Non-violent grass roots reform and Democracy: Which Alternative Reality Are You Living In?

There should have been no doubt, back in 2015, that Donald Trump never intended to defend the working class or Drain the Swamp but establishment politicians really were as corrupt as he claimed they were, even if he did manage to make it even worse when he was in office, turning it into an insane satire. However, just because they should have recognized that Trump was an obvious demagogue long before the 2016 election, doesn't mean either Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden ever had much if any popular support, even if establishment media gave them obsession coverage trying to make them seem like the inevitable front funner in 2016 & 2020!

There's also little or no doubt that the election wasn't stolen from Donald Trump in 2020; however, that doesn't mean it was legitimate, despite all the media propaganda to make it seem so. The truth is that rigging elections has been going on for decades, and we haven't had a legitimate election in decades, assuming we ever had one. Some of the efforts to rig elections have been documented in several peer reviewed books, listed below; however, the most effective way to rig elections doesn't involve stuffing ballots or switching votes with computer hacking!

It involves rigging the media coverage so that only candidates supported by wealthy corporations, including the six oligarchs controlling over 95% of national media! And the evidence of this has been hidden in plain sight all along! Traditional media routinely tells us which presidential candidates are viable years ahead of time, typically predicting accurately at least one of the leading nominees, often predicting both. Even if they don't predict them they can narrow them down to about four or five, at the most, since they only cover candidates supported by campaign donors, ensuring that those that might represent the public much better get virtually no name recognition.

Bernie Sanders was the closest thing to an exception in my life time; and when it looked like he had a chance they began rigging the primaries against him, and for some reason, he pretended that rigging wasn't happening even when there was overwhelming evidence and endorsed Clinton or Biden, who both oppose almost all the progressive issues popular with the vast majority of the public.

The media has repeatedly claimed that Donald Trump says, "without evidence," that the election was rigged; and if you ignore the primaries, they may be right; however, if you look at the primaries there's an enormous amount of evidence showing they were rigged, even after giving Joe Biden an enormous amount of positive media coverage! They routinely refer to this as "The Big Lie;" however, they fail to remind people of an even bigger lie which they're trying to cover up!

Election rigging has been going on for hundreds of years, starting even before the American Revolution, when Colonial elections were rigged, including seats to the House of Burgess. Following the 2000 election disaster, when even the mainstream media was forced to report on it, for a little while there were several researchers that wrote about it including Andrew Gumbel, who wrote:

Andrew Gumbel "Steal This Vote" 2005

A few days before the November 2004 election, Jimmy Carter was asked what would happen if, instead of flying to Zambia or Venezuela or East Timor, his widely respected international election monitoring team was invited to turn its attention to the United States. His answer was stunningly blunt. Not only would the voting system be regarded as a failure, he said, but the shortcomings were so egregious the Carter Center would never agree to monitor an election there in the first place. "We wouldn't think of it," the former president told a radio interviewer. "The American political system wouldn't measure up to any sort of international standards, for several reasons."

What, after all, was to be done with a country whose newest voting machines, unlike Venezuela's, couldn't even perform recounts? A country where candidates, in contrast to the more promising emerging democracies of the Caucasus or the Balkans, were denied equal, unpaid access to the media? There were a number of reasons, in the sharply partisan atmosphere surrounding the Bush-Kerry race, to wonder whether campaign conditions didn't smack more of the Third World than the First. Every day, newspapers recounted stories of registration forms being found in garbage cans, or of voter rolls padded with the names of noncitizens, fictional characters, household pets, and the dearly departed. The Chicago Tribune, a paper that knows its voter fraud, having won a Pulitzer for its work on the infamous Daley machine, found 181,000 dead people on the registration lists of six key battleground states.

Bush opponents were all too inclined to believe, in fact, that the Republicans were about to steal the presidency, just as they believed it had been stolen the last time. The Republicans, for their part, laughed this off as conspiratorial nonsense, but they also weren't shy about announcing how hard or how dirtily they were prepared to fight if it came down to another Florida-style tug-of-war. Long Island's GOP congressman Pete King, caught on camera by the documentary maker Alexandra Pelosi during a White House function on election day, bragged even as the first polls were closing that Bush had already won. When Pelosi asked him how he knew, he answered, perhaps jokingly, perhaps not: "It's all over but the counting. And we'll take care of the counting." Complete article

The lack of media coverage for candidates not collecting massive amounts of money from corporations ensuring they never get the name recognition they need is hardly ever mentioned; Gumbel is one of the few sources that discuss it, and even he doesn't put enough emphasis on it. Traditional media certainly never reminds us that they choose who gets name recognition by simply refusing to cover candidates they don't support.

