Politics & Stuff

[KEVINAA 106]

 

[Vesper 29,017]

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/11/x-white-supremacist-site/680538/

X has always had a Nazi problem. I’ve covered the site, formerly known as Twitter, for more than a decade and reported extensively on its harassment problems, its verification (and then de-verification) of a white nationalist, and the glut of anti-Semitic hatred that roiled the platform in 2016.

But something is different today. Heaps of unfiltered posts that plainly celebrate racism, anti-Semitism, and outright Nazism are easily accessible and possibly even promoted by the site’s algorithms. All the while, Elon Musk—a far-right activist and the site’s owner, who is campaigning for and giving away millions to help elect Donald Trump—amplifies horrendous conspiracy theories about voter fraud, migrants run amok, and the idea that Jewish people hate white people. Twitter was always bad if you knew where to look, but because of Musk, X is far worse. (X and Musk did not respond to requests for comment for this article.)

It takes little effort to find neo-Nazi accounts that have built up substantial audiences on X. “Thank you all for 7K,” one white-nationalist meme account posted on October 17, complete with a heil-Hitler emoji reference. One week later, the account, which mostly posts old clips of Hitler speeches and content about how “Hitler was right,” celebrated 14,000 followers. One post, a black-and-white video of Nazis goose-stepping, has more than 187,000 views. Another racist and anti-Semitic video about Jewish women and Black men—clearly AI-generated—has more than 306,000 views. It was also posted in late October.

Many who remain on the platform have noticed X decaying even more than usual in recent months. “I’ve seen SO many seemingly unironic posts like this on Twitter recently this is getting insane,” one X user posted in response to a meme that the far-right influencer Stew Peters recently shared. It showed an image of Adolf Hitler holding a telephone with overlaid text reading, “Hello … 2024? Are you guys starting to get it yet?” Peters appended the commentary, “Yes. We’ve noticed.” The idea is simply that Hitler was right, and X users ate it up: As of this writing, the post has received about 67,000 likes, 10,000 reposts, and 11.4 million views. When Musk took over, in 2022, there were initial reports that hate speech (anti-Black and anti-Semitic slurs) was surging on the platform. By December of that year, one research group described the increase in hate speech as “unprecedented.” And it seems to only have gotten worse. There are far more blatant examples of racism now, even compared with a year ago. In September, the World Bank halted advertising on X after its promoted ads were showing up in the replies to pro-Nazi and white-nationalist content from accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers. Search queries such as Hitler was right return posts with tens of thousands of views—they’re indistinguishable from the poison once relegated to the worst sites on the internet, including 4chan, Gab, and Stormfront.

The hatred isn’t just coming from anonymous fringe posters either. Late last month, Clay Higgins, a Republican congressman from Louisiana, published a racist, threatening post about the Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, saying they’re from the “nastiest country in the western hemisphere.” Then he issued an ultimatum: “All these thugs better get their mind right and their ass out of our country before January 20th,” he wrote in the post, referencing Inauguration Day. Higgins eventually deleted the post at the request of his House colleagues on both sides of the aisle but refused to apologize. “I can put up another controversial post tomorrow if you want me to. I mean, we do have freedom of speech. I’ll say what I want,” he told CNN later that day.

And although Higgins did eventually try to walk his initial post back, clarifying that he was really referring to Haitian gangs, the sentiment he shared with CNN is right. The lawmaker can put up another vile post maligning an entire country whenever he desires. Not because of his right to free speech—which exists to protect against government interference—but because of how Musk chooses to operate his platform. Despite the social network’s policy that prohibits “incitement of harassment,” X seemingly took no issue with Higgins’s racist post or its potential to cause real-world harm for Springfield residents. (The town has already closed and evacuated its schools twice because of bomb threats.) And why would X care? The platform, which reinstated thousands of banned accounts following Musk’s takeover, in 2022—accounts that belong to QAnon supporters, political hucksters, conspiracy theorists, and at least one bona fide neo-Nazi—is so inundated with bigoted memes, racist AI slop, and unspeakable slurs that Higgins’s post seemed almost measured by comparison. In the past, when Twitter seemed more interested in enforcing content-moderation standards, the lawmaker’s comments may have resulted in a ban or some other disciplinary response: On X, he found an eager, sympathetic audience willing to amplify his hateful message.

