In fact, Trump won every voter in the country both times he ran. It’s just the Deep State rigged it so it looked like he didn’t
I hope they have that on tape. I think it could be useful in an ad, don’t you?
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Digby's Hullabaloo Posts
There’s something amiss in the whistleblowers’ tale
US Attorney David Weiss, who is overseeing the Hunter Biden criminal probe, says in a letter obtained by CNN that he did not ask to be named as a special counsel and was never refused authority to bring charges anywhere in the country, refuting two key allegations from IRS whistleblowers.
Weiss’ comments, in a letter sent Monday to GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, go against claims from IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley and one of his deputies, who said they witnessed political interference in investigation of President Joe Biden’s son.
They testified to Congress that during an October 2022 meeting, Weiss said he had requested to be named as a special counsel but was denied by Justice Department leadership. But Weiss said in the new letter that he never requested special counsel status, but rather explored becoming a “special attorney” under a different statute.
“I have not requested Special Counsel designation,” Weiss wrote to Graham on Monday. “Rather, I had discussions with Departmental officials regarding potential appointment under 28 U.S.C. § 515, which would have allowed me to file charges in a district outside my own without the partnership of the local U.S. Attorney.”
Weiss said he got these assurances “months before the October 7, 2022, meeting referenced throughout the whistleblowers’ allegations.”
The prosecutor also wrote that he has “never been denied the authority to bring charges in any jurisdiction.” Shapley claimed that Weiss said in that same October 2022 meeting he wasn’t the deciding person on whether to indict Hunter Biden, because political appointees had blocked him from bringing charges in Los Angeles and Washington, DC.
Shapley and his deputy raised their concerns in congressional testimony that was made public last month by House Republicans. The Justice Department and Attorney General Merrick Garland have denied that there was any political interference in the Hunter Biden criminal probe, which led to a plea deal where the president’s son will admit to two tax misdemeanors, resolve a felony gun charge and likely avoid jail time.
Lawyers for Shapley told CNN on Monday that the letter shows that “Weiss’ story continues to change.”
“As a practical matter, it makes no difference whether Weiss requested special counsel or special attorney authority. Under no circumstances should ‘the process’ have included the political appointees of the subject’s father, because Congress and the public had been assured it would not – but it did,” they said.
In the letter, Weiss also declined to comment on the internal FBI document from 2020 that contained uncorroborated allegations that Joe Biden and his son Hunter were involved in a foreign bribery scheme. Weiss said Graham’s questions about the matter “relate to an ongoing investigation.”
But Rod Rosenstein and Bill Barr were neck deep in the Trump investigations and that wasn’t a problem for these folks.
I don’t know what Shapley and his deputy’s deal is. Maybe they misunderstood what was said or maybe they’re just disgruntled Trumpies who believed they’d found a smoking gun and it was really just another dud. Weiss is a Trump appointee, not a Biden political appointee, so I don’t know what that attorney is talking about.
I simply do not believe that Garland or Weiss or the FBI went easy on Hunter Biden. They just aren’t the types to play that game.
If you want to get into the weeds on all this, Marcy Wheeler has been down the rabbit hole for the last couple of weeks. This thing is a mess.
Well, it looks as though they’ve another way to perform for the cult. It’s a meaningless waste of time but it does have the benefit of degrading our democracy even further. Hunter at DKos has the story:
Well, here we go again. House Republicans have been shrieking that they’re going to impeach a whole passel of top officials in the Joe Biden administration for supposed crimes that include investigating seditionist Donald Trump too much and investigating Hunter Biden too little, but every once in a while one of them remembers that Congress also has the power to simply zero out the salaries of any executive branch employees they don’t particularly like.
It’s akin to a bill of attainder targeting a particular executive official’s career. Frustrated congressional cornballs have been sporadically remembering the power for years now, especially whenever some government agency does something that they really super do not like but can’t muster the legislative votes to actually change.
Politico reports that House Republican cranks are again threatening to use this power, probably after someone in the Freedom Caucus sobered up long enough to remember it existed. The possible targets reportedly include Attorney General Merrick Garland, FBI Director Christopher Wray, and “some are hoping to use the procedure on investigators working for special counsel Jack Smith.”
