Republican activists say they have to water down the reality of their opponents’ agenda in focus groups. ‘They just don’t believe it’s true. It can’t be.‘

Tabletmag.com – Park MacDougald – October 28, 2024

In the September debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, Trump said something so ludicrous that many viewers must have dismissed it out of hand. “She did things that nobody would ever think of,” Trump said, while rattling off a list of some of the vice president’s most radical past positions. “Now she wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison.”

The idea that the vice president “wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison” seemed so patently absurd that The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser cited it in a column posted the next morning as an example of Trump’s lunacy: “What the hell was he talking about?” Glasser wrote of the trans operation lines. “No one knows, which was, of course, exactly Harris’ point.”

That reaction was understandable—the idea of the operations was, as Trump himself said, a “thing nobody would ever think of.” The problem was that it is true. As CNN had reported that week, Harris, when running for the Democratic nomination in 2019, had written in an ACLU questionnaire that she supported publicly funded “gender-affirming care,” including transition surgeries, for federal prison inmates and detained illegal immigrants.

Follow-up reporting from The Washington Free Beacon revealed that while serving as California attorney general, Harris had in fact implemented a statewide policy of taxpayer funding for prisoners’ sex changes, born out of a settlement in which she agreed to pay for the transition of a man convicted of kidnapping a father of three and then murdering him as he begged for his life. Harris later bragged, on camera, about this policy as evidence of her commitment to the progressive “movement”—in a clip that has since become a staple of Trump campaign ads.

Many Americans still have trouble accepting these facts, because the underlying predicate—that Barack Obama purposefully sought to ally the United States with a terror-sponsoring, America-hating theocracy—seemed too insane to credit.

The sequence of events neatly encapsulated a pattern that has played out countless times since Trump entered American political life. Trump says something seemingly insane, to many people’s outrage and disbelief, only to have his supposed “lie” revealed to be wholly or at least significantly true. Often the specific truth revealed—that the outgoing Obama administration spied on the Trump transition team in order to gather information for what later became the Russiagate hoax, to cite another example—is in fact “crazier” than Trump’s exaggerations or garbling of the details. The insanity of the policy becomes the front line of defense against potential blowback: Who would believe that anyone would actually propose or support something so obviously at odds with public opinion and basic common sense? Trump must be a raving nutjob, just like we told you he was.

The reason that this strategy has worked is because Democrats rely on all nonexplicitly right-wing media to adopt their framing of issues and cite the party’s preferred experts, which they do. The party’s influence over the country’s communications apparatus has, for the past decade, emerged into something like a political superpower, allowing it to act outside the normal bounds of American politics without suffering from political blowback.

“All of it,” said a Republican congressional staffer, “is insulated by their absolute confidence that they can just use their control over communications institutions to just say words, including change of language, right? Flip a switch and it’s now gender affirming care. Flip a switch and it’s now undocumented migrants, or undocumented Americans. Flip a switch and now you can change people’s pronouns.”

The result, for anyone skeptical of the Democratic Party yet bound to operate within the consensus reality of its discourse, is akin to living in a wilderness of mirrors. How to explain, for instance, that elected Democrats from the Biden White House on down support not only taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners and illegal aliens, but policies that allow schools to “socially transition” children without informing their parents? How to explain, without sounding like a lunatic, that the newspapers and expert bodies that recommend life-altering surgeries for children, and defend them as “life-saving” or “medically necessary” care opposed only by cranks and Bible thumpers, either don’t know what they’re talking about or are lying to you for political reasons?

That the claim that such surgeries were rarely if ever performed on children was also a lie? That when President Biden, the kindly old moderate, directed his Department of Health and Human Services to address the “barriers and exclusionary policies” keeping children from accessing “gender medicine,” what he was describing was a policy that would see members of his own administration pressuring medical agencies to allow procedures such as breast and penis removal be performed on young children, despite the lack of any proof that these measures contribute to greater mental or physical health?

The same GOP staffer, who is currently working on a competitive congressional race, told me that one problem his campaign regularly faces is that aspects of Democratic governance are simply too insane for voters to find credible, even when they are documented as official U.S. government policy. “When you outline the Democratic agenda, you have to water it down, because in both polling and focus groups, people just don’t believe it,” he said. “They are critical of things like boys in girls’ sports, but they tune out stuff about schools not informing parents about transitioning their children. They just don’t believe it’s true. It can’t be.”