His deleted post is instructive, though, as a way to measure the degradation of X under Musk. The site is a political project run by a politically radicalized centibillionaire. The worthwhile parts of Twitter (real-time news, sports, culture, silly memes, spontaneous encounters with celebrity accounts) have been drowned out by hateful garbage. X is no longer a social-media site with a white-supremacy problem, but a white-supremacist site with a social-media problem.

Musk has certainly bent the social network to support his politics, which has recently involved joking on Tucker Carlson’s show (which streams on X) that “nobody is even bothering to try to kill Kamala” and repurposing the @america handle from an inactive user to turn it into a megaphone for his pro-Trump super PAC. Musk has also quite clearly reengineered the site so that users see him, and his tweets, whether or not they follow him.

When Musk announced his intent to purchase Twitter, in April 2022, the New York Times columnist Ezra Klein aptly noted that “Musk reveals what he wants Twitter to be by how he acts on it.” By this logic, it would seem that X is vying to be the official propaganda outlet not just for Trump generally but also for the “Great Replacement” theory, which states that there is a global plot to eradicate the white race and its culture through immigration. In just the past year, Musk has endorsed multiple posts about the conspiracy theory. In November 2023, in response to a user named @breakingbaht who accused Jews of supporting bringing “hordes of minorities” into the United States, Musk replied, “You have said the actual truth.” Musk’s post was viewed more than 8 million times.

Read: Musk’s Twitter is the blueprint for a MAGA government

Though Musk has publicly claimed that he doesn’t “subscribe” to the “Great Replacement” theory, he appears obsessed with the idea that Republican voters in America are under attack from immigrants. Last December, he posted a misleading graph suggesting that the number of immigrants arriving illegally was overtaking domestic birth rates. He has repeatedly referenced a supposed Democratic plot to “legalize vast numbers of illegals” and put an end to fair elections. He has falsely suggested that the Biden administration was “flying ‘asylum seekers’, who are fast-tracked to citizenship, directly into swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin and Arizona” and argued that, soon, “everywhere in America will be like the nightmare that is downtown San Francisco.” According to a recent Bloomberg analysis of 53,000 of Musk’s posts, the billionaire has posted more about immigration and voter fraud than any other topic (more than 1,300 posts in total), garnering roughly 10 billion views.

But Musk’s interests extend beyond the United States. This summer, during a period of unrest and rioting in the United Kingdom over a mass stabbing that killed three children, the centibillionaire used his account to suggest that a civil war there was “inevitable.” He also shared (and subsequently deleted) a conspiracy theory that the U.K. government was building detainment camps for people rioting against Muslims. Additionally, X was instrumental in spreading misinformation and fueling outrage among far-right, anti-immigration protesters.

In Springfield, Ohio, X played a similar role as a conduit for white supremacists and far-right extremists to fuel real-world harm. One of the groups taking credit for singling out Springfield’s Haitian community was Blood Tribe, a neo-Nazi group known for marching through city streets waving swastikas. Blood Tribe had been focused on the town for months, but not until prominent X accounts (including Musk’s, J. D. Vance’s, and Trump’s) seized on a Facebook post from the region did Springfield beoame a national target. “It is no coincidence that there was an online rumor mill ready to amplify any social media posts about Springfield because Blood Tribe has been targeting the town in an effort to stoke racial resentment against ‘subhuman’ Haitians,” the journalist Robert Tracinski wrote recently. Tracinski argues that social-media channels (like X) have been instrumental in transferring neo-Nazi propaganda into the public consciousness—all the way to the presidential-debate stage. He is right. Musk’s platform has become a political tool for stoking racial hatred online and translating it into harassment in the physical world.

The ability to drag fringe ideas and theories into mainstream political discourse has long been a hallmark of X, even back when it was known as Twitter. There’s always been a trade-off with the platform’s ability to narrow the distance between activists and people in positions of power. Social-justice movements such as the Arab Spring and Black Lives Matter owe some of the success of their early organizing efforts to the platform.