Andrew Gumbel and several other good researchers including Mark Crispin Miller in "Loser Take All" 2008 and Tracy Campbell in "Deliver the Vote: A History of Election Fraud, an American Political Tradition-1742-2004" 2006 do a much better job tracking massive amounts of voting fraud, both recent and going back hundreds of years. They don't cover the 2016 or 2020 elections after the fact; but they do explain how routine voting fraud was long before this, including how the fiasco from the 2000 elections was used as an excuse to create electronic voting without a paper ballot that could be recounted or checked.

Both Gumbel and Miller reported on how the "Help America Vote Act" (HAVA), which was supposed to solve the problems with the 2000 election may have caused many more problems, including the privatizing of the election process and making it harder, if not impossible to check for fraud. This act encouraged electronic voting and it didn't always come with a paper ballot. I reported more on some of the problems they pointed out and how they impacted the 2020 and 2016 elections in Epidemic 2020 Election Fraud Again and Can Hillary Clinton win without cheating? (2016) which also included many other efforts to suppress the vote or how exit polls didn't match the official totals.

In 2016, the polls using electronic voting without a paper trail went for Hillary Clinton by much larger margins than those with a paper trail. There were also much longer lines in both election years, for both primaries and the general election, in lower income areas, especially minorities. This became much more common following revisions in the way the Supreme Court interpreted the Voting Rights Act, declaring that many Southern states are no longer bound by many of the terms. Following this ruling many states across the country began cutting back on polling places in minority areas as part of a massive voter suppression operation.

Despite the media's claims that there was "no evidence" of voter fraud, if you look at the evidence from the primaries there was an enormous amount of it, some that they even reported themselves, although they seem to have forgotten it now, and only reported many incidents at the local level at the time. In many cases, when the traditional media did report on voter suppression, they often reported about a handful of voters that waited extremely long lengths of time, but eventually did vote, as if this was evidence of elections working, despite the flaws, thanks to the perseverance of those people. However, they didn't vote on an enormous number of people that couldn't wait that long and were disenfranchised; and if they mentioned that this was much more common in low income or minority areas, it was brief and quickly forgotten. Alternative researchers like Miller, Gumbel, Campbell, and others like Lee Camp that reported on more recent elections are much more thorough. There were an astronomical number of reports, either in traditional media or alternative media, about election irregularities in the primaries, which I listed in previous articles about both 2020 and 2016

If the enormous number of reports from credible sources, even if traditional media ignores most of them, aren't convincing enough; why couldn't either Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden attract large crowds if they were as popular as the polls allegedly claim? Some of the articles about rigged polls also covered the ones taken months before the primaries, pointing out that they over-polled older people that supposedly were more likely to support establishment candidates.

And why are so many people allegedly voting for candidates that oppose them on almost all fiscal issues, especially when campaign donors for both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden overwhelmingly oppose the will of the public on these issues, since they involve rigging the economy in their favor?

One of the most brazen examples where the vast majority of the public support one issue, yet the overwhelming majority of the political and media establishment oppose it is Medicare for All, which Bernie championed very well during the primary pointing out that a quarter of the public is uninsured under the current system, 30,000 people die unnecessarily per year and half a million go bankrupt. Joe Biden laughed and defended this system, even though there were numerous studies, even at that time showing that Medicare for All would save thousands of lives and billions of dollars. A new Yale Study Says Medicare for All Would Save U.S. $450 Billion, Prevent Nearly 70,000 Deaths a Year 02/19/2020, but there were other studies at the time of the debate with similar results, and no studies saying that we would save an enormous amount of lives and money.

