Trump begged Elon Musk to buy Truth Social. That’s not just funny, it’s dangerous

Posted on March 12, 2024 by Aldous J Pennyfarthing

God has had roughly 4,000 years to reload since Sodom and Gomorrah, so it might not be the best idea to put the two worst people on the planet together in the same place—even if that place is Mar-a-Lago. Nevertheless, Trump and aspiring Bond villain Elon Musk have tempted fate at least once, meeting in Palm Beach, Florida, with top Republican donors a little more than a week ago.

That’s been widely reported, of course—as has the fact that Musk reiterated he wouldn’t be donating to Trump or President Biden this cycle. What hasn’t previously been reported is that Trump has been begging Musk for financial favors since at least last summer, even going so far as to ask the multibillionaire if he’d rescue Trump’s social media company, Truth Social, which at the time appeared to be just a few spots ahead of Xwitter in line for the abattoir.

The Washington Post:

Former president Donald Trump asked Elon Musk last summer whether the billionaire industrialist would be interested in buying Trump’s social network Truth Social, according to two people with knowledge of the conversation.

The overture to Musk, whose business empire includes SpaceX, Tesla and the social networking site X, did not lead to a deal. But the conversation, which has not been previously reported, shows the two men have communicated more than was known. The two have had other conversations, too, Trump advisers say, about politics and business.

Of course, Trump would have loved for Musk—or anyone else, for that matter—to buy Truth Social. It’s been losing money, Lilliputian hand over balled-up angry baby fist, and E. Jean Carroll didn’t even have to sue it.

Just check out these sad financials, which were reported in January:

By the numbers: Truth Social's parent company, Trump Media & Technology Group, generated a total of $3.38 million in revenue for the first nine months of 2023.

It reports a $49 million net loss during the same period, including around $26 million in Q3.

The company's cash-on-hand dwindled to just $1.8 million at the end of September, compared to $2.4 million at the end of June, while its total liabilities climbed nearly 72% to $60.5 million.

Oof. Weird that screeching in all caps about how unfair the world is to gold-plated guys who refuse to return top-secret documents to the government and try to topple Western democracy isn’t somehow more profitable.

Ah, but this is America, the land of opportunity for wealthy serial business failures. Despite consistently sucking wind, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel for Goof Social. Last month, the Securities and Exchange Commission finally paved the way for a merger between Trump Media & Technology Group and Digital World Acquisition Corp., the special purpose acquisition company that seeks to partner with Trump’s company.

And despite an 11th-hour lawsuit launched by two of DWAC’s co-founders—who, in the shock of the century, accused Trump of trying to cheat them out of their investment—he stands poised to rake in some badly needed cash. Because it turns out that continually defaming one’s sexual abuse victims and fraudulently running a real estate empire can contribute a lot to one’s operational overhead.

As The New York Times reports, “If shareholders approve the merger, it would give Trump Media more than $300 million in badly needed cash to keep operating. The deal would also boost Mr. Trump’s net worth by more than $3 billion, based on Digital World’s current stock price.” But last summer, when Trump reportedly proposed the sale to Musk, that merger appeared to be in jeopardy over accusations that DWAC had misled investors.

Of course, while the impending merger appears to offer Trump a lifeline as he faces tens of millions of dollars in legal fees and fines, Trump’s willingness to cozy up to sketchy rich guys as he campaigns to become head of the government that would, in theory at least, be charged with holding said rich guys accountable, is alarming.

And these two have sniped at each other in the past—Musk once said Trump should hang up his hat & sail into the sunset,” and Trump responded by claiming Musk’s platform was “perhaps worthless.” So the fact that Trump begged Musk for what would have amounted at the time to a financial bailout is particularly concerning. Because it really points up the transactional nature of basically everything Trump does.

Needless to say, Trump will have some serious potential conflicts of interest if he becomes president again. Worse even than President Joe Biden’s financial entanglements after he loaned his son $4,140 to buy a truck.

Vox:

“It’s pretty scary from an ethics perspective,” said Virginia Canter, the chief ethics counsel at the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonpartisan watchdog group that has chronicled Trump’s abuses of power and filed lawsuits against him.

You don’t have to look far to find the reasons why. Trump’s first term was riddled with conflicts of interest, and that’s in no small part because of his financial well-being (or lack thereof, depending on how you look at it). At the time that he tried to overturn the 2020 election, he was hundreds of millions of dollars in debt, largely stemming from loans to help rehabilitate his struggling businesses, and most of which would be coming due over the subsequent four years. Throughout his presidency, he refused to divest from his businesses, which made millions of dollars in revenue from taxpayers and continued to do work with other countries while he was in office — a practice he indicated he would repeat in a second term.

The fact that he has so many entanglements with big businesses and other nations leaves plenty of room for things to go awry. That’s why a 2020 New York Times exposé uncovering his staggering debt during his first term wasn’t just embarrassing for Trump, who has a tendency to claim he’s richer than he actually is. It also raised fears about how his debt could implicate national security.

National security was pretty much flushed as soon as Trump dumped dozens of boxes of national secrets into the Mar-a-Lago shitter.

But it could always get worse.

Imagine the kinds of deals a desperate Trump might make while in office—or before then. After all, while the merger between Trump’s company and DWAC will almost certainly go through now, Trump will be barred from selling any of his shares for another six months. And if past is prologue, those shares could be worth less than your Aunt Martha’s Beanie Baby collection by this Christmas.

Is it so hard to imagine, say, Vladimir Putin finding some way to keep Trump afloat in the interim, in exchange for an even sweeter deal on Ukraine? And if not Putin, how about anyone else in a position to leverage a relationship of convenience with a sitting U.S. president?

