Month: November 2023

Say it ain’t so!

Oh look:

Three Ukrainians who aided the Donald Trump campaign’s efforts to discredit the Biden family have been charged with treason.

The 2019 drive was led by former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who was Mr Trump’s personal lawyer at the time.

It centred on unproven allegations that Joe Biden had corrupt dealings with Ukraine as vice-president.

Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) said the three men charged were paid by Russian military intelligence (GRU).

It added that they had used a “tense political situation” to harm Ukraine’s reputation abroad.

The three men charged are understood to be current MP Oleksandr Dubinsky, former lawmaker Andriy Derkach and ex-prosecutor Kostyantyn Kulyk.

Mr Dubinsky has denied the charges.

All three are said to be members of an agent network led by Russian Gen Vladimir Alekseyev, the deputy head of the GRU.

The charges allege they pursued “information subversive activities” related to the 2020 US election and were paid $10m (£8m).

The men are accused of helping to spread the falsehood that Ukraine, rather than Russia, interfered in the recent US elections.

The allegations against Mr Biden involved the business dealings of his son Hunter, who was a director of Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma.

Mr Trump and his allies suggested that Mr Biden, as Barack Obama’s vice-president, encouraged the firing of Ukraine’s top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, because he had been investigating Burisma.

Hunter Biden has since filed a lawsuit against Mr Giuliani for “the total annihilation” of his privacy via the former New York mayor’s search for damaging information related to the Biden family.

Ukrainian authorities did not explicitly identify Mr Dubinsky, instead using his alleged Russian intelligence call sign “Burtino”.

However, the lawmaker identified himself in a Telegram post, saying that a court in Kyiv had ordered his detention for 60 days on the basis of the charges.

Mr Dubinsky denied all wrongdoing in a series of posts on Telegram and alleged that he faced political persecution directed at him by President Volodymyr Zelensky’s office.

He faces 15 years in prison and the forfeiture of his assets if convicted.

Mr Derkach and Mr Kulyk fled Ukraine after Russia’s invasion in 2022, the SBU said.

Mr Dubinsky, Mr Derkach and Mr Kulyk were previously sanctioned by the US government in the final days of Mr Trump’s administration for their alleged efforts to undermine the 2020 election in the US.

The Treasury Department identified Mr Derkach as a Russian agent. He is named in the nearly 1,000-page report produced by the US Senate Intelligence Committee on Russia’s interference in the 2016 US election.

Mr Derkach publicly met Mr Giuliani in Ukraine in 2019 as part of their effort to link Hunter Biden to corruption in Ukraine.

He also appeared with Mr Giuliani in right-wing US media ahead of the 2020 election, where they shared details of their alleged investigation.

Separately, while serving as a Ukrainian deputy prosecutor general, Mr Kulyk wrote a 2019 memo that pushed for Ukraine to investigate Hunter Biden’s role on Burisma’s board.

It included unsupported claims that he had evidence President Joe Biden unlawfully enriched himself, which reportedly sparked Mr Giuliani’s search for incriminating information in Ukraine.

Well, ok then.

“It looks like they hate immigrants. Well I am an immigrant, and I did what I could to try and save that little girl ”— Hero Brazilian delivery driver Caio Benicio

Right wingers rioted in Dublin last night, angry because an immigrant stabbed 5 people. It turns out that it was an immigrant who stepped in and stopped the assailant. Imagine that.

 Brazilian food delivery driver in Dublin heroically stopped the knifeman who attacked a group of young children outside their school yesterday.

The attack, which hospitalized three children under the age of 7 and a 30 year old teacher who was trying to protect them, triggered the worst riots in living memory in the Irish capital after a far right mob, described as a “lunatic, hooligan faction” by the police was whipped up by reports on social and mainstream media that the knifeman was an immigrant. The ringleaders were then joined by opportunistic rioters who looted stores, and torched buses and police vehicles.