That last part is another bit of nice, clean proof that at least “some” House Republicans are eager to use their positions as U.S. congresscreatures to interfere specifically with the ongoing investigations and criminal charges against the coup-attempting, document-stealing Donald Trump. As House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s bag of deplorables prepare to begin impeachment proceedings against Garland for not finding anything except petty crimes to indict Hunter Biden on, yet again disrupting one of Rudy Giuliani and Republicanism’s most grand pro-Russia, anti-Ukraine conspiracy theories, and enraging the petty fascists of the party beyond all hope of reason, there are at least some bozos in the caucus eager to target the Jack Smith investigation specifically.
It’s a simple enough strategy: Zero out the salaries of any Department of Justice or FBI official involved with prosecuting Trump for lying to federal officials about stolen national security documents, and you’ll neatly empty out the offices of anyone willing to pursue Trump’s crimes. It’s a gleefully corrupt act, all premised on the House Republican insistence that the government must arrest their enemies for committing crimes they can’t prove while letting powerful Republicans get away with crimes even if they’re caught in the act.
And this is why it’s perfectly reasonable to conclude that the Freedom Caucus and allies are not so much a political caucus as an organized crime ring. Not a well-organized crime ring, mind you, but organized enough.
Now that Politico has brought us this news, it’s time for the usual caveats. Guess what? House Republicans won’t actually be able to zero out salaries whether they “want” to or not, and that’s because the whole scheme has the same flaw that supposed impeachment of federal officials does. The Democratic-held Senate would have to agree, and the Senate has no interest in helping Jim Jordan’s crime spree along. A bill to do this would go nowhere.
It’s also an arcane enough move that one imagines it wouldn’t be worth all that much for House Republicans to try it for the sake of campaign trail bragging rights: “I tried to take away Merrick Garland’s paycheck but it didn’t work” isn’t the best bullet point for a campaign flier. House Republicans will instead probably keep moving forward with a Garland impeachment “investigation,” solely because it would be an opportunity for an extended, months-long spectacle. Jordan and other House Republicans are still clamoring for revenge against House Democrats who had the audacity to impeach Trump twice: once for attempting to extort the Ukrainian government for personal gain, and once for that whole “attempting to violently overthrow the United States government” thing.
Remember, too, that Jordan’s been demanding state and federal prosecutors turn over their case materials to him in the cases where Trump has already been indicted. House Republicans aren’t just interfering with the multiple criminal investigations of Trump, they’re doing it repeatedly, continually, and as an explicit strategy. And why wouldn’t they? They were willing to obstruct investigations of an attempted Republican coup, they’re hardly going to recoil at this sort of old-school corruption.
They are all completely corrupt and we have come to accept that that’s just the way it is.
We are in trouble, folks.
The real problem is the right’s massive case of arrested development
This is enough to make me hurl. And it’s not just Elon and Zuck. With Nikki Haley being the only woman in the race, the GOP primary is also a dick measuring contest:
Francis Suarez is bragging about placing sixth in an Independence Day 5K in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Vivek Ramaswamy, a former nationally ranked junior tennis player, is flexing his weekly pickup victories over former collegiate athletes at a Life Time Fitness outside Des Moines. And Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the muscle-bound, 69-year-old longshot Democratic presidential hopeful, went viral for doing pull-ups shirtless at a Gold’s Gym.
Even Asa Hutchinson, the 72-year-old former Arkansas governor, is boasting about still playing full-court basketball.
More than a month before the election cycle’s first debates, the 2024 presidential contest has careened into a kind of testosterone primary, a frenetic fit boy summer sidequest in which candidates are drawing fewer contrasts on policy and proving more keen on comparing feats of strength.
Brawn and bravado are in demand, particularly among a GOP base conditioned by a steady dose of both in the Trump era. Thirst traps are a new wedge issue.
“Republican candidates are now needing to play to a base that has really been defined by the Trump presidency and just the Trump persona,” said historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez, who has traced the ideological and theological roots of masculinity in conservative and evangelical political circles in her book, “Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.” “Now, to win as a Republican, you need to play that game. This kind of masculinity — physical fitness — goes hand in hand with masculine toughness.”
Displaying physical prowess is nothing new for American politicians. Former President Teddy Roosevelt extolled the virtues of the “strenuous life” and practiced Judo in the White House basement. Joe Biden, when he was vice president, posted a video of himself doing arm curls.
