Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Donald’s Trump’s threats on social media MIGHT finally lead to legal consequences for him. Woo hoo! Today it was revealed that in Trump’s pretrial conditions in the Georgia RICO case he is forbidden from making any “direct or indirect threat of any nature against the community or to any property in the community,” including in “posts on social media or reposts of posts” by others on social media.

Wow. It took a long time to get here, especially considering all the other times he intimidated and threatened witnesses on social media. Remember Alexander Vindman? Marie Yovanovitch, US Ambassador to Ukrainian? But now, because he’s under pretrial conditions and protective orders issued by a judge in our legal system, he MIGHT be charged with witness tampering. It’s one of the reasons that we needed to get him in this position. It’s the difference between lying to the media and on social media to the public, vs lying in court under oath.

Keep Normalizing Jail For Trump

Every time these conditions are set I watch the cable hosts and legal analysts talk about how pretrial jailing is not going to happen. But some, like Glenn Kirschner, have said, “It’s time to detain Trump pending trial.” Kirschner has made some videos with the compelling reasons Trump should be put in jail. The legal experts and the media are finally starting to discuss the possibility that pretrial detention is more and more likely. Good! I’m on board the “Jail Trump” train. But before that, what else can the judge do? Last week i wrote about what happens when Trump violates his protective order or pretrial conditions.

Today I heard former Federal prosecutor Will Rollins explain to Brian Tyler Cohen that a judge can forbid Trump from posting anything on social media or require Trump to provide all his social media posts ahead of time to his defense attorneys to certify they aren’t being used for witness intimidation. If they do, the attorney can lose their bar card. HA! That would be fun to see.

I like the idea of Trump physically in jail because it would stop HIM from threatening people on social media, since he won’t personally be able to post on #TruthSocial, his own personal social media platform. He also won’t be able to threaten people at a rally. And, unless he gets to do a jailhouse interview with Tucker Carlson, there will be no live interviews.

Trump’s constant use of threats works for him politically and if we can’t stop them completely, we need a way to limit them. So it’s great that a judge FINALLY imposed a gag order on Trump in his Georgia RICO case.

Now, when he keeps making threats, we look for ways to make it hurt him and those people who knowingly and intentionally aid and abet Trump in the commission of his witness tampering.

What’s The Strategy to Beat Trump on Social Media?

Trump uses social media to talk directly to the public. It lets him set the narrative. One of his current narratives is that Biden and “big tech” is trying to limit his free speech. But threats of violence are not protected speech. We need to keep educating everyone on what is and is not protected speech.

We also need to remember that private entities can restrict what is said on their platform.

Remember how Facebook and Twitter give Trump special treatment until it was no longer possible to ignore his threats? Then he used Twitter to incite violence on January 6th. After January 6th, Twitter and Facebook banned him.

Facebook made some changes, put in some new guidelines and welcomed him back. Do you think “the temperature” has gone down? No! But he doesn’t need to post directly on Facebook. He has his own social media platform. And, in addition, it’s repeated on Twitter/X, Facebook and in the MSM. (Marcy Wheeler reminds us not to run his posts without breaking them up. Don’t be a data mule for his messages! )
Because of the reposting TFG gets all the benefits of the big social media platforms without the possibility of restrictions. Nothing he says will be removed. But it’s not as if Truth Social doesn’t have Terms of Service, they do!

In Truth Social’s Terms of Service it says:
“your contributions do not advocate or incite, encourage, or threaten physical harm against another. And, “your contributions do not violate any applicable law, regulation, or rule.”
They have consequences for people who violate their TOS and posting threatening speech.

And before you say, “They’ll never enforce any TOS on their contributors”. You should know that Truth Social gave law enforcement info on the man in Utah who threatened Biden. (In fact, they acted when Meta/Facebook did not!) Truth Social alerted the FBI about a user threatening Biden and other Democrats. Facebook seemingly failed to even moderate the violent posts.

So, will they enforce their Terms of Service on Trump? They should. If they don’t, this is where we look at the laws that apply to people or companies that KNOWINGLY and WILLINGLY participate in witness tampering.

You might recall how Musk fought a subpoena about turning over evidence to Jack Smith, He wanted to violate the rules of the subpoena that said NOT to tell the subject that their data was being subpoenaed. They were fined $350,000. Look, I don’t want to go all Fani Willis RICO here, but we can’t just let the social media companies enable Trump’s crimes and the crimes of his followers.

We know that Zuckerberg kept people on Facebook who made threats because they had political connections and/or high engagement. We know that Elon Musk has replatformed and is now PAYING Nazis to post on X. If Devin Nunes, the CEO of Truth Social, is asked to remove Trump’s witness tampering posts and does NOT, could that be considered aiding and abetting Trump in the commission of a crime?

There are specific laws that could compel Truth Social to remove witness tampering threats. These laws exist. Here’s the law enforcement process for Truth Social. The process for Facebook/Instagram is described under Legal Removal Request.

