Month: February 2022

Of course he’s cashing in. And the marks are happy to pay:

In early December, Donald J. Trump put on a tuxedo and boarded the private jet of a scrap-metal magnate and crypto-miner for a short flight across Florida, touching down at an airport in Naples. There, a long red carpet marked the pathway into a Christmas-decorated hangar filled with supporters of Mr. Trump who had paid $10,000 to $30,000 for the privilege of attending a party and taking a photo with him.

The event had all the trappings of a typical high-end fund-raiser: a giant American flag, a lectern, chandeliers and an open bar. Frank Stallone’s band provided the music; an anti-Biden “Let’s Go Brandon” banner hung from the rafters.

But the money raised did not go to Mr. Trump’s political operation. Instead, Mr. Trump’s share of the evening’s proceeds went straight into his pocket, according to a person familiar with the arrangement.

Multiple attendees said they bought their tickets from a private company, Whip Fundraising, whose founder, Brad Keltner, has asserted that “the lion’s share” went to charity. But the website advertising the event listed no charitable cause. And Mr. Keltner, reached by phone, declined to discuss how money was distributed.

In the year since Mr. Trump has left the White House, he has undertaken a wide-ranging set of moneymaking ventures, trading repeatedly on his political fame and fan base in pursuit of profit. Much as he did while in the White House, Mr. Trump has thoroughly blurred the lines between his political ambitions and his business interests.

He has gone on an arena tour with the former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, where a backstage “V.I.P. package” sold for more than $7,500. He has published a $75 coffee-table book, after being paid a multimillion-dollar advance by a new publishing company co-founded by his eldest son. He has turned an online Trump store into a MAGA merchandiser, with his company sending marketing missives to people on his 2020 campaign’s email list.

That store is now selling red “Make America Great Again” hats for $50 each — a $20 markup from the price currently offered by his political action committee — with all proceeds going to a Trump-owned company.

His wife, Melania, has gotten into the act, too, auctioning off online collectibles and scheduling her own big-ticket event in Naples this April, a “tulips and topiaries high tea,” with V.I.P. packages reaching $50,000 and an undisclosed portion going to charity.

For Mr. Trump, the monetization of his post-presidency represents a return to his roots. He expertly leveraged his celebrity as the host of “The Apprentice” and his image as a decisive businessman to build credibility when he first entered politics. Now, he is executing the same playbook, only in reverse: converting a political following that provided hundreds of millions of dollars in small campaign contributions into a base of consumers for all things branded Trump.

There are grandiose enterprises, such as a fledgling social-media company, whose billion-dollar market capitalization is largely predicated on Mr. Trump’s direct personal involvement. And there are smaller ones, like remodeling the lobby bar of Trump Tower in Manhattan and renaming it the 45 Wine and Whiskey Bar — where specialty cocktails range in price up to, yes, $45 (that one comes with two “American beef sliders”) and can be sipped in dark velvet chairs surrounded by Mr. Trump’s black-and-white presidential portraits and paraphernalia.

“You come here, you drink Trump,” said Daniel Popescu, a 79-year-old architect and a bar regular, whose typical order is a $20 glass of Trump Blanc de Blanc sparkling wine. He hailed Mr. Trump on a recent evening as “the best president this country has ever had.”

“For a billionaire to give up his life to do good for the country,” Mr. Popescu said, with a shake of his head and a sip, “it’s unbelievable.”

Other past presidents have cashed in financially after leaving the White House. Barack and Michelle Obama reportedly sold a joint book deal for $65 million. Bill and Hillary Clinton’s speechmaking after leaving the White House was estimated to have netted them $153 million by the spring of 2015, when Mrs. Clinton announced her own run for president. George W. Bush has been a mainstay on the speaking circuit, too.

But no former president has been more determined to meld his business interests — from chocolate bars to real estate to a tech start-up — with a continuing political operation and capitalize on that for personal gain.

Taylor Budowich, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, noted that Mr. Trump had been wealthy before seeking public office. “After sacrificing considerably to lead our nation, there continues to be unprecedented demand for President Trump, his thoughts and his products, unlike anything politics has ever seen,” Mr. Budowich said.

I just love the idea that he “sacrificed” by being president. He monetized the presidency. He and his family made hundreds of millions while he was president largely by selling access and using the presidency to sell his brand. In fact, it was one long promotion.

Here’s the Orange Oracle speaking today:

Trump describes his presidency as a "romantic period" and "glamorous time" in US history

Originally tweeted by Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) on February 12, 2022.

He thinks it was Camelot.

This piece in the Washington Post outlines the inevitable argument among Democratic strategists about whether or not to run against Republicans or bore voters to death with ten point plans. By this I mean the proverbial “kitchen table issues” vs “fascism”:

Democrats heading into turbulent reelection battles want to focus their campaigns on the bread-and-butter issues that appeal to swing voters, not Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

Take Wednesday’s introduction of legislation that would suspend the federal gas tax for the rest of this year. Its lead sponsor is Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), with three other initial co-sponsors being Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.), Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) and Raphael G. Warnock (D-Ga.).

