An Elon Musk-funded group called Future Coalition PAC is targeting Muslim voters in Michigan and Jewish voters in Pennsylvania with diametrically opposed political advertisements about Kamala Harris. In areas of Michigan with relatively large Muslim populations, the Super PAC is painting Harris as a close friend of Israel and is suggesting that she is beholden to the beliefs of her Jewish husband Doug Emhoff; in parts of Pennsylvania with relatively large Jewish populations, the advertisements call Harris antisemitic and say she “support[s] denying Israel the weapons needed to defeat the Hamas terrorists who massacred thousands.”
Meanwhile, a related PAC also funded by Musk is microtargeting likely Black voters on Snapchat with ads that says Kamala Harris is trying to ban menthol cigarettes (surveys have shown that 81 percent of Black smokers use menthols, and big tobacco has disproportionately marketed menthol cigarettes to Black Americans).
Elon’s all over this election spreading disinformation on his wholly owned social media platform, doing stump speeches and funding rat fucking groups on Trump’s behalf.
He is Roger Stone on steroids.
On the other hand, when it comes to the most important job, running Trump’s Get Out The Vote operation, he’s not doing so well:
The political action committee funded by billionaire Elon Musk to help re-elect former U.S. President Donald Trump is struggling in some swing states to meet doorknocking goals and is investigating claims that some canvassers lied about the number of voters they have contacted, according to people involved in the group’s efforts.
The difficulties, in pivotal battleground states including Wisconsin and Nevada, come as the group, America PAC, races to enlist voters behind the Republican candidate in the final two weeks before the Nov. 5 election. Four people involved in the group’s outreach told Reuters that managers warned canvassers they are missing targets and needed to raise the number of would-be voters they contact.
Alysia McMillan, who canvassed for the PAC in Wisconsin, said field organizers recently told campaigners there they weren’t reaching daily objectives and were on track to miss an ultimate goal of contacting 450,000 voters by Election Day. In one meeting with canvassers, recorded by McMillan and reviewed by Reuters, a manager warned of the shortfall.
One canvassing manager in Arizona said leaders there had issued similar warnings. Three other people familiar with the outreach told Reuters that Chris Young, a Musk aide and longtime Republican operative, had recently traveled to Nevada to audit whether doorknocking tallies there had been inflated by some of the workers hired by contractors. Another person briefed on the matter said America PAC was struggling to find sufficient people to conduct audits in other states.
It sure seems like they got a late start.
I hate to get my hopes up but it wouldn’t surprise me if a couple of megalomaniacs working together overestimated their talents and abilities.
Donald Trump said he’d consider exempting police officers, firefighters, active duty military and veterans from paying taxes, the Republican nominee’s latest campaign trail idea to deliver tax breaks to key groups of supporters. https://t.co/N5WwC01y2g
Franklin Foer on the Trump-Musk alliance (The Atlantic):
In Elon Musk’s vision of human history, Donald Trump is the singularity. If Musk can propel Trump back to the White House, it will mark the moment that his own superintelligence merges with the most powerful apparatus on the planet, the American government—not to mention the business opportunity of the century.
Many other titans of Silicon Valley have tethered themselves to Trump. But Musk is the one poised to live out the ultimate techno-authoritarian fantasy. With his influence, he stands to capture the state, not just to enrich himself. His entanglement with Trump will be an Ayn Rand novel sprung to life, because Trump has explicitly invited Musk into the government to play the role of the master engineer, who redesigns the American state—and therefore American life—in his own image.
And what an image.
Michael Lonsdale as Hugo Drax in “Moonraker.”
In case you need reminding, Brian Klaas wrote recently on how many of the ultra rich get richer by becoming politicians:
The answer: 11.7 percent of the world’s billionaires have sought or held political office, a remarkably high number. What’s more, because money talks in politics, almost all the billionaires who tried to gain political office succeeded. Unsurprisingly, their “hit rate” is high. (When the researchers loosened their definition to include political advisory boards and other informal political positions beyond formal office, the rate rose to around 15 percent).
They have an affinity for seeking political positions in a particular kind of country, Klaas writes: autocracies.
The reason? Politics is the most straightforward way to get rich in autocracies. When the state controls the spoils, the way to get the spoils is to become part of the leadership of the state. That is one reason why China has so many billionaire politicians, the largest raw number—and the highest proportion—of any country.