Yet the website has also been one of the most reliable mainstream destinations on the internet to see Photoshopped images of public figures (or their family members) in gas chambers, or crude, racist cartoons of Jewish men. Now, under Musk’s stewardship, X seems to run in only one direction. The platform eschews healthy conversation. It abhors nuance, instead favoring constant escalation and engagement-baiting behavior. And it empowers movements that seek to enrage and divide. In April, an NBC News investigation found that “at least 150 paid ‘Premium’ subscriber X accounts and thousands of unpaid accounts have posted or amplified pro-Nazi content on X in recent months.” According to research from the extremism expert Colin Henry, since Musk’s purchase, there’s been a decline in anti-Semitic posts on 4chan’s infamous “anything goes” forum, and a simultaneous rise in posts targeting Jewish people on X.

X’s own transparency reports show that the social network has allowed hateful content to flourish on its site. In its last report before Musk’s acquisition, in just the second half of 2021, Twitter suspended about 105,000 of the more than 5 million accounts reported for hateful conduct. In the first half of 2024, according to X, the social network received more than 66 million hateful-conduct reports, but suspended just 2,361 accounts. It’s not a perfect comparison, as the way X reports and analyzes data has changed under Musk, but the company is clearly taking action far less frequently.

Read: I’m running out of ways to explain how bad this is

Because X has made it more difficult for researchers to access data by switching to a paid plan that prices out many academics, it is now difficult to get a quantitative understanding of the platform’s degradation. The statistics that do exist are alarming. Research from the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that in just the first month of Musk’s ownership, anti–Black American slurs used on the platform increased by 202 percent. The Anti-Defamation League found that anti-Semitic tweets on the platform increased by 61 percent in just two weeks after Musk’s takeover. But much of the evidence is anecdotal. The Washington Post summed up a recent report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, noting that pro-Hitler content “reached the largest audiences on X [relative to other social-media platforms], where it was also most likely to be recommended via the site’s algorithm.” Since Musk took over, X has done the following:

• Seemingly failed to block a misleading advertisement post purchased by Jason Köhne, a white nationalist with the handle @NoWhiteGuiltNWG.
• Seemingly failed to block an advertisement calling to reinstate the death penalty for gay people.
• Reportedly run ads on 20 racist and anti-Semitic hashtags, including #whitepower, despite Musk pledging that he would demonetize posts that included hate speech. (After NBC asked about these, X removed the ability for users to search for some of these hashtags.)
• Granted blue-check verification to an account with the N-word in its handle. (The account has since been suspended.)
• Allowed an account that praised Hitler to purchase a gold-check badge, which denotes an “official organization” and is typically used by brands such as Doritos and BlackRock. (This account has since been suspended.)
• Seemingly failed to take immediate action on 63 of 66 accounts flagged for disseminating AI-generated Nazi memes from 4chan. More than half of the posts were made by paid accounts with verified badges, according to research by the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate.

None of this is accidental. The output of a platform tells you what it is designed to do: In X’s case, all of this is proof of a system engineered to give voice to hateful ideas and reward those who espouse them. If one is to judge X by its main exports, then X, as it exists now under Musk, is a white-supremacist website.

You might scoff at this notion, especially if you, like me, have spent nearly two decades willingly logged on to the site, or if you, like me, have had your professional life influenced in surprising, occasionally delightful ways by the platform. Even now, I can scroll through the site’s algorithmic pond scum and find things worth saving—interesting commentary, breaking news, posts and observations that make me laugh. But these exceptional morsels are wthat make the platform so insidious, in part because they give cover to the true political project that X now represents and empowers.

As I was preparing to write this story, I visited some of the most vile corners of the internet. I’ve monitored these spaces for years, and yet this time, I was struck by how little distance there was between them and what X has become. It is impossible to ignore: The difference between X and a known hateful site such as Gab are people like myself. The majority of users are no doubt creators, businesses, journalists, celebrities, political junkies, sports fans, and other perfectly normal people who hold their nose and cling to the site. We are the human shield of respectability that keeps Musk’s disastrous $44 billion investment from being little more than an algorithmically powered Stormfront.

The justifications—the lure of the community, the (now-limited) ability to bear witness to news in real time, and of the reach of one’s audience of followers—feel particularly weak today. X’s cultural impact is still real, but its promotional use is nonexistent. (A recent post linking to a story of mine generated 289,000 impressions and 12,900 interactions, but only 948 link clicks—a click rate of roughly 0.00328027682 percent.) NPR, which left the platform in April 2023, reported almost negligible declines in traffic referrals after abandoning the site.

