cities shows that The Wisconsin 5 already had some of the most generous election funding in the state. After accounting for CTCL grants, an obvious two tier election system – at least in financial terms – emerges in Wisconsin between the Wisconsin 5 plus 1 (the additional city being Janesville in Rock County) and the rest of Wisconsin cities.

• Average per capita election budgets among the six largest CTCL grant recipients was $5.61. Among the next 5 largest Wisconsin cities it was $2.64 per capita. CTCL singled out for its largest grants some of the most well funded election offices in the state.
• After accounting for CTCL grants, average per capita funds available for election spending rose to $15.48 among the Wisconsin 5 while among the next 5 most populous Wisconsin cities, after accounting for their much smaller CTCL grants, average per capita election funding was only about $3.63.
• Not only was CTCL funding not based on any objective criteria of “underfunding” at the state level, but CTCL grants greatly exacerbated existing election funding disparities significantly, even between high grant CTCL cities, and low grant or no grant CTCL cities.
• Approximately 25 percent to 35 percent of Wisconsin’s population benefited considerably from CTCL funding, while the remainder of the state’s population would have to make do with their existing budgets, supplemented perhaps by one of CTCL’s nominal $5,000 grants.

Partisan Bias in The Distribution of CTCL Grants: Why It Matters

In Wisconsin, CTCL grants were awarded to cities and towns, which are in charge of administering elections. Partisan bias in the distribution of CTCL money is important not only because it is unfair, but because it introduces an easily quantifiable structural bias that favors Democrats in the election system in places that are already more inclined to generate more Democratic votes than Republican votes.
Table 3 shows that big CTCL money went to some of the most heavily Democratic cities in the U.S.

• The Wisconsin Institute For Law and Liberty estimates that 216 communities in Wisconsin got CTCL grants totalling about $10.3 million.
• $8.8 million, or 85 percent, went to The Wisconsin 5, all heavily Democratic cities.
• $9.2 million, or about 90 percent of total CTCL spending in Wisconsin, went to the top 15 cities which are distributed among 11 out of 72 of Wisconsin’s counties.
• The top 9 CTCL grants all went to heavily Democratic cities. 80 percent of CTCL’s large grants, which amounted to 90 percent of all CTCL spending in Wisconsin, went to reliably Democratic cities.
• CTCL has repeatedly claimed that the distribution of their grants shows no partisan bias. This is because in Wisconsin, over 200 of their small $5,000 grants, which appear to have been handed out indiscriminately, accounted for only 10 percent of their statewide funding. The distribution of CTCL grant funding, on the other hand, shows considerable and systematic partisan bias.
• Between Dane (Madison) and Milwaukee Counties Joe Biden beat Donald Trump by 364,372 votes in a state that Biden won by less than 21,000 votes. Taking into account grants to Fitchburg and Sun Prairie in Dane County, and West Allis in Milwaukee County, the two most heavily Democratic counties in the state got $4.79 million in CTCL grants, or 46.5 percent of total CTCL spending in Wisconsin while they make up only 25.6 percent of the state’s population..
• About 85 percent of CTCL’s Wisconsin grants went to the Wisconsin Five cities, whose average partisan bias is D+37 percent.
• 87 percent of cities that got substantial CTCL grants became more heavily Democratic. Even Republican majority cities like Wausau, Waukesha and Brookfield (in Waukesha County) became less Republican in 2020. This is not because of voters switching sides. Donald Trump increased his vote totals throughout these counties over 2016 by over 12 percent. It is because Democrat votes in CTCL cities increased by a larger amount than Republican votes increased.
• By targeting such heavily Democratic cities, even in Republican counties like Brown, Kenosha and Racine, CTCL money could be relied upon to generate the maximum possible vote gains for Joe Biden over Donald Trump in Wisconsin. Even in CTCL cities where Donald Trump won, he won by fewer votes than he did in 2016 as a result of a greater percentage increase in Biden votes, which is all that matters for statewide vote totals.
• The GOTV multiplier we estimate for these cities shows how a randomly targeted get-out-the-vote effort will affect their net additional Democratic votes. For example, in Madison an additional 1000 votes is expected to generate a net gain for Democrats of 670 votes. In Kenosha, it would be 160 votes.

The Impact of CTCL on Wisconsin’s Election, 2020

Joe Biden won only 14 of Wisconsin’s 72 counties. In the ten counties Biden won that did not receive substantial CTCL money, the sum of his victory margin was only about 19,600 votes.

In the remaining 4 counties in which Biden won, all of which were CTCL counties, his margin was 380,371 votes. Biden’s margin of victory came almost entirely from CTCL funded counties, so that is where we look to attempt to discover the impact of CTCL funding on Wisconsin’s 2020 election results.
Many counties received more than one CTCL grant that add up to a substantial total, so we include countywide grant totals in our analysis. Our conclusions are based on a binary in group/out group analysis, where the in group consists of counties that were awarded over $50k in CTCL funds. These counties when combined exhibit different statistical characteristics than Wisconsin’s other 62 counties when we focus on CTCL spending as a determining variable. We conceptualize elections in CTCL counties as “Get Out the Vote” machines for Joe Biden based on our GOTV multiplier in Table 3, where a randomly targeted get out vote effort will generate net gains in votes for Joe Biden based on the D+ percentage. Since the get-out-the-vote effort in CTCL counties was not randomly targeted, this methodology gives very conservative estimates.

Using this method, and adjusting for systematic increases in turnout and population growth, we estimate with a reasonable degree of scientific certainty that CTCL spending in Wisconsin caused: 65,222 Additional Joe Biden votes. Since Joe Biden’s margin of victory in 2020 was 20,682 votes, we conclude with a reasonable degree of scientific certainty that in the absence of CTCL in Wisconsin: Donald Trump wins Wisconsin by 44,540 votes.

This estimate is closely aligned with our undisputed Texas results, where we were able to employ a more sophisticated methodology because of the greater number of counties that received CTCL grants, and higher and more continuous variability in grant amounts. In the Texas case, using BART analysis, we estimated that additional Biden votes that could be attributed to CTCL was about 200,000 votes, or 3.8 percent of his statewide total. In this case our estimate is 4 percent of Biden’s Wisconsin statewide total, so these results are closely aligned with our Texas results.

CTCL spending had other effects, in addition to increasing Biden’s vote total. With the exception of Fond Du Lac County, all of the counties which comprise our CTCL in-group shifted significantly toward Democrats in 2020, despite the fact that all witnessed significant increases in Donald Trump votes over 2016, usually in the neighborhood of 10 percent to 12 percent. This was not a systematic pattern that we observed in Wisconsin’s other 62 counties, in which Republican to Democratic shifts are far fewer and more randomly distributed.

Waukesha County, Wisconsin’s reliably red and third most populous county, shifted Democrat by an astonishing 5.85 percent in 2020, while solidly red Marathon County also shifted Democrat. Though they remained Republican counties, they are much less so now.

Extremely blue Dane County became even more blue, with the Democrat vote share increasing by an equally stunning 5.28 percent from an already high level. Unless this is reversed, one of the most significant effects of CTCL’s intervention in Wisconsin was to make its most populous counties significantly more Democratic than they were in 2016. These changes could have a decisive impact on elections in 2022 and 2024, especially if an organization like CTCL attempts to replicate their 2020 effort in the future.

We can assert with a reasonable degree of scientific certainty that CTCL’s $10.3 million investment in Wisconsin flipped the state from red to blue in 2020. A bill to prevent private funding of Wisconsin’s elections in the future recently passed both houses of the Wisconsin legislature but was vetoed by Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers. We doubt he will reconsider his veto after reviewing this report.

theamericanconservative.com

Given my experience with young people’s hopelessness, I was skeptical of a Harvard Kennedy School spring 2021 poll of 18-to-29 year olds that declared “hope for America among young people is rising dramatically.”

Harvard’s #1 top finding is: “In the fall of 2017, only 31% of young Americans said they were hopeful about the future of America; 67% were fearful. Nearly four years later, we find that 56% have hope.” However, scrolling down, Harvard’s #5 finding reads: “More than half of young Americans are going through an extended period of feeling ‘down, depressed or hopeless’ in recent weeks; 28% have had thoughts that they would be better off dead, or of hurting themself in some way.”x

So according to Harvard, with the defeat of Trump and the election of Biden, the majority of young Americans are hopeful about America’s future but, at the same time, the majority of them are experiencing extended despair about their own lives. Furthermore, if among the young Americans who bothered to respond to the poll, “28% have had thoughts that they would be better off dead, or of hurting themself in some way,” then the actual percentage of young people with this level of deep despair—including those reluctant to report suicidality to a pollster—is likely higher.

For the last two decades, critically-thinking young people have increasingly been telling me that the idea of having a satisfying life is more of a fantasy than an expectation. On a political level, Trump repulsed them but so too had Hillary, and the Bernie-Biden shit-show made them feel stupid about having cared about electoral politics. On a personal level, many use some kind of daily combination of pot, alcohol, and/or Prozac to forget their student-loan debt or to take the edge off of their parents nagging them to get a job with benefits; while others use Adderall or some other speed to hold on to a miserable job such as moving boxes around a giant Amazon warehouse.

The level of hopelessness among the young critical thinkers in my clinical practice is actually much lower than the level of despair among those I chat with outside of my day job (such as baristas, servers, retail clerks, and college students). The young people I see in my practice routinely have some financial resources—parents who are partially or totally supporting them, or they are among that small handful of young people with decent-paying jobs and health insurance without outrageous deductibles and ridiculous co-payments.

Even among those young critical thinkers with jobs that allow them to actually afford their own apartment, life is mostly a shit deal. They tell me there are no in-person cool scenes to connect with other critical thinkers. There are no counterculture coffee houses or socialist/anarchist independent book stores, but instead meet ups and megachurches—depressing prospects especially for the more radical among these young people.

Of course, there is social media, which is hated by every one of the critical-thinking young people I talk to. On the political-intellectual level, they hate how their loneliness and boredom is exploited to collect marketing data. On the personal-emotional level, they hate its insult to injury of forcing them to see other young people with great lives—painful to see even when they have direct knowledge that a Facebook braggart is a Facebook bullshitter.

Among young critical thinkers, in my practice, I spend more time with young men than any other group. Lacking any cool in-person scenes to meet women, they spend many hours swiping profiles on Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge, but they tell me that unless a guy has a model-pretty face and meets the height requirements, few women reciprocally “swipe right” on them. Of course, free Internet porn is plentiful and they can masturbate to it—unless they are on Prozac or some other so-called antidepressant which routinely diminishes the capacity to achieve an erection. If not for the distraction of video games, even more of their time would be spent considering whether they would be better off dead.

Some of these critical thinkers do have faces pretty enough to have been successful with their dating aps, and so they have had sex with people other than themselves. However, whether these attractive young critical thinkers are heterosexual males or heterosexual females or LGBTQ, even successful swiping has been no antidote to a general sense of hopelessness.

The CDC reported in 2020, that from 2007 to 2018, the suicide rate among persons aged 10–24 had increased 57.4%. Upon hearing about the suicide or overdose death of a peer, these young people are saddened but not shocked. While an early exit from life “makes no sense” for societal authorities, it makes perfect sense to them.

If you are a liberal Boomer desperate to see hopeful signs, somehow you will find them. If you are desperate to see hopeful signs in Joe Biden, you will somehow find them, and if you are a real Pangloss, you will somehow find hopeful signs even with respect to climate change. So if you are a liberal Boomer desperate to remain in denial about failing future generations, you will revel in Harvard finding #2: “Young Americans are significantly more likely to be politically engaged than they were a decade ago; a sharp increase in progressive political values marked since 2016,” as young people who reported themselves as “politically active” increased in the last decade from 24% to 36%.