Second, while US billionaires enter politics at about the same rate as those in peer democracies, because there are so many American billionaires, that entry rate translates into a larger number of billionaires being involved in politics than other similar countries. As a result, billionaires play a bigger role in American politics than in other similar countries.
Musk, Foer writes, has already turned the U.S. government into a profit center. Now he’s hungry for real power through an alliance with Trump to that will realize his grandiose vision for himself: to turn over government spending to the tech bros and to eliminate politcally neutral civil servants.
Rami Malek as Safin in “No Time to Die.”
This isn’t a standard-issue case of oligarchy. It is an apotheosis of the egotism and social Darwinism embedded in Silicon Valley’s pursuit of monopoly—the sense that concentration of power in the hands of geniuses is the most desirable social arrangement. As Peter Thiel once put it, “Competition is for losers.” (He also bluntly admitted, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”) In this worldview, restraints on power are for losers, too.
It’s a Bond villian’s idea of Utopia.
Foer concludes:
At Tesla, Musk assigned himself the title of “technoking.” That moniker, which sits on the line between jokiness and monomania, captures the danger. Following the example set by Trump, he wouldn’t need to divest himself from his businesses, not even his social-media company. In an administration that brashly disrespects its critics, he wouldn’t need to fear congressional oversight and could brush aside any American who dares to question his role. Of all the risks posed by a second Trump term, this might be one of the most terrifying.
They don’t want to govern. They want to rule. Not the America of the 19th century, but the Europe of the 14th. Except with gadgets and Bond women. I’m sorry, bondwomen.
And all this time I thought we were living in a “Twilight Zone” episode.
This is new. Following Simon Rosenberg’s advice to vote on Day 1, I did on Thursday. So did a lot of neighbors here in the Cesspool of Sin despite many still smarting from the wrath of Hurricane Helene and the loss of homes, jobs, businesses, and loved ones.
Learning to navigate new voting machines and North Carolina’s new requirement for presenting photo IDs slowed the voting process. There were long lines on Thursday (and Friday) that gave the false impression of heavier turnout here than previous elections. It looked like the 2008 Obama election. Friday’s statistics revealed Day 1 turnout here in Helene-wracked Buncombe County was down about 40% from 2020. Not so in the rest of the North Carolina (NC Newsline/Yahoo News):
North Carolina set a new all-time record for early voting with a surge of more than 350,000 voters on the first day of open polls.
The State Board of Elections reported 353,166 voters Thursday, narrowly beating out the 2020 record of 348,559 ballots — a staggering shift in enthusiasm from the start of the campaign, when voters seemed to largely dread an expected rematch between a pair of familiar presidential candidates.
[…]
The result is even more noteworthy in consideration of the devastation to western North Carolina from Hurricane Helene, which observers widely predicted would present major disruptions to the election. According to the State Board of Elections, voters reported “no significant issues or problems” on Thursday.
“Yesterday’s turnout is a clear sign that voters are energized about this election, that they trust the elections process, and that a hurricane will not stop North Carolinians from exercising their right to vote,” said election board executive director Karen Brinson Bell.
The news story featured the photo I posted to FKA Twitter and other social media sites to help Rosenberg’s Day 1 promotion. It went viral. As of this moment, 6.5 million views.
The image cheered a lot of X users and triggered seemingly as many Trump supporters. Plus a lot of bots with next to no followers that joined Elon Musk’s MAGA magnet within the last year. Many of them seemed programmed to respond to good news from the left by the “I know you are but what am I?” rule.
“I landslide victory incoming for Trump. It’s a beautiful thing.”
“Trump really brings the people out!”
“Vote trump in droves”
“I know nobody voting Harris”
There were also “lefty” bots programmed to fight with the “righty” bots, though since they are bots they are neither. They are programmed to stir up anger and sow discord like the pass-it-on emails of the aughts.
An army of political propaganda accounts powered by artificial intelligence posed as real people on X to argue in favor of Republican candidates and causes, according to a research report out of Clemson University.
The report details a coordinated AI campaign using large language models (LLM) — the type of artificial intelligence that powers convincing, human-seeming chat bots like ChatGPT — to reply to other users.