Continuing to post on X has been indefensible for some time. But now, more than ever, there is no good justification for adding one’s name to X’s list of active users. To leave the platform, some have argued, is to cede an important ideological battleground to the right. I’ve been sympathetic to this line of thinking, but the battle, on this particular platform, is lost. As long as Musk owns the site, its architecture will favor his political allies. If you see posting to X as a fight, then know it is not a fair one. For example: In October, Musk shared a fake screenshot of an Atlantic article, manipulated to show a fake headline—his post, which he never deleted, garnered more than 18 million views. The Atlantic’s X post debunking Musk’s claim received just 28,000 views. Musk is unfathomably rich. He’s used that money to purchase a platform, take it private, and effectively turn it into a megaphone for the world’s loudest racists. Now he’s attempting to use it to elect a corrupt, election-denying felon to the presidency.

To stay on X is not an explicit endorsement of this behavior, but it does help enable it. I’m not at all suggesting—as Musk has previously alleged—that the site be shut down or that Musk should be silenced. But there’s no need to stick around and listen. Why allow Musk to appear even slightly more credible by lending our names, our brands, and our movements to a platform that makes the world more dangerous for real people? To my dismay, I’ve hid from these questions for too long. Now that I’ve confronted them, I have no good answers.

[Vesper 29,017]

[robsblubot 3,529]

7 minutes ago, KEVINAA said:

 

I hope you don't take them seriously... 😆

Remember it is the *other* side that never loses and does not concede. 

[KEVINAA 106]

4 minutes ago, robsblubot said:

I hope you don't take them seriously... 😆

Remember it is the *other* side that never loses and does not concede. 

I Really know what's going on. I'm just putting this here just for awarenesses purposes. 

California also has a planned power outage for republican counties in California.

I know the deep down conspiracies of what's going on. I can't type stuff here due to internet surveillance through ISP.

Edited November 5 by KEVINAA

[Vesper 29,017]

The empathy gap that is imperilling future generations

To protect our descendants from catastrophe, we must overcome the emotional hurdles that make it easy for us to look away

https://psyche.co/ideas/the-empathy-gap-that-is-imperilling-future-generations

A worker disinfects cinema seats in Quezon City in the Philippines, 16 October 2021. Photo by Lisa Marie David/Reuters

Mary is on her daily walk around the neighbourhood. Suddenly, she breaks into a fit of wheezing and coughing. Her chest feels constricted as she tries to regain her breath. She grabs a seat on a nearby bench to gather herself.

Now, I’ll add one last detail to the story: Mary is living in the year 2050. Her suffering is no different because of this fact. But perhaps it now feels a bit harder to empathise with her.

Warnings about the future peril facing humanity – which, of course, will be made up of specific people like Mary – are common these days, and for good reason. The harms of the climate crisis are poised to ramp up, while pandemics worse than COVID-19, threats of nuclear conflict, and safety risks from advancements in AI loom large. Experts estimate the odds of a catastrophe that kills at least one in 10 humans within a five-year span at 20 per cent this century – basically a roll of the dice. Yet most of the world remains insufficiently focused on mitigating the gravest threats to our species’ future wellbeing.

How should we balance our focus on immediate, shorter-term problems versus more gradually developing and future threats? It’s very difficult to say. But in a world where people could more easily empathise with future generations, public pressure to address those catastrophic risks would be greater. This, in turn, might lead to relevant safety policies moving closer to the front of political parties’ agendas. Government agencies that focus on such policies could receive much more funding to establish larger research teams and regulatory capacities for risk mitigation.

Public discourse has been gradually filling up with philosophical arguments and statistical information to marshal action to reduce the risks to our collective future. However, while presenting persuasive logic and convincing data is absolutely critical, it’s just not enough. To win the hearts and minds of policymakers and society at large, we also need to overcome emotional hurdles.