The identity of the attacker has not been revealed but it has now emerged that the attack might have been much, much worse had it not been for the astonishing bravery and quick thinking of an immigrant who was working in Dublin; Brazilian Deliveroo rider Caio Benicio, 43.

Benicio was on a job when he saw the attack taking place. He jumped off his motorcycle, took off his helmet, and hit the attacker with it until the attacker collapsed.

“I didn’t even make a decision, it was pure instinct, and it was all over in seconds. He fell to the ground, I didn’t see where knife went, and other people stepped in,” he told Irish news website The Journal.

Benicio said that as a father of two children, he “had to do something” and realized he could use his helmet as a weapon to disable the attacker.

We are living through such an ugly era. But people like that man give me a glimmer of hope.

They’re there for him in his time of need. And they’re prepared to use the power of the state to shut down his critics.

Here’s how the free speech warriors of the right defend the first Amendment:

Elon Musk’s new lawsuit against Media Matters, which X Corp. filed late Monday, has been dismissed by legal experts as a frivolous effort to bully a prominent critic into silence. But some Republicans apparently see this as a feature, not a bug: They are allying themselves with Musk’s effort for precisely this purpose.

Musk’s suit charges that Media Matters deliberately and deceptively harmed X (formerly Twitter) with a widely-publicized investigation showing that posts containing pro-Nazi content appeared on X alongside advertisements from leading companies. That, along with a surge in antisemitic content, has advertisers fleeing the site, sparking a slide in ad revenue.

Republicans are eagerly rushing to Musk’s rescue — and not just rhetorically. Two GOP state attorneys general — Ken Paxton in Texas and Andrew Bailey in Missouri — have responded by announcing vaguely defined investigations into Media Matters.

Meanwhile, Trump adviser Stephen Miller is urging Republican law enforcement officials to probe Media Matters for “criminal” activity. And Mike Davis, who is touting himself as Donald Trump’s next attorney general, has declared that Media Matters staff members should be jailed.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Texas, doesn’t deny that the juxtapositions between ads and pro-Nazi postings are real. Rather, it accuses Media Matters of creating an account following only fringe content and endlessly refreshing it until it finally generated the juxtapositions. Those are “extraordinarily rare,” the suit says, but were deliberately engineered to disparage X, harm its revenue stream and interfere with its contracts with advertisers.

It’s a weak case, as experts point out. The Media Matters article said it had “found” the juxtapositions, which X calls “false,” insisting they were “manipulated” into existence. But even if you question Media Matters’s presentation of the facts, it still wouldn’t show that it did “all of this to harm X’s market value,” said Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

“If Media Matters doctored the images and couldn’t replicate those results, then maybe there would be a claim here,” Vladeck told me, stressing that it did prove “possible to see those ads” alongside Nazi-related content. He noted that Media Matters plausibly wrote about these juxtapositions not to hurt X, but because they’re “newsworthy.

They did it to prove that the guardrails Musk insisted were there did not exist. And I’m sure that many, if not all, of the big companies that pulled out verified it. Can you imagine the conversation? The head of marketing sees this story or hears about it and of course asks their ad sales people to check and see if it’s happened to any of their ads and voila. It has. Because we know it has. We’ve all seen it.

Now, Musk can show all the antisemitic drivel he wants on his platform. Media Matters has the right to publish the fact that he’s doing it in violation of his own stated policy against allowing such things to happen. It’s a free country. And needless to say, his advertisers have no obligation to support it.

I think what people are missing in all this is that Musk himself commonly posts antisemitic comments like the one above along with many other odious comments which get massive engagement on the platform and in the media at large. This report was obviously just another in a long line of complaints about twitter since he took over and many advertiser had probably just had enough, particularly after all the assurances the company no doubt made that it was technically impossible for their ads to be shown next to this objectionable content.

We can all see what’s happening on that platform and it’s driving people away by the millions. Why would major advertisers see that as a smart place to sell their products?

Where we are headed

That’s about as succinct as it gets.

So do yourselves a favor. Volunteer for a local campaign. Donate to a local campaign (not to a marquee one doomed to fail because you really can’t stand the Republican). Encourage your Democratic family and unaffiliated friends (especially) to vote in the primary and general election next year.