However, anybody can call themselves “politically engaged” or “politically active.” When I talk to young people who are actually politically engaged enough to show up at a BLM demonstration, I ask them if they believe that 36% of their peers are “politically active,” and they laugh, telling me 3.6% would be too high of an estimate. They tell me that many of their peers equate political activism with voting. I ask these real-deal activists and organizers if they are hopeful, and they tell me that they are not—not simply because the real number of them who truly are politically active is low but because among even those who are, few are completely committed.

In some areas, these young critical thinkers are even more hopeless than I am—for example, about the prospect of them receiving social security when they are old. I sound Pollyannaish to some of them when I tell them, “Yeah, the politicians will screw you by taking more out of your paycheck, but they have to keep social security going or else Florida and Arizona will cease to exist.” Hopefully, I am not selling them some false hope here.

Why are Young People so Hopeless?

Some Boomers might ask, “Don’t they have reasons for hope? Hasn’t there at least been some progress for some groups with regards to some civil rights? My sense is that critically-thinking young people’s hopelessness is only partially caused by social, economic, and environmental injustices. Their hopelessness appears caused more by the reality that to be terrified and broken has become the norm.

These young critical thinkers are well aware of the fact that American society has always been controlled by rich scumbags who have always exploited whoever and whatever they could to become even richer scumbags. What seems almost unfathomable for these young people is that not that many years ago, American workers actually put it all on the line to defeat these scumbags. When, for example, they see the solidarity, smarts, and cojones of the workers who occupied a factory in the Flint Sit-Down Strike during the Great Depression, it feels as if they are looking at a different species than their own.

In the case of Edward Snowden, one of the very few individual models of courage they see today, these young critical thinkers view his so-far survival as a miracle that won’t last. And after the U.S. government’s sadistic punishment of Julian Assange, these young critical thinkers conclude that the U.S. government can now make courageous people pay even a worse price than assassination and prison. These young people are all familiar with Orwell’s 1984, and like Orwell, they eschew romanticism and know that clever totalitarianism can destroy courage and kill hope.

In contrast to Snowden and Assange, virtually all the public figures they see are completely gutless—possessing an extraordinary cowardice that a spineless mainstream media terms as maturity. They see this “maturity” with both the Repugs and the Dems, from Ted Cruz and Mitch McConnell’s cowardice with respect to Trump, to Bernie’s cowardice with respect to the DNC.

Perhaps even more demoralizing for these young people than the gutlessness that they see from politicians is the cowardice they see from authorities in their daily lives. Two decades ago, I talked to young people who would become excited about a new teacher who was authentic and told taboo truths; while those brave teachers would often get fired or not have their contracts renewed, at least these young people had witnessed models of courage. Nowadays, no young people are telling me about their courageous teachers. They tell me only about teachers so terrified of being “cancelled” that they are so boring that these young people can’t pay attention to them no matter how many milligrams of Adderall they pop.

Back in the 80s when I began my career as a clinical psychologist, there were psychologists and psychiatrists willing to risk their careers to challenge drug company hegemony and authoritarian psychiatry institutions, and a few of them were even in positions of power. Psychiatrist Loren Mosher, chief of the Center for Schizophrenia Research at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), created an alternative approach called the Soteria House to standard authoritarian hospitalization for people diagnosed with schizophrenia (helping start and run it was social worker Voyce Hendrix, cousin of Jimi). The Soteria staff was comprised of non-professionals who were selected and trained to relate to “madness” and altered states without preconceptions and labels; and heavily tranquilizing antipsychotic drugs were rarely used. Soteria produced great results, but as Big Pharma had begun to take over psychiatry, Mosher was fired from his NIMH position. Today, there are few psychologists and psychiatrists willing to speak out against Big Pharma hegemony and authoritarian psychiatry, and their tiny organizations — such as the International Society for Ethical Psychology and Psychiatry — are invisible to the mainstream media and have little power to change a mental health profession that is throwing an ever-increasing number of young critical thinkers under the Big Pharma bus.

There has always been governmental-corporatist punishments for courageous challenges, but today, society itself has changed. Those punished for courageous challenges can no longer expect support from a large segment of society, and this has had a chilling effect. Compare society’s treatment of Eugene Debs—the hero of Bernie’s youth and the subject of a Sanders produced a documentary—to society’s treatment of Ralph Nader, the bogey man of a more “mature” Bernie.

“Eugene Debs, a lifelong Democrat who three times campaigned for Grover Cleveland,” notes his biographer Ray Ginger, “was deprived of faith in the major political parties” initially by the corporatist actions of Grover Cleveland during the 1894 Pullman Strike. Beginning in 1900, Debs ran as the Socialist candidate for president, and would ultimately run five times. In the 1912 presidential election, Debs obtained 6% of the vote and pissed off Democrat Woodrow Wilson who won the election but with only with 42% of the vote (in a race that included Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft). Wilson would get his revenge by incarcerating an elderly Debs in a hard-time federal penitentiary after Debs spoke out against Wilson’s entry into World War I (Wilson had been re-elected president in 1916 on a pledge of neutrality but reversed himself and venomously attacked those who did not follow suit). Wilson’s venom for Debs was such that even after the end of the war, Wilson announced, “This man was a traitor to his country and he will never be pardoned during my administration.”

However, despite his treatment by Wilson, Debs remained so popular among many Americans that it was politically astute for Warren Harding, the Republican president following Wilson, to commute Debs’s sentence, and in 1921, Eugene Debs was released from the Atlanta federal penitentiary. Estimates of the crowd that welcomed his return to his hometown Terre Haute, Indiana ranged from 25,000 to 50,000, and Gene was hoisted above the crowd and carried. That was a different American society than the one that Snowden and Assange face today, and a different one than Ralph Nader faced following his defiance of the Democratic Party in 2000.

Ralph Nader may well be the most accomplished “pro-human/anti-corporatist” figure in U.S. history, as he along with “Nader’s Raiders” (the young consumer advocates who Nader came to inspire and lead) were responsible for the following safety and human rights protections: the Occupation and Safety Health Act; the Environmental Protection Agency; Natural Gas Pipeline Safety Act; Safe Water Drinking Act; Clean Water Act; Nuclear Power Safety; Wholesome Meat Act; Clean Air Act; Mine Health and Safety Act; Foreign Corrupt Practices Act; Freedom of Information Act; and the Whistleblower Protection Act.

Earlier in Nader’s activist career, in the 1960s, when fighting for automobile safety against automakers, a key ally was Democratic Senator Abe Ribicoff, but by the 1980s, the Dems began to aggressively pursue corporate money; and by the 1990s, Bill Clinton’s agenda was a corporatist one (e.g., passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement and repeal of the Glass–Steagall Act). However, Nader still had not completely given up on the Democrats even by the late 90s. “From 1980 to 2000,” Nader recounted, “we tried every way to get the Democrats to pick up on issues that really commanded the felt concern in daily life of millions of Americans, but were issues that corporations didn’t want attention paid to.” Clinton and his then vice president Al Gore refused to meet with Nader, and so Ralph could not convince them to support even the most politically popular anti-corporatist agenda. Finally, Nader could no longer stomach the Democratic Party’s complete betrayal of the American people, and he ran as the Green Party candidate for president.

After Al Gore was narrowly defeated in Florida and lost the electoral-college vote to George W. Bush, Nader not only received the expected rebukes from mainstream Dems but received even greater scorn from so-called “progressives.”Eric Alterman, a columnist for the Nation, stated about Nader: “The man needs to go away. I think he needs to live in a different country. He’s done enough damage to this one. Let him damage somebody else’s now… To me, he’s a very deluded man. He’s a psychologically troubled man.” Todd Gitlin, former president of the Students for a Democratic Society, stated about Nader’s 2000 presidential run: “I find this worse than naive. I think it borders on the wicked.”

Unlike Gene Debs, Ralph did not to return to his hometown of Winsted, Connecticut to thousands of people who hoisted him above the crowd and carried him. Instead, the man who in the 1970s was up there with Walter Cronkite as one of the most trusted and admired men in America, has for quite some time been marginalized by both the Dems and the mainstream media.

Ralph continues to be so much of a pariah among the Blue leadership that, as Nader put it in 2016, Bernie Sanders is “obsessed by the way I was shunned. He hasn’t returned a call in 17 years.” In Orwell’s 1984, Winston is taken to Room 101 by authorities who have knowledge of everybody’s greatest fears, which for Winston was being mauled by rats; and when Winston sees the rat cage and the possibility that his head will be inserted in it, he betrays the love of his life, Julia, by stating that she should receive the torture instead of him. Bernie’s greatest fear is the derailment of his political career, and apparently even just talking to Ralph is enough of a crime for this punishment.

Anyone familiar with Gene Debs (as Bernie certainly is, having himself voiced Gene’s words in his documentary about him) knows that Debs had warned that the Democratic Party will never be a true friend of the working class. But after Bernie betrayed his hero by “swiping right” on the war-monger corporatist Hillary—who lost anyway and then blamed Bernie for being a rotten lover—some young people felt sorry for Bernie.

With social media, their Internet browsing records, the NSA, and a generally surveilled society, young critical thinkers assume that their greatest fears can easily be known, and that they too—just like Winston and Bernie—can at any time be broken and humiliated. Pervasive fear, as much as anything, is why many of them feel hopeless.

counterpunch.org

By Leonardo FLORES

For the first time in four years, every major opposition party in Venezuela participated in elections. For the fifth time in four years, the left won in a landslide. Voters elected 23 governors, 335 mayors, 253 state legislators, and 2,471 municipal councilors. The governing United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) won at least 19 of 23 governorships (one race remains too close to call) and the Caracas mayoralty in the November 21 “mega-elections.” Of the 335 mayoral races, the vote count has been completed in 322 of them, with PSUV and its coalition taking 205, opposition coalitions 96, and other parties 21. Over 70,000 candidates ran for these 3,082 offices, and 90% of the vote was counted and verified within hours of polls closing. Turnout was 42.2%, eleven points higher than last year’s parliamentary elections.

Here’s why chavismo, the movement behind Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution, won:

1. Good governance in health, housing and food. Venezuela’s health policies in response to Covid-19 have been exemplary. The expectation in the U.S. was that the coronavirus would overwhelm Venezuela’s healthcare system, which has been devastated by years of sanctions. And yet, per million population, Venezuela registered 15,000 cases and 180 deaths. For the sake of comparison, the figures in the U.S. are 146,000 cases/million and 2,378 deaths/million, Brazil’s are 103,000 and 2854, and Colombia’s are 98,000 and 2,481. Unlike images we saw in Ecuador or Bolivia, there were no bodies of victims left on the streets, nor were there overflowing morgues like in New York.

In terms of housing, the Venezuelan government has built 3.7 million homes for working-class families over the past ten years, the majority of which were built and delivered by the Maduro administration while under sanctions.

As deadly as the sanctions have been, things would be significantly worse were it not for Venezuela’s most important social program in the past five years: the CLAPs. These consist of boxes of food and other necessities, some of which are produced locally, which are packaged and distributed by communities themselves. Seven million Venezuelan families receive CLAP boxes every month, out of a country of 30 million people. Not only has this program been instrumental in keeping people fed, but it has also invigorated the base of chavismo and reconnected the government with grassroots after the PSUV’s defeat in the 2015 legislative elections.

2. The economic situation is improving. According to an August 2021 survey by opposition pollster Datanálisis, 50% of Venezuelans consider that their lives have improved compared to the previous year or two. Despite sanctions that have caused a 99% drop in government income, the Venezuelan economy is stabilizing. Inflation is down to single digits for the first time in four years. Credit Suisse projected 5.5% growth in 2021 and 4.5% growth in 2022. Oil production hit an 18-month high in October, helped by a trade deal with Iran.

3. The left is united (mostly). The PSUV didn’t win the elections alone, they were united with 8 other left parties in a coalition known as the GPP (Great Patriotic Pole). The PSUV itself held internal primaries in August, the only party to do so. Over half the GPP candidates were women, 52%, while another 43% were youth. Overall, 90% of the candidates hadn’t held office before, suggesting a renewal of the party from the grassroots. However, this marked the second election in a row in which the left wasn’t completely united. A coalition that included Venezuela’s Communist Party ran its own ticket. These parties got less than 3% of the vote in the 2020 parliamentary elections and their decision to run separately appears to have had no impact on the gubernatorial races.