That quartet represents the most endangered Senate Democrats and could decide the Senate majority next year: If all four win, Republicans likely have no path to getting the 51 seats. These Democrats say inflation is a big concern for their voters, not the former president.

“Things like the price of gasoline, the price of ground beef or groceries or prescription drugs, especially if they’re a senior,” Kelly said in a brief interview. “You know, they’re not looking back at an old — an election a year ago. They’re thinking about, What affects my family?”

That message has echoes of 2018 when Democrats won the House majority on a similar message, imploring candidates to avoid the bright lights that Trump messaging brings.

But some Democrats fear that this is letting the ex-president’s allies off the hook. They believe that voters, both the liberal base and some swing voters in the suburbs, need to hear a message that links GOP candidates to the attempts to overturn President Biden’s victory and future threats to elections.

“Yes, Democrats need a positive narrative about the work we are doing for the American people,” Stop Him Now, a super PAC formed last month, said in releasing its first ad. “Yes, we need smart, aggressive, localized campaigns against individual opponents. … But it won’t be enough.”

It begins with video of rioters attacking the Capitol and transitions to various GOP candidates shaking hands with Trump, ending with the image of a police officer getting crushed by rioters on Jan. 6.

“Republicans in ’22 means Trump in ’24,” the ad reads in its final image, with shattered Capitol windows in the backdrop.

These strategists expect candidates to occupy the traditional lanes of voicing a positive agenda about what incumbents have delivered and also striking back at their opponents with negative ads specific to their own history.

“Our concern was that lane three — the Trump lane — was being abandoned,” Mandy Grunwald, a veteran strategist who co-founded the Trump-focused PAC, said in an interview Friday.

That fear grew in the weeks after Terry McAuliffe’s loss in the Virginia gubernatorial race, after his closing weeks focused on tying now-Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) to Trump.

He came up short in a state Biden won comfortably, so many Democrats deemed that approach too risky, favoring the 2018 approach of appealing to swing voters’ pocket books.

Geoff Garin, the pollster for Barack Obama’s successful 2008 and 2012 campaigns, is also calling for a sharper focus on linking these candidates to the ex-president.

“More important than Trump himself is what has happened to the Republican Party in the wake of Trump. This is a party that in many ways has become extreme and radicalized,” Garin wrote in an email exchange.

A CNN poll released Friday showed a small silver lining for Democrats advocating a get-tough-on-Trump message. Yes, by 42 percent to 32 percent, voters said they preferred a congressional candidate who opposes Biden.

But by a bigger margin, 44 percent to 27 percent, voters prefer candidates who oppose Trump.

Garin wants to remind the current president’s 81 million voters that many of this fall’s GOP candidates will be vocal supporters of the former president, who is very much considering another national campaign.

“Trump personally is relevant to the extent that voters see Republican victories in 2022 as setting the stage for Trump’s comeback in 2024,” he wrote.

[…]

“I think it’s incredibly important to clearly focus on things that are impacting families today, which are the bread-and-butter issues, and candidates need to lean in to those issues,” Peters said. “But they should also bring up the fundamental threat to our constitutional democracy being posed by all too many Republicans.”

He thinks a Trump-focused message can help energize liberal voters, so that ads and direct mail might be tailored to talk about the former president to that bloc of supporters.

“You always have to know your audience,” Peters said.

Grunwald’s camp, while understanding that House and Senate incumbents will be reluctant to talk about Trump controversies, is pushing party leaders to embrace an outside effort to even target suburban swing voters with this message.

Rather than just sitting in a defensive crouch talking about local accomplishments, they say Democrats should roll the dice with their own national message, tying their opponents to the ex-president and his desire to reclaim the presidency even after the Jan. 6 riots.

They believe the DSCC and super PAC allies could fill this lane, especially since Trump has already christened front-runners in the Nevada and Georgia Senate races and expects to be out on the trail with rallies in the fall.

“The biggest ally we have is Trump himself. He’s not going to allow Chris Christie or Ron DeSantis or anyone else define the future of the Republican Party. He wants the decision of whether to run again be something that he alone decides,” Saul Shorr, a veteran Democratic media consultant who co-founded Stop Him Now, said.

But senators themselves grimace at the thought of focusing on Trump, especially in states like Arizona, where Biden won by a little more than 10,000 votes out of more than 3.3 million ballots cast.

Asked about the insurrection, Kelly likened it to his days as an astronaut.

“I was at NASA when we had the space shuttle Columbia accident,” he said, referencing the deadly 2003 crash.

“You do an investigation. And you figure out, ‘Why did this happen?’ And then you come up with a plan,” Kelly said.

He suggested that the House select committee might come up with proposals to ensure something like that “does not happen again,” but he does not believe it will be a central issue in his campaign.

“The American people are focused on what’s going on in their lives,” Kelly said.

One of the things that’s going on in their lives is the Republican Party turning into an authoritarian, white nationalist party. It’s a problem.

