The Real Election Meddling Will Happen Right Out In The Open

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

The election in November will be rigged.

This election rigging will not be done by Russia, or by China, or by Iran, or by far right coup plotters, or by some shadowy cabal tampering with voting machines. It will happen right out in the open, and will be perfectly legal.

In fact, it’s already happening.

This election is being rigged by the donor class. It’s being rigged by lobby groups. It’s being rigged by the plutocrat-owned mass media, and by plutocrat-controlled Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation. It’s being rigged by obscenely wealthy people who can afford to extract political favors in exchange for massive campaign donations in ways normal members of the public never could. It’s being rigged by people who’ve bought up so much narrative control in the form of media ownership that they can set agendas for the entire country in ways the average voter has no chance of ever doing.

These election meddlers dictate the political framework and information environment in which elections take place. They decide what positions will be considered normal and acceptable, and which will be considered radical and extreme. They predetermine the location and range on the political spectrum at which the election will be contested, and they restrict the Overton window of acceptable political opinion within which debates and discourse will occur.

They do this without any regard for the interests of ordinary members of the public, but solely for their own interests. That’s why you see candidates arguing not about WHETHER wars should happen, but WHICH wars should happen, and HOW they should occur. It’s why you see them accusing one another of being too weak and dovish on foreign policy instead of attacking each other as reckless warmongers. It’s why you see them arguing over who loves Israel the most and who will send it the most weapons, rather than who will do the most to end Israel’s genocidal atrocities. It’s why you see them debating who supports the most fracking and oil-drilling instead of promising to end ecocidal policies and stop the corporate destruction of our environment. It’s why you see them arguing over the minute details of what capitalism and imperialism should look like, rather than if capitalism and imperialism should exist at all.

It’s also why, when you see a candidate show up with a platform of ending war and militarism, stopping ecocide, and curbing the injustices and abuses of capitalism, they are treated as outlandish extremists. Not just by the rich and powerful, but also by ordinary members of the public who’ve been indoctrinated by all this manipulation into accepting status quo politics as the norm.

This rigged, controlled political environment is what we were all born into, so we’re conditioned to think it’s normal. It’s very easy to miss how freakish and abominable the whole thing is. How destructive it is. How much needless death and misery and devastation it causes. If we came from a healthy world into this one we would scream in horror, but because we’ve never lived in a healthy world, we can be manipulated into mistaking the sickness of this civilization for health.

Elections are rigged in this way by a fairly small group of plutocrats and empire managers, not just in the United States but throughout the western world. They rig our entire political system in their favor, and then have the gall to tell us we all need to freak out because some Russians made some Facebook memes near an election season.

This is not democracy. This is plutocracy. This is oligarchy. We’re just indoctrinated into calling it democracy, by the very same mass-scale psychological manipulations they use to keep it from being a democracy.

All US elections these days come with allegations of election interference, especially from the losing side. But it’s important to keep in mind that even in the unlikely event that those allegations were 100 percent true, they’d still be a tiny drop in the ocean compared to the election interference that’s already happening right out in the open.

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