Deciphering the Pre- and Post-Election Narratives

Democrats employ the CCP's Three Warfares during the midterm election campaign

Residents of Orange County drop off voting ballots at the Orange County Registrar of Voters offices in Santa Ana, Calif., on Nov. 8, 2022. John Fredricks/The Epoch Times

Commentary

The narratives and political messages conveyed by the U.S. corporate media during the 2022 midterm election campaign are a classic example of media warfare of which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) would be proud. The Democrat-media complex playbook was right out of the Three Warfares strategy endorsed by the CCP Central Committee and the Central Military Commission in 2003.

Three Warfares is a non-kinetic strategy that integrates psychological, media, and legal warfare to achieve geopolitical-military objectives. China watchers have long described the Three Warfares as “war by other means.” Just as Prussian Gen. Carl von Clausewitz once said (paraphrasing), “War is politics by other means,” the reverse is also true for the language of politics amounts to political warfare (for example, defeat, victory, winners, losers, annihilate, destroy, etc.). Thus, it is no surprise that Democratic Party strategists—many of whom have long been enamored of the authoritarian methods of the CCP—have adopted the Three Warfares strategy to achieve Democrat political goals and objectives.

The Democrat media narratives in 2022 represented a confluence of media, legal, and psychological warfare. Let us examine the premise, with particular emphasis on media warfare.

3 Warfares Applied to Politics

The communist Chinese defined media warfare as “constant, ongoing activity aimed at long-term influence of perceptions and attitudes.” These are the objectives of media warfare: “preserve friendly morale; generate public support at home and abroad; weaken an enemy’s will to fight and alter an enemy’s situational assessment.”

Psychological warfare involves using political “pressure, rumor, false narratives, and harassment” to influence one’s political adversaries, while legal warfare exploits the legal system and its bureaucracy to achieve designated political objectives.

A China Daily newspaper box is with other free daily papers in New York on Jan. 20, 2021. Chung I Ho/The Epoch Times

The Democrats have practiced non-stop media warfare for over six years against former President Donald Trump to preserve the morale of the Democrat base, to generate public support for impeaching (and prosecuting) Trump, to try to weaken his will to fight back and alter his assessment of the political landscape. The Democrat media gaslighting included continuous propagation of the following blockbuster narratives that were later exposed as complete fabrications: Trump-Russia collusion, that Trump was not “spied upon” during his 2016 presidential campaign, the Ukraine quid pro quo phone call, the twisting of his “very fine people” comments and his statement about using bleach and UV light against COVID-19, the 2020 election was the “most secure in history,” and many more.

A key long-term Democrat objective of this media warfare campaign was to psychologically poison the electorate against Trump such that a significant portion of the American people would never believe anything Trump might say on any topic or issue (this is psychological warfare). This objective has been achieved because there remains a core of Americans who still believe that Trump colluded with Russia and is a “criminal” who should be prosecuted for any number of the crimes for which Democrats have tried and failed to indict him (thus far). In short, there are Americans who have been psychologically conditioned to believe virtually any Democrat media accusation against Trump, no matter how outlandish.

This conditioning was exploited through the Democrats’ media warfare to the fullest during the 2022 campaign to make the midterms about Trump as opposed to the real issues about which Americans were concerned and for which Democrats were politically vulnerable. One particular example was the continuous Democrat media speculation about Trump’s supposed crimes that led to the unprecedented FBI raid of his Mar-a-Lago home on Aug. 8: compromising of national security, retention of highly classified materials, disclosure of nuclear secrets, and more. The Democrat media complex ran cover for the DOJ and FBI for months and ruminated that it was only just a matter of time before Trump would be indicted.

And now we find out that that raid was almost certainly nothing more than election tampering! On Nov. 14, The Washington Post published these revelations from “sources familiar with the investigation”: “FBI interviews with witnesses so far … do not point to any nefarious effort by Trump to leverage, sell or use the government secrets. Instead, the former president seemed motivated by a more basic desire not to give up what he believed was his property, these people said.”

Isn’t that convenient now that the election is over, and the story served its purpose of motivating the Democrat base to turn out and vote? This gambit amounted to all three elements of Three Warfares: legal, media, and psychological!

A sign with a U.S. flag is seen at a polling station during early voting ahead of the midterm elections in Los Angeles, Calif., on Nov. 1, 2022. Robyn Beck/AFP via Getty Images

At what point will Americans automatically reject out of hand the next Democrat media false narrative? Surely, that day is coming soon!