4. The opposition is divided. Never known for their unity, the Venezuelan opposition suffered a major split as a result of some parties opting for boycotting elections and attempting to overthrow the government, while others preferred a democratic path. Despite all the major parties participating in these elections, the opposition was split into two main coalitions, the MUD (Democratic Unity Roundtable) and the Democratic Alliance. The vast majority of the 70,000 candidates are in the opposition and they were running candidates against each other in almost every race. Of the 23 gubernatorial races, six were won by PSUV candidates with less than 50% of the vote and by less than six points – more unity between the MUD and Democratic Alliance could have made the difference.

A count of the votes in the gubernatorial and Caracas mayoral races shows the PSUV coalition taking 46% of the total vote, with the rest split between the various oppositions. A united opposition could win in Venezuela, but “united opposition” is an oxymoron.

5. The opposition is deeply unpopular. While much is made about the alleged lack of support for President Maduro (the millions of votes his party got will never be acknowledged by the U.S.), it’s less known that the opposition is deeply unpopular. Here are the disapproval ratings for some of the opposition’s key figures: Juan Guaidó, 83% disapproval; Julio Borges (Guaidó’s “Foreign Minister), 81%; Leopoldo López (Guaidó’s mentor and mastermind of coup attempts), 80%; Henry Ramos Allup (longtime opposition leader), 79%; Henrique Capriles (2012 & 2013 presidential election loser), 77%; and Henri Falcón (2018 presidential election loser), 66%. All of these but Falcón are part of the MUD.

The MUD coalition spent years claiming they represented a majority, a claim which couldn’t be verified by their strategy of electoral boycotts. However, their return to the electoral process only marked a ten-point increase in voter turnout compared to 2020. Moreover, the MUD placed below other opposition parties in 9 of 23 states and in Caracas. The MUD only won one of the three governorships taken by the opposition. This might be due in part to the widespread rejection of U.S. sanctions. The MUD has repeatedly endorsed deadly sanctions despite the fact that 76% of Venezuelans reject them.

The MUD enjoys the political, financial and logistical support of the United States and the EU, while members of other opposition parties have been denounced and sanctioned by the U.S. for negotiating with the Maduro administration. These elections should put the Biden administration on notice that continuing to support the MUD, and in particular, the fiction of Guaidó as “interim president”, is a failed policy.

mintpressnews.com

By Ben NORTON

Millions of Nicaraguans went to the polls on November 7, 2021, re-electing the leftist Sandinista Front and President Daniel Ortega by a large margin.

The Joe Biden administration refused to recognize the results, however. The United States and its allies in the European Union and the Organization of American States (OAS) have instead launched what essentially amounts to a new coup attempt against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government.

On November 10, President Biden signed the RENACER Act, which will impose more crushing sanctions on Nicaragua. Washington’s escalating campaign of economic war was supplemented by the OAS’ claim that the election was “illegitimate.”

This campaign of hybrid warfare aimed at overthrowing Nicaragua’s Sandinista government has many parallels with the ongoing US coup attempts against Venezuela and Cuba, as well as the military putsch the OAS oversaw against Bolivia’s elected socialist President Evo Morales in 2019. Indeed, it involves many of the same tactics and players.

Following the line of Washington and Brussels, international corporate media outlets have spread an array of demonstrably false claims about Nicaragua’s 2021 elections, incorrectly reporting, for instance, that the government banned anti-Sandinista parties, that is imprisoned opposition candidates, or that voter turnout was negligible.

Unlike the foreign reporters spreading these falsehoods from Florida, Costa Rica, or Spain, The Grayzone was on the ground in Nicaragua to observe the electoral process.

This reporter, Ben Norton, visited 4 different polling stations in various parts of Chinandega, one of the largest cities in the country.

There, I spoke to more than a dozen average voters, to hear their experiences and get their perspectives on the election. Everyone I interviewed said the process was clean, fair, and transparent, and that they were able to vote without any difficulties.

There is so much propaganda and fake news in the corporate media trying to discredit Nicaragua’s elections. I visited 4 voting centers, and there were a lot of people voting in a very efficient, quick, and transparent process.

Don’t believe me? Well, I interviewed voters. Watch: pic.twitter.com/62lBFBywah

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) November 9, 2021

Myth: the opposition was barred from participating in Nicaragua’s 2021 elections

Although its correspondent Natalie Kitroeff was reporting from Mexico, not Nicaragua, the New York Times leveled several baseless accusations against the Sandinista government in an attempt to discredit its electoral victory.

Among the most absurd of these claims is that Nicaragua prevented opposition parties from participating and closed voting stations.

This is simply false. There were a total of seven different alliances participating in Nicaragua’s 2021 elections: five national opposition parties (all of which were right-wing), another regional opposition party on the Caribbean Coast, and finally the leftist Sandinista Front-led alliance, which itself consists of nine parties.

The following parties competed in the November 7 elections:

National opposition parties

• Constitutionalist Liberal Party (PLC)
• Independent Liberal Party (PLI)
• Alliance for the Republic (APRE)
• Nicaraguan Christian Way (CCN)
• Nicaraguan Liberal Alliance Party (ALN)

Regional opposition party on Caribbean Coast

• Yapti Tasba Masraka Nanih Aslatakanka (YATAMA)

FSLN alliance

• Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN)
• Nationalist Liberal Party (PLN)
• Christian Unity Party (PUC)
• Alternative for Change (AC)
• Nicaraguan Resistance Party (PRN)
• Multiethnic Indigenous Party (PIM)
• Yapti Tasba Masraka Raya Nani Movement Party (Myatamaran)
• Autonomous Liberal Party (PAL)
• Progressive Indigenous Movement Party of the Moskitia (Moskitia Pawanka)

Today is election day in Nicaragua. I visited 4 voting sites, interviewing voters (video coming soon)

Things are very calm, and the voting process is totally open and free, with 7 options on the ballet (6 opposition)

The onslaught of corporate media propaganda is so ridiculous pic.twitter.com/SDroqtdVWn

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) November 7, 2021

The Sandinistas created a system of political autonomy for Nicaragua’s eastern Caribbean Coast, responding to requests for self-determination by the large Indigenous and Afro-descendent communities there.

This meant that, in the two separate zones of the North Caribbean Coast Autonomous Region (RACCN) and South Caribbean Coast Autonomous Region (RACCS), there were seven options on the ballot in the election for regional lawmakers.

Everywhere else in Nicaragua, there were six options on the ballot, five of which were anti-Sandinista opposition parties.

Myth: voter turnout was negligible

Another unfounded accusation spread by foreign corporate media outlets to attack the integrity of Nicaragua’s elections is that voter participation was supposedly very low.

According to official results from Nicaragua’s Supreme Electoral Council (CSE), the Sandinista Front won 75.87% of the total of 2,921,430 votes, with 65.26% turnout.

The main opposition party, the PLC, got 14.33%. The other four opposition parties each got 3% or less.

Western governments sought to discredit these electoral results by claiming the CSE is unreliable. But anyone even vaguely familiar with the history of recent Nicaraguan politics can see that this 2021 outcome is highly consistent with both polling and past results.

In Nicaragua’s 2016 elections, which were observed by the OAS, the FSLN got 72.44% of the vote, and the PLC garnered 15.03%, with 68.2% participation – figures very similar to those of 2021.

And in the 2011 elections, which were monitored by the Carter Center, European Union, and OAS, the Sandinista Front won 62.46% of the vote.

Moreover, the results in the 2021 election are unsurprising when one considers the months of opinion polling before the vote. The most respected, and really only credible, apolitical polling firm in Nicaragua is M&R Consultores. (CID-Gallup did an extremely inaccurate study on behalf of the right-wing opposition, which was plagued with problems and heavily criticized for its bad methodology.)

In the lead-up to the November 7 vote, M&R Consultores’ surveys consistently found that 60 to 70% of Nicaraguans supported the Sandinista Front and the government of President Ortega.

The latest poll from Nicaragua’s top firm shows the leftist Sandinista Front remains by far the most popular force, while support for the right-wing opposition is tiny

69% approve of President Daniel Ortega’s gov’t

73% say it gives them hope

76% feel the country has progressed pic.twitter.com/jpviNSmHQ6

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) May 26, 2021

When considering these polls in combination with past elections, the 2021 results appear utterly unsurprising. But the cold, hard data did not interrupt the wave of disinformation flowing from corporate media across the world.

Several major news outlets published the dubious claim that only 18.5% of Nicaraguans participated in the vote. In each case, the source was a shady, little-known organization called Urnas Abiertas, which appears to have fabricated the figure out of whole cloth.

Indeed, Urnas Abiertas has not published any raw data publicly, and scarcely exists as an organization.

Urnas Abiertas calls itself a “citizen observatory,” but has no technical credentials to speak of. Its official website and social media pages contain no concrete information about the group and do not even disclose the identities of its staff members.

The report it published after the election is totally anonymous and is just four pages long (in both Spanish and English). The document does not include any of the raw data it supposedly collected. It vaguely describes its methodology in two brief paragraphs, without identifying any of the people who purported to run a massive secret monitoring operation.

The organization’s previous reports are also anonymous, not naming any authors or researchers, and, once again, do not contain raw data or detailed information about methodology.

Moreover, the logos at the bottom of these past reports show that Urnas Abiertas collaborates with a series of right-wing opposition groups in Nicaragua that are funded by CIA cutouts.

In fact, only two people have been publicly identified with this shadowy organization, and both are partisan right-wing activists who work in the Western government-funded nonprofit-industrial complex, without any technical background or experience in election monitoring.

The man most closely linked to Urnas Abiertas is Pedro Salvador Fonseca Herrera, an anti-Sandinista activist sponsored by the European Commission – a clear conflict of interest, given the EU’s refusal to recognize the election and its role in openly funding and supporting the extremist opposition in Nicaragua.

Fonseca Herrera previously worked in Washington, DC as a “consultant” for the Organization of American States (OAS) in 2017 and 2018, during the violent OAS-backed coup attempt in Nicaragua.

Before that, Herrera organized with the regime-change lobby group Techo, which also happens to be the former employer of the only other known person associated with Urnas Abiertas, Olga Valle López.

Valle López’s LinkedIn profile shows that she, too, has worked with Techo, which is funded by Latin American governments and major Western multinational corporations, and pushes their interests in Latin America by destabilizing left-wing states.

Fonseca Herrera and Valle López were identified as “researchers” with Urnas Abiertas in an event in October organized by the US government-funded Wilson Center and the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA), a Western state-backed lobby group.

The event, a panel discussion titled “Nicaragua 2021 elections: A painful plan to end with democracy,” did not even pretend to be impartial; it explicitly aimed to discredit the country’s vote weeks before it even took place. The host, from International IDEA, referred to the forthcoming vote as an “electoral farce.”

Fonseca Herrera and Valle López spoke alongside US government-funded right-wing Nicaraguan and Venezuelan opposition figures, and their inflammatory comments made it extremely clear that these two anti-Sandinista activists are political operatives, not impartial electoral observers. They had already established their conclusion that Nicaragua’s election was supposedly illegitimate weeks before it even took place.

The panel discussion was in fact the presentation of a report of the same name that Urnas Abiertas published in a joint effort sponsored by International IDEA and Venezuelan right-wing activists at the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello (UCAB).

Unlike the other reports published by Urnas Abiertas, this document named the authors: three foreigners from International IDEA, two Venezuelan anti-Chavista activists, and just two Nicaraguans: Olga Valle y Pedro Fonseca.

In other words, this document that purported to inform people about the situation on the ground in Nicaragua was almost entirely written by non-Nicaraguans outside of the country. And it had the support of a Western government-funded lobby group and Venezuelan right-wing activists at UCAB, a key hub for the anti-Chavista opposition.