Yes, it really does matter:

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — In the northwest corner of Louisiana, a candidate for parish sheriff demanded a recount Wednesday after losing by a single vote in an election where more than 43,000 people cast ballots.

[…]

“This extraordinarily narrow margin … absolutely requires a hand recount to protect the integrity of our democratic process, and to ensure we respect the will of the people,” John Nickelson, the Republican candidate who trailed by one vote in last week’s election for Caddo Parish Sheriff, posted on social media Wednesday.

Henry Whitehorn, the Democrat who won the sheriff runoff, did not immediately respond to an email requesting comment.

You’ve seen plenty of close races, even in unlikely places like this.

That’s a pretty remarkable outcome, one supposes, in a parish that voted for Joe Biden in 2020 with 52.5% of the vote but for Bill Cassidy (R) by 59.3%. In a state with 64 parishes but few ways to contact any of their local committees (I just looked up all of them).

They apparently have a Democratic Committee in Cado (population 230k, parish seat Shreveport, pop. 188k): a chair, vice chair, secretary and treasurer, but no way to contact them online either except via a Facebook message. The state party hasn’t issued a press release all year (by their web site), and has no calendar of events. Although they did have a “war room” the other day.

Democratic Party war room on Election Day. We are better together! pic.twitter.com/43AJXFm7OZ

— Louisiana Democrats (@LaDemos) November 19, 2023

And you wonder why we have John Kennedy and Mike Johnson in Congress.

Trump’s “Stanford” experiment

The MAGA faithful, at long last, have not seen the light. That Road to Talledega moment, that flash of insight when the scales fall from their eyes and their political savior is revealed a bronzer-caked madman bent on the destruction of the red, white and blue nation they hold so dear? Never happened.

What has happened since Donald Trump’s Veterans Day “vermin” speech is that the mainstream press and others have finally stopped giving him the benefit of the doubt.

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Donald Trump is a fascist,” late-night host Stephen Colbert told his audience. Former Republican Tom Nichols declared Trump had “crossed one of the last remaining lines that separated his usual authoritarian bluster from recognizable fascism.” Even the New York Times this week broached the subject.

How it started … how it’s going pic.twitter.com/7AnF9DaX4n

— George Conway (@gtconway3d) November 23, 2023

But the answer to why the faithful have not wavered might be found in Philip Zimbardo’s 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment and its aftermath. Zimbardo famously set up a mock prison in Stanford University’s psychology department. He recruited students to play the roles of prisoners and prison guards for a study in human dynamics.

The New Yorker recently summarized:

According to the lore that’s grown up around the experiment, the guards, with little to no instruction, began humiliating and psychologically abusing the prisoners within twenty-four hours of the study’s start. The prisoners, in turn, became submissive and depersonalized, taking the abuse and saying little in protest. The behavior of all involved was so extreme that the experiment, which was meant to last two weeks, was terminated after six days.

Less than a decade earlier, the Milgram obedience study had shown that ordinary people, if encouraged by an authority figure, were willing to shock their fellow-citizens with what they believed to be painful and potentially lethal levels of electricity. To many, the Stanford experiment underscored those findings, revealing the ease with which regular people, if given too much power, could transform into ruthless oppressors. Today, more than forty-five years later, many look to the study to make sense of events like the behavior of the guards at Abu Ghraib and America’s epidemic of police brutality. The Stanford Prison Experiment is cited as evidence of the atavistic impulses that lurk within us all; it’s said to show that, with a little nudge, we could all become tyrants.

But not so fast. The study was controversial and drew critics. Among them, Thomas Carnahan and Sam McFarland. They speculated that perhaps Zimbardo’s recuitment ad influenced who volunteered to participate in “a psychological study of prison life.”