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington:

Giving the highest and most powerful office in the land to someone deeply in debt and looking for ways to make back hundreds of millions of dollars he lost in court is a recipe for the kinds of corruption that aren’t theoretical when it comes to Trump. There’s a reason that you can’t get a job in the military or the financial services industry, or even referee a major sporting event, if you have a massive amount of debt. And you certainly aren’t getting a security clearance because you become too big of a target for corruption.

Trump’s corruption has always brought with it a threat to national security because he viewed the office of the president as one of self-service rather than public service. He routinely used his position to give paying customers access to the highest officials in the country. He even allowed three Mar-a-Lago members with no government or military experience to shape his administration’s veterans policies in secret. And his first impeachment revolved around Trump’s use of national security aid to Ukraine as leverage for dirt on his political opponent. Even after leaving office, Trump reportedly shared classified nuclear submarine information with an Australian billionaire who only became a Mar-a-Lago member to ingratiate himself with the American president, paying generously to attend galas Trump would attend, while in private saying Trump does business “like the mafia.”

Despite his financial ups and downs in office, one thing remained remarkably consistent: Trump’s laser focus on using the presidency to line his pockets.

In other words? If you thought Trump was a national security threat now, just wait until the Navy’s Sixth Fleet is dispatched to protect Elon Musk’s secret volcano lair—or destroy it, depending on whether the check clears in time.

Check out Aldous J. Pennyfarthing’s four-volume Trump-trashing compendium, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link.

The guy who fetches Donald Trump’s Diet Cokes is innocent, after all. And the dude who’s paid tuppence to baste him in the upstairs bath has already been punished enough.

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Profiles in cowardice: Three years after Jan. 6, GOP leaders won’t hold Trump accountable

Posted on January 6, 2024 by Charles Jay

Sen. John F. Kennedy wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Profiles in Courage” in 1956, focusing on eight U.S. senators Kennedy felt were courageous under intense pressure from the public and their own party. If you were to write a book about Republican House and Senate members in the three years since the Jan. 6 insurrection, you’d have to title it “Profiles in Cowardice.”

Just weeks before the Iowa caucuses, all the members of the GOP House leadership have endorsed former President Donald Trump. That’s the same Trump who sicced a mob on the Capitol, urging his supporters to “fight like hell.” Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a presidential candidate, was asked Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” why Republican politicians remain loyal to Trump. He replied that it’s “a combination of two emotions: fear and ambition.”

That fear can be understood given the results of a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll published Tuesday. It shows that “Republicans are more sympathetic to those who stormed the U.S. Capitol and more likely to absolve Donald Trump of responsibility for the attack then they were in 2021.” That’s despite the twice-impeached former president facing 91 felony counts in four criminal indictments. The poll found:

More than 7 in 10 Republicans say that too much is being made of the attack and that it is “time to move on.” Fewer than 2 in 10 (18 percent) of Republicans say Jan. 6 protesters were “mostly violent,” dipping from 26 percent in 2021.

The poll also found that only 14% of Republicans said Trump bears a great or good amount of responsibility for the Jan. 6 attack, compared with 27% in 2021. So it’s no surprise that Trump feels comfortable on the campaign trail where he regularly downplays the violence on Jan. 6. Yet nine deaths were linked to the Capitol attack, and more than 450 people have been sentenced to prison for their roles in it. The Associated Press reports:

Trump has still built a commanding lead in the Republican primary, and his rivals largely refrain from criticizing him about Jan. 6. He has called it “a beautiful day” and described those imprisoned for the insurrection as “great, great patriots” and “hostages.” At some campaign rallies, he has played a recording of “The Star-Spangled Banner” sung by jailed rioters — the anthem interspersed with his recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance.

YouTube Video

Just Security reported that special counsel Jack Smith has taken notice of “Trump’s repeated embrace of the January 6 rioters” as part of the federal case against him for allegedly plotting to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.

Trump probably should have stuck to the script he read in a video released on Jan. 7, 2021. Trump was under pressure to make a statement after two Cabinet members and several other top administration officials had resigned over the Capitol violence. Trump denounced what he called the “heinous attack” on the U.S. Capitol and said:

“Like all Americans, I am outraged by the violence, lawlessness and mayhem … America is and must always be a nation of law and order.

"The demonstrators who infiltrated the Capitol have defiled the seat of American democracy. To those who engaged in the acts of violence and destruction, you do not represent our country. And to those who broke the law, you will pay."

pic.twitter.com/csX07ZVWGe
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 8, 2021

Of course, Trump couldn’t stick to that script. But the Jan. 6 attack prompted some to prematurely declare the death of Trumpism. In an opinion piece in The Hill on Jan. 7, 2021, Glenn C. Altschuler, professor of American Studies at Cornell University, wrote:

Trumpism has been exposed for what it is: a cancer on the Republican Party and a real threat to democracy in the United States. It is in our power — starting with Republican politicians in Washington, D.C. and red states, the mass media news outlets, as well as voters throughout the country — to make Jan. 6, 2021 the day Trumpism died.

Initially, Republican congressional leaders showed some spine. The New York Times wrote:

In the days after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol building, the two top Republicans in Congress, Representative Kevin McCarthy and Senator Mitch McConnell, told associates they believed President Trump was responsible for inciting the deadly riot and vowed to drive him from politics.

Mr. McCarthy went so far as to say he would push Mr. Trump to resign immediately: “I’ve had it with this guy,” he told a group of Republican leaders, according to an audio recording of the conversation obtained by The New York Times.

