A nutso doomsday report is apparently influencing the Left’s preparations for Election Day. This likely will not end well for anyone.
The progressive initiative Fight Back Table has built a coalition of more than 50 left-wing organizations to prepare for the 2020 election, including mapping out numerous contingency plans, the Daily Beast reports.
Lately, there has been disagreement among the collective, which includes Planned Parenthood, the Service Employees International Union, MoveOn, and the Working Families Party, over whether they should keep their work in the shadows. The camp that believes the consortium should go public with its Election Day fears and contingencies has been “bolstered” by the release of a completely bonkers white paper produced by a group known as the Transition Integrity Project, whose members include John Podesta, Jennifer Granholm, Donna Brazile, Bill Kristol, Max Boot, and David Frum.
Formed in 2019, the Transition Integrity Project’s 22-page document, titled “Preventing a Disrupted Presidential Election and Transition,” sketches out completely insane election scenarios, including one where President Trump invokes the Insurrection Act to maintain an illegitimate claim to the White House.
Remember: This report is not just known to the 50 left-wing organizations operating under the aegis of Fight Back Table. It also is reportedly informing how some of them are preparing for Election Day.
“The potential for violent conflict is high,” reads the white paper. The word “violence” appears 15 times in the document; “chaos” nine times; “unrest” three times; and “crisis” 12 times.
It goes on to detail the results of simulations based on possible election outcomes, including a landslide victory for Democratic nominee Joe Biden, Biden winning only narrowly, and Trump again winning the Electoral College but losing the popular vote.
The simulations show the Trump campaign was “consistently more ruthless than Team Biden.” The document claims that to maintain power, the Trump administration may disseminate manipulated classified information, selectively release “classified documents for political purposes, fueling manufactured rumors,” freeze the “assets of individuals and groups the president determines to be a threat,” and restrict “internet communications in the name of national security.”
The white paper also asserts the president may “rely on surrogates to embed operatives inside protests to encourage violent action.” Trump may also “mobilize a range of law enforcement actors … who might, without proper training or if led by politicized actors, escalate matters.”
One simulation shows the Trump campaign “succeeded in invoking the Insurrection Act and sending active-duty military troops into U.S. cities to ‘restore order,’ ‘protect’ voting places, or confiscate ‘fraudulent’ ballots.”
Another simulation shows Attorney General William Barr “order[ing] the seizure of mail-in ballots to ensure that vote counting would stop.” The people running the scenarios also said there is “quite a bit of speculation that Trump might himself initiate a foreign crisis shortly after the election or during the transition, perhaps to change the media narrative.”
The report’s authors continue, speculating that a Democratic victory could result in “Infowars [publishing] a list of addresses, phone numbers, and other personal information of electors pledged to vote for Joe Biden. … [and] spurious claims linking 88 of these electors to [George] Soros and 14 to child sex trafficking.”
Lastly, the group’s election report details a scenario wherein the Biden campaign encourages “Western states, particularly California but also Oregon and Washington, and collectively known as ‘Cascadia,’ to secede from the Union,” barring meaningful electoral reforms.
“With advice from President Obama,” the report reads, “the Biden Campaign submitted a proposal to 1) Give statehood to Washington, DC and Puerto Rico; 2) Divide California into five states to more accurately represent its population in the Senate; 3) Require Supreme Court justices to retire at 70; and 4) Eliminate the Electoral College, to ensure that the candidate who wins to the popular vote becomes President.”
These scenarios have the same probability as one where Trump uses constitutional loopholes to remain in office past his term and then grants himself emergency powers to create a clone army, leading to the eventual dissolution of the Senate and the birth of the First Galactic Empire. This is the plot to Star Wars, by the way, which is to say the simulations outlined in the Transition Integrity Project document are about as realistic as a space opera.
The white paper is not a serious one. It is not based on any hard evidence or fact. It is not even based on rumor or anonymous claims. The paper is pure speculation, the absurd fantasies of people who spend far too much time watching cable news and playing on social media.
Amazingly, rather than tossing the wild-eyed and 100% speculative white paper directly in the trash, Democratic operatives are apparently using it as a guide for preparing for the election.
“It’s the hardest scenario,” one source told the Daily Beast of the possibility of an Electoral College-popular vote split. “It’s 2016. But it’s that plus all Trump has done on voter suppression.”
MoveOn Executive Director Rahna Epting said elsewhere, “It is very obvious that Trump is laying the groundwork for claiming victory no matter what. … We will fight to protect it from what we truly see as a president who has gone off the rails and taking this country down an authoritarian fascist path.”
To defeat Trump, all the Left had to do was not be insane. It could not manage even that.