But in 2023, as Du Mez put it, “It’s getting out of hand.”
“Are they just so in this alpha male competition that they lose all sense of reality?” she asked. “And if you’ve got a mediocre 5K, that’s what you work with? Or, are they a little bit smarter, knowing that this is performative and just putting that signal out there, and being perfectly fine when they get kind of ratioed on Twitter because it just elevates their profile just a bit?”
It may all just be kayfabe. But it also underscores undercurrents in modern politics; chief among them, a discomfort with the top of the presidential contest, in which the leading candidates are a septuagenarian and octogenarian. With polls showing voters want a pugilistic candidate, a premium is being placed on testosterone by the modern GOP — one that at the moment seems more obsessed with the idea of being ripped than the ideas of the Ripon Society.
Masculinity has become a major point of focus for the party. Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, who ultimately decided against his own presidential campaign, tackled the topic earlier this year in his 248-page meditation on the matter, “Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs.” Last month, not long after straddling a Harley-Davidson in a leather vest at Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst’s Roast and Ride and then announcing his own presidential campaign, Mike Pence made a stop at Gridiron Men’s Conference in Alabama, an Evangelical gathering with the mission of “BUILDING UP GODLY MEN TO BE CLEAR. BOLD. STRONG.” Former President Donald Trump attacks his chief rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, as “Tiny D,” a swipe at the Florida governor’s figurative and literal manhood.
[…]
The competition has spawned whole rounds of skirmishing among the candidates and their supporters about the legitimacy of their athletic achievements. Suarez issued a flex over his 5K pace on Twitter, despite clocking in at a little under 8 minutes a mile.
“Name another presidential candidate who can place 6th in a 5K with a 24-and-a-half minute run time. Go,” he said.
A number of people took him up on the offer, pointing out that he actually placed 87th overall and 6th in the 45-49 age group. They offered up former Rep. Beto O’Rourke’s 21:44 time in Houston’s 2022 pride run and Pete Buttigieg’s 1:42 half marathon in Afghanistan. A Ramaswamy staffer pointed out that her boss had a 5K time that was nearly a minute faster than Suarez’s.
In an interview with POLITICO, Suarez, who launched his campaign with an ad featuring him running, didn’t repeat his boast about his time. Instead, he downplayed it, saying he had not been training and that he “surprised himself” with his pace.
Told of Ramaswamy’s faster finish, he said: “Oh, I could definitely beat 23 minutes. There’s no doubt about it.” Then he challenged Ramaswamy to a 5K duel before adding that his best personal record actually came in the CrossFit challenge known as the “Murph,” consisting of a one-mile run, 100 pull-ups, 200 push-ups and 300 bodyweight squats, followed by another mile run while sporting a weighted vest.
Suarez declined to give his time, saying, “I don’t want to put it out there, and then [have] people say that it’s too good or too bad.” He told POLITICO he is contemplating a future ad in which he goes shirtless.
“I think physical fitness should be considered an asset for a president in terms of someone who has a comprehensive sense of what it is to be healthy,” Suarez said. “And I think that’s something we should want in our candidates. I’m not sure if my wife would let me be without a shirt on film, but you know, I’m working on it.”
In an interview, Ramaswamy declined Suarez’s 5K challenge, citing his weekly tennis matches with former college tennis standouts. He said that even though he posted a faster 5K time than Suarez, “that’s not something I wanted to beat my chest about.” But he did not exhibit the same restraint when talking about his recent run of tennis match wins on the trail, saying “I’m probably about the level of somebody who was, if they were a Division 1 college tennis player, but they were like, maybe five to 10 years out.”
It wasn’t always like this. Back in 2016, there was only one candidate who seemed outwardly gleeful about discussing his record of physical fitness and that of the field. When he first announced his 2016 presidential campaign, Gary Johnson promised he would be “the fittest president of the United States ever.” Days after the announcement, he brought a journalist with him for a run down Tuckerman Ravine on Mount Washington in New Hampshire. “These guys were like, ‘What the fuck? This is serious’” he once recalled. “It was extreme.”
In an interview with POLITICO, the former Libertarian presidential candidate and New Mexico governor turned self-described “ski bum” (he now skis 110 days out of the year in Taos, N.M., he says) declined to criticize others’ athletic accomplishments. But Johnson was quick to tout his own, including a 2:47 marathon (a per-mile pace across 26.2 miles that is nearly two minutes faster than Suarez’s pace over 3.1 miles), and a 33:45 10K pace.
