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What Michael Sokolove found in a tiny Pennsylvania town

Comprehending what’s become of a large faction of Americans and a majority of the Republican Party will be the object of study for historians and psychologists for decades. Reporting from Riegelsville, Pa., a hamlet of 800 that voted in 2020 for Donald Trump by a mere two votes, Michael Sokolove found not one of the 60 Republican and Democrat voters he spoke with is changing sides this election. Just why will be the subject of doctoral dissertations (gift link):

Most of the Harris supporters I spoke to in Riegelsville cited the vice president’s personal qualities — what they perceived as positivity and decency — along with a desire for a president who might somehow calm our rancorous political climate. Most of the Trump supporters were unconcerned with matters of character. If they ever had a hope that a U.S. president would be someone they admired, a person who might represent the best of us — a war hero, say, like Dwight Eisenhower; a straight arrow like Jimmy Carter; or a trailblazer like Barack Obama — they had abandoned it. Many said that was an outdated or even naïve notion. They know who Mr. Trump is and don’t care.

“They know it’s wrong and they don’t care” (October 2014) was one of my earliest observations on this site.

“He’s a shyster, but I’d take him over her,” Marvin Cegielski, 84, the retired stone mason, told me. “He’ll block off the border.”

“I detest him as a person,” said Natalie Wriker, 37, who works at the Lutheran church in town, “but he’s the lesser of two evils.” She said she believes that politicians are “easily bought” but that Mr. Trump has less motivation to do things for money because of his wealth.

Among the Harris voters I talked with was Jaycee Venini, 23, who grew up in Riegelsville and works as a landscaper. “She is actually a human being,” he said. “I feel like that’s a minimum requirement. And she’s not full of greed or a convicted felon.”

The Good Liars clearly cherry-pick the videos they post of Trump supporters absolutely certain of what Trump has done for them until asked to name it. Mitigating their cherry-picking is how many they find. These people are almost impossibly uninformed. What people who believe Trump incorruptible because he’s rich miss is this: the more people have, the less secure they feel and the more they feel they need.

In this exchange from “The Rise of the New Global Elite” (2011), Chrystia Freeland recounts:

As an example, she described a conversation with a couple at a Manhattan dinner party: “They started saying, ‘If you’re going to buy all this stuff, life starts getting really expensive. If you’re going to do the NetJet thing’”—this is a service offering “fractional aircraft ownership” for those who do not wish to buy outright—“‘and if you’re going to have four houses, and you’re going to run the four houses, it’s like you start spending some money.’”

The clincher, Peterson says, came from the wife: “She turns to me and she goes, ‘You know, the thing about 20’”—by this, she meant $20 million a year—“‘is 20 is only 10 after taxes.’ And everyone at the table is nodding.”

As out of touch with them are the Trump voters Sokolove encountered. On Trump’s Chinese menu of character defects, “they offered a range of explanations and rationalizations that did not align with any knowable reality.”

In this Hallmark town, Sokolove expected to find people who had grown tired of the divisiveness and chaos he spawns. He was disappointed.

I was wrong. One of my last conversations was with a construction worker at the general store who asked that his name not be used. He brought up the assassination attempt on Mr. Trump in western Pennsylvania. “It was Biden’s fault,” the man said. How so? I asked. “Oh, c’mon,” he said. “The deep state tried to take him down. You have to be an idiot not to be able to see that.”

I also heard Riegelsville described as “quintessential Americana” — and in a slightly altered way, that also felt apt. It is America in 2024. It’s defenseless, like everywhere else, from the ever-rising tide of division and madness in the civic life of our nation.

So get out and vote, willya? Knock some doors. Make come calls if MAGAland is not the America in which you care to live.

Axios reports:

In the heat of this historic election, educated elites who should know better — billionaires, elected officials, journalists — keep falling for fakes, conspiracy theories and outright lies…

Each day on the digital campaign trail has brought a torrent of false or misleading claims, often courtesy of partisan accounts with massive audiences. In the last few weeks alone:

-MAGA influencers breathlessly spread the false claim that Vice President Kamala Harris used a teleprompter during her Univision town hall, which the X algorithm then promoted in its trending topics as fact.

-Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) posted a purported screenshot of a headline in The Atlantic that read: “To Save Democracy Harris May Need To Steal An Election.” It was fake, and Roy deleted the post.

-Bill Ackman, a hedge fund billionaire with 1.4 million followers on X, obsessively promoted allegations from an ABC News “whistleblower” that the network had given Harris questions in advance of her debate with Trump. On Wednesday, more than a month later, Ackman admitted it was “fake.”

 Elon Musk, whose takeover of X has enabled fake news slop at scale, is among the most consistent offenders — credulously promoting baseless claims about voter fraud that rack up billions of views.

“Is this true?” the pro-Trump billionaire will often ask his legions of followers about blatant bunk, helping it spread like wildfire.

Musk frequently touts the “Community Notes” system, whereby X users can vote to add fact checks to false posts, but many posts don’t get the Community Notes treatment until well after they go viral, if at all.

Axios reports that liberals do this too, noting that there was a viral untrue rumor that Karl Rove was stumping for Harris and a spate of conspiracy theories about the Trump assassination attempt. (I might add that the rumors were even more plentiful on the right about that last one.)

Anyway, as we know this takes a real toll on people’s lives when it affects the information necessary to help people in a disaster.

“The truth is, it’s getting harder to describe the extent to which a meaningful percentage of Americans have dissociated from reality,” The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel wrote in an article about hurricane conspiracies headlined: “I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is.”

And apparently, 54% of respondents in an Axios Vibes survey published last month agreed with the statement, “I’ve disengaged from politics because I can’t tell what’s true.”