People reported less empathy toward the future sufferer (depending on how far in the future it was)

It’s already difficult for many of us to care about our future selves, let alone future generations. Many of us don’t save enough for retirement or exercise as much as we think we should, in large part because we find it hard to sufficiently empathise with the person we’ll eventually become. Present bias is pervasive. Passing the societal version of the marshmallow test may prove even more challenging, as it involves forms of favouritism that are both temporal (present vs future) and interpersonal (me vs you). In order to set humankind up for a flourishing future, we need to push against the psychological tendency to value our present selves far more than we value future others.

Other scholars have argued that there is no inherent moral distinction between someone’s suffering now or in the future. In a series of studies, David DeSteno and I recently investigated differences in how people actually feel when thinking about future versus present pain – and what, if anything, can be done to make future suffering more emotionally evocative.

We used a simple experimental design in which we randomly assigned participants to imagine a person suffering – from a respiratory disease, a broken ankle, etc – either in the present or at least 25 years in the future. Besides a brief description of the suffering (as in the case of Mary), participants weren’t told much else about this hypothetical person. We found that participants rated the amount of suffering the person experienced as nearly the same whether it was in the present or the future. However, when asked about their level of distress and concern, people reported 8 to 16 per cent less empathy toward the future sufferer (depending on how far in the future it was). That is, there was a mismatch between what people understood at an intellectual level (the amount of pain experienced by someone else) and their felt experience when imagining someone else’s suffering.

In everyday life, people often talk about future generations in a broader, more collective sense than we did in these studies. This introduces another pernicious computation of the mind: people find it easier to empathise with a single individual than with groups, plausibly because individuals are easier to conjure in one’s imagination. Therefore, the difference in empathy toward a present person and future others in general is likely even greater than what we’ve found.

Though empathy guides us to help others, psychologists have warned about how it drives us to preferentially help people we already know or who are similar to us, often at the expense of strangers or dissimilar others. Our findings illustrate that an empathy deficit applies not only across social and geographical distance, but across temporal distance, as well.

Does this empathy deficit matter, in practical terms? Yes, it does. We found that the lower level of empathy toward future others had real-world consequences. In one study, we framed the Clean Air Task Force, a nonprofit addressing climate change, as either helping people in the present day or helping people who will live 200 years from now. Compared with those who saw the present framing, those responding to the future framing donated 6 per cent less – and this difference was explained by reduced empathy. While this may seem like a small effect, the stakes are large when you consider the hundreds of billions donated to charity annually in the United States alone.

Of course, supporting present-oriented causes isn’t a bad thing. There’s no lack of suffering from actively occurring problems that are worth addressing. Yet the effect of merely indicating that present (as opposed to future) people will benefit from a donation suggests a potential strategy for future-oriented nonprofits: if they emphasise their organisation’s benefits for people today, prospective donors should feel more empathy towards the beneficiaries and, in turn, be more willing to donate.

Experts on catastrophic risks can complement their data-driven science communication with emotionally engaging rhetoric

Fortunately, empathy is malleable. It can be redirected and expanded to those whom one might not naturally tend to care about very much. In our final study, we deployed a simple intervention that asked participants to imagine another person’s future suffering in vivid, concrete detail. Before reading about the suffering of someone like Mary, they were asked to take 30 seconds to imagine the situation in as much detail as possible, contemplating the expression on her face and any sounds she might make. We found that engaging in this brief exercise ramped up the study participants’ empathy for future others so that it resembled what they felt toward present others. In other words, promoting richer mental simulations of the future eliminated the empathy gap.

Communicators in many different professions could leverage this insight to motivate their audiences to help future generations (such as by donating to nonprofits or supporting political candidates who seriously address long-term global problems). Filmmakers and authors can ‘reel in’ the future, so to speak, by depicting relatable characters facing future problems in clear, vivid detail. Public officials can tell powerful stories to their constituents about the consequences of our present bias for the soon-to-be very real people inheriting the world we’ve left them. Experts on catastrophic risks can complement their data-driven science communication with emotionally engaging rhetoric of this kind.

This is a relatively new area of research, and there are many important unanswered questions. It’s conceivable that parents, for example, might feel more empathy for future people, given that they’re already invested in the future vis-à-vis their child’s wellbeing. Maybe the empathy deficit is less prevalent in cultures that explicitly value the welfare of future generations. Or, perhaps those who think major societal risks are imminent don’t require any more future-orientation, as their empathy for present people is already sufficient to get them to act. Further exploration of the impediments to empathising with future generations could inform other practical strategies for overcoming them.