I listened to a Twitter Space, I mean an X Space, the other day about Elon Musk’s proposal to ban the block button. Some fan boys and girls talked about how it was a very very smart business decision. But other women and men talked about the very real impact of threats and harassment on the platform have on people. I heard stories of subpoenas being issued by law enforcement to remove threats of violence and the company had to comply. The non-fan boys pointed out that this wasn’t “a few flamers” in the comments section with differences of opinions. They were serious, true threats to people.

Finally, when Donald Trump breaks his pretrial conditions and protective orders, by witness tampering people on social media, he will be sanctioned, up to and including jail. Then we keep fighting. Because we can’t let the social media companies off the hook when they don’t manage their own platform while it is being used to harm people.

How to help the victims of harassment and threats on social media

In April I suggested that the City of New York should monetize the threats Trump and his people make. This would be a civil case in addition to the criminal trial.

The people on the various jurys around the country who are being threatened and intimidated by Trump and his followers should be able to sue in a civil court. The jurys are going to be anonymous, but the CITIES will know who they are, they should be prepared for the threats against them.

And it’s not just Trump, there are others doing the intimidation. Junior, Marge, And Eric Trump Go After Judge’s Daughter. These harassers, defamers and threateners have jobs, assets & are connected to people with money. They aren’t lone wolf RWNJs. Trace them, record them, find them, arrest them and charge them. Then make them pay. This is possible. Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss won their multimillion dollar defamation case against One America News. They are on their way to winning their case against Rudy Giuliani.

St. Luke’s Hospital won their harassment and defamation case against Ammon Bundy, his co-defendant, their two mob organization and Bundy’s Campaign for Governor. They were ordered to pay $52.5 million dollars. Then, when Bundy didn’t, they put him in jail.

Cross posted on Spocko’s Brain. Will Trump’s threats on social media send him to jail?

He’s full of it:

Vivek Ramaswamy is once again Just Asking Questions about what happened on 9/11.

In an interview with the Atlantic, the GOP presidential candidate spontaneously turned to the subject during an exchange about whether Americans know the “truth about what really happened” during the January 6 assault on the Capitol.

“I don’t know, but we can handle it,” said Ramaswamy. “Whatever it is, we can handle it. Government agents. How many government agents were in the field? Right?”

He then pivoted to September 11, 2001, when terrorists hijacked four jetliners and crashed them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania — killing close to 3,000 people.

“I think it is legitimate to say how many police, how many federal agents, were on the planes that hit the Twin Towers,” he said. “Maybe the answer is zero. It probably is zero for all I know, right?”

“I have no reason to think it was anything other than zero. But if we’re doing a comprehensive assessment of what happened on 9/11, we have a 9/11 commission, absolutely that should be an answer the public knows the answer to,” he continued. “Well, if we’re doing a January 6 commission, absolutely, those should be questions that we should get to the bottom of.”

He later insisted that he didn’t think the two events “belong in the same conversation” and that it’s “ridiculous” to compare them — but continued to insist that he wants the “truth” about that day.

“I am not questioning what we — this is not something I’m staking anything out on,” he said. “But I want the truth about 9/11.”

If you want his full explanation, it’s here. An excerpt:

The CIA has consistently denied that it allowed the hijackers to come into the United States as part of a failed recruitment effort. Former White House counterterrorism coordinator, Richard Clarke, cited this as a plausible explanation for the CIA’s failure to track the first two hijackers and its abiding refusal to alert the FBI to their presence in the United States.

The government hasn’t done itself any favors since then to build public trust around 9/11 or the U.S. response to it. The Pentagon’s prevarications about celebrity soldier Pat Tillman’s death in Afghanistan – initially claiming he was shot by enemy forces, but later forced to admit that he was killed by friendly fire – is one undisputed case among many.

These events are important foremost because U.S. government officials continue to lie about other matters of public importance – the origin of Covid-19, knowledge about UAPs, Hunter Biden’s laptop, and so on – with a complicit media that just accepts the prevailing narrative without question. This fuels rampant public distrust.

There is no credible evidence that 9/11 was an ‘inside job,’ but ironically when the government systematically lies about Saudi involvement and the media runs interference, that lends plausibility to an otherwise nonsensical claim.

Actually, what lends plausibility is a GOP presidential candidate asking how many federal agents were on board the planes that went into the World Trade Center.

It’s a semi-clever walk back but it’s ridiculous. Mentioning Hunter Biden’s laptop and COVID-19 and UAPs as examples of the government lying to the public totally gives the game away. He’s a cynical jackass of the highest order feeding into the QAnon conspiracy bullshit while pretending to be a government skeptic who is just asking questions.

The GOP primary is a toxic hellhole.