“Politicians,” Johnson said, “are all narcissists.”
As for the recent rash of physical stunts posted by candidates, Johnson said he, too, had taken notice.
“It’s all about the alpha candidate,” Johnson said.
But this year, Johnson said, it’s legitimate for candidates to tout their physical health. And it’s not like anyone could stop them, the way machismo is coursing like a vein in a swole bicep just beneath the GOP primary’s skin.
“It does take discipline to run an eight-minute mile,” Johnson said of Suarez’s time. “That does take some effort. You can’t just do that. I think it relates to your calmness, your demeanor, your whole makeup. Somebody who is physically fit is better off than somebody that’s not.”
After an initial interview, Johnson called back minutes later. He’d forgotten something important, apparently, in modern politics — it involved the Seven Summits, the highest mountains on each continent.
He said he’d scaled them all.
He had never heard of Aleppo…
I get that they want to contrast themselves with the two ancient mariner frontrunners, Biden and Trump. But running around acting like teenage bullies isn’t exactly reassuring. Does anyone think these macho little boys are an improvement?
Trump said over the weekend that Joe Biden is the most corrupt president in history. Uh huh. Check out his latest grift with his good pals the Saudis:
The LIV Golf League’s season-ending team championship will be played at Trump National Doral Golf Club in Miami for the second straight year.
LIV Golf League officials announced Monday that the $50 million team championship will be played Oct. 20-22 at Trump National Doral, which is owned by former U.S. President Donald Trump.
The three-day team championship was originally scheduled to be played Nov. 3-5 at Royal Greens Golf & Country Club in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. LIV Golf League officials have been working to move it back to Trump National Doral, where it was staged in the league’s inaugural season in 2022. The Jeddah event, now scheduled for Oct. 13-15, will be the final regular-season tournament.
The Republicans are relentlessly investigating Hunter Biden’s alleged influence peddling from years ago. This is not of interest to them. Hmmm.
Why Trump is beating DeSantis
It’s still a long way until the first Republican primaries but unless something changes quickly, it is looking more and more grim for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and more and more secure for former President Donald Trump. The polls in the early primary states show that Trump is still polling at least 20 points higher than DeSantis who still isn’t catching on.
DeSantis appeared on Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo’s show this weekend and insisted that he’s floundering because the News Media doesn’t want him to be the nominee which isn’t true at all. If anything they were champing at the bit for a real horse race against Donald Trump because that would make excellent copy. But it is reasonable to ask why has been sinking in the polls over the last few months.
The consensus among the pundit class seems to be that he’s just unlikable so the more people see of him the less they like him. I suspect there’s some truth to that. But it may just be the contrast between him and Trump, the political superstar. As Kate Briquelet of the Daily Beast reported from the Moms for Liberty presidential cattle call after Trump’s keynote speech:
“He has so much charisma,” a man told me in the elevator afterward. “The guy is just electric! I love DeSantis, he’s my guy, but he doesn’t have the same charm.”
I long ago chalked up this inexplicable attraction to Trump to the fact that his following still views him as a celebrity, which he was before he got into politics, and now they have turned him into a superhero. He really isn’t seen as a politician at all. Poor, dull Ron DeSantis can’t compete with that.
There’s no doubt that Trump’s cult of personality is very powerful and it almost has a life of its own. But there is more to it than just his personality. It’s about his message as well.
We know all about Ron DeSantis’ message by now. He’s been relentlessly pushing his “anti-woke” agenda and enacting it in every way he could manage in Florida to show that he is the guy who will make the MAGA crowd’s internet memes come true. There is nobody out there who takes the culture war as seriously as DeSantis and he doesn’t just confine himself to a few hot button issues, he embraces all of them and there is literally nothing else he seems to care about.
Yair Rosenberg in the Atlantic submits that DeSantis turned Florida into a right wing hellscape and obsessively said the word “woke” for a year and half as his strategy to win Iowa which is full of white conservative evangelical voters. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s true but it’s yet another example of his general ineptitude. It’s certainly possible that he could ride the culture war to a win in Iowa just as President Cruz, President Huckabee and President Santorum did but let’s just say it’s a little bit short-sighted to create your entire persona and record for the purpose of winning the state that specialized in producing also-rans. Since 1980, a GOP candidate who won Iowa (aside from incumbents) only went on to win the nomination twice.