There is a sense that that Democrats won in 2018 because they ran on “kitchen table issues”, health care specifically. That is not really true. It was a referendum on Donald Trump and Democrats came out in large numbers to vote on that issue, while anti-Trump Republicans stayed home. The Republicans want to turn that around next fall but they still have that Orange Monster out there (who they continue to enable and encourage), as well as a restive fringe that’s causing trouble. The Democrats should be able to run on that — and they need to. This is an existential crisis.

Of course they have to address “issues.” The country is still traumatized by the pandemic and the economic challenges it brought with it. But it is also traumatized by what Trump and the Republicans are doing our democracy and political system and if the Dems fail to address that they will look completely out of touch. And that will not end well.

I mean…

If we tell ourselves that inflation is more important than the threat to democracy, we are walking the path so many took in pre-WW2 Germany. The choices we make today will determine our future. Vote while your vote still counts. https://t.co/GZcRMg2Kxa

— Stuart Stevens (@stuartpstevens) February 2, 2022

There’s a lot of talk about Big Brother campus speech codes but never let it be said that the right wing isn’t an innovator in suppressing free speech. Get a load of this:

A new Texas law that keeps local election officials from encouraging voters to request mail-in ballots likely violates the First Amendment, a federal judge ruled late Friday.

Following a testy three-hour hearing earlier in the day, Federal District Judge Xavier Rodriguez temporarily blocked the state from enforcing the rule against Harris County’s election administrator until the rest of a lawsuit plays out. Although the scope of Rodriguez’s preliminary injunction is limited, the judge dealt the first legal blow to new elections restrictions and voting changes Republican lawmakers enacted last year.

The injunction applies to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and local county prosecutors in Harris, Travis and Williamson counties.

The state is expected to quickly appeal the ruling. The lawsuit was brought by Harris County election administrator Isabel Longoria and Cathy Morgan, a volunteer deputy registrar who is appointed to help register voters in Travis and Williamson counties.

Feb. 18 is the last day for counties to receive applications for mail-in ballots for the March 1 primary.

Rodriguez previewed his order throughout a Friday morning hearing during which he repeatedly pressed the state’s attorneys — with increasing exasperation — to fill in what he cataloged as ambiguities in the new law. The challenged provision makes it a state jail felony for election officials to “solicit the submission” of an application to vote by mail if the voter did not request it.

Rodriguez took particular issue with the lack of a clear definition for what constitutes soliciting when talking to voters, even those 65 and older who automatically qualify to vote by mail under the state’s strict rules.

“It has a chilling effect,” Rodriguez said while questioning a state attorney Friday morning. “They don’t know when they’re going to run afoul of this vague [law].”

His comments followed testimony from Longoria and Morgan, who said they feared the civil and criminal penalties that could come from violating the broad prohibition.

Longoria said her office was now taking a “passive” approach to voter outreach in regard to voting by mail, with staffers “gingerly” weighing their words while answering voters’ questions about their options.

“When it comes to voting by mail, I have to be very careful with my words,” Longoria said from the witness stand. “I stop mid-sentence sometimes at town halls. … I’m tentative to overreach at the moment.”

Morgan testified that she was concerned the law applied even to volunteers like her, given that her role is formally certified by county election offices. She offered examples of voters she no longer felt she could help navigate the vote-by-mail process. That included an 88-year-old voter whom Morgan would typically call at the start of every year to remind her that she has to reapply for mail-in ballots.

I suspect the state Supreme Court will let the law stand and who knows what will happen from there. These people have been micro-managing health care workers’ dialog with patients around the issue of abortion for a long time so I expect this will be “left up to the states” as well.

I have to wonder why they assume that mail in voting is only used by Democrats though. It has to be affecting their own voters as well:

A restrictive new voting law in Texas has sown confusion and erected hurdles for those casting ballots in the state’s March 1 primary, with election administrators rejecting early batches of mail ballots at historic rates and voters uncertain about whether they will be able to participate.

In recent days,thousands of ballots have been rejected because voters did not meet a new requirement to provide an identification number inside the return envelope.

In Harris County, the state’s most populous county and home to Houston, election officials said Friday that 40 percent of roughly 3,600 returned ballots so far have lacked the identification number required under Senate Bill 1, as the new law is known. In Williamson County, a populous northern suburb of Austin, the rejection rate has been about 25 percent in the first few days that ballots have come in, the top election official there said.

“Twenty-five percent of mail ballots from the starting blocks is a big deal for our county,” said Chris Davis, Williamson County’s elections chief. “We’ve never seen it before. And yes, our hope is that we can get these voters to correct the defects in a timely fashion. But what if they don’t, because three months ago they didn’t have to? There’s a learning curve. There are going to be possibly painful lessons that their vote doesn’t count because they weren’t aware.”

None of this is necessary, of course. There is no threat of massive voter fraud from mail in voting. Some states have been doing it for many years. But thanks to Trump, it’s been demonized and tens of millions of Americans believe it’s uniquely vulnerable. Then again, many of them also don’t want to stand in line for hours. So we’ll see how this works for the Republicans.

Meanwhile, it looks increasingly like Russia is going to invade Ukraine.

