Politics & Stuff

Vesper · October 19

7 minutes ago, cosmicway said:

The question we are asked is not if we approve of the affair.
Since Clinton was married (to Hillary) it was an extramarital affair - one the bible belt condemns.
The question is was it a real metoo situation ? It was n't.

You are obsessed with the infinitely-abused woo that is religion, and more specifically your own person take. You weave its artificial diktats into every misogynistic hot take you put forth as if they are some kind of universally binding code.

I shall NEVER bend the knee to some human-invented god or gods and their far-too-often hate, fear, greed, guilt, misery, subjugation, and death-filled religions, creations that are assorted poxes on humankind, and every bit as corrupt as the humans who invented them as well.

cosmicway · October 19

8 minutes ago, Vesper said:

You are obsessed with the infinitely-abused woo that is religion, and more specifically your own person take. You weave its artificial diktats into every misogynistic hot take you put forth as if they are some kind of universally binding code.

I shall NEVER bend the knee to some human-invented god or gods and their far-too-often hate, fear, greed, guilt, misery, subjugation, and death-filled religions, creations that are assorted poxes on humankind, and every bit as corrupt as the humans who invented them as well.

So you like her:

Vesper · October 19

9 hours ago, cosmicway said:

So you like her:

What does Linda Tripp have to do with my reply?

For the record, Tripp was a RW operative up until the day she died 4 and a half years ago.

My stance on the whole Lewinski thing is a pox on everyone's house who was a principle player.

Clinton, Lewinski, Ken Starr, Tripp, etc etc.

cosmicway · October 19

12 minutes ago, Vesper said:

What does Linda Tripp have to do with my reply?

For the record, Tripp was a RW operative up until the day she died 4 and a half years ago.

My stance on the whole Lewinski thing is a pox on everyone's house who was a principle player.

Clinton, Lewinski, Ken Starr, Tripp, etc etc.

The question is if it was "rape" as the metoo.org maintains.
Otherwise call it immoral, call it what you like.

Vesper · October 19

10 minutes ago, cosmicway said:

The question is if it was "rape" as the metoo.org maintains.
Otherwise call it immoral, call it what you like.

several points:

I have not seen anyone associated even tangentially with #metoo say the Clinton raped Lewinsky. If any of them have, I disagree with them and think they are not being helpful. Lewinsky herself never claimed rape.

The Lewinsky events happened around 20 years before the #metoo movement gained widespread traction. The Lewinsky events happened in the mid-90s (1995-97) and were exposed in early 1998.

The hashtag #MeToo was used starting in 2017 as a way to draw attention to the magnitude of the problem. "Me Too" is meant to empower those who have been sexually assaulted through empathy, solidarity and strength in numbers, by visibly demonstrating how many have experienced sexual assault and harassment, especially in the workplace.

That all said, I agin ask what does Lewinsky have to do with my reply, the one you replied to with the Lewinsky non sequitur?

Vesper · October 19

Weaponized Polling Is More Dangerous Than Ever

Right-leaning outfits are skewing the polls for Trump for quite sinister reasons.

https://thinkbigpicture.substack.com/p/2024-trump-red-wave-polls

Election analyst Simon Rosenberg recently noted that of the last 15 general election polls released for Pennsylvania, a state viewed by both sides as key to any electoral victory, 12 have right-wing or GOP affiliations.

Rosenberg warned,

“Their campaign to game the polling averages and make it appear like Trump is winning—when he isn't—escalated in [the] last few days.”

This isn’t the first time the GOP has weaponized polling. In October 2022, right before the midterms, Republican-leaning polls flooded the zone, leading many in the media to predict a “red wave” that would swamp Democrats and turn control of the battleground states, the House, and the Senate over to the GOP.

But the red wave was a manufactured story, and it never crashed ashore. Instead, Democrats (and anti-extremist Republicans) won nearly across the board in the key swing states, gaining one seat in the Senate and only barely losing the House due to poor performance by Democrats in big blue states like New York and California.

Legacy media should be pushing back hard against this narrative, having been bamboozled by it before. Instead, headline after headline is repeating the “vibe” generated by crap, partisan polling: “Trump is on the move, the race is narrowing.”

But that’s not true. The race, both nationally and in the battlegrounds, hasn’t appreciably moved in the past few weeks at all. Harris still has a narrow lead both in national polls and in the battleground states.

It’s very much worth asking: What do the GOP and the Trump campaign gain by polluting the poll averages with bad data? In today’s piece, I review what happened with the polls during the 2022 midterms and what lessons we ought to have learned. Then I’ll give some examples of some of the more egregious partisan weaponized polling today to demonstrate how the GOP has sought to put its fingers on the electoral scales.

I’ll then discuss three broad reasons why it’s to their advantage to prove the race is “tied” rather than that Trump continues to trail. Finally, I’ll offer some guidance on how we can push back against the negative poll vibe and maintain our collective sanity and sense of determination as the election draws to a close.

Gaming the system

Back in 2022, right as the pivotal midterms were upon us, a handful of election analysts began to sound the alarm about the sudden increase in right-leaning polls, especially in the battleground states. Simon Rosenberg led the charge:

"In six major battleground states, more than half the polls conducted in October have been conducted by Republican firms… Basically we can't trust the data on RealClearPolitics or FiveThirtyEight any longer... it's essentially Republican propaganda," he told Joy Reid on MSNBC on October 31st, just eight days before the election.

Rosenberg noted that the two main polling averages that many relied on had become corrupted by a flood of Republican polling. No one was listening, however, and many dismissed his concerns outright.

So I looked into this too, and concurred. At the time, I wrote that if we screened out the polls that were partisan, the story around the midterms looked far different than a predicted “red wave.”

The media narrative in October was uniformly about such a blow-out, based in part around a series of polls that came out showing the GOP had regained the upper hand in the generic congressional ballot. But that may have turned out to be a temporary phenomenon driven by pollsters with strong Republican partisan biases.

I agreed with Rosenberg that the filtered polling averages told a very different story, one of a country that was pretty much dead even.

Our conclusions proved to be correct. Instead of a red wave in the battlegrounds, Democrats nearly swept the swing states, winning key governor and senate races, gaining majorities in some state legislative chambers, and nearly preventing the GOP from taking back the House—when they had been expected to cruise to a 30-seat majority.

But the flood of GOP pollsters had taken a toll. It demoralized Democrats and shifted dollars away from races that the polls claimed were unwinnable. Chief among these was the nearly successful Senate campaign of Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes. Those corrupted polling averages had him trailing the incumbent Republican, Sen. Ron Johnson, by as much as five points. Democratic donors believed the numbers and decided Barnes was likely to lose. Money shifted to places like John Fetterman’s race in Pennsylvania—a race he actually won quite handily.

But Barnes was much more competitive than the corrupted polls showed. He lost to Johnson by less than one percent. The Senate would have been a very different place over the past two years if we could have ignored the corporatists like Sens. Manchin and Sinema because we had 52 instead of 51 seats in that body.

The frustrating thing as we look out over the polling today is that the GOP is running the exact same play, and Democrats and the media are falling for it again. This is in part because Democrats tend to worry and fret more than Republicans. After all, to defenders of democracy, this is an existential election, but to the MAGA right it’s just the same entertaining show. As far as the media, they love to run any story that draws anxious readers in. “The race is tied” feeds into this cycle, with the press reporting on the horse race rather than the stakes of the election.

Examples of corrupted polling

After what happened in 2022, election analysts have been tracking the number of GOP-leaning polls that dropped in the battleground states versus the number of non-partisan or Democratic-leaning polls. Earlier this month, former pollster Adam Carlson noted,

Since September 30 (last Monday), there have been almost as many Republican-aligned polls released as non-partisan polls — with Democratic-aligned polls basically non-existent.

🟣 Non-partisan-aligned polls: 33

🔴 Republican-aligned polls: 26

🔵 Democratic-aligned polls: 1

Carlson later corrected this count to 27 GOP and 32 non-aligned polls.

“I believe this is what the kids call ‘flooding the zone,’” Carlson further remarked.

Also sounding the alarm was Rosenberg, who warned on October 5,

The red wavers stepped up their activity this past week, releasing at least 20 polls across the battlegrounds…. As in 2022, these polls usually [are] between 2 and 4 points more Republican than the independent polling so when there [are] a lot of them they can move the averages rightward.

Rosenberg called out the polls by name and further noted:

the states that have received the most red wave polls [these] few weeks are Montana, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Over the past 10 days, depending on how you characterize the pollsters, they released at least 5 and as many 7 polls in Pennsylvania alone. Their recent flood of polls in NC and PA tipped the Real Clear Politics polling average for each state to Trump, which then in turn got Trump to 281 in their corrupt Electoral College map. Yes, in Real Clear Politics Trump is now winning the election due to their gamesmanship.

Some of these pollsters even bragged publicly about what they had accomplished.

Note in particular attempts to sink Sen. Jon Tester, the Democratic incumbent in Montana, by making it seem like he can’t win. This is the Mandela Barnes story rebooted. It’s an attempt to drive national dollars away from Tester and depress turnout in Montana for him.

On Sunday, October 13, Rosenberg reported with a stunning update:

“With three weeks to go we should note that Rs have dropped more than 60 polls into the polling averages over the last few weeks to red wave 2024.”

Some observers, such as Jon Favreau, have noted that these GOP-leaning polls haven’t been able to move the actual averages that much, maybe a point or so. But even that can be significant in a tight race. And besides, it’s more than just the averages. It’s the constant drumbeat of “Trump is winning” or “the race is essentially tied” headlines. They are affecting the media reporting while dampening the national mood with Democrats and raising expectations undeservedly with Republicans. As I’ll discuss later, that all matters a lot.

How do the GOP polls and shenanigans skew things?

Here’s an example of how shady the polling can get. TIPP is a right-aligned pollster, according to Rosenberg. It released a poll on October 10, commissioned by American Greatness (yes, that’s really the name of the group) with a headline that Trump was leading in Pennsylvania:

Funny thing about that poll, though. Looking at the Registered Voters (RVs) polled, a whole 1079 of them, Harris was actually leading Trump by four points. But when it only counted the 803 Likely Voters (LVs), somehow Trump was leading by one point, 49-48. How could that be?

The methodology was very suspicious. Among the 124 RVs surveyed in Philadelphia, TIPP in its wisdom determined that only 12 (yes, 12) of them were “likely voters.” It basically nearly zeroed out Philadelphia. The cancellation of votes from 112 respondents from that city alone accounted for around half of the 206-person difference between RVs and LVs in the TIPP poll.

You can see for yourself in their “crosstabs.” Here are the 124 RVs in Philly:

Oh, and whoops! They’re nearly all gone when it comes to Likely Voters!

When 538 investigated, it asked TIPP about this wild erasure. According to 538, TIPP responded that

a disproportionate # of their Philly respondents had factors that made them unlikely to vote: they were young, not a college graduate, and/or nonwhite. So a ton of them happened to fall beneath the threshold to count as a likely voter.

Notably, TIPP had not used this screening method for Likely Voters in its surveys of AZ and NC. In those surveys, it counted everyone as a Likely Voter who responded with an intention to vote. But not for PA, apparently. And especially not for Philly.

But hey, let’s use the poll anyway in the averages. 538 by its own admission “doesn’t police pollsters’ LV screens.” And a poll “appearing on our polls page is not a guarantor of quality, just of existence.” Thanks for that helpful reminder, 538!

The red-wavers are also using the political betting site Polymarket to make the case that Trump is actually winning. Polymarket itself has some eyebrow-raising participants. The biggest user appears to be “Fredi9999” who has a whopping 7.2 million shares on Trump and $6.4 million in positions, all on Trump. Is this a billionaire looking to tilt the scales? I should also note that Peter Thiel, a die-hard Trumper, is himself a big investor in Polymarket through his Founders Fund. That fund recently led a $70 million round of investment into the betting site. Oh, and fun fact, oft-cited election prognosticator Nate Silver is now also an advisor for Polymarket.