But within weeks both men backed off an all-out fight with Mr. Trump because they feared retribution from him and his political movement. Their drive to act faded fast as it became clear it would mean difficult votes that would put them at odds with most of their colleagues.

Just hours after the Capitol attack, 147 Republican lawmakers—a majority of the House GOP caucus and a handful of Republican senators—voted against certifying Biden’s election. Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana, the current House speaker, played a leading role in the effort to overturn the presidential election results. In a radio interview he even repeated the debunked claim about an international conspiracy involving deceased Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez to hack voting machines.

On Jan. 13, 2021, the House voted to impeach Trump for incitement of insurrection, but only 10 House Republicans supported the resolution. Only two of them remain in Congress. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy read the writing on the wall: He made a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago on Jan. 27 to bend the knee to Trump. He realized that he never would become House speaker without Trump’s support. Trump’s Political Action Committee Save America put out this readout of the meeting:

“They discussed many topics, number one of which was taking back the House in 2022,” the statement read. “President Trump’s popularity has never been stronger than it is today, and his endorsement means more than perhaps any endorsement at any time.”

The Senate impeachment trial represented a last chance to drive a stake into Trump’s political career because conviction would have kept him from holding office again. Seven Republican senators voted to convict Trump, but the tally fell 10 votes short of the two-thirds majority required for conviction.

McConnell voted to acquit Trump. In his Feb. 13 speech to the Senate, he said Trump “is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events” of Jan. 6. He suggested that Trump could still be subject to criminal prosecution: “We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former Presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one.”

In 2023, McConnell stayed quiet when asked for reaction to Trump's criminal indictments. But McCarthy and other Republicans joined in defending Trump and criticizing prosecutors. On Aug. 14, 2023, after Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis announced her racketeering and conspiracy indictment against Trump and 18 allies for allegedly trying to overturn the presidential election results in Georgia, McCarthy posted:

Justice should be blind, but Biden has weaponized government against his leading political opponent to interfere in the 2024 election. Now a radical DA in Georgia is following Biden’s lead by attacking President Trump and using it to fundraise her political career. Americans…
— Kevin McCarthy (@SpeakerMcCarthy) August 15, 2023

Trump has now made the outlandish claim that he’s immune from criminal prosecution over his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election because he was serving as president at the time. In a brief filed last Saturday to a federal appeals court, Smith warned that Trump’s claims “threaten to undermine democracy.”

The events of Jan. 6 were a warning that Trump and his MAGA cultists really don’t believe in the Constitution. McKay Coppins, who wrote a biography of Mitt Romney, wrote in The Atlantic that the Utah senator wrestled with whether Trump caused the downfall of the GOP, or if it had always been in play:

Was the authoritarian element of the GOP a product of President Trump, or had it always been there, just waiting to be activated by a sufficiently shameless demagogue? And what role had the members of the mainstream establishment—people like him, the reasonable Republicans—played in allowing the rot on the right to fester?

The feckless Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina has been a weather vane of what’s been happening within the GOP. During the 2016 campaign, he dismissed Trump as a “kook” and “race-baiting bigot” unfit to be president. Then Graham stuck his head up Trump’s posterior once the reality show host became president. On Jan. 6, 2021, Graham declared he had “enough” of Trump and voted to confirm the election results. But in February 2021, Graham made a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to make peace with Trump. Graham’s remarks at the time proved to be quite prescient:

"If he ran, it would be his nomination for the having …" Graham told The Washington Post. "Because he was successful for conservatism and people appreciate his fighting spirit, he's going to dominate the party for years to come.”

Recently, Graham even defended Trump’s presidential immunity claim on CBS’ “Face the Nation”:

“Now, if you're doing your job as president and January 6th he was still president, trying to find out if the election, you know, was on the up and up. I think his immunity claim, I don't know how it will bear out, but I think it's a legitimate claim. But they're prosecuting him for activity around January 6th, he didn't break into the Capitol, he gave a fiery speech, but he's not the first guy to ever do that.”

After Jan. 6, some ultra-right Republicans tried to portray what happened as a largely peaceful protest and absolve Trump of any blame. Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia said many of the people who entered the Capitol on Jan. 6 behaved in an orderly manner as if they were on a "normal tourist visit." Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar blamed the violence on left-wing activists, calling it an “Antifa provocation.”

But now the fringe conspiracy theories have moved into the party’s mainstream as MAGA Republicans have gained influence in Congress. As speaker, McCarthy granted then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson exclusive access to 42,000 hours of Jan. 6 security footage. Carlson used the footage for a show that portrayed the riot as a peaceful gathering. “These were not insurrectionists. They were sightseers,” Carlson said.

Trump claimed Carlson’s show offered “irrefutable” evidence that the rioters had been wrongly accused of crimes and called for the release of those jailed on charges related to the attack, the Associated Press reported. In the December Republican presidential debate, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy pushed the conspiracy theory that the Jan. 6 attack looked “like it was an inside job” orchestrated by federal agents.

Trump has pushed these “deep state” conspiracy theories in filings by his lawyers in the case brought by Smith accusing Trump of attempting to overturn the 2020 election results, The Washington Post reported. The Washington Post-University of Maryland poll found that 34% of Republicans believe the FBI organized and encouraged the Jan. 6 insurrection, compared with 30% of independents and 13% of Democrats.

In a CNN Town Hall in May, Trump said he had no regrets about what happened on Jan. 6 and repeated the Big Lie that the 2020 election “was rigged.” Trump has also portrayed Ashli Babbitt—the Jan. 6 protester who was fatally shot by police as she tried to force her way into the House chamber—as a martyr. He has cast the jailed Jan. 6 insurrectionists as “patriotic” heroes. That should raise alarm bells because there’s a dangerous precedent. After his failed 1923 Munich Beer Hall putsch, Adolf Hitler referred to Nazi storm troopers killed in the attempted coup as blood martyrs. It took Hitler a decade to become chancellor of Germany in 1933.