President Biden spoke with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia for one hour on Saturday in a bid to defuse the crisis over Ukraine, and the State Department ordered all but a “core team” of its diplomats and employees to leave the American Embassy in Kyiv over fears that Moscow would soon mount a major assault.

Details of the phone call were not yet released early Saturday afternoon.

Reflecting the urgent concern in Washington over Russia’s growing military buildup surrounding its smaller neighbor, the Pentagon said it would temporarily pull 160 American military trainers out of the country, where they had been working with Ukrainian troops near the Polish border.

Even as Mr. Biden and Mr. Putin spoke by telephone — and after calls earlier Saturday between the top U.S. and Russian diplomats and between the countries’ defense secretaries — the path to a diplomatic resolution to the standoff appeared to be narrowing, with growing numbers of Russian and Russian-backed forces massing around Ukraine on three sides.

U.S. intelligence officials had thought Mr. Putin was prepared to wait until the end of the Winter Olympics in Beijing before possibly ordering an offensive, to avoid antagonizing President Xi Jinping of China, a critical ally. But in recent days, they say, the timeline began moving up, an acceleration that Biden administration officials began publicly acknowledging on Friday.

“We continue to see signs of Russian escalation, including new forces arriving at the Ukrainian border,” Jake Sullivan, the president’s national security adviser, told reporters on Friday, adding that an invasion could begin “during the Olympics,” which are scheduled to end on Feb. 20.

The United States has picked up intelligence that Russia is discussing next Wednesday as the target date for the start of military action, officials said, acknowledging the possibility that mentioning a particular date could be part of a Russian disinformation effort.

The Ukrainian government urged calm, with President Volodymyr Zelensky saying that he had not seen intelligence indicating an imminent Russian attack, and that “too much information” about a possible offensive was sowing unnecessary fear.

The United States has ruled out sending troops to defend Ukraine, but it has increased deployments to NATO member countries in Eastern Europe. The Pentagon on Friday said it had ordered 3,000 more soldiers to Poland.

The White House is eager to avoid a repeat of the chaotic evacuation of the U.S. Embassy staff from Kabul last August as Afghanistan fell to the Taliban. The United States and countries including Britain, Denmark, Germany, Japan, Latvia and the Netherlands have issued increasingly urgent calls for their citizens to leave Ukraine. On Saturday, KLM, the main Dutch airline, announced that it will stop flying to Ukraine, citing the security situation.

A State Department official emphasized on Saturday that the U.S. military would not be evacuating American citizens from Ukraine in the way troops did in Afghanistan.

Russia has accused Western countries of spreading misinformation about its intentions. On Saturday, its Foreign Ministry said it was pulling some of its diplomatic personnel out of Ukraine because it was “drawing the conclusion that our American and British colleagues seem to know about certain military actions.”

I’m having a hard time wrapping my mind around this. Are we really going to have a war in Europe? In 2022?? What?

Well, I guess if the United States could elect an unfit, reality show weirdo to the presidency and his unhinged followers could storm the Capitol to stop the peaceful transfer of power anything can happen.

We have learned that the Trucker’s Convoy is being financed by the American right wing and now MSNBC’s Ben Collins reports that it’s also being manipulated by profit-making fake Facebook accounts from around the world that are pulling in QAnon and anti-vaxxers:

There is growing momentum in the U.S. anti-vaccination community to conduct rallies similar to Canada’s “Freedom Convoy” that has paralyzed Ottawa, Ontario, and the effort is receiving a boost from a familiar source: overseas content mills.

Some Facebook groups that have promoted American “trucker convoys” similar to demonstrations that have clogged roads in Ottawa are being run by fake accounts tied to content mills in Vietnam, Bangladesh, Romania and several other countries, Facebook officials told NBC News on Friday.

The groups have popped up as extremism researchers have begun to warn that many anti-vaccine and conspiracy-driven communities in the U.S. are quickly pivoting to embrace and promote the idea of disruptive convoys.  

Researchers at Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy first noted that large pro-Trump groups had been changing their names to go with convoy-related themes earlier this week. Grid News reported on Friday that one major trucker convoy Facebook group was being run by a Bangladesh content farm.

Many of the groups have changed names multiple times, going from those that tap hot-button political issues such as support for former President Donald Trump or opposition to vaccine mandates, to names with keywords like “trucker,” “freedom” and “convoy.”  Facebook allows groups on its platforms to change names but tracks the changes in each page’s “about” section.

The motivations of the people behind the content mills are not clear, but Joan Donovan, director of the Shorenstein Center, said the pattern fits existing efforts to make money off U.S. political divisions. 

“In some ways, it’s normal political activity,” Donovan said. “In other ways, we have to look at how some of the engagement online is fake but can be a way to mobilize more people.”

“When we see really effective disinformation campaigns, it’s when the financial and political motives align,” she added.

The groups frequently directed users away from Facebook toward websites that sold pro-Trump and anti-vaccine merchandise, a spokesperson for Meta, the parent company of Facebook, said. The spokesperson noted that the majority of the content posted in these groups came from real accounts and that the company has removed the groups tied to foreign content mills.

