James.galbraith

A report today from Motherboard highlights several email apps that sell anonymized or pseudonymised data collected from users' inboxes, including Edison Mail, Cleanfox, and Slice, adding that many users are unaware of this practice.


An excerpt from the report:

The popular Edison email app, which is in the top 100 productivity apps on the Apple app store, scrapes users' email inboxes and sells products based off that information to clients in the finance, travel, and e-Commerce sectors. The contents of Edison users' inboxes are of particular interest to companies who can buy the data to make better investment decisions, according to a J.P. Morgan document obtained by Motherboard.

Data obtained by Motherboard reveals what some of the information scraped from emails can look like, using Slice as an example:

A spreadsheet containing data from Rakuten's Slice, an app that scrapes a user's inbox so they can better track packages or get their money back once a product goes down in price, contains the item that an app user bought from a specific brand, what they paid, and an unique identification code for each buyer.

The report serves as a good reminder to review the privacy policies of apps that you use. Edison Mail is transparent about its data collection in its privacy policy, for example, noting that it uses "non-personal data such as seller, product and price extracted from information we collect" to help its Edison Trends business partners "aggregate and understand commerce trends."

Edison's privacy policy and support website also indicate that users can opt out of having their anonymized data shared with Edison Trends partners by navigating to Account > Settings > Manage Privacy in the app.

Most importantly, Edison Mail requires users to accept or decline Edison Trends data collection during initial setup of the app.

Edison emphasizes its transparency in its response to the report:

To keep our Edison Mail app free, and to protect your privacy by rejecting an advertising-based business model, our company Edison Software, measures e-commerce through a technology that automatically recognizes commercial emails and extracts anonymous purchase information from them. Our technology is designed to ignore personal and work email, which does not help us measure market trends.

Edison puts privacy first in everything we do as a company and that includes making our users aware of how we use their data in our products. You have complete control over how your information is used and we allow you to opt-out of data sharing in our research product, without impacting your app experience. We strive to be as transparent as possible about our business practices in our press communications, Edison Mail website, Edison Trends website, privacy policy, blog posts, on our app store pages, on social media, and of course, in our app itself. We do not participate in any ad targeting of our users and do not allow others to do ad targeting of our users.

To learn more, read Edison's lengthy blog post on its business model from last year.


This article, "Edison Mail Responds to Report on Email Apps Selling Anonymized Data Scraped From Inboxes" first appeared on MacRumors.com

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If he becomes president, he will have helped them sabotage the American economy and his presidency.

Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden speaks during the 100 Club Dinner at SNHIU on February 08, 2020 in Manchester, New Hampshire. | Scott Olson/Getty Images

It wasn’t the first time he’s had an odd answer to a woman’s question.

A young female voter asked Joe Biden on Sunday why voters should believe he can win.

His response was rather unusual.

“You’re arguably the candidate with the greatest advantage in this race,” Madison Moore, a college student, said to Biden at a New Hampshire campaign event. “How do you explain the performance in Iowa, and why should the voters believe that you can win the national election?”

“Iowa’s a Democratic caucus,” the former vice president responded. “You ever been to a caucus?”

When Moore said she had, he responded, “No you haven’t. You’re a lying dog-faced pony soldier.”

The phrase immediately got attention, with many confused by Biden’s choice of words. As it turns out, “lying dog-faced pony soldier” is a phrase Biden has used before. He attributes it to John Wayne, though its actual provenance is somewhat unclear.

But for Moore, the problem wasn’t so much Biden’s word choice as the fact that he responded to her question by demanding whether she’d ever been to a caucus.

“Joe Biden has been performing incredibly poorly in this race,” Moore told the Washington Post. “His inability to answer a simple question from a nobody college student like me only exacerbates that reality.”

Biden has been criticized in the past for responding to questions — especially questions posed by women — in ways that seem condescending, as when he called moderator Lyz Lenz a “lovely person” after her question at a September LGBTQ rights forum. And the moment in New Hampshire was another reminder that while Biden’s responses may seem folksy or homespun to some, to others they’re a sign that he’s not always treating voters with the seriousness they deserve.

Biden has used “lying dog-faced pony soldier” before

Biden explained the provenance of “lying dog-faced pony soldier” at a North Dakota rally in 2018, saying that his brother loved to use lines from movies.

“There’s a line in a movie, a John Wayne movie, where the Indian chief turns to John Wayne and says, this is a lying dog-faced pony soldier,” Biden said.

It’s not clear if this line actually shows up in any John Wayne movie — as Matthew Dessem points out at Slate, there are 180 to sift through. The general consensus seems to be that Biden is probably thinking of the 1952 Tyrone Power film Pony Soldier, in which a character says, “The pony soldier speaks with a tongue of the snake that rattles.”

Whatever the case, Biden has used the line in the past when responding to questions. At an Iowa event in December, a young voter said that President Obama promised his father that he could keep his existing health plan after the passage of the Affordable Care Act — but, in fact, his dad wasn’t able to do so.

“Were you lying to my dad?” the voter asked.

“A lying dog-faced pony soldier. No,” Biden said, before acknowledging that some people were forced to change plans under the ACA.

When he used the phrase on Sunday, it felt like a bit of a left turn from Moore’s question. She had asked why voters should believe he could win, following his fourth-place finish in Iowa. His response was, apparently, to start explaining caucuses to her, assuming she’d never been to one.

As it happens, he was right — Moore later said in a statement to the Washington Post that she had never been to a caucus.

“I asked Joe Biden a fair question,” she wrote. “His immediate response was to question whether I had ever attended a caucus. In my nervousness in the presence of the former Vice President, I nodded yes.”

Whether she’d personally been to a caucus or not, she told the Post, was irrelevant to her question.

It’s part of a pattern in his interactions with voters

The “lying dog-faced pony soldier” phrase itself was a joke, according to Biden campaign traveling national press secretary Remi Yamamoto.

But it wasn’t the first time Biden has faced scrutiny for his responses to questions.

In June, activist K.C. Cayo asked Biden about his stance on the Hyde Amendment, which bans federal funding for most abortions (though he supported Hyde in the past, Biden now says he backs repeal of the amendment). Cayo, who uses they/them pronouns, and the two women activists with them, also asked Biden to protect sexual assault survivors.

In response, Cayo wrote at Vice, Biden “leaned in very close to my face, and started wagging his finger at me,” saying, “Nobody has spoken about it, done more, or changed more than I have.”

“I wasn’t able to even finish my 30-second elevator pitch — I never got past the first sentence,” Cayo told Vice. “Just the fact that he wagged his finger at me in such a condescending manner is very telling.”

Then, at a forum on LGBTQ issues in September, moderator Lyz Lenz brought up Biden’s votes in favor of “don’t ask, don’t tell” and the Defense of Marriage Act. “You did vote to repeal both of those, but you have also praised Vice President Mike Pence as a ‘decent guy,’” Lenz noted.

“You’re a lovely person,” the former vice president responded.

Lenz later said that Biden had called her “a real sweetheart” backstage at the event, and that she saw both comments as “a little condescending.”

Biden has also faced questions about his behavior with women in the past, with several saying he kissed or touched them in ways that made them uncomfortable. The former VP has said he will change to match evolving “social norms,” but to some, the way he has spoken to women on the campaign trail is evidence he’s not changing enough.

It’s clear that “lying dog-faced pony soldier” itself was meant as a joke, and that lines like this are part of Biden’s style. Film writer Farran Nehme describes the phrase as “uniquely Uncle Joe.”

Biden’s “Uncle Joe” persona (sometimes, less flatteringly, “Creepy Uncle Joe”) was the subject of jokes during the Obama years. But he’s not the vice president anymore, the older foil to a young commander in chief. Now, Biden is running to be the leader of the country, and young voters are less likely to brush it off when he answers their questions with strange movie references — at 77, he has to prove that he actually understands them and their concerns.