Another target for GOP-leaning polls is Real Clear Politics, a polling agglomerator that will throw any poll into the mix no matter who is behind it. The fellows behind RCP are also conservative Republicans, and their polling average feels like the Fox News of polling averages. Here’s what the New York Times reported back in 2020 when the nation was on edge over election results:

For three days after every major news organization declared Joseph R. Biden Jr. the victor of the presidential election, one widely read political site maintained that Pennsylvania was still too close to call.

The delay was welcome news to allies of President Trump like Rudolph W. Giuliani and friendly outlets like The Gateway Pundit, which misrepresented the site’s decision in their efforts to spread false claims that Mr. Biden’s lead was unraveling.

That site, Real Clear Politics, is well known as a clearinghouse of elections data and analysis with a large following among the political and media establishment — and the kinds of political obsessives who might now have all the counties in Georgia memorized. It markets itself to advertisers as a “trusted, go-to source” admired by campaign and news professionals alike. Its industry benchmark polling average is regularly cited by national publications and cable news networks.

But less well known is how Real Clear Politics and its affiliated websites have taken a rightward, aggressively pro-Trump turn over the last four years as donations to its affiliated nonprofit have soared. Large quantities of those funds came through two entities that wealthy conservatives use to give money without revealing their identities.

It is rather depressing when you realize that the most popular and widely used and shared sources, from RCP to Polymarket to even 538 to some extent, are corrupted by the presence of so many right-leaning actors.

Trump needs the polls to be close to be able to claim fraud

It doesn’t take much deduction to understand that an election that is perceived as close benefits Trump, especially when it comes to calling the election results into question. This is something he already has signaled he will do, and we should be prepared for it.

In order to pull this off this time around, Trump will need to convince his followers (as well as county and state officials) that he would have prevailed but for the claimed election fraud. That is much easier to do if he can point to “polls” showing he was actually ahead or tied, and not losing by 2-4 points, which is where he may wind up in some of the battleground states.

Seen in this light, the GOP-leaning surveys are doing more than simply putting their fingers on the scales when it comes to polling. They are actively and knowingly enabling future false claims and conspiracies around election fraud.

Trump needs to appear strong

In a thread, Rosenberg also makes an excellent point that the right-leaning polls showing Trump is tied or leading also serve to prop up his image as a candidate of strength:

Trump may be a rapist, fraudster, traitor and 34 times felon but he is leading in the polls and is strong.

Trump may be a dangerous extremist, a bigot, misogynist and a racist but he is leading in the polls and is strong.

Trump may want to end the global economy which has made us prosperous, end the Western alliance which has kept us safe, end American democracy which has kept us free but he is leading in the polls and is strong.

The “strength” masks his inherent ugliness. It also covers for the fact that Trump is actually consistently behind in the national polls and trailing in the most important Blue Wall states of PA, MI and WI that hold the keys to the electoral math.

Further, whenever Trump starts to lose it, freaking out over whatever quality, non-partisan poll has reported about the race recently, his advisors can point him toward a Rassmussen or Trafalgar poll to allay his fears. And then he can go before his MAGA faithful and proclaim that the “polls” have him leading “by a lot.” Problem solved!

Close polling normalizes Trump’s horrors

I want to add one more point to this: Trump’s positive poll numbers, ginned up as they are by right-leaning outfits, create a permission structure for Republicans and Trump-leaning independents to vote for him, not just because they show he’s strong, but because other voters apparently have no issue doing so.

As I wrote in The Status Kuo newsletter yesterday,

Why is the GOP flooding us with so many partisan polls to make it seem like the race is far better for Trump than it is? What’s the point of all that?

Many of you have answered that question yourselves already without realizing it, just by wondering aloud, “Why is the race tied?!”

You see, if people are led to believe it is tied, then it must also be true that half of America thinks it’s somehow okay to pick Trump, despite everything we know about him. It normalizes him. It tells us all that these horrific things don’t matter, and we begin to believe that because the polls are telling us so.

The media is complicit in this. They often simply repeat these bunk polls, especially in the battlegrounds, rather than report Harris continues to lead and Trump appears to have hit a ceiling long ago,

Resetting the scales

It’s not easy to filter out the noise created by the GOP and its red-waving tactics. This is especially true for Democrats who instinctively latch onto bad news in order to prepare mentally for a bad outcome like we saw in 2016.

Resilience in the age of disinformation comes from practice. When I see a poll number now, my first question is not what it says but rather, “Who is saying it?” We have earned the right to be skeptical given the polluted environment. When Donald Trump or JD Vance makes a claim, we already know not to put much faith in it. The same now goes for most polling results.

I’ve often said that polls can’t tell you who is going to win, even just three weeks from Election Day. They can give some indication of momentum, or where things have settled out, however. Here, it’s already clear that Harris took the momentum early, and there is no indication that Trump has somehow seized it back from her.

On the other hand, because this is an election about turnout and enthusiasm, Democrats are already putting up impressive numbers in the early voting. The “blue firewall” in Pennsylvania is already nearly half constructed, based on mail-in ballot returns and a back of napkin target of an Election Day lead of ~400,000 votes for Harris. In states like Michigan, Democratic counties are returning ballots in numbers far higher than Republican ones. The Harris ground game remains strong and effective, while the Trump campaign is flailing and feels directionless as Trump spends his time on vanity rallies in solidly blue states like New York and California.

I’ll have more to say in the coming weeks about early voting patterns, which in my opinion matter far more than any polls. This is especially true now that we know and, I hope, understand just how polluted those polls are by GOP mischief.

Vesper · October 19

A week before the election, Trump will hold his most unsettling spectacle yet

Trump’s planned rally at Madison Square Garden will be the ultimate act of ego and the climax of his Hitlerian rhetoric

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/18/donald-trump-madison-square-garden-rally

For the apotheosis of his entire “poisoning of the blood” campaign, Donald Trump has planned a spectacular extravaganza in Madison Square Garden on 27 October, a week before the election. When JD Vance sings Trump’s fulsome praises to introduce him, his ominous tribute will not inspire comparison to the night in the Garden of 19 May 1962, when Marilyn Monroe sang Happy Birthday, Mr President to John F Kennedy.

Trump’s climactic rally will not be in the spirit of any past presidential event ever held there. His gathering for the great racist replacement theory will be the culmination of his spiraling descent since the Charlottesville rally in 2017 when neo-Nazis chanted, “Jews will not replace us.” “Fine people on both sides,” Trump said then. Now, at his night at the Garden, Trump will revive the memory of the infamous American Nazi mass rally held there on 20 February 1939 through his reflected Hitlerian rhetoric.

In the last week, Trump has pledged to deploy the military against “the enemy within”, domestic opponents he claims are worse than foreign adversaries – those Hitler called “Feind des Volkes”, or “enemy of the people”. Trump has threatened to destroy CBS, ABC and the New York Times. About ABC, after it conducted the debate in which he performed disastrously, he called to “take away their license”. After Kamala Harris’s 60 Minutes interview, having refused his own, he tweeted on 10 October: “TAKE AWAY THE CBS LICENSE.” About the Times, he said on 9 October: “Wait until you see what I’m going to do with them.” He has singled out by name journalists for the Times and the New Yorker as “FAKE OBAMA LOVING ‘JOURNALISTS”. At every rally he denounces the “fake news”, a drumbeat for years, echoing Hitler’s pejorative slur, “die Lügenpresse” – “the lying press”.

Trump traveled on 11 October to Aurora, Colorado, where he claimed a Venezuelan gang had seized control, “scum” and “animals” who have “invaded and conquered” and “infected” the town, a description dismissed as false by its Republican mayor. “We have to clean out our country,” said Trump. His language represented the Nazi idea of “Rassenhygiene” – “race cleansing” that required purification, not an academic interest in genetics but a program of eugenics for designating inferior races to be isolated or eliminated.

As Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, “A people that fails to preserve the purity of its racial blood thereby destroys the unity of the soul of the nation in all its manifestations. A disintegrated national character is the inevitable consequence of a process of disintegration in the blood.”

The former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, retired general Mark Milley, according to Bob Woodward in his new book War, told the veteran journalist: “No one has ever been as dangerous to this country as Donald Trump. Now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is the most dangerous person to this country.” Trump had stated that for Milley’s communication with his counterparts in China on January 6 to reassure them that the US military was stable, he deserved “DEATH” – to be executed.

On 14 October, retired general Mike Flynn – Trump’s former national security adviser, whom he pardoned for failing to register as a foreign agent and obstructing justice – was asked at a Christian nationalist rally for Trump whether he would preside over military tribunals in a second Trump term to “not only drain the swamp, but imprison the swamp, and on a few occasions, execute the swamp”. “Believe me,” Flynn replied, “the gates of hell – my hell – will be unleashed.”

Trump has been inevitably drawn to the Garden, in the city that made and unmade him. He is irreversibly entrapped in his endless neurotic syndrome of desperately seeking approval there that he constantly repels and success he inexorably undermines, a cycle of failure, rejection and humiliation. He wants New York to love him unreservedly, but his relationship with the city has been one long unrequited romance. His true love affair has always and only been with himself. When he does not receive the adoration he feels he deserves, he hates New York. Then, he tries to win its love again by performing a disgusting act, which, when he is predictably rejected, triggers his anger once again. And, then, he engages in gestures of infantile defiance, like holding a Nazi-esque rally. Trying to show himself triumphant over the city, he invites its scorn once again, and again, and again. He never comprehends that he is the cause of his continuing narcissistic injuries.

Trump’s rally, through the rhyme of history, will be a rebuke to the greatest campaign speech delivered by Franklin D Roosevelt, which, though given 88 years ago in the Garden on 31 October 1936, rings remarkably contemporary, a speech for “the restoration of American democracy” and its “preservation”.

“We have not come this far without a struggle and I assure you we cannot go further without a struggle,” FDR said. “We know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob. Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me – and I welcome their hatred.”

Three years after FDR spoke at the Garden, another rally was held there, on 20 February 1939, under the sponsorship of the German American Bund, raising the slogan of “America First”, to advance the great replacement theory that Jews and other “inferior races” were displacing white Aryans. The Nazis claimed the mantle of true Americanism and Christian nationalism. Swastikas framed a gigantic portrait of George Washington as the backdrop to the stage. From the balcony hung a banner: “Stop Jewish Domination of Christian America.” “Wake up!” shouted the Führer of the Bund, Fritz Kuhn, “you, Aryan, Nordic and Christians, to demand that our government be returned to the people who founded it!”

Gerhard Wilhelm Kunze, the Bund’s public relations director, declared that white supremacy was the essential basis of the nation. “The spirit which opened the west and built our country is the spirit of the militant white man,” he said, citing racial segregation and immigration quotas as its bulwarks. “It has then always been very much American to protect the Aryan character of this nation.”

In 2019, a seven-minute documentary about the Nazi rally of 1939, A Night at the Garden, was nominated for an Academy Award. To promote it, a 30-second TV ad was produced with the tagline: “It Can Happen Here.” The line was a reference to Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel, It Can’t Happen Here, about a populist demagogue defeating FDR and imposing a fascist regime. Lewis’s wife, the famous journalist Dorothy Thompson, a columnist for the New York Herald Tribune, who had reported on the rise of Hitler, pointedly attended the Nazi rally. “I saw an exact duplicate of it in the Berlin Sports Palast in 1931,” she wrote.

Trump’s Maga rally will be the first time since the 1939 Nazi rally that the same themes of the replacement theory will echo in the Garden

When the film distributor of A Night at the Garden sought to buy time for a spot on Fox News, its CEO, Suzanne Scott, rejected it as “not appropriate for our air”. After the 2020 election, during Trump’s ramping up to the January 6 insurrection, she ordered that Fox News suppress factchecking his lies because it was “bad for business”.

Now, in his announcement of his night at the Garden, Trump advertised a clipped version of the replacement theory, declaring that New York was “reeling” from “Kamala’s reckless open-border policies”, “flooding” the city with criminal “illegal migrants”. For nearly a $1m contribution to attend the event, the top tier, donors are promised an “Ultra MAGA Experience”, details to follow.