Aka “I know you are but what am I”

The following discussion is hardly anything new to those of you who’ve been following the netroots, blogs, online left, what-have-you for the past couple of decades. There was once an obsessive focus in those groups on “messaging” and how to combat what seemed to be the right’s mastery of the form. Nobody talks about it much anymore but it’s still an issue and this article is a decent reminder of that:

By almost any measure, the struggle for political dominance in the US seems deadlocked between Republicans and Democrats. At times, the two parties resemble a pair of punch-drunk boxers, slugging away at one another in a contest that neither can end.

But there is one political battleground where Republicans triumph virtually every time — and control of this arena could determine who wins the White House in 2024.

Republicans are masters of verbal jiu-jitsu. It’s a form of linguistic combat in which the practitioner takes a political phrase or concept popularized by their opponent and gradually turns into an unusable slur. Like the Japanese martial art known as jiu-jitsu, its devotees avoid taking opposing arguments head on and instead redirect their opponents’ momentum to beat them.

If this sounds abstract, consider the evolution of “ woke.” The word is defined as being “actively aware of social injustice.” But it has been transformed into a contemporary scourge, one that a politician compared to a “virus more dangerous than any pandemic, hands down.”

Mention almost any touchstone phrase adopted by the left in recent years — “critical race theory,” “diversity,” “global warming,” even the word “liberal” itself — and it has been redefined or tarnished by conservatives.

Meanwhile, Republicans continue to proudly use words and pet phrases such as “family values,” “conservative” and “patriot” – no matter who or what is associated with the terms.

As candidates prep for the first 2024 GOP presidential debate Wednesday in Milwaukee, it’s a good time to ponder this question: Why are Republicans so good at this form of verbal combat, and Democrats so bad?

Part of the answer comes down to effort and discipline — Republicans devote more time to turning words into weapons and do a better job of sticking to their message, says Lindsey Cormack, a political scientist who focuses on race, gender, communications and politics at Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey.

“I’ve been studying their communications for 15 years and it sort of blows me away because I think Democrats are good at doing plenty of things, but they really dropped the ball on the communications piece a lot,” Cormack says.

Cormack says conservatives have built a think-tank ecosystem of linguists and focus groups to test words and phrases for political battle. Democrats do some of the same, but with not the same level of commitment, she says.

“They (conservatives) think about what words resonate, what words cue other sorts of thoughts or what sort of images come to mind with people when they’re hearing messages,” Cormack says. “They seem to have more invested in that, and they have more people who write about that sort of work and linguists who do these sorts of things for them.”

How conservatives flipped the script on race

Verbal jiu-jitsu is not new in American politics. Conservatives have long employed it on racial issues. During the civil rights movement of the ‘50s and ‘60s, conservatives in both the Democratic and Republican parties often used a series of verbal feints that changed the direction of their opponent’s moral arguments.

They didn’t say they opposed integration; they said they were for “state’s rights.”

They didn’t say they didn’t want their children sitting next to Black or brown kids when opposing desegregation of public schools; they said they were against “forced busing.”

Conservatives didn’t directly say they opposed school integration. They, like these New York City parents pictured here, said they opposed “forced busing.”Harry Harris/AP

They didn’t say they opposed civil rights leaders’ efforts to make the US a genuine multiracial democracy; they called those leaders “communists” or “socialists.”

They flipped the script by offering new words to replace other terms that were hard to attack head-on.

Sometimes they disarmed a liberal phrase by transforming its meaning.

“Social justice warrior,” for example, didn’t start off as an insult. What’s wrong with someone fighting on behalf of the poor and exploited? Then the term was turned by conservatives and internet culture into something else: a “whiny,” self-righteous progressive who can’t take a joke.

Recent years have brought numerous headlines about another liberal term that has been dismantled by the right.

Critical race theory was once an obscure academic discipline that insisted that racism is more than individual prejudice; it’s embedded in laws, policies and institutions. But conservatives redirected the discussion and turned the term into a catchall phrase that criticizes virtually any examination of systemic racism or history that could make White people uncomfortable.

Whatever the method, this form of verbal jiu-jitsu is used for one purpose, says Robin DiAngelo, author of “White Fragility,” a popular book that spawned another popular liberal catchphrase.

“The function is to silence the conversation and to protect the status quo,” DiAngelo says. “It doesn’t have to make sense. It just has to work and get race off the table and prevent any challenges to the status quo.”

How ‘diversity’ and ‘equity’ became dirty words

Next on the hit list are two other terms favored by liberals: “diversity” and “equity,” DiAngelo says.

Those words originally meant values that were virtually universally accepted. Not many people would openly argue for exclusion or inequity.

In recent years many institutions have launched initiatives around Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) to make their workplaces more fair and diverse.  

But Republican leaders are now comparing DEI initiatives to “wokeness” and “loyalty oaths.” They have introduced bills cutting DEI programs in public universities and corporate America.

Paulette Granberry Russell, president of the National Association of Diversity Officers and Higher Education, recently told a reporter she doesn’t use the acronym DEI anymore because it’s been “weaponized.”