While it’s unclear who operated or funded the network, its focus on particular political pet projects with no clear connection to foreign countries indicates it’s an American political operation, rather than one run by a foreign government, the researchers said.
As the November elections near, the government and other watchdogs have warned of efforts to influence public opinion via AI-generated content. The presence of a seemingly coordinated domestic influence operation using AI adds yet another wrinkle to a rapidly developing and chaotic information landscape.
The network identified by the Clemson researchers included at least 686 identified X accounts that have posted more than 130,000 times since January. It targeted four Senate races and two primary races and supported former President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign. Many of the accounts were removed from X after NBC News emailed the platform for comment. The platform did not respond to NBC News’ inquiry.
The accounts followed a consistent pattern. Many had profile pictures that appealed to conservatives, like the far-right cartoon meme Pepe the frog, a cross or an American flag. They frequently replied to a person talking about a politician or a polarizing political issue on X, often to support Republican candidates or policies or denigrate Democratic candidates. While the accounts generally had few followers, their practice of replying to more popular posters made it more likely they’d be seen.
And what aren’t “RW” bots are swarming bad faith actors with way too much free time on their hands. It’s just not something to which I’ve paid much attention before.
Michael Bitzer, a political science professor at North Carolina’s Catawba College, said early voting showed an equal number of Democrats and Republicans cast ballots on Thursday, a dramatic change from 2020, when more Democrats took advantage of early voting on the first day.
“There’s a great deal of interest in both sides of the aisle,” Bitzer said. “The great unknown is what are the unaffiliateds doing. We don’t have a good sense of where they may be landing in all of this.”
Donald Trump is grifting from his cult members as he’s running for president. This is unprecedented. Normally, candidates just beg for money to get themselves elected. But Trump is begging to line his own pockets. And his followers don’t seem to think there’s anything wrong with it.
Philip Bump at the Washington Post notes that he’s doing so much of it thathis campaign is suffering from a shortage of cash:
The New York Times looked at the “creative bookkeeping” it said the campaign was undertaking to expand its relatively modest coffers. That phrase is a fraught one. Earlier this year Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts in New York for using “creative bookkeeping,” if you will: creative bookkeeping specifically centered on hiding money that was spent to boost his 2016 campaign. That is one way to run a low-cost presidential campaign: skirt the laws around transparency.
Another is to outsource campaign functions. Trump’s team has done this in some obvious ways, including tasking outside groups with running his turnout efforts. But the effort goes well beyond that, with the Times noting that his campaign had only 11 employees on its payroll in August, the most recent month for which full spending data was available.
This is in part because the campaign has offloaded its direct voter contact, which often means setting up offices in targeted states and hiring people to staff them and do the actual outreach. It is in part, too, because the campaign is “bending the rules to their breaking point,” in the words of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Dan Weiner, who spoke to the Times. Consider that in 2020, Trump’s campaign employed more than 200 people in August. And even that was modest: In August 2012, Barack Obama’s reelection bid employed about 900.
If we visualize the August spending by each major-party campaign since 2012, we can see just how small the purple “payroll” sliver is in the 2024 spending for Trump. (The circles below are scaled to total spending.)
Both in terms of raw spending and as a percentage of total August spending, Trump’s 2024 campaign expenditures on staff are modest. (You can also see that a lot of those August 2020 employees weren’t making very much.)
He doesn’t like to pay people. We know that. Bump speculates that if he wasn’t getting his donors to buy his worthless junk to pad his own wallet maybe the campaign would have more money to spend. But then, why bother? He’s got billionaires to pay for his super pacs and paupers to give him their last pennies to buy his hideous sneakers and blasphemous Bibles so why change a thing? Man’s gotta make a living. And he’s tied in the polls…
How is it possible that this lecherous criminal cretin is tied in the polls????
.@PlanetTyrus: Nelson Mandela was trying to come to the United States. You chartered a plane for the entire trip. Why is hard for you to talk about the things you've done?
PRESIDENT TRUMP: I love doing it. I don't need praise for it. I just like helping people. I help a lot of… pic.twitter.com/L5aUfXzH2D
If you want to know why Trump is popular, blame social media. That’s the kind of bs that’s making the rounds. This is the truth:
This is a perfect example of the propaganda that’s got millions of people believing myths about Trump, conspiracy theories and lies. It’s a huge problem and I don’t know if anyone has enough juice to counteract it. The attempts that were being made by the platforms themselves a few years ago are gone and there’s nothing to take its place.