Trump’s Maga rally will be the first time since the 1939 Nazi rally that the same themes of the replacement theory will echo in the Garden. But his closing argument is more than Nazi cosplay. He cannot help but reveal his deepest desire to be loved and then to fling the middle finger to the city whose unconditional admiration he has sought since he first crossed the Queensboro Bridge.

Trump’s permanent physical move to Palm Beach after his failed coup in 2020 has not transformed him into a contented Florida Man. To the inveterate New Yorker, the Sunshine state is strictly for snowbirds, God’s waiting room for shuffleboarders. Mar-a-Lago, his winter escape, has become his unnatural embittering palace-in-exile. Florida represents disgrace to Trump.

Trump’s emotional journey back to the White House must travel through New York. He has nothing but contempt and indifference for Washington. He despises policy, flaunts his ignorance and detests anyone who has ever tried to temper him, from four-star generals to Republican congressional leaders. He wants the pomp without the circumstance. January 6 played out Trump’s true view of the capital.

Trump plots his night at the Garden as the climax of his comeback tour. He may have been president, but never top of the heap. Roy Cohn could tell him how to skirt the law and ingratiate himself with the mob, but Cohn was not a Virgil to guide his protege to respectability. Trump’s lowlife publicity antics, tutored by Cohn, made him into one of the revolving cast of characters populating tabloid trash. The larger the headline of the sordid story about himself, the bigger Trump’s delusion that kitsch burnished his class. He was always crestfallen when his frolics did not win his admission into the club.

Trump has only been truly comfortable strutting in his old New York, conning and threatening, greasing the palms of the mafia, stiffing his contractors and workers, while trying to buy his way into society affairs. Time and again, the city spat him out. He was ridiculed and reviled. He went bust six times. He defaulted on the Trump Shuttle. The banks denied him loans. He had to sell his yacht named for his daughter, The Princess. His brutish father, who financed his wild ventures, throwing good money after bad, had to buy chips illegally to momentarily float his sinking Atlantic City casino. He dumped two wives. He allegedly sexually assaulted dozens of women. When he tried to lowball Frank Sinatra, an idol, Ol’ Blue Eyes told him, “Go fuck yourself.”

After Trump had plunged in what seemed to be his final bankruptcy, he was rescued by a TV producer, Mark Burnett, who created the reality TV show The Apprentice, which depicted Trump as a business genius reigning over the Manhattan skyline. The sheer fiction was the veneer that enabled his grubby lucrative product placement side deals. His motive for running for president was a branding scam gone haywire.

Now, he has returned to the city on his road to redemption. Yet, so far, he has been held accountable for his vast crimes only in New York. He has been found liable for defamation and sexual assault and termed an adjudicated rapist by the judge in the E Jean Carroll case, and ordered to pay $83.3m in damages plus continuing interest; found liable of widespread financial fraud and ordered to pay $364m for ill-gotten gains plus continuing interest; and convicted of 34 felony counts of financial fraud for hush-money payments, to a porn star and Playboy model with whom he had affairs, in order to affect the outcome of the 2016 election.

Once again, he intends to prove himself in the city that never sleeps, the city that will give him another shot at murdering someone on Fifth Avenue and getting away with it. A star is reborn.

These little town blues are melting away
I’m gonna make a brand-new start of it in old New York
And if I can make it there, I’m gonna make it anywhere
It’s up to you, New York, New York

Trump now says that if he loses he will blame the unappreciative Jews – he hasn’t been “treated right” by the Jews and their support for Democrats is a “curse”. But Trump, who has picked up a few Yiddish words, uses them unconsciously like a native New Yorker. On 2 January 2021, he displayed his proficiency in his notorious telephone call with the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, in which he sought to intimidate him into committing election fraud to switch the state’s voting results.

“So look,” said Trump. “All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have.”

Raffensperger resisted Trump’s strong-arming, the Georgia outcome stood, and four days later Trump incited the assault on the Capitol in a last-ditch effort to thwart the certification of the election: “Hang Mike Pence!” Trump has since been indicted in Georgia for election fraud, a case in legal purgatory until after the 2024 election.

Twice, during his call with Raffensperger, Trump derided the Republican governor, Brian Kemp, who refused to be complicit in Trump’s scheme, by calling him a “schmuck”. Perhaps the word was lost on Trump’s listeners. According to Leo Rosten’s The Joy of Yiddish, it carries several meanings, including “penis” and “a dope, a jerk, a boob, a clumsy bumbling fellow”. Rosten wrote that “few impolite words express comparable contempt”.

Now, New Yorkers can only wonder, what kind of schmuck holds a Nazi-esque rally in Madison Square Garden?

Donald Trump’s Hitlerian logic is no mistake

The former president claims to have never read Mein Kampf. But his use of blood and soil rhetoric is deliberate

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/07/donald-trumps-hitlerian-logic-is-no-mistake

If genealogy is destiny, as Donald Trump believes, then “poison in the blood” – a phrase Trump repeatedly uses – determines the fate of nations. By Trump’s logic, “blood” is the true and final measure. Trump, like Hitler, appears to classify people and countries by “blood” on a scale of their innate racial characteristics. Those features define the essence of nations, which are themselves delineated on a racial pyramid, with the purest and whitest, the most Aryan, at the pinnacle. True to his doctrine, the Nazis on his family tree must explain his penchant for Hitlerian rhetoric.

“Poison in the blood” was the core of Hitler’s race doctrine as well. Hitler, too, believed it explained the rise and fall of civilizations. “All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning,” stated Hitler. It is also Trump’s fundamental trope. “We’re poisoning the blood of our country, and you have people coming in, think of it, mental institutions all over the world are being emptied out into the United States,” he said on Fox News in March. “Jails and prisons are being emptied out into the United States. This is poisoning our country.”

Just recently, on 31 August, addressing Moms For Liberty, a rightwing group devoted to book-banning, he raised again the menace of “poison in the blood”: “But what’s happening to our country, our country is being poisoned, poisoned!”

At a rally on 18 September, Trump elaborated: “They’re coming from the Congo, they’re coming from Africa, they’re coming from the Middle East, they’re coming from all over the world – Asia! A lot of it coming from Asia … And what’s happening to our country is we’re just destroying the fabric of life in our country, and we’re not going to take it any longer, and you got to get rid of these people.”

“Blut und Boden” – blood and soil – was adopted as an official slogan of the Nazi regime to express its ideal of the nation rooted in the authentic unity of Aryan blood. The community of its people – Volksgemeinschaft – comprised only those of shared ethnic blood. Aliens corrupting the blood, principally Jews, but also Slavs, Poles and Roma, were described as disease carriers and “vermin” – Volksshadlinge – and posed an existential threat. Only those people of the blood belonged to the Heimat, a concept the Nazis cast as the racially pure home, intrinsic to Blut und Boden.

Jews were Heimatlos – a people separate from the Heimat, without a true home, wanderers, cosmopolitans and globalists, a menace to the sanctity of the culture and the identity of the nation. They were not simply outsiders, or the Other. They were a different species – subhumans, Untermenschen – and must be eradicated to preserve the blood of the race. “Although it has features similar to a human, the subhuman is lower on the spiritual and psychological scale than any animal,” instructed a pamphlet entitled Der Untermenschen, illustrated with distorted photographs of these lower beings to depict the “bestial” nature of the subhuman Jews and Slavs. Four million copies were published in 1942 under the direction of Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS.

“In some cases, they’re not people, in my opinion,” Trump said this March. “But I’m not allowed to say that because the radical left says that’s a terrible thing to say. These are animals, OK, and we have to stop it.” When they are removed, it will be, says Trump, “a bloody story”.

Friedrich Trump, Trump’s grandfather, was deported from his native Bavaria as an undesirable and had his German citizenship revoked in 1905. Born in the town of Kallstadt in 1869, he dodged compulsory military service and emigrated to the United States in 1885. In and around Seattle and the Yukon, he owned restaurants and hotels that also did a brisk business as brothels. He returned to Germany a well-to-do man, married Elisabeth Christ, and took her to New York. But his wife did not like America and was homesick.

He returned to Kallstadt to settle, but the authorities investigated him and ruled he should be banished for dodging military service. He wrote the Prince of Bavaria a letter begging to stay. “Why should we be deported? This is very, very hard for a family.” His plea was rejected. He was expelled. Upon his return to New York, in October 1905, a son, named Fred, was born. The Trump family saga began.

The Trump and Christ families, with the exception of Friedrich and Elisabeth Trump, remained in Kallstadt. Many of them served in the Nazi army. Some were members of the Nazi party. Two of these relatives of Donald Trump are now known to have fought and died for Hitler. It appears that they were involved in the early stage of the Holocaust. (A certified professional genealogist distinguished in the field discovered these Trump Nazi soldiers through their research, but prefers to remain anonymous to avoid retribution.)

If ‘blood’ is the biological marker of indelible personal, racial and ethnic character, by his own reasoning Trump’s organic linkage to Nazis must inexorably explain his unapologetic Hitlerian politics

Ernst Christ, of the Christ branch of the family, a first cousin once removed of Donald Trump, the son of his great-uncle Johannes Christ, born in Kallstadt, was a Nazi. Unteroffizier Christ, a corporal, served in the 1st Company of the Panzerjager-Abteilung 670, an anti-tank unit that saw action on the western front in Belgium and France before being transferred to participate in the invasion of Russia.

In July 1942, Christ’s company occupied the town of Polodovitoye, about 100 kilometers south of Stalingrad. The Nazi soldiers rounded up about 100 Jewish families who had fled there from throughout the region. According to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust research center in Jerusalem, “Jews were loaded onto trucks, supposedly to be taken home. In fact, the victims were taken outside the village toward a ravine located 50 meters south of the village. There the victims were shot or probably severely wounded and then doused with some highly flammable liquid and then set on fire.” A month later, on 13 August, Unteroffizier Christ was killed in battle.

Three days before, on 10 August, the Wehrmacht reached the outskirts of Stalingrad. On that day, Private Eduard Freund, born in Kallstadt, was killed. He was the first cousin once removed of Donald Trump, the son of Donald’s great-aunt Elisabetha Trump and Karl Phillip Freund. Private Freund served in a security unit, the fourth company of the Sicherungs-Battalion 790, whose task of guarding supply lines and police work quickly turned, like that of all such units, into the operation of wholesale brutal terror. He was one of those soldiers from “all walks of life” described in historian Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men, who found themselves occupiers in eastern Europe to execute the regime’s policies, often under the control of the SS, where “mass murder and routine had become one”, murdering partisans and civilians alike, and systematically killing Jews. The policy was justified in a phrase – Jude gleich Bolschewik gleich Partisan, or “Jew equals Bolshevik equals Partisan”.

If “blood” is the biological marker of indelible personal, racial and ethnic character, by his own reasoning Trump’s organic linkage to Nazis must inexorably explain his unapologetic Hitlerian politics. On Fox News, in March, Howard Kurtz, the host of its show Media Buzz, interviewed Trump. “Why do you use words like ‘vermin’ and ‘poisoning of the blood’?” he asked. “The press, as you know, immediately reacts to that by saying, ‘Well, that’s the kind of language that Hitler and Mussolini used.’” To which Trump replied, “Because our country is being poisoned.”

But another Trump relative stands as a repudiation of Trump’s theory. John G Trump, Fred’s younger brother, did not go into real estate. Instead, he earned a master’s degree in physics and a doctorate in electrical engineering. He became a co-inventor of high-voltage electrostatic generators, which during the second world war he applied to advancements in radar. He served as the secretary of the microwave committee created by the federal government’s new National Defense Research Committee. After the war, he was appointed director of MIT’s High-Voltage Research Laboratory, whose work he used in cancer research and on environmental pollution.

His obituary in Physics Today in 1985 by a colleague paid tribute to his personal virtues as well as his scientific contributions: “Trump’s remarkable personality mix contributed to all of this achievement and success. He was remarkably even-tempered, with kindness and consideration to all, never threatening or arrogant in manner, even when under high stress. He was outwardly and in appearance the mildest of men, with a convincing persuasiveness, carefully marshaling all his facts.” Furthermore, wrote his eulogist, “He cared very little for money and the trappings of money.”