UCAB, one of the most elite private universities in Venezuela, is run by the Catholic Church, which has played a major role in coup attempts in both Venezuela and Nicaragua. At the beginning of the US-sponsored putsch in Venezuela in 2019, UCAB hosted coup leader Juan Guaidó. The university is directed by Francisco José Virtuoso, an ultra-conservative priest who openly supported the coup attempt and Guaidó.

In short, Urnas Abiertas is a tiny fringe group run by two young anti-Sandinista activists with no expertise in election monitoring. It is not even clear if they are physically in Nicaragua or outside of the country – although they do have the support of Western governments and the right-wing Venezuelan opposition.

These clear conflicts of interest and Urnas Abiertas’ flagrant lack of credibility did not however stop the Los Angeles Times from publishing a puff piece praising Urnas Abiertas and claiming without a shred of evidence that it secretly mobilized 1,450 volunteers at 563 voting centers across Nicaragua to observe the election.

Considering Urnas Abiertas has fewer than 1,300 followers on Twitter, it seems extremely implausible that such a miniscule outfit could secretly mobilize 1,450 electoral observers, especially without attracting attention from the government. But this did not stop corporate media from printing the absurd claim.

US government-funded opposition media outlets in Nicaragua also amplified the shadowy group’s unsubstantiated allegations of 81.5% abstention in the 2021 election. But once again, they presented absolutely zero evidence to back up these claims.

All indications show Urnas Abiertas to be nothing more than an opposition front group posing as a monitoring organization – and with the stated intent of discrediting the Nicaraguan election results before the vote even took place.

Myth: Nicaragua arrested opposition presidential candidates

An even more common accusation made by Western capitals and corporate media outlets to discredit Nicaragua’s 2021 election is that the Sandinista government arrested seven “presidential hopefuls” from the right-wing opposition.

The figures who were detained have been variously described in the international media as “precandidates” or “possible challengers.” But in reality, not a single one was an actual registered candidate.

On the November 7 election, there were indeed six different presidential candidates to choose from. President Ortega was not even the first name or face on the ballot. (Number one was Walter Espinoza Fernández, the presidential candidate from the PLC.)

As for the opposition figures who were detained several months before the election, The Grayzone documented how they were arrested for conspiring with a foreign government (the United States), taking millions of dollars from Washington in a large money-laundering scheme to organize a violent coup attempt in 2018, in which hundreds of Nicaraguans were killed and the country was destabilized, and in which right-wing extremists hunted down, tortured, and murdered Sandinista activists and state security forces, even setting some on fire.

That the opposition leaders who were detained received millions of dollars from the US government to carry out these operations is an undeniable matter of public record, confirmed by documents from CIA cutouts such as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

In any other country on Earth, these figures would have faced similar, if not more severe legal consequences. Accepting millions of dollars in funding from a foreign state as you attempt to violently overthrow your elected government is illegal everywhere on the planet.

But when Nicaragua enforces its laws – even when they are laws modeled after long-existing US legislation – Washington condemns the country as “repressive” or “authoritarian.”

The United States, European Union, and OAS habitually refer to violent criminals as “political prisoners” after they are arrested in Nicaragua. People arrested for murder and rape have ended up on US-sponsored “political prisoner” lists.

In one high-profile case that caused a national scandal in Nicaragua, a charged murderer who had been active in the violent tranque barricades in the 2018 coup attempt was arrested, but later dubbed a “political prisoner” and released under pressure by the US, EU, and OAS. It was not long before he returned to his violent ways, stabbing his pregnant girlfriend to death.

Another US-designated Nicaraguan “political prisoner” was let out of jail, only to be caught again with explosives and guns, planning a terrorist attack on a pro-Sandinista mayor’s office.

.@BenjaminNorton traveled to Jinotepe, Nicaragua to report the shocking story of how the US and OAS lobbied for the release of violent criminals behind a 2018 coup attempt

One man they called a “political prisoner” stabbed his pregnant girlfriend to deathhttps://t.co/6fA6TZOgmO

— The Grayzone (@TheGrayzoneNews) February 28, 2020

If an opposition figure is arrested for violating a law in Nicaragua, in an offense that would be punishable in any country, Washington often reflexively responds by dubbing that person a “political prisoner.” If they are wealthy and powerful, the US claims they were a “presidential hopeful,” even if they made no effort whatsoever to go through the legal process of officially registering as a candidate.

This is a way to try to maintain impunity for US-backed coup-plotters and money-launderers. It is the geopolitical equivalent of the strategy that Washington-sponsored insurgents in Hong Kong openly espoused in the New York Times: “use the most aggressive ‘nonviolent’ actions possible to push the police and the government to their limits,” and then frame that state’s self-defense against foreign aggression as a form of “repression” and “authoritarianism.”

One of the reasons the United States was particularly furious about Nicaragua arresting the coup leaders it had cultivated is because Washington clearly had made plans to repeat the putschist strategy that saw it appoint Juan Guaidó as so-called “interim president” of Venezuela.

US government officials and their right-wing Central American allies not-so-subtly hinted that they planned to recognize right-wing oligarch Cristiana Chamorro as the unelected “interim president” of a parallel Nicaraguan coup regime. When she was arrested for money laundering in June, it foiled their new destabilization plot.

Nicaragua has an election in November and concerns are growing the US may try to impose a fake “interim president” like Juan Guaidó

The US State Dep’t special envoy and right-wing Central American leaders recently referred to opposition oligarch Cristiana Chamorro as “president” pic.twitter.com/MmGIquS2dC

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) March 24, 2021

Myth: there were no foreign electoral observers and journalists

Another myth spread by foreign media outlets is that there were no foreign observers and journalists in Nicaragua for its 2021 elections. This is yet another massive distortion.

The Nicaraguan government did prevent the Organization of American States (OAS) from sending observers, given the US-funded group’s well-documented role in orchestrating a right-wing military coup in Bolivia in 2019.

But there were hundreds of foreigners accredited to accompany the elections, from more than two dozen countries, including:

• United States
• Canada
• Spain
• France
• Germany
• Britain
• Ireland
• Italy
• Belgium
• China
• Russia
• Argentina
• Peru
• Puerto Rico
• Dominican Republic
• Colombia
• Costa Rica
• Guatemala
• Honduras
• Mexico
• Uruguay
• Venezuela
• Cuba
• Panama
• Brazil
• Chile

In total, there were 232 foreigners accredited from 27 countries, 165 to accompany the election and 67 as journalists.

They monitored voting centers in all 10 departments of Nicaragua (Managua, Masaya, Estelí, Chinandega, León, Granada, Matagalpa, Rivas, Chontales, and Carazo), as well as both Caribbean Coast autonomous regions (RACCN and RACCS).

The Nicaraguan government chose to use the term acompañante (meaning someone who accompanies) to refer to these international monitors, rather than “observer,” because of the history of so-called observers from the OAS and EU meddling in the country’s internal electoral process on behalf of the anti-Sandinista opposition.

225 people accredited to accompany Nicaragua’s election have visited voting centers in 10 departments; Esteli, Chinandega, León, Rivas, Chontales, Matagalpa, Masaya, Granada, Carazo and Managua, and two Autonomous Regions; RACCN and RACCS. pic.twitter.com/YlGX04euG4

— Kawsachun News (@KawsachunNews) November 7, 2021

The final misleading charge spread by the New York Times and other corporate media outlets to delegitimize the 2021 elections is that Nicaragua barred parties from holding large public rallies. This is technically true, but not because of political reasons, but rather due to Covid-19 health restrictions.

In fact, the Sandinista Front itself has not held an official rally since March 2020, before any cases were discovered in the country. Many foreign nations have imposed much harsher restrictions, while banning protests and attacking demonstrators with no outrage from the self-declared “international community.”

Latin American left warns of US-OAS coup attempt in Nicaragua

The United States has a long history of blood-soaked meddling in Nicaragua. The US military invaded and occupied the Central American country numerous times in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Then Washington helped install the right-wing dictatorship ruled by General Anastasio Somoza, which it subsequently propped up until the Sandinista Revolution of 1979.

In the 1980s, the CIA waged a terrorist war on Nicaragua, arming and training far-right Contra death squads that, as one of their former leaders admitted, “burn down schools, homes and health centers as fast as the Sandinistas build them.”

Since the violent coup attempt failed in 2018, the US government has been escalating its economic warfare on Nicaragua. Late that year, the Donald Trump administration implemented the NICA Act, which imposed aggressive sanctions on the small Central American nation.

Several more rounds of US sanctions on Nicaragua followed in the next two years. Then, on November 3, in a flagrant form of election meddling, just four days before the 2021 election, the House of Representatives voted 387-35 to pass the RENACER Act, which will hit Nicaragua with a new round of economically punishing sanctions.

The Grayzone reported on a September Congressional session hosted by neoconservative lawmakers, where participants made it clear that Washington had been preparing a brutal campaign of economic warfare against Nicaragua, while also planning to expel the country from the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) and Organization of American States (OAS).

On November 9, the OAS officially announced that it had rejected the results of Nicaragua’s elections, branding them “illegitimate.”

This declaration was published almost exactly two years to the day after the OAS did the same in Bolivia, spreading false accusations of “fraud” in order to justify a military coup against the country’s democratically elected president, Evo Morales.

We reject the results of the illegitimate elections in #Nicaragua.

I urge countries of the OAS to respond to this clear violation of the Democratic Charter during its #OASassembly.

Report of the Secretariat for Strengthening of Democracy: @Almagro_OEA2015 https://t.co/8CBUz303Dp

— OAS (@OAS_official) November 9, 2021

In a clear reflection of its ulterior motives, the OAS held a neoliberal “Private Sector Forum” calling on foreign corporations to invest in Latin America on the same day it denounced Nicaragua’s elections.

The conference perfectly encapsulated the corporate priorities of the coup-sponsoring OAS. Among its most notorious participants was the far-right president of Colombia, Iván Duque, who only came to power thanks to the illegal vote-buying scheme of a drug lord named Ñeñe Hernández, at the orders of political kingpin and US asset Álvaro Uribe.

Palabras del Presidente de Colombia @IvanDuque en el XIII Foro del Sector Privado de las Américas en #AsambleaOEA

“Por una América renovada: el rol del sector privado en la recuperación económica y social”

https://t.co/CenV5VdCJp
https://t.co/YOgQAQjAOY pic.twitter.com/Bas8vZLdvj

— OEA (@OEA_oficial) November 9, 2021

As a victim of US-OAS meddling, Evo Morales immediately recognized the warning signs in Nicaragua, and cautioned about the coming coup.

In statements on Twitter after the vote, Morales congratulated “the honorable people of Nicaragua, which in a demonstration of courage and democratic maturity chose brother Daniel Ortega as constitutional president, despite a campaign of lies, blackmail, and threats by the US.”

The former Bolivian president said the United States is attacking “the democratic will and sovereignty of Nicaragua,” and, “The victory of Ortega is the defeat of yankee interventionism.”

When US President Joe Biden demonized Nicaragua’s 2021 vote as an “electoral pantomime,” Morales retorted, “The only ‘pantomime’ is acted out each day in the White House, where so-called ‘presidents,’ instead of serving their people, follow the orders of transnational corporations, the weapons industry, and the CIA.”

While Cuba, Venezuela, and other leftist leaders in Latin America congratulated the Sandinista Front and Ortega for their victory, warning of US destabilization efforts, there is a new generation of young, NGO-cultivated, liberal reformist leaders in the region who are much softer on imperialism.

In Chile, Gabriel Boric – the face of the liberal nonprofit-industrial complex – condemned the Sandinistas and affirmed his “solidarity” with right-wing oligarch Cristiana Chamorro, a scion of the most powerful dynasty in Nicaragua, and the daughter of Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, the first neoliberal president to take power after the Sandinista Revolution thanks to a massive CIA meddling campaign.