As we mark the third anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection, Trump is on a faster track to become president again, aided and abetted by right-wing news outlets and social media platforms like Elon Musk’s X.

Biden understands the growing threat to American democracy. That’s why he’s following up his Friday speech in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, about democracy on the brink with an advertising push starting Jan. 6. In the Biden-Harris campaign’s first ad of 2024, Biden says: “Now something dangerous is happening in America. There’s an extremist movement that does not share the basic beliefs in our democracy. All of us are being asked right now, what will we do to maintain our democracy?”

YouTube Video

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The most overhyped stories of 2023

Posted on December 31, 2023 by SemDem

Welcome, fellow political enthusiasts, to the ultimate rundown of the year's most hyped-up, exaggerated, and downright overblown political sagas! From politicians who were hailed as up-and-coming only to fizzle, to news anchors juggling breaking news like hot potatoes, to conspiracy theories juicier than a ripe watermelon on a summer day, I give you my contenders for the most overrated, overreacted, and overhyped political stories of the year!

1. The white knight: Ron DeSantis

Most outlets and pundits, including CNN’s now unemployed Chris Cillizza, said Trump was heading for a reckoning. The Republican Party still wants a right-wing white supremacist wannabe dictator, but one without the immense stupidity and baggage. Whatever to do? DeSantis was the lone bright spot for the Republicans on election night 2022. He defeated the Democratic opponent by nearly 20 points and even won the blue county of Miami-Dade. He really fit the bill: He hated the right people and promoted the wrong people. He had zero qualms with violating the state constitution again and again while daring someone to do something about it. He literally bullied children, attacked teachers, and proceeded to pick fights with our state’s largest employers if they offered the slightest critiques of his destructive policies. Our state legislature gave in to his bullying repeatedly, even allowing him to illegally redraw the political map. DeSantis was the one to watch in 2023, we were told.

So what went wrong? In a word, everything. DeSantis waited too long, he didn’t prepare, and wasn’t used to having to answer real questions from journalists outside of Florida, much less talk and act like a regular human. There was his campaign’s launch, which was a complete disaster on Twitter, and making gaffe after gaffe on the campaign trail. Let’s not forget the viral clips of him awkwardly laughing at nothing, wiping his fingers on supporters, and wearing elf boots to appear taller. He showed everyone that he was one weird dude. He continued to refuse to denounce Nazism, and his campaign even put out ads embracing Nazi imagery. He blew up at reporters for asking sensible questions and decided to go all in on defending the merits of slavery.

His wife, nicknamed “Tacky O” here in Florida, was better, but not by much. She crisscrossed the state with the Moms for Liberty crowd and her “Mamas for DeSantis” before they became super-toxic. She tried to humanize Ron by crying into the camera saying how wonderful he was for finally agreeing to drop off his children at school because there was a brief time she just wasn’t able to. (Because she was fighting cancer!)

Oh, and Ron refused to take on the front-runner he was scared to mention, fearing he’d alienate Trump’s supporters. This was, by far, his dumbest decision. Trump gave him no quarter and used him as a punching bag every day while DeSantis just stood there.

Now Ron is behind Trump in the polls by 39 points ... in Florida! His own state legislature no longer fears him, as most of them have endorsed Trump. DeSantis’ requests for appointments and ideas for legislation have been ignored, which was unheard of last year. His entire political career has collapsed, and he’s been forced to debate other governors since Trump has completely ignored him. The best news is that he won’t even be a contender for 2028. He’s hated by the MAGA crowd and just about everyone else. The most-hyped threat to America is now a joke. It couldn’t have happened to a worse guy.

2. Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter/Twitter Files

There was a time that Twitter was a huge deal. It altered the media landscape, changed our political discourse, and amplified marginalized voices. It provided a platform for citizen journalists and sparked movements like #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter. Yet when plutocrat Elon Musk wanted to control it as his plaything, there was much fear from everyone except the right, who thought they would finally have a wide-ranging legitimate platform to spew their hateful and conspiratorial nonsense. Musk himself promised to release what he dubbed the "Twitter Files" late last year, which several outlets described as a “big deal.”

In fact, it was a desperate attempt to legitimize the well-worn conservative narrative that the suppression of Hunter Biden’s “laptop” proved collusion with the so-called deep state. This had conservatives salivating as they felt it was going to be spectacle on par with the Jan. 6 hearings. Democratic careers would be destroyed and Jim Jordan would lead it all. Kevin McCarthy promised a major hearing.

We're learning in real-time how Twitter colluded to silence the truth about Hunter Biden's laptop just days before the 2020 presidential election.⁰ In 32 days, the new House Republican majority will get answers for the American people and the accountability they deserve.
— Kevin McCarthy (@SpeakerMcCarthy) December 3, 2022

Have you heard or thought about that since? The only thing it “showed” was that Twitter's former content moderators were doing their best to fight political disinformation. When people say “Twitter” now, (I refuse to call it “X”), they don’t think about Hunter Biden’s laptop. They instead associate the word with Elon Musk’s antisemitism and his multibillion-dollar business failure. In fact, 2023 might well be regarded as the fall of Elon.

Gone are the days Elon would make an appearance on “The Big Bang Theory” to cheers or be taken seriously as some kind of scientific guru. What he showed the world is not just what a terrible business man he is, but also what an awful person he is. His attempt to turn a once-prominent social media platform into a forum for the far right has flopped spectacularly, with major advertisers leaving in droves, which happened even before Elon literally told them in a fit of rage to “F off.”