Another Republican operative made a related point on the failure of the party’s attempt to message on trans issues in 2022, which was that the reality of the procedures was so gruesome that voters simply preferred not to think about it. “Phrases like ‘genital mutilation’ are disgusting and viscerally off-putting, even to voters who may be sympathetic to the Republicans’ position but will just write you off as a freak for talking about it that way.”

A similar dynamic plays out in foreign policy. On the one hand the Democrats conjured out of thin air the claim that Trump colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election, which was, we now know, a conspiracy theory concocted by ex-spies and Clinton campaign operatives and seeded in the intelligence agencies and media by the outgoing Obama administration to cripple the new administration. That is to say that it is not a matter of partisan political opinion; it is simply false.

Yet, as of 2022, nearly half of U.S. voters, and a majority of Democrats, still believed that Trump was elected in 2016 due to Russian interference, and the hoax remains a mainstay of Democratic rhetoric. It even played a major role in the 2020 election, providing the predicate for the Biden campaign to collude with tech companies and retired spooks to censor reporting about Hunter Biden’s foreign influence-peddling schemes, which turned out to be entirely real.

Outside the pages of a handful of news sites, however, you will look in vain for coverage of the Biden-Harris administration’s disturbingly close relationship with the Islamic Republic of Iran, an authoritarian and explicitly anti-American regime currently waging a multifront war against Israel. Like the Obama administration, of which it is a continuation, the Biden-Harris administration has attempted to realign the United States away from Israel and other traditional allies and toward a revisionist-Islamist bloc led by Iran but also including Qatar, the Muslim Brotherhood, and various Palestinian radical groups. This orientation is reflected at the level of policy—including nonenforcement of Iranian oil sanctions, flooding Hamas and Hezbollah with cash through cutouts, and, since Oct. 7, the relentless undermining of Israel’s war against Iran and its proxies—as well as at the level of personnel.

The Biden administration’s envoy to Iran, who was suspended last spring for mishandling classified information later published in Iranian state media, also hired a confirmed Iranian influence agent into the U.S. State Department. And the White House’s coordinator for intelligence and defense policy on the National Security Council—i.e., the man who would normally be responsible for investigating the recent leak of Israeli military plans to Iran—is a former affiliate of not one but two fronts for the Iranian proxy Hamas: Students for Justice in Palestine and the U.N. Relief and Works Agency. The Iranian regime has repaid the Biden-Harris administration for its generosity, hacking the emails of Trump campaign employees and handing them off to a Democratic PAC, which published them last week.

These are all demonstrable matters of fact. Yet many Americans still have trouble accepting them, because the underlying predicate—that our country is purposefully allying with a terror-sponsoring, America-hating theocracy in its pursuit of nuclear weapons, which it has already promised to use to wipe America’s most powerful regional client, Israel, off the map—seemed too insane to credit. Why would Barack Obama have put that into motion, and why would everyone else let it happen? There are plenty of conceivable answers to these question, of course. But you can’t get at any of them if the underlying reality itself is too insane to accept.

Americans do not, as a rule, pay much attention to foreign policy, but the White House’s orientation abroad is inseparable from its politics at home. Within the United States, the Democratic power vertical has cultivated allies and sympathizers of the Iranian “axis of resistance” as donors, fundraisers, “organizers,” clients, and street muscle. It has protected them from law enforcement scrutiny, invited them into the policymaking process, and directed both federal money and funds from party-aligned megadonors such as George Soros and the Tides Nexus into their nonprofits, as I reported for Tablet in May. These nonprofits have in turn played a major role in organizing the pro-terror protests and encampments that erupted across blue America in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks, which have drawn on activist networks previously mobilized to organize anti-Trump protest movements (e.g., the Women’s March and Black Lives Matter) during his first term and anti-Supreme Court protests in the wake of the Dobbs decision in 2022.