In other words, John Trump was nothing at all like his bullying, ignorant and greedy nephew, who bears the middle name “John”, the only apparent correspondence between them. The resemblance, regardless of genetics, is nil. Yet Trump cites him as proof of his intelligence, a case positive of “blood”. “I had an uncle who went to MIT who is a top professor. Dr John Trump. A genius,” Trump said in an interview with CNN in 2015. “It’s in my blood. I’m smart. Great marks. Like really smart.” From time to time, he brings up his uncle as his forebear of his own “genius”. “Good genes, very good genes. OK, very smart.”

Through his distorted lens, Trump’s uncle, who was the opposite of a narcissist, serves as a rationale for his narcissism. He is held up as an example of Trump’s “blood” mania, though the scientist in the family had no use for the sort of malevolent superstition the Nazis propagated and his nephew mimics.

Trump designates his blood as superior and the blood of those he chooses to demonize as inferior. “Well, I think I was born with a drive for success,” Trump told CNN in 2010. “I’m a gene believer. Hey, when you connect two racehorses, you usually end up with a fast horse. And I really was – you know, I had a – a good gene pool from the standpoint of that.”

Trump designates his blood as superior and the blood of those he chooses to demonize as inferior

“I have an Ivy League education, smart guy, good genes. I have great genes and all that stuff, which I’m a believer in,” Trump informed a crowd in Biloxi, Mississippi, in 2016. He had recently called for a ban on all Muslims entering the United States.

“You have good genes, you know that, right?” Trump told another nearly all-white rally during his 2020 campaign in a Minnesota town that had voted against accepting refugees. “You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it, don’t you believe? The racehorse theory. You think we’re so different? You have good genes in Minnesota.” He compared and contrasted. “Every family in Minnesota needs to know about sleepy Joe Biden’s extreme plan to flood your state with an influx of refugees from Somalia, from other places all over the planet.”

“Why do we want all these people from shithole countries coming here?” Trump bemoaned in a White House meeting in 2018. He pointed to Haiti – “take them out” – El Salvador and the entire continent of Africa. “We should have more people from Norway.”

This April, at a fundraiser with donors at Mar-a-Lago, Trump proudly recalled his “shithole countries” moment to elaborate on his categories of acceptable and unacceptable immigrants. “And when I said, you know, ‘Why can’t we allow people to come in from nice countries,’ I’m trying to be nice. Nice countries, you know like Denmark, Switzerland? Do we have any people coming in from Denmark? How about Switzerland? How about Norway?”

Trump claims he has not read Mein Kampf. His first wife, Ivana Trump, said he “reads a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, My New Order, which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed”, Vanity Fair reported in 1990. Trump explained it was a gift from a Jewish friend. Then, he told Marie Brenner of Vanity Fair, “If I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them.”

As Trump ginned up his third campaign, Hugh Hewitt, a rightwing radio talkshow host, tried to help cleanse Trump of taint from his “poison in the blood” incantations. “Now, Mr President,” said the deferential Hewitt, “your critics say that you are using Hitlerian language that was used to dehumanize Jews by saying that Jewish blood cannot be part of German blood. Do you have anything like that in mind when you say poisoning our blood?”

“No, and I never knew that Hitler said it, either, by the way,” Trump replied. “And I never read Mein Kampf. They said I read Mein Kampf. These are people that are disinformation, horrible people that we’re dealing with. I never read Mein Kampf.”

Asked again by Hewitt, Trump answered, “First of all, I know nothing about Hitler. I’m not a student of Hitler. I never read his works. They say that he said something about blood. He didn’t say it the way I said it, either, by the way.” Then, after showing he was familiar with Hitler’s “blood” obsession that he had just said he did not know about, he repeated his “poison” meme eight times.

“I know nothing” was the comic punchline of Sergeant Schultz, the buffoonish Nazi prisoner-of-war camp guard from the 1960s television series Hogan’s Heroes. “I know nothing” has been a useful if transparently false tactic of deflection for Trump, from David Duke – “I don’t know anything about David Duke, OK?” – to the Proud Boys.

After the violent neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville in 2017, ringing with chants of “Jews will not replace us,” attended by a number of Proud Boys, Trump infamously stated, there were “very fine people on both sides”.

When Chris Wallace, the moderator of the 2020 CNN presidential debate, asked Trump if he would denounce white supremacists, he replied, “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by,” a message to the neo-fascist paramilitary group that would be the shock troops in the attack on the Capitol on January 6. After the debate, he told reporters, “I don’t know who the Proud Boys are.” Now, he has pledged to pardon those Proud Boys and others serving prison terms for their actions in the insurrection of January 6. He refers to them as “hostages”.

White supremacists, neo-fascists and neo-Nazis attach themselves to Trump, sometimes appearing as more than a fringe

White supremacists, neo-fascists and neo-Nazis attach themselves to Trump, sometimes appearing as more than a fringe – including, recently, the self-proclaimed “Black Nazi” Mark Robinson, the Republican candidate for governor of North Carolina, whom Trump called “Martin Luther King on steroids.”

Neo-Nazis just seem to pop up weirdly on Trump’s property. At Mar-a-Lago, on 22 November 2022, Trump had a night to remember: dinner with the antisemitic rapper Kanye West, AKA Ye, and Nick Fuentes, a neo-Nazi, who was a leader at the Charlottesville march and riot, present in the mob on January 6, and has built an antisemitic following he calls the “Groypers”. Afterward, when the press reported on the dinner, Trump issued a statement that Ye brought “a guest whom I had never met and knew nothing about”.

Trump’s footsie with Nazis mingles narcissism with Nazism. But it is his belief in the far-right “replacement theory”, which is the central idea of his campaign, that provides the greatest illumination on what are more than overlapping coincidences. The historical lineage of poisonous ideas, rather than “poison in the blood”, explains Trump’s doctrine of a master race, whether Trump is aware or not of the origins of his venom.

Trump’s embrace of the replacement theory may owe a good deal to its relentless promotion by its chief exponent, Tucker Carlson, who also serves as an intellectual mentor to JD Vance. On more than 400 shows when Carlson was on Fox News, according to the New York Times, “he has amplified the idea that a cabal of elites want to force demographic change through immigration”.

On his 2 September podcast, Carlson interviewed a self-proclaimed “non-racist fascist”, Darryl Cooper, whom he introduced as “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States”. For two hours, he held forth on Winston Churchill as the “chief villain of the second world war” and the Holocaust as an accident forced on Hitler. Despite Carlson’s Nazi fascination, his principal influence has been as a recent popularizer of a doctrine developed more than a century ago.

When Trump says immigration, he means race. When he says crime, he means race. When he says communism, socialism, or Democrat, he means race

Trump’s replacement theory is derivative of the nativism of eugenicists and “race scientists”, especially Madison Grant, whose 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race, warned against “the old stock being crowded out” by “swarms of Polish Jews” and other aliens, who were pushing aside “the Nordic man”, and fostering “suicidal ethics which are exterminating his own race”.

Grant served as an adviser to the congressional members who wrote the Immigration Act of 1924, which severely restricted immigration of those ethnic groups from eastern and southern Europe that he deemed inferior, closing out Italians and Jews. He also helped write laws in the south banning interracial marriage.

Hitler regarded Grant’s book in his speeches as scientific proof and wrote him an admiring letter telling him it was his “Bible”. “It was America, in spite of its enormous territory, that was the first country to teach us by its immigration law that a nation should not open its doors equally to all races,” Hitler told the New York Times in an interview on 20 December 1931, before he seized power. “Let China be for the Chinese, America for the Americans and Germany for the Germans.” In 1936 the Nazis promoted The Passing of the Great Race as essential reading for Germans.

“The irony is that by putting Madison Grant’s theories into practice, the Nazis discredited those theories forever,” wrote the historian Jonathan Spiro in his biography of Madison Grant, Defending the Master Race.

That is, until Trump.

When Trump says immigration, he means race. When he says crime, he means race. When he says communism, socialism, or Democrat, he means race. When he says America is declining, he means race. When he says “American First”, he means race. When he says blood, he means race. When he says poison, he means race.

When he says race, he means Black people. When he says race, he means Hispanics. When he says race, he means Muslims. And when he says race, he means other white people, too, some less white, less pure, less clean, less acceptable depending on their ancestral origin, than others. When he says race, he means the replacement theory.

Trump has Hitler on the brain in unknowable ways until he lets his admiration seep out. “Well, but Hitler did some good things,” Trump remarked to his White House chief of staff, General John Kelly. “Well, what?” asked Kelly. “Well, [Hitler] rebuilt the economy,” Trump replied. Kelly was outraged. He told him, “Sir, you can never say anything good about the guy. Nothing.” Kelly reflected, “It’s pretty hard to believe he missed the Holocaust, though, and pretty hard to understand how he missed the 400,000 American GIs that were killed in the European theater,” Kelly told Jim Sciutto, the CNN correspondent. “But I think it’s more, again, the tough guy thing” – Trump’s insatiable need to playact.

On 17 September, Trump launched a new theme with an old echo. He made a prophecy about who should be blamed if he is defeated in the election. “I’m not going to call this as a prediction, but in my opinion, the Jewish people would have a lot to do with a loss,” he said. Then, he repeated, “If I don’t win this election – and the Jewish people would really have a lot to do with that if that happens because if 40%, I mean, 60% of the people are voting for the enemy …” He complained that as “the most popular person in Israel” he was not “treated right” by American Jews.

Trump’s Jewish son-in-law Jared Kushner, his converted Jewish daughter Ivanka, his Jewish grandchildren, his Jewish adviser Stephen Miller, who is poised to be the implementer of the replacement theory and deportation of millions, including legal immigrants, and his Jewish supporters and donors are exempt from his condemnation of “the Jewish people”. Trump’s family ties don’t give him pause from his obsession. His “blood” makes them kosher. In the case of an inconvenient contradiction his narcissism prevails.

Trump’s blame game is his version of the Dolchstosslegende – the stab in the back legend – that Germany did not lose the first world war in battle but was betrayed on the home front by Jews and leftists. Hitler traced his political awakening to his understanding of the Dolchstoss.

Now, after all Trump has done for the Jews, after all he has done for Israel, “the Jewish people” are ungrateful. Too many of them support “the enemy”. Trump is warming up his myth of a scapegoat.

cosmicway · October 19

1 hour ago, Vesper said:

several points:

I have not seen anyone associated even tangentially with #metoo say the Clinton raped Lewinsky. If any of them have, I disagree with them and think they are not being helpful. Lewinsky herself never claimed rape.

The Lewinsky events happened around 20 years before the #metoo movement gained widespread traction. The Lewinsky events happened in the mid-90s (1995-97) and were exposed in early 1998.

The hashtag #MeToo was used starting in 2017 as a way to draw attention to the magnitude of the problem. "Me Too" is meant to empower those who have been sexually assaulted through empathy, solidarity and strength in numbers, by visibly demonstrating how many have experienced sexual assault and harassment, especially in the workplace.

That all said, I agin ask what does Lewinsky have to do with my reply, the one you replied to with the Lewinsky non sequitur?

Metoo existed in the 70s though not with that name.
Lewinski was metoo.

Vesper · October 19

Trump’s ‘Day of Love’ Caps a Bizarre Week

The former president’s mental coherence continues to unravel in public.

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2024/10/trumps-day-of-love-caps-a-bizarre-week/680312/

You know the expression and what it means, but I will use only the abbreviation: WTF. In military circles, it is rendered as “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.” On the show The Good Place, it is “What the fork.” I think I have a pretty good vocabulary, but I find myself at a loss for any other way to describe a week in American electoral politics that must rank among the most bizarre in modern times.

Trump, of course, tops the leaderboard for gobsmacking moments, and this week, his comments ran the gamut from vile to hilarious to head-scratching. Even so, nothing could match his description of the January 6 insurrection—one of the darkest moments in American political history—as “a day of love.”