Millions upon millions of users, including many celebrities who made extensive use of the platform, have signed off. And while it’s still being used by some—including me—its reputation is now synonymous with misinformation and hate since Elon decided it was a good idea to elevate Nazis and conspiracy monsters. (As I write this, he has reinstated Alex Jones.) Elon leveraged Tesla stock to buy Twitter, effectively sabotaging both ventures. Twitter, which he bought for $44 billion, is now worth to be estimated somewhere around $19 billion. My dumb cat could have done a better job—at least she wouldn’t have tweeted that Jewish communities were anti-white. The fact that Elon still has money isn’t a testament to his professed “genius,” but rather a testament to how broken our economic system is and the benefits of generational wealth.

Regardless, the hype was misplaced. Twitter once had the power to set the narrative of the masses, and that is what Elon and his ilk wanted. Yet its reputation is in such tatters that it’s seen as just another toxic waste dump that conservatives like to use. Threads, which was Mark Zuckerberg’s answer to Twitter, is abhorrent but it says something that tens of millions of users left Twitter the day it first launched. There are also now other options to use, such as Bluesky and Mastodon, so Twitter becomes more irrelevant each day.

3. NY Times/Sienna poll

After the 2022 midterms, Biden held a comfortable lead over Trump. No one cared. In October this year, a poll showed Trump with a slight lead in several battleground states. Other polls disagreed, but that didn’t matter. The media went nuts, and the typical Democratic bedwetters shouted the sky was falling. Almost immediately after the poll was released, Democrats swept every major race in the 2023 election. They flipped the Virginia House, held the Virginia Senate, elected a Democrat in Kentucky and New Jersey, and damn near almost won Mississippi if not for the shenanigans. They won every ballot measure, every important judgeship, and every important local race. It was one of the best elections in our party’s history. The result? The press doubled down on Biden being in trouble.

Damn. What do you suppose they would have written if the Democrats actually lost?

Need more proof of bias? Our economy is outperforming every metric and is the envy of the world, but people have only recently begun feeling it. It takes time, but it will happen—especially within the next few months.

And yet we have headlines like this:

Really? The economy is booming! (Which could have been its own overhyped story from the doom and gloom predictions last year.) So the economy is great but once again, this means bad news for Joe Biden? I guess if the economy were in the toilet, he’d be better off?

Here we are, one year out. We are winning elections, people are employed, inflation is dropping, and Trump’s convictions haven’t even started. They are going to be coming fast and ugly, and that’s just not going to sell with non-cult suburbia. In fact, the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll said 31% of Republican voters won’t vote for Trump if a jury convicts him of a felony.

Clearly, despite what Republicans say, the media is not Biden’s friend. Trump called to terminate the Constitution and promised to be a dictator on Day One, but you gotta let Trump be Trump, I guess. The media wants a horserace and they’ll get one. But I’m not worried about a poll a year from an election, and you shouldn’t be either. Even good polls only give a snapshot in time, not a prediction one year away. Meanwhile, Biden has more accomplishments under his belt than any Democratic president in modern history, the economy is on the upswing, and the people are just beginning to feel it.

I went back to 2011 for some perspective, and Obama's former campaign manager said the exact same story is playing out.

Nate Silver declared our campaign and President Obama “toast.”

A lot of Democrats romanticize the 2012 Obama campaign. But if you were there, you know it was a knock-down, drag-out battle — not just with Republicans, but with bad media narratives. One such narrative hit us on Nov. 3, 2011, when the New York Times Magazine published an analysis giving Obama a 17 percent chance to win reelection.

When that magazine hit my desk, I knew it was trouble. Not because I believed it, but because of the anxiety it would stir up. Immediately, we had donors, elected officials, and my Mom absolutely freaking out. We couldn’t get supporters to rallies. People were calling for me to be fired.

We all know how that played out. It never changes. The same when we were told there would be a red wave in 2022 and Democrats were in trouble in 2023. Yes, there is a real danger of Trump winning: there is and always was, even if Biden weren’t our nominee. But Biden is doing everything right. He’s not only the incumbent this time, he’s beaten Trump before. He is constantly underestimated, he knows what he’s doing, and he has a crack campaign team. A week is a long time in politics, but a year is an eon.

By the way, multiple polls one year ago were coronating Ron DeSantis, including this one reported by U.S. News and World Report:

The Florida governor would beat Trump by double-digits in four critical states, according to a poll released by an influential conservative group just a day before the former president may announce his 2024 bid.

4. Numerous GOP House investigations

Most stories about the imminent GOP takeover of the House last year focused on the myriad investigations that would haunt the Biden administration. The “weaponization of government” was supposed to be the big one, and it flopped as hard as Kevin McCarthy’s disastrous impeachment inquiry. It was so bad that even Fox News chose not to cover it. But there were so many hearings, and none of them stuck. There were hearings on border security, Afghanistan, one on the deep state (seriously), the Biden family’s business practices, Hunter Biden’s laptop, the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, and even one on the Pentagon’s alleged cover-up of space aliens. Great job. I’m not even touching the litany of attempts to find things to impeach Biden, which is still ongoing one year later.

Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives.

The fact is that most of these groups only met once or twice, didn’t have anyone of substance attending outside of discredited right-wing cranks, and was completely ignored by the public. Even right-wing outlets were embarrassed and frustrated. People know exactly what the Republicans are trying to do in the House, and they just aren’t interested.