“Voicing opposition to government mandates is not against Meta’s policies,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “However, we have removed multiple groups and Pages for repeatedly violating our policies prohibiting QAnon content and those run by spammers in different countries around the world. We continue to monitor the situation and take action.”

The details of foreign interference come as anti-vaccine protesters, pro-Trump groups and QAnon supporters have shifted their full attention to making trucker convoys a reality on American roads. Anti-vaccine protesters, some of whom are truckers, have clogged roads in Ottawa for more than a week, demanding the Canadian government remove mask and vaccine mandates.

American far-right groups on Facebook, Telegram and the voice chat app Zello have aimed to replicate the demonstration in cities across the United States. People have passed around flyers in group chats urging truckers to stop traffic at this Sunday’s Super Bowl in Los Angeles, but the groups have found a three-day window to be too short for sufficient mobilization.

Discussion in the anti-vaccine communities has largely coalesced around a different date for road closures — March 5 — with plans for convoys headed toward Washington D.C. and Los Angeles in the days prior.

Major websites and social media accounts behind the anti-vaccine mandate protest that marched on Washington last month are rebranding as “trucker convoys,” part of a widespread effort to bring versions of Ottawa’s anti-vaccine road closures to American cities.

The official website for the “Defeat the Mandates” event has changed its homepage and is now advertising a trucker convoy in Southern California in March.

“There’s a misconception that every participant in these chats is a trucker, but that’s not true at all. It’s really anybody who’s been a part of these movements who’ve been waiting for an excuse to do something — QAnon, anti-vaccine, sovereign citizens,” said extremism researcher Sara Aniano, who recently published a report on QAnon’s growth after Jan. 6 for the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation, a London-based nonprofit group. ”This feels like the culmination of everything that’s happened since Jan. 6th.”

Social media-based foreign interference in domestic politics first came into public view in the aftermath of the 2016 election after researchers found that Russia’s Internet Research Agency was conducting an elaborate influence campaign across American social media sites in an effort to support candidate Donald Trump. Since then, foreign social media interference has been tempered by efforts by major social media platforms to crack down, though various influence operations are still frequently identified.

Donovan, of Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center, said Vietnamese spammers specifically sell what they call “Nick” accounts at scale, which are credible-seeming Facebook accounts that moderate high-profile groups.

Once purchased, the accounts and the groups they run can be used for any purpose, from selling T-shirts to executing a foreign influence campaign.

Some content mills even offer to help if Facebook takes action against a certain page or group.

“The fake account trade is alive and well,” Donovan said. “Really, they act as something like customer service. Whether it’s a person or an organization, if you bought an account from a person, and they do get taken away, you can contact him and he will reimburse you with more accounts. It has some dark marketing aspects to it.”

The point of renaming larger groups is not only to retain and spam the already-existing community but to also appear higher in Facebook’s search and recommendations bar, which helps lend credibility to those curious about the movement.

Facebook said it would “continue to monitor the situation” for more inauthentic activity.

“We continue to see scammers latch onto any hot-button issue that draws people’s attention, including the ongoing protests,” the Meta spokesperson said. “Over the past week, we’ve removed groups and Pages run by spammers from different countries around the world who used abusive tactics to mislead people about the origin and popularity of their content to drive them to off-platform websites to monetize ad clicks.”

Aniano, who said she recently spent several days listening in on audio chats in convoy-related Telegram groups, said the communities largely consist of a mishmash of anti-vaccine groups and QAnon supporters.

Aniano said the groups, which have tens of thousands of subscribers, flow between logistical discussions about essentials to bring on a long-haul car trip and getting followers up to date on QAnon-based conspiracy theories

This is nuts.

Fox is pushing these protests and Trump has already put out the word that he’s behind them too. It appears that the energy of January 6th is still with us.

Canadian police moved in to clear vaccination-mandate protesters after a judge ordered them to leave. For five days protesters tied up the international Ambassador Bridge between Detroit and Windsor, Ontario (The Guardian):

Many protesters began driving away as police approached shortly after dawn. They had spent the night at the busiest crossing between the US and Canada despite new warnings to end the blockade that has disrupted the flow of goods between the two countries and forced the auto industry on both sides to roll back production.

With dozens of police around his car, a man with “Trump 2024” and “Mandate freedom” spray-painted on his vehicle left without any resistance. Other protesters began dismantling a small tarp-covered encampment.

But three large trucks and about 20 protesters remained blocking traffic early Saturday and they began singing Canada’s national anthem.

The demonstrators are protesting against Canada’s Covid-19 mandates and restrictions. There is also an outpouring of fury toward the prime minister, Justin Trudeau.

Despite the police surrounding them and slowly moving closer, a few dozen Windsor protesters are still just standing around, vowing to “hold the line” pic.twitter.com/M8CxsIPZt9

— Thomas Daigle (@thomasdaigle) February 12, 2022

CNN adds:

Police in Windsor, Ontario, tweeted shortly before 8:30 a.m. ET that they “commenced enforcement at and near the Ambassador Bridge.”