The idea that the radicals and thugs shutting down a bridge in your city are part of the Democratic machine is not a particularly difficult idea to wrap one’s head around, particularly following years in which we were constantly warned about the threat of supposed Trumpist “militias” like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. The problem is that the Democrats’ alignment with these thugs strikes most Americans as too bizarre and obviously destructive to be true—a thing that “nobody would ever think of.” “You cannot get people to pay attention to the idea that the Biden-Harris machine is plugged into the Democratic machine, which is plugged into campus antisemitism,” a staffer told me. “It’s not because it’s too complicated. Voters understand that the same people fund the same things. It’s just that Americans find antisemites weird. We’re not in Europe, right?”

It does appear that this insanity defense may finally be breaking down. Polls and early voting returns suggest that Trump may be poised to recapture the White House and potentially even win the popular vote, despite a near daily stream of invective from Democrats and their press allies casting him and his supporters as some version or another of Hitler. Some of this is a product of objective factors hurting the incumbent administration, such as a middling economy and popular anger of its deliberate opening of the southern border, a crisis that eventually became too glaring for the White House to spin away. And some of it, no doubt, is the legacy of nearly a decade of hysteria and overheated propaganda on every topic under the sun, from Trump to the pandemic to race and the relations between the sexes. At some point, voters outside the bubble simply tune out.

Joe Biden, whatever his faults and infirmities, played an important role as a symbolic figurehead for what functioned in practice as a radical bureaucratic regime. Even as his administration pursued policies far outside the Overton window of American politics, it was difficult for anyone, let alone moderately engaged voters, to believe that “Scranton Joe,” the avuncular centrist and Irish bullshitter, believed in any of the things that his party was said to be doing. Noting the sudden success of the campaign’s transgender ads, one Trump campaign staffer told me, “We were making this attack on Biden, but it was through some sort of convoluted process because of, like, some sort of Department of Education regulation. But everyone perceived Biden as what he was—an establishment moderate. Maybe he’s had to take up some radical positions for political reasons, but no one thinks Joe Biden sincerely cares about trans rights.”

That seems to have changed when Biden was overthrown in favor of Kamala, whose 2020 primary campaign—pitched at party activists and powerbrokers—led her to make the mistake that both Biden and Obama for the most part managed to avoid: openly pandering to the party’s activist base, often on camera. Defund the police. Decriminalize illegal border crossings. Ban fracking. Confiscate guns. Transgender surgeries for illegals.

Harris has since tried to walk many of these positions back, which only creates the new problem of appearing inauthentic and weak—a bad combination when the opponent is Donald Trump, especially when he’s also trouncing you on every issue of substance. It is of course too early to say whether Trump really will return for a second term, though his campaign couldn’t have hoped for better odds back at the DNC in August, when it looked as if Obama and the rest of the party’s messaging machine might successfully reinvent Kamala as a patriotic moderate and champion of the middle class. That machine is slick and sophisticated, to be sure, but eventually, the laws of political gravity do reassert themselves. You can piss on the shoes of the American people for one term or maybe two, but eventually, they’re going to figure out it isn’t raining.

One of those people is Norman Eisen, and it looks like he’s up to his old Lawfare & Color Revolution tricks again. The man responsible for virtually all of the legal attacks on President Trump now has a new activist group – although it has many of the same players – and they’re preparing for an assault on a second Trump Presidency.

Eisen, a Brookings senior fellow, Obama’s former White House Ethics Czar and Ambassador to Czechoslovakia during the “Velvet Revolution,” has been behind the ongoing Lawfare that has targeted Trump for years. Eisen was one of the primary forces behind the first impeachment of Trump and is also the co-founder of Leftist non-profit CREW or Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

Eisen played a lead role in Democrats pre-2020 election war games which predicted a remarkably accurate contested election scenario that ended unfavorably for Trump. Of particular note in regards to his current efforts, Eisen is also the author of the highly influential color revolution manual, The Democracy Playbook.

Eisen’s latest venture, State Democracy Defenders Action (SDDA), bills itself as bringing “together a bipartisan all-star team of experts in safeguarding democracy” and ominously claims they help “shape the long term strategy to defeat Election denial and its logical outgrowth: American Autocracy, starting with preparing for a vigorous response to whatever 2025 – and beyond – may bring.”