In fact, there were only two big stories from the House this year: the fact that they couldn’t pick a leader, and the fact that the GOP had to admit in their official report that they found no wrongdoing by Joe Biden. But that hasn’t stopped them from trying. Nothing they do at this point is going to hurt Biden next year because their sham investigations are a joke, and all the press energy is going to be sucked up by Trump’s actual multiple criminal cases. That is the most painful reality of all that the right wing is now facing.

5. Trump’s indictments will rip this country apart

Once again at good ol’ CNN:

“A criminal prosecution of an ex-president and current presidential candidate by the administration that succeeded him would subject the country’s political and judicial institutions to more extreme strain than even Trump has yet managed. If Trump were indicted, the uproar could be so corrosive that it’s fair to ask whether such an action would be truly in the national interest – assuming special counsel Jack Smith assembles a case that would have a reasonable chance of success in court.”

It wasn’t as bad as when the disgraced former CNN legal pundit Jeff Toobin begged Merrick Garland not to prosecute Trump, or when Trump himself promised “death and destruction” if he were to be indicted for his many crimes. I remember watching a pundit this time last year calling the Jan. 6 riots a “tea party” compared to the violence that would occur if Trump was indicted. Trump also promised the biggest protest the world would ever see would happen after his first indictment.

This is the reality of what actually happened.

Two lone demonstrators show their support for the former President outside of Trump Tower pic.twitter.com/ImxAAOFhEd
— Dean_Moses (@Dean_Moses) March 21, 2023

More reporters than protesters showed up. But the second time would be different. Then the third time. Nope. Then the fourth time:

Jack Smith was there. Gave live shots of the massive protest at tRump's 4th indictment. So scary! https://t.co/GdzzSGXjj4
— Lea💙DragonSlayin💛💙SoothSayin💙💛VaXXinatedLib🟧 (@LeeZee_Bee) August 14, 2023

I’m hearing the same garbage now about if Trump is jailed for his crimes that it will amount to a civil war. It won’t. The people who ruined their lives storming the Capitol serve as a reminder to everyone who thinks about putting their lives in jeopardy for Trump. He could have pardoned all of the J6 insurrectionists, but didn’t do that for any of them. He just doesn’t care. He desperately wants violence and has outright called for it, but it hasn’t happened. There will be a few nutballs for sure, but we’ll deal with them.

6. Moms for Liberty school takeover:

Going on the Google time machine, there many stories about this new powerful group—some of which were cheered:

The lazy media bought into the narrative that it was just two moms selling T-shirts that spawned a nationwide movement on banning books, bullying LGBTQ+ teens, and terrorizing teachers and administrators. The fact that this was an astroturfed right-wing takeover attempt of public schools funded by spiteful billionaires didn’t seem to register at first.

Protest sign outside Moms for Liberty Joyful Warriors summit in Pennsylvania.

Yet their multiple times quoting Hitler, their open antisemitism, their bigoted book bans on everything from Anne Frank to Amanda Gorman, and their designation as a hate group turned many people against them. And that’s not to mention their most recent sex scandal. (Don’t all right-wing “values” groups have at least one sex scandal?)

The most recent election gave them a drubbing even in deep red areas. The headlines now read a little differently:

USA Today: “A Moms for Liberty pep talk after big election losses to 'filthy liberal book huggers'”
Miami Herald: “If Moms for Liberty co-founder had sex with a woman, why is she targeting Florida’s gays?”
Business Insider: “Book banning Moms for Liberty just got canceled by US voters”

They’ll still be around next year, but no one is tolerating their BS anymore, least of all this amazing Sarasota student who was personally attacked by Bridget Zeigler, the Moms for Liberty co-founder on the Sarasota school board who is embroiled in a sex scandal and refuses to resign.

Holy shit — this is fucking fire. 🔥pic.twitter.com/25olipJkje
— Jo (@JoJoFromJerz) December 17, 2023

Those are my picks. If you have any that you think I missed, please put in the comments.

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Carlson turns a sober warning of Russian threat into a false claim of extortion

Posted on December 8, 2023 by Mark Sumner

Speaking before Congress on Tuesday, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin warned the House Foreign Affairs Committee that failing to stop Russia in Ukraine could mean much greater costs in the future. That included the possibility of deploying U.S. troops to Europe should Putin invade a NATO ally.

Republican representatives present at the event seemed to get it. As The Messenger reports, House Foreign Affairs Chairman Michael McCaul understood Austin’s warning. “If [Vladimir] Putin takes over Ukraine, he'll get Moldova, Georgia, then maybe the Baltics,” McCaul said following the briefing. He noted that the idea of more troops on the ground in Europe was “what we're trying to avoid."

However, by Thursday, fired Fox News pundit and Putin supporter Tucker Carlson had distorted Austin’s words into what Carlson insisted was an attempt at extorting further aid for Ukraine. Writing on X (formerly Twitter), Carlson claimed that Austin threatened to send “your uncles, cousins and sons to fight Russia” unless more money was handed over to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Not surprisingly, every word of this was a lie—a lie even Fox News has debunked.

Fox’s chief national security correspondent Jennifer Griffin responded that Carlson’s claim was “100 percent not true.” What Austin said was what many officials have said from the outset: Failing to stop Russia in Ukraine invites Putin to expand his ambitions to other countries in Europe.

None of the language that Carlson used in his post has been confirmed by any other source. That didn’t stop X owner Elon Musk from wading in to reply, asking Carlson, “He really said this?” to which Carlson replied, “He really did. Confirmed.”

Except no. Had Austin actually said this before a Republican-led House committee, Congress members would have emerged from the room boiling mad, and it would have been the major story of the day. They didn’t, and it wasn’t, because Austin never made the statement Carlson claims.