And anyway, it appears that Trump is likely going to win Iowa because the conservative evangelicals like him too.And it’s not as if he isn’t a hardcore culture warrior too. Despite DeSantis’ attempt to paint him as soft on “the gender issue” which seems to be the issue that has the Iowa evangelicals all riled up, he’s got some nasty anti-trans policies he can point to, like his order to expel transgender members of the military when he was president and his orders to redefine sex discrimination to exclude protections for transgender people in education, housing, and employment, as well as health care. And he’s announced that when he is returned to the White House he will “revoke every Biden policy promoting the chemical castration and sexual mutilation of our youth and ask Congress to send me a bill prohibiting child sexual mutilation in all 50 states” and has even gone so far as to promise, “on Day One, I will sign an executive order instructing every federal agency to cease the promotion of sex or gender transition at any age, they’re not gonna do it anymore” which even the anti-trans warrior DeSantis hasn’t proposed.
Trump is also taking credit for reversing Roe v Wade and is fine with the “parents rights” movement pushing Christian education in public schools. He and DeSantis spar over the pandemic response but that issue is rapidly losing salience. In other words, DeSantis can’t really get to Trump’s right no matter how hard he tries. When Trump says stuff like “‘Democrats are pushing the transgender cult” on young people while “persecuting Christians” and “demonizing patriots'” it goes straight to the wingnut lizard brain. Nobody does it better.
But unlike DeSantis, Trump understands that the base isn’t just about the culture war defined by the outrage of the day or some far right think tanker’s obscure jargon laden hobby horse like “DEI” or “CRT.” Sure, he’ll go along with it. (Remember how he would blurt out that he was going to do away with “Common Core” during the 2016 election?) But his themes are much simpler and much broader. He understands that what moves the Republican base is grievance writ large and he speaks directly to that.
Much of the Trumpian rhetoric that penetrates the national consciousness is about his personal legal travails and his persecution complex — but that plays into the grievance in new ways in this campaign. He claims he’s being indicted “for you”, his loyal followers, and that he’s the only thing standing between the government and them. That’s the superhero/messiah appeal.
And he knows that what drives the base isn’t really sincere concern about “woke ideology” or Christian morality. (That’s obvious since he is a corrupt libertine, pathological liar and they love him anyway.) What drives them is loathing of their perceived enemies and it applies to whatever those enemies are doing whether it’s supporting Ukraine’s fight to repel the invasion by Russia or teaching that slavery was bad and had longterm consequences that still reverberate today. The details don’t really matter. Whatever the “other side” is against they are for and vice versa, without regard to the substance.
Donald Trump understands this. He told them in his announcement speech, “I am your retribution” which is what they really care about. DeSantis’ laundry list of “anti-woke” achievement miss the big picture. None of that really resonates unless you can tap into the emotional wellspring of resentment and sense of injustice that fuels the MAGA right. Trump does that instinctively because he is one of them.
The Republican base yearns to be a movement (some might call it a cult) rather than a political party and under Donald Trump they’ve completely moved beyond politics as we used to define them.. DeSantis is just another politician — and that’s the last thing these people want.
Tick, tick, tick….
Florida man Cesar Sayoc was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2019 for sending over two dozen inoperative pipe bombs to perceived enemies of then-President Donald Trump. None exploded. No one was injured. His intended victims were lucky.
Politics in the U.S. is not yet full-on blood sport, but there are days it trends that way. Taunts, red hats, belligerence and semi-autos are at any moment inches away from mayhem. People have had to go into hiding over viral accusations disseminated both by social media, propaganda outlets such as Fox News, and political figures such as Donald Trump. The right-wing media complex has yet to feel enough pain in its pocket to pull back from provoking its audience to credible threats of violence. In the case of the Jan. 6 insurrection, it was actual violence.
One victim of Tucker Carlson gets a profile this morning in The New York Times:
What’s known about the man — a two-time Trump voter named Ray Epps — is that he took part in demonstrations in Washington that day and the night before. He was captured on camera urging a crowd to march with him and enter the Capitol. But at other points, he pleads for calm once it becomes clear the situation is turning violent. He can be seen moving past a line of Capitol Police at the barricades, but never actually goes inside the Capitol.