This vertigo-inducing moment occurred during Trump’s Univision town hall two nights ago. A Cuban American construction worker named Ramiro González said that he was “disturbed” by Trump’s behavior on January 6 but wanted to give Trump a chance to win back his vote. Trump’s answer was a slurry of sentence fragments and passive constructions, but its mendacity was unmistakable:

Some of those people went down to the Capitol, I said, peacefully and patriotically, nothing done wrong at all. Nothing done wrong. And action was taken, strong action. Ashli Babbitt was killed. Nobody was killed. There were no guns down there. We didn’t have guns. The others had guns, but we didn’t have guns. And when I say “we,” these are people that walk down, this was a tiny percentage of the overall, which nobody sees and nobody shows.

Everything was fine, you see, but “action was taken.” By someone. For some reason. Note also that Trump aligns himself with the insurrectionists: “We” didn’t have guns; “they” had them. (This is a lie: Some of the rioters were armed.) And then Trump concluded: “But that was a day of love, from the standpoint of millions …”

A “day of love” is one way to put it. Other ways to put it, of course, are “one of the worst days for American law enforcement since 9/11” and “the first time a hostile force carrying Confederate flags managed to breach the Capitol.”

In response to Trump’s words, the former Capitol police officer Aquilino Gonell went on X and posted a video of the mob attacking him. “Here’s me receiving an outpouring amount of affection during the ‘day of love,’” he said, adding, “They almost loved me to death.”

González has now said that he was not convinced by Trump’s response and will not be voting for him. But millions of other voters have continued to support Trump despite his obvious approval of this brutal attack on our constitutional order.

I had hoped, however, that by now, Trump might be shunned among political and cultural leaders—at least by those who have not already bent the knee.

After everything Trump has said and done, why would any decent person want him to stand among a group of dignitaries while he curses, makes bad jokes, and does some of his usual rally shtick?

Which brings me to the Al Smith dinner. The Smith dinner, named after one of the great governors of New York (and the first Catholic major-party nominee for president), is a formal-dress charity event hosted by the Catholic archbishop of New York.

Politicians attend (especially during an election year) to give speeches and engage in some good-natured banter and camaraderie.

Trump, of course, has no evident good nature. His previous in-person appearance at the dinner was in 2016, and it was so shameful and mean-spirited that, as The New York Times noted this morning, Trump and his wife “slunk out of the room the second it was over.”

This year was no better. Kamala Harris had the good sense not to attend, and sent a video message instead. (It wasn’t very good comedy, but so it goes.) Trump showed up in person, however, and made sure to be just as offensive and rude as he had been eight years before.

The point is not that Trump is too bilious to be funny; the point is that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Archbishop Timothy Dolan, and many others who should know better sat there and pretended that Trump was just a regular political candidate soft-shoeing his way through an Al Smith dinner.

All of these people should have refused to share a stage with Trump, but the dinner was another example of what Jonathan Last acidly—and rightly—calls “Kabuki Normality,” the careful pretense that all is well, and that appearing with a convicted felon, a man found liable for sexual abuse, a racist and a misogynist and a “fascist to the core,” is just another day at the office for the leader of New York’s Catholics and the senior Democratic senator from New York.

Elsewhere, Trump’s running mate, J. D. Vance, has finally decided to take a stand on a question he’s been weaseling out of answering for weeks: Did Trump lose to Joe Biden? “No,” he said to a reporter during a question-and-answer session at an event in Pennsylvania this week. “I think there are serious problems in 2020. So, did Donald Trump lose the election? Not by the words that I would use, okay? … I really couldn’t care less if you agree or disagree with me on this issue.”

Even by the Ohio senator’s standards of disdain, this signals a new level of contempt. Yet Vance’s embracing of the Trump campaign’s Big Lie caused barely a ripple in the national consciousness today—because Trump was busy flooding the zone with nutty, baffling answers on Fox & Friends this morning.

Asked who his favorite president was when he was little, Trump said, “Ronald Reagan.” Reagan took office when Trump was in his mid-30s. Trump went on to claim that Fox staffers wrote some of his jokes for the Smith dinner (which Fox denied).

He did his usual riffs about Harris and her IQ; said that if she is elected, we will no longer have cows—no, I don’t get it either—and disparaged Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was “probably a great president,” Trump allowed, “although I’ve always said, why wasn’t that settled?” He meant the Civil War.

Trump finished up by saying he was going to go talk to Fox owner Rupert Murdoch and demand that Murdoch stop Fox from running “negative” Harris-campaign ads about Trump—“and then we’re going to have a victory.”

It’s normal to both express shock and laugh at such things, but none of this is funny. Trump is unfit to enter the White House. He is unstable, disordered, and morally repulsive.

Yet today, the election could be a coin toss. If Trump wins, in January, he will sit behind the Resolute desk, and military aides will once again walk him through the process to order the use of nuclear weapons.

No phrase or expletive is enough to capture that terrifying possibility.

Edited October 19 by Vesper

Vesper · October 19

6 minutes ago, cosmicway said:

Metoo existed in the 70s though not with that name.
Lewinski was metoo.

define 'metoo'

also

Lewinski was most definitely NOT metoo.

Tripp manipulated her for Tripp's own RW motivations.

If not for Tripp, Lewinski likely never would had came forward.

Edited October 19 by Vesper

Vesper · October 19

8 minutes ago, cosmicway said:

Metoo existed in the 70s though not with that name.
Lewinski was metoo.

I repeat:

You are an open misogynist with a twisted worldview.

You try and belittle and/or negate any and all pushback by women against their mistreatment (including violent manifestations) done to them at the hands of men.

In your world, women should just shut up and take it.

Your own words clearly show this to be a fact.

Vesper · October 19

JD Vance’s New Spin on the Big Lie Is Even More Fascist Than Trump’s Original

Trump's conspiracy theory was vague and self-centered, but Vance's version is about justifying a radical ideology

https://www.salon.com/2024/10/18/jd-vances-new-spin-on-the-big-lie-is-even-more-fascist-than-original/

U.S. Senator and 2024 Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance speaks during a campaign event at the Milwaukee Police Association in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on August 16, 2024. (ALEX WROBLEWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)

After weeks of dodging and weaving, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, finally bit the bullet and endorsed the Big Lie. Donald Trump's running mate has been coy about echoing his boss's false claims that President Joe Biden stole the 2020 election, but Wednesday, Vance came right out and claimed Trump was the true winner in 2020. When asked by a reporter if Trump lost in 2020, Vance feigned exasperation and said, "No. I think there are serious problems in 2020. So did Donald Trump lose the election? Not by the words that I would use."

That's the part of his quote getting the most attention, but what he said next may be even more chilling:

He reiterated this point later that day, again pretending to be exhausted by reporters asking him about it: "I think that Big Tech rigged the election in 2020."

He's arguing that tech companies are obliged to publish right-wing disinformation, and their failure to do so means democracy is forfeit.

Vance appears to believe he's found a nifty little tapdance that allows him to both back Trump's ridiculous lies while also holding himself out as too smart to really believe all that nonsense. As usual, Vance is not nearly as clever as he seems to think he is. Instead of coming across as "MAGA, but smarter," he reads like a naked opportunist who views his own voters with contempt. He is so worried that journalists will think he's stupid that he will tacitly admit he's lying rather than let reporters think he might actually believe this stuff. This isn't the first time, either, as we saw when he told CNN he feels he's entitled to "create stories" smearing innocent people as cat-eaters.

But Vance's novel spin on the Big Lie isn't just a sad attempt to look smart in front of reporters. It's deeply tied to the larger political project that Vance, far more than Trump himself, is deeply enmeshed in: Building the pseudo-intellectual scaffolding to justify fascism. In this way, Vance's version of the Big Lie may be even more dangerous than the original rolled out by Trump in 2020.

While some of Trump's co-conspirators like Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell generated buzzwords — "Dominion machines," "mules" and "Hugo Chavez" — to create the illusion of evidence, Trump himself was not all that interested in filling the Big Lie with manufactured details. That's the old-school style of conspiracy theory, where the theorists fling around names and dates, in hopes it sounds like they are investigating, instead of making it all up. Trump was too lazy to bother. Vague "fraud" was alleged and cities with large Black populations were accused of specifics-free funny business, but he didn't bother with drafting many fictional particulars. It was all just a thin cover for Trump and his supporters to say the only legitimate voters are white.

Vance is doing something different from either Trump or the Mike Lindell crowd, with their string-covered bulletin boards. He's arguing that tech companies are obliged to publish right-wing disinformation, and their failure to do so means democracy is forfeit. The Hunter Biden laptop gambit is a red herring. It's technically true that Twitter toggled stories about Biden's laptop for 24 hours while determining if the story was real, but no one with functioning cognitive capacities mistakes that for a serious case of censorship. Instead, what chaps the hide of Vance and all other Republicans whining about "censorship" is the inadequate job social media companies are doing of keeping disinformation off their platforms.

Put simply, Vance is yet again asserting not only that Republicans have a right to lie, but that they are entitled to have those lies amplified on massive platforms. One is reminded of his tantrum during the vice presidential debate, when Vance whined, "You weren't going to fact-check" at the debate moderators for correcting a lie he kept repeating about immigrants. Vance also threw a fit last week on ABC when the host called him out for lying about Biden's hurricane response, calling it "nit-picking" when she correctly noted it is untrue that FEMA was neglecting Republican-voting areas.

Trump's lies stem from a lifetime of being a cheat and a fraud, who will say whatever it takes to get ahead. Vance's lies — and the fact that he keeps insisting he's entitled to lie — are part of a larger ideological project of creating "intellectual" rationales for fascism. As he showed Dana Bash on CNN with his "creating stories" remarks, he employs an "ends justify the means" approach to lying. In this view, he and his are the only legitimate rulers, and therefore there is no limit on what they can do to seize the power that is rightfully theirs.

As has been well-documented, Vance and his billionaire benefactor, Peter Thiel, are deeply involved in a pseudo-intellectual movement of enemies of democracy. Some, like Curtis Yarvin, might identify as "neo-monarchist." Others, like Vance's Twitter buddy Costin Vlad Alamariu, proudly call themselves fascists. But whatever labels they apply, they share a belief that democracy has failed and must replaced by dictatorship. Yarvin, for instance, has insisted Americans must "get over their dictator phobia."

Vance is more coy than his buddies, but his antipathy to democracy is never far from the surface. During his Republican National Convention speech, Vance rejected the long-standing view "that America is an idea." Vance ignored the fact that GOP idol Ronald Reagan repeatedly insisted that "America is freedom" and that what defines America is not an ethnicity but that "we believe in our capacity for self-government." Vance rejected both the history of the American Revolution and Reagan's words to offer a blood-and-soil nationalism as a replacement. "It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future," he said. America, in his telling, isn't found in the Constitution or the concept of democracy, but in a "cemetery plot in Eastern Kentucky" where his white ancestors are buried. In his view, a small number of immigrants may be allowed in. His wife, who married into a white family, appears to get a pass. Still, he rejected the concept of a nation formed by laws uniting people of different races and identities, in favor of an ethnonationalist view of America.

Vance didn't spell out the implications of this dramatic shift in the definition of "American," but it's not hard to see what they are. When tensions arise between democratic laws and preserving a white ethnostate, he unmistakably believes democracy must give way. For the MAGA movement, that time has come. The majority of voters back the view that America is a multiracial democracy, not a white ethnostate. And so the majority, in his view, should not have a say. Only "real" Americans should count.

In light of this, it's easier to make sense of why Vance barely bothers to hide his belief that there's no sin in lying for the fascist cause. Empiricism, rationality and truth are all values entwined with the democratic ideal. The concept of self-governance requires believing citizens are entitled to reality-based information to make informed decisions. But if what matters to you is not democracy, but preserving your concept of the correct American ethnic hierarchies, then the truth value of information doesn't matter. In Vance's view, a lie that upholds his preferred social order is always superior to a fact.

