Foreign Interference? What’s That?

I’m so old, I can remember when foreign interference in our elections was a vitally important problem. A naive observer might have thought that the issue would still be with us, what with Joe Biden, the Manchurian Candidate, being one of the nominees. But the naive observer would be wrong.

Tyler Cowen asks some good questions:

What is the current take on foreign interference in the 2020 presidential election? I hardly hear anyone mentioning this. Was there much? And if not, why not? Our sagest minds were warning of this for years, and I heard several nat sec experts warn me of this but a few weeks ago. There have been hundreds of media articles about the topic. So what is up? I see a few options:

1. There was lots of foreign interference (again), but things turned out OK so it is not a major issue. “Never mind.”

2. President Donald Trump ensured election integrity through vigilance, good policy, and cooperation with Vladimir Putin.

3. Local election authorities were alert this time around, and they choked off each and every instance of foreign election interference.

4. The major tech companies were alert this time around, and they choked off each and every instance of foreign election interference. They didn’t even let the Russkies spend 60k on Facebook ads. Those are such great companies.

5. Foreign election interference was never much of a significant issue to begin with. “Never mind.”

6. Foreign powers are now all, in each and every country, committed to free and fair American elections, and they acted accordingly.

To be clear, I am not asking which is true. I am asking which one I am supposed to believe.

Here is an idea: maybe we should make up, out of whole cloth, the claim that the Communist Chinese colluded with Joe Biden and his campaign to swing the election to Biden by organizing groups of activists to collect mis-addressed or otherwise available ballots and ballot applications and mail them in; by harvesting ballots for Biden; and by hacking into various states’ electoral software (much as the Russians hacked into the DNC’s email system in 2016) and altering vote totals in Biden’s favor. We could make up a bunch of fake memos supporting these claims and pull them together in a single document. We could call that document a “dossier” to make it sound more official.

We could then leak the “dossier” to the New York Times, the Washington Post and CNN, and for the next four years, every news organ in America will devote itself to propagating the claims that we made up. The House of Representatives, which should be in Republican hands after 2022, can then impeach the Manchurian Candidate for colluding with the ChiComs and stealing the election.

All right, some elements of that plan won’t work. The press is resolutely on the side of Biden and the ChiComs. But still: the idea that Joe Biden colluded with the Chinese Communists, who undoubtedly are eager to see him win the election, is far more plausible than the fantasy that Vladimir Putin wanted the “America First” candidate to win in 2016. Russia’s main interest in American elections is that the U.S. not develop its fossil fuel resources, which is why the Russians have long financed our environmental movement. The Democrats are therefore Putin’s party as well as Xi Jinping’s.

I think there was plenty of chicanery in this year’s election–perhaps not including collusion with the CCP–but when, if ever, will it be exposed? Don’t hold your breath: we are still waiting for anything like a full accounting of the chicanery the Democrats pulled off in connection with the 2016 election.

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