Federal prosecutors have not charged Mr. Epps with a crime, focusing instead on the more than 1,000 other demonstrators who acted violently or were trespassing in the Capitol. The Justice Department’s sprawling investigation into the attack remains open, however, and Mr. Epps could still be indicted.
Yet for more than 18 months, Mr. Carlson insisted that the lack of charges against Mr. Epps could mean only one thing: that he was being protected because he was a secret government agent. There was “no rational explanation,” Mr. Carlson told his audience, why this “mysterious figure” who “helped stage-manage the insurrection” had not been charged.
Epps and his wife have had to sell their Arizona business and go into hiding in another state after receiving death threats from people who believe the conspiracy theory. The couple plans to sue Fox News for defamation:
Now lawyers representing Mr. Epps and his wife are proceeding with plans to sue Fox News for defamation. “We informed Fox in March that if they did not issue a formal on-air apology that we would pursue all available avenues to protect the Eppses’ rights,” said Michael Teter, a lawyer for Mr. Epps who sent the network a cease-and-desist letter asking for an on-air apology and a retraction. After Mr. Teter did not hear from Fox about his request, he began to prepare the suit. “That remains our intent.”
Mr. Epps declined to comment on his potential suit. A Fox News spokeswoman declined to comment.
It is unclear whether such a suit would possess enough merit to move forward.
Epps and his wife are not alone (Newsweek):
The family members of the federal attorneys prosecuting former President Donald Trump in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case are “at risk” due to death threats, former U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade warned on Saturday.
[…]
Prosecutors handling the case are now facing threats and harassment, according to a Washington Post report published on Thursday. The newspaper reported that some Trump supporters have posted the names and personal details of individual prosecutors online despite DOJ efforts to keep that information hidden.
McQuade told Newsweek in a statement on Saturday that threats to prosecutors risk “the lives of public servants” and send “a dangerous message about the rule of law.”
New York Attorney General Tish James, also investigating Trump and his corporation, has received death threats. As has Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis. As have mother and daughter Georgia election workers accused by Trump of manipulating ballot counts. And others in Arizona.
McQuade told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” (Raw Story):
“This is not normal,” McQuade said. “From time to time, prosecutors do get death threats, maybe based on someone they’re prosecuting, but I think we’ve reached a whole different era when we’re sort of crowdsourcing these threats. Any time former president Donald Trump says these things about witch hunts and hoaxes, calling for the defunding of [the Department of Justice], there is the risk that someone out there is going to hear that and take matters into their own hands and go after these line career prosecutors.”
Authorities have never captured the person who left pipe bombs at the Democratic and Republican national headquarters properties ahead of Jan. 6, 2021. Those devices were viable, says the FBI.
People like Trump, Carlson, and others are playing with fire. What’s even more nuts is that Trump’s campaign for president is viable.
“I did that”
Being on the field and in the game (rather than a heckling spectator) means that, even if you get politically run over sometimes, you don’t feel like road kill. Small consolation, maybe, but it’s something. And sometimes you get personal credit for the wins. Keep hope alive, Jesse Jackson might say.
E.J. Dionne suggests that hope is more than a sop, but “a demanding virtue, not a sunny disposition.” Also, it’s practical, he writes. (It gets me up every morning.) Meaning it’s not naive to seek out “a rendezvous with hope“:
Carol Graham, my colleague at the Brookings Institution, has made the study of well-being her life’s work as an economist. Nodding to the reality that “The Power of Hope” reflects an unusual preoccupation within a discipline often referred to as “the dismal science,” Graham opens her first chapter with nice understatement: “Hope is a little-studied concept in economics.”
It shouldn’t be, she argues, because hope is relevant to so many of the outcomes economists seek, including upward mobility, a well-trained dedicated workforce, better health and the economic growth that flows from all of them. Hope’s opposite, despair, is now an enormous, measurable problem.
“Despair in the United States today is a barrier to reviving our labor markets and productivity,” she writes. “It jeopardizes our well-being, longevity, families and communities.”
In “A Commonwealth of Hope, Wake Forest University’s Michael Lamb considers St. Augustine’s view of “both the limits and possibilities of politics.”
