2024 US presidential election

[SeanAU]

RFK Jnr bails on the Democratic nomination .... will as an independent.

Robert Francis Kennedy Junior announced on Monday that he was ending his challenge to the incumbent US President Joe Biden for the Democratic Party nomination and leaving the party to run in 2024 as an independent.

Speaking in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, RFK Jr. declared “independence from the two political parties and the corrupt interests that dominate them, and the entire rigged system of rancor and rage, corruption and lies, that has turned government officials into indentured servants of their corporate bosses.”

Hollywood director Rob Reiner, an outspoken Democrat, also denounced RFK. Jr’s announcement as “a dangerous and cynical move by wealthy Republicans to put [former President Donald] Trump back” in the White House. “I talked with Bobby and told him that what he is doing could destroy American Democracy. He didn’t care,” Reiner added.

Q: How can you destroy what does not exist?

A Rasmussen Reports poll in September showed that 25% of Democrats would back Kennedy in the primaries, but 33% would vote for him if he ran as an independent.

Four of RFK Jr’s siblings disavowed their brother’s actions, however, calling his announcement “deeply saddening” and denouncing his third-party candidacy as “perilous for our country.”

“Bobby might share the same name as our father, but he does not share the same values, vision or judgment,” his sister Kerry Kennedy said on X. The denunciation was also signed by Rory Kennedy, former Congressman Joe Kennedy III, and Kathleen Kennedy Townsend.

Note: You can't choose your family.

Kennedy launched his primary challenge to Biden in April, but has since accused the party of changing its rules to benefit the incumbent and complained that Biden would not grant him Secret Service protection. His father, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, was assassinated in 1968 while running for president. His uncle, President John F. Kennedy, was assassinated in 1963.

The US “sits atop a bubbling cauldron of fury,”  RFK Jr. said in the Philadelphia speech, describing Americans as “angry at being left out, left behind, swindled, cheated, and belittled by a smug elite that has rigged the system in its favor.”

“Instead of two parties, we have a uniparty, a monster with two faces loudly bickering with itself as it lumbers over a cliff. At the bottom of that cliff lies the destruction of our country,” he added.

He described it as “painful” to give up on the party where his father, uncles, grandfather and both great-grandfathers helped build, but compared it to the risk the country’s founders undertook in 1776, when they rebelled against the British crown.

https://www.rt.com/news/584489-kennedy-independent-us-president/

How could any of this report be deemed 'Russian propaganda' is mind boggling.

[SeanAU]

This week’s decision by the Colorado Supreme Court to bar former President Trump from the presidential ballot has led to expected repercussions:

Republicans across the country are threatening revenge barring Biden from Red state ballots.

Suddenly, after just one small thing happens and civil war is not such a far off notion after all.

btw small factoid - not one of the thousands of Jan 6 convictions that were sent to prison were charged with Insurrection.

[Rodius]

This week’s decision by the Colorado Supreme Court to bar former President Trump from the presidential ballot has led to expected repercussions:

Republicans across the country are threatening revenge barring Biden from Red state ballots.

Suddenly, after just one small thing happens and civil war is not such a far off notion after all.

btw small factoid - not one of the thousands of Jan 6 convictions that were sent to prison were charged with Insurrection.

Trump will use this as the spark to ignite a bigger fire.
If he gets to run, I would put money on him winning

[The Walrus]

This week’s decision by the Colorado Supreme Court to bar former President Trump from the presidential ballot has led to expected repercussions:

Republicans across the country are threatening revenge barring Biden from Red state ballots.

Suddenly, after just one small thing happens and civil war is not such a far off notion after all.

btw small factoid - not one of the thousands of Jan 6 convictions that were sent to prison were charged with Insurrection.

This is a sad precedent, and will likely backfire.  The U.S. Supreme Court will need to decide this quit, lest Trump supporters use this as rallying cry.  I can see it now, “remember Colorado!”

[LeftyLarry]

This week’s decision by the Colorado Supreme Court to bar former President Trump from the presidential ballot has led to expected repercussions:

Republicans across the country are threatening revenge barring Biden from Red state ballots.

Suddenly, after just one small thing happens and civil war is not such a far off notion after all.

btw small factoid - not one of the thousands of Jan 6 convictions that were sent to prison were charged with Insurrection.

This is a sad precedent, and will likely backfire.  The U.S. Supreme Court will need to decide this quit, lest Trump supporters use this as rallying cry.  I can see it now, “remember Colorado!”

The US is still a democracy and my guess is this will be overturned by the Supreme Court and/ or Coloradans will write in Trumps name Election Day and he will carry the State .

Trump is carrying African- American votes at the highest level ever for Republicans in recent polls and young voters are moving to his side also , along with a rising number of Hispanic Americans , even with cheating, seems like there is a high probability he will defeat Biden next November .
Then the fun begins as he puts it to the EU and China very quickly.
No, we do not want globalization and we certainly don’t want any treaties that will restrict America’s ability to act as a sovereign nation , those days will be over.

[Rodius]

This week’s decision by the Colorado Supreme Court to bar former President Trump from the presidential ballot has led to expected repercussions:

Republicans across the country are threatening revenge barring Biden from Red state ballots.

Suddenly, after just one small thing happens and civil war is not such a far off notion after all.

btw small factoid - not one of the thousands of Jan 6 convictions that were sent to prison were charged with Insurrection.

This is a sad precedent, and will likely backfire.  The U.S. Supreme Court will need to decide this quit, lest Trump supporters use this as rallying cry.  I can see it now, “remember Colorado!”

The US is still a democracy and my guess is this will be overturned by the Supreme Court and/ or Coloradans will write in Trumps name Election Day and he will carry the State .

Trump is carrying African- American votes at the highest level ever for Republicans in recent polls and young voters are moving to his side also , along with a rising number of Hispanic Americans , even with cheating, seems like there is a high probability he will defeat Biden next November .
Then the fun begins as he puts it to the EU and China very quickly.
No, we do not want globalization and we certainly don’t want any treaties that will restrict America’s ability to act as a sovereign nation , those days will be over.

How cute... you still think the US is a democracy.

Spoiler alert... it is a facade

And understand this... the more protectionist a Nation becomes, the worse it becomes for that nation. It is a sign of a failing empire as well.
ANd people like Trump rising to leadership rolls is another sign of a failing state.

Trump is likely to win.
He will retreat from NATO (which I tend to agree with), and sticking it to China will not work the way Trump seems to think.

And should the US suddenly withdraw from the many places they are stationed, vaccuums will appear and those locations will suffer for it which.... oddly enough, creates more people who hate the US.
Look at Bin Laden as the classic case of the US creating the monsters that hit back and the US calls evil.... the US funded him then stopped then bad things happened just because the US decided to stop suddenly.

Anyway, Trump is likely to win so we will get to see what happens.
My money is on bad things happening everywhere teh US changes direction and if Trump pushes China, it will go bad for Trump

[SeanAU]

falsely accused corrupt politician Frank Underwood indicates a likely tilt at the 2024 presidency during an  interview with Tucker Carlson on xmas eve.  excellent insightful 7 mins video

https://www.swentr.site/news/589675-kevin-spacey-teases-politics-tucker/

[SeanAU]

So Trump will be the GOP nomination .... barring acts of god, courts, or miracles.

Acknowledging there was no “clear path to victory” following his second-place finish in Iowa, where he lost to Trump by some 30 points, DeSantis reasoned that Trump was a better choice for commander-in-chief than incumbent President Joe Biden – or the next Republican runner-up, former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley.