Trump thinks he would have settled the slavery question before the civil war. I suspect he thinks he could have “settled” it the way he “settled” the abortion quesiton: by giving the assholes everything they want and then saying it was what everyone wanted all along.
Also:
I know sometimes people post screenshotted transcripts like this as a gag. But nope, this is what Trump actually said. https://t.co/kGcDtjnTi1
Former President Donald Trump has pulled out of a string of campaign events and interviews over the last two months, often leaving his hosts frustrated after being promised a visit by the GOP presidential candidate.
The staff of The Shade Room, an entertainment site with wide reach among young and Black audiences, shortly after wrapping an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris last week were left feeling that their “feet were being dragged in the Trump campaign,” according to two sources who spoke to Politico Playbook. When they called to reschedule, a campaign official reportedly gave them a concise explanation: the former president was “exhausted.”
Because of this, the official continued, Trump was “refusing [some] interviews but that could change” at any time, according to the two people familiar with the conversations. Trump campaign national press secretary Karoline Leavitt pushed back against the report, telling Playbook that Trump’s alleged exhaustion is “unequivocally false” and that he “has never backed down from an interview.”
She did not provide an explanation, however, for why Trump has been flaking despite his constant criticism of Harris for not making enough media appearances. While Trump did show up to some interviews, most of them have been with friendly hosts like right-wing radio host Laura Ingraham and networks such as Fox News.
He’s not used to all this activity. He spent the last four years watching TV, tweeting, playing golf and entertaining his dinner guests at Mar-a-lago. In other words he’s come out of retirement at the age of 78 to run for president. He’s just not up for it.
In September of 2020, 200,000 Americans had just died of COVID. There was no vaccine, unemployment was at 8%. The whole world had just been shut down and was only slowly coming back to life. Donald Trump was pushing snake oil cures and pretending the whole thing wasn’t much of a problem.
And yet 55 percent of Americans believed they were better off than they’d been four years ago.
We have officially entered the manic stage of the presidential election in which the candidates are suddenly everywhere. At least Kamala Harris is everywhere. She’s holding huge raucous rallies all over the swing states, appearing on podcasts and mainstream interviews even going on Fox and subjecting herself to a barrage of hostile Trump inspired accusations from anchor Brett Baier who didn’t seem to want her to actually answer them. (She showed she cannot be intimidated which was probably the point of the interview in the first place.) Nobody at this point should complain that she isn’t being available to the public. Just turn on your TV and you’ll see her there.
Trump, on the other hand, is as present as always by holding looney rallies and post on crazy comments on Truth Social, but is refusing to debate Harris again and has cancelled numerous scheduled interviews this week. Yet he’s holding events in California and New York which aren’t even on the radar.
According to Tara Palmieri at Puck, the Mar-a-lago insiders say this is all because Trump is so assured he’s going to win that he’s just letting his freak flag fly and the campaign figures that Trump’s “self-assurance” may create a bandwagon effect as voters decide they want to go with a winner. Republicans do love the bandwagon effect strategy, but Trump is seeming off his rocker in a way that doesn’t easily read as “confident” except to the extent he may believe his “election integrity” plans will ensure that he “wins” even if he doesn’t win.
Trump did do some events this week and it’s a big leap to say he showed self-assurance. There was the now notorious “swaying to the music” town hall that I wrote about earlier. That appearance was so bizarre that it actually managed to dominate the conversation for a couple of days which is really saying something in this frenzied news cycle.
Then he held a taped Fox News town hall with host Harris Faulkner, who sat him down with a group of allegedly undecided women. We know that a large majority of women voters in this country loathe him and they’d like to mitigate that by allowing him to beguile a few of them with his suave charm. They did seem rather weirdly ecstatic by his presence, but that’s because they were all Republican party shills and ardent supporters brought in by Fox. It even turned out that Fox edited out one of the questions that gave away the scheme.