Similarly, the foreign ministry of Peru issued a statement denouncing Nicaragua’s elections. It was the latest sign of the debilitation of the country’s newly inaugurated left-wing President Pedro Castillo, whose proudly anti-imperialist Foreign Minister Héctor Béjar was forced by the military to resign just weeks after entering office.

Béjar warned the forced resignation and the right-wing takeover of Castillo’s foreign ministry was “a soft coup, or the beginning of it.”

So while progressive forces enjoy a resurgence in parts of Latin America, the left is also divided between an older generation of revolutionary anti-imperialists and a newer generation of NGO-backed, media-friendly social democrats who acquiesce to US empire.

President Ortega vows resistance against US meddling

For his part, President Daniel Ortega has vowed to continue resisting US and European attempts to meddle in his country’s internal affairs.

The Nicaraguan leader delivered a fiery speech on November 8, the day after the elections, commemorating the 45th anniversary of the killing of Sandinista Front founder Carlos Fonseca Amador by the US-backed Somoza dictatorship.

“It is impossible for Nicaraguans – and I would say for Latin Americans and Caribbeans – it is impossible to stop talking about the interventionist policies, the expansionist, colonialist policies of the United States of America and the European countries,” Ortega said.

“We are under the threat of the yankee empire, under the aggressions of the yankee empire, and under the threats of the European colonialists. And I’m not the one saying that; they’re saying it,” the Nicaraguan president added.

“They believe that we are their colony, and they want to tell us how to behave, and they want to decide what type of democracy we should practice,” Ortega continued. “They continue with their colonialist practices, to dominate these lands. But not for good, but rather to subjugate them and exploit them, and involve them in their expansionist and warmongering policies.”

Reflecting on his country’s long history of resistance, the Nicaraguan leader declared that its people would not give in to another foreign conquest.

“In the end, they could not defeat Sandino,” he declared. “Whichever [US] president came to power, whether Democrat or Republican, he came to try to oppress Nicaragua. But he always was met with resistance, with heroism, with the fighting spirit of the Nicaraguan people.”

thegrayzone.com

The Democratic Party will be tempted to blame their recent crash and burn on the monument to national embarrassment that is Joe Biden, but that would be missing the wider picture, which is that most Americans find woke politics absolutely repulsive.

Just one month ago, few people believed that Republican Glenn Youngkin, a former business executive and newcomer to the political jungle, had any chance of beating Democrat Terry McAuliffe in Virginia’s high-stakes race for governor. But then McAuliffe laid his woke cards face up on the table and it was game over.

The revelatory moment came last month during the gubernatorial debate when the candidates were asked how much influence parents should have in their children’s education. Before revealing McAuliffe’s rather predictable answer (hint: he’s a woke liberal), it is important to note that school board meetings are no longer the monotonous cures for insomnia they once were. Rather, they have become major social events where parents confidently take the podium to harangue school officials over the progressive perversities now being taught in the classroom.

It is no secret that the U.S. public school system, in cahoots with powerful advocacy groups, like the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Open Society Foundation, has been stealthily incorporating teachings on Critical Race Theory, which postulates, in a nutshell, that white people are inherently and irreconcilably racist. And when schoolchildren are not being warned of the pint-sized supremacists in their midst, they are being instructed on more titillating topics, like how the biological differences between the sexes, undisputed since before Cro-Magnon times, is in fact nothing more than a social construct of our lacking imaginations. So instead of learning proper grammar and sentence structure – glaring signs of racism – students are now focused on knowing the correct pronoun for the approximate 75 varieties of gender out there.

Needless to say, the liberal dream weavers pushed the mindf**kery too far and Loudon County, Virginia exploded into a modern day civil war between Republicans and Democrats. In fact, so great was the backlash against the unabashed educators that the National School Boards Association addressed a letter to Joe Biden where they compared the agitated parents to “a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.” That shows how venal, weak-minded and thin-skinned the limpid left has become: it can’t even handle a dressing down by disgruntled soccer moms without calling in the Feds. The response by the establishment was no less pathetic.

I want to thank the Loudoun County school board. None of this would have been possible without you. Tonight’s result was your handiwork. Congratulations!

— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) November 3, 2021

Instead of telling the teachers union to grow a proverbial pair and face the music, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland fell into full metal jacket mode, directing the FBI to meet with local law enforcement to determine how to open “lines of communication for threat reporting, assessment, and response.” Needless to say, that directive didn’t go down well with parents, or with Republican Senator Ted Cruz, especially considering that no acts of violence had been committed.

Here is where Terry McAuliffe put his political ambitions to pasture once and for all. With a degree of tone-deafness typically found only in nursing homes and CNN studios, the gubernatorial wannabe declared at the debates that, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” At this point, Glenn Youngkin could have taken a long swig of Jack Daniels from a brown paper bag on stage and he still would have become governor.

On a cautionary side note, Republicans would be wise not to bank too much on Mr. Youngkin, who seems to be cut from the same pricey cloth as his Euro contemporary across the pond, French President Emmanuel Macron. Both of these relative newcomers to the political stage emerged from the murky world of finance – Youngkin from the Washington-based Carlyle Group, where George H.W. Bush Sr. had once served, impeccably, of course, as a senior advisor; Macron hails from Rothschild & Co. where he was an investment banker. I only mention the connection because my faith in the U.S. election system (and those held abroad) has been shaken to the point where it is difficult to imagine fair and honest elections, but rather shady selections in secret retreats – a bit like Eyes Wide Shut meets The Manchurian Candidate. But I digress.

Let’s be clear about something: the small and hugely overpublicized contingency of radical progressives, espousing Cultural Marxist claptrap, has little in common with America; that smack of reality does not seem to have hit the Democratic Party yet only because they have been deluded into believing that Joe Biden’s (still unexplained) victory over Donald Trump somehow legitimized their unhinged, un-American ideals. The fact is these people live in some phony facsimile of the country beamed into their living rooms each evening courtesy of the legacy media dinosaurs. Rather than taking their talking points from the detached talking heads of Lemon, Maddow and Cuomo, for example, the Democrats should have paid heed to time-tested political strategists, like James Carville.

In an interview with PBS NewsHour, the ‘Ragin’ Cajun’ nailed it when he blamed McAuliffe’s defeat on “stupid wokeness.”

“Don’t just look at Virginia and New Jersey [where the incumbent Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy narrowly defeated his Republican challenger, Jack Ciattarelli]. Look at Long Island, look at Buffalo, look at Minneapolis, even look at Seattle, Washington,” Carville railed, and not for the first time. “I mean, this ‘defund the police’ lunacy, this take Abraham Lincoln’s name off of schools. I mean — people see that.”

“Some of these people need to go to a ‘woke’ detox center or something,” he added. “They’re expressing a language that people just don’t use, and there’s backlash and a frustration at that.”

The irony here is that the Democrats never stopped talking about how Donald Trump alienated himself from the ‘suburban woman’ electorate, yet they have gone out of their way to do exactly the same thing with their woke insanity. Instead of trying to appease the progressive prima AOC donnas who have tarnished the Democratic brand name, perhaps irreparably, the Democrats would do well to consider what their radical turn to the left looks like for average Americans –the omnipotent soccer moms and dads. It’s easy to wager that for every lewd book that appears on school library shelves, and every new racist slander hurled at innocent folks, to every violent crime committed by a migrant crossing the border illegally, the Democrats lose considerable ground with their base.

The woke flag may be flying high inside of Democratic headquarters, but in towns and cities across America it looks every bit as ominous as the appearance of a Jolly Roger on the horizon. In short, the Democrats must ditch the woke, or they will, invariably, go broke.

By Ben NORTON

Just days before Nicaragua’s November 7 elections, top social media platforms censored top Nicaraguan news outlets and hundreds of journalists and activists who support their country’s leftist Sandinista government.

The politically motivated campaign of Silicon Valley censorship amounted to a massive purge of Sandinista supporters one week before the vote. It followed US government attacks on the integrity of Nicaragua’s elections, and Washington’s insistence that it will refuse to recognize the results.

The United States sponsored a sadistically violent coup attempt in Nicaragua in 2018, which resulted in hundreds of deaths in a desperate effort to overthrow the democratically elected government of President Daniel Ortega.

Since the putsch failed, both the Donald Trump and Joe Biden administrations have imposed several rounds of devastating sanctions on Nicaragua. The US Congress plans to levy new heavy-handed sanctions against Nicaragua following the November 7 elections.

Silicon Valley’s crackdown on pro-Sandinista journalists and activists was part and parcel of the US government’s political assault on Nicaragua.

Facebook and Instagram – both of which are owned by the newly rebranded Big Tech giant Meta – suspended 1,300 Nicaragua-based accounts run by pro-Sandinista media outlets, journalists, and activists in a large-scale crackdown on October 31.

Days before, Twitter did the same, purging many prominent pro-Sandinista journalists and influencers.

On November 1, Sandinista activists whose accounts were suspended by Facebook and Instagram responded by posting videos on Twitter, showing the world that they are indeed real people. But Twitter suspended their accounts as well, seeking to erase all evidence demonstrating that these Nicaraguans are not government bots or part of a coordinated inauthentic operation.

Twitter’s follow-up censorship was effectively a double-tap strike on the freedom of speech of Nicaraguans, whose apparent misdeed is expressing political views that challenge Washington’s objectives.

Insane! Facebook/Instagram falsely claimed left-wing Nicaraguans are govt-run bots, censoring them. So they posted videos on Twitter showing they’re real. But now Twitter is suspending them too!

This is a coordinated purge of Sandinistas, days before Nicaragua’s Nov. 7 election https://t.co/sB7COoxl7Q pic.twitter.com/E2EPVAK5tx

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) November 1, 2021

The thousands of accounts censored by Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter collectively had hundreds of thousands of followers, and represented some of the biggest and most influential media outlets and organizations in Nicaragua, a relatively small country of 6.5 million people.

US Big Tech companies suspending all of these accounts mere days before elections could have a significant, tangible impact on Nicaragua’s electoral results.

The purges exclusively targeted supporters of the socialist, anti-imperialist Sandinista Front party. Zero right-wing opposition supporters in Nicaragua were impacted.

Facebook published a report on November 1 claiming the Sandinistas it censored were part of a “troll farm run by the government of Nicaragua and the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) party” that had engaged in “coordinated inauthentic behavior.”

This is demonstrably false. In reality, what Facebook/Instagram did is purge most high-profile Sandinista supporters on the platforms, then try to justify it by claiming that average Sandinista activists are actually government-run bots.

Facebook implicitly admitted this fact by conceding in the report that there were “authentic accounts” purged in the massive social media crackdown. But Facebook refused to differentiate between the authentic accounts and the alleged “inauthentic” accounts, naming none and instead lumping them all together in order to justify erasing their digital existence.

Unlike Facebook’s investigators, this reporter, Ben Norton, is based in Nicaragua and personally knows dozens of the Nicaraguans whose accounts were censored, and can confirm that they are indeed real people organically expressing their authentic opinions – not trolls, bots, or fake accounts.

I interviewed more than two dozen Sandinista activists whose personal accounts were suspended, and published videos of some of them below, to prove that Facebook’s claims are categorically false.

Facebook’s security team is run by former high-level US government officials

The Facebook report falsely depicting average Sandinista activists as government trolls was co-authored by Ben Nimmo, the leader of Meta’s “Threat Intelligence Team.”

The Grayzone has exposed Nimmo as a former press officer for the US-led NATO military alliance and paid consultant to an actual covert troll farm: the Integrity Initiative, which was established in secret by British military officers to run anti-Russian influence operations through Western media.

Nimmo has served as head of investigations at Graphika, another information warfare initiative that was set up with funding from the US Defense Department’s Minerva Institute, and operates with support from the Pentagon’s top-secret Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Nimmo, who is also a senior fellow at the Western government-funded Atlantic Council, meddled in Britain’s 2020 election by smearing leftist Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn as the vessel for a supposed Russian active measures operation.