Given their echo chamber of lies, what other 2022 election narratives propagated by the Democrats were false—or, at the very least, highly suspect?

Democrat Political Narratives in 2022

The pre-election media narrative predicted a Republican wave based on the polling that showed Republicans were more in tune with the issues that were most important to the voters. The issues of the economy, inflation, and crime dwarfed all others in polls leading up to the election. Despite the efforts of media-controlled polls to depress Republican turnout, the generic congressional vote polling also shifted dramatically toward Republicans in the waning days of the campaign, with Real Clear Politics polling averages giving Republicans a 4.5 percent advantage.

The Democrats’ election narratives involved topic-shifting as a major strategy. Since they couldn’t run on their record on the economy, inflation, and crime, the Democrats endlessly preached about the need to “save our democracy” and to restore abortion as the law of the land as the twin pillars of their political campaign. Save our democracy meant saving Democrats from being kicked to the curb by Trump-supporting America First voters, and the Dobbs decision reinforced the Democrats’ hatred of Trump in general since his three Supreme Court nominations made that verdict possible. Through these two narratives, the Democrats counted on the long-term effects of their Three Warfares campaign against Trump to motivate their base.

But were those narratives what enabled the Democrats to hold the Senate and nearly hold the House, or were they just camouflage that obscured the real Democrat strategy that made the difference, such as ballot harvesting and other efforts to undermine election integrity in various states?

Post-Election Narratives

Does it make sense that voters who feel the pain daily of high inflation and gasoline prices somehow voted to keep Democrats in control of the Senate? That saving our democrats and support for infanticide were the two issues that made the difference during the midterm elections when families were struggling to pay the rent and put food on the table?

When the predicted massive Republican wave didn’t happen, the legacy media shifted into overdrive to explain why the Democrats have apparently held the Senate and the Republican margin in the House was minuscule. Every reason possible was dredged up except the elephant in the room: ballot harvesting.

The Democrat media strategy from Nov. 9 onward was to declare victories for Democrats early while delaying the announcement of Republican victories for as long as possible to establish key Democrat political narratives: that there was no Republican wave, Trump “lost the election,” Ron DeSantis has replaced Trump as the leader of the Republican Party, and Trump should not run for president in 2024. And the obligatory media polls have been dutifully manufactured to support those Democrat narratives.

Former President Donald Trump announces he is running for president in the 2024 U.S. presidential election during an announcement at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla., on Nov. 15, 2022. Alon Skuy/AFP via Getty Images

Except it was a wave election in the sense that Republicans earned 6 million more votes nationwide than Democrats did. That story has been completely ignored by the Democrat media complex in their various efforts to rationally explain how Democrats cast 70 percent of the early votes in Pennsylvania, or that Democrats cast only 16.6 percent of the Election Day votes in Maricopa County (Arizona), or that the virtually unknown GOP candidate for state treasurer in Arizona got more votes than GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake received, or that Maricopa County election officials contributed to an anti-Republican PAC, or that the right-wing violence that the Democrats predicted would almost certainly happen did not materialize after all, or that a large number of Trump-endorsed candidates won on Election Day (and here).

The Democrat narrative has been that millennial women made the difference in the election—that the abortion narrative endlessly repeated during the campaign turned out young women in unprecedented numbers to tip close elections to the Democrats. Is that a believable narrative or just another Democrat lie that obfuscates the truth?

With ballot harvesting in play in all the swing states, no one will ever know the real will of the voters. The closest glimpse of reality was the Republican sweep of national and statewide offices in Florida and North Carolina, where ballot harvesting is illegal and strong voter ID requirements are enforced. Their results somehow matched election predictions, but that didn’t happen in states that authorized ballot harvesting.

The pre-election abortion narrative perfectly aligns with the post-election “young women vote” narrative. This is not a coincidence! Both were designed to distract from the real driver of the Democrats’ narrow wins, which was the continued counting of harvested ballots after Election Day.

Concluding Thoughts

The Democrats completely control the corporate media narrative, and they practice media warfare against their Republican adversaries every day of the year. This year’s pre- and post-election political narratives were and are all in lockstep with Democrat political objectives, the most important of which is to thwart Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign through psychological, legal, and—most importantly—media warfare.

The midterm elections are (nearly) over, subject to last-minute counting and probably recounts. The Democrat media complex’s employment of the Three Warfares against the hapless Republican Party paid dividends in staving off what should have been devastating Democrat losses in Congress. And they were able to pull it off by completely avoiding discussion of what really made the difference: ballot harvesting and the weakening of election integrity laws in many states.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.