Improving the quality of humanity’s future requires serious, significant action on the part of governments, businesses and everyday individuals. To inspire such action, we need to align economic incentives and deploy a healthy dose of political pressure. But let’s not neglect the importance of nudging the human mind. Coupled with sound evidence and well-reasoned logic, an enhanced level of feeling for the people of coming generations can give us the motivation we need to steer our collective future in the right direction.

Edited November 5 by Vesper

[Fulham Broadway 16,920]

2 minutes ago, Vesper said:

Experts estimate the odds of a catastrophe that kills at least one in 10 humans within a five-year span at 20 per cent this century – basically a roll of the dice.

Incredible.

Thats a good article. And the one above it. Reading between the lines there is a billionaires club that are desentizing us to lying on one hand, and extreme violence, slaughter on the other. After all they get richer from weapons and dividing the masses. They know the shit will hit the fan big time soon. There's a reason why record numbers of billionaires are building underground citadels in New Zealand and South Pacific

[robsblubot 3,529]

15 minutes ago, KEVINAA said:

I Really know what's going on. I'm just putting this here just for awarenesses purposes. 

California also has a planned power outage for republican counties in California.

I know the deep down conspiracies of what's going on. I can't type stuff here due to internet surveillance through ISP.

lol California is a wash.
OMG conspiracy theorist. Never mind. I'm out. 🙄

[Vesper 29,017]

13 minutes ago, robsblubot said:

lol California is a wash.
OMG conspiracy theorist. Never mind. I'm out. 🙄

yes

Ian Miles-Cheong is a RW crank and hyper troll

massive pusher of fake news and RW CT

he was one of the bigger actors in ramping up the ultra misogynistic #Gamergate harassment campaign 10 years ago, and the POS has only gotten worse since then

Edited November 5 by Vesper

[robsblubot 3,529]

9 minutes ago, Vesper said:

yes

Ian Miles-Cheong is a RW crank and hyper troll

massive pusher of fake news and RW CT

he was one of the bigger actors in ramping up the ultra misogynistic #Gamergate harassment campaign 10 years ago, and the POS has only gotten worse since then

It's even crazier to me that California is even part of these stupid conspiracy theories--even the dogs are PC there. 😆

And I actually lived there.

Edited November 5 by robsblubot

[Vesper 29,017]

[Fulham Broadway 16,920]

Whitney Groenevelt is in an advanced placement federal government and politics class at her Florida high school, and the senior turned 18 in January.

Ahead of her first vote in a presidential election in Broward county, she has been watching “a ton” of politics on television and the internet, and says she is excited to finally be able to take part in a process she has spent years studying.

“I know the way it’s not supposed to work. There’s not supposed to be a convicted felon in office. A convicted felon shouldn’t be able to vote,” she said, referring to Donald Trump’s 34 convictions from his hush money case in May.

Groenevelt said the preservation of democracy was among the two top election issues for her, the other being women’s health and reproductive rights.

Supporting Kamala Harris, she said, was the right thing to do.

“I watched the debate, and I’ve watched a ton of TV coverage from both left and right to try to get a balanced perspective,” she said.

[Fulham Broadway 16,920]

Ring of steel round the Capitol - so many shops and businesses boarded up and closed - getting ready for the nutters wearing fur and buffalo horns screaming 'Stop the Steal'

[Vesper 29,017]

Co-founder of The Uncommitted Movement Says He Voted for Harris

“This is a moment of deep pain and, honestly, frustration,” Abbas Alawieh, a delegate from Michigan and co-founder of the Uncommitted National Movement said. “Members of the Arab-American, Muslim-American community for months have been oscillating between dealing with our grief, dealing with the fact that so many of our family members are there living under the bombs that our US government is sending Benjamin Netanyahu—while also trying to do the politically savvy thing.”

As Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote for Vanity Fair during the DNC, “In February, as President Joe Biden sought to seal the nomination from that party, activists in Michigan rallied registering voters in the state to check ‘uncommitted’ as a protest against the Biden administration’s backing of the war. The campaign garnered 13 percent of the vote and quickly spread to other states. By Democratic Party rules, this entitled the Uncommitted movement to 29 delegates, who are here in Chicago to press their case against what has been labeled, convincingly I might add, a genocide.”