[SeanAU]

The American Crack-Up - Unherd

The nation remains blinded by a veil of madness

    > Americans now find themselves living in an oligarchy administered day-to-day by institutional bureaucracies that move in lock-step with each other, enforcing a set of ideologically-driven top-down imperatives that seemingly change from week-to-week and cover nearly every subject under the sun. <

    > So where did it start? The collapse of the 20th-century print pyramid and its replacement by the cracked mirror of the internet clearly had something to do with the current madness. The election of Donald Trump, and the subsequent rise of the Russiagate conspiracy theory, which was promoted by Trump-phobic elites as fact, both helped to make insanity and illogic the coin of everyday political discourse. Once that happened, it didn’t take much to drive the entire country mad. <

https://unherd.com/2024/01/the-american-crack-up/

[morganism]

Why the Politics of Republican Latinos Suggests They Want To Be White | Opinion

As our country gears up for another racially fraught presidential election, many political observers are wondering whether the roughly 30 percent of Latinos who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020 will once again support a Republican candidate who is openly xenophobic and anti-Latino. The answer is very likely "yes" because many of these Latinos want to be white—but not in the way that you're thinking.

To understand this Latino puzzle, we must transform our understanding about whiteness in America. Most people view white people as a group whose membership depends on skin color and other observable traits. But there is a more telling, and perhaps more accurate, way of thinking about this group as one whose membership is based on an ideological way of thinking—a worldview that demands both hierarchy and domination of others. Only with this perspective in mind can we begin to better understand Latino Republicans in contemporary times.

The conventional view of race in America is that it is a social construction: an imagined but meaningful category with real consequences for people's lives. This perspective views white people as being comprised exclusively of individuals whose skin color is relatively light and who find their ancestral origins in Western Europe. But in the current moment, this understanding cannot explain why so many Latinos keep such close political company with a mostly white Republican Party.

Consider Enrique Tarrio, former leader of the white supremacist organization, the Proud Boys, and ally of former President Donald Trump. Enrique is a dark-skinned Cuban man who looks unmistakably Latino. Yet he fundamentally thinks like many Republican white people in ideological terms.

What Enrique Tarrio and other Latino Republicans today have in common is their earnest and devout investment in whiteness as an ideology. If whiteness is an ideology, then your skin color and racial classification do not matter as much as your genuine belief in a subjugating worldview. If whiteness is an ideology, then what earns you your bona fides is your commitment to pushing back, politically, and sometimes violently, against a variety of minoritized groups who "deserve" to be put in their place and kept there.

Does this mean that Latino Republicans are ashamed of their ethnic origins and would rather be white? Yes, in an ideological sense.

What Republican Latinos, today, are reacting to is the prevailing—and accurate—understanding of Latinos as a mostly progressive, Democratic-leaning, and genuinely aggrieved group. Latino Republicans aspire to be the kind of Latino who thinks that racial and ethnic minorities—especially Black people—"complain too much;" who think that women should be "seen, not heard;" who believe we are being overrun by "lawbreaking illegal immigrants;" who feel that homosexuals and transgender individuals are "unnatural aberrations," and so on. It is an ideological thread that connects all of these opinions together. Research showed that Latino supporters of nativist candidates like Donald Trump share a worldview that—among other things—denies the continued prevalence of racism in the lives of many Latinos and other people of color, despite wide evidence to the contrary.

Why are so many Latinos drawn to this ideology?

In a field of race relations where white people are still—even if precariously—the dominant racial group, many Latinos are psychologically compelled to affirm this status quo by ideologically joining in whiteness. Mounting data-driven research showed that for many individuals, there is a stronger sense of security in bolstering how things are rather than embracing a highly uncertain future—such as a changing field of relations between white people and people of color.

My own research in this area has examined what belief in this status quo does to some Latinos. Our data showed that when Latinos are reminded about the virtues of the American Dream—the popular but bankrupt idea that one can get ahead by simply working hard—they become more likely to agree with ideas like "society is set up so that people usually get what they deserve."

In turn, the more Latinos agree with these notions, the more supportive they become of harsher policies toward undocumented Latino immigrants, including ending temporary relief from deportation for undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children. For these Latinos, if the way of doing things seems good and fair, then it is important to protect that system against its alleged enemies—even if some of those enemies are other Latinos. This way of thinking has found fertile ground in the Republican Party.

As these and other examples suggest, it is a shared ideology with Republicans that allows Latinos to access whiteness. This is a key lesson to grasp—and fast.

Public shaming of Republican Latinos as race-traitors, turncoats, or other names that impugn their credentials as "real" ethnics is unproductive and will not work because they are ideologically opposed to thinking of Latinos as a racially aggrieved member of the Democratic coalition, where the grand majority of Latinos exist (about 66 percent, actually). In fact, Latino Republicans revel in being a persona non grata among the larger Latino community as currently defined. The sooner we adapt to this reality, the better equipped we'll be to combat it in the marketplace of ideological ideas.

Efrén Pérez is a professor of political science and psychology at UCLA and director of its Race, Ethnicity, Politics & Society (REPS) Lab.

https://www.newsweek.com/why-politics-republican-latinos-suggests-they-want-white-opinion-1874029

[zenith]

get it through your skulls, the republic is dead. 'democracy' is a las vegas show, a theme park, a potemkin village. it's a bad joke.

Nobody With Real Power Cares If You Refuse To Vote For Biden
https://caityjohnstone.medium.com/nobody-with-real-power-cares-if-you-refuse-to-vote-for-biden-4bf6851d6815

Caitlin Johnstone RED PILLS Readers on 2024 Election

[SeanAU]

Col. Douglas McGregor has issued his own version of State-of-the-Union address, covering all topics, not just military ones. 11 minutes.
https://rumble.com/embed/v4fb2n3/?pub=4

I do wonder how accurate / balanced all the data points are he mentions.

[SeanAU]

US is not a democracy – Putin
The Russian leader has called the political situation in the United States a “catastrophe”

Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that by criticizing democratic processes in other states, all while using their own administrative resources to suppress one of American presidential candidates, Washington has become a laughing stock of the rest of the world.

Speaking to the journalists at his campaign headquarters in Moscow on early Monday morning, after the preliminary results indicated his victory with over 87% of the vote in the country’s presidential elections, the Russian leader said that the "whole world is laughing at what is happening” in the US.

“We are behaving with more restraint than their opponents in other countries, but this is just a catastrophe, not a democracy – that’s what it is,” Putin said.

“I think it’s obvious to everyone that the American political system cannot claim to be democratic in any sense of the word,” he said in an interview with journalist Dmitry Kiselyov. Putin refused to comment further on the current presidential campaign in the US, but described the atmosphere as becoming “increasingly uncivilized.”

RT

[morganism]

(excellent article calling out polling and rural vs. urban voter resentments)

 What Liberals Get Wrong About ‘White Rural Rage’ — Almost Everything

The ‘White Rural Rage’ narrative gets the research wrong. I know, because some of it is mine.

If you’ve been watching television or tracking trending topics over the last few weeks, you’ve probably seen or read something about “white rural rage.” This is owed to the publication of a new book, White Rural Rage, by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman, whose thesis is that white rural Americans, despite representing just 16 percent of the American electorate, are a “threat to the world’s oldest constitutional democracy.”

In an interview on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Schaller gave this unvarnished assessment of the rage he sees overflowing in the heartland. Rural whites, he said, are “the most racist, xenophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-gay geo-demographic group in the country.” He called them, “the most conspiracist group,” “anti-democratic,” “white nationalist and white Christian nationalists.” On top of that, rural whites are also “most likely to excuse or justify violence as an acceptable alternative to peaceful public discourse.”

This premise has triggered a backlash towards rural voters from some on the left. Amanda Marcotte, writing for Salon, said she’s tired of handling rural voters “with kid gloves,” and time has come to pop the “racist, homophobic, sexist bubble” they all live in. Daily Beast columnist Michael Cohen agreed, writing that “these aren’t hurtful, elitist stereotypes by Acela Corridor denizens and bubble-dwelling liberals… they’re facts.” David Corn, the D.C. bureau chief at Mother Jones, piled on, agreeing that “white rural voters [are] the slice of the public that endangers the constitutional future of the republic.”