Like Graham in the policy sphere, Lamb highlights the high cost of despair in politics, which he argues “can license apathy or fatalism, encouraging citizens to withdraw from politics rather than stretch toward difficult political goods.”
His valuable warning: “When despair becomes a habit — a vice — it can further entrench the social and political problems that prompted pessimism in the first place.”
One sometimes encounters glass-half-empty progressives sporting “a plague on both your houses” cynicism toward politics. A dark cloud in every silver lining. I avoid them. They’re downers.
“Democracy cannot work if citizens are demoralized and demobilized by such despair,” Dionne writes.
My working career was built around industrial construction projects. Some went better than others. Some clients were easier to work with than others. But there always came a point, months in, in which everyone was sick of it, ready to be done and move on. But eventually you could drive down the interstate and point to new facilities where people got jobs and think, I did that.
At one political event where people were doing the “and what do you do” thing, I told a woman I’d been working with a biotech firm whose hot product was a multiple sclerosis drug I named. She said she had MS, was taking [product name], “and it’s really working well for me.” My job did not suck that week.
Each new political cycle feels like that. Fresh hope for making people’s lives better. And new projects. I have one now that, if it gets funding, could pay off in 2024 election wins in North Carolina. I’ll think, I did that.
Here’s my bold statement for 2023:
Social media companies in the United States need to be regulated.
Before you start agreeing and explain why it’ll never happen… you should know Meta didn’t launch Threads in the EU. Because of the EU’s REGULATION. It would have led to massive NEW fines and Meta doesn’t want MORE massive fines. It was recently hit with an order to stop sending EU users data to the US for processing and was fined almost $1.3BN for breaching the GDPR’s requirements on data export.
When companies’ actions or inactions harm the public, the public demands something be done. In the EU they’ve recognized the harm being done by social media companies and enacted regulation. Short term, companies pay the fine and change their behavior to stop new fines. This is what we want, what the public deserves. Protection from harm.
Here’s a good piece by Natasha Lomas’ in Tech Cruch that spells out Meta’s current privacy problems and reminds us of the General Data Protection Regulation, the Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act. Some regulations are currently in effect others are coming on August 25, 2023.
Meta’s Threads app is a privacy nightmare that won’t launch in EU yet,
TechCrunch July 5, 5th 2023
Here’s the deal, regulations force companies to change their behaviors. If they don’t, they pay a fine. Big fines gets their attention AND, if they are a public company, it gets the attention of the big shareholders who say “Stop the bleeding! Keep that quarterly revenue growing or we will punish you!”
I want companies to take action on threats of violence and hate speech. Meta has already defined what they consider a threat and hate speech and have said what they will do about them. I’m the nerd who read ALL of Meta’s / Instagram’s /Thread’s Terms of Use. and Community Guidelines . Check this part out:
“We remove content that contains credible threats or hate speech, content that targets private individuals to degrade or shame them, personal information meant to blackmail or harass someone, and repeated unwanted messages. violence, deadly disinformation and hate speech.”
Threads Community Guidelines on threats under Meta/Instagram
The good news is that it appears that Meta is trying to moderate the content on Threads. Read this great Media Matters piece pointing out the methods used by RWNJs & Nazis to test the moderation AND the rhetoric deployed to avoid regulation.
[They ] have posted about the limits of its moderation, while also questioning whether Meta will “censor” them — which is a false claim that right-wing media and figures frequently employ against social media platforms with moderation policies.
Far-right figures, including Nazi supporters, anti-gay extremists, and white supremacists, are flocking to Threads by Camden Carter & Jack Winstanley
Meta wants Threads to be #BrandSafe, so they can get advertising revenue, but they get revenue from other ways, like collecting data on people. And, because Meta is so big, they can run Threads without ads for YEARS if they want while Nazis’ & extremists work the system.
Taylor Hatmaker did a GREAT analysis of Threads in TechCrunch
“The brands just need a Twitter-like experience stocked with users that they can point their delirious social media managers to. Their champion has arrived.”
And it’s not as if Meta has a great track record with Instagram. From the Media Matters piece.
In the last year, Meta, along with other major social media platforms, has noticeably deprioritized its content moderation and user safety practices. Instagram specifically has a long history of allowing hate speech and misinformation to prosper on the app, including permitting virulently anti-LGBTQ accounts, far-right extremists, and right-wing advertisers to post false and harmful rhetoric.