Republicans also have sought to reframe “equity,” which means “being fair or impartial,” by calling the word “a “mandate to discriminate.” And they have attempted to delegitimize “diversity” by expanding the term to “diversity industrial complex,” which a critic described as “a bureaucratic juggernaut running roughshod over every aspect of national life.”

“I’m going to tell you as somebody who’s been in this work for decades, there’s no diversity industrial complex,” DiAngelo says. “When an organization has a diversity program, there’s often one person up against the entire institution. And they maybe have a staff of one or two people on a minimal budget. But using language like that implies that it’s some kind of getting over on people, like it’s some kind of trick.”

When ‘global warming’ becomes ‘climate change’

Some of the most skillful practitioners of verbal jiu-jitsu are able to disarm their opponents without them knowing that they’ve given ground. As a result, liberals eventually end up using the terms favored by their conservative opponents.

The phrase “global warming” was popularized by the media and some scientists in the 1980s. It’s been virtually eliminated from public discourse by verbal jiu-jitsu. Some of that change is due to science. Some scientists believe climate change is a more accurate description of the environmental challenges facing the planet.

Demonstrators march across the Brooklyn Bridge during a climate change protest in New York on March 3, 2023.Yuki Iwamura/Bloomberg/Getty Images

But it was Republicans who initially pushed for the name change, for reasons that had little to do with scientific accuracy. Instead of acknowledging the science pointing toward a looming environmental disaster, one Republican pollster offered another phrase to mute the alarm: climate change.

That term was popularized in part by Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster who advised GOP politicians in the early 2000s to stop using the term “global warming” because it had “catastrophic connotations” and reframe the issue as the more benign “climate change.” (Luntz has since disavowed his efforts to cast doubt on global warming.)

Two decades later, many liberal politicians and activists continue to use the phrase “climate change, the cognitive scientist George Lakoff noted.

“The word ‘climate’ sounds nice – like palm trees or something – and the word ‘change’, well, ‘change’ just happens,” Lakoff said in an interview. “It’s not a big deal. Nothing you can do about it. Not humanly caused. So, the term itself is a right-wing position that people on the left just innocently adopted instead of saying, well, this is a climate disaster that’s approaching.”

The article mentions George Lakoff who was once seen as the Frank Luntz of the left. But his ideas never really caught on beyond a discrete portion of the online left. Anat Shenker-Osario is still working on these issues and continues to offer some great insights:

It’s something to be aware of — and think about. Their recent wordsmithing under Trump seems pretty lame to me — crude nicknames and dumb acronyms like “MAGA” but it seems to work for them.

They’re doubling down:

Just two days after the Georgia indictment, one of Trump’s most enthusiastic backers took the stage at a conference in Missouri to again spread election misinformation. Mike Lindell, the owner of MyPillow who is a vocal promoter of the myth that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, kicked off an event on purported election crimes with a video about fraud.

It included footage from November 2020 that purported to show a Fulton County, Georgia, election worker pulling a briefcase of ballots from under a desk to surreptitiously add them to the tally.

As evidence has since shown, the worker, Ruby Freeman, was simply doing her job — pulling out a standard government container full of real ballots that had to be counted. Three different counts of the Georgia vote, including one by hand, showed the ballots were tallied properly and the results were accurate.

But Freeman and her daughter, who also worked in the elections office that night, were targeted by Trump and his allies and accused of helping throw the election to Biden, compared to drug dealers and deluged with threats. The women testified before the congressional Jan. 6 committee about their ordeal and sued several Trump backers, including former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, for libel. The lies about them are a central part of last week’s indictment of Trump and his allies for allegedly conspiring to spread misinformation to steal the Georgia election.

Yet they persisted. During his conference, Lindell prefaced the video by saying “it isn’t about evidence” and meant to evoke the atmosphere of December 2020, as Trump was challenging the election results and trying to find avenues to remain in power. The anonymously produced video, full of fevered reports of other ”anomalies” in the election, opens with the words “this video is pure data.”

“I never forgot this video,” Lindell said.

Nor has the Republican electorate. Although Trump’s allegations have repeatedly been disproven — often by his own advisers — they’ve taken a firm hold among his party. An Associated Press poll last week found 57% of Republicans said they didn’t view Biden as a legitimately elected president.

The 98-page Georgia indictment lists several false allegations made by Trump that were quickly disproven by fellow Republicans, Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, and Gov. Brian Kemp. Still, Trump insists to this day that the election was stolen from him and continues to lie about it.

After the indictment, he promised a press conference this week revealing a report he claimed would show how the Georgia election was stolen from him — a pledge he rescinded on Thursday, saying his lawyers wanted to make his argument in a court filing instead.

“Does anybody really believe I lost Georgia?” Trump asked on his Truth Social network Saturday. “I DON’T.” […]

At the recent Iowa State Fair, where he was campaigning for that state’s presidential caucus next year, Trump again claimed the 2020 election was “rigged.” In anticipation of the Georgia indictment, Trump’s campaign issued a statement a week ago saying prosecutors were “taking away President Trump’s First Amendment right to free speech, and the right to challenge a rigged and stolen election that the Democrats do all the time.”