This latest obsession with rural rage is nothing new. After 2016, when rural voters in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania put former President Donald Trump over the top, Democrats tried to figure out why they had gone so sour on the Democratic Party. Some liberal thinkers called out the left’s reflexive condescension and dismissal of rural voters that escalated during the George W. Bush administration and peaked with Hillary Clinton’s campaign and her dismissal of Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables.” Some said the party should increase attention to rural issues and nearby rural communities.

But don’t be misled. The publication and widespread celebration of White Rural Rage among progressive circles is doing something different than those post-2016 post-mortems. It is not an attempt to understand the needs and concerns of rural America. Instead, it’s an outpouring of frustration with rural America that might feel cathartic for liberals, but will only serve to further marginalize and demonize a segment of the American population that already feels forgotten and dismissed by the experts and elites.

The people doing the work of protecting democracy in rural America recognized this immediately. The morning of the MSNBC interview, I woke up to a mountain of messages and threads from rural organizers, community activists and local officials from across the country. Each one was distressed over what they considered the authors’ harsh and hurtful accusations about the communities they cherish and strive to uplift.

What seemingly set apart this book is that the authors claimed to have data backing up their assertions. “We provide the receipts,” Schaller said in the interview. What is their data, my friends and colleagues asked, and why do they get it so wrong?

Imagine my surprise when I picked up the book and saw that some of that research was mine.

I’m an academic who studies rural Americans and lives in rural Maine. My job and passion is to pore over reams of data, including some of the largest surveys of rural voters ever conducted. Sitting on my computer are detailed responses from over 25,000 rural voters that I have conducted over the last decade and used to publish a range of peer-reviewed and widely cited research. And I’ve done it all largely to make sense of why rural voters are continually drawn to the Republican Party.

But the thing about rage — I’ve never found it.

(snip)
Bottom line: The “threats” to democracy just aren’t there. Our research found that just 27 percent of rural voters — including 23 percent of rural Trump voters — think that if the opposing candidate wins in November, “people will need to take drastic action in order to stop [Biden or Trump] from taking office.” That’s the exact same proportion — 27 percent — as voters in urban and suburban areas who hold the same view. Nor are rural voters more likely than urban voters to say that the opposing party is a “threat to the future of America;” while 38 percent of rural Trump voters strongly believe that about Democrats, 36 percent of nonrural Biden voters think that same thing about Republicans.

To be sure, 27 percent isn’t a negligible number of people in a country of 330 million. But the threats to democracy that lurk in America are not specific to rural areas. Importantly, and often overlooked by the rage peddlers, is the flip side of those numbers — that more than 60 percent of both sets of voters, a strong majority of Americans, both rural and urban, do not hold those attitudes.
(plenty more)

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/04/05/white-rural-rage-myth-00150395

[The Walrus]

Very nice morganism.  Spending a significant amount of time in rural Michigan, I find that the Liveral view of rural America tends to lump the entirety into their narrow viewpoint.  Most have a similarly repulsive view of the urban Left, as the urban Left has of them.  The language used in an attempt to denigrate rural America just reinforces their disdain.  Both sides feel that they are in the right, but only a minority of each believe that their opponents should be stopped at all cost.  Lumping the entirety with the minority, is misguided, and may lead to another election loss this year.

[morganism]

Major mail delivery delays raise concerns about voting in the 2024 elections

Residents and businesses nationwide have been reporting slowdowns in mail and package delivery by the U.S. Postal Service, raising concerns that mail-in ballots could be affected in the upcoming election.

(...)
Residents and businesses nationwide have been reporting slowdowns in mail and package delivery by the U.S. Postal Service, raising concerns that mail-in ballots could be affected in the upcoming election.


In Virginia, hundreds of veterans had their colon cancer screening tests invalidated after the results took months to arrive by mail. An Atlanta college student missed an academic trip to Ghana when their passport with two-day shipping took a month to show up. A bride in Texas had to rent a dress for her wedding after hers spent weeks stuck in a Houston postal facility.

Across the country, residents and businesses have been reporting widespread slowdowns in mail and package delivery by the U.S. Postal Service. The delays have become so persistent that members of Congress have gotten involved, urging the Postal Service to drastically correct course and raising concern about what impact the disruptions could have on mail-in ballots in the upcoming election.

The delays appear to largely stem from a new system the Postal Service began rolling out last fall that will eventually funnel all the nation’s letters and packages through a consolidated network of 60 regional distribution centers — similar to the airlines’ hub-and-spoke model. The change is part of a wider $40 billion, 10-year overhaul of the network that Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has said will reduce costs, improve reliability and make the Postal Service more competitive. But in some instances, the plan has done the opposite, according to the Office of the Inspector General for the Postal Service, members of Congress and Postal Service advocacy groups.

“It’s just a dumpster fire right now,” said Leo Raymond, a former Postal Service manager and managing director of Mailers Hub, an industry group for direct mail companies. He said his members have had everything from customer bills to strategically timed marketing material caught up in the delays. “If you’re a business, you’re going to be discouraged from using the mail because you want your stuff to actually get there.”

(snip)
Delays have been the most significant in some of the first regions to roll out the new regional distribution system, including Richmond, Virginia, Houston and the metro Atlanta area.

Mail delays have become so prevalent in Richmond, which implemented one of the first regional distribution centers in October, that Richmond General Registrar Keith Balmer told residents in February not to send their ballots for the March presidential primary by mail and to instead use one of three drop boxes in the city or to vote in person at an early voting location or a polling site on Election Day. For the upcoming election, Balmer said he will be strongly urging voters to use drop boxes.

“I understand that these issues extend beyond mere inconvenience; they represent a fundamental threat to our democracy,” Balmer said in a blog post on Feb. 26.
(more)

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/major-mail-delivery-delays-raise-concerns-voting-2024-elections-rcna146479


In a a letter to DeJoy last month, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) led an effort with nearly two dozen Senate Democrats to publicly condemn DeJoy's USPS overhaul and its effect on mail delivery. They warned that under the plan, "outgoing mail processing will move hundreds of miles to a regional facility, outside reasonable commuting distance and, in some cases, to another state entirely."

"Wyoming, Vermont, and New Hampshire are set to lose all outgoing mail processing from within the state," the letter read. "[F]or communities near facilities under review, it is unclear how local first-class mail will meet its two-day standard while traveling hundreds of miles for sorting. This is especially concerning for Americans who need reliable and expedient mail service to conduct business, pay their bills, receive medications, and stay in touch with loved ones."

One of the hardest-hit metropolitan areas by DeJoy's plan is Atlanta, which Leo Raymond described as "a complete house on fire." According to NBC, the rate of on-time delivery of mail went from 60-70% to roughly 20%. And because President Joe Biden won the state by less than 12,000 votes in 2020 largely due to high Democratic turnout in the Atlanta Metro area, it's expected that mail-in ballots could play a crucial role in deciding who wins Georgia's electoral votes this November.

"“We’re approaching a major November election,” Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D-Texas), who represents parts of Houston, said last month. “We need to make sure that we iron out any difficulties, any obstacles, any barriers, any issues now, so that we don’t end up in a situation much like we were in with the November ballots.”

Louis DeJoy's tenure at the helm of the USPS may not continue for much longer. In March, Biden nominated former US Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh to fill one of the USPS Board of Governors' two vacancies. If confirmed by the US Senate, Walsh would be the sixth Democrat to sit on the nine-member board. And because DeJoy is accountable to the board rather than the president, the board could theoretically hold a vote to appoint a new postmaster general at any point.

Steve Hutkins, who runs the Save the Post Office website, told NBC that he hopes mail delays "won't be a problem" in November as the USPS has in the past implemented special procedures to speed up mail delivery in previous elections. However, he didn't rule out the possibility of a fiasco in the event of a nail-biter election.