The latest Nimmo-engineered pseudo-scandal highlights Facebook’s role as an imperial information weapon whose security team has been essentially farmed out of the US government.

The head of security policy at Facebook, Nathaniel Gleicher, promoted Nimmo’s report, echoing his false claims.

Before moving to Facebook, Gleicher was director for cybersecurity policy at the White House National Security Council. He also worked at the US Department of Justice.

Gleicher clarified that when Facebook accused Nicaragua of running a supposed “troll farm,” it “means that the op is relying on fake accounts to manipulate & deceive their audience.”

According to this definition, Facebook’s report is completely wrong. Many of the accounts it suspended were run by everyday Nicaraguans, and The Grayzone has interviewed them and posted videos below.

1/ Today we shared the removal of a domestic CIB network in Nicaragua that was run by the government of Nicaragua and the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) party.https://t.co/505nHhgljV

— Nathaniel Gleicher (@ngleicher) November 1, 2021

Facebook’s “director of threat disruption,” David Agranovich, also shared Nimmo’s false report.

Like Gleicher, Agranovich worked at the US government before moving to Facebook, serving as director of intelligence for the White House National Security Council.

1/ Today we shared our latest monthly CIB report, which includes a deep-dive into a network in Nicaragua that was run by the government of Nicaragua and the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) party. https://t.co/2S36MInjeh

— David Agranovich (@DavidAgranovich) November 1, 2021

Both of these US National Security Council veterans actively promoted Facebook’s coordinated purge of pro-Sandinista Nicaraguans.

If you want to know why Facebook/Instagram is purging average Nicaraguans, falsely claiming they’re gov’t “trolls,” this might explain why:

This is Facebook’s director of “threat disruption.” He was formerly director of intelligence for the White House National Security Council https://t.co/L8vtdX5kkv pic.twitter.com/7quffeeo5l

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) November 1, 2021

The Grayzone contacted Facebook with a request for comment. The head of security communications, Margarita Z. Franklin, replied without any comment, simply linking to Nimmo’s report.

When The Grayzone followed up and asked Franklin about Facebook suspending many real-life Nicaraguans who support their government but are very much not bots, she did not respond.

Meet the Nicaraguans censored by Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter

The Grayzone spoke with more than two dozen living, breathing Sandinista activists, whom this reporter knows and has met in person, and who were purged in the social media crackdown.

Many said this was the second or third time their accounts had been censored. Several had their Facebook and Twitter accounts removed during a violent US-backed right-wing coup attempt in 2018.

Multiple activists said they are afraid Washington will sponsor another coup attempt or destabilization operations following Nicaragua’s November 7 elections, and because they were banned on social media, the Sandinista supporters will be unable to inform the outside world about what is actually happening in their country.

Ligia Sevilla

Here is Nicaraguan Sandinista activist Ligia Sevilla @ligiasevilla_, who was censored by Facebook@Meta falsely claimed she’s a “fake account,” part of a government-run “troll farm”

Will Facebook retract its false claims and restore her account?@benimmo@DavidAgranovich@olgs7 https://t.co/mDx9QvvtlU pic.twitter.com/wpykMeFon7

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) November 1, 2021

Sandinista influencer Ligia Sevilla, who had more than 5,500 followers on her personal Instagram account, which was suspended along with her Facebook profile, proclaimed, “I’m not a bot; I’m not a troll. And my social media accounts were censored. Maybe Facebook doesn’t allow us to be Sandinistas?”

After Sevilla shared this video to verify her authenticity, Twitter suspended her account as well – a sign of a coordinated censorship campaign targeting Sandinistas on social media.

Franklin Ruiz

And here is Nicaraguan Sandinista activist Franklin Ruiz G. @ElChequelito, whose personal account was censored by Facebook, which falsely claimed he is a government-run bot/troll.

Still no comment on this political censorship by@Meta@benimmo@DavidAgranovich @ngleicher@olgs7 pic.twitter.com/KTthCikmgi

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) November 1, 2021

Sandinista activist Franklin Ruiz, whose personal Facebook page was suspended, published a video message as well: “I want to tell you that we are human beings; we are people who, on Facebook, are defending our revolution, defending our country. We are not bots, as Facebook says, or programmed trolls.”

After Ruiz shared this video on Twitter, the platform purged him too.

Hayler Gaitán

This is another Nicaraguan Sandinista activist, Tyler Moreno Diaz @AlexdiazTyler, who was falsely dubbed a government-run bot by Facebook and had his account suspended.

Why won’t @Meta admit its “troll farm” report is totally bogus?@DavidAgranovich@olgs7@benimmo@ngleicher pic.twitter.com/bDS3E5ngre

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) November 1, 2021

Hayler Gaitán, another Sandinista activist censored by Facebook, published a video explaining, “”I am a young communicator. I am not a troll, as Facebook says, or a bot.”

“I am a young communicator who shares information about the good progress in Nicaragua,” he continued. “We enjoy free healthcare, free education, and other programs that benefit the Nicaraguan people, and that we have been building throughout our history. And they have wanted to take that from us, but they will never be able to.”

After Gaitán posted this video on Twitter, it suspended his account as well.

Darling Huete

This is a Nicaraguan journalist, Darling Huete @DarlingHHuete, who was falsely dubbed a “government-run troll” by Facebook and had her personal account suspended.@Meta refuses to comment on this clearly outrageous censorship scandal@benimmo@DavidAgranovich@ngleicher@olgs7 pic.twitter.com/nyjswjo1Fb

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) November 1, 2021

Darling Huete is a Nicaraguan journalist whose personal Facebook account was also censored.

“I’m here to tell you that Facebook censored my account, according to it because my account is a troll account or fake account, something that is not true. My account has been active for more than seven years,” she said in a video she posted on Twitter.

“This is clearly political censorship,because I support the government of Nicaragua, so they have decided that my opinion, or my way of thinking, is not appropriate according to the absurd policies of Facebook,” Huete lamented.

After Huete shared this video, Twitter deleted her account, too.

Huete told The Grayzone this is the second time her Facebook and Twitter accounts were suspended. The first time was during the violent US-backed right-wing coup attempt in Nicaragua in 2018.

Daniela Cienfuegos

This is another Nicaraguan Sandinista supporter, Daniela Cienfuegos @dani100sweet, an activist in the Red de Jóvenes Comunicadores, which Facebook/Instagram suspended and falsely claimed is a gov’t bot farm.

Any comment from @Meta?@benimmo@DavidAgranovich @ngleicher@olgs7 pic.twitter.com/md32dU6WZp

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) November 1, 2021

Daniela Cienfuegos, an activist with the pro-Sandinista Red de Jóvenes Comunicadores (Network of Youth Communicators), posted a video on Twitter saying, “I wanted to tell you that, no, we are not trolls. We are people who dedicate ourselves to communicate from the trenches, to inform the Nicaraguan people, and on the international stage.”

After Cienfuegos published this, Twitter deleted her account as well.

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter censor top pro-Sandinista Nicaraguan journalists and media outlets

The above are just a small sample of Nicaraguans who were falsely smeared as “government-run trolls” by Facebook and erased from social media.

But it wasn’t just individual Nicaraguans who were censored. Major Nicaraguan media outlets that provide a pro-Sandinista perspective were also removed.

On the night of October 31, Facebook removed 140 pages and 24 groups, 100% of which were pro-Sandinista. Among those deleted were:

• official Sandinista newspaper Barricada, which had more than 65,000 followers
• popular youth-run left-wing media outlet Redvolución, which had more than 81,000 followers
• the Red de Jóvenes Comunicadores, or Young Communicators Network, which brings together journalists and media activists from the Sandinista Youth social movement, and which had more than 71,000 followers
• and the individual profiles of dozens of Nicaraguan journalists, activists, and influencers.

At the exact same time as the Facebook purge, its sister platform Instagram took down many of the same pages:

• Barricada, which had more than 9,500 followers
• Redvolución, which had more than 22,700 followers,
• Red de Jóvenes Comunicadores, which had more than 12,600 followers
• and, once again, the personal pages of dozens of Nicaraguan journalists, activists, and influencers.

Instagram also suspended the account of the fashion organization Nicaragua Diseña, which is very popular in Nicaragua, and had more than 42,700 followers.

Unlike the other purged accounts, Nicaragua Diseña is decidedly not a political organization. It is run by Camila Ortega, a daughter of the president, but Nicaragua Diseña intentionally goes out of its way to avoid politics, trying to bring together opposition supporters and Sandinistas in apolitical cultural events.

Just a few days before the coordinated Facebook-Instagram purge, Twitter also removed the accounts of the most prominent pro-Sandinista journalists and influencers on the platform.

On October 28, Twitter suspended the accounts of media activists @ElCuervoNica, @FloryCantoX, @TPU19J, @Jay_Clandestino, and numerous others. Together, these pro-Sandinista communicators had tens of thousands of followers.

Many of them, such as @CuervoNica and @FloryCantoR, had been censored before. This was the second or third account they had created, only to be censored for their political views.

Twitter’s politically motivated censorship is again targeting Latin American leftists:

Influential Nicaraguan Sandinista supporters @ElCuervoNica and @FloryCantoX were suspended

This is the SECOND time the US government thought police at Twitter suspended @FloryCantoR‘s account pic.twitter.com/xlZJWVO9vt

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) October 29, 2021

Silicon Valley’s censorship of Nicaragua always goes in one direction: It is leftist, anti-imperialist supporters of the Sandinista government who are censored, while right-wing opposition activists, many of whom are funded by the US government, are verified and promoted by the social media monopolies.

Numerous Nicaraguan journalists whose individual social media accounts were suspended told The Grayzone they were upset and angry, as they had spent countless hours of work over years building their pages, doing journalism, and sharing information. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter deleted all of that labor in mere seconds.

Some said they fear this censorship will also harm them financially, as they had relied on their social media accounts as a source of income.

In addition to clearly infringing on their rights to freedom of the press and freedom of expression, the latest wave of Silicon Valley censorship has done concrete economic damage to working-class Nicaraguans who had relied on Facebook and Instagram to run small businesses. Several of those affected told The Grayzone they are now locked out of the Facebook and Instagram pages they had used to sell products like food, clothing, or homemade jewelry.

This Silicon Valley censorship thus not only greatly hinders these working-class Nicaraguans’ ability to do their work as journalists, given social media is an integral part of contemporary journalism, but also deprived them of extra sources of income they had relied on to support their families.

Given the US government’s hyperbolic claims of Russian meddling in its 2016 presidential election, the social media purge it has inspired in Nicaragua is stained with irony. After years of investigations, and billions of dollars spent, the only ostensible evidence Washington found of Russian interference was some Facebook posts, including absurd humorous memes.

If these alleged Russian Facebook memes constitute a Pearl Harbor-style attack on North American democracy, as top US government officials have claimed, then what does it mean for Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to censor highly influential pro-Sandinista media outlets, journalists, and activists mere days before Nicaragua’s elections?

Aaron Mate discusses Russian troll farms’ dangerous Jesus masturbation memes that allegedly won Donald Trump the election. Full ep https://t.co/0izDspjRxX @aaronjmate @mtaibbi #UsefulIdiotsPod @RollingStone @RSPolitics #russiagate pic.twitter.com/XG2cH6NZ8F

— Katie Halper (@kthalps) May 18, 2020

Besides meddling in foreign elections, North American social media monopolies have systematically and repeatedly censored journalists, politicians, and activists in numerous countries targeted by Washington for regime change, such as Venezuela, Iran, Syria, Russia, and China. On numerous occasions, these Silicon Valley companies have admitted such purges were carried out at the request of the US government.

The Grayzone has documented the many ways in which these Big Tech giants collaborate with Western governments, while promoting US state media and silencing people in countries that Washington has deemed its adversaries.

For their part, the Nicaraguans censored by Facebook and Twitter have vowed to continue their work.