And every GOP strategist cringes every time he does this. It cost them the red wave in 2022. And it will cost them 2024.

“a friendlier Nazi Germany”

Amanda Moore went undercover in late 2020 as a far-right extremist. She attended the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) and Turning Point USA’s Student Action Summit. By August 2021, she was attending a Proud Boys riot in Portland with a neo-Nazi. The far-right threat, Moore felt, was “misunderstood by much of the press and far more dangerous than what was being reported.” What began as an idea for a podcast and a couple of blog posts became an 11-month journey into the heart of American darkness.

The press underestimates the white-nationalist threat because these groups are careful to conceal their real agenda. They work as congressional campaign staffers and work to form congressional caucuses, all while “meeting with leaders of far-right political parties in Italy and Hungary” and heading up local Young Republican clubs.

“Some have worked hard to scrub themselves from the Internet or to curate their online personas; others operate in the shadows, so that people do not even know to look for them,” Moore explains in The Nation. “But they network with each other, calling in favors and introductions. They’ve created a social maze that’s almost impossible to trace—unless you are invited to become one of them.”

Moore was.

At just 29 years old, Gavin Wax, the president of the New York Young Republican Club, has already been working for years to push the Republican Party to the right and encourage those on the far right to enter mainstream GOP organizations. In 2016, Wax was the editor of Liberty Conservative, an online libertarian magazine. Alongside palatable pieces on libertarian candidates and policy, Wax published racist work by the white nationalist James Allsup. Ultimately, the magazine shifted so far right that multiple contributors quit. And since 2019, when he was elected president of the club, Wax has led a MAGA-style takeover of the previously moderate NYYRC. He was also the national spokesman for Republicans for National Renewal, an organization whose mission is to infiltrate the GOP with “hard core conservatives” and “unabashed America First patriots.”

[…]

Working from within the system isn’t a strategy unique to Wax, who did not respond to my requests for an interview. Wax’s tactics have become a model for how to seize power. Increasingly, young far-right activists appear just reasonable enough to be let in the door, and once inside the establishment, they recruit people to the movement. Wax’s former colleague James Allsup did this well. After Allsup became a GOP precinct committee officer in Washington State, one neo-Nazi said on a podcast, “We can’t all be Andrew Anglin [the founder of the neo-Nazi outlet The Daily Stormer], but 10,000 of us can be James Allsup.”

Moore cautions that these groups are different from MAGA foot soldiers.

“Almost without fail, the boomer conspiracy theorists who populated QAnon conferences were quick to say January 6 was a peaceful day. But the fascists and those with ties to white nationalist groups were proud of storming the Capitol.”

The latter have no illusions that Donald Trump won the 2020 election. That’s for the dupes at TPUSA. White nationalists like Alex Nelson view “the steal” as cover for defending their allies arrested over the Capitol assault.

In July 2021, I met Alex Nelson for the first time at a cocktail reception during Turning Point USA’s Student Action Summit in Tampa. I was standing in line for a glass of wine when Nelson asked me what my vision for America was. To avoid encouraging people, I was always careful not to be more extreme than the people I met, so I deflected and asked what he wanted for the country.

“Uh… like a friendlier Nazi Germany,” Nelson responded.

Nelson was disappointed that more Capitol rioters failed to stand their ground against the FBI on Jan. 6.

“None of them fought back. None of them Ruby Ridged themselves,” he told Moore.

Ashli Babbitt was not enough and too female, one supposes. White nationalism needs more Horst Wessels and a more martial marching song than Y.M.C.A.

Soon after the Portland event, Moore found herself doxed on Telegram, the fringe-right social media site. “Amanda Moore is a 33 year old communist infiltrator in the DC area,” someone wrote and included pictures. She revealed herself on Twitter and included photos of herself with far-right figures including former Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn.

Hey everyone. My name is Amanda, and I have been undercover as a MAGA since the 2020 November Stop the Steal Rally in Washington, DC. pic.twitter.com/Glg1qiL4oI

— amanda 🐢 (@noturtlesoup17) October 24, 2021

Read the entire thing in The Nation. They walk among us.

Lie-lie-lie-lie-lie-lie-lie

So, okay, Donald Trump is not being booked the day of the GOP debate (AP):

Former President Donald Trump says he will surrender to authorities in Georgia on Thursday to face charges in the case accusing him of illegally scheming to overturn his 2020 election loss in the state.

“Can you believe it? I’ll be going to Atlanta, Georgia, on Thursday to be ARRESTED,” Trump wrote on his social media network Monday night, hours after his bond was set at $200,000.

This will be Trump’s fourth arrest since April.

When defendants arrive at the building, they typically pass through a security checkpoint before checking in for formal booking in the lobby. During the booking process, defendants are typically photographed and fingerprinted and asked to provide certain personal information. Since Trump’s bond has already been set, he will be released from custody once the booking process is complete.