It doesn't take a genius to determine that a major part of the reason for these large savings is that under our current system, a shocking amount of the money we pay for premiums doesn't go to health care at all; instead it goes to advertising, astronomical CEO salaries, massive amounts for lobbying and campaign donations, and much more waste that has nothing to do with health care. Since the media gets a large amount of this in the form of advertising profits, and they also have a lot of interlocking boards of directors and stockholders, they have a financial incentive to ignore how corrupt the system is and even make it worse, by giving large advantages in coverage to candidates that support Wall Street instead of the will of the people. A year before the Yale study came out Christopher Cai examined 22 studies and found they all agree: 'Medicare for All' saves money 02/24/2020

This isn't limited to rigging presidential primaries, ensuring both nominees support the corporate agenda it also involves rigging Congressional primaries as well as I pointed out in Bernie Sanders Is More Democratic Than Fake "Democrats!" which explains how Cheri Bustos, Steny Hoyer, Nancy Pelosi, Senators Catherine Cortez Masto and Chuck Schumer have all been caught conspiring to give insurmountable advantages to Wall Street candidates that oppose the will of the vast majority of the public. One of the tactics they use to rig primaries so that few if any progressives supporting popular issues is that they refuse to give any business to consulting firms that help progressive campaigns, anther one is to provide an enormous amount of money for those supporting Wall Street at the expense of the public.

One one occasion when Steny Hoyer was confronted with these tactics he said, on tape, “You know, frankly, that happens in life all the time.” When asked about it in public Nancy Pelosi said “I Don’t See Anything Inappropriate” in Steny Hoyer's activities, which clearly involved giving wealthy donors unjustifiable advantages at the expense of the public. She went on to say that the only problem was that it was taped and the public was informed about attempts to rig the primaries. This is the same type of outrage during the 2016 leaks of E-mails, when the entire democratic establishment claimed it was within their rights to give insurmountable advantages to Hillary Clinton, who was extremely unpopular with the public but popular with campaign donors; but they were outraged that somehow their efforts to rig the primaries were exposed to the public! This massive amount of fraud is one of the biggest reasons Trump was able to win in 2016, although it wasn't a fair victory.

There's enough public evidence, even without new E-mail links to show that they used many of the same tactics to rig the primary for Biden in 2020, which clearly means that he's no more of a legitimate candidate than Donald Trump was!

If you accept traditional media as a reliable sources and the claim that the elections are fair, and weren't stolen, then the claim that the United States is the leader of the "Free World" defending Democracy; however a closer look at the incredibly long history of rigging elections and the media coverage, ensuring only candidates supported by the oligarchs indicates this is an obvious lie. This is supported by the fact that the political establishment routinely opposes most of the issues supported by the vast majority of the public, especially fiscal issues benefiting the wealthy.

If you accept the version of truth presented by traditional media there's also little doubt about another Big Lie that they repeat over and over again, the fact that we're constantly fighting war in other countries To Defend Our Freedom! Other countries haven't been trying to invade the mainland of the United States and take away our democracy in over two hundred years, when the war of 1812 happened! The last time another country attacked a military base on one of our territories was in Pearl Harbor in 1942 Since then it's been our country invading other countries, and in some cases overthrowing their own democratic governments, or at least governments that had far more popular support than the governments our leaders installed for them. The terrorist attacks, including, of course, 9/11, against the United States were either against military bases abroad, which wouldn't fit the original definition of a terrorist attack, since they were attacks against combatants not civilians, or, when they attacked in the United States against civilians, they were in retaliation for our occupations and bombings of foreign countries. And the vast majority of citizens of countries invaded or bombed by the United States never retaliated; with the most notable exception being Muslim extremists.

This includes the South American, Central American and Vietnamese victims of wars or illegal coups carried out by our leaders. Seventy-five years ago, on September 2 1945, Vietnam made it clear that they wanted to rule themselves, demanding Independence from France as indicated in the following excerpt:

Declaration of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam

"All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among them are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."

This immortal statement was made in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. In a broader sense, this means: All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live, to be happy and free.

The Declaration of the French Revolution made in 1791 on the Rights of Man and the Citizen also states: “All men are born free and with equal rights, and must always remain free and have equal rights.”

Those are undeniable truths.

Nevertheless, for more than eighty years, the French imperialists, abusing the standard of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, have violated our Fatherland and oppressed our fellow-citizens. They have acted contrary to the ideals of humanity and justice.

In the field of politics, they have deprived our people of every democratic liberty. Complete Declaration

The Vietnamese were, of course, aware of this Declaration of Independence all along, and so were virtually all the people from their neighboring countries; however, the vast majority of Americans never heard of it, either while the war was going on or, still to this day. The reason for this starts with the most basic fundamentals of propaganda, "A lie, repeated often enough, becomes the truth," or at least it seems to, especially if the truth is practically never mentioned, or in some cases, ridiculed as a conspiracy theory.