Redvolución wrote that it will keep struggling in the “digital trenches” to “defend the revolution.”

Quenri Madrigal, a prominent Sandinista activist and social media influencer, commented, “We have already witnessed the forms of online censorship targeting other countries, like Cuba, Venezuela, Russia, and Iran. There is a tyranny of transnational technology and social media corporations. They are instruments that don’t belong to the peoples.”

thegrayzone.com

By Diana JOHNSTONE

There was no clear winner in Germany’s Sept. 26 elections. No party has a strong majority, no strong leader is in sight. Weak national leadership has become the model for liberal Western democracy. And weak leadership is unlikely to resist powerful established interests.

To put it more clearly, the forthcoming German government, to be formed by a coalition of parties, is not very likely to rebel against the influence of the pro-U.S. Atlanticist institutions that have directed the policy of the German Federal Republic since it was founded in 1949 under Washington’s auspices. The United States exercises direct and daily influence on German policy-makers in NATO, German media, civil society organizations and personal relationships built up through contacts of all kinds. 

Only two of the five parties in the new Bundestag are at all critical of NATO, and they are on the polar margins: the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) on the right and Die Linke (The Left) on the left, outside whichever government emerges. They are the only ones in favor of normalized relations with Russia. Both have at times appealed to neglected East Germans but there is animosity between them.

Which Coalition?

Bundestag composition after 2021 election. (Furfur/Wikimedia Commons)

The election marked an unexpected comeback for the SPD, clearly not out of any burst of enthusiasm but from rejection of the others. The CDU lead candidate Armin Laschet ran a pitifully weak campaign, leading his party to an historic low. During the campaign, a video from 2016, at a time when many East Germans were opposing Merkel’s mass immigration policy, showed Laschet displaying total contempt for his East German compatriots by claiming that the German Democratic Republic (socialist East Germany) “permanently destroyed not only the country but also the minds of the people. …whole swaths of the country have not learned that you have respect for other people.”

This contributed to collapsing support for the CDU in the East.

The leading SPD candidate, Olaf Scholz, was not very exciting either. But he looked good compared to Laschet, so voters unexpectedly fell back to voting for the SPD. Logically, Scholz should head the new government. But the SPD has early on spoken out against a renewal of the “Big Coalition” between SPD and CDU (the GroKo) and the CDU would not like to be in second place.

So the odds are on a “traffic light” coalition between the SPD (red), the Greens and the FDP (liberals, gold or yellow) who got 11.5 percent and 92 seats.

Stop and Go Coalition

Annalena Baerbock (Wikimedia Commons)

Last April, the German Greens were dreaming that they would come in first, as opinion polls then suggested, and their young, inexperienced candidate, Annalena Baerbock, would succeed Angela Merkel as Chancellor. In those days, she was sycophantishly interviewed for the Atlantic Council by Fareed Zakaria. For a German who had studied in both the U.S. and the U.K., her English was surprisingly awkward, but as she praised eternal U.S.-German collaboration, she helped it along by echoing a trite phrase or two from Joe Biden.

Biden 2019: “The United States urgently needs to embrace greater ambition on an epic scale to meet the scope of this challenge.”

Baerbock 2021: “We urgently need to embrace greater ambition on an epic scale to meet the scope of the problems.”

However, as the campaign proceeded, Baerbock’s utter mediocrity became more and more blatant, enforced by revelations that she had hyped her CV, failed to declare party payments and heavily plagiarized equally boring sources for her book, optimistically titled Now: How we renew our country.

Finally, the Greens fell into third place, with 14.8 percent of the vote and 118 seats. That is not enough to form a coalition majority with either of the two big centrist parties, so if the SPD and CDU don’t get together, the FDP must be part of the equation along with the Greens. This promises domestic policy quarrels from the start, as the FDP wants an austere budget with low taxes and the Greens want the opposite. The FDP is after all, fundamentally a free market business party whereas the Greens want to raise taxes on higher incomes. And their differences do not stop there.

Together Against Russia

Merkel and Putin in Moscow, January 2020. (Russian President/Wikimedia Commons)

But there is one area on which these two runner-up parties can agree: hostility toward Russia. The Merkel government, with its belligerent woman defense minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, has already been an enthusiastic participant in NATO military war game gestures of hostility toward Russia, and a “traffic light” coalition threatens to be even worse.

The leading Green candidate has gone farthest in Russia-bashing, even demanding that Germany refuse to purchase natural gas from Russia via the now-completed Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Considering the growing threat of energy shortages resulting from Germany’s simultaneous rejection of nuclear power (basically out of fear of a Fukushima-type accident) and planned rapid phase-out of coal (for reasons of CO2 emissions), rejection of Russian natural gas is a luxury Germany simply can’t afford. Especially since Germany’s large park of windmills have since last year failed to produce the renewable energy expected when the wind refused to blow.

One might think that the pressing need for Russian gas would incite German business interests to impose a normalization of German-Russian relations. But this does not seem to be happening.

U.S.-led sanctions have decreased Russian-German trade in recent years. And somehow, there is a trend in German ruling circles to forgo normal commercial relations with Russia in favor of extending decisive German influence over countries between Germany and Russia, notably the large, mismanaged, potential economic prize that is Ukraine.

Anglo Attitude in Germany

Under U.S. tutelage for decades, much of the present German ruling class seems to have interiorized the peculiar American imperial attitude, an arrogant power projection draped in political self-righteousness. This characteristic Anglo-American attitude, forged in the British Empire, is currently to be found in Germany and northern Europe, and will find expression in the virtual “Summit for Democracy” which President Biden is convening in December. This is intended to solidify a new ideological Cold War between the Good, led by the United States, and the Evil—those who are not allowed in the club.

Joschka Fischer (Wikimedia Commons)

The community of Democracies will proclaim themselves champions of combating authoritarianism, fighting corruption, and promoting respect for human rights. The countries opposed by these paragons of virtue will be condemned for their sins and can be considered fair game for sanctions, subversion and whatever other cybernetic or military means may induce them to repent and take the path of Western virtue.

Nobody is more permeated with this self-righteousness than the Green Party of Germany. This makes it the perfect partner in a German government that wants to overcome its repentance for World War II and wage a “Good War” – as it did bombing Yugoslavia in 1999 with Green Joschka Fischer as foreign minister.

The Story Tellers

After over 75 years of military and political occupation by the United States, Germany and Japan are obvious candidates for a Washington-led reconstitution of the Axis Powers, opposing Russia and China as in the past, but proclaiming an ideology of anti-fascism, anti-authoritarianism, human rights, not to mention gender variety and equality.

The fascists felt good about themselves in their day, and the anti-authoritarians can feel good about themselves in theirs. They are helped along by the storytellers not only in the mainstream media but also, for policy-makers in Western governments, by the foundations, the think tanks, financed by a “civil society” that includes big investors in the weapons industry.

A recent strategy paper published by the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP) outlines a more aggressive German foreign policy. Faced with alleged Russian propaganda and “targeted disinformation” by Russia intended to “damage NATO’s reputation,” the paper calls for creation of a “non-governmental rating agency” to evaluate media. By a funny coincidence, YouTube just expelled the Russian German-language news channel RT-de (which can still be viewed on Internet).

But the DGAP also calls for more determined “action against enemies of democracy in Germany and the EU.” Better still, it demands stronger German interference in Russia’s internal affairs to promote change.

Think tank analysis bases its alarm over “the Russian threat” on a far-fetched analysis of the Ukrainian crisis of 2014. To anyone with any knowledge of the historic background and a bit of common sense, Russia’s moves in response to the U.S.-backed coup in Kiev are perfectly clear and rational.

The U.S. installed an anti-Russian puppet government declaring its desire to join NATO. This was an immediate threat to Russia’s principal long-standing naval base in Crimea, so long as Crimea was part of Ukraine. But since the population of Crimea was largely Russian and had never wanted to be part of Ukraine (it was transferred from Russia to Ukraine in 1954 without consulting the population when both were part of the Soviet Union), the easy solution for Russia was to sponsor a referendum in which Crimeans predictably voted to return to Russia.

This peaceful return was then willfully interpreted as a signal that Russia was preparing to invade and conquer its neighbors. The Baltic States, Poland and even German leaders all feign alarm at this preposterous interpretation.

However, even the Greens, who excel in verbal Russia-bashing, do not want Germany to spend the 2 percent of economic output on “defense” as demanded by Washington. When the Germans call for a special EU defense force, they are in an ambiguous position. They do not want the same such force as advocated by the French, whose superior arms, including nuclear weapons, would be dominant. Rather, for the Germans any such force must be closely tied to NATO. In fact, nobody seriously imagines the EU defending itself against Russia, and a more or less independent EU force would surely be earmarked for interventions in the global South or the Balkans, in cahoots with the U.S. and NATO.

The Vanishing Left

Sahra Wagenknecht addresses media. (Die Linke/Flickr)

Of the two marginalized opposition parties, the AfD maintained its strength in two East German states, Saxony and Thüringen, winning 10.3 percent of the vote and 83 seats. As for the Left party, Die Linke , with 4.9 percent of the vote it failed to go over the 5 percent hurdle for Bundestag membership, but got 39 members anyway due to a provision in Germany’s complex voting system which lets a party in if three of its candidates come in first in their conscription. Die Linke did so in Berllin and Leipzig and thus has 39 members in the parliament, including its most popular member, Sahra Wagenknecht, whom much of the party had been attacking throughout the campaign.

Wagenknecht led up to the election by publishing a book entitled Die Selbstgerechten (the Self-Righteous) in which she attacked the contemporary identity politics, woke left and called for a return to traditional left defense of the working class and anti-war policies. The exemplary self-righteous are the Greens, but their example had been adopted so thoroughly by Left party leaders that they felt targeted by Wagenknecht and struck back.

The election was a foreseeable disaster for Die Linke, and Wagenknecht had foreseen it clearly. During the campaign, Linke leaders were enchanted by the imaginary prospect of getting into the government as junior partner in a “red-green-red” coalition between the SPD, the Greens and themselves. To facilitate this unlikely outcome, they spent their time expressing their willingness to set aside their principles out of a realism that was anything but realistic.

The mainstream parties demanded that any party entering the government must be in favor of NATO. Die Linke is formally for its abolition, but leaders made clear they would forget about that.

As a pale copy of the Greens, they lost most of their voters. Notably, the Left party got fewer working class votes than any other party.

In its compromise mood, Die Linke in its campaign did not play up its role as the principal anti-war party in Germany. It failed to pound away at exposing anti-Russian propaganda designed to win public support for the NATO military buildup surrounding Russia.

Only the AfD pointedly asked the German government to clarify details of the preposterous Alexei Navalny tall tale sold to the public to arouse self-righteous indignation against Russia. In a parliamentary question, the AfD asked the government whether, as reported, Bellingcat financed Navalny’s expensive stay in the Black Forest where he made a dishonest propaganda film attacking Vladimir Putin. With some delay, the German government claimed to neither know nor care enough to investigate.

The Navalny story is crammed with improbabilities, blatant contradictions and strong indications of being the creation of British intelligence. A left party concerned with preserving peaceful relations should have been leading the challenge to get to the truth. It should have been speaking out against German participation in plans to send military forces to the Pacific to annoy China. But instead, Left leaders yearned to be accepted among the self-righteous.

The next German government will be self-righteous without them.

consortiumnews.com

Just what shape Germany’s governing coalition will take is still unclear in the aftermath of the September 26 election, which saw the Social Democrats (SPD), led by finance minister Olaf Scholz, come away with just over a quarter of the vote, at 25.7 percent. The balance of power in Germany is now held by the Greens and the Free Democrats, which, taken together, received more votes than the victorious SPD or the Christian Democratic Union, the party of outgoing Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel.

The one thing that is certain is that after 16 years in power, Merkel will soon exit the scene. So the question that now arises is: What shape will post-Merkel Europe take?