Fox did not disclose even basic information about who was asking the questions at their Trump town hall with women voters. And even more egregiously, they edited out one woman *making that disclosure* pic.twitter.com/hwfG3Wk812
But Trump did do one event this week that may turn out to be important because of the substance of what he said. He appeared on the Spanish language network Univision for a town hall with Latino voters. I think we all know what an important demographic this is and have heard that Trump is garnering a larger percentage of Hispanic men than ever before. I suspect he believed that it would, therefore, be an easy exchange like the one with the women plants the day before. So he wasn’t prepared for the kind of questions he got.
A man named Ramiro Gonzales, who identified as a Republican, asked Trump why he should support him when people from his own administration, including his Vice President, refuse to do so? He said January 6th and his COVID mismanagement had disturbed him but he wanted to give him a chance to win back his vote.
Trump replied that 97% of people in the former administration supported him and said that January 6th was “a day of love”, “nobody was killed”, and “we didn’t have guns, the others had guns but we didn’t have guns.” You can see from the look on Gonzales’s face and that of the people in the audience, that they knew he was full of it.
Q: I am a Republican, but no longer registered. I was disturbed by January 6. People from your own administration don't support you. Your own Vice President doesn’t support you. So why would I want to support you?
Gonzales later said that he would not be voting for Trump.
Trump has been charged with several felonies related to the January 6th insurrection. He claims that he bears no responsibility for any of it. And yet here he said that “we” didn’t have guns, the others had guns, by which he can only mean the police. One imagines that Special Prosecutor Jack Smith will be looking at that footage with keen interest. (Needless to say, there were plenty of guns among the rioters and certainly many of those whom Trump calls “hostages,”and promises to pardon on day one, were charged with violent acts against the police. )
But there was another question that interested me the most because I’ve been dying for someone to ask it for months. A 64 year old man named Jorge Velazquez, who described himself as having spent many years working with his hands “hunched over picking strawberries and cutting broccoli”, asked Trump who he thought was going to do this type of work if he deported all the undocumented workers who account for most of the agricultural work force.
Trump went into his usual rant about criminal immigrants, showing once again that he is completely clueless about how anything actually works. Trump seems to think they’re taking the jobs away from American citizens, specifically “African Americans and Hispanics” who are suffering as a result. These are the “Black jobs” he was talking about.
📌 A Latino farmer asks Donald Trump who will do the hard jobs if he deports undocumented immigrants.
Trump made a point of saying that he wants laborers (who love our country) to come legally which suggests he’s talking about something like the old bracero program which was replaced by the issuance of H-2a and H-2b visas. The problem is that his agenda, as articulated in Project 2025, wants to discontinue all temporary worker visas. His immigration guru, Stephen Miller, has made it very clear that he intends to drastically curtail legal immigration as well.
Trump’s grotesque xenophobic rhetoric, whether or not he fully understands it, is paving the way for the GOP’s mainstream adoption of “The Great Replacement Theory” which holds that all foreigners from the so-called “shithole countries” must be barred, not just because they are criminals or are taking all the “Black jobs” but because they are supposedly destroying the culture of America. When Trump reads Stephen Miller’s screeds on the stump about immigrants “poisoning the blood,” there is no distinction between legal and illegal.
His new best friend Elon Musk is pushing the Great Replacement Theory constantly, having signed on to the idea that Democrats are trying to import immigrants so they will vote for them, an old standby promoted by the likes of Ann Coulter in her book “Adios, America.” One would think that with all the talk about Latinos voting in large numbers for Trump this time they’d stop and think about whether this is a good long term strategy for them but they’re so hooked on the idea that migrants are marauding gangsters who are also inexplicably motivated beyond reason to vote, that they aren’t thinking clearly on the subject.
On a more material level, I have to wonder how everyone’s going to like the prices at the grocery store when strawberries and broccoli are necessarily selling at 20 times what they cost today from the combination of labor shortages and tariffs on imported food. Trump may not ever eat a vegetable but I’d guess even Republicans like to eat a salad once in a while.
While I doubt that Trump’s ever read a treatise on The Great Replacement Theory, he’s fully on board with it and we know that because he’s recently promised to deport the Haitian immigrants in Springfield despite the fact that they are here legally, are working at jobs that others didn’t want and profess to love America. He believes they’re polluting the culture of Springfield Ohio and need to go back where they came from. That’s what this is all about. And that, my friends, is fascism with a capitol F.