In May, USA Today produced a timeline of Carlon’s extensive love affair with Russia. It includes such highlights as Carlson claiming that American liberals hate America more than Putin and claiming that reporters interfered in the 2016 election more than Russia because they released “the Access Hollywood tapes.” And there’s this:

YouTube Video

Carlson is now deliberately attempting to fuel conspiracy theories around U.S. support for Ukraine and weaken the Ukrainian military. As Carlson was posting his false claims, Austin was in Ukraine, where he spoke with Zelenskyy and informed him that no more assistance was forthcoming unless Congress appropriated additional funds.

Warnings like the one Austin delivered in Congress have been a constant feature of military analysis since the illegal, unprovoked invasion of Ukraine began on Feb. 24, 2022. As NATO Review made clear in July 2022, “Putin’s regime has chosen confrontation with the ‘collective West,’ irrespective of the costs for Russia itself.”

Russian leadership has threatened that the war will continue into Poland, the Balkans, and even Germany and the U.K. Putin wants to crush the West, write his name in the history books, and restore the Russian empire.

What Austin said isn’t extortion, or even controversial. If Putin is allowed to benefit from an illegal invasion, he will do it again. Right now, the Ukrainian army is doing an amazing job of smashing Russian forces and destroying thousands of tanks, armored vehicles, and aircraft. But they are fighting an enemy that vastly outnumbers them in manpower, equipment, and wealth. They cannot succeed without sustained assistance.

If he wins in Ukraine, Putin will next bring the war to an allied nation that the U.S. has sworn to defend using our own forces. The cost of that will be vastly greater than anything being provided to Ukraine and if Congress doesn’t act, that’s where the world is headed.

That’s not extortion: That’s the truth. And it’s why Russian state media is thrilled about what Republicans have been doing to block funding for Ukraine—and why Putin has sent his congratulations to Republicans for their work in blocking Ukrainian assistance.

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Musk leaks Twitter documents to pursue his own agenda, making Twitter a more dangerous platform

Posted on December 5, 2022 (Updated December 5, 2022) by Hunter

It's been an eventful weekend in Muskland, and as usual every act boils down to Elon Musk making some new attempt to make Twitter worse. Say what you want about Musk, but the creativity of his approach is impressive; the man keeps inventing new ways to make Twitter worth less than it was the day before. Could you do that? No, probably not. Even more impressive is Musk's creativity in inventing new disasters for Twitter that don't involve white supremacists or Nazi sympathizers.

The big news, or what was supposed to be big news until it flopped, was Musk's release of internal Twitter communications that showed employees agonizing over the company's October 2020 decision to block a New York Post story in which the Post claimed it had obtained access to—insert drumroll here—"Hunter Biden's laptop." In a fairly interminable Twitter thread, former big-name journalist turned Substacker Matt Taibbi shared snippets of the internal debate that were provided to him by Musk.

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The big news, as Taibbi would have it, was that this internal debate existed; we already know, however, that Twitter would soon reverse its decision and that the company saw this particular episode as an unforced error on its part. What Taibbi (who is not a credible voice on these matters) glosses over are the reasons why Twitter, along with nearly every other major non-Rupert Murdoch-owned news outlet, was so wary of the Post's October "surprise." The news that the contents of a laptop belonging to "Hunter Biden" had somehow been delivered to Rudy Giuliani and other pro-Trump provocateurs was enough to cause skepticism of itself, given that Giuliani was embroiled in a years-long effort to manufacture a new pro-Russia hoax that would claim that it was Russia's enemy Ukraine and U.S. Democratic figures who were the true villains behind the Russian government's interventions on Trump's behalf in the 2016 presidential elections. The FBI had even warned Twitter beforehand that there was reason to believe a Russia-backed disinformation campaign targeting Hunter Biden, specifically, was in the works. The Post refused to provide evidence of its claims to more reputable media outlets, and many observers inside and outside Twitter indeed saw all the makings of a Giuliani-backed, possibly Russian-backed election eve hoax.

If it wasn't a hoax, new factors came into play: Was the laptop's data stolen, and would publishing information from a stolen device constitute a crime? What evidence could the Post provide that even if the data was genuine, it hadn't been altered between the time it left Hunter Biden's possession and, through a series of suspect events, landed in the Post's possession? (And, it turns out, the data had indeed been altered.)

We still don't have solid answers to any of it, but the internal Twitter debate was initially premised on suspicions that the Post's "laptop" story stood good chance of either being a Giuliani-tied hoax or the product of a criminal data hack. Twitter later reevaluated those odds and reversed itself, but if you were to ask anyone not on the Trump campaign's personal go-to lists whether or not they could vouch for a story that seemed to be pulled quite directly from the same Giuliani-promoted anti-Ukraine propaganda efforts that led to Donald Trump's first impeachment trial, you can begin to understand why Twitter's trust and safety teams were falling over themselves to determine whether the notoriously sensationalist Post had just willingly fallen for a hoax or, worse from Twitter's standpoint, were abetting a crime.

All of this is fairly interesting from a content moderation standpoint ... and that's about it. For a thread exploring just what it does and doesn't mean, however, you can try here.

It also can't be overlooked that a very great deal of the controversy revolves around conservatives wanting to expose pornographic images of Hunter Biden found on the "laptop," in the name of constitutional free speech or somesuch. Revenge porn is not, however, generally considered free speech. Nor do we have any concrete explanation for why the crowd currently beside themselves with theories about "groomers" continues to be so fired up in their demands that they be able to post images of penises, though the Jordan-Gaetz wing of the party could probably shed some light on that for us and will no doubt make it their mission to do so whether we want them to or not.