In a 2007 study, the psychologists Thomas Carnahan and Sam McFarland asked whether that wording itself may have stacked the odds. They recreated the original ad, and then ran a separate ad omitting the phrase “prison life.” They found that the people who responded to the two ads scored differently on a set of psychological tests. Those who thought that they would be participating in a prison study had significantly higher levels of aggressiveness, authoritarianism, Machiavellianism, narcissism, and social dominance, and they scored lower on measures of empathy and altruism.

There was more nuance, of course, but subsequent studies and papers never quite dispelled the urban legends.

One of the few, true talents Trump possesses is for self-promotion. The faux-business genius/reality TV star’s rise to power in this country has been one long advertisement for “aggressiveness, authoritarianism, Machiavellianism, narcissism, and social dominance.” We see in those who have volunteered to join him a group that seems self-selected for lower scores on empathy and altruism.

What Trump promises to create in his second term is a nationwide experiment in which “regular people” will be invited to play guards at expanded detention camps for undesirables. His plans to centralize more power in the presidency, to bring more federal agencies under direct presidential control, and to prosecute his enemies and rivals is an intentional, months-long advertisement for the type of people Zimbardo’s experiment attracted by accident of wording.

Trump is recruiting Americans predisposed to stare long into the abyss.

Not yet

Kevin Drum has an interesting observation:

How is Joe Biden doing these days? Courtesy of CNN, here are his approval ratings from a variety of national polls over the past few months:

From August through October Biden’s approval dropped about 1.5% per month. Since the Israel-Gaza war broke out a month ago, his approval has improved by about half a percent.

I’d like to generate a chart like this just for young Democrats, but I can’t find the data to do it. My suspicion is that Biden has been hemorrhaging approval from young voters for a long time and the Israel-Gaza war hasn’t really had a big effect. But I don’t know that.

In any case, even if it has had an effect, it’s apparently been counterbalanced by increased approval from older voters. Taken as a whole, the war has rather surprisingly had only a very small effect on Biden’s approval, and probably a positive one.

POSTSCRIPT: The change is even more dramatic if you draw two separate trend lines for the before and after periods:

I think there are probably quite a few people like me who are appalled by what is happening in Gaza but think that Biden is doing the best he can to keep the whole thing from hurtling out of control while trying to rein in Netanyahu, for whom he has no love. US control of the situation is limited to “influence” over Israel which is less powerful than a lot of people think. But the global ramifications of this going sideways regionally are profound.

I do think the protests in the US and Europe have an effect on this however, by showing the Israeli government that there is serious objection to the overkill in Gaza and it gives the US and allies some leverage. Not that I’m sanguine Netanyahu gives a damn. He knows the whole world is worried that this thing is going to explode the region so perversely he’s being even more reckless than usual in order to keep the US and its allies closer than they want to be. It’s a mess.

As for the polling, I don’t know what to make of it. It does appear that Biden is holding on to his pathetic approval rating regardless of what happens in Gaza. That’s about the best we can hope for at this moment. I’m hoping things settle down soon.

The ones who love him anyway

Brian Beutler on this new “relationship” between Trump and Univison.

If you haven’t read this already, you’ll want to. It’s left Democrats deeply unsettled. They were surprised as everyone to see Univision offer Donald Trump a fawning, hour-long, primetime interview earlier this month, particularly after the abuse he heaped on the network during his presidency and first campaign; they were stunned when Univision summarily canceled ads the Biden campaign had purchased to run during the interview, citing an undisclosed policy the network, by all appearances, adopted special for Trump; they’re aghast that Univision tried to create the false impression that it approached the Biden campaign with the same offer; and now they’re really worried, because they see Univision prevailing on local affiliates to pull popular programming off the air to carry Trump rallies live. 

They’re upset, and understandably so, about the effect that transforming the most watched Spanish-language news network into a pro-Trump propaganda outlet will have on the election. It caught my attention because of the role Jared Kushner seems to have played behind the scenes with network executives to land the interview and seemingly draw Univision into a new, pro-MAGA incarnation. 

