On August 12, Irish-American Donie O’Sullivan, a CNN Senior correspondent covering the intersection of politics and technology, premiered his report “MisinfoNation Part 2: Patriots, Pillows and Paper Ballots” on The Whole Story with Anderson Cooper.
“Two narratives that we focus on in this documentary is [sic], one, of course the voting machines. Which is something that Mike Lindell is obsessed about,” says O’Sullivan. “He is wrongly convinced that the last election was stolen through hacked voting machines linked to China, et cetera.”
“One thing I’ve tried to have a conversation with Mike…it’s paper ballots in Ireland. There’s no voting machines. It’s hand-counted paper ballots. Which, it’s fine if you want to advocate for that, and you want to push that and support that. But what Mike and people like him are doing is, they are pushing for that while also saying, without evidence, that the machines are totally corrupt.”
O’Sullivan’s report is predicated on begging the question—or assuming the conclusion—that concerns about U.S. elections are all lies and false conspiracy theories. It is an assumption that has been challenged, not only for the past nearly four years by Republicans, but even prior to that…by Democrats.
The security of the U.S. election system—largely centered on voting machine vulnerabilities—is a supposed “conspiracy” that leading Democrats took very seriously between 2016-2020, including presenting substantial evidence to back up the claims.
- The Washington Post (and other media outlets) ran multiple detailed reports on voting machine and election process problems in 2014, 2016, 2017, and 2019.
- Democrat Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR)—who co-sponsored a House bill to mandate hand-marked paper ballots—said during a March 21, 2018, U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee hearing: “Forty-three percent of American voters use voting machines that researchers have found have serious security flaws including backdoors. These companies are accountable to no one. They won’t answer basic questions about their cyber security practices and the biggest companies won’t answer any questions at all. Five states have no paper trail and that means there is no way to prove the numbers the voting machines put out are legitimate. So much for cyber-security 101…The biggest seller of voting machines is doing something that violates cyber-security 101, directing that you install remote-access software which would make a machine like that a magnet for fraudsters and hackers.”
- Democrat Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), discussed her concerns with the three main voting machine manufacturers in the 2020 HBO Documentary, Kill Chain: The Cyber War on America’s Elections: “We’re very concerned because only three companies account for about ninety percent of U.S. election equipment. You could easily hack into them. It makes it seem like all these states are doing different things, but in fact, three companies are controlling them.”
- In September 2015, the Brennan Center published America’s Voting Machines at Risk, a comprehensive report about America’s outdated voting machines. By 2018, the Center complained that there had been “remarkably little progress” in securing our elections. Their prescribed solutions included assertions from prominent mainstream media, strikingly similar to more recent statements made by Lindell, Elon Musk, and others:
Richard Clarke, ABC News, Aug. 31, 2016: “More pernicious would be attempts to hack into voter machines and change the results that they report. In some states, there is no paper backup or audit trail, just electronic digits that record how people voted…If a cyberattack is done well, there may be no evidence of the attack…Every voting machine must create a paper copy of each vote recorded, and those paper copies must be kept secured for at least a year.”
Bruce Fein, The Washington Times, July 4, 2017: “Congress should…require in federal elections the use of paper ballots or electronic voting machines that produce voter-verified paper ballots… Before certification of final election results, a random sample of electronic voting system totals should be compared with hand counts of the votes on the corresponding paper ballots to detect hacking or error.”
Lt. Colonel Tony Shaffer (Ret.), The Hill, March 17, 2017: “Get back to the elegant simplicity that once defined American elections: plain old paper ballots, hardened cybersecurity protection…and inexpensive automatic post-election vote audits in randomly selected areas to scan for irregularities.”
“The vulnerabilities of the United States’ election system are highlighted in the unnerving new trailer for the documentary, Kill Chain: The Cyber War on America’s Elections, debuting March 26th on HBO,” trumpeted a March 5, 2020 Rolling Stone article. “The clip starts by taking on one of the major misconceptions about American voting machines—that concerns about hacking are unwarranted because voting machines don’t connect to the internet. In fact, many machines do connect to the internet—very easily—and hacking them is really just one of several ways outside actors can tamper with the election process, leading to long lines and delays at polling places and greater mistrust in this crucial democratic act.”
(Long lines and delays in polling places were major complaints by Republicans in the 2022 Midterm Elections in Maricopa County, which elicited allegations of tampering with the election machines and election process.)
Yet, just days after the 2020 election, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued a classic “appeal to ignorance” fallacy, “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes or was in any way compromised,” they quickly claimed to the nation.
Classical dialectic reasoning dictates that an absence of evidence of fraud is not evidence of the absence of fraud. Yet the nation was given the political equivalent of the “settled science” on the matter as the “official” position. Any discussion to the contrary was broadly labeled a “threat to Democracy.”
The Associated Press jumped on the bandwagon with an “appeal to authority,” compounding the fallacies: “The statement late Thursday by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency amounted to the most direct repudiation to date of Trump’s efforts to undermine the integrity of the contest, and echoed repeated assertions by election experts and state officials…a broad coalition of top government and industry officials is declaring that the Nov. 3 voting and the following count unfolded smoothly with no more than the usual minor hiccups…It was, they declare…“the most secure in American history.”
Because the people running the system said it was secure, it was secure. Any challenge to the official narrative is “election denial.” That’s where reports like O’Sullivan’s begin, and they continue to stubbornly chalk up any dissent as “conspiracy.”
Interesting term, “broad coalition of top government and industry officials…” Or, as Time Magazine proudly called them, “a well-funded cabal of powerful people.”