Alternatively you can do what Donald Trump Jr. did: Snort a hell of a lot of something and melt the absolute bejeebers down because being able to expose private information and images of a politician's grown-ass adult son is the most important issue of our modern era:

Junior is upset that the media isn’t making a big deal out of the Hunter story, and says that 70% of people would’ve switched their vote in 2020 if they had known about it. pic.twitter.com/dUgjdnol1s
— Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@RonFilipkowski) December 4, 2022

It's not clear Uday here is really thinking through the consequences of his assertions that probing the private life of a prominent American politician's drug-fueled failson is absolutely something that must be done, but if that clip is any indication he won't be able to think through such things until he gets three full days of sleep and at least a few bags of IV fluid.

The biggest takeaway from the story, however, might be its impact on Twitter itself. In a wide-ranging Twitter Spaces Q&A session featuring a vaudevillian cast of supporting characters, Elon Musk claimed he has given full access to internal Twitter emails and documents to Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and to at least one other person.

Musk's goal appears to be to hunt for justification for his claims that Twitter has acted to "give preference to left wing candidates" here and abroad; in order to find such evidence, Musk is relying on at least two would-be investigators who have focused their current careers on making such claims.

Whether you work for Twitter or simply use the platform, Musk has now demonstrated that he's willing to publicly release your work for the purposes of backing his own conservative agenda.

That's going to be an existential problem—literally—for protesters in other countries who have used Twitter to organize and to evade government speech restrictions. If Musk is willing to open up private employee communications in order to target, by name, employees and groups who he believes favor the "left," will the Musk-led company be similarly eager to expose the direct messages of those who have run afoul of conservative Saudi and Iranian regimes? And what of Ukraine, where Twitter is a dominant means of tracking—often anonymously—both military movements and likely war crimes?

Can U.S. journalists themselves trust that Musk will not personally take an interest in their own direct messages on the social network, or release those private messages if he believes they show "bias" against his own friends and allies?

Musk's apparent move to provide anti-left "investigators" with years of internal employee records goes beyond making Twitter a more dodgy place for advertisers and for attention-grabbing celebrities and journalists. It demonstrates Twitter to be a now inherently unsafe place for anyone who might someday run afoul of Musk and his personal agenda. It wipes out Twitter as an organizing tool—unless, of course, you're a white supremacist, neo-Nazi sympathizer, crypto scammer, conservative propagandist, or other Musk ally.

Yes, that brings us to the final story of the weekend: Musk's order to reinstate celebrity train wreck Kanye West, even though West had been suspended from Twitter for antisemitic statements, ended precisely how everyone but Musk thought it would after Musk was again forced to suspend West after West tweeted, in the immediate aftermath of an Alex Jones appearance in which he praised Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, an image that merged the Star of David with the Nazi swastika.

Because Musk continues to know absolutely nothing about anything when it comes to running a social media network, First Amendment-thumping conman Musk falsely claimed he was obliged to suspend West because showing the image was a violation of American law. This is an outrageously false statement, and one that proves Musk to be an absolute buffoon when it comes to interpreting "free speech" rights or anything else.

It does, however, hint at yet another way Musk may be getting Twitter into very hot regulatory waters. Displaying Nazi symbols is not illegal in the United States, but it can be illegal in Germany. As an international company, Twitter must navigate an ever-bubbling stew of international regulations, and must now do so despite Musk's removal of most of the staff responsible for knowing those regulations and abiding by them.

There's no question that West tweeted the symbol as an intentional nod to Nazis, but whether that specific image would run afoul of German law is unclear. What's considerably more dangerous to Musk is his own order that previously banned hate accounts, including neo-Nazi figures, be unbanned. There appear to be around 12,000 suspended accounts so far reactivated, including QAnon hoaxers, spam accounts, "adult content" distributors, and the heads of several notorious white supremacist groups.

At the same time, Twitter moderation is grappling, poorly, with far-right and fascist attempts to get anti-fascist watchdog accounts banned en masse by flooding Twitter with false reports targeting those users. The far-right may not need help, however, given that Musk himself has been publicly asking far-right figures to provide him with lists of accounts they believe should be suspended.

Oh—and in the meantime, the re-launch of "Twitter Blue" remains stymied by rampant identity theft concerns and now, a Musk-led attempt to dodge Apple App Store fees.

So there's where things stand now. Twitter is suspending watchdog accounts that report on the doings of extremist far-right groups, a far-right campaign that is successful in large part because Twitter now doesn't have enough moderators to police against the gaming of their systems. Musk himself is publicly appealing to extremist figures to report their enemies. And Musk is releasing internal Twitter communications to a handpicked list of right-leaning investigators in a move that is already resulting in the far-right targeting of Twitter employees who made (or didn't make) decisions that Musk personally suspects to have been motivated by hostility towards the right.

Whether it's time to leave Twitter, at least for the moment, is up to you. But know the platform is now inherently "unsafe" in that Musk has proven willing to use his ownership to selectively leak whatever he personally believes might provide him with an advantage. In the meantime the question of Twitter's short-term viability is entirely out of our hands; Musk is on a collision course with European regulators, with the Federal Trade Commission, and with the site's own teetering stability.

With the reinstatement of high-profile hate accounts and new warnings from federal officials predicting that new Twitter-published hate speech will lead to extremist violence, it's now impossible to name any Musk action that hasn't had the immediate result of making Twitter less profitable, less reliable, and far more dangerous.

Musk's only hope for keeping Twitter alive is circling down the drain of that sink he carried in

More top Twitter executives resign, warning that Musk is exposing the company to massive legal risks