If one of us had declared that a "cabal" of elites, composed of Big Corporate, Big Labor, Big Tech, Big Green, and Black Lives Matter had all conspired to rig the 2020 election, we'd have been called nuts.  We'd be tinfoil hatters, far-right loonies, and denizens of the dreaded QAnon.

But surprise, surprise, the cabal has come out of the closet in a shocking piece that ran in Time magazine titled: "The Secret Bipartisan History of the Shadow Campaign that Saved the 2020 Election" by Democrat-with-byline Molly Ball:

This is the inside story of the conspiracy to save the 2020 election, based on access to the group's inner workings, never-before-seen documents and interviews with dozens of those involved from across the political spectrum. It is the story of an unprecedented, creative and determined campaign whose success also reveals how close the nation came to disaster. "Every attempt to interfere with the proper outcome of the election was defeated," says Ian Bassin, co-founder of Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan rule-of-law advocacy group. "But it's massively important for the country to understand that it didn't happen accidentally. The system didn't work magically. Democracy is not self-executing."

That's why the participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream — a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information. They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it. And they believe the public needs to understand the system's fragility in order to ensure that democracy in America endures.

Trump was willing to "go there," back when the left was claiming all was free and fair, Ball continued:

To the President, something felt amiss. "It was all very, very strange," Trump said on Dec. 2. "Within days after the election, we witnessed an orchestrated effort to anoint the winner, even while many key states were still being counted."

In a way, Trump was right.

There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans. The pact was formalized in a terse, little-noticed joint statement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO published on Election Day. Both sides would come to see it as a sort of implicit bargain — inspired by the summer's massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protests — in which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump's assault on democracy.

The handshake between business and labor was just one component of a vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election — an extraordinary shadow effort dedicated not to winning the vote but to ensuring it would be free and fair, credible and uncorrupted. For more than a year, a loosely organized coalition of operatives scrambled to shore up America's institutions as they came under simultaneous attack from a remorseless pandemic and an autocratically inclined President. Though much of this activity took place on the left, it was separate from the Biden campaign and crossed ideological lines, with crucial contributions by nonpartisan and conservative actors.

"There was a conspiracy"?  "Not rigging, but fortifying"?  Changed the rules?  Did a campaign against misinformation, meaning, suppressed the New York Post story about Hunter Biden?  "Every attempt to interfere with the proper outcome of the election was defeated"? 

This is some creepy-ass gloating from leftists who have obviously won and would like us to know.

That's going to be their downfall, but right now, they don't know.

Ball's idea is to claim that Big Corporate, Big Tech, and the rest of the co-conspirators who brought us doddering puppet Joe Biden were actually heroes.  They're like suddenly beloved hedge funds of GameStop fame.  They saved "democracy" from the demos but claim they "saved" us from President Trump.  Because, after all, we peons can't help ourselves; we just keep voting for Trump.  Being big-hearted and all, they saved us from ourselves.  This kind of sums up what Ball's story is about.

Ball wrote about plotting and co-ordination dating from 2019 among Big Tech, Big Labor, Big Corporate, the Chamber of Commerce, Big Media, far-left activists, and Molly's eyesight being kind of weak on the right, "bipartisan" help from the right, meaning the same old NeverTrumps who've been hating on Trump since the escalator.  Imagine the phone calls.  Imagine the money swooshing through the system.  Imagine the spin plotting in the aftermath.  They changed election rules, foisted upon us easy-to-fraud mail-in balloting, called the election for Biden before the votes were in, and shoveled money to bankrupt local governments who were incapable of running a decent election even under normal circumstances, as Frank Friday noted here.  It was all planned.  It was all rigged.  Ball, though, uses their spin and now would have us know that it was "fortified."

Laura Ingraham has an appropriately outraged segment worth listening to on this now brazen, vile plot, which, if you can't stand reading Ball, amounts to an intelligent summary:

Two interpretations as to what it means are out — one, that it means that their Big Lie about all being free and fair in this election is falling flat, and they're trying to spin it now, as Mark Wauck notes here:

The Time story offers conservatives good news. The good news is that the Dems and all the authors of the Big Steal know they have a Big Problem. They realize that all their perception management efforts thus far have gone for naught.

UPDATE: Wow! Glenn Reynolds is all over this angle with a truly smokin' article:

Why are Democrats so scared of Donald Trump when they just defeated him?

Another way to frame that question is: Why aren't Dems secure in their victory? The obvious answer — given their "prohibition on questions" is: They know that we know that they didn't actually win. And that's why they're trying this new tactic of, Here, now we'll tell you the secret truth that makes everything OK — for us! We wuz protecting the country!

There's additional support for this argument in a brilliant piece written for American Thinker by military historian James Corum, who described the bombing of Hamburg and how the Nazis were unable to suppress the news of it, simply because too many people already knew the truth. 

Bottom line in this argument is that they know that everyone knows the rigging happened, so now the riggers are trying to spin it into a virtue.

The other is the one I suspect is perhaps even more likely: they know we know.  So now they're into psy-ops, trying to demoralize us in their open gloating.

As Ace at Ace of Spades noted:

This is the part of the war where they have shot most of the survivors, and are now engaging in psyops to humiliate and degrade whoever is still alive. They are now admitting they rigged the election so that we understand that there is nothing we can do about it — we are a defeated people, they want us to know, and they intended to rule us.

This is a nasty picture but probably true.  Someone is burbling with delight in leftist circles, delighted that the U.S. has been rigged into electing the most far-left administration ever and gotten away with it.  And like all far-left regimes (see Venezuela), it can't be reversed.  It's permanently rigged now, and we will just have to prepare for decline and learn to live with it, fading away into nothing.  Nothing we can do can stop it, because they are all chain-locked together, and all of them are against us.

Bad as that sounds, it's good news, too.  It's intelligence.  It's someone opening up their secret files like what WikiLeaks used to do to John Podesta to give us their battle plans.  The spin is (edited), but the truth is out.  And with that in mind, we now know we're not conspiracy theorists, we now know we have a gloating enemy convinced that their victory is total.  It's as if we now have their game plan and now know what to look for, come 2022, to counter it.  Knowledge, after all, is power.  But they're too dumb to know this.  Even Antifa knows enough to keep these kinds of secret battle plans, memberships, victories, and techniques out of the news, denying everything, convincing us they're just "an idea" — but not these guys.  That's what's good news for us.  They've come out of the woodwork to do a victory dance.  But we now know who the opponent is and are no longer battling an invisible enemy. 

Yes, they gloat, but as they march in their victory parade, they seem to forget the lesson of the ancient Romans, to always have a victorious general parading around with a slave at his side whispering into his ear that "you are mortal." 

We aren't slaves, they're brazenly stupid brimming with hubris, and they don't have that person.

Image: Matthias Kabel via Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0.