He also has to prove he takes them seriously. The biggest issue with the “pony soldier” comment, for Moore, seems to be the sentiment behind it — that she, a young female voter with a serious question to ask, needed a fairly basic part of the American democratic process explained to her. Whether or not that was Biden’s intent, it was part of a pattern this election cycle, in which some voters — many of them women — have left interactions with him feeling belittled or disrespected.

President Donald Trump delivers remarks at a White House session with the state governors on February 10, 2020. | Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images

The president is either brazenly lying about his 2021 budget or doesn’t know what’s in it.

President Donald Trump posted a tweet on Saturday vowing that “We will not be touching your Social Security and Medicare in Fiscal 2021 Budget.” One day later, the Wall Street Journal published a report indicating that Trump is doing exactly that with his budget proposal.

The Journal’s report, which came a day ahead of the administration officially releasing its budget on Monday, indicates that Trump’s $4.8 trillion budget includes “steep reductions in social-safety-net programs,” including cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security:

The White House proposes to cut spending by $4.4 trillion over a decade. Of that, it targets $2 trillion in savings from mandatory spending programs, including $130 billion from changes to Medicare prescription-drug pricing, $292 billion from safety-net cuts—such as work requirements for Medicaid and food stamps—and $70 billion from tightening eligibility access to disability benefits.

That Trump is proposing cuts to these programs isn’t surprising — his 2020 budget cut all three as well. It’s a long-running contradiction for the president. He often says he won’t touch these entitlement programs, but he’s continued to employ Republican party officials who make cutting these programs center to their work.

Trump keeps proposing entitlement cuts and then denying that he did so

In 2015 and ’16, Trump differentiated himself from the rest of the Republican presidential hopefuls by campaigning on a vow to not cut entitlements.

“I’m not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican and I’m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid,” Trump told the Daily Signal, a conservative publication affiliated with the Heritage Foundation, in 2015.

As his budget proposals indicate, this promise was an empty one. Trump, however, seems to realize that cutting entitlements is a political loser for him, and as a result has continued to make assertions about preserving them that are at odds with reality.

Last month, however, Trump seemed to have a moment of radical honesty when he told CNBC during an interview conducted in Davos that “at some point” entitlement cuts will be on the table.

Those comments created a negative stir, so the very next day Trump tried to walk them back.

Fast-forward less than a month, and Trump is again pushing entitlement cuts. It’s whiplash-inducing.

Democrats have already signaled Trump’s budget is going nowhere

While Trump tries to have it both ways by proposing entitlement cuts while claiming he’s not really doing that, Treasury Department spokesperson Monica Crowley was somewhat more straightforward during a Monday morning appearance on Fox Business.

Asked by host Stuart Varney if she agrees that the new budget “hits the safety net,” Crowley sad the president “understands that Washington’s habit of out of control spending without consequence has to be stopped.”

But for Trump, not all spending is bad. While his budget cuts non-defense spending by 5 percent, he actually slates defense spending for an increase to $740.5 billion for fiscal year 2021.

Of course, budget proposals are just that — proposals. And while Trump insists that Republicans are the ones trying to save entitlements from destruction, the irony is that the truth is exactly the opposite: Entitlement cuts are dead on arrival as long as Democrats control a chamber of Congress.

House Budget Committee Chair John Yarmuth (D-KY) alluded to this reality in a statement he released on Sunday blasting Trump for “proposing deep cuts to critical programs that help American families.”

The “budget reportedly includes destructive changes to Medicaid, SNAP, Social Security, and other assistance programs that help Americans make ends meet — all while extending his tax cuts for millionaires and wealthy corporations,” Yarmuth wrote. “Congress will stand firm against this President’s broken promises and his disregard for the human cost of his destructive policies.”

---

The news moves fast. To stay updated, follow Aaron Rupar on Twitter, and read more of Vox’s policy and politics coverage.

Sen. Lindsey Graham laid out the next step on the march to authoritarian rule on Sunday, advertising that Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, is now officially feeding dirt on Trump’s political opponents to the Justice Department with the blessing of Attorney General William Barr. Barr, Graham said on Face the Nation, has "created a process that Rudy could give information and they would see if it’s verified.”

Is this true, or is Graham just running his mouth? Well, The New York Times reports, “A spokeswoman for the Justice Department declined to comment on Mr. Graham’s assertion,” which is not what you want to see here. The only appropriate response would be to strenuously distance the Justice Department from such a brazenly corrupt scheme, one that would overtly politicize the agency.

As Daily Kos’ Hunter summed up Graham’s claims on Sunday, “the president's self-identified ‘personal lawyer,’ acting on behalf of known-corrupt pro-Russian Ukrainian oligarchs and ex-officials and in concert with two now-indicted launderers of Russian cash, is now directly channeling conspiracy claims against Trump's election opponent to the U.S. Attorney General's office. There is no longer any pretense of Giuliani's efforts not being state policy.” 

As a reminder, the Justice Department’s mission statement is “To enforce the law and defend the interests of the United States according to the law; to ensure public safety against threats foreign and domestic; to provide federal leadership in preventing and controlling crime; to seek just punishment for those guilty of unlawful behavior; and to ensure fair and impartial administration of justice for all Americans.” Graham is claiming that the department is engaging in behavior that would violate basically all of that. And the department’s response is “No comment.”

If Barr’s Justice Department doesn’t come out and disavow this strongly, it’s a warning sign that Barr is signing on to Trump’s plan to cheat in the 2020 elections, and equally a sign that Barr doesn’t care about the judgment of history—that he, as much as Trump, is unleashed to try to dismantle American democracy and replace it with perpetual Republican rule.

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President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani on New Year’s Eve at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida. | Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

Sen. Lindsey Graham says Rudy Giuliani will feed dirt on the Biden family to the DOJ, as the Senate continues its investigation into Hunter Biden.

Now that the President Donald Trump’s Senate impeachment trial has concluded, White House officials and administration allies are signaling readiness to move forward with investigations into the Biden family — the very thing that sparked the impeachment inquiry roughly half a year ago.

One of the main fronts in this process is set to take place through a backchannel, according to Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), a staunch Trump ally and chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

On CBS’ Face the Nation on Sunday, Graham, said Attorney General William Barr has set up a “process” for receiving information about the Bidens from Ukraine, using Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, as an intermediary.

This revelation came shortly after Giuliani claimed to have a uncovered a “smoking gun” involving former Vice President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, that would legitimate Trump’s request last July for Ukraine’s then-new president to investigate him and his father.

Giuliani made the claim on Fox News’ Watters’ World Saturday night, saying that he and his team now have three witnesses ready to share evidence of Biden’s son having engaged in corrupt activities.

“I want to prove what happened,” Giuliani told host Jesse Watters, “Because I believe if we prove what happened, [Trump] will be totally vindicated.”

The lawyer then made a public request of the South Carolina senator, calling for him to begin an official Senate investigation into Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine.

“Lindsey, get started,” Giuliani said.

Sunday, Graham affirmed that the Hunter Biden investigation would be “explored,” but expressed discomfort with leading it, as Giuliani requested. Instead he said it would take place within an information pipeline between Department of Justice, the White House, and Ukraine.

“I’m not going to be the Republican Christopher Steele,” Graham said, referring to the ex-British spy who compiled a dossier featuring salacious allegations against Trump. “If Rudy Giuliani has any information coming out of the Ukraine, he needs to turn over the Department of Justice because it could be Russian propaganda.”

He added, “Any documents coming out of the Ukraine against any American, Republican or Democrat, need to be looked at by the intelligence services, who has expertise I don’t because Russia is playing us all like a fiddle.”