"If the election is really close and a couple of key states have mail ballot issues, it could be a nightmare," he said.

https://www.rawstory.com/louis-dejoy-ballots/


https://www.sanders.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/Senate-Letter-to-Postmaster-General-DeJoy-RE-Mail-Processing-Facility-Reviews.pdf

[morganism]

UNIDOS.org   (run the clearest hispanic polling in the USA)


Latinos contribute to our country's history and economy

Key Facts

70%
Between 2020 and 2040, 70% of new homeowners will be Hispanic.


80%
Nearly 80% of Latinos are U.S. citizens.

24%
Nearly a quarter of Hispanics in the U.S. self-identify as Afro Latino.

21%
The percentage of the country’s 16.6 million students enrolled in undergraduate programs who are Latino.

1 million
The average number of Hispanics who turn 18 each year and become eligible to vote.


https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4577139-joe-biden-donald-trump-women-female-voters-gen-z-college-educated-black-women/

[morganism]

Harvard Youth Poll
Introduction

A national poll released today by the Institute of Politics (IOP) at Harvard Kennedy School indicates that among 18-to-29-year-olds nationwide, more than half of young Americans say they will definitely be voting in the Presidential election this Fall. But findings show that among those likely voters, levels of support varied significantly among different subgroups.

The poll also finds:

    Broad support for a permanent ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war;
    Economic concerns continue to be top of mind for young voters;
    Confidence in public institutions continues to decline.

Since 2000, the Harvard Public Opinion Project (HPOP) has provided the most comprehensive look at young Americans’ political opinions and voting trends. It provides essential insight into the concerns of young Americans at a time when the nation is confronting numerous challenges both at home and abroad. President Kennedy once said, "It is a time for a new generation of leadership, to cope with new problems and new opportunities." The IOP is preparing a new generation of political leaders to confront these very challenges and gain the ability to successfully lead in today’s complicated political landscape. Identifying areas of concern through the Harvard Youth Poll lets tomorrow’s political leaders get started on ideas, strategies, and solutions, and allows them to decide today what the next generation of political leadership needs to look like.

The Spring 2024 Harvard Youth Poll surveyed 2,010 young Americans between 18- and 29 years old nationwide, and was conducted between March 14-21, 2024.

"Young people today have clear concerns about where our country is headed," said IOP Director Setti Warren. "From worries about the economy, foreign policy, immigration, and climate, young people across the country are paying attention and are increasingly prepared to make their voices heard at the ballot box this November."

"As the Biden/Trump rematch takes shape, we see strong levels of engagement and interest in voting among young Americans," said John Della Volpe, IOP Polling Director. "Make no mistake, this is a different youth electorate than we saw in 2020 and 2022, and young voters are motivated by different things. Economic issues are top of mind, housing is a major concern—and the gap between young men's and young women's political preferences is pronounced."

"Young Americans are emerging from a pandemic that has tested our trust in democratic institutions and the bonds that unite us," said Anil Cacodcar, Student Chair of the Harvard Public Opinion Project. "Despite this, young Americans are more ready than ever to engage with these institutions to push for the change we want to see in the world."

Ten key findings from the 47th in the biannual series are below.
Key Takeaways

Among young Americans under 30, President Biden leads former President Trump by eight percentage points; among likely voters, Biden's lead expands to 19 points.

Approximately half (53%) of young Americans indicate they will "definitely be voting" in the 2024 general election for president. Young Americans' interest in voting in 2024 is now on par with Harvard Youth Poll data from 2020, which indicated that 54% would likely vote.

If the presidential election were held today, President Biden would outperform former President Trump among both registered (50% Biden, 37% Trump) and likely young voters under 30 (56% Biden, 37% Trump). When there is no voter screen (i.e., all young adults 18-29), the race narrows to single digits, 45% for President Biden, 37% for former President Trump, with 16 percent undecided.

Among the 1,051 "likely voters" in our sample, we found significant differences in support levels based on gender, age, race/ethnicity, and education levels, among other subgroups. For example, among likely young voters:

    President Biden's lead among young men is six points; among young women his lead is 33 points;
    President Biden's lead among 18-24 year-olds is 14 points, and among 25-29 year-olds it is 26 points;
    President Biden's lead among white voters is 3 points; among non-white voters his lead is 43 points;
    President Biden's lead among college students is 23 points; he leads by 47 points among college graduates. The race is even among those not in college and without a four-year degree.

For context, at this stage in the 2020 election, the Harvard Youth Poll showed Biden leading Trump by 23 points among all young adults (51%-28%) and by 30 points (60%-30%) among likely voters under 30.

One area where former President Trump has an advantage over Biden is enthusiasm. Three-quarters (76%) of Trump voters say they enthusiastically support their candidate, while 44% of Biden voters say the same.

A guilty verdict in any of former President Trump's trials could significantly impact the youth vote. If Trump is found guilty, we find that:

    Biden's lead among all young Americans increases from 8 to 18 points;
    Biden's lead among young registered voters increases from 13 to 21 points;
    Biden's lead among young likely voters increases from 19 to 28 points.

In a hypothetical scenario, when Biden and Trump were joined on the ballot by independent and third party candidates Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Cornel West, and Jill Stein, Biden would still win the youth vote but with smaller margins.
 

Support for a permanent ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war is 5-to-1 in favor; majorities of young Americans sympathize with the Israeli and the Palestinian people.

While only 38% of young Americans tell us that they are following the news about the war between Israel and Hamas very or somewhat closely, the proportion rises among registered voters (45%) and those most likely to vote in November (52%). Overall, we find that Democrats (49%) are more likely to follow this news closely compared to Republicans (32%), and those with a college degree (50%) are more likely to be following these events compared to current college students (39%) and those that never attended (32%).

When young Americans are asked whether or not they believe Israel's response so far to the October 7 attack by Hamas has been justified, a plurality indicates that they don't know (45%). About a fifth (21%) report that Israel's response was justified with 32% believing it was not justified. Across most subgroups, more young Americans say the actions of the Israeli government were unjustified than justified. Republicans see Israel's actions as justified (36% justified, 16% not justified), while Democrats (14% justified, 44% not justified) and independents (19% justified, 30% not justified) feel the opposite is true.

Young Americans support a permanent ceasefire in Gaza by a five-to-one margin (51% support, 10% oppose). No major subgroup of young voters opposes such action.

https://iop.harvard.edu/youth-poll/47th-edition-spring-2024#key-takeaway--id--1564

[The Walrus]

Yes, other polls show young voters not supporting Biden as they did four years ago.

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/04/07/voter-age-biden-trump-2024-election-00150923

[nadir]

This tweet by Hillary is actually hilarious. Not sure what kind of favor she is doing to Biden in any case!

[morganism]

Americans Who Want To Kill Americans
A.R. Moxon Apr 20, 2024

An essay about the present danger, and the danger coming after the present danger. Supremacists who kill with laws and those who kill without them. Differentiators, Part 4

(...)
This one is also sort of about the election, insofar as the election is one of the ways that Republicans (or evangelical Christians or or conservatives or white supremacists or Americans Who Want to Kill Americans or whatever other synonym you care to use for people captured in our nation's spirit of supremacy) intend to capture power, so they can get down to the business of exercising domination and control over our bodies and our lives. So, it would probably be good if they lost the election, and every other election after it, and it would probably even be good if we made it so that such people winning elections was no longer in the realm of the possible, though I confess that I'm not sure exactly how to accomplish such a thing other than a complete shift away from our dominant and very popular supremacist cultural values.