As The Washington Times reported in a February 5, 2021 commentary, “Time expose spotlights ‘shadow campaign’ that ‘saved’ 2020 election: ‘They were fortifying it’”:
An exposé by Time magazine confirms the existence of a vast and powerful network that worked to ensure the “proper outcome” of the 2020 presidential election.
National Political Correspondent’s Molly Ball’s piece titled “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election” was published Thursday after she gained access to “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.”
“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,” Ms. Ball wrote. “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.”
“Look, the system works,” declared O’Sullivan to Wired. “The system held…I don’t know if the system can hold up against…just how sophisticated and organized it’s [the opposition] going to be around this time.”
But, what “system” is O’Sullivan referring to? Apparently not a Democratic one of, for, and by the People.
Wired correspondent, David Gilbert, expressed a fear of local-level (ie. Democratic) involvement from State Houses and, “even more local than that, down to the county level, where sheriffs get involved.”
“I think it’s hundreds, maybe thousands…of election officials, senior election officials across the country have left their jobs over the past few years,” complained O’Sullivan. Citing the primary loss by Maricopa County Recorder, Stephen Richer, O’Sullivan lamented as well that, “election deniers, election conspiracy theorists…are coming into roles that are overseeing elections across the country.”
In other words, O’Sullivan is concerned that the democratically elected representatives of the People will override the will of the non-elected bureaucracy.
“As we talk about trust in the system,” continued O’Sullivan, “there’s also this possibility that, if Trump wins, that you will have Democrats being able to point at certain counties, certain parts of the country to say, ‘Well, isn’t there an election denial election official working here? Why should we trust the vote here?’”
“What you’re saying is that Democrats might become the ones pushing election conspiracies themselves,” responded Wired senior politics editor, Leah Feiger.
“Yeah,” responded O’Sullivan. “I don’t want to get into a false equivalency here.”
Alex Newman is an award-winning journalist with a career spanning decades. “I’ve probably been in professional journalism longer than Donie,” he said. “We do real journalism as opposed to the very fake news and propaganda pumped out by the ‘Communist News Network.’ Even the far-left viewers of the far-left comedy show with Stephen Colbert laughed when he referred to CNN as ‘objective,’” adds Newman. “Even the people who watch CNN know the network is a joke.”
Asked whether MyPillow “subsidizes” his podcast, magazine and other journalistic endeavors, Newman replied, “I never make more than a few hundred a month from the MyPillow affiliate program. It is a tiny fraction of what it takes to operate, and so—no—it isn’t ‘subsidizing’ my work.” However, said Newman, “We are grateful that there are patriotic businesses willing to sponsor real journalism, as opposed to the Big Pharma and governmental cronies funding the ‘Clown News Network.’”
“We all know this has been devastating to Mike’s business interests,” continued Newman, “and we appreciate the courage and principles he has had to sacrifice his own interests for the cause of our wonderful country. What Mike is doing is the opposite of grifting; he’s gone to great sacrifice to truly protect our constitutional republic, the will of the people, and even basic God-given rights such as free speech.”
O’Sullivan contradicts his own claim that Lindell is funding conspiracy theories and subsidizing a network of election denial grifters by pointing out the losses he’s incurred. “Because of his election denialism,” O’Sullivan told Wired, “he’s been kicked off a lot of TV networks, he’s been kicked out of the big stores around the US. Therefore, you’re not hearing from him as much.”
O’Sullivan continued his Wired interview with a statement unwittingly revealing a battle between communo-fascist style repression of free speech and actual grassroots Democracy:
After January 6, 2021, Big Tech, like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, et cetera, kicked off a lot of election deniers. Trump notably being one. But also, just a lot of regular Americans, regular Trump supporters got kicked off some platform in one way or the other. People started moving into new platforms, like Truth Social, which is run by Trump. But also, some existing platforms became incredibly and increasingly popular. Like Telegram, like Gab. There’s also now Rumble, which is the right’s YouTube, basically. All of this is out there. It’s also created a lot more space for up-and-coming wannabe influencers, or whatever they want to call themselves, to start going out there, creating this election denialism content. Having an audience, but also having a way to monetize it.”
The real motivation behind the dedicated attacks by CNN against Mike Lindell and MyPillow seems to be the fear that voices of dissent among the citizen “ants” are challenging the authoritarian narrative of the administrative cabal’s “grasshoppers.”
As “Hopper” says in Pixar’s A Bug’s Life, “You let one ant stand up to us, then they all might stand up! Those puny little ants outnumber us a hundred to one and if they ever figure that out, there goes our way of life! It’s not about food, it’s about keeping those ants in line!”
The subtitle of an August 8 interview of O’Sullivan is telling; “Ahead of November, far-right election deniers are only getting organized.”
An organized democratic opposition is what the “Cabal” seem to fear most.
About
The Lindell Offense Fund, a 501(c)4 founded by Mike Lindell, is dedicated to securing U.S. election platforms on behalf of all Americans, regardless of party affiliation. The Lindell Plan for Secure Elections includes strategies, materials and staffing to promote transparency, fairness, and accountability to restore confidence in our elections.
Kelly John Walker is an American statesman, senior writer, and entrepreneur. He is Communications Director for Lindell Offense Fund, Founder of FreedomTalk, and a freelance writer published in The Washington Times, Gateway Pundit, The Epoch Times, George Magazine, Andrew Magazine, Newsmax, Townhall, Law Enforcement Today, and more. Kelly holds a BA in English & Theology, and a Master of Science degree on a graduate fellowship with the US Department of Defense. He had a distinguished career as a conservation professional before founding two award-winning advertising agencies.