Instead of following through his committee, Graham said, “The Department of Justice is receiving information coming out of the Ukraine from Rudy. ... They’ve created a process that Rudy could give information and they would see if it’s verified.”

It is not clear whether the president is on board with this plan, however.

In a message with an opaque meaning, he responded to a CBS Twitter advertisement for the interview with Graham by tweeting, “DeFace the Nation will tell [Graham] that he must start up Judiciary and not stop until the job is done. Clean up D.C. now, last chance!”

He followed that with a clearer message 20 minutes later, tweeting, “Yes!!!!!” in response to a conservative reporter’s tweet calling for a Senate investigation.

While it’s questionable whether now is the time for such an investigation — particularly since Trump’s opponents have argued he now feels unrestrained rather than chastened by the impeachment process — it would seem that the president’s desire for such an inquiry has materialized: Alongside the unofficial investigation that is evidently running between Giuliani and the DOJ, an official one appears to be underway on the Hill as well.

The Bidens also appear to be under investigation in the Senate

Thursday, one day after Trump was acquitted, the New York Times reported that Senate Republicans on the Finance Committee and Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs had requested documents related to Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine last year, a request that the Treasury Department has complied with.

The request suggests Republican senators are looking into Hunter’s finances using standard protocols for Senate investigations. But some Democrats are accusing the administration of complying with this investigation in a way that it refused to in the impeachment inquiry.

“Applying a blatant double standard, Trump administration agencies like the Treasury Department are rapidly complying with Senate Republican requests — no subpoenas necessary — and producing ‘evidence’ of questionable origin,” a spokesperson for Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, said in a statement. “The administration told House Democrats to go pound sand when their oversight authority was mandatory while voluntarily cooperating with the Senate Republicans’ sideshow at lightning speed.”

The Senate Finance Committee chair, Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, pushed back on this allegation, according to the New York Times:

“It’s unfortunate that Democrats whom we’ve kept in the loop on our investigations would recklessly seek to interfere with legitimate government oversight,” said his spokesperson; Grassley also reportedly confirmed the investigation is ongoing.

Hunter Biden sat on the board of a Ukrainian energy company at the same time that his father, then the vice president, was overseeing policy in the region on behalf of the Obama administration. His detractors — like Trump — have pointed to this as evidence of corruption within the Obama White House.

Trump and others alleged, without evidence, that Joe Biden used the power of his position to help Hunter Biden and his business interests in both Ukraine and China. Trump’s calls for those countries to investigate these allegations kicked off the impeachment inquiry that ended on Wednesday with acquittal.

Now that Trump is in the clear, and as the Democratic primary campaign ramps up — with Joe Biden still in the race — this administration has made clear it will continue looking into the Biden family indefinitely.

A proposal to ban LGBT discrimination in Florida is effectively dead.

The Orlando Sentinel reports that the bipartisan Florida Competitive Workforce Act has not had a hearing, and is unlikely to receive a vote in the 2020 session:

One obstacle standing in its way is House Speaker José Oliva, who fears that prohibiting LGBTQ discrimination in the workplace could lead to a flood of litigation.

A person’s sexual orientation isn’t evident like it is for race or gender, presenting a challenge for employers, he said.

“It is very possible that an employer does not know of a person’s sexual orientation,” said Oliva, R-Miami Lakes. “Then you could get in an event where somebody could lose their job and then they might claim it is based on something that somebody did not know to begin with.”

He doesn’t see a need for legislative action.

“This is not a major problem throughout Florida,” Oliva said. “Florida is a tremendously inclusive, immensely diverse state.”

Oliva’s statement contradicts the findings of a 2017 study from UCLA’s Williams Institute, which found widespread LGBT discrimination in the Sunshine State.

“Florida’s legal landscape and social climate contribute to an environment in which LGBT adults experience stigma and discrimination in employment and other areas, and LGBT youth experience bullying in schools and family rejection,” the study’s authors concluded. “Such experiences have a negative impact on LGBT individuals in terms of health and economic stability, which in turn have economic consequences for the state. If Florida were to take steps toward a more supportive legal landscape and social climate, the state’s economy would likely benefit.”

Meanwhile, some GOP lawmakers in Florida are working to roll back local LGBT protections, according to a Jan. 28 report from Equality Florida:

Today Florida Legislators advanced a bill which would have dangerous effects on local LGBTQ nondiscrimination protections in employment across the state. Despite strong opposition from Equality Florida and advocates, the Florida House Subcommittee on Local, Federal, and Veterans Affairs voted 10-5 on a party line to move State Representative Bob Rommel’s HB 305 to its final committee. As filed, the bill would roll back local LGBTQ protections that currently cover nearly 60% of the state’s population. …

“Lawmakers should oppose HB 305 and instead pass the broadly supported, bipartisan-led Florida Competitive Workforce Act to establish statewide nondiscrimination protections. This is one of the most co-sponsored bills year after year. It is time for leadership to bring this legislation to the floor and for the Governor to sign it into law. Everyone should be able to earn a living, including the LGBTQ community.”

In related news, Speaker Oliva is downplaying a recent controversy over LGBT discrimination by private schools that receive taxpayer funding through a state voucher program, calling it “scare tactics.” After an Orlando Sentinel investigation exposed the discrimination, two of the nation’s largest banks ended their financial support for the voucher program.

“The one thing that we are not going to do is have a situation where children who now finally have [a] great opportunity are now going to be ripped from those schools,” Oliva said this week. “What is happening in this situation, is that a few at the Orlando Sentinel have always taken issue with programs that are proven to continually increase the lives of poor and minority children, and are using this angle as nothing more than a ruse to create scare tactics and trample on the constitutional rights we all enjoy — the freedom of religion, and the freedom of speech.”

The post Florida GOP Speaker Dismisses Proposal to Ban LGBT Discrimination: ‘This is Not a Major Problem’ appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Donald Trump’s private company is making big bucks off American taxpayers when the president stays at his own properties, which he has visited on 342 days since he took office.

According to a new analysis from the Washington Post‘s David Farenthold, Trump’s company is charging $650 per night for Secret Service agents to stay at Mar-a-Lago, and $17,000 per month for a cottage at Trump National Golf Club Bedminster.

This directly contradicts what @realdonaldtrump’s son Eric said last year: that Trump Org gives the government rooms “for free — meaning, cost of housekeeping.” Instead, Trumps have charged rates as high as $650/night for one hotel room. https://t.co/GdToSWQpHB

— David Fahrenthold (@Fahrenthold) February 7, 2020

WaPo reports: The only glimpses of this spending have come out via Secret Service records, released after public records requests. But these documents are often cryptic, giving few details. Last November, in response to a public records request from the group Property of the People, the Secret Service released a list of 56 payments it had made to Trump’s companies. All were from 2017. But the list was cryptic. It didn’t say what the Secret Service had been charged for. In some cases, it didn’t even say which Trump property had been paid. The Post tried to decode this list. One surprise: at least 20 of the payments to “Trump National Golf Club” — worth $63,700 — weren’t to a golf club at all. Other documents, already released, showed they were payments to Mar-a-Lago. The Post learned that many of them were hotel bills for $650 per night — a rate far higher than the usual limits on federal hotel spending. There is no legal limit on what the Secret Service may spend on hotel rooms while its agents are protecting the president.

Farenthold noted on Twitter (above) that the analysis directly contradicts something Trump’s son, Eric, said last year.

“If my father travels, they stay at our properties for free,” Eric Trump said. “So everywhere that he goes, if he stays at one of his places, the government actually spends, meaning it saves a fortune because if they were to go to a hotel across the street, they’d be charging them $500 a night, whereas, you know we charge them, like $50,” he added.

Several commenters noted that the arrangement appears to violate the Constitution’s domestic emoluments clause, which provides: “The President shall, at stated Times, receive for his Services, a Compensation, which shall neither be increased nor diminished during the Period for which he shall have been elected, and he shall not receive within that Period any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them.” 