In a democracy, we should want social media companies to use their First Amendment right to refuse to publish fascist propaganda. If one believes in the concept of self-governance, it's self-evident that the people should have access to trustworthy sources of information. Trump is a liar because he's self-serving. Vance's vigorous defense of lying is even more disturbing. It's part of a larger ideological rejection of democracy. He's setting up MAGA as more than a personality cult around Trump. He's hoping to shepherd MAGA fully into a fascist movement, one that will outlive Trump.

Fulham Broadway · October 19

1 hour ago, Vesper said:

JD Vance’s New Spin on the Big Lie Is Even More Fascist Than Trump’s Original

Trump's conspiracy theory was vague and self-centered, but Vance's version is about justifying a radical ideology

https://www.salon.com/2024/10/18/jd-vances-new-spin-on-the-big-lie-is-even-more-fascist-than-original/

U.S. Senator and 2024 Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance speaks during a campaign event at the Milwaukee Police Association in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on August 16, 2024. (ALEX WROBLEWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)

After weeks of dodging and weaving, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, finally bit the bullet and endorsed the Big Lie. Donald Trump's running mate has been coy about echoing his boss's false claims that President Joe Biden stole the 2020 election, but Wednesday, Vance came right out and claimed Trump was the true winner in 2020. When asked by a reporter if Trump lost in 2020, Vance feigned exasperation and said, "No. I think there are serious problems in 2020. So did Donald Trump lose the election? Not by the words that I would use."

That's the part of his quote getting the most attention, but what he said next may be even more chilling:

He reiterated this point later that day, again pretending to be exhausted by reporters asking him about it: "I think that Big Tech rigged the election in 2020."

He's arguing that tech companies are obliged to publish right-wing disinformation, and their failure to do so means democracy is forfeit.

Vance appears to believe he's found a nifty little tapdance that allows him to both back Trump's ridiculous lies while also holding himself out as too smart to really believe all that nonsense. As usual, Vance is not nearly as clever as he seems to think he is. Instead of coming across as "MAGA, but smarter," he reads like a naked opportunist who views his own voters with contempt. He is so worried that journalists will think he's stupid that he will tacitly admit he's lying rather than let reporters think he might actually believe this stuff. This isn't the first time, either, as we saw when he told CNN he feels he's entitled to "create stories" smearing innocent people as cat-eaters.

But Vance's novel spin on the Big Lie isn't just a sad attempt to look smart in front of reporters. It's deeply tied to the larger political project that Vance, far more than Trump himself, is deeply enmeshed in: Building the pseudo-intellectual scaffolding to justify fascism. In this way, Vance's version of the Big Lie may be even more dangerous than the original rolled out by Trump in 2020.

While some of Trump's co-conspirators like Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell generated buzzwords — "Dominion machines," "mules" and "Hugo Chavez" — to create the illusion of evidence, Trump himself was not all that interested in filling the Big Lie with manufactured details. That's the old-school style of conspiracy theory, where the theorists fling around names and dates, in hopes it sounds like they are investigating, instead of making it all up. Trump was too lazy to bother. Vague "fraud" was alleged and cities with large Black populations were accused of specifics-free funny business, but he didn't bother with drafting many fictional particulars. It was all just a thin cover for Trump and his supporters to say the only legitimate voters are white.

Vance is doing something different from either Trump or the Mike Lindell crowd, with their string-covered bulletin boards. He's arguing that tech companies are obliged to publish right-wing disinformation, and their failure to do so means democracy is forfeit. The Hunter Biden laptop gambit is a red herring. It's technically true that Twitter toggled stories about Biden's laptop for 24 hours while determining if the story was real, but no one with functioning cognitive capacities mistakes that for a serious case of censorship. Instead, what chaps the hide of Vance and all other Republicans whining about "censorship" is the inadequate job social media companies are doing of keeping disinformation off their platforms.

Put simply, Vance is yet again asserting not only that Republicans have a right to lie, but that they are entitled to have those lies amplified on massive platforms. One is reminded of his tantrum during the vice presidential debate, when Vance whined, "You weren't going to fact-check" at the debate moderators for correcting a lie he kept repeating about immigrants. Vance also threw a fit last week on ABC when the host called him out for lying about Biden's hurricane response, calling it "nit-picking" when she correctly noted it is untrue that FEMA was neglecting Republican-voting areas.

Trump's lies stem from a lifetime of being a cheat and a fraud, who will say whatever it takes to get ahead. Vance's lies — and the fact that he keeps insisting he's entitled to lie — are part of a larger ideological project of creating "intellectual" rationales for fascism. As he showed Dana Bash on CNN with his "creating stories" remarks, he employs an "ends justify the means" approach to lying. In this view, he and his are the only legitimate rulers, and therefore there is no limit on what they can do to seize the power that is rightfully theirs.

As has been well-documented, Vance and his billionaire benefactor, Peter Thiel, are deeply involved in a pseudo-intellectual movement of enemies of democracy. Some, like Curtis Yarvin, might identify as "neo-monarchist." Others, like Vance's Twitter buddy Costin Vlad Alamariu, proudly call themselves fascists. But whatever labels they apply, they share a belief that democracy has failed and must replaced by dictatorship. Yarvin, for instance, has insisted Americans must "get over their dictator phobia."

Vance is more coy than his buddies, but his antipathy to democracy is never far from the surface. During his Republican National Convention speech, Vance rejected the long-standing view "that America is an idea." Vance ignored the fact that GOP idol Ronald Reagan repeatedly insisted that "America is freedom" and that what defines America is not an ethnicity but that "we believe in our capacity for self-government." Vance rejected both the history of the American Revolution and Reagan's words to offer a blood-and-soil nationalism as a replacement. "It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future," he said. America, in his telling, isn't found in the Constitution or the concept of democracy, but in a "cemetery plot in Eastern Kentucky" where his white ancestors are buried. In his view, a small number of immigrants may be allowed in. His wife, who married into a white family, appears to get a pass. Still, he rejected the concept of a nation formed by laws uniting people of different races and identities, in favor of an ethnonationalist view of America.

Vance didn't spell out the implications of this dramatic shift in the definition of "American," but it's not hard to see what they are. When tensions arise between democratic laws and preserving a white ethnostate, he unmistakably believes democracy must give way. For the MAGA movement, that time has come. The majority of voters back the view that America is a multiracial democracy, not a white ethnostate. And so the majority, in his view, should not have a say. Only "real" Americans should count.

In light of this, it's easier to make sense of why Vance barely bothers to hide his belief that there's no sin in lying for the fascist cause. Empiricism, rationality and truth are all values entwined with the democratic ideal. The concept of self-governance requires believing citizens are entitled to reality-based information to make informed decisions. But if what matters to you is not democracy, but preserving your concept of the correct American ethnic hierarchies, then the truth value of information doesn't matter. In Vance's view, a lie that upholds his preferred social order is always superior to a fact.

In a democracy, we should want social media companies to use their First Amendment right to refuse to publish fascist propaganda. If one believes in the concept of self-governance, it's self-evident that the people should have access to trustworthy sources of information. Trump is a liar because he's self-serving. Vance's vigorous defense of lying is even more disturbing. It's part of a larger ideological rejection of democracy. He's setting up MAGA as more than a personality cult around Trump. He's hoping to shepherd MAGA fully into a fascist movement, one that will outlive Trump.

He's like one of those toxic influencers.

Will say anything for money and lies for a career

Vesper · October 19

Pro-Trump dark money network tied to Elon Musk behind fake pro-Harris campaign scheme

https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2024/10/pro-trump-dark-money-network-tied-to-elon-musk-behind-fake-pro-harris-campaign-scheme/

An initiative called Progress 2028 that purports to be Kamala Harris’ liberal counter to the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is actually run by a dark money network supporting former President Donald Trump.

Building America’s Future, the dark money group at the helm of the network, has steered money to a constellation of groups and initiatives boosting Trump’s agenda and spreading messaging aimed at chipping away voters from Harris. The dark money group reportedly received over $100 million in funding from billionaire Elon Musk, along with other donors, the New York Times recently reported.

The newest effort to benefit from their largesse is Progress 2028. Building America’s Future registered to use Progress 2028 as a fictitious name on Sept. 23 and the website was created three days later, OpenSecrets’ analysis of corporate filings and DNS records found.

The Progress 2028 site appears to be created by IMGE LLC, a firm run by Republican political operatives that the New York Times described as the “hidden hand” behind Building America’s Future, and a page on the Progress 2028 site includes the firm’s sizzle reel.

IMGE LLC has also done work for Elon Musk’s America PAC and several other Republican political committees, including a super PAC funded by America’s Future Fund named Future Coalition PAC, as first pointed out by Brendan Fischer, Deputy Executive Director of Documented, an investigative watchdog and journalism project.

The Progress 2028 manifesto draws clear parallels to Project 2025, a controversial blueprint for restructuring the executive branch under the next Republican administration. The Project 2025 blueprint was developed by the Heritage Foundation and written by many conservatives who worked in or with Trump’s administration. Project 2025 has drawn intense criticism, and the former president has said it does not reflect his own priorities should he return to the White House.

Some of the policies listed in Progress 2028 highlight disproven and misleading claims about Harris’ positions. Policies listed include “Empowering Undocumented Immigrants, Building Our Future” and “Expanding Medicaid to Undocumented Immigrants.”

“Undocumented immigrants are the backbone of our country, and by removing barriers, we unlock incredible potential,” the document states. “Kamala Harris believes that every person, no matter their immigration status, deserves access to basic healthcare.”

Harris expressed support for allowing immigrants residing in the U.S. to obtain health insurance with her 2019 Medicare for All plan but did not indicate whether there would be a cost. Her 2024 running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, recently said that Harris does not currently support programs for undocumented immigrants to qualify for free government health care, free tuition at state universities or driver’s licenses.

The document claims Harris will “support policies that protect minors’ access to gender-affirming care and ensure that schools provide comprehensive LGBTQIA education.”

“She’s committed to banning fracking, phasing out internal combustion engines, and rolling out the most progressive Green New Deal yet,” another section of the Progress 2028 plan reads. Harris has explicitly stated that she won’t ban fracking natural gas but her campaign has sent mixed signals about her own position on regulation of gas-powered cars.

Some individuals have received text messages directing them to the Progress 2028 page.

“Kamala Harris will support a nationwide gun buy-back program that will take dangerous weapons off our streets,” one text message reads, noting, “A mandatory buy-back is the only way to keep our streets safe.” Harris expressed support for a mandatory buyback of military assault weapons in 2019 but has expressed a more lenient stance in 2024, highlighting her own gun ownership.

^{_{Digital advertisement featuring Kamala Harris paid for by Progress 2028 (Screenshot from Meta Ad Library)}}

Progress 2028 has also started pouring money into digital advertising. Since Oct. 11, several digital ads on Facebook and Instagram have included the disclaimer “paid for by Progress 2028” — totaling over $36,000 in ad buys over just five days.

While the ads appear to include pro-Harris messaging, they lean into contentious issues listed on the Progress 2028 site that have created friction among different divisions of the party.

“Let’s remove barriers for undocumented immigrants who are undocumented!” one ad states, adding, “Access to affordable housing, driver licenses, and fair wages creates a stronger America for everyone.”

Another ad reads, “A national, mandatory buy-back program means fewer guns & fewer tragedies. Kamala Harris gets it!”

Operating under a shroud of aliases, Building America’s Future has funneled tens of millions of dollars in dark money from anonymous sources into campaigns boosting Trump ahead of the 2024 election. The dark money network also has a history of fueling initiatives impersonating and parodying Democrats.

Building America’s Future is the top funder of Citizens for Sanity, a dark money group that bankrolled inflammatory ads mocking Democrats and progressive policies in battleground states ahead of 2022 midterms, tax returns show. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Elon Musk secretly steered tens of millions of dollars through Building America’s Future to help fund the effort.

Citizens for Sanity spent over $90 million on messaging pitting minority communities against each other and chipping away at traditionally Democratic voting blocs.