This is the tactic that traditional media used to create a false belief system about the Vietnam war being fought to defend Democracy against Communism. They ignored some of the most fundamental facts and repeated their propaganda over and over again, until people believed it without question. The omission of the Declaration of Independence was just the beginning of their efforts to cover up the truth and replace it with deceptive propaganda. On one detail after another for traditional media reported one version of truth, while foreign media or alternative media that doesn't blindly trust the government reported a different version. In many cases, traditional media did admit to some of the details that expose their lies; however, when this happens, they typically only do it briefly, before letting it fall down the memory-hole, or at least they try to.

One of the reasons they can get away with this is that the vast majority of the public simply doesn't pay much, if any attention to the news, and when they do, it's often for brief times during crisis's, when they only listen to traditional media, and quickly forget a lot of what they hear.

The same tactic is used in dozens more wars or coups, often with little or no media coverage on many of them, and most Americans are very ignorant of current affairs. In many of these coups CIA backed regimes set up death squads terrorizing their own people. Three of the most notorious of these coups include Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, and Chile in 1973, which the CIA now even admits to, although traditional media rarely reminds the public of these admissions, which would raise major doubts about the claim that the United States has been "fighting for freedom and democracy" for decades.

Foreign countries and some people who pay attention to alternative media knew these coups were supported by the CIA from the beginning; however, the majority of Americans, including me, didn't learn about it until decades later; in many cases there are many people, probably a significant majority of the public, that still don't know about it, since the media hardly ever mentions it. The CIA finally admitted they were involved in the coup in Chile over thirty years after it happened, and that they were responsible for the Iranian coup almost sixty years after it happened, even though credible alternative media outlets provided overwhelming evidence to prove it long before that and many of the individuals involved with it even admitted it.

When the CIA finally made these admissions, traditional media finally provided a minimal amount of coverage, before letting it fall down the memory hole again. However, when they mentioned it briefly they often included denials of some of the worst atrocities, which don't stand up to scrutiny, which traditional media doesn't provide. Another one of the most fundamentals of propaganda is that if they fail to report the truth, or only mention it very briefly, it can quickly fall down the memory hole and be forgotten, so lies repeated over and over again can go unchallenged. This is exactly what the mainstream media does routinely. Not only do they fail to remind the public of these coups, but they fail to mention that it much more than one coup here and another one there.

Of course, it also helps if people have an emotional attachment to the propaganda, which the media often tries to take advantage of by telling them they're part of the "Greatest Country in the World," that is constantly "Fighting for Freedom," and after many people join the military and fight these wars, or send their relatives to these wars, they don't want to believe they died for lies or that they were killing people that really were fighting for their freedom, or some other cause.

Fortunately, there are many good researchers that do a much better job reporting on the history of foreign conflicts, but they get little or no media coverage from traditional media. The historians that do get covered by traditional media, including, even Doris Kearns Goodwin, bury some of the most important facts where for people read them, assuming they mention them at all. Ironically the mainstream media tries to convince us that the best researchers are radicals, not because they're unreliable or they're lying, in fact many of them do a far better job citing their sources; but because they challenge the official version of truth and expose many of the lies by our government, often reminding their readers of many of the admissions of wrong doing that were only briefly mentioned before letting them fall down the memory hole, and reporting a lot of the news that traditional media never reports in the first place, like the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence. (Some of these authors are listed below.)

Some of these authors, including Douglas Valentine, author of "The CIA as Organized Crime" and John Perkins, author of "The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man" (First edition of "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man" 2004 now free online) go so far as to refer to the CIA, or the dominant political establishment as criminal organizations; which may seem extreme to people not familiar with alternative media outlets; however, they do a far better job citing sources for their beliefs than the traditional media, and other authors also confirm the history ignored by traditional media.

Once you become familiar with the long history of voter fraud, wars based on lies, and many other subjects, including the economy, ignored or misrepresented by traditional media it becomes that there are at least two versions of the truth, one controlled by the mass media and the wealthiest fraction of 1% of the public, and another well researched version explained by dozens of authors who get little or no attention from traditional media, even though it's better researched and almost certainly far closer to the truth.

There are many credible peer reviewed books in the library about protecting the environment, health care, propaganda methods, economic inequality, reducing violence, and many more traditional scientific subjects, and perhaps some subjects that are considered fringe by many people, although even they should be treated scientifically. These perceived fringe subjects may include UFOs, mysticism, alleged psychic or supernatural abilities, fringe religions and many other things. Instead of treating them scientifically the traditional media and a significant portion of the scientific community often treats many of these subjects with ridicule.