“For me personally, my decision, I see it as it’s gonna be Trump or Harris in the White House,” Alawieh continued on MSNBC today, “and it’s Harris voters, it’s young voters, it’s Black voters, anti-war voters all across our country who are going to be the coalition that hopefully pressures the next administration to break from the policy of sending unconditional weapons and funding to the Israeli military.”

[Vesper 29,017]

SEALed With a Tweet

Robert O’Neill is a retired Navy SEAL whose main claim to fame is being part of the infamous SEAL Team 6 that carried out the operation that killed Osama Bin Laden in 2011. If you ask O’Neill, he is the one who actually did the deed.

Now, he’s a motivational speaker and, apparently, prolific social media poster, doing his public service to his country through tweets like his observation on Sunday that “25% of women are diagnosed with mental illness. This is so scary because that means 75% are walking around without treatment…”

A real mensch.

O’Neill has also taken the time to share his political opinions and his, shall we say, novel idea of what a concubine is.

On Sunday, O’Neill reposted a photo of social media content creator Harry Sisson and four other male friends wearing Harris/Walz merch. “We’re Gen Z voters and we all PROUDLY voted for Kamala Harris! Real men support Harris!” Sisson wrote in the original post.

This didn’t sit right with O’Neill, who wrote in response, “You’re not men. You’re boys. If there was no social media, you would be my concubines.”

Setting aside the role social media plays in stopping him from being a concubine, Sisson was also surprised. “So the guy who shot Osama Bin Laden put out this very strange tweet about myself and some friends. Um…” he wrote.

He had a more specific question for O’Neill.

“So you want 5 young ‘boys’ to be your sex slaves…?” he tweeted at him. “That’s pretty f*cking weird.”

O’Neill doubled down in a now-deleted response, saying in part, “I’m telling you exactly what Betas like you will be used for: Sex and food. Mostly food.”

So it’s not that he confused the words “cannibal” and “concubine.” He thinks the two are inextricably linked.

Don’t worry, O’Neill clarified his stance by posting a video of himself speaking into the camera while walking through an airport on Tuesday morning. He dropped a few c-words in addition to “concubine” while talking about Sisson, and, yep, he stands by the “these 20-something-year-old men would be my sex slaves” thing.

“What I meant by that is…yeah, you would be. You don’t know how to fight. You’ll never know how to fight,” he said in part in the video, which he introduced merely with the word “Betas…”

“I basically will do whatever I want with you. That’s all I meant.”

All this, and it wasn’t even noon when he posted the video. Buckle up, everyone, looks like it’s gonna be a long day.

[Vesper 29,017]

Don Trump Jr. says he'll 'fly to a non-extradition country' if his father loses

https://www.rawstory.com/donald-trump-jr-extradiction/

Donald Trump Jr. said he would likely "fly to a non-extradition country" if his father loses the 2024 presidential election.

In an election day live video on TikTok, Trump took a question from a follower who wondered what he would do after the race was called.

"If we win, you know, I'll probably be fairly busy on transition," he said, referring to the president-elect's transition team. "I want to make sure we, you know, stop some of these, the scumbags from last time, the people who are, you know, they know better, and we're going to take what the duly elected president of the United States wants to do, and we're just going to not do that because we know better, even though we're unelected bureaucrats that haven't accomplished anything."

"So we're going to make sure those guys don't get into government to create a path for the guys like in Elon [Musk] and Ron Paul and Tulsi [Gabbard] and, you know, and they, like, to do what they do best," he continued. "So we got to keep those guys out of those power positions."

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Trump also addressed what he would do if his father lost the election.

"If we don't win, then I'll probably, you know, the way the Democrats function, I'm going to have to fly to a non-extradition country and just, you know, take up shop there so I don't end up in the gulags with Elon and everyone else, but only partially kidding about that, frankly," he said. "And if you've been watching the other side, you realize that is probably only partially kidding."

"So, you know, one way or the other, we'll either be busy or relaxed or in hiding."

Watch the video below from TikTok.

https://rumble.com/v5m8m84-don-jr.-says-he-will-fly-to-a-non-extradition-country-if-trump-loses.html

Edited November 5 by Vesper

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