Their site claims that SDDA will “fill three key gaps in the fight against election sabotage and autocracy” by going “on offense against democracy deniers who break the law, including through our innovative program of outside public support for criminal prosecutions.”

The group says they “work with national, state and local allies across the country to defend in real-time the foundation of our democracy – free and fair elections.” State Democracy Defenders Action also foreshadows future civil unrest by claiming to “help shape the long-term strategy to defeat autocracy in 2025 – and beyond.”

As we’ll see, this sounds like the formation of a Color Revolution.

Central to their efforts are what the group calls their 10 Principles, which can appear innocuous with a casual glance but are actually representative of NeoCon, Never-Trump talking points and Globalist Goals. When one reads these principles with an eye towards a future Trump Presidency, their words take on an entirely different meaning.

The group’s first principle states that they “believe in the foundational idea of rule of law.” But that claim is immediately followed by a weaponized declaration that’s obviously aimed at Trump:

“Our country cannot be led by anyone who believes they are not accountable to our Constitution or who repeatedly and persistently violates civil and criminal statutes. That is disqualifying and contrary to the principle of rule of law.”

You can probably see where this is going. State Democracy Defenders Action repeatedly references J6, Project 2025 and Autocracy, utilizing these leftist dog whistles wherever possible:

“We are alarmed about the rising autocratic movement in the United States that threatens the American idea and the American people. January 6, 2021, represented an ugly inflection point of this movement and it is driving forward with authoritarian proposals like Project 2025 that constitute an assault on the freedoms of every American. This movement threatens to eviscerate our rights, our prosperity, and our stability and security upon which our nation and the world rely.”

The group also appears to be preparing to fight Trump’s planned downsizing of the federal government, noting that career civil service employees “work in our government irrespective of the political party or ideology of the person elected to the Presidency.” They laughingly claim that “Our civil servants’ obligations to the people of this country, the Constitution, and the rule of law serve a fundamental role in effective democratic governance.”

Eisen appears to be using many of the useful idiots and perennial talking heads that he hosts on his weekly lawfare calls: Jennifer Rubin, Asha Rangappa, George Conway, Joe Walsh, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Ty Cobb, John Dean, Heath Mayo, and Skye Perryman.

Although most are not particularly impressive, these operatives do have a purpose to fulfill. The way Eisen’s projects have worked historically is through the establishment of a public-facing entity that propagates and publicizes their ideas and agendas while disguising the organization’s more sinister goals.

Eisen and the other senior operators always seem to use the same talking heads and former federal prosecutors to get their narrative circling in the public sphere. A public “prep” if you will. Meanwhile, a far more serious effort is mounted behind the scenes.

In advance of the 2020 election, Edward Foley, an Eisen collaborator and head of the election law program at Ohio University, issued a 55-page paper discussing the coming Blue Shift — a theory which holds that Democratic candidates often gain votes in the days following the actual election. This narrative was carefully crafted by Eisen’s operatives and carried by the media over the next twelve months.

By the time the 2020 election arrived everyone anticipated a delay in voting results. The sudden overnight shift from a Trump lead to a Biden win was still a huge shock — but it would have been impossible without this careful advance planning and widespread dissemination by Democrat operatives. Eisen’s useful idiots fulfill precisely this function — which is why he uses them in almost all of his operations.

But make no mistake. More serious operators are in charge of things. In addition to Eisen, there’s Eisen’s original Lawfare partner Norm Ornstein of American Enterprise Institute, NeoCon and Never-Trumper Bill Kristol (we can debate how serious Kristol actually is), the Atlantic’s David Frum, Susan Corke (Managing Director of SDDA), Victoria Nuland’s husband Robert Kagan — and DNC Power Operative Michael Podhorzer.

Podhorzer, the former political director of the AFL-CIO and current Fellow at the Center for American Progress, is the man credited in Time’s now-infamous article, The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign, as being “The Architect” of Biden’s “win in 2020. Podhorzer is also the founder of The Analyst Institute, which has been referred to as “the nerve center of the data-driven empirical turn in Democratic campaign strategies.”

Unlike the public-facing useful idiots, Podhorzer is rarely seen and once again appears to be operating behind the scenes. Podhorzer is a highly powerful, highly influential, but little known DNC operative — and while we can’t prove it, our guess is that he’s directing Eisen rather than the other way around.