Instagram has also failed to adequately moderate many aspects of its platform, with users easily sidestepping moderation with story features, the “link-in-bio loophole,” commerce functions, and comments sections.
What kind of misinformation? Deadly vaccine misinformation. I spoke to Matt Binder about how RFK Jr. was the 2nd biggest spreader of disinformation , according to a report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate.
Back in 2021, the tech companies told Congress that they would deplatform the 12 biggest spreaders of disinformation on vaccines, but one month later 9 of the 12 were still posting. Including RFK Jr on Facebook. This was BEFORE he announced his run for President, which puts him in the “newsworthy” category. BUT even that category has rules for violations of their policies.
Remember when Meta made special “guardrails” for Donald Trump for when he returned to Facebook? If he violates them he MIGHT be banned again! For a month. Multiple violations maybe another 2 years!
What Meta DOESN’T have is outside punishments for failing to uphold its own policies. At least Meta is trying. But what about Musk’s Twitter, or Trump’s Truth Social? Rumble or Gab? They don’t care about profit from advertisers. They don’t have shareholders screaming at them for losing money to force content moderation on them.
Did you know that Truth Social has Terms of Service? Here are a few:
- your Contributions are not obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, violent, harassing, libelous, slanderous, or otherwise objectionable.
- your Contributions do not depict violence, threats of violence or criminal activity.
- your Contributions do not advocate or incite, encourage, or threaten physical harm against another.
- your Contributions do not violate any applicable law, regulation, or rule.
- your Contributions do not violate the privacy or publicity rights of any third party.
If you’ve read Trump’s posts there you can spot the violations.
Truth Social says, “Any use of the Service in violation of the foregoing violates these Terms of Service and may result in, among other things, termination or suspension of your rights to use the Service and removal or deletion of your Contributions.”
But they don’t HAVE TO do anything.
Trump remains an extreme danger to others. When will law enforcement take appropriate measures to hold him accountable?
Glenn Kirschner did a podcast this weekend making the case that Trump should be in jail. He makes an excellent argument. He used specific examples and his history as a prosecutor of dangerous individuals.
Trump’s statements on Truth Social provide evidence to support why Trump should be in jail. Some of Trump’s posts SHOULD get him suspended from Truth Social. AND, if he posted them natively on other platforms like Threads, should get him banned from posting there too. TFG posts threats on Truth Social knowing that management ( Devin Nunes!) won’t suspend his rights to post, even when they violate Truth Socials own Terms of Service. When Trump’s threats gets reposted on other platform with added context, it’s news. But too often there IS no added context. It’s often just a straight up repeating of the threats and disinformation verbatim.
So what are we going to do about the need for regulation on social media? In America we know how money rules, but we can’t count on “The Market” alone to stop companies from enabling the spread of threats of violence, deadly disinformation and hate speech.
Musk’s Twitter is NOT brand safe, is losing money, has welcomed Nazi supporters, allows and encourages attacks on trans people, and because there is no outside regulation, it keeps going.
Will Meta enforce their own policies? If they don’t, how do we pressure them to be enforced? Do like the EU did and pass regulation! While it’s NOT happening we need to tell the stories of violence, incitement & hate speech coming from RWNJs that are being left up to spread. Show the harm that is being caused because of it. File lawsuits. Work on legislation in the US. Point out that it exists in the EU. Learn from them. It’s not an impossible task.
Companies make decisions every day about who is protected and supported by their products and services. Part of the role of government is to step in and stop the entities that are causing harm to the public.
Oh, btw I did join Threads so I could report violations of their community guidelines… threads.net@spockomichal
spoutible.com/spocko
Cross posted to Spocko’s Brain
Seriously???
Trump is honest and trustworthy enough to run the most powerful country in the world but you couldn’t trust him or his people to do business with your software company. Is this guy for real?
These people are so far gone it’s beyond all reason. Luckily, this cipher isn’t going to be in the race very long but it’s instructive to hear him speak anyway. They are all so tribal that they are willing to twist themselves into pretzels to stay in the GOP fold for Dear Leader but grasp at these straws to show that they are somehow different. It’s pathetic.
I hope you enjoy looking in the mirror Bergum. If it looks a little bit distorted, check your conscience.