“We urge all demonstrators to act lawfully & peacefully. Commuters are still being asked to avoid the areas affected by the demonstrations at this time,” the tweet reads.

The move comes a day after the issuance of a court order geared toward winding down the blockade that has snarled supply chains and alarmed political leaders.

Those refusing to leave could face fines up to $100,000 and up to one year in prison, Premier of Ontario, Doug Ford, said in issuing a state of emergency on Friday. That announcement covers both protests in Windsor and in the capitol of Ottowa.

And the Ambassador Bridge between Windsor and Detroit is not the only affected border crossing. Demonstrators also have used semitrailers — and sometimes farm equipment and other vehicles — to block crossings between Emerson, Manitoba, and Pembina, North Dakota, as well as at the Coutts access point between Alberta and Montana.

The tie-up at Detroit has affected the U.S. auto industry since Day 1, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer told CNN.

Vladimir Putin may need another distraction.

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For The Win, 4th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.

Activist Greg Greene ponders trucker protests and rumors of trucker protests and tweets, “IDK — if I were a government planning a foreign military adventure that NATO disdained, keeping two alliance governments somewhat diverted by ‘convoy’ protests might seem like a useful ploy.”

If not one to organize from scratch, then to exploit.

On the dark web, someone is exploiting it, Ben Collins finds:

These foreign, stolen accounts and groups are called “Nick accounts,” according to Harvard’s Joan Donovan.

You can buy them on the dark web cheap.

They even have great customer service. Did your convoy group get banned from Facebook?

Call them. They’ll give you another. pic.twitter.com/zo7M9yJgbk

— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) February 12, 2022

“When we see really effective disinformation campaigns, it’s when the financial and political motives align,” said Joan Donovan, director of Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on Media. Some activity is normal political organizing even if instigated by fake accounts (NBC News):

The details of foreign interference come as anti-vaccine protesters, pro-Trump groups and QAnon supporters have shifted their full attention to making trucker convoys a reality on American roads. Anti-vaccine protesters, some of whom are truckers, have clogged roads in Ottawa for more than a week, demanding the Canadian government remove mask and vaccine mandates.

American far-right groups on Facebook, Telegram and the voice chat app Zello have aimed to replicate the demonstration in cities across the United States. People have passed around flyers in group chats urging truckers to stop traffic at this Sunday’s Super Bowl in Los Angeles, but the groups have found a three-day window to be too short for sufficient mobilization.

Although there are some, it is not just truckers in these discussions, Collins adds in a tweet thread, but “a massive amalgam of followers of major QAnon and antivaxx influencers.”

“There’s a misconception that every participant in these chats is a trucker, but that’s not true at all. It’s really anybody who’s been a part of these movements who’ve been waiting for an excuse to do something — QAnon, anti-vaccine, sovereign citizens,” said extremism researcher Sara Aniano, who recently published a report on QAnon’s growth after Jan. 6 for the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation, a London-based nonprofit group. ”This feels like the culmination of everything that’s happened since Jan. 6th.”

Social media-based foreign interference in domestic politics first came into public view in the aftermath of the 2016 election after researchers found that Russia’s Internet Research Agency was conducting an elaborate influence campaign across American social media sites in an effort to support candidate Donald Trump. Since then, foreign social media interference has been tempered by efforts by major social media platforms to crack down, though various influence operations are still frequently identified.

Donovan, of Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center, said Vietnamese spammers specifically sell what they call “Nick” accounts at scale, which are credible-seeming Facebook accounts that moderate high-profile groups.

Once purchased, the accounts and the groups they run can be used for any purpose, from selling T-shirts to executing a foreign influence campaign.

Hard to tell which is which.

Conversations have moved from general discussion about convoy protests to planning for long-haul car trips before wandering into “Q and elites drinking baby blood.”

“They are happy enough to see a neighboring liberal democracy paralyzed by right-wing extremism,” Brian Beutler wrote Friday, “and downright giddy about the thought of replicating the chaos here, given who the president is right now.”

Aside from the protests themselves, Beutler nailed what really drives them:

Underlying all the brazen lawlessness and antisocial conduct on the political right is an implicit threat, especially unsubtle among far-right men, to make the country ungovernable if they don’t get their way, let alone if they face any kind of consequences for their actions.

They are aided further in this hostage-taking approach to civic life by non-trivial levels of support among law-enforcement officers, and a general passivity among liberal leaders, who often convince themselves that any exercise of liberal power will be met with a larger opposite backlash. That is: they’re scared. The anti-democratic right thrived in this climate throughout the Trump years, and is testing the limits of impunity now that he’s out of office.

When democracy isn’t going your way, try politics by tantrum.

I’ve long said that the right is fully prepared to burn the place to the ground rather than let browner and more liberal Americans than them govern it democratically. If they don’t get their way, they’ll murder their beloved, “Banks of the Ohio” style.

Or with a little foreign help, perhaps, Banks of the Dnieper.

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For The Win, 4th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.