And golf carts … don't forget the golf carts.

Emoluments be damned!

— Watching from Canada – "No quid pro quo!" – 16,241 (@RobertC93555010) February 7, 2020

Emoluments who? Idk her https://t.co/zxiPph0vRt

— Conner Williams (@CEWilliamstwitr) February 7, 2020

Why wasn’t violating the Emoluments clause included in the articles of impeachment? Open-and-shut case.

— A.T. Fields (@_KommSuesserTod) February 7, 2020

Another total conflict of interest, served up with more lies and of course the ‘E word’-Emoluments.

Are 63M of our fellow Americans and 51 GOP Senators as dumb as they seem? History will not be kind to any.

Government by Denial, Distraction, Deflection. @JohnAvlon @CNN https://t.co/0jKBhAtgvj

— George Farenthold (@GeoFarenthold) February 7, 2020

Hey House Intelligence! Emoluments Clause! Impeach the motherfucker again! https://t.co/XZE94xG551

— Nathaniel Walters (@atheisthusker) February 7, 2020

The post Trump Hotels Bill Taxpayers $650 Per Night for Secret Service Agents: ‘Emoluments be Damned!’ appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Chairman Tom Perez said Sunday the Democratic National Committee can’t simply tell Iowa not to hold caucuses anymore.

“One of the challenges, and the reason we didn't do that in our most recent conversation about this, is that you need to pass a state law to have a state-run primary,” Perez told host Jake Tapper on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “There are some states that still have caucuses where I'm not sure the Republican governor would sign the law to have the election.”

Perez did say that the trend was moving in the right direction.

"One of the conversations we had after the 2016 election, in addition to the superdelegate reform to return power to the people, is we incentivized states to go from caucuses to primaries," Perez added. "There were 14 states four years ago that held caucuses; seven of them are now primary states. Iowa chose to keep their caucus status.”

Besides Iowa, Democratic caucuses are scheduled to be held in three states — Nevada, North Dakota, Wyoming — and three U.S. territories, American Samoa, Northern Marianas, Guam.

Coming out of the debacle of the Iowa caucuses last week, Perez and the DNC have been the subject of much flak — with some Democrats calling for Iowa to lose its first-in-the-nation caucus privileges and for Perez to step down as party chief.

Tapper asked Perez whether Iowa should lose its position as the first state to vote in Democratic presidential primaries, Perez said: “That’s a conversation that will absolutely happen after the election cycle.”

“I’m frustrated. I’m mad as hell — everybody is,” Perez said. “I think what we're going to do at the end of this cycle is have a further conversation about whether or not state parties should be running elections.”

At least one presidential hopeful shared Perez’s frustration on the Sunday show circuit: Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who on CBS’ “Face the Nation” called the Iowa Democratic Party’s struggles a “sad state of affairs.”

“It really saddens me because, you know, I went all over the state of Iowa and there are beautiful people, good people who take their responsibilities seriously,” Sanders said Sunday. “And the fact that the Iowa Democratic Party that has received all kinds of money, could not count those votes in a timely matter is really a sad state of affairs.”

The ongoing difficulties in Iowa prompted Perez to call for a recanvass of the caucus results. Sanders and former Sound Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg remain neck and neck.

Top sycophant Sen. Lindsey Graham took to the Sunday shows, of course, to bask in the Senate's nullification of Donald Trump's impeachment for using the tools of his power to extort the Ukrainian government into providing him "dirt" on a Democratic election opponent. It is not just Trump that appears to feel unleashed; Graham, too, was eager to describe the next steps of the administration-led descent into American fascism.

A first step: The Trump "private lawyer" Rudy Giuliani's smear campaign against the Bidens is now moving into Attorney General William Barr's Justice Department. Whatever Barr’s prior pretenses may have been, Barr is now explicitly establishing the means by which Rudy’s propaganda can be filtered into official “investigations” of Trump’s targeted enemies.

Throughout the House and press investigations into the Ukraine scandal, Trump Attorney General Barr either refused comment or denied that he was involved with the Giuliani efforts, despite Trump specifically naming both Barr and Giuliani as contacts for the Ukrainian president in the "transcript" of Trump's now-infamous phone call. Whether this was a lie or not—and it is almost certainly a direct lie by a complicit Barr—such pretenses have now vanished.

On CBS's Face the Nation, Graham said that the Department of Justice is now "receiving information coming out of the Ukraine, from Rudy." Barr's Justice Department, says Graham, has "created a process that Rudy could give information and they would see if it’s verified."

This means that the president's self-identified "personal lawyer", acting on behalf of known-corrupt pro-Russian Ukrainian oligarchs and ex-officials and in concert with two now-indicted launderers of Russian cash, is now directly channeling conspiracy claims against Trump's election opponent to the U.S. Attorney General's office. There is no longer any pretense of Giuliani's efforts not being state policy.

And this, in turn, means the claims of Russian organized crime-tied Dmytro Firtash, seeking to exchange "dirt" on Biden in exchange for the U.S. Department of Justice dropping his indictments in this country, are now being funneled through Giuliani directly into a Barr-led Justice Department that seems more then agreeable to making such a trade.

That was not the only assertion from Graham that Republicans and the Trump administration would be adopting new fascist policies of targeting and retaliating against Dear Leader's critics and enemies. Just after Trump removed multiple U.S. government officials (and a family member) who testified to the House impeachment committee despite Trump and Barr's standing orders to refuse House subpoenas, Graham indicated that many of those who investigated Trump will be heading to prison.

"We're not going to live in a world where as a Republican you get investigated from the day you're sworn in, three years later they're still coming after you," said Graham, erasing both Whitewater and the Benghazi "investigations" from the nation's history.

"Here's what amazes me. The Russian investigation, what happened? Half the people behind the Russia investigation are going to go to jail," the Republican told his Fox News host. "And Trump was cleared."

"When? Hopefully," host Maria Bartiromo mugged.

"Well, just hang tight," Graham responded.

We are now well into fascism, and it is the Republican Senate that is not merely looking the other way, but aggressively assisting Trump's team in its implementation. Those that testified against Trump are being removed, despite laws seemingly barring such retaliation. The propaganda efforts against Trump's targeted political foe spearheaded by Rudy Giuliani (financed, it should be noted, from Russia, as previous Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort was financed for his own role in manipulating Ukraine towards Russian interests while creating schisms between that country and the west) are now being pipelined directly into Barr's Department of Justice.

Barr, whose department attempted to stifle the Ukrainian whistleblower complaint and worked to sabotage all investigation of Trump, has issued orders that he must be informed of and approve of any new investigations that touch on a 2020 campaign or candidate—both giving him direct access to any information potentially damaging to Trump's foes while maintaining absolute power to block probes of Trump himself.

It is in this environment that Lindsay Graham, who has been one of the prime advocates of Trump's new, law-bending authoritarian powers, has confidence that Trump's prior investigators will be jailed. "Just hang tight," he tells his propagandizing state media host.

It is not likely that John Bolton's book will see the light of day, not with the White House insisting it contains "classified" information that will take an unspecified amount of time to review. It is not likely that the Republican Senate will take any action, even the most minor, to restrain the Trump team in retaliating against witnesses or to block Barr from turning the nation's Justice Department into a tool for smearing, and possibly jailing, Trump's adversaries.

Travel restrictions imposed against the non-compliant. The stifling of official information contrary to Trump's scattershot, often-delusional proclamations. Invented state propaganda. The celebration of pro-state conspiracy and white nationalism promoters. Escalating threats of far-right domestic terrorism.

The only path out, now that Republicans have morphed from a conservative movement to a fascist one, is election turnout so overwhelming as to swamp even these new, myriad election-rigging efforts. And even that may not be enough.