Come on people. It’s crazy out there for real. We all know that. Just look at the circus sideshow the Republicans are trying to sell us for the presidency. And it’s also crazy out there because our media econsystems are full of lies and BS. But if you use your intuition and your brain you can get your way through it even if you screw up once in a while and believe something that’s fake. But it’s important to stay engaged. Reality still exists.

Coming from the man who has demeaned and insulted every judge in every one of his cases except for Aileen Cannon in Florida who was clearly biased in his favor, that was pretty rich.

Just yesterday he did it again:

Trump called the release of the documents “election interference” during his podcast appearance and said it was “a terrible thing, what’s happening. And the judges, this judge is the most evil person.”

“They all said, ‘Well, make sure you don’t get Chutkan.’ And who did I get? I got Chutkan. So, you know, they supposedly pick, they pick balls, right?” Trump continued, referring in lottery-like terms to the random selection system used to assign federal judges to cases. “It’s not— I don’t think it works that way, but that’s what they say. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. You pick out of a hat, and that’s the judge.”

I guess it’s not very useful to point this stuff out because almost half the country doesn’t think his addled hypocrisy even matters. But it’s important, I think, to at least put it on the record.

Those of you who read this blog know about the Republicans’ affinity for the bandwagon effect — tell everyone you’re winning and in the end people will want to go with the winner. Trump is especially enamored of this because he brags about everything anyway.

Dan Pfeiffer has a piece today explaining that it might not be the smartest move this time out.

Believe it or not, there are strategic reasons why Republicans publicly assert they are winning no matter what the polls say, and Democrats always hypothesize that a stunning defeat is right around the corner.

However, this election is unlike any other. The electoral coalitions have shifted, and the Trump campaign did not adjust its playbook to address the new reality.

For the longest time, the Republican coalition was comprised of older, mostly college-educated voters who participated in every election. Democratic success, on the other hand, depended on turnout from lower-propensity voters who rarely voted in midterms.

This explains why Republicans generally did better in lower-turnout midterm elections and Democrats have won the popular vote in all but one presidential election since 1988 (Yep, you read that correctly). Higher turnout was good for Democrats and bad for Republicans. Higher turnout means irregular voters show up and dilute the power of the GOP’s hard-core base of regular voters.

[…]

Because of the differing nature of their coalitions, Democrat and Republicans took different approaches to motivating their voters.

The Republican theory depends on the “Bandwagon Effect.” They believe that undecided voters will tip to the likely winner. The Republicans want the illusion of momentum at the end of a campaign. They often go to extreme measures to create that illusion. They rely on a barrage of junk polls that show their candidates winning. They assert that the map is shifting in their direction — even campaigning in solidly Blue states as a demonstration of confidence.

Democrats worry about complacency. Lower-propensity voters are less likely to vote if the outcome is assured. In other words, their decision to turn out depends on believing their vote matters. We learned this lesson in 2016. Approximately four million people who voted for Obama in 2012 stayed home during that election, which helped put Donald Trump in the White House.

Pfeiffer points out that coalitions have changed dramatically since 2016, however. With those college-educated suburbanites moving to the Democrats, it’s the GOP that depends on low propensity voters. He quotes a Cook Report survey that found”

Our final poll finds Harris leading 51%-47% among high-engagement voters — a remarkably stable four-point lead the same as the previous two polls — only this time with just 2% remaining undecided. But Trump has bounced back to a seven-point lead with low/mid-engagement voters, 52%-45% — smack dab in between his 10-point lead over Biden among those voters in May and his three-point lead over Harris in August. The likely explanation? Since August, Trump has consolidated more Robert F. Kennedy Jr. supporters and other third-party voters to his column, allowing him to increase his low/mid-engagement vote share from 48% to 52%, while Harris’s share among that group has remained stagnant at 45%.

Pfeiffer notes:

Trump and the Republicans now need less-likely voters to turn out — the exact type of voter prone to complacency. There is now real dissonance between the Trump campaign’s messaging and its target voters.

Trump is literally telling his voters that he can’t lose (unless the other side cheats) and it’s clear they are already measuring the drapes for the White House. He’s campaigning in states he can’t win and is refusing to do interviews and events by the dozen. He’s acting like he’s already got it in the bag. Of course.

Pfeiffer points out that Obama’s team knew they had to turn out those low propensity voters so they built a massive, sophisticated field operation. I remember it well and it started months before the election. As you know (just read the previous post) the Trump team has not done that. They outsourced their field operation to Super PACs one of which, Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point ,has been relegated to just one state after failing to meet goals this month and the other a late comer to the party, Elon Musk, who’s apparently having similar problems.

As Pfeiffer says, the GOP hasn’t updated its campaign strategy and frankly, I don’t think they could if they wanted to because Trump lives by the bandwagon effect. He just lies and lies about everything, under the assumption he can make people believe anything. And he’s certainly right about the members of his cult. But whether he can count on that working with low propensity voters in another thing. They might just hear him bragging about how great he is and assume he’s going to win whether they vote or not. If they like him, that’s a problem.

There’s a new ratfucker in town

404 media reports:

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.

I’ve seen some pandering in my day… He really is one step away from promising that anyone who votes for him will pay no taxes.

How will he pay for it? Tariffs of course. And the rest of us who didn’t vote for him will make up the difference.

Techno-authoritarians’ Trojan horse

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.

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.

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.

Of bots and bad faith

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 AI-powered bot army on X spread pro-Trump and pro-GOP propaganda, research shows (NBC News):

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.

But 15k retweets I’ll take.

It’s not all good news:

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.”

What have I been saying?

I think we all need a little bit of the chillest animal on th earth right now:

I want one.