The inclusion of Robert Kagan, a Brookings Fellow like Eisen, is also notable. He recently “resigned” from the Washington Post after the paper refused to endorse Kamala. A long-time NeoCon, Kagan has worked tirelessly to lie and manipulate our country into multiple wars. His wife, Victoria Nuland, was instrumental in overthrowing the legitimately elected government in Ukraine in early 2014 and she was also involved in the RussiaGate lie — receiving perhaps the earliest known copy of the Steele Dossier in early July 2016.

Back in November 2023, Kagan penned a dangerous — 6,000 word editorial in the Washington Post titled “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.” Kagan said a Trump win was all but inevitable — and Trump would rule as a ruthless dictator “unless something radical and unforeseen happens.”

As Mollie Hemmingway noted at the time, “This extreme and dangerous genre — of claiming Trump is Hitler (because, they say, he might do what Democrats are doing right now) – should probably be given the name Assassination Prep.” 

Kagan’s inclusion in Eisen’s new effort also explains the sudden appearance of Victoria Nuland on Rachel Maddow — which prompted Alexandros Marinos to ask “Did Nuland step down from State so she could coordinate the color revolution playbook from outside, like she did in Ukraine?” The answer to that question is almost certainly a resounding “yes.”

After resigning from the State Department, Nuland joined the Board of Directors at the National Endowment for Democracy. As Mike Benz notes, the NED is really just a CIA cut-out —and a major driver in the censorship of Americans — something that Nuland told Maddow she still supports:

“In 2020, the social media companies worked hard with the government to try to do content moderation to try to catch this stuff as it was happening, but this time we have Elon Musk talking directly to the Kremlin and ensuring that every time the Russians put out something like this, it gets 5 million views on X before anybody can catch it. So it’s quite dangerous.”

Eisen’s new group has also collaborated closely with the No Dictators Declaration, a loose-knit coalition organized by Senator Jamie Raskin — who recently stated that he intended to lead an effort to refuse to certify Trump as president if Trump won the election. Included in the No Dictators Declaration are specific calls to reduce Trump’s ability to respond to any post-election domestic unrest or civil uprisings. From their A Call to Protect American Freedoms declaration:

1. 1. To reduce the threat of dictatorship, Congress should limit the president’s ability to declare bogus domestic and foreign emergencies.

2. 2. To reduce the threat of dictatorship, Congress should limit the president’s abuse of his or her power to deploy the military on American soil.
   • ◦ Under the outdated and overbroad Insurrection Act, presidents can claim extraordinary powers to deploy troops domestically. Recently, some have called for its invocation to prevent Americans from exercising their First Amendment rights of free expression.

3. 3. To reduce the threat of dictatorship, Congress should prevent the adoption of partisan, personal, and ideological loyalty tests, loyalty oaths, and similar authoritarian measures designed to purge the professional civil service and replace qualified workers with unqualified loyalists to the president.
   • ◦ Working for the federal government means working for the American people under the Constitution and the rule of law.

4. 4. To reduce the threat of dictatorship, Congress should ensure that presidents who abuse their powers to commit crimes can be prosecuted like all other people.
   • ◦ The founders overthrew a king and wrote a Constitution to enshrine the core American ideal that no person is above the law. We the people must restore the concept that we are all equal before the law.

5. 5. To reduce the threat of dictatorship, Congress should limit the president’s ability to use investigative and prosecutorial decisions and resources to pursue vendettas against disfavored people and groups.
   • ◦ The Department of Justice, the Internal Revenue Service, and other government agencies cannot become instruments of tyranny. We must make certain that the executive branch cannot employ increasingly creative ways to persecute individuals, civil society organizations, and nonprofits based on their ideologies.
   • ◦ The U.S. currently has 42 national emergencies declared, some decades-old. Under emergency powers, a president can claim the authority to divert funds, seize property, and bypass Congress.

Everything contained within the group’s declaration is designed to limit and neuter a Trump Presidency —  to cripple Trump’s ability to respond and follow through on his campaign promises. Their declaration is really the fearful confession of guilty parties who are willing to do anything to avoid accountability.