Here's Lindsey Graham telling CBS that Attorney General Barr has "created a process" where Rudy Giuliani can feed Biden dirt from Ukrainian sources directly to the DOJ, and the DOJ will then check it out pic.twitter.com/A6N8YV6tS9

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 9, 2020

Lindsey Graham: Half the people behind the Russia investigation are going to go to jail pic.twitter.com/Xi9LQV6J9M

— Acyn Torabi (@Acyn) February 9, 2020

Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech on Tuesday night was marked with dozens of lies, threats, and false claims that more than deserved the shredding Nancy Pelosi delivered to the text. In defending Trump’s speech, his supporters have pointed to the supposedly “uplifting” moments and personal stories that Trump slipped in between false claims about President Obama or fear-mongering over “criminal aliens.”

Among those happy stories was that of Philadelphia fourth grader Janiyah Davis, who Trump said was trapped in a “failing government school” before he made the point of awarding her, and only her, a scholarship, live, on prime time TV. Anyone watching would have seen that Janiyah was puzzled by Trump’s statements and had to be encouraged to applaud. As it turns out, there’s a very good reason—Janiyah Davis was already going to a top-notch school, had no need for a scholarship, and didn’t have a clue why Trump put her in the audience.

As the Philadelphia Inquirer reports, Janiyah attends Math, Science and Technology Community Charter School III, one of Philadelphia’s most sought-after schools. It’s a charter school, but paid for by public funds, so Janiyah and the 900 other students don’t pay tuition.

Janiyah moved to the school last year after previously attending a Christian school that did have a tuition. Based on a statement from the principal at Janiyah’s former school, it seems that someone called up the Christian school and asked about students who might need a scholarship. That principal apparently gave the White House Janiyah’s name. After this, Janiyah’s mother got a call inviting them to appear in the gallery during the SOTU.

But what the White House failed to do was to check on where Janiyah Davis was going to school, or if she needed a scholarship. They also didn’t bother to tell her mother why she and Janiyah were being invited to appear, or warn them that Trump was going to turn the camera their way during his speech.

With Republicans shouting and clapping, Trump continued the game show atmosphere of his address by informing Janiyah that she had just won a scholarship to any school she wanted to attend. Courtesy of Trump’s need for a photo-op. The problem is that Janiyah’s mother said afterwards that “I don’t view MaST as a school you want to get out of at all. I view it as a great opportunity.”

So Trump gave Janiyah Davis nothing. Which seems like the perfect ending to a story that began with Trump and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos applauding the idea of “failing government schools” as if neither of them had anything to do with, ick, government schools. The actual point of reaching out to someone in Philadelphia appears to be because Trump wanted to take a swipe at Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf this week, because Wolf vetoed a bill that would have awarded tax credits for attending private schools—a favorite program of DeVos.

Janiyah has plenty of company. Trump has been offering all kinds of prizes to people who donate to his campaign, without bothering to follow through. And there are the veterans he stiffed during the 2016 campaign, along with all the other times he’s lied about his gifts to charities.

But that the White House brought a fourth grader and her single mom to the State of the Union to use them as props, without even bothering to ask the most basic questions about their life, inform them about why they were being invited, or ask them about being props in Trump’s speech … seems absolutely on brand for Trump.

Trump at Mar-a-Lago in December. | Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images

Records indicate the Secret Service has spent nearly $500,000 at Trump properties — and that’s likely the tip of the iceberg.

New reporting about taxpayer expenditures at Trump properties suggests President Donald Trump and his family are making a ton of money off the presidency — and it makes their allegations of “corruption” about the Bidens ring hollow.

The Washington Post reported on Friday that Secret Service records obtained from a variety of sources show nearly $500,000 in payments to the president’s companies since he took office, including $650 per night charges for rooms at Mar-a-Lago and $17,000 a month above-market-rate charges for a three-bedroom cottage at Trump National Golf Club Bedminster, New Jersey. And it’s likely there have been additional payments to Trump’s companies that aren’t public knowledge, as the Secret Service has stonewalled efforts from Democrats to get a full accounting.

From the Post’s David Fahrenthold, Jonathan O’Connell, Carol Leonnig, and Josh Dawsey:

Trump’s company says it charges only minimal fees. But Secret Service records do not show that.

At Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club, the Secret Service was charged the $650 rate dozens of times in 2017, and a different rate, $396.15, dozens more times in 2018, according to documents from Trump’s visits.

An elected official using his office to financially benefit his family is basically the textbook definition of corruption, and the Post’s new reporting is simply the latest chapter in the ongoing saga of the Trump family normalizing self-dealing in a manner unprecedented in American history. But in an especially shameless display, Donald Trump and his eldest son repeatedly attacked the Bidens for their purported corruption on Thursday, just hours before the Post’s report dropped.

During his bonkers post-impeachment acquittal victory lap speech at the White House, President Trump justified his efforts to strongarm the Ukrainian government into announcing investigations of the Bidens by saying, “I probably have a legal obligation to report corruption.” He unfavorably contrasted Hunter Biden’s lucrative role on the board of a Ukrainian gas company with what his own kids are up to, claiming “my kids could make a fortune” if they did the same.

The irony is that the Trump children have made a fortune from foreign dealings, and not just before their dad took office. In October, Forbes reported that Eric and Donald Jr. have sold more than $100 million of the family’s real estate since the January 2017 inauguration — including a $3.2 million deal in the Dominican Republic in 2018 that is “the clearest violation of their father’s pledge to do no new foreign deals while in office.” Foreign money has also poured into the Trump International Hotel, located just blocks from the White House, which the president’s most recent financial disclosure indicated made him $41 million in 2018 alone.

Shamelessness, however, appears to be a trait Trump shares with his children. On Thursday evening, Donald Trump Jr. went on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show and attacked Hunter Biden, saying, “Hunter Biden can make millions from the Ukraine, but I’m pretty sure they’d have a problem with Donald Trump Jr doing it.”

Many Democrats do indeed object to the Trump family’s corruption. But with regard to Secret Service expenditures at the president’s properties, they’ve been unable to get to the bottom of it because Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin has refused to disclose the pertinent records until after the 2020 election.

Sen. Tom Udall (D-NM) told the Post that Trump has been “trying to hide the details from the public, because he knows how bad it looks. That’s the truth of it. He’s a billionaire, but we’re spending millions of dollars to support his for-profit clubs and for-profit businesses.”

Not only are Republicans unbothered by the Trump administration’s lack of transparency about taxpayer expenditures at their properties, but in an especially ironic twist, they’re helping the Trump’s family efforts to gin up a scandal about the Bidens.

Republicans Sens. Chuck Grassley (IA) and Ron Johnson (WI) recently requested the Secret Service turn over records of expenditures related to Hunter Biden’s protection when his father was vice president. And while the Treasury Department has stonewalled Democratic efforts to get to the bottom of what it’s costing taxpayers to protect the Trump family at properties they still own and profit from, the Treasury Department immediately turned over the Hunter Biden records.

---

The news moves fast. To stay updated, follow Aaron Rupar on Twitter, and read more of Vox’s policy and politics coverage.

Democratic governors are vowing to avoid a repeat of the bungled Feb. 3 Iowa caucus, insisting that their own state and party officials have things under control.

As governors of both parties gathered in Washington for the National Governors Association's winter meeting, the subtext was thinly veiled: We told you so, Iowa.

“Our caucus is coming up in two weeks from today. We are not using an app," Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak told reporters alongside other Democratic governors Saturday. "I can tell you that our folks on the ground are working extremely hard making sure that every 't' is crossed every 'i' is dotted. ... Hopefully Iowa is behind us and we’re going to be fine when we get to Nevada in two weeks.”