There's no doubt that some, if not all of these subjects attract more cult followers, including many of the same QAnon followers that supported or participated in the storming of the Capitol based on the false assumption that the election was stolen from Donald Trump, who never looked out for their best interests in the first place, instead of being stolen from the American people. Apparently many QAnon members also believe in UFOs and other absurd theories, including a few of the theorists on Ancient Aliens. The version of their beliefs or many of the beliefs from the History Channels Ancient Aliens have an enormous number of scientific flaws; and it may be easy to dismiss the theory in its entirety; however, that might be premature.

Even though the vast majority of claims by either QAnon or Ancient Aliens on the History Channel are either obviously false or presented in a manner that has major credibility problems, that doesn't mean they're wrong about everything. It's extremely difficult if not impossible to find a good researcher on UFOs or Ancient Aliens; however, they may have some things right; and there were better researchers at one time, and may still be although they're not on traditional media. One of the best researchers on the subject still living may be Jacques Vallée, who has never been on Ancient Aliens, that I know of; but he was a former associate of Allen Hynek, a former skeptic for Project Bluebook and the Air Force.

Both Jacques Vallée and Allen Hynek came to the conclusion that there's a major unsolved mystery worthy of scientific research; however, over three decades after Allen Hynek died there still hasn't been good research done, at least not publicly. Jacques Vallée and several other researchers also concluded that were major unsolved mysteries surrounding Uri Geller and several other mystics; he also researched older historical unsolved mysteries which are tougher to confirm, since the events happened decades, if not centuries ago, including "The Miracle of the Sun" at Fatima, Joseph Smith Jr. and "Our Lady of Guadalupe," among many other things, and concluded there's a major unsolved mystery.

In "The Invisible College" he claimed that it's difficult, if not impossible to do good research with most organized researchers, including UFO groups; I might not go quite that far all the time; but I would have to agree that there are large blunders from all the highest profile researchers on the subject, often so obvious they should have corrected them, so this is close to a good recommendation. Jacques Vallée may seem like one of the only relatively high profile UFO researchers that can be trusted; however, even he needs to be fact checked. On one occasions in one of his books Jacques Vallée claimed that there's no major accomplishment by ancient civilizations that they couldn't have accomplished with technology allegedly available to them, which is false, and he should have known about at least one of the most obvious examples of this.

In 107 Wonders of the Ancient World I reviewed a large number of many unsolved mysteries in ancient archaeology, including many that require a close look to realize they shouldn't have been possible; but one is so obvious that Jacques Vallée should have known about it, massive megaliths moved by ancient civilizations. Experiments to move massive megaliths with ancient technology only succeeded with megaliths up to ten tons before they had to cheat to get them on the sledge. With experiments between ten and forty tons they cheated to get the megalith on the sledge and still was only able to pull it very short distances, and never even tried anything over forty tons.

This leads me to the conclusion that even when it comes to far-fetched things like UFOs or mystics you should be willing to question the best so-called experts on the subject, whether they're skeptics or believers, to avoid adopting a false cult belief.

On many subjects, including election fraud, wars based on lies, environmental protection, the most effective ways to reduce violence, etc., if you do a good job picking good experts, which won't be on the mainstream media, you might be able to trust them most of the time, especially if they've had good peer review. This won't be the case for subjects like UFOs or mystics, until there's better scientific review, which will require avoiding ridicule and allowing an open exchange of ideas.

Some of the best researchers reporting on the history of invading other countries or supporting coups include:

Howard Zinn author of "The People's History of the United States" etc.
Noam Chomsky author of "Deterring Democracy," "Manufacturing Consent," "Failed State" etc.
Alfred McCoy author of "A Question of Torture" "In the Shadows of the American Century," "Policing America’s Empire," etc.
Naomi Klein author of "The Shock Doctrine" etc.
James Carrol author of "House of War" etc.
William Blum author of "Killing Hope," "Rogue State" etc.
Michael Parenti author of "Against Empire," "Superpatriotism," "The Sword & The Dollar" etc.
Douglas Valentine, author of "The CIA as Organized Crime"
John Perkins, author of "The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man" (First eddition of "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man" 2004 now free online)