So yes, it would be good if they lost the election, I think, even as we recognize the numerous and multifarious failings of the party that would be the beneficiary—a party called "Democratic," which has an unfortunate and sometimes overwhelming habit of accommodating Americans Who Want to Kill Americans rather than standing in solidarity with the Americans they want to kill. We could argue whether or not so many of them so frequently do this because they agree with the Americans Who Want To Kill Americans, or simply because they support a status quo that is murder-aligned, or even some other reason, and we should argue about that to get to the bottom of it, but we should also acknowledge that the Democratic Party has a leader who has, for example, not tried to overthrow democracy in order to establish a white Christian dictatorship, and has actually walked with striking workers, and hasn't published plans for dispatching roving gangs of deputized brute forces to round up millions of people, and he doesn't appoint judges who are aligned with and/or bribed by fascist white Christians, and he's not facing 91 criminal charges while posing an active threat to the lives of the judges and jurors, and so on and so forth, and so despite many failings, if he and his party wins, Americans Who Want to Kill Americans will not be as empowered as if the white Christian party wins.

I think it's worth saying it again: it would be good if the election empowered Americans Who Want to Kill Americans as little as possible.

(This is different from saying that the Democratic Party will save us, and silly things of that nature. We can get into all that some other time. Today I'm talking about the Americans Who Want to Kill Americans.)

If Americans can murder their fellow citizens using the existing rules and institutions, they'll do it. If they can't, they'll corrupt those rules and seize those institutions. And if they can't do that, then they're pretty clear about their intentions: they'll follow Master Tom Cotton's instructions and take matters into their own hands, because what they want is hard use and brutality and murder to come to those of their fellow citizens they believe deserve it, and if our institutions stop delivering those things to their liking, then they'll attack the institutions, by which I mean they already have.

More and more, they're talking now about waging some form of something like war, though perhaps it won't look like war as we're used to seeing it. It's not too hard these days to find somebody openly agitating for secession and civil war, and here I'm not just talking about Republican governors or conservative propagandists, but also rank-and-file members of the white Christian party, who seem to take comfort from thinking of how many members of the military and our military police are conservatives or white Christians or white supremacists or whatever, and also of how many massacre weapons they all own and how much massacre they would be able to deliver if their fellow citizens, who don't deserve life, ever try to threaten their existence by replacing them— in other words, by insisting on existing in public as if they are equal human beings whose lives hold equal value, even though they aren't Christian or a made up thing called "white."

I think the Americans Who Want to Kill Americans expect to use the election and the planned and published takeover that would come after to establish the fascist domination of creepy religious bigots that they crave. But if they can't, I think a great many of them—far more than we'd want!—hope and intend to deliver stochastic white supremacist terrorist violence on a scale that I honestly don't think any of us is capable of imagining, including even them.
(more)

https://www.the-reframe.com/americans-who-want-to-kill-americans/

[Neven]

An essay about the present danger, and the danger coming after the present danger.

An essay about why it is important to vote for the Lesser Evil yet again, even if that Lesser Evil has become markedly more evil than last time's Lesser Evil.
 
How about going up to people on the other side and unite with them against the system? Because the essay's proposed strategy is only going to assure violence.

But I really liked this sentence:

I think it's worth saying it again: it would be good if the election empowered Americans Who Want to Kill Americans as little as possible.

Empower the Americans who want to kill other Americans just a little bit. 

[sidd]

"The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted." - D.H. Lawrence

sidd

[The Walrus]

That essay almost entices me to vote against the Democratic Party, as it succumbs to most of the attributes that it attempts to tie to the opposition. 

I think kassy has it right with attempting to unite, rather than divide.  This essay is more about division than unity. 

[morganism]

The 8 Types Of Democrats And Republicans In The House

We analyzed voting patterns to see if members actually vote with their caucuses.

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/types-democrats-republicans-house-2024/

Some say Congress is a lot like high school — but who lawmakers vote with isn't necessarily who they sit with in the cafeteria. We were interested in whether members’ formal ideological caucus affiliations matched up with how they actually voted. Is every member of the Problem Solvers Caucus actually voting to advance bipartisan legislation? (Spoiler alert: No.) Do members of the moderate Blue Dog Coalition actually break with their party to side more often with Republicans? (Spoiler alert: Yes.)

A new 538 analysis of voting data reveals that while many members’ formal caucus affiliations matched up pretty well with their voting behaviors, some did not. We analyzed every House floor vote from the first year of the 118th Congress (2023) and applied an algorithm to divide representatives into eight clusters based on similarities in their voting records, using eight official ideological congressional caucuses as a comparison. We then dug into what these clusters say about which issues and votes set members apart, and how these divides fell along the lines of ideology, tenure, district partisanship and more. (See the methodology below for more details.)

We called these clusters “quiet caucuses” to reflect that they’re the unspoken voting cohorts that members align with, regardless of their declared affiliations or how they say they plan to legislate.

No matter how we tweaked the parameters, the algorithm produced five Republican clusters and three Democratic clusters, reflecting more division among the GOP conference than among the Democrats. And by including every floor vote in this analysis, from passage of major legislation to doomed “messaging” amendments that were defeated by 60-point margins, our analysis found that some of the biggest differences among Republicans were on messaging.
(whole lot more)

[morganism]

Boxing, tacos and TV: Democratic Senate contender aims to win back Latino voters

Ruben Gallego, taking on Kari Lake in key Arizona race, focuses on ‘community events’ to reach those who have slipped away

When one of the most celebrated Mexican boxers in history, Canelo Álvarez, steps into the ring against the undefeated Mexican fighter Jaime Munguía on Saturday at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, excitement will be through the roof at a campaign event just 280 miles away.

That’s because the Democratic congressman Ruben Gallego, caught in one of the most critical US Senate races in the country against the former TV anchor Kari Lake, will be holding a watch party for the fight at JL Boxing Academy in Glendale, Arizona, complete with big screens inside, and a truck serving birria tacos and Mexican Cokes outside.

The event on Cinco de Mayo weekend, expected to bring more than 100 largely Latino residents and families, is not just happening because Gallego is a boxing fan, but rather serves as evidence of how the campaign from the former US marine and Iraq combat veteran aims to reach Latino voters and Hispanic men who have eroded from the Democratic party in recent election cycles.

“I remember leaving work sites with my cousins to gather with friends and family to watch epic boxing matches,” Gallego told the Guardian, citing famous boxing legends like Julio César Chávez, Mike Tyson and Oscar De La Hoya. “Far too often, politicians treat Latino voters as a box to check. Our campaign is different: we’re focused on community events – food tours, town halls in Spanish, and this weekend: boxing watch parties.”
Arizona abortion ruling is a win Kari Lake didn’t need in key Senate race
Read more

Latino voter support for Democrats nationally slipped 8 percentage points from 2016 to 2020, according to the firm Catalist. A 2022 survey of 3,600 exit-poll interviews with voters in battleground states, conducted by the progressive donor network Way to Win, found that 58% of Hispanic men supported Democratic candidates, compared with 66% of Latinas. Meanwhile, the Democratic political action committee Nuestro Pac found after the 2022 midterms that Hispanic men consistently lagged Latinas in Democratic support in battlegrounds by 8 to 12 points.

Chuck Rocha, an adviser to Gallego’s campaign, said Gallego himself texted senior staffers in the fall with the idea for the event, recalling his message was that with the Canelo bout coming in 2024 it would be good to have a presence around the fight for boys and their fathers and families who love boxing.

“We all know Latino men have been trending away from [Democrats], and Ruben Gallego is reflective of those men,” Rocha said, noting that Gallego had to sleep on a couch in his living room until he went away for college because his sisters shared a room together and he didn’t have a bedroom.

“Ruben went off to war and served with men and women who are true blue-collar, working-class kids like him. We both know the reason Latino men are slipping from Democrats is because we’re not showing up in the places we need to, and not having conversations about things Latino men care about.”

For its part, Lake’s campaign said Gallego’s events, and ads focused on Harvard and being a marine would not ultimately reach voters who are focused on inflation and border issues.