Any answer must begin with an eye on the Élysée Palace, as French President Emmanuel Macron is set to become the senior most partner in the Franco-German partnership that has steered the EU since its founding in 1993.

There may be major changes afoot should Macron, motivated by the insult handed to him by the United States, the UK and Australia with AUKUS—a new trilateral security alliance —pursue his oft-stated desire for European strategic autonomy. As former State Department official Max Bergmann recently observed, AUKUS served to “empower stakeholders in Paris who advocate for a much cooler relationship with Washington and—tapping into the Gaullist foreign policy tradition—wish to be allied with the United States, but not necessarily aligned on key issues related to Russia and China.”

France takes over the six-month rotating presidency of the EU on January 1, 2022, but support already seems to be growing for closer military integration within the EU. On September 2, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell noted, “it is clear that the need for more European defense has never been as evident as today—after the events in Afghanistan.” Meanwhile, proposals have been put forward for the creation of a 5,000-soldier rapid reaction force.

American officials have long sought to put the brakes on any move toward an autonomous European defense capability. And Macron has a history criticizing the Atlantic alliance and what he has incisively referred to as the “imported neoconservatism” of his immediate predecessors, Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande. Macron once famously observed that NATO was experiencing “brain death” and appointed former French Foreign Minister Hubert Védrine to fill France’s seat on a NATO commission set up in 2020 to consider the alliance’s future. Védrine has described “the American desire to enlarge NATO to Ukraine” as “unfortunate.”

Should Macron succeed in setting up an independent European defense force, this would lessen NATO’s importance on the continent and give the United States an opportunity to reassess its commitments in the EU, particularly if U.S. President Joe Biden continues to pursue a policy of political isolation and military containment against China.

Greater EU autonomy would be a good thing for the United States and the world. It might even serve as an obstacle to the new cold war that the Anglo-American national security establishment seems intent on waging against Russia. And so it should be welcomed. After all, former U.S. President Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower, among other architects of the postwar world, never wanted the U.S. to permanently subsidize the European defense umbrella. Furthermore, there is little enthusiasm among the European public for a new cold war by the United States against both Russia and China, as a recent survey by the European Council on Foreign Relations confirms.

Should Marcon emerge victorious in the French presidential election in the spring of 2022, it would not be unreasonable to expect that he may double down on his Gaullist opposition to Atlanticism. In the surprising event he loses to Marine Le Pen, one should expect an even more radical break with the Anglo-sphere.

As things stand now, it looks as though post-Merkel Europe may finally see the Europeans stand on their own.

Ike would approve.

independentmediainstitute.org

It says a lot that AOC wasn’t even able to vote against an Israeli apartheid measure that everyone already knew would pass regardless of her vote.

I mean, how far gone is your progressive revolution if you’re not even allowed to have a perfectly safe performative “no” vote? If even the illusion of opposition is banned?

* * *

People say, “Why pick on AOC when other lawmakers are way worse?”

They’re not worse, they just perform different functions. The Manchins and Sinemas kill leftward movement openly, the AOCs encourage the left to feed their political energy into a party that’s built to kill leftward movement.

It happens that one of these manipulations is much easier for leftwardy-inclined people to see than the other; it’s easier to recognize Manchin and Sinema-type bullshit than AOC-type bullshit. So you’ll see some factions on the left putting special emphasis on pointing out the one that the general public needs a lot more help recognizing.

* * *

I don’t know who needs to hear this but there is no functional difference between a politician who votes a certain way because they want to and a politician who votes a certain way because systemic pressures push them to.

It’s like Trump supporters saying he wanted to fight the Deep State but the Deep State wouldn’t let him. It’s like, okay, so? Who gives a fuck? Either he’s an asshole or an impotent puppet, either way fuck him. Same with AOC and her constant establishment capitulations. Whether they’re serving the empire because they want to or because they have to, it’s clear and undeniable that electoral politics isn’t the way to advance the interests of normal human beings. The system simply does not allow for that.

The absolute least important thing in the universe is how some politician’s feelings are feeling inside. It does not matter what secret intentions they have in their heart. All that matters is what they do. If they can’t do what you need them to, it means they’re useless. Period.

* * *

The single greatest threat to freedom and democracy is not foreign governments, nor the authoritarian measures being implemented by our own governments, but the fact that giant media and tech companies are used to continuously manipulate the way people think about all of those governments.

You are not free if your mind is not free. It doesn’t matter if you were free to say and do whatever you want if the powerful are still actively manipulating the thoughts you think, because all your words and actions will arise from those thoughts. Mental sovereignty comes first.

* * *

In an alternate universe the governments of a parallel Earth responded to the pandemic by pouring money into healthcare systems, transferring wealth from their nations’ richest to their poorest, and saying “Here’s a new vaccine but it’s up to you whether you use it or not.”

* * *

It’s true that knowledge is power. That’s why the powerful work to control people’s access to knowledge through the internet and news media. It’s also why there’s privacy for the powerful and radical transparency for the public, instead of the other way around as it ought to be.

* * *

Biden proclaiming that the US is no longer at war because he moved a few thousand troops out of Afghanistan is the most Trump-like thing that has happened so far in this very Trumpian administration.

* * *

The US is like “We do not seek a new cold war, we simply seek to remain the unipolar dominator of the entire planet and maintain the ability to unilaterally destroy smaller nations which disobey us. And we’ll do anything to accomplish this, including waging a new cold war.”

* * *

George W Bush should never be able to give any speech anywhere without people in the audience cutting him off to yell about his war crimes.

* * *

Invented a highly effective new antidepressant that I hope to get to the market ASAP. It’s not a pill it’s just a big wad of cash taken by force from giant corporations.

* * *

Mothers and nurses work harder than any billionaire on earth.

* * *

People complain about how I do my thing here and say I should do it some other way, and I totally get it. One time I went to an AC/DC concert and they played not one note of smooth jazz. I was so angry.

* * *

We are ruled by a nuclear-armed globe-spanning power structure which is driving our world to its doom in myriad ways and that power structure has somehow seamlessly paced us from fearing terrorists to fearing Russian hackers to fearing anti-vaxxers instead of fearing it.

* * *

Someone who calls you an “anti-vaxxer” for expressing moderate and reasonable human rights concerns about brand new government policies that affect everyone deserves as much respect as someone who calls you an “anti-semite” for voicing legitimate criticisms of Israeli apartheid.

* * *

Having principles means having them even when they don’t further your personal agenda. You may enjoy the sight of having your politics enforced by gunpoint today, but it completely demolishes your voice and integrity when police brutality comes for you tomorrow. Those little self-serving lies that we tell ourselves about how our principles don’t apply here because of blah-blah reason are the levers by which the powerful manipulate us into further and further submission.

* * *

Propaganda works because it plugs into our most fundamental egoic mechanisms: identity and fear. Identify tightly with a group or political faction and you’ll accept propaganda which comes from there. Be driven by fear and that will be used to herd you into power-serving agendas.

If you want to free your mind from the chains of power it’s not enough to do research and memorize a bunch of facts. The most important step to freeing your mind from its shackles is to remove from yourself the psychological hooks to which those shackles are attached.

caityjohnstone.medium.com

Just as the Russian Federation goes to the polls in legislative elections this weekend, the European parliament launched an unprecedented attack on Russia’s sovereignty.

Some 74 percent of Europe’s 669 members of parliament (MEPs) voted on Thursday to approve a report calling for a staggering array of hostile moves towards Russia. The massive irony here is that this amounts to gross and explicit interference in Russia’s internal affairs by the European Union. This aggression is what the EU accuses Russia of without any credible evidence.

(Credibility warning: recall that the European parliament is the same disreputable chamber that voted two years to distort the history of World War Two by insinuating that the Soviet Union was partly responsible for starting the conflagration along with Nazi Germany.)

One particularly offensive theme in the latest report is the allegation that Russia’s elections held this weekend are not going to be legitimate. That’s even before they take place! And in that case, it urges the European Union to not recognize the new Russian parliament that emerges from the ballots. This is an incredibly idiotic way to further sabotage already-frayed relations between the EU and its largest European neighbor. It’s a gratuitous act of aggression.

What is doubly offensive is that Russia claims to have substantial evidence that the United States and its European allies have been interfering in Russia’s election by funding pseudo opposition groups and purported election monitors. One such monitor is Golos which is funded by USAID and the U.S.-based National Endowment for Democracy, both of which are fronts for the CIA. Then when the Russian electoral authorities restrict the subversive activities of such groups the Americans and Europeans decry “unfair elections”. This is what can be called a self-fulfilling prophecy.

One small mercy is that the European parliamentary vote is non-binding which means it can be ignored by the European Commission executive and any of the bloc’s 27 member states. And ignoring such a provocative move is what they should do if relations between the EU and Russia are not to be plunged into further turmoil.

Nonetheless, the European lawmakers’ attack on Russia is deserving of forthright condemnation. At a time when international tensions are becoming more fraught and confrontational, it is contemptible that the European parliament is promoting a hostile policy towards Russia (and China). Dialogue, diplomacy and international law are being undermined by unhinged calls for adversarial actions. The European parliament is being criminally irresponsible.

The rhetoric in the 32-page report approved by the European parliament is irrational, intemperate and incendiary. It repeatedly refers to the Russian government as the “Putin regime” and accuses the Russian state of “repressing” its own population as well as being a “threat” to European neighbors.

The report is a voluminous agitprop screed befitting a Cold War time-warp which advocates that the EU “should counterbalance the efforts of Russia and China to weaken democracy worldwide and destabilize the European order”.

This is while the United States and its European NATO allies build up military forces on Russia’s borders and while the U.S. this week set up a new military alliance – known as AUKUS – with Britain and Australia that is an audacious provocation to China’s security.

Lamentably, the geopolitical climate is one in which the world is sliding dangerously towards war. And to its utter shame, the European parliament – supposedly a bastion of democracy and rule of law – is recklessly pushing this destructive dynamic.

A few other choice hostile declarations in the European parliamentary report are calls for the EU to curb energy imports from Russia so as to “end dependence on Russian oil and gas”; calls for the EU to cut Russia off from international banking systems; and calls for the EU to strengthen cooperation with the United States and other like-minded partners to “defend democracy globally”.

The latter is particularly laughable coming after the United States left European so-called allies high and dry by its unilateral pullout from Afghanistan. Also this week, the U.S. move to form a new military alliance with Australia, providing the latter with nuclear-powered submarines, caused France to howl about being “stabbed in the back” by Washington owing to Paris losing out on a $50 billion naval contract with Canberra.

European lawmakers are voting like pathetic lackeys of the United States despite Europe being treated over and over again as a mere vassal.

Mick Wallace, an independent Irish MEP who voted against the anti-Russia report this week, said his fellow European lawmakers were slavishly following a U.S. agenda and not acting in the interests of European citizens.

“The U.S. does have a vested interest in driving a wedge between the EU and Russia – a financial one. And sadly right now, the EU lacks the courage to stand up to the Americans and follow their own best interests,” commented Wallace.

“The vote against Russia was no surprise,” he added. “The anti-Russia rhetoric has been growing for over two years now. It is primarily driven by the U.S. which has found it easy to persuade some EU members states to dance to their bidding. Obviously, the Baltic states are more than willing to comply, as is Poland, the Scandinavians and some Eastern European countries.”

However, Wallace contended that the majority vote is largely meaningless in practical reality.

He said: “It’s important to remember that while many of the German and French MEPs are voting with the Baltic states, Poland etcetera, it amounts to a bit of game-playing for them, rather than serious intent. Especially for the Germans who see the sense of having a good relationship with Russia, but with their own elections coming up, now is not the time to be making that argument.”

Here’s the kicker though. The European Union is facing a crisis of governing authority among its 500 million citizens. And it’s no wonder when so many of its parliamentarians are cowards, duplicitous, and serving a foreign power against the interests of its own citizens, including putting their security and peace in jeopardy.

Whose parliament is not legitimate?