Baby rhino was too small to play with other rhinos — and she has the most ecstatic reaction when she meets her first friend 💛 pic.twitter.com/T7k3WFS2lV

— The Dodo (@dodo) February 10, 2022

It looks like the US Intelligence Community did it again:

Sens. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Martin Heinrich (D-NM), who both sit on the Senate Intelligence Committee, made a surprising announcement late Thursday, releasing a statement saying that they had discovered the CIA had been running a “secret bulk collection program.”

The Democratic senators released a redacted letter they had sent to CIA Director William Burns and Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines on April 13 last year regarding the program.

The CIA has “secretly conducted its own bulk program” under Executive Order 12333, according to the letter, and it has done so “entirely outside the statutory framework that Congress and the public believe govern this collection, and without any of the judicial, congressional or even executive branch oversight that comes with [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] collection.”

“This basic fact has been kept from the public and from Congress,” Wyden and Heinrich wrote.

The Democratic lawmakers urged Burns and Haines to declassify information on the program.

The letter claimed that the Senate Intelligence Committee wasn’t aware of the CIA’s secret collection until the month before, when the agency turned over a report on it. An anonymous intelligence official told the New York Times that the committee did know about the program, just not the systems for storing and probing the data that was collected.

Wyden and Heinrich did not provide details on the program in the letter or their announcement on Thursday, such as who was being surveilled and what the full scope of the program was.

The CIA’s privacy and civil liberties officer, Kristi Scott, told the New York Times that the intelligence agency is “committed to transparency consistent with our obligation to protect intelligence sources and methods.”

This is just the first reporting on this and we don’t have a lot of details. But if it is what it looks like, it’s a very big problem. It’s bad enough that the NSA was doing this in the previous decade and I’m sure you all remember what an uphill battle it was to dial that back. CIA doing this is infinitely worse.

Stay tuned. This could be an earthquake.

I’m going to outsource this to Brian Beutler’s Big Tent because it’s just that good:

​You’ve no doubt heard by now about the right-wing, anti-vaccine truckers who’ve caused quite a truckus made life hell in Canada, and even in parts of the U.S., by blockading cities and shutting down shipping arteries that cross the northern border.

Their stridency and persistence, to say nothing of the media’s soft-touch fascination with them, might make it seem as though these men (mostly men, anyhow) and their lawless actions grew out of widespread Canadian opposition to the country’s vaccination requirements; that they express Canada’s true national character, even if most Canadians would never go to their lengths. To the contrary, though, Canadians are pissed as hell at these truckers; indeed most Canadian truckers seem to be pissed at these truckers. If they have any support base at all, it’s among U.S. Republicans, who have cheered them on from the nihilist cheap seats. They are happy enough to see a neighboring liberal democracy paralyzed by right-wing extremism, and downright giddy about the thought of replicating the chaos here, given who the president is right now.

And if domestic security services here in the U.S. are to be believed, they might get their way. That’s disturbing if true, less because of any direct danger angry truckers pose to members of the public than because of the existing climate of right-wing impunity they will join. As unpopular as they are in Canada, they have persisted there, as of this writing, for over a week. And it’s unclear whether any liberal governments in America, let alone the federal government, have the mettle to stop them if they materialize here.

Obviously right-wing men in America can’t get away with literally everything. When they plot to kidnap a Democratic governor, they go to jail; when they film themselves, or get caught on someone else’s camera, laying siege to Congress and assaulting Capitol police, they generally go to jail. When they commit sex trafficking, they stay in Congress, but maybe eventually go to jail.

But if they create a general atmosphere of menace and threat, through illegal actions that don’t constitute direct harm to people or property—or through acts of violence that are arguably legal—they tend to get off scot free. They might even get invited to the State of the Union address by their Republican representatives, or offered contributor contracts with Fox News.

Underlying all the brazen lawlessness and antisocial conduct on the political right is an implicit threat, especially unsubtle among far-right men, to make the country ungovernable if they don’t get their way, let alone if they face any kind of consequences for their actions.

They are aided further in this hostage-taking approach to civic life by non-trivial levels of support among law-enforcement officers, and a general passivity among liberal leaders, who often convince themselves that any exercise of liberal power will be met with a larger opposite backlash. That is: they’re scared. The anti-democratic right thrived in this climate throughout the Trump years, and is testing the limits of impunity now that he’s out of office.

With encouragement from prominent Trump allies, it’s easy to see why a small but feral group of organized truck drivers and affiliated neo-confederates and conspiracy theorists might try something like the “Freedom Convoy” here in the U.S. If we think of the January 6, 2021 insurrection as a test of the outer bounds of right-wing impunity, we learned that scores of people with thousands of followers could organize a mob attack on the Capitol very much out in the open, and that at go time there’d be zero federal officers reinforcing the Capitol police to stop them. Over the course of several hours they assaulted over 100 cops, did millions of dollars worth of damage, got several people killed, threatened the lives of senior government officials, interrupted the peaceful transfer of power, and were then allowed to walk home.

Hundreds of them have since been arrested and charged with various crimes, of course, but this is just to say they’ve learned they can go very far before the state will deploy law-enforcement authorities against them.