“Broadly every group is facing problems with inflation and the border and our plan all along is as voters learn about Gallego’s record, they will like him less, no matter what events he does and no matter his biography,” said Alex Nichol, a Lake campaign spokesperson, noting Gallego’s votes with Joe Biden’s “deeply unpopular” policies on illegal immigration and the economy.

A FiveThirtyEight analysis of Gallego’s votes in the 117th Congress found the Phoenix congressman was aligned with Biden 100% of the time.

Reaching voters where they are

Still, Gallego’s event is being lauded by veteran political organizers and operatives of both parties who stress that while most Latinos don’t celebrate Cinco de Mayo, with the holiday often viewed as an excuse to drink margaritas and eat Mexican food, Hispanics who enjoy sports often look forward to the holiday as part of a major boxing weekend, when star Mexican prizefighters have high-profile bouts.

“This brings politics and engagement into a place candidates often don’t think about,” said Tomas Robles, founder of Roble Fuerte Strategies, and an organizer for 14 years in Arizona who has worked to mobilize Latino voters. “So it’s doing what most politicians hope to do, which is reaching new people and communities with their message, who they haven’t been able to reach in the past.”

Gallego has also put on a round table last week with Latino leaders on lowering prescription drug prices, a Maryvale, Arizona townhall last year entirely in Spanish, and a south Phoenix food tour with local influencer Señor Foodie.

“The Canelo fight watch party, I would say, is smart, because he’s continuing to mine parts of the Latino vote that Lake will never even touch, so if he can get them to turn out that’s a net gain for him,” said Jaime Molera, who served as an adviser to the former Republican governor Jane Dee Hull and co-founded the Molera Alvarez consulting firm.

While the Democratic party for the first time this cycle acknowledged its problem with reaching Latino men amid fear that they are gravitating to former president Donald Trump driven by his bravado and policies, Robles argues it’s an inaccurate view, and Hispanic men have instead been moved by what they perceive as “authenticity”.

“He’s no doubt been to a bunch of events like the one his campaign is organizing, like the ones we went to in our 20s. He can have a 15-minute convo by the taco truck and it won’t have to be anything about politics, it will be about boxing,” he said.. “That is the connection politicians are eager to make but a lot of them don’t put themselves in the shoes of the people they’re trying to connect with.”
(more)

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/03/ruben-gallego-arizona-senate-race

[morganism]

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/06/china-russia-republican-party-relations/678271/

(...)
Over the past several years, universities and think tanks have used their own data analytics to try to identify inauthentic networks on the largest websites—but they are also now meeting resistance from MAGA-affiliated Republican politicians. In 2020, teams at Stanford University and the University of Washington, together with the Digital Forensic Research Lab at the Atlantic Council and Graphika, a company that specializes in social-media analytics, decided to join forces to monitor false election information. Renée DiResta, one of the leaders of what became the Election Integrity Partnership, told me that an early concern was Russian and Chinese campaigns. DiResta assumed that these foreign interventions wouldn’t matter much, but she thought it would be useful and academically interesting to understand their scope. “Lo and behold,” she said, “the entity that becomes the most persistent in alleging that American elections are fraudulent, fake, rigged, and everything else turns out to be the president of the United States.” The Election Integrity Partnership tracked election rumors coming from across the political spectrum, but observed that the MAGA right was far more prolific and significant than any other source.

The Election Integrity Partnership was not organized or directed by the U.S. government. It occasionally reached out to platforms, but had no power to compel them to act, DiResta told me. Nevertheless, the project became the focus of a complicated MAGA-world conspiracy theory about alleged government suppression of free speech, and it led to legal and personal attacks on many of those involved. The project has been smeared and mischaracterized by some of the journalists attached to Musk’s “Twitter Files” investigation, and by Representative Jim Jordan’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. A series of lawsuits alleging that the U.S. government sought to suppress conservative speech, including one launched by Missouri and Louisiana that has now reached the Supreme Court, has effectively tried to silence organizations that investigate both domestic and foreign disinformation campaigns, overt and covert. To state baldly what is happening: The Republican Party’s right wing is actively harassing legitimate, good-faith efforts to track the production and dissemination of autocratic disinformation here in the United States.

Over time, the attack on the Election Integrity Partnership has itself acquired some of the characteristics of a classic information-laundering operation. The most notorious example concerns a reference, on page 183 of the project’s final post-2020-election report, to the 21,897,364 tweets gathered after the election, in an effort to catalog the most viral false rumors. That simple statement of the size of the database has been twisted into another false and yet constantly repeated rumor: the spurious claim that the Department of Homeland Security somehow conspired with the Election Integrity Partnership to censor 22 million tweets. This never happened, and yet DiResta said that “this nonsense about the 22 million tweets pops up constantly as evidence of the sheer volume of our duplicity”; it has even appeared in the Congressional Record.

The same tactics have been used against the Global Engagement Center. In 2021, the GEC gave a grant to another organization, the Global Disinformation Index, which helped develop a technical tool to track online campaigns in East Asia and Europe. For a completely unrelated, separately funded project, the Global Disinformation Index also conducted a study, aimed at advertisers, that identified websites at risk for publishing false stories. Two conservative organizations, finding their names on that latter list, sued the GEC, although it had nothing to do with creating the list. Musk posted, again without any evidence, “The worst offender in US government censorship & media manipulation is an obscure agency called GEC,” and that organization also became caught up in the endless whirlwind of conspiracy and congressional investigations.
(more)



Of all the tools and techniques available to counter the effects of foreign disinformation and propaganda, a well-engineered video game may be among the most effective. 

In early November, the U.S. Global Engagement Center (GEC), in collaboration with the Department of Homeland Security, released Harmony Square. This online game takes players through the steps of developing a disinformation campaign to sow division and disrupt the peace of a fictitious town square. Based on “inoculation theory,” the game purposely engages players in the use of disinformation techniques with the goal of building mental defenses against those same techniques when they are eventually encountered on the internet. Harmony Square taps into the massive pool of 2.5 billion gamers worldwide.

https://harmonysquare.game/en

What is Harmony Square?

 Harmony Square is a game about fake news. The game’s setting is the idyllic Harmony Square, a small neighborhood mildly obsessed with democracy. You, the player, are hired as Chief Disinformation Officer. Over the course of 4 short levels, your job is to disturb the square’s peace and quiet by fomenting internal divisions and pitting its residents against each other.

 How does the game work?

 The goal of the game is to expose the tactics and manipulation techniques that are used to mislead people, build up a following, or exploit societal tensions for political purposes. Harmony Square works as a psychological “vaccine” against disinformation: playing it builds cognitive resistance against common forms of manipulation that you may encounter online.

[morganism]

What happens if a US presidential candidate dies?

Joe Biden and Donald Trump are the two oldest candidates in US history. If either needs to be replaced, what next?


(...)
What happens if Biden or Trump needs to be replaced?

The answer, experts say, depends largely on when the vacancy arises. Is it after the party’s nominating convention? Before election day? What if the winning candidate is no longer able to take the oath of office? The timing matters.

If the unexpected occurs, the job of replacing the presidential candidate would fall to “10,000 people who no one has ever heard of”, according to Elaine Kamarck, a member of the Democratic National Committee rules committee and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Collectively they represent convention delegates, members of the parties’ national committees, the 538 members of the electoral college and the 435 members of the House of Representatives.

Each plays a relevant role at different stages of the election process.
(more)

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/05/what-happens-presidential-candidate-trump-biden-dies

[Neven]

Normally, I wouldn't approve the kind of crap that was posted by morganism in the preceding comment, but I coincidentally read a piece recently about the inauthentic networks that immoral people like Renée DiResta set up to deceive and manipulate people like morganism.