Unlike in other jurisdictions, in Fulton County, arraignments — where a defendant first appears in court — are generally set after a defendant completes the booking process and do not happen on the same day.

There is a zero percent chance this dude won’t violate the bond conditions his lawyers just agreed to. The only question is whether they will enforce them when he does. pic.twitter.com/n31MGs250F

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) August 22, 2023

This is getting to be a familiar drill for Trump. A burly booking officer will look at him with tears in his eyes and say, “Sir….” He’ll soon claim nobody knows more about getting arrested than him. In the history of this country. “Believe me.”

No retreat, baby, no surrender

Lie-lie-lie-lie-lie-lie-lie-lie-lie-lie-lie-lie
Lie-lie-lie-lie-lie-lie-lie-lie-lie-lie-lie-lie
Lie-lie-lie-lie-lie-lie-lie-lie-lie-lie-lie-lie
Lie-lie-lie-lie-lie-lie-lie-lie-lie-lie-lie-lie

Or maybe retreat.

Interesting that fleeing to Russia and living with Putin is in his head. Seems like a somewhat odd thing to be thinking about. pic.twitter.com/d5At6Ewxl2

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) August 22, 2023

Get the net.

It’s not Donald Trump

Ronan Farrow has a deep dive on Elon Musk:

Initially, Musk showed unreserved support for the Ukrainian cause, responding encouragingly as Mykhailo Fedorov, the Ukrainian minister for digital transformation, tweeted pictures of equipment in the field. But, as the war ground on, SpaceX began to balk at the cost. “We are not in a position to further donate terminals to Ukraine, or fund the existing terminals for an indefinite period of time,” SpaceX’s director of government sales told the Pentagon in a letter, last September. (CNBC recently valued SpaceX at nearly a hundred and fifty billion dollars. Forbes estimated Musk’s personal net worth at two hundred and twenty billion dollars, making him the world’s richest man.)

Musk was also growing increasingly uneasy with the fact that his technology was being used for warfare. That month, at a conference in Aspen attended by business and political figures, Musk even appeared to express support for Vladimir Putin. “He was onstage, and he said, ‘We should be negotiating. Putin wants peace—we should be negotiating peace with Putin,’ ” Reid Hoffman, who helped start PayPal with Musk, recalled. Musk seemed, he said, to have “bought what Putin was selling, hook, line, and sinker.” A week later, Musk tweeted a proposal for his own peace plan, which called for new referendums to redraw the borders of Ukraine, and granted Russia control of Crimea, the semi-autonomous peninsula recognized by most nations, including the United States, as Ukrainian territory. In later tweets, Musk portrayed as inevitable an outcome favoring Russia and attached maps highlighting eastern Ukrainian territories, some of which, he argued, “prefer Russia.” Musk also polled his Twitter followers about the plan. Millions responded, with about sixty per cent rejecting the proposal. (Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s President, tweeted his own poll, asking users whether they preferred the Elon Musk who supported Ukraine or the one who now seemed to back Russia. The former won, though Zelensky’s poll had a smaller turnout: Musk has more than twenty times as many followers.)

No single nutcase should have this much power.

In the end he agreed to continue — for a price.

There is little precedent for a civilian’s becoming the arbiter of a war between nations in such a granular way, or for the degree of dependency that the U.S. now has on Musk in a variety of fields, from the future of energy and transportation to the exploration of space. SpaceX is currently the sole means by which nasa transports crew from U.S. soil into space, a situation that will persist for at least another year. The government’s plan to move the auto industry toward electric cars requires increasing access to charging stations along America’s highways. But this rests on the actions of another Musk enterprise, Tesla. The automaker has seeded so much of the country with its proprietary charging stations that the Biden Administration relaxed an early push for a universal charging standard disliked by Musk. His stations are eligible for billions of dollars in subsidies, so long as Tesla makes them compatible with the other charging standard.

In the past twenty years, against a backdrop of crumbling infrastructure and declining trust in institutions, Musk has sought out business opportunities in crucial areas where, after decades of privatization, the state has receded. The government is now reliant on him, but struggles to respond to his risk-taking, brinkmanship, and caprice. Current and former officials from nasa, the Department of Defense, the Department of Transportation, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration told me that Musk’s influence had become inescapable in their work, and several of them said that they now treat him like a sort of unelected official. One Pentagon spokesman said that he was keeping Musk apprised of my inquiries about his role in Ukraine and would grant an interview with an official about the matter only with Musk’s permission. “We’ll talk to you if Elon wants us to,” he told me. In a podcast interview last year, Musk was asked whether he has more influence than the American government. He replied immediately, “In some ways.” Reid Hoffman told me that Musk’s attitude is “like Louis XIV: ‘L’état, c’est moi.’ ”

Musk’s power continues to grow. His takeover of Twitter, which he has rebranded “X,” gives him a critical forum for political discourse ahead of the next Presidential election. He recently launched an artificial-intelligence company, a move that follows years of involvement in the technology. Musk has become a hyper-exposed pop-culture figure, and his sharp turns from altruistic to vainglorious, strategic to impulsive, have been the subject of innumerable articles and at least seven major books, including a forthcoming biography by Walter Isaacson. But the nature and the scope of his power are less widely understood.