Maybe it all came together through an above-board process of relationship-building and persuasion. But if you’ve followed Kushner’s trajectory through American political life, and then as an international influence merchant, you’ll be highly skeptical. There’s almost certainly something seedy at the heart of this arrangement. 

I like to think, though can’t say for certain, that the Washington Post was trying to wink in that direction with these paragraphs. 

Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, a friend of one of the executives, helped arrange the interview and was also in the room, according to multiple people familiar with the event.

“All you have to do is look at the owners of Univision. They’re unbelievable entrepreneurial people, and they like me,” Trump said in response to the question about Latino voters.

Entrepreneurial, you say? How so? 

There are many possible answers, and I hope reporters seek them out. 

But unearthing the secret details of a presumably corrupt bargain between Kushner, Univision, and the Trump campaign will be a tough reporting challenge. The people who really should be seeking them out are the ones with subpoena power. A year ago, after Democrats grew their Senate majority in the 2022 midterms, I did a crossover podcast with my then-colleague Jon Favreau about whether and how they could use their agenda-setting power to neutralize GOP propaganda. I argued they should stage dramatic battles that attract a lot of media attention and (thus, also) reach the swing voters who decide U.S. elections. We closed out that episode in agreement that if House Republicans decided to Benghazify™ Joe Biden, Senate Democrats should match them investigation for investigation, subpoena for subpoena. 

I read earlier today that they are going to start carrying Trump’s rallies live.

This is a real thing and I fervently hope that both the press and the Senate get to the bottom of it. It’s fishy as hell.

On Monday one shot 4 people in Ohio

The mass shooting on Monday garnered hardly a mention in the news because the shooter only managed to wound four people before he killed himself. No biggie in America’s shooting gallery. But it is worth noting that it appears he had an ideological motive:

The man suspected of shooting four people at an Ohio Walmart earlier this week was inspired by racially motivated violent extremist ideology, according to authorities.

Benjamin Charles Jones, 20, of Dayton, Ohio, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at a Beavercreek, Ohio, Walmart after he shot two Black females, a white female and a white male Monday, the FBI stated. 

One victim remained in critical condition, while three others suffered from non-life-threatening injuries.

Based on evidence, including journal entries, investigators believe the attack was at least partially racially motivated, when Jones fired from a Hi-Point .45 caliber carbine purchased two days before the incident, according to a news release. 

Court documents obtained by News Center 7′s I-Team show two Nazi flags, “the SS history book,” a shooting complex card, handwritten notes, a laptop, and an external hard drive were also allegedly among items investigators found at Jones’ house.

Let’s not lose sight of the right wing racist antisemites in our midst. They’re the ones with all the guns.

Thanksgiving menu at the Plaza Hotel 1899, courtesy of Michael Beschloss:

I would have loved to watch that kitchen in action.

Moms For Liberty paying off their friends

It’s all one big grift:

A Pennsylvania school board that banned books, Pride flags and transgender athletes slipped a last-minute item into their final meeting before leaving office, hastily awarding a $700,000 exit package to the superintendent who supported their agenda.

But the Democratic majority that swept the conservative Moms For Liberty slate out of office hopes to block the unusual — they say illegal — payout and bring calm to the Central Bucks School District, whose affluent suburbs and bucolic farms near Philadelphia have been roiled by infighting since the 2020 pandemic.

“People are really sick of the embarrassing meetings, the vitriol, they’re tired of our district being in the news for all the wrong reasons. And … the students are aware of what’s been going on, particularly our LGBTQ students and their friends and allies,” said Karen Smith, a Democrat who won a third term on the board.

The district, with about 17,000 students in 23 schools, has spent $1.5 million on legal and public relations fees amid competing lawsuits, discrimination complaints and investigations in the past two years, including a pending suit over its suspension of a middle school teacher who supported LGBTQ and other marginalized students.

I wonder if those moms got a little taste…

This is a perfect lesson for people to see exactly who it is that’s causing all the trouble in our politics. It isn’t a bunch of woke college kids, it’s these Real Americans who have all lost their minds. And, by the way, they’re corrupt too! Surprise!