From the Disinformation Chronicle (the author of which has done massive work on climate change misinformation networks, comparable to Oreskes), emph. mine:

WHISTLEBLOWER: Insider Details How "New Knowledge" Cybersecurity Firm Created Disinformation in American Election

Documents find Center for American Progress paid disinformation company to update "Hamilton 68" dashboard that was caught spreading Russian disinformation.

Some of the shine on the disinformation industry has gone dull in recent years, as many misinformation experts having been caught trafficking in misinformation themselves, or exposed for their ties to intelligence agencies. This should not come as a shock.

It’s a basic tenet of “mirror politics” and practitioners of propaganda to accuse others of the very same actions they plan to commit.

In late 2018, the New York Times and Washington Post reported on a leaked document discussing a secret project by Democratic Party operatives that falsely accused Republican candidate Roy Moore of support by Russians, while he was running in a tight race for the Senate in Alabama. The scheme linked the Moore campaign to thousands of Russian accounts on Twitter and drew national media attention.

“We orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet,” the New York Times reported that the leaked documents stated.

The documents linked a relatively unknown company called New Knowledge to the Alabama disinformation campaign, although New Knowledge’s chief executive Jonathon Morgan said the company was not involved, and he worked on “Project Birmingham” in his personal capacity. Morgan also reached out at the time to Renee DiResta, a self-styled expert on disinformation, who told the New York Times she disagreed with such tactics, and later joined New Knowledge sometime, but only after Project Birmingham ended.

New Knowledge later changed names to Yonder, while DiResta joined Stanford University as an expert in disinformation. However, New Knowledge could not stop landing in the media spotlight.

In early 2023, journalist Matt Taibbi released a “Twitter Files” drop about “Hamilton 68,” a public dashboard created by New Knowledge. Hamiton 68 tracked hundreds of Twitter accounts to monitor the spread of purported pro-Russian propaganda online, but screenshots of emails sent by former Twitter executive, Yoel Roth, voiced alarm that the dashboard was creating, not tracking disinformation.

“I think we need to just call this out on the bullshit it is,” Roth wrote.

The “Hamilton 68” dashboard had spurred dozens of stories in major media outlets that accused conservatives of trafficking in Russian disinformation, but when Twitter looked into the dashboard’s accuracy, they found it was garbage in, garbage out.

Former FBI counterintelligence official Clint Watts headed the Hamilton 68 dashboard and Jonathon Morgan of New Knowledge had helped to build it, along with J.M. Berger at the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), housed by the German Marshall Fund.

“No evidence to support the statement that the dashboard is a finger on the pulse of Russian information ops,” one Twitter official wrote of Hamilton 68.

The internal Twitter emails were so damaging that the Washington Post later posted corrections to multiple stories that reported on Hamilton 68 and its findings.

But every story about disinformation elites caught creating disinformation contains critical missing facts and minor elements of disinformation planted by the very experts being exposed. New Knowledge is no different.

Starting a month ago, I began discussing what the media got wrong about New Knowledge and Hamilton 68 with Betsy Dupuis, a former New Knowledge employee who worked on Hamilton 68. Dupuis tells me she was fired from New Knowledge after expressing misgivings upon discovering the company that branded itself  “the world’s first platform for defending online communities from social media manipulation” was itself engaging in blatant social media manipulation.

To back up her claims, Dupuis provided internal documents and photos from her time at New Knowledge, as well as screenshots of texts messages. Some of those we are publishing today.

New Knowledge poached Dupuis from another company and set her to work improving the Hamilton 68 dashboard, which was planned as a product for groups aligned with the Democratic Party. The development was underwritten with a year of funding by the Center for American Progress, a think tank and lobby shop run by party political operatives.

Dupuis says she enjoyed her work updating Hamilton 68, but she became concerned when people in the office discussed the “Alabama Project” and she began wondering if this had anything to do with Roy Moore, a Republican candidate running for Senate. When she had joined the company, Jonathon Morgan had assured her that New Knowledge would only monitor, never create disinformation.

But then several former employees from the National Security Agency (NSA) joined New Knowledge.

Out for company drinks, former NSA employees explained to Dupuis how agencies get around federal laws that ban the U.S. government from spying on and censoring Americans: they contract with companies like New Knowledge to do their dirty work. By the time New Knowledge announced they had secured a Department of Defense contract to create automated disinformation, Dupuis had had enough.

She met with Jonathon Morgan to discuss her concerns and was fired days later.

Speaking with me from her home in Austin, Dupuis says that neither Jonathon Morgan, nor Stanford’s Renee DiResta have come clean with journalists about what happened in Alabama to create disinformation during an American election. But she says she is tired of being scared and the time has come for her to speak up. “Silence doesn’t buy you safety, Dupuis says. “People will still come after you because of what you know.”

“I just kept quiet, until now, because I didn’t want to be accused of spreading a conspiracy theory,” Dupuis tells The DisInformation Chronicle. “After I was fired, I was just like, ‘You know what? This is so crazy. Nobody's ever going to believe me. I'm never going to talk about this again.’”

Jonathon Morgan did not return multiple requests for comment sent to his current job and personal cell phone number. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Read the interview here.

Good luck with winning elections using McCarthyism. You're no better than Trump.

[kassy]

Why two US election 2024 threads?

[Rodius]

Why two US election 2024 threads?

I was thinking the same thing... it is bad enough having one of them

[morganism]

CIA/NSA invests in or buys HUNDREDS of companies, and twists or backdoors them. Buying an info group to promote dis-info seems pretty on brand for them.

https://www.iqt.org/portfolio/

He was a lead investigator of the United States Senate Committee on Finance for Senator Chuck Grassley. (Grassley a guy who had a RU dis-info packet sent from RU to (wrong) congress address by FedEx?)
Twisting a discussion from the Twitter files by Tabbi is pretty lame too. No other MSM or legal FA folk find anything nefarious in those files. Tabbi does.

Brownstone Institute - Bias and Credibility - Media Bias/Fact Check
The Brownstone Institute is a nonprofit organization that advocates for Anarcho-Capitalism and opposes lockdowns, masks, and vaccine mandates. Media Bias/Fact Check rates it Right Biased and Mixed for factual reporting due to its promotion of misinformation and failed fact


Toward a Transnational Information Ecology on the Right? Hyperlink Networking among Right-Wing Digital News Sites in Europe and the United States

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1940161220963670


When we map media sources this way, we see that Breitbart became the center of a distinct right-wing media ecosystem, surrounded by Fox News, the Daily Caller, the Gateway Pundit, the Washington Examiner, Infowars, Conservative Treehouse, and Truthfeed.

https://www.cjr.org/analysis/breitbart-media-trump-harvard-study.php

Still pretty amazed u think im a Neocon, i read Confessions of an Economic Hit Man too....

[Neven]

Why two US election 2024 threads?

I was thinking the same thing... it is bad enough having one of them

Yes, zero would be best, but I'm afraid of what will happen to the members who suffer from TDS.

I hadn't even noticed there were two separate threads. Merged now.

Still pretty amazed u think im a Neocon, i read Confessions of an Economic Hit Man too....

You support them with almost every political comment you post, especially in the Ukraine thread. How many dead Ukrainians will have been worth it, Madeleine?

[zenith]

Carville ADMITS Trump Is WINNING In DESPARATE RANT

[Freegrass]

Carville ADMITS Trump Is WINNING In DESPARATE RANT

Please don't start posting fascist rhetoric here, or I'm outa here.

[The Walrus]

The polls do show that Trump has a slight advantage.  That is somewhat significant, as he was trailing during most of the polling in the previous two elections.  That rant is not off-base.

[Neven]

Please don't start posting fascist rhetoric here, or I'm outa here.

Have you watched the video? Do you know who Carville is? Or does your brain shut off automatically as soon as the word 'Trump' passes the retina? Don't worry, you're far from the only one.