Similar to Progress 2028, the ads hit on contentious issues such as LGBTQ+ rights, immigration and criminal justice reform. The ads have been accused of trying to suppress voting among minority communities.

Citizens for Sanity does not disclose its donors but other groups were legally required to report money they gave to it. That includes $43 million from Building AmerIca’s Future as well as $28.7 million from Freedom’s Future Fund, a sister group of Building America’s Future, and $13.4 million from American Commitment.

The many faces of Building America’s Future

Building America’s Future has also fueled other pro-Trump groups and was the sole funder of the Future Coalition PAC, new Federal Election Commission records filed Oct. 15 show.

The super PAC that has run ads targeting Harris in Michigan by highlighting her positions that are pro-Israel and the Jewish faith of her spouse, Doug Emhoff. The ads are reported to be pro-Harris but have been criticized as featuring antisemitic dog whistles. The PAC has been accused of attempting to use the conflict in the Middle East as a wedge issue to depress turnout for Harris in Michigan, a state with a significant Muslim and Arab American population.

Future Coalition PAC reported receiving $3 million from Building America’s Future through the end of September.

Another $16 million was steered through Building America’s Future to Duty to America PAC, according to new FEC disclosures filed Oct. 15. The super PAC has targeted young male voters and Black voters trying to persuade them to vote for Trump.

Building America’s Future was also the top funder of Stand For Us PAC, OpenSecrets’ analysis of FEC reports filed Oct. 15 found. The super PAC received at least $3.8 million from the dark money group and has spent over $15 million on ads attacking Republican primary candidates in Ohio with divisive messaging tying a prescription drug program to immigration and transgender rights.

In addition to funding a cluster of political groups, Building America’s Future operates under several fictitious names such as Americans for Consumer Protection.

In August, Americans for Consumer Protection launched an ad campaign criticizing the White House’s proposal to ban menthol cigarettes. CNBC reported that the effort was intended to chip away at Harris’ key base of Black voter support in swing states including Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina and Wisconsin.

Building America’s Future reportedly raised and spent more than $100 million over the last four years, the New York Times reported.

Building America’s Future is not legally required to report its finances, vendor payments or outgoing grants for 2023 until after Election Day and, even then, will not be required to disclose its donors.

OpenSecrets’ requests for comment to Building America’s Future and Progress 2028 were not returned prior to publication.

end

https://mastodon.online/@Luis_Fierro/113329645316544388

Luis Fierro@[email protected]

Musk is really mucking around!

PENNSYLVANIA Voters, this is for you. You will be getting flyers in the mail purporting to be from the Harris campaign promoting her 'Progress 2028' initiative. IT'S A SCAM funded by Elon Musk. Throw the flyer away! Do NOT follow the links or donate. IT'S A SCAM!

Oct 18, 2024, 07:39 PM··Mastodon for iOS

Fulham Broadway · October 19

Manufacturing Genocide

The US and UK government have masked their deep complicity in Israel’s genocidal war behind soft criticism and empty pleas for restraint. And the mainstream media, on the whole, have bought it.

President Joe Biden and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer speak to reporters before participating in a bilateral meeting in the Oval Office of the White House. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

According to John Newsinger’s A People’s History of the British Empire, it was the outsourcing of genocide which gave Britain the edge over its European imperial rivals. By ensuring an arms-length distance from the mass slaughter carried out on its behalf, the British state was able to project the image of a more benevolent empire, even at times publicly criticising the brutality of its client regimes.

It was an unprecedented feat of propaganda, and it’s not hard to spot its enduring legacy in how atrocities against the Palestinian people have been widely reported over the last year. Much like the crime boss on an image clean-up mission to disassociate from the thugs on his payroll, the US and UK governments have attempted to hide their bankrolling of Israel’s military machine behind soft criticism and empty pleas for restraint. And the mainstream media, on the whole, have bought it.

It’s complicated, of course, and at first glance, the coverage of Gaza over the last year has hardly followed Israel’s official script. When ITV captured shocking footage of the Israeli military shooting and killing a man clearly holding a white flag, it pushed the story against the grain of official Israeli denial and obfuscation. Nor did the BBC wholly accept the Sunak government’s framing of peaceful demonstrations in support of Gaza as terrorist hate mobs.

Indeed, the unprecedented outpouring of public sympathy for Palestinians across the democratic world undoubtedly owed much to the real-time broadcasting of the wholesale destruction of life in Gaza and what legal experts were increasingly calling a genocide in action. And there’s no question that, on the whole, broadcasters have been far more nuanced in their reporting of events in Gaza (as well as the West Bank and now Lebanon) compared to their reporting of the Ukraine war.

Shaping the Narrative

So what’s going on? First, we can’t ignore the news values of scale and timing. If relatively more attention has been paid to the violence unleashed on Palestinians since October 7th, compared to that faced by Israelis on October 7th, it is only because the former is both ongoing and now over forty times the scale of the latter. Perhaps not surprisingly, these two rather obvious facts were hopelessly lost on a recent ‘study’ carried out by a pro-Israel law firm with zero expertise or experience in media analysis and funded by an ‘Israeli businessman'

The media also don’t instinctively like giving aggressors or invaders an easy ride. When Western allies are the invading, conquering, or oppressing state in any given conflict, they are either largely ignored (the US-UK-backed Saudi war on Yemen is a case in point) or subject to exactly the kind of soft and contained criticism that the Empire is given to make of its more wayward client regimes.

There’s a further complicating factor: Netanyahu has made no attempt to hide his friendship with sworn enemies of the West, including Hungary’s Viktor Orban and even, to some extent, Putin. Added to that is his deep personal connection to Donald Trump — a president whose embittered relationship with the US security establishment was historically matched only by Kennedy.

All this has undoubtedly given rise to a degree of discomfort and something of a split within the ranks of the Washington/London power structure. And it doesn’t take much for such unease and uncertainty to be reflected in news narratives.

But the real problem lies in what this nuance obscures. For a start, it distracts from the subtle but profoundly significant advantage of Israeli officials in shaping agendas and, crucially, the language of reporting. This much has been demonstrated consistently by any credible and serious analysis of mainstream media coverage of Israel-Palestine going back decades. In the current conflict, anyone who’s had the news on, even in the background noise, will recognise the boundaries of what can and can’t be said. So, for instance, it is perfectly acceptable to describe the indiscriminate killing of Palestinians by the Israeli military as ‘attacks in retaliation for’ October 7th. But it was much more difficult to describe the indiscriminate killing of Israelis by Hamas and other militants on October 7th as ‘attacks in retaliation for’ any or all of the crimes of what is now almost universally recognised by human rights groups as a brutal apartheid regime.

There is one particularly notable feature of the language adopted by British broadcasters post-October 7th. This is the way in which any reference to Hamas is commonly followed by some form of words that make clear it is a terrorist group according to the UK government. Veteran BBC reporter Jon Simpson made an impassioned defence of this convention against pro-Israel critics in the aftermath of October 7th, who were furious that the BBC still felt any need to qualify the terrorist label. Simpson argued that it’s not for the BBC to simply accept at face value that Hamas is a terrorist organisation just because the UK, US, Israel and some other governments say it is.

A more pertinent question entirely overlooked in this pseudo-debate is why broadcasters feel the need to qualify any reference to Hamas in this way. It’s a question that has nothing to do with whether or not Hamas is or should be considered terrorist, but rather the double standards applied in respect of reporting on Israel. For instance, a number of countries have accused Israel of state-sponsored terrorism as well as being an apartheid regime, yet this is almost never mentioned by reporters in respect of Israeli official sources. And since October 7th, a total of thirty-three countries have classified Israel’s assaults on Gaza as a genocide, along with a cross-section of international legal bodies and human rights groups. Yet there is no pressure on BBC journalists to repeatedly point this out to viewers, no perceived need to provide context in the way that even the reporting of casualties by the ‘Hamas-run’ health ministry is routinely subject to caveat.

Indeed, claims by Israeli officials — from beheaded babies to Hamas control centres located under hospitals — have been far too often accepted at face value over the last year and widely reported as fact, long before they were thoroughly debunked. Even now, despite the overwhelming evidence of indiscriminate bombing of civilian life and infrastructure in Gaza, BBC reporters still adopt the language of Israeli propagandists in framing similar massive bombing campaigns in Lebanon as ‘strikes targeting Hezbollah’.

Hiding Complicity

But these double standards pale into insignificance compared to the media’s blind spot over not just the active complicity of the West but its continual sponsoring of what even the International Court of Justice has ruled a potential genocide on the Palestinian people. The problem is not just the obscene use of taxpayer money to fuel a war that public opinion is overwhelmingly against. Arms manufacturers are also massively profiteering from Gaza, as they did Ukraine, and as NATO military spending escalates at an unprecedented rate. After uncovering that the CEO of BAE Systems had personally pocketed almost £1 million cash from the Gaza genocide, arms trade investigators told me a number of broadcasters expressed interest in covering the story, before promptly dropping it prior to airing. Making a personal killing from mass killing was not, it seems, sufficiently newsworthy.

The depth of US and UK military and intelligence involvement is often obscured or, more often, completely ignored by mainstream media. Declassified UK has reported on the use of the UK military base in Cyprus to deploy US special forces to Israel, as well as on hundreds of cargo shipments and frequent spy plane flights over Gaza and Lebanon. Yet consumers of mainstream media would have no idea that such hands-on involvement exists.

What’s more, in conjunction with the massive imbalances over language, this blind spot presents a trap for some pro-Palestine critics of the media who are given to perceive Israeli propaganda as uniquely and universally powerful. There’s certainly good reason to believe that the pro-Israel lobby in the UK, US and elsewhere operates through a shadowy and extensive network of political influence. But the trap lies in mistaking this influence as some kind of autonomous power leverage that Israel wields over the West, with the effect that US/UK/EU governments are reluctantly or unwittingly forced into complicity by the sheer extent and agency of the pro-Israel lobby.

And it is the product of an age-old truth: that real power tends to erase itself. In the end, the pro-Israel lobby only exerts the influence that it does because it is enabled by powerful, vested interests within the countries in which it operates.

Any wider and honest look at how Israeli apartheid evolved historically can’t ignore this enablism. From the Balfour Declaration to the Camp David accords, when US power effectively underwrote Israel’s determination never to allow a contiguous and genuinely independent Palestinian state.

A true balanced depiction of the horrors that have taken place over the last year calls not for equal treatment between the oppressor and oppressed, or between the victims of a heinous terror attack over two days, and the victims of industrialised mass slaughter over twelve months. Rather, we should question where the balance is struck between attention to the atrocities and war crimes carried out by Israel, compared to critical scrutiny of its paymasters; between the hit man and the crime boss who is supplying the guns and calling the shots.

Vesper · October 19

It’s time to say goodbye to Elon Musk’s X. Changes to blocking online harassment will endanger users.

As announced to users Wednesday, X is planning to deprive its users of another vital tool for combating ever-escalating online stalking and harassment on the platform, writes Gwen Snyder.

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/commentary/x-twitter-block-changes-harassment-stalking-endangerment-20241018.html

The Nazi troll crew called themselves “The Shed,” and you weren’t supposed to write about them.

To write about them was to attract their attention, and to attract their attention was to experience one of the most vile firehoses of online abuse imaginable. They lived to harass, and they were well-versed in every troll tactic in the book.

Earn their notice, and they’d swarm you. You might see your home address posted, your reputation destroyed through impersonator accounts, or your family held at gunpoint after a “prank” 911 call. It could have been The Shed, or one of the many hornet nests of Nazis who were only too happy to swarm at their prodding. Either way, they’d visit misery on you.

How would they find you to target you? By reading your tweets, of course.

How could you minimize the chances of them reading your tweets? By blocking every Twitter (now X) account associated with them. It’s a necessary defense measure that X’s Elon Musk has decided to neutralize.

As the social media platform’s engineering team announced to users Wednesday, X is planning to deprive its users of another vital tool for combating ever-escalating online stalking and harassment on the platform. Blocking a troll will no longer prevent them from reading your tweets. It’ll suddenly be a lot easier for stalkers, abusers, and harassers to keep tabs on their victims and instantly direct harassment their way.

