Media worried too many Amerikans will question legitimacy of 2016 election!

NEW YORK (PNN) - August 23, 2016 - 2016 is the year many, many Amerikans began to question whether or not our elections, and to a lesser extent, our democracy (insert “it’s a constitutional republic, big difference!” here) are rigged. There is plenty of evidence suggesting these skeptical Amerikans are, indeed, onto something with their suspicions. But the corporate media have come out in defense of Amerika’s “democracy” - and political elites are defending the system, too. In the wake of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s recent rhetoric regarding the “rigged” system, the ruling class of the Fascist Police States of Amerika is peddling the fiction that somehow Trump’s irresponsible sensationalism is solely to blame for the newfound feelings of illegitimacy plaguing our elections.

Trump’s [rigged election] words are having an effect. Just 38% of Trump supporters believe their votes will be counted accurately, and only 49% of all registered voters are “very confident” their votes will be tabulated without error, according to a Pew Research survey taken last week.

According to corporate media, the only reason Amerikans think their elections are rigged in one way or another is because Trump said so. It has nothing to do with the explosive DNC email leaks that showed the Democrats manipulated the corporate media in favor of Hillary Clinton. It has nothing to do with superdelegates who get to override the voters. It has nothing to do with the Republican establishment choosing to shut down Colorado’s primary, handing all the delegates to Ted Cruz. It has nothing to do with now-former DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz admitting the role of superdelegates is to fend off grassroots political challengers. It also must have nothing to do with an RNC committee member openly wondering why the Republican Party has primary elections to begin with since the Party chooses the nominee anyway - not the voters.

While Bernie Sanders fades into the matrix with his endorsement of Hillary Clinton and recent decision to hit the campaign trail for her, many of his supporters feel the same way Trump supporters feel. The Democrat primary was rife with inconsistencies, voter suppression, and suspect voting machines - all of which have culminated into several high-profile lawsuits alleging wrongdoing by the DNC. Coincidentally, Shawn Lucas, the man who was spearheading one of the lawsuits, was recently found dead on his bathroom floor.

But this is all Trump’s fault, right? Or maybe Russia’s?

Even though voting inconsistencies became famous in the 2000 Bush v. Gore presidential election, Gore was a good boy and didn’t bother questioning the findings. He did the right thing and conceded defeat despite vocal cries from his ardent supporters that he contest the election.

What’s interesting is that according to the Emmy-nominated HBO documentary Hacking Democracy, which followed the trail of investigators in Florida in an attempt to get to the bottom of the voter inconsistencies, the Gore campaign was made aware of verifiable issues with the vote counts but still encouraged the investigators to drop their cause and shut up. They were silenced by the candidate they were trying to help. POLITICO suggests that this is what Trump should do if there are any questionable results in November.

Trump hates the media. He says it all the time. So much so that POLITICO says that Trump could single-handedly do irreparable damage to the institution of mainstream media this election. This is yet another fiction being peddled by the self-serving corporate media.

Instead of owning up to its waning trust among the general public, they would rather play the blame game. You see, long before Trump hit the 2016 political circuit, Amerikans had already started to lose trust in corporate media. In September 2014, Anti-Media reported, Amerikans’ trust in media had reached an all-time low. As of October of 2015, only 7% of the country had a “great deal” of trust in mainstream media - but this must be Trump’s fault. Or maybe we can pin this on Russia, too.

Another recent development that doesn’t prove the elections are rigged per se - but rather, that they are illegitimate - is the overwhelmingly small turnout of voters who nominated both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. The two of them combined only attracted 9% of the general public to vote for them in the primaries, meaning less than a tenth of the Fascist Police States of Amerika population anointed the nominees, one of whom will eventually be ruling over all Amerikans. Amerikans are hardly excited to get out and vote in elections nowadays - possibly because after years of believing unrepresentative politicians’ empty promises, they think the whole process has become futile.

But none of this really matters, anyway, since the FPSA is no longer a democracy or constitutional republic. It’s an oligarchy. In short, as a 2014 Princeton University study concluded, “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on (FPSA) government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.”

But again, it’s not the actions of the oligarchy or corporate media that have led voters to question the legitimacy of the system - it’s Trump’s words.

“Many Republican elites fear that Trump’s efforts to diminish people’s confidence in mainstream media, fair elections and politics itself will have a lasting impact,” POLITICO observes.

“The damage this is going to do to various institutions is going to be long term,’ said Charlie Sykes, a prominent conservative radio host in Milwaukee who has been one of the country’s most outspoken and consistent anti-Trump voices. “How do you restore civil discourse after all this? He is a postmodern authoritarian who’s in the process of delegitimizing every institution - media, the ballot box - that can be a check on him.”

But what if it’s the oligarchic political system and corporate media that have delegitimized themselves, and not some manufactured Trump conspiracy that has suddenly turned half the country into skeptical anti-establishment rebels? Maybe corporate media’s collusion with the corporate government is the real conspiracy. Or maybe we should stop complaining and just blame Russia and Julian Assange - that seems a lot more convenient to The New York Times.