More than thirty of Musk’s current and former colleagues in various industries and a dozen individuals in his personal life spoke to me about their experiences with him. Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, with whom Musk has both worked and sparred, told me, “Elon desperately wants the world to be saved. But only if he can be the one to save it.”

According to this article, a lot of this is driven by ruthless financial motivation. But his acquisition of twitter and its resultant destruction due to his massive ego and ignorance shows that it’s not just that.

This is obviously the era of the megalomaniacal moron. I presume he has good luck and instincts in business which has made him very rich. But he is also quite stupid in many ways and is exceedingly immature and shallow. We know this because we can see his blatherings on his little toy every day. This man having so much money and this much power is very, very bad for humanity.

Here we have one of the supposedly great centrist unifiers promising to hand the election to Donald Trump:

Former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) said Sunday that No Labels will “very likely” launch a third-party “alternative” if former President Trump and President Biden win the nominations for their parties.

“But if Trump and Biden are the nominees, it’s very likely that No Labels will get access to the ballot and offer an alternative,” Hogan said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “And if most of the voters don’t want A or B, we have an obligation to give them C, I mean, for the good of the country.” 

Hogan, who serves as the national co-chairman of No Labels — a political group that has been pushing for a third-party ticket — said two-thirds of the American people are “not interested” in voting for the Republican or Democratic nominee. 

“It’s an overwhelming majority of people who are completely fed up with politics,” Hogan said. “They think Washington is broken. And so, even though this normally is not something that we consider and talk about seriously, because it hasn’t happened in the past, this is something that could happen,” noting that it is still a “long way off.” 

David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to President Obama, pushed back against Hogan’s proposal Sunday, saying, “Honestly, doesn’t that pave the way for Donald Trump? Doesn’t that siphon votes from Joe Biden and elect the person that you have criticized so heavily?” GOP senator touts Ramaswamy as exciting presidential candidate Sununu says he’ll work to narrow 2024 GOP field in effort to defeat Trump 

Hogan disagreed and said the third-party candidate would “pull just as many votes from Donald Trump as Joe Biden.” 

“I love Larry Hogan, but that’s just not true,” Axelrod responded. “I think that broken glass will be the jagged edge that cuts the throat of the Biden campaign. History shows that. Trump has a high floor and a low ceiling. If you lower the ceiling to where his … high floor is good enough to win, he will win. And he benefited from third parties in 2016. This would be a dreadful mistake if the goal is to deprive Donald Trump of the presidency.” Axelrod called it the former president’s “hope” and “prayer.”

Hogan isn’t stupid. He knows Axelrod is right about Trump’s solid core support. I can only assume that he’s decided that anything is better than Joe Biden, including Donald Trump. No one with any other motive would do this in this election.

He can’t help himself

Mediaite reported:

According to a recent WalletHub report, Atlanta is ranked 11th in the nation for violent crime and has seen an increase in murder rates over the past few years. No doubt Atlanta is not the safest city in the nation, but its problems do not seem materially different than other urban areas in red and blue states.

I wonder if at some point the GOP residents of Georgia will get tired of their state and its leaders being slagged by Donald Trump day in and day out. I suppose most of them are fine with it. He’s their god and can do no wrong. But there must be a few who still have a little pride in their own state. Aren’t there?

Over the weekend Florida Governor Ron DeSantis may have sealed his political fate with one recklessly dumb comment. Failing to learn the lesson that a Trump opponent can say a lot of things but he cannot ever insult Trump supporters he told The Florida Standard:

“The movement has got to be about what are you trying to achieve on behalf of the American people and that’s got to be based in principle, because if you’re not rooted in principle, if all we are is listless vessels that’s just supposed to follow … whatever happens to come down the pike on Truth Social every morning, that’s not going to be a durable movement.”

The so-called “listless vessels” were not amused.

Looks like Ron DeSanctimonious just had his “Basket of Deplorables” moment.

Not good!

“Ron DeSantis rips Donald Trump supporters as ‘listless vessels’” https://t.co/Tux95LDNBN

— Jason Miller (@JasonMillerinDC) August 19, 2023

DeSantis and his people scrambled to defend themselves, saying that he was referring to Trump’s congressional supporters not his Real American supporters but referring to members of congress as a “movement” was very sloppy even if he was actually whining about elected officials. He also said:

“I think that we have a stream in our party that views supporting Trump as whether you are a Rino or not. And so you could be the most conservative person since sliced bread, unless you’re kissing his rear end, they will somehow call you a Rino.”