It’s that instantaneousness that makes this shift so insidiously dangerous. Mass harassment campaigns are like snowballs in the sun. At a slow roll, the snowball melts faster than it can pick up new snow. Allow it to gain momentum, though, and even the afternoon sunshine is no match for that rapid accumulation. The snowball becomes a snow boulder in no time.

Pre-Musk Twitter was far from perfect, but it did allow harassment victims to create at least some meaningful roadblocks that might slow such a snowball before it gained steam. The block button allowed you to keep a troll account from engaging with you or seeing your content. Third party mass block tools allowed you to block that troll account’s followers, too, making it more difficult for them to collectively flood you with harassment. Moderation wasn’t terrific, but generally you could get the site to ban users who directly threatened your life or your family, or posted explicit Nazi content.

A pile of characters removed from a sign on the Twitter headquarters building in July 2023.Godofredo A. Vásquez / AP

Musk has already dismantled X’s hate speech and harassment moderation system and implemented changes that make mass blocking unworkable. His latest step — allowing abusers and stalkers to freely view their targets’ content even when blocked — takes aim at X’s most basic and necessary anti-harassment feature. Trolls needn’t bother to switch to shadow accounts to stalk anymore; their craft will be that much more efficient. That efficiency translates to speed, and that speed aids the snowball’s growth. The less friction a harasser experiences as they stir up hate, the greater their mass harassment campaign’s odds of success.

[Musk] seems determined to turn the website into an ever more welcoming echo chamber for the worst humanity has to offer.

And let’s be clear: “success” here can mean not only psychological torture but endangering offline terror for the targets. I speak from experience. When I was only a few weeks postpartum in 2021, I answered a sharp knock on our door and found armed police officers outside. Nazis had sent them there with a fake 911 call, hoping a SWAT team would shoot first and ask questions later. I was able to safely convince the cops to leave after a brief conversation; others have not been so lucky.

Since that time, Elon Musk has merrily made X an open haven for Nazis and abusers. There’s not much to be done to pressure him into change; the man has majority ownership and has very publicly leveled profanity-laced taunts at his own advertisers. He seems determined to turn the website into an echo chamber for the worst humanity has to offer, in particular violent misogynists, transphobes, and white supremacists.

What we can change is the influence of the platform. Though its reach is slowly dwindling, X remains a default home and broadcast system not only for politicians and journalists, but for government agencies, news services, and elected officials. Every day that these people and organizations choose to communicate through X is a day that vulnerable people are forced to choose between their dignity and their access to their news, political representation, and taxpayer-funded services.

It’s time for these leaders to actually lead, clearing a path that leads beyond X and towards social media environments like Bluesky (pictured) and Mastodon, writes Gwen Snyder.Monique Woo / Monique Woo/TWP

It’s time for these leaders to actually lead, clearing a path that leads beyond X and towards social media environments like Bluesky and Mastodon — platforms that at least gesture in the direction of user safety and protection of the vulnerable.

Without that leadership and exodus, marginalized people will find themselves forced to make an impossible choice: to endure harassment, or abandon meaningful access to the communications of the government they fund and the officials sworn to represent them.

There’s no way around it anymore. Twitter is dead, replaced by the cesspool that is Elon Musk’s X.

There’s a path out; it’s time to take it. It’s time to say goodbye.

Vesper · October 19

Donald Trump’s other mental health problem that we’re not talking about

Trump calls anyone who opposes him mentally ill, reflecting his warped approach to a major issue. How much is projection?

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/donald-trump-mental-health-crisis-20241017.html

Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump watches as South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem dances to the song "YMCA" at a campaign town hall at the Greater Philadelphia Expo Center & Fairgrounds, Monday, Oct. 14, 2024, in Oaks.Read moreAlex Brandon / AP

by Will Bunch | Columnist

Donald Trump may be running again for the presidency, but some days on the campaign trail it feels like he’s minoring in psychology. At a rally Monday night in Atlanta, the GOP nominee added Black and Latino voters who don’t support him (which would be a majority of them) to his growing list of Americans in need of mental health therapy, or more aggressive meds.

“Any African American or Hispanic, if you know how well I’m doing, that votes for Kamala [Harris], you’ve got to have your head examined,” Trump proclaimed. It’s the same language he’s used to describe others who aren’t voting this time for POTUS 45, including anti-Trump Jews, Catholics, and seniors, whom he warned in September that “we’re gonna have to send you to a psychiatrist to have your head examined.”

The frequency of this claim — that the millions backing Democrat Harris might not just have different ideas about issues like climate change or tariffs, but must suffer from a mental illness — is disturbing. But Team Trump’s impromptu diagnoses can be even more wildly inappropriate when an individual crosses the increasingly authoritarian candidate.

In one of the worst cases, a U.S. Army employee who tried to block Trump and his aides from breaking the rules about filming campaign material in a restricted area of Arlington National Cemetery, and was physically confronted by the ex-president’s men, was described without evidence by Trump spokesman Steven Cheung as “clearly suffering from a mental health episode.” (Team Trump insisted it had a video to back this claim, but never released it.) When legendary journalist Bob Woodward published a new book with damaging information about Trump’s ties to Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, Cheung was back to claim the Watergate scribe “has lost it mentally.” Most disturbingly, Trump in his rallies has taken to describing rival Harris as “mentally impaired” and — when speaking to his wealthy donors behind closed doors, according to the New York Times — “retarded.”

Just on its face, Trump’s growing tendency to brand any opponents as mentally ill is deeply offensive in two ways. It highlights his increasingly unhinged and dictatorial rhetoric toward his perceived enemies, yet also suggests a callous and grossly insensitive attitude toward those who are actually struggling with mental health, in a nation where problems such as rising rates of teenage depression and a high suicide rate ought to be on the front burner. Experts on mental health say Trump’s language is stigmatizing and dangerous.

“People with mental health conditions have been campaigning for years against the social stigma directed against them — and in recent years have made a lot of progress,” Rob Waters, a veteran mental health journalist who founded the website MindSite News, told me this week. “Donald Trump seems to be on a one-man campaign to bring back that kind of stigma.” Waters noted a key element of Trump’s crusade to demonize immigrants is a totally unfounded charge that Latin American nations are emptying their mental institutions and sending these patients north.

In this Feb. 15, 2018, file photo, President Donald Trump speaks in the Diplomatic Room at the White House about the shooting in Parkland, Fla. Trump has repeatedly tied mental illness to mass shootings.Carolyn Kaster / AP

Trump’s re-stigmatizing of mental illness is unconscionable — and it also matters in a couple of other profound ways in the election less than three weeks away. Most important is the way that Trump’s harmful and retrograde attitude toward mental illness could warp U.S. policies if he’s elected the 47th president. But that’s not the first thing on most voters’ minds these days when they see a headline about “Trump and mental health.”

It can’t be a coincidence that Trump’s increasingly bombastic and insensitive charges about the mental health of other people come right as the electorate is questioning what’s happening inside the cerebral cortex of the oldest major-party nominee for president in U.S. history. Ever since the candidate descended the Trump Tower escalator in 2015, Trump’s public displays of narcissism and penchant for telling lies have prompted controversial warnings from some psychiatrists. But the Republican’s increasingly erratic behavior on the 2024 campaign trail — slurring words, confusing names, rambling far off-topic — has voters asking who really “needs to have their head examined”: some 75-year-old voter worried about Medicare cuts, or Donald John Trump?

It all came to a head Tuesday night right here in the Philadelphia suburbs, when Trump — after interruptions from two medical emergencies in an overheated convention hall — abruptly cut short a promised town hall on women’s issues and declared an impromptu dance party. He swayed on stage for 39 gobsmacking minutes, in front of a crowd speckled with confused faces and people leaving. The candidate looked lost in his own world during the bombast of “Ave Maria” or Sinead O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2U,” before gyrating to the Village People’s “YMCA.”

“Hope he’s OK,” Harris tweeted from her personal account over video highlights from arguably the strangest and, to some, most disturbing moment in the 235-year history of American presidential politics. Matt Drudge of the popular Drudge Report headlined the moment with a lack of political correctness that rivaled Trump’s own: “American Psycho.”

We need to acknowledge that political pundits shouldn’t be making long-distance mental health diagnoses of presidential candidates — something even America’s top psychiatrists and psychologists have been arguing about for the last 60 years. Here’s what is clear: Trump, with his recent run of bizarre behavior, owes it to the American people to offer a full medical report — something Harris did recently while Trump has balked. Voters have a right to demand to know the physical, mental, and cognitive health of the person trailed by a briefcase with codes to blow up the planet.

But there’s another story about Trump and his twisted ideas about mental health, involving how it might affect his policies.

It probably won’t surprise you that — despite his tendency to link mental health to everything from mass shootings to undocumented immigration — the Republican’s actual policies, such as they are, around the issue are either weak or a massive step backward. As the 45th president, Trump would have set mental health care back decades if he’d succeeded in his promise to repeal Obamacare. As a 2024 candidate, Trump has proposed nothing as comprehensive as the regulations rolled out just last month by the Biden-Harris administration to require insurers and providers to expand coverage.

But experts say the worst Trump idea around mental health is his recurring proposal to bring back large-scale mental institutions — the kind that were phased out beginning in the 1970s amid widespread patient abuse scandals, most famously at the Willowbrook State School in Trump’s hometown of New York City — as part of sweeps of the urban homeless, and possibly for involuntary commitment of other people whom an authoritarian Trump finds undesirable.

“We’re going to have to start talking about mental institutions …” the then-president told a governor’s confab after a 2018 school shooting. “You know, in the old days, we had mental institutions. We had a lot of them. And you could nab somebody like this because they … knew something was off.”

As a candidate in 2023, Trump fine-tuned this into a major part of his plan for dealing with the unhoused, declaring that “for those who are severely mentally ill and deeply disturbed, we will bring them back to mental institutions, where they belong, with the goal of reintegrating them back into society once they are well enough to manage.”

Waters, whose three-year-old site dealing with America’s mental health crisis is currently reporting on how Trump’s mass deportation scheme is affecting the psyche of the U.S. immigrant community, said Trump’s plan is “essentially, to have police be the lead figures to address mental health on the streets. Lock them up.” This, he noted, would reverse the last five years of innovative policies to send out more trained mental health responders, especially since police responses to 911 mental health calls have led to a rash of shootings.

There are even more troubling implications. Trump’s open calls for a revenge-minded presidency and to wage war on “the enemy within,” combined with his insistence on policing mental health with involuntary commitment, creates an enormous potential for abuse. His default position of locking people up, from the homeless to undocumented immigrants — in a country already weighed down by the world’s highest rate of mass incarceration — echoes history’s worst strongmen.

Do not sink to Trump’s level and suggest that anyone voting for him on or before Nov. 5 needs to visit a psychiatrist’s couch. What is needed is for Americans to use the critical thinking portion of their brains and decide whether we really want to be a nation ringed by a Trumpian gulag archipelago of new Willowbrooks, bringing back the horrific abuses of 50 years ago. Whatever drama is playing out right now in Trump’s 78-year-old mind to the strains of Luciano Pavarotti or James Brown, we can’t allow this to become America’s problem.

Edited October 19 by Vesper

Vesper · October 19

Trump Wanders Stage for 18 Minutes in Silence After Mic Fails

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Weaponized Polling Is More Dangerous Than Ever

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Pro-Trump dark money network tied to Elon Musk behind fake pro-Harris campaign scheme

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Manufacturing Genocide

The US and UK government have masked their deep complicity in Israel’s genocidal war behind soft criticism and empty pleas for restraint. And the mainstream media, on the whole, have bought it.

Shaping the Narrative

Hiding Complicity

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It’s time to say goodbye to Elon Musk’s X. Changes to blocking online harassment will endanger users.

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Donald Trump’s other mental health problem that we’re not talking about

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Trump Wanders Stage for 18 Minutes in Silence After Mic Fails

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