It’s no surprise then that they’ve spent the past year terrorizing elections officials simply for doing their jobs. It follows just as predictably that they’ve threatened and assaulted educators and school-board members en masse over mask mandates and black-history curricula, and that when law-enforcement officials have done the bare minimum in response—like convene a working group to think through how to protect educators from political violence—Republicans have been there to accuse the federal government of sicing jack-booted thugs on American parents exercising their First Amendment rights.

The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent has closely monitored the manufactured panic over critical race theory and school masking rules—and the liberal response to both—and his conclusion is pretty depressing. “Much discussion among Democrats of how to approach those matters seems to envision mostly an array of defensive responses,” he wrote, “from avoiding talking about them at all to aggressively calling out the left with a Sister Souljah-type attack for foisting activist terminology on the party. There’s little discussion of how Democrats might hold Republicans politically accountable for the deeper national aims their tactics reflect, and the harms they’re inflicting on our national life.”

After a prologue like this, why wouldn’t right-wing antivaxers try to paralyze commerce within the U.S. At worst they’d accomplish nothing and get away with it; at best they’d erode our public-health defenses further still, using blackmail to prolong the pandemic, which is among their top political goals.

Hopefully the Canadian trucker nonsense won’t metastasize, but that would still leave us stuck with the general problem. Our overall COVID-19 response in the year since Joe Biden took office has been marked by a familiar tendency among both reporters and elected Democrats to view right-wing aggression as the surface manifestation of popular will, when in reality Republicans just act like raging assholes whenever they want to get their way, even if what they want is unpopular.

(Side bar: I honestly wish Democrats would ‘roid out now and again when they want to make progress on some important, partisan issue. It’s reasonable for people to suspect that if politicians are acting worked up, they must be furious about something bad and unpopular. It’s an effective way of framing issues preemptively: seize a position of strength, and leave the opposition to choose between escalating and conciliating.)

Usually this takes the form of breathless hyperbole rather than direct incitement—health-care reform is socialism, vaccine mandates are tyranny, etc etc. When Trump does it, he turns subtext into text, in service of both political goals (remember “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” ) and his personal interests (remember when he directed his mobs to target prosecutors and their cities if they move to prosecute him? Because that was like two weeks ago.) And the fear is that at one level or another, these increasingly explicit threats of violence and disruption are already working.

We learned this week that in addition to habitually destroying presidential records, Trump also stole troves of them when he left the White House for Mar-a-Lago, including some unknown number of classified documents. We also learned that it’s “not yet clear” whether Merrick Garland’s Justice Department will investigate what by every appearance is blatant criminal activity. Lump it together with the warmed over Mark Meadows contempt citation, Trump’s attempt to shake Brad Raffensperger down for fake votes, the absence of any Trump accountability for obstructing justice, and we’d be naive not to wonder how much of his reluctance to enforce the law against prominent right-wing criminals is driven by fear. And if crooks can opt out of the criminal law through public intimidation, we should wonder how much they’ll ultimately get away with simply by threatening to whip up a public shitstorm if they meet any resistance.

Congressional Democrats aren’t completely cowed by the conservative shitstorm problem. The January 6 committee has been pretty aggressive for the most part, and it looks like we’ll get some kind of investigation of Trump’s document theft and destruction. But I don’t think they’re inured to it either. Held up against their willingness to subpoena the most senior of White House officials, the January 6 committee members’ reluctance to subpoena Ivanka Trump seems to stem entirely from fear of backlash. And, let’s never forget that, under the influence of Chris Coons, Democrats withdrew from their pursuit of further evidence in Trump’s second impeachment trial after Republicans threatened to go apeshit in retaliation.

If the system we have is ever to work, though—if we’re ever going to have a passable democracy—liberals are going to have to press ahead doing the right thing with as much conviction and fearlessness as these bad actors bring to their bad deeds. It simply can’t function if one side gets a hostage-taker’s veto over the rules of fair play. And if that’s not enough to persuade Democrats to stiffen their spines, they should game this all out in purely partisan terms as well. It’s soothing to imagine that the public will reward Democrats simply for behaving reasonably by comparison to their screeching opponents, but so much recent history suggests that absent pushback, the public will just grow desensitized to right-wing tactics or, worse, come to suspect that the people with all the passionate intensity must be worked up over something valid.

At bottom, that means Dems can respond to all of it—the vandalous truckers, the frothing school board astroturfers, the Trump mobs—in one of two ways: wait for them to set the terms of the fight before it begins, or choose new ones proactively, and fight them on those.

I’m seeing the first already happening, unfortunately, It’s true that the 1/6 Committee seems to be moving aggressively but the administration caving on “crack pipes” for no other reason than that Fox News made a fetish of it shows they are running scared. And a lot of good it did them:

They are just nasty little bitches.

This convoy gambit is very likely to cause a lot more trouble before its over, including putting blue collar workers out of a job, price gouging by industries taking advantage of the crisis and other major disruptions, none of which really has much to do with vaccines and everything to do with the phenomenon Beutler discusses. This whole thing makes me very nervous.