I guess sliced bread isn’t “woke.” What a relief.

DeSantis should have known better than to go there even if he did mean to target members of congress. They’re Trump supporters too and they are very popular with the voters he seems determined to woo. He might as well have called them all deplorable and then dropped out of the campaign. It’s only a matter of time before somebody starts selling coffee mugs and T-shirts that say “Proud to be a listless vessel” on them.

And anyway, if there was ever a group of people, whether in Congress or among the American people who are anything but listless, it’s MAGA followers. They may be “vessels” but they are as energetic and enthusiastic a political faction as we have ever seen. It’s fun!

Rep. Kat Cammack (FL) takes her show on the road for the Young Republicans in Dallas. pic.twitter.com/s3f7nSVPXH

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) August 19, 2023

PANDERING ACT: GOP's presidential hopeful, Vivek Ramaswamy, delivers a spirited performance to Eminem's "Lose Yourself" at the Iowa State Fair. 🎤🇺🇸 #CampaignVibes #Vivek #Ramaswamy #Election2024 #VivekRamaswamy #Iowa #IowaStateFair #MAGA #Trump pic.twitter.com/sDXi2mhEUv

— Sir Maejor – FBA 🇺🇸 (@Maejor4Congress) August 12, 2023

In fact, they’re having so much fun that they are living in a full-fledged, delusional fantasy that makes “Barbie” look like “The Sorrow and the Pity.” These results from the latest CBS Poll are from another dimension:

Trump far and away leads the GOP field among voters who place top importance on a candidate being “honest and trustworthy.”

61% for Trump to the next candidate, DeSantis, at 17%. And it gets even weirder:

More generally, Trump’s voters hold him as a source of true information, even more so than other sources, including conservative media figures, religious leaders, and even their own friends and family.

This is classic cult follower behavior. And this isn’t some small group, tens of millions of Americans feel that what Donald Trump, one of history’s greatest liars, tells them is true even compared to the clergy.

61% of primary voters also believe that Trump would definitely beat Biden, which the pollsters acknowledge is likely due to the fact that they believe he won the last election and has the advantage of a Bizarro World form of incumbency. They believe his lies that the Trump presidency was the most successful of all time and they want more of it. (His overall record is actually very mixed and his handling of the pandemic, his greatest challenge, was a historic failure.)

77% believe that the indictments against Trump are politically motivated and 62% say they plan to vote for him in the primary. His closest rival is DeSantis at 16%. But according to this article in The Atlantic by Russell Berman, there is some evidence that a change in the way that question is worded challenges the conventional wisdom that Trump is actually being helped by the indictments. But it only adds up to about 1.6% points which is trivial considering his lead.

More relevant is the finding by Sarah Longwell a Republican strategist who holds frequent focus groups, that GOP primary voters in the main just don’t care about them. Almost no Republicans have said the indictments have made them less likely to support him. He is their leader and they believe he’s telling the truth when he says he did none of it. I’m afraid that if any of these trials end up with one or more of these fun-loving Trump followers on the jury it’s going to be very hard to shake them out of their belief that he can literally do no wrong.

Trump responded to this poll on his Truth Social platform:

New CBS POLL, just out, has me leading the field by “legendary” numbers. TRUMP 62%, 46 Points above DeSanctimonious (who is crashing like an ailing bird!), Ramaswamy 7%, Pence 5%, Scott 3%, Haley 2%, Sloppy Chris Christy 2%, “Aida” Hutchinson 1%. The public knows who I am & what a successful Presidency I had, with Energy Independence, Strong Borders and Military, Biggest EVER Tax & Regulation Cuts, No Inflation, Strongest Economy in History & much more. I WILL THEREFORE NOT BE DOING THE DEBATES!

He has instead agreed to do a pre-taped interview with former Fox celebrity Tucker Carlson to be aired on X, formerly twitter, at the same time as the Fox News debate. (He’s miffed at Fox for not reporting his best poll numbers and using the “big orange” pictures of him so this is obviously his idea of a clever slap in the face.)

The fact that it’s pre-taped is interesting for two reasons. If Carlson insisted on it, it may be because he wants to control it instead of letting Trump run off at the mouth as he does in live interviews. If Trump demanded it, it’s possible that he has other plans. Apparently Fox isn’t sure that he won’t just crash the debate anyway so they’ve got plans in place to accommodate him in case he does. It is not beyond the realm of possibility.

It’s also possible that he’ll be sneaking in the back door of the Fulton County Jail to turn himself in for arrest. It’s open 24/7. He’s got to do it sometime before Friday, and if he’s on twitter and the debate’s on Fox perhaps he hopes he can keep his “listless vessels” from seeing it live. But he needn’t worry. As he said before, he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and not lose any votes. For once he wasn’t lying.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2023/08/trump-indictment-2024-election-republican-primary-polling/675062/

NY T: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/20/us/politics/trump-biden-debates.html

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-poll-indictments-2023-08-20/