One word that’s used over and over again by Eisen’s group is Autocracy — in which absolute power is held by the ruler — in this case Trump. It’s a subtle continuation of the “Trump is Hitler” theme that’s used as the rationale for the group’s existence (Eisen’s group even has an extensive “American Autocracy Threat Tracker”). As SDDA member Ruth Ben-Ghiat stated, “This is an anti-autocracy conference because autocracy is what we are looking at if Donald Trump comes back to the White House.”

It’s also why there’s a continual focus on restricting Trump’s use of the Insurrection Act.

A number of current and former officials have claimed that Trump will attempt to use military force. Leon Panetta, who served as Obama’s CIA Director and then as his Secretary of Defense, told NBC that “Like any good dictator, Trump’s going to try to use the military to basically perform his will.” Senator Dick Blumenthal breathlessly claimed that “There are an array of horrors that could result from Trump’s unrestricted use of the Insurrection Act.”

Mary McCord, executive director of the Institution for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown Law, told NBC that “‘We’re already starting to put together a team to think through the most damaging types of things that Trump might do so that we’re ready to bring lawsuits if we have to.”

McCord was the Acting head of the DOJ’s National Security Division from 2016 to 2017 and she was involved in the FBI’s early FISA surveillance of Trump advisor Carter Page. McCord was also appointed by Nancy Pelosi as legal counsel to the Jan 6th Capitol Security Review Task Force and has written articles pushing the Jan 6th narrative. McCord is one of the very worst of the Deep State actors.

The Insurrection Act authorizes the president to deploy military forces inside the United States to suppress rebellion or domestic violence or to enforce the law in certain situations. The Insurrection Act was last invoked in 1992, during the L.A. riots that followed the Rodney King beating by police. Both sides seem to believe that it may be needed again.

Podhorzer placed things into frightening context when he told the Autocracy in America conference that “The key question going into November is whether or not — and this is the message this conference is trying to get across — is to believe that this is an election as profound as any since 1860 about where this country is going.”

Podhorzer knew exactly what he was invoking. The election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 marked the final slide of America into the Civil War which formally began on April 12, 1861.

We mentioned the Time Magazine article on the 2020 election earlier, and we did so for a reason. There were several material admissions made, not the least being that the Left does actually control the activities of groups like Antifa, Black Lives Matter and others that rioted throughout the 2020 election year.

As the article notes, “Many of those organizers were part of [Mike] Podhorzer’s network” the man credited in Time’s article as being “The Architect” of the entire election effort.

The article detailed how more than 150 liberal groups had joined the “Protect the Results” coalition and stated that “The group’s now defunct website had a map listing 400 planned post-election demonstrations, to be activated via text message as soon as Nov. 4. To stop the coup they feared, the left was ready to flood the streets.”

There is another unspoken admission here as well. The trigger for the pre-planned riots was a Biden loss, not a “stolen election”. Or said another way, the Left would determine what comprised a stolen election only by its outcome.

This matter was further highlighted by Angela Peoples, director for the Democracy Defense Coalition, who told Time Magazine that “We wanted to be mindful of when was the right time to call for moving masses of people into the street.” But after Fox called Arizona for Biden, a decision was made to “stand down”. As Podhorzer noted, “They had spent so much time getting ready to hit the streets on Wednesday. But they did it…there was not a single Antifa vs. Proud Boys incident.”

In other words, Podhorzer and his crew effectively controlled the actions of Antifa and Black Lives Matter — if not completely, then at the very least during these critical moments and days. It seems likely that they control these same groups today.

In his Color Revolution playbook, Eisen wrote that “Political opposition groups should form networks between other opposition groups, local electoral activists, civil society groups, and, where appropriate, international organizations and actors” and “Forcefully contest each individual illiberal act of non-democratic actors”. Eisen also foreshadowed his continued use of lawfare, noting that “big data and AI can play a role in litigation by forecasting which judges and jurisdictions are responsive to specific arguments, thereby guiding well-funded litigants while disadvantaging those without access to such tools.” The plans by Eisen’s group should be taken seriously. We all remember the chaos and widespread civil unrest that took place in 2020. And don’t forget. If Trump is Hitler, then in Eisen’s eyes we are the “non-democratic actors” that his group is targeting.