Reflections on the 2020 Election: How the Elites Led us into Disaster
by John D. O’Connor
The following is an article originally published on Biz Pac Review. Read it HERE.
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Given a dispiriting razor-thin loss to Joe Biden in 2020, many disappointed Trump supporters suspected a highly choreographed, widespread campaign of media bias, speech suppression, and disinformation by elites. They also prophesized that the new President, an incompetent pledged to Progressive idiocy, would ruin our country. It gives no pleasure to now say that they were right on both counts.
In the glow of Joe Biden’s inauguration, our country’s elites dropped their hypocritical guard and celebrated their proudly admitted “conspiracy” to influence the election, in essence deceitfully, for the higher good of ridding us of Donald Trump. After all, Trump was a threat to democracy, they told us.
In February 2021, Time Magazine’s Molly Ball jubilantly took us behind the scenes as she told us of the intense, purportedly benign “conspiracy” of the country’s elite, vowing to stop at nothing to prevent a Trump victory. Their aim, she said, was to “keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy.”
She admitted that this was a “well-funded cabal of powerful people” working to “influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage, and control the flow of information.” She explained that they “were not rigging the election but fortifying it.”
All of this, well yes, rigging, was, she said, to combat “disinformation” and “voter suppression.” Some would interpret this to mean censorship and encouraging illegal voting.
One initiative of the group was a $300 million grant from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, to roll out thousands of unsupervised drop boxes, as the Initiative also demanded control of the voting count in many jurisdictions cash-strapped by COVID.
What was most effective about this unholy alliance was the successful effort, not to answer what elites considered “disinformation”, but, rather, to suppress it. As Ball described, a future Biden Justice Department official, for instance, met with Twitter’s Jack Dorsey on a plan to squelch conservative talking points on his site by “tagging them and taking them down.” They did this as well on other social media sites.
And, of course, the group admittedly took maximum political advantage of the George Floyd riots, somehow blaming Trump, who would have stopped them in their tracks, and not the Blue State politicians who encouraged them, two of whom ran on the Democrat ticket in 2024.
While the Trump forces post-election had claimed a widely-derided dirty conspiracy, after the inauguration Ball’s proud sources admitted their earlier pressure tactics against lawmakers and canvassing boards, including unleashing thousands of angry activists, crowing that as a result, these officials “stood up to Trump’s bullying.” In other words, they interfered with the democratic, civil process of contesting an election, the kind of contest they lauded when Al Gore did it.
Was Ball correct that this ”conspiracy” actually affected the election? It appears so, quite strongly. To shortcut, we can put aside thousands of anecdotes of election irregularity, which together led more than half of the country to conclude that more likely than not, the election was, in a word, “stolen.”
But, putting aside anecdotes, two sets of circumstances sealed the deal. First, the ubiquitous Chan Zuckerberg drop boxes were thousands of invitations to fraud. The documentary film 2000 Mules presented dramatic proof of what at least appeared to be fraudulent vote harvesting through “mules,” each dumping thousands of votes at multiple stations. The film drew savage left-wing attacks, but it is impossible to dismiss out of hand this impressive tour de force.
Given the millions of unsolicited mail-in ballots sent without voter request, how could there not have been some degree of vote harvesting fraud? That said, this horrifying situation does not mean that a legal challenge could ever be successful. Courts do not like million-witness trials.
The second, far more troubling tableau was the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story of the New York Post. The aforementioned Jack Dorsey, a conspirator lauded by Ball, censored the story, preventing all users from tweeting it. He was supported by a rogue FBI that had falsely warned Twitter and other social media outlets of Russian disinformation in the soon-coming laptop story.
Did the conspiracy’s pressure on state officials succeed in holding them firm? One easy example is Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, praised by Ball for “standing up” to Trump’s bullying. But Raffensperger was acting in self-preservation, because he had already been bullied pre-election by Democrat Stacy Abrams, who pushed the weak politician to agree to a court stipulation making signature verification and rejection virtually impossible in Georgia. What resulted from Raffensperger’s weakness in a state that Biden carried by 11,000 votes? Only 0.05% of Fulton County (Atlanta) ballots were disqualified, versus 3% historically. Clearly, the failure to reject improper ballots enabled Biden to barely prevail in the state.
Did this conspiracy affect the results? Of course. The suppression of the Biden laptop story alone, per polling, would have affected the votes of 9% of Biden voters, and clearly would have given the election to Trump.
The 2024 presidential election, with one of history’s highest percentage turnouts, was decided by 156,302,318 votes. But in 2020, with 4 million fewer eligible voters (240,628,443 voters in 2020 versus 244,666,890 voters in 2024), over 2 million more votes were counted, for a total of 158,429,631 votes cast in the 2020 presidential race. This statistic does not by itself prove election fraud, but is certainly consistent with it. Three states with a combined 40,000 vote margin for Biden, if reversed, would have given the 2020 election to Trump.
In Wisconsin, a partisan 4-3 Democratic Supreme Court majority allowed illegal mail-in votes to count. Georgia represented by the compromised Raffensperger, and Arizona, with Democrat Katie Hobbs as Secretary of State, kept those states from any meaningful investigation, in 11,000 vote margin states, not so much bowing to elite pressure as being part of it. Hobbs was an elected Democrat, while Raffensperger, of course, would only uncover his own incompetence if he investigated fully.
So, we can conclude that the cabal did in fact meaningfully influence the election. But how good was the government that the elite cabal foisted on us?
The answers are all too obvious. With the border invasion of millions, immediate strain was caused on social and law enforcement budgets. Biden’s open-border policy caused a dramatic increase as well in homelessness, as housing supply did not meet increased demand. Horrid inflation strained personal budgets and increased interest on governmental debt to over $1 trillion annually. The “Bidenomics” $2 trillion laws (the IRA and ARP), along with inflationary drilling restrictions, pushed the country toward both governmental and personal insolvencies. Biden’s strategic weakness caused worldwide instability and wars. Invective-filled hate messaging came out of the MAGA-assaulting Oval Office, along with indictments of the opposition. Unpopular, invasive social policies such as transgender sports, DEI discrimination in hiring and college admissions, and muzzling of the parents of school children all contradicted the will of the people.
The upshot is that the entire country, including many Trump-haters and uber-loyal Democrats, realize that the elites provided disastrous policies dishonestly sold by its captive media.
Commentary magazine’s media columnist Christine Rosen probably said it best:
[The] over-the-top displays of partisan bias by the media during this election cycle might have helped Trump get elected. This might be the first national election in which media bias proved fatal not for its intended target, but rather for the media themselves and their preferred political party, the Democrats. Unable to identify their own liabilities, they suffocated inside their own partisan bubble.
Failures should be, but probably won’t be, easily confessed by the elites as they look into the mirror: our policies were as unwise as they were unpopular; our messaging was both dishonest and divisive; we – not Trump and MAGA – relied on hate and tribal animosity; we, not Trump, criminalized our political opponents. It is doubtful that many elites will come to any of these realizations, but even fewer will confront the most damning core insight: those unsophisticated masses we constantly lecture, and upon whom we look down, are, collectively, much smarter and wiser than we.
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John D. O’Connor is a former federal prosecutor and the San Francisco attorney who represented W. Mark Felt during his revelation as Deep Throat in 2005. O’Connor is the author of the books, Postgate: How the Washington Post Betrayed Deep Throat, Covered Up Watergate and Began Today’s Partisan Advocacy Journalism and The Mysteries of Watergate: What Really Happened.