“I would like to say that Kansas anticipated all of this," Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly said. "We’ve abandoned the caucus process as we go to a primary process in May. Part of the reason that we did that is we understood that the caucus process is really exclusionary."

Governors here have been taking repeated shots at Iowa's place in the nominating process. And it’s not just Democrats: The Iowa debacle has also fanned Republican flames, in some quarters at least, to reframe the nominating system. Utah’s Republican governor Gary Herbert on Friday suggested a system of rotating regional primaries in lieu of the current process that he says keeps the best competitors from ascending to office.

The NGA confab is supposed to be a bipartisan forum for governors to work through challenges facing state governments, but this year’s event couldn’t come against a more partisan backdrop: on the heels of Iowa and President Donald Trump’s impeachment acquittal, and just ahead of Tuesday’s New Hampshire Democratic primary. At least 43 of the nation’s governors are confirmed to be in Washington at some point through the weekend — fewer than usual.

“It was the Iowa Democratic Party — I don't know if it extends beyond that,” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, told POLITICO ahead of the National Governors Association winter meeting in Washington on Friday. “But I do hope it says, ‘we've got to have a more inclusive way.’”

Minnesota changed its caucus to a primary system following high turnout in the 2016 system, and Walz said he’s confident the state’s Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party will run the March 3 event with finesse. But Iowa should be a “wake-up call” across the country, he said.

Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, a Democrat who ended his own presidential bid in December, said it’s too early to judge Iowa, but warned against underestimating outside forces.

“We’ll do everything we can to make sure our party’s effective,” he said of Montana Democrats. “But there’s greater issues we should be thinking about as well: though these challenges in Iowa may have been brought on by themselves, this underscores the importance of making sure that elections are secure — there very well may be meddling far beyond this.”

"It was not our finest hour," said New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, the current chair of the Democratic Governors Association. "I’m confident in our party in the upcoming caucuses and primaries will have their act together, that it will be lesson learned. But God willing be in the rear view mirror and we’ll be on to the real fight over the 'kitchen table' issues — and who stands for working families in this country."

Illinois Gov. J. B. Pritzker went further on Friday, offering up his state up as a better choice to lead off the primary calendar. He called it the “right way to go,” and challenged Iowa’s lack of representation.

“Diversity matters, right? And to have these states with no diversity come first, and somehow that's going to decide who's going to drop out?” Pritzker said at POLITICO’s 10th annual State Solutions conference.

Utah’s Herbert argued that “you oughta cut the country up into quarters, 25 percent based mostly on population, some geography maybe,” at the State Solutions event. Under his plan, the regions could each pick a designated month of the calendar and hold a Super Tuesday-like cluster of primaries at the end of their designated month.

Minnesota’s Walz echoed criticism of the Iowa caucus as a poor representation of the country and the party and called it “ridiculous” to spend “all that money for 40,000 votes or something."

“We’ve gotta get this stuff right,” he said. “I was reading today there was some concerted efforts to overwhelm the phone line by outside groups — you have to anticipate those kinds of things. So I think what it is for us is make sure the state parties are doing that. I for one, have to say — and it’s no offense with the usual border battles with Iowa — but an overemphasis on a smaller Midwestern state with a caucus system is a terrible way to start this thing out.”

Some Democrats are happy to wait a while before upending the election system during an already tumultuous year.

“It’s just Iowa,” said Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont. “Let’s give it a month and see what happens.”

— Caitlin Oprysko and Quint Forgey contributed to this report.

It isn't just about Trump's personal misdeeds. Even on policy, nothing matters.

Trump is taking taxpayer dollars and pocketing them, deliberately, openly, and in larger quantities than most people even realize. Of all the crimes Donald Trump has committed while in office, the violation of the emoluments clause of the Constitution may be the most obvious and consistent. It was clearly an issue before Trump ever stepped through the door of the White House. And ever since then, the failure to do a thing about it has been just as blatant. 

Trump may not have built a wall that can stand up to a breeze, but he has built a reliable pipeline that funnels money from both foreign governments and the U.S. government straight into his bank accounts. And the latest numbers show that, far from being concerned about how fast the money may be flowing through that pipe, Trump has cranked the valve open wide—overcharging taxpayers and supercharging the flow into his own pocket.

That includes booking Secret Service agents into rooms at Trump’s own hotels, for the low, low price of $650 a night.

Since taking office, Trump has made an astounding 114 visits to his own golf resorts, racking up a $127,000,000 bill to taxpayers in the process. Each one of those visits requires that the Secret Service and other White House staff come along. But they don’t come along for free. Trump charges each of those he drags off to Doral or Mar-a-Lago as if they were visitors on a holiday—on a holiday at special opposite-of-discount rates.

By August of 2019, the Secret Service had given Donald Trump over half a million dollars for the privilege of driving golf carts around his courses. Check that again. Trump plays golf, then charges the Secret Service rental on the carts they drive while protecting him—a rate of $2,000 dollars a day. 

But, as The Washington Post reports, that’s far from the only place where Trump is charging the country a premium rate to remain in his presence. Federal records show that Trump has been billing rooms for Secret Service agents at rates up to $650 per night. Trump has previously stated that he charges minimal fees … but the records don’t support those claims. 

That $650 rate wasn’t just a one-off fee that landed on agents squeezing into Mar-a-Lago at some kind of peak season. That was the rate Trump charged dozens of times in 2017 alone, the Post said. But then, not every Secret Service agent had a plain old room. When visiting his Bedminster club, Trump rented the service a so-called cottage for the bargain rate of $17,000 a month. That includes billing for days when neither Trump nor the agents were present.

None of this squares with claims from Eric Trump that when Trump travels, agents “stay at our properties for free—meaning, like, cost for housekeeping.” But then, that was Eric.

To make things more fun, an appeals court ruled on Friday that individual Americans, even if they are members of Congress, have no standing to sue Trump for violating the emoluments clause. Which is just what this week needed: even more evidence that Trump is beyond the law.

Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Donald Trump awarded the Medal of Freedom to Rush Limbaugh during the State of the Union address on Tuesday. If reading that sentence makes you want to tear something up, just remember, that’s exactly how they want you to feel. As Rep. Ayanna Pressley (quoting Adam Serwer writing in the Atlantic in 2018) said after Trump’s speech, “the cruelty is the point” for Trump.

The idea that Individual-1 placed Limbaugh on a list that includes people as righteous and moral as Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., Mother Teresa, Harvey Milk, Rosa Parks, and Cesar Chavez sickens me. As we all know, Limbaugh is a hateful bigot who has brought race-baiting, in particular as it relates to President Barack Obama, to a new level.

I spent far too many months going through eight years—spanning the entire Obama presidency—of “The Rush Limbaugh Show” transcripts, documenting his race-baiting. Others have collected examples of Limbaugh spewing hate throughout his whole career. Yet we don’t need decades, or even just years of Limbaugh transcripts to prove that his particular brand of race-baiting, which centers on stoking white fears with lies that they are or will be somehow oppressed by the all-powerful people of color, infects his discussion of every issue—including ones that, like healthcare reform, ostensibly are about policy differences which can be discussed without bringing up race. We just need one.

In a broadcast on July 20, 2010, Limbaugh targeted Shirley Sherrod, an African American official in the Georgia office of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). On July 19, 2010, Andrew Breitbart, the now-deceased founder of Breitbart News, posted a falsely edited video in which Sherrod was supposedly heard openly recounting an act of discrimination against a white farmer to an audience at a National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) meeting. Shortly thereafter, Sherrod was fired by the USDA. The full, unedited video surfaced within a day, showing that Sherrod had actually helped the farmer. In a subsequent interview, the farmer said that without Sherrod’s assistance, he would have lost his farm, adding that they remained friends. Here’s Limbaugh’s rant, which quickly moved from Sherrod to something much broader and more insidious:

(W)e know that the NAACP is racist, we know that the race business is racist, we know that it relies on racism and we know that the way it relies on racism is to tar and feather everybody else as racist. And what they’re doing to the tea party now some people look at as a success because it’s taken the tea party off message. But the real thing you need to glean is that the Obama administration and the federal bureaucracy is full of incompetents like Shirley Sherrod and it’s not going to be very long before you’re going to be dealing with her for your health care, and if you happen to be showing up to a black bureaucratic [sic] appointed by Obama and you happen to be something other than black, you might have the same treatment regarding your health care that this poor white farmer got. I mean, the bigger picture here is that.

Now, she supposedly has been dismissed, and she’s out now saying, (paraphrasing) ‘This is a terrible misunderstanding. I didn’t do any of this. The interpretation here on Fox and everywhere else is totally incorrect. I didn’t do anything.’ Of course not. Of course not. Minorities, they can’t be racist, they don’t have the power to be racist. It simply isn’t possible. So remember, folks, these are the kind of people—and we are talking about the federal bureaucracy—these are the kind of people, ‘Look, go to work for the government, nobody ever gets fired here.’ The ruling class. Nobody ever gets fired in the government. Everybody gets raises when you work for the government. And these people look at it as having all kinds of power over the rest of us, the ruling class versus us, the so-called country class. It’s not going to be long before these same kinds of people are going to be the people you have to go through to get the healthcare treatment or whatever access you need to the system. Those are going to be the people you first run into, by design and on purpose.

Limbaugh told his white audience that, under Barack Obama and his healthcare plan, it is highly likely that a “black bureaucratic [sic]” will have control over what kind of health care you will receive. In other words, the host told white people that power over their very lives will be in the hands of black people who work for a black president, a man who, Limbaugh had already told the audience countless other times by this point, hates white people and white America. When people say that Rush Limbaugh has spent years exacerbating white racial resentment for partisan, political purposes, this is what they mean.

What is the most important impact of Limbaugh’s race-baiting rhetoric? It helped lay the groundwork for Trump—The Man Who Lost The Popular Vote—to win the Oval Office. On the day Trump announced his candidacy, he slandered people coming into the U.S. from Mexico as rapists and drug dealers.

Both on the campaign trail and since his inauguration, Trump has spoken the language of racially resentful and alienated whites, language Limbaugh had been broadcasting five days a week to millions of Americans since Barack Obama had become president in 2009. By practicing the most divisive kind of white identity politics, Trump has put himself forward as the false champion of those whites in the struggle against their supposed enemies, people like President Obama, liberals, and those whom they championed—particularly, Americans of color and immigrants.

In reality, Trump, Limbaugh, and the Republican Party enact policies that benefit the economic elite and harm most of their white supporters, both in terms of their wallets and their health. By playing with and preying on white anxieties about the future of their collective status as the nation’s demographics shift, Republicans distract middle and working-class whites from this reality.

When Trump said that there were “very fine people” on both sides of a white nationalist, neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Limbaugh defended him by claiming his president was merely “trying to be accommodating, and he was trying to identify both sides as being somewhat guilty and somewhat responsible.” If you want to know why I believe Limbaugh deserves Trump, those shameful remarks are Exhibit A. The clash between the Obama and Limbaugh/Trump definitions of America and Americanness will remain central to our public discourse for the foreseeable future.

Trump gave the Medal of Freedom to Limbaugh at the State of the Union, ostensibly because the host had just announced that he was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer. Daily Kos Community member Leslie Salzillo offered what I thought were appropriate comments on how progressives might react to that news.

I don't wish anyone ill health. Nevertheless, Limbaugh is a liar and a race-baiter. He has grown incredibly rich by spreading hate, and has helped bring to power those who make our country weaker, less just, less free, and less democratic. It is said that one should not speak ill of the dead, even if what one says is the truth.

Either way, Rush Limbaugh is still alive.

Ian Reifowitz is the author of The Tribalization of Politics: How Rush Limbaugh's Race-Baiting Rhetoric on the Obama Presidency Paved the Way for Trump (Foreword by Markos Moulitsas). Some of the material in this post is excerpted (in some cases with slight alterations) from the book, with full permission from the publisher.

Breaking long-standing agency tradition, CIA Director Gina Haspel attended the State of the Union address on Tuesday. Breaking yet another norm for the intelligence and defense community representatives at the speech, Haspel showed her enthusiastic response to impeached president Donald Trump's domestic policy pronouncements on abortion and school prayer and the like. Haspel, one of the architects of torture in the Bush-Cheney regime with her "torture laboratory" in Thailand, shocked and dismayed former CIA directors and intelligence and military leaders with her Trumpism.

"I never did that," former CIA director Gen. Michael Hayden, told Politico. "That wouldn't be right. […] It's not my job," and he added he "never" attended the address while he was director. A former acting director of the agency, John McLaughlin said "Generally CIA directors have felt awkward at these things and have not gone often." Former CIA director John Brennan also "Never once" attended, his spokesman told Politico. "I can't remember this being regular practice in recent years," George Little, a former CIA public affairs director, told the website. The thing that's different in the case of Haspel is that she's been elevated by Trump to the cabinet, and thus was acting like a cabinet member. But she should have been taking the lead of the Joint Chiefs, who are there as nonpartisan representatives of the national security community.

Politico describes Haspel's conduct as "jarring" and "surprising" to them, as well as just not right. Because avoiding any appearance of partisanship is job one for the military and national security community at the event, which the Joint Chiefs always attend. Larry Pfeiffer, who spent more than three decades in intelligence and now serves as the director of the Michael V. Hayden Center for Intelligence, Policy and International Security at George Mason University told Politico, "those who come to the director's job as career professionals would be held to the same standard to which we hold our military leaders, particularly by their colleagues in the intelligence service."

But it's the Trump administration. No one will be held to any standard—if the president isn't, why should they be?

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Boeing Co. engineers have discovered a new software problem on the grounded 737 Max that must be patched before the plane can return to service, Federal Aviation Administration chief Steve Dickson said. A light indicating that the stabilizer trim system wasn't working properly "had been staying on for longer than a desired period," Dickson said, without providing more detail. The issue involves an alert designed to warn when the so-called trim system, which helps raise and lower the plane's nose, isn't working properly, according to two people familiar with the issue who weren't authorized to comment on it. It's not clear how much of a delay, if any, the issue will create as Boeing finalizes numerous fixes required to get its best-selling plane back into service. One of the people familiar with the trim alert problem said it's not likely to change Boeing's projection of returning the plane to service by mid-2020 because the company had built padding into its schedule. The trim alert issue resulted from Boeing's redesign of the two flight computers that control the 737 Max to make them more resilient to failure, the two people said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Virginia is set to become the first Southern state to ban LGBT discrimination, after both the House and Senate approved the Virginia Values Act on Thursday.

The Virginia House of Delegates just passed the Virginia Values Act — our state version of the Equality Act to protect everyone in the commonwealth on account of sexual orientation, gender identity and veteran status.
Change has come.
Welcome to Virginia. pic.twitter.com/0QwEoRCZJY

— Danica Roem (@pwcdanica) February 6, 2020

The Washington Post reports: A sweeping LGBT-rights bill banning discrimination in employment, housing and public accommodations sailed out of the Virginia Senate on a bipartisan vote Thursday. … The bill also would for the first time apply Virginia’s civil rights protections to public accommodations like restaurants and stores — not just for the LGBT community but also for racial minorities, women and religious groups. The House of Delegates was poised to approve an identical bill later Thursday. The Senate and House bills have to cross over to the opposite chamber and win passage again before Gov. Ralph Northam (D), who requested the legislation, can sign them into law. But those steps were regarded as mere technicalities by advocates cheering what they regard as landmark human rights legislation.

More from the Human Rights Campaign: Similar legislation passed through the Virginia Senate several times in recent years, but was blocked by anti-equality lawmakers in the House of Delegates. In the 2019 election, voters in the commonwealth elected pro-equality majorities to both houses of the General Assembly, making this victory possible. … Virginia will be the first state in the South to have non-discrimination protections for LGBTQ people, the first state in over a decade to add sexual orientation and gender identity to existing non-discrimination law, and the first state since 1993 to add a prohibition on discrimination in public accommodations (protecting all Virginians) where none existed before.

LGBTQ Virginians should never have to fear being fired or evicted because of who they love. These comprehensive anti-discrimination protections will make our Commonwealth stronger and more inclusive and I'm proud to support them. https://t.co/DR6CaoMTWt

— Ralph Northam (@GovernorVA) February 6, 2020

The post ‘Change Has Come’: Virginia Will Be 1st Southern State to Ban LGBT Discrimination appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

The newest Republican senator, Kelly Loeffler, has quickly risen to be a favorite of impeached president Donald Trump. The Georgia Republican, who was appointed to fill out retired Sen. Johnny Isakson's term, received high praise from Trump in Thursday's acquittal/Festivus "celebration." He gave Loeffler praise that her fellow Republican Sen. Martha McSally must be seething over. Loeffler has "been so supportive and she's been downright nasty and mean about the unfairness to the president," Trump said.

It probably also didn't go over too well with Rep. Doug Collins, the Republican who glued himself to Trump through the House impeachment process and has been counting on Trump to boost his own run for the Senate in the primary for Loeffler’s seat. He got another dagger to the heart today with the report that Loeffler kicked in $5 million to her own campaign this week. There's more where that came from, too. She's got so much money, she's charging her own campaign interest on that loan. She could make as much as $120,000 back in interest! No wonder Trump is impressed: That's the kind of grift he pulls every day, except of course he's doing it to the taxpayers. She's just doing it to potential donors. Charging yourself interest on your campaign loans isn't against the law, but as Beth Rotman, director of money in politics and ethics at Common Cause, says, it's awfully tacky.

Another billionaire is screwing up the Senate. Help fight back. Please give $3 to our nominee fund to bury them and help Democrats take the Senate back.

At his rally Thursday, Trump did give some props to Collins, calling him an "unbelievable" friend. He also said he's working on a compromise between the two. "Something's going to happen that's going to be very good. I don't know; I haven't figured it out yet," he said. Of course he hasn't, because the idea occurred to him right there on the spot.

But somebody who has no applicable qualifications to speak of is going to get a plum job from Trump any day now.

YouTube Video

Well, that was something. What it was isn’t clear, but it was … something. For an hour and a half, Donald Trump stood in front of a hand-selected collection of his most sycophantic sycophants and wandered through time and space to talk about the “scum” at the FBI, how he refuses to believe that Nancy Pelosi prays, and how Ivanka Trump could really make some money if she was only allowed to work with foreign companies.

In the process, Trump shared some love with his favorite members of Congress, including praising Devin Nunes for his work “in dungeons” and telling Steve Scalise that being shot had improved his looks. But most of the love Trump held for himself, as he flipped between parts of his normal rally speech and … indefinable weirdness. Mostly Trump seemed out to prove that in between his plodding, slow-motion appearance at the National Prayer Breakfast and his hyper-loopy sniffle-fest at noon had come a whole, whole lot of chemicals for better living.

Throughout the hour, Trump pointed out Republicans who had been particularly useful to him—here’s Mitch McConnell! Here’s Chuck Grassley! Here’s Mark Meadows! This included going off on an extended discussion of Jim Jordan’s ears. A good case of cauliflower ear on Jordan’s part apparently reminded Trump of his time play-acting with the Wrestlemania crew. Which made Jordan one of his favorites.

At another point, in addition to talking about how amazing it was that Steve Scalise’s wife actually stayed with him at the hospital after he was shot—something that “a lot of wives” would not do, according to Trump, who has experience with a lot of wives—Trump went through a dramatic reenactment of the shooting. He also mentioned that the bullet that hit Scalise was one especially designed to cause more damage on impact. He didn’t mention that Republicans, including Scalise, have voted to keep that particular kind of bullet available to the public. 

It was during this time talking about a shooting that happened on a softball field that Trump’s pinballing thought process took him back to his youth. Remembering a former Yankees second baseman, Trump asked the room if they remembered Bobby Richardson. It’s not likely that many did, because Richardson retired from baseball in 1966.

On the other hand, Richardson is only 84. Chuck Grassley is 86. He probably thinks of Richardson as an upstart.

Between sniffles, Trump found time to criticize everyone who ever suggested that selling out the White House was a bad thing. But strangely enough, most of these attacks seemed to be fixed on James Comey. Had he not fired the former FBI director, said Trump, it was likely “I would not be here today.” Which is … interesting. Trump paused to make fun of Robert Mueller, Christopher Steele, and of course Lisa Page—it would not be a Trump speech without his fixation on Lisa Page. 

But at a speech that was supposed to be about his acquittal after impeachment, Trump seemed to forget to mention anything about that impeachment, except that Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi are “vicious.” Oh, and that Mitt Romney only voted against him on one count, so he got “almost 53” votes. 

Earlier in the day, Trump was promising a speech full of retribution. But whatever substance brings him from ploddy to sniffy apparently left him unable to stop stroking his ego—and Ivanka—long enough to get his vengeance full-venging. Instead he settled for throwing out a lot of “sleaze” and “slime” and “dirty cop” references, without telling us just what kind of thumbscrews he’s ordering in bulk.

It wasn’t a news event. It wasn’t a speech. It’s was just a thing.

Oh, and twice Donald Trump insisted that the plural of “apprentice” is “apprenti.” Apparently he believes that he spent several seasons on The Apprentus.  

Updated at 2:30 p.m. ET on February 10, 2020.

One day last fall, I sat down to create a new Facebook account. I picked a forgettable name, snapped a profile pic with my face obscured, and clicked “Like” on the official pages of Donald Trump and his reelection campaign. Facebook’s algorithm prodded me to follow Ann Coulter, Fox Business, and a variety of fan pages with names like “In Trump We Trust.” I complied. I also gave my cellphone number to the Trump campaign, and joined a handful of private Facebook groups for MAGA diehards, one of which required an application that seemed designed to screen out interlopers.

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The president’s reelection campaign was then in the midst of a multimillion-dollar ad blitz aimed at shaping Americans’ understanding of the recently launched impeachment proceedings. Thousands of micro-targeted ads had flooded the internet, portraying Trump as a heroic reformer cracking down on foreign corruption while Democrats plotted a coup. That this narrative bore little resemblance to reality seemed only to accelerate its spread. Right-wing websites amplified every claim. Pro-Trump forums teemed with conspiracy theories. An alternate information ecosystem was taking shape around the biggest news story in the country, and I wanted to see it from the inside.

The story that unfurled in my Facebook feed over the next several weeks was, at times, disorienting. There were days when I would watch, live on TV, an impeachment hearing filled with damning testimony about the president’s conduct, only to look at my phone later and find a slickly edited video—served up by the Trump campaign—that used out-of-context clips to recast the same testimony as an exoneration. Wait, I caught myself wondering more than once, is that what happened today?

As I swiped at my phone, a stream of pro-Trump propaganda filled the screen: “That’s right, the whistleblower’s own lawyer said, ‘The coup has started …’ ” Swipe. “Democrats are doing Putin’s bidding …” Swipe. “The only message these radical socialists and extremists will understand is a crushing …” Swipe. “Only one man can stop this chaos …” Swipe, swipe, swipe.

I was surprised by the effect it had on me. I’d assumed that my skepticism and media literacy would inoculate me against such distortions. But I soon found myself reflexively questioning every headline. It wasn’t that I believed