Chester James Carville Jr. (born October 25, 1944) is an American political consultant, author, and occasional actor who has strategized for candidates for public office in the United States and in at least 23 nations abroad.[1] A Democrat, he is a pundit in U.S. elections who appears frequently on cable news programs, podcasts, and public speeches.

[Freegrass]

Please don't start posting fascist rhetoric here, or I'm outa here.

Have you watched the video? Do you know who Carville is? Or does your brain shut off automatically as soon as the word 'Trump' passes the retina? Don't worry, you're far from the only one.

Chester James Carville Jr. (born October 25, 1944) is an American political consultant, author, and occasional actor who has strategized for candidates for public office in the United States and in at least 23 nations abroad.[1] A Democrat, he is a pundit in U.S. elections who appears frequently on cable news programs, podcasts, and public speeches.

Of course I know who Carville is. I love him. The fascists are the guys making fun of him. That's what fascists do, they disparage all that good is in this world, like truth, media, and science.

If this forum becomes a propaganda tool for the extreme right, I'm outa here.

[colchonero]

Fascist rhetoric is to post a video where it says Trump, one of two main candidates in this election, is winning? The topics name is literally 2024 US election. Is it allowed only to say Biden is winning, but if it is Trump than it is fascism?. Your comment with suppression of 1 of 2 candidates would be borderline fascist.  The same applies the other way around, really not taking any sides, but complaining about fascism, while trying to suppress one candidate was funny.

[be cause]

I had hoped the resident fascists would be having enough 'fun' with the war war war thread

[The Walrus]

I had hoped the resident fascists would be having enough 'fun' with the war war war thread

That thread seems to dominated by the antisemitists (or is that what you mean by fascists?)

[gerontocrat]

The US Presidential election is too close to call.

In Europe, politicians have been in a huddle to discuss" What the fuck do we do if Trump wins?"

Mind you Orban is rooting for Trump. and so are China & Russia.

Me I would prefer Biden as he has a few remnants of integrity left, while Trump is the ultimate Narcissist (the most common characteristc of Dictators & would-be Dictators, the 2nd being psychopathy?)

If weather extremes (fuelled by El Nino & climate change) hit the USA really badly this summer and geopolitics brings even more death & destruction and most importantly the USA economy hits a wall, then that will help Trump.

Mind you, what a lousy choice.

[Neven]

I had hoped the resident fascists would be having enough 'fun' with the war war war thread

Nah, they all left when they saw they were increasingly losing the argument (as well as the insane war that was provoked in their name and with their full support). Hundreds of thousands of dead Slavs and no positive result to speak of, unless you include weapon industry profits and politicians pissing over democracy.

People promoting peace are fascists, the media is good, Biden has some remnants of integrity left...

The level of delusion went up a few notches in just a few hours. I guess that's what happens when there's a glaring lack of coherent vision. Doesn't anybody here notice how their actions are achieving the exact opposite of what they want?

[zenith]

I had hoped the resident fascists would be having enough 'fun' with the war war war thread

That thread seems to dominated by the antisemitists (or us that what you mean by fascists?)

the due dissidence boys are jewish you nitwits. max blumenthal, aaron mate, katie halpern, ilan pappe, gideon levy, miko peled and many, many more are all jewish and have been warning about the fascism that's taken root in israel, some for a couple decades now.

your upside down world holds no water.

The Ethnic cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappe
https://yplus.ps/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Pappe-Ilan-The-Ethnic-Cleansing-of-Palestine.pdf

[zenith]

8 years ago.

"Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy talks to journalist Max Blumenthal about how the Israeli occupation has poisoned not only the region but much of the world, and how BDS might be the last standing hope to dismantle it"

Gideon Levy: Americans "Are Supporting the First Signs of Fascism in Israel"

[zenith]

Of course I know who Carville is. I love him. The fascists are the guys making fun of him. That's what fascists do, they disparage all that good is in this world, like truth, media, and science.

If this forum becomes a propaganda tool for the extreme right, I'm outa here.

if you love carville then you are extreme right. the traditional left is dead, the last nails in the coffin were hammered in by bill clinton who realized more of the republican agenda than they ever could have. it's a one party state now with two banners. an oligarchy and corporatocracy.

edit to add:
read it and weep. hard to believe it was written 12 short years ago, things sure escalated quickly.

Destroying the Commons: On Shredding the Magna Carta
What we do right now, or fail to do, will determine what kind of world will greet that event
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2012/07/23/destroying-commons-shredding-magna-carta

Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracy
https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746#:~:text=Here's%20how%20they%20explain%20it,little%20or%20no%20independent%20influence.

[Freegrass]

Of course I know who Carville is. I love him. The fascists are the guys making fun of him. That's what fascists do, they disparage all that good is in this world, like truth, media, and science.

If this forum becomes a propaganda tool for the extreme right, I'm outa here.

if you love carville then you are extreme right. the traditional left is dead, the last nails in the coffin were hammered in by bill clinton who realized more of the republican agenda than they ever could have. it's a one party state now with two banners. an oligarchy and corporatocracy.

I love Carville because of his sharp analysis of American politics. But I'm in no way an America lover. I actually hate that country. But in between all evils, there is still the lesser of all evil’s, and that's Joe Biden in this election. He's restoring unions, and doing better on the climate than any president before him. That's all that matters to me.

If we get Trump again, the world will become total chaos.

And just so you know, I'm voting extreme left again this year in our Belgian elections.
https://www.pvda.be/

[zenith]

it's all the same arguments since the clinton years...

Bill’s big backers
Though Clinton’s contributions from Wall Street were lower than expected, other industries — notably oil and defense — took up some of the slack. But the best-kept secret of the election is that it was the telecommunications industry that rescued Bill Clinton.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/1996/11/bills-big-backers/

our left wing (socialist - NDP) party in canada has sold out to the for profit corporate climate solutions and global agenda too. they're currently keeping trudeau in power, he's lost the young people who voted him in as he's completely destroyed their future. the traditional left is dead.

the environmental movement was bought out when the rockefellers, rothschilds and their front man maurice strong took over.

Maurice Strong (1929–2015)
https://www.nature.com/articles/528480a

"Oil man who was first director of the United Nations Environment Programme."

[zenith]

I love Carville because of his sharp analysis of American politics. But I'm in no way an America lover. I actually hate that country. But in between all evils, there is still the lesser of all evil’s, and that's Joe Biden in this election. He's restoring unions, and doing better on the climate than any president before him. That's all that matters to me.

If we get Trump again, the world will become total chaos.

And just so you know, I'm voting extreme left again this year in our Belgian elections.
https://www.pvda.be/

carville is a democratic hatchetman for the elites, that you're sucked in by the democratic window dressing is sad. it's still neoliberal economics, tell me the difference between liberal interventionism and neoconservatives and i'll tell you the difference between milk chocolate and dark chocolate. voting for the lesser evil is still evil and nobody should wonder how things got this way. it's all fascism yet you have the temerity to call actual leftists that are dissenting against this failing fascism fascists. have you ever considered that you're part of the problem?

smoke another one you flake.

[Freegrass]

Let's talk about the real problem for a change. This documentary, shown on Al Jazeera and BBC, is batshit crazy. I call them the American Taliban, and they should be feared, as you'll see at the end of part 2.

Praying for Armageddon
An influential movement of Christian fundamentalists in the US, who with millions of dollars in backing and threads into the government, are fighting for the end of the world.

Press Reviews
“However, the core thesis is abundantly, horribly clear: there are a growing number of people in positions of major power in US politics and broader society who are actively working to bring about the end of the world as we know it. It does not feel fine.”

 - Jessica Kiang in Variety
“Imagine not only believing the world is coming to an end, but wanting it to happen. Eagerly. Then, take it a step further and imagine people with such a mentality engineering American politics and foreign policy to bring about the very thing they seek — the apocalypse.”

https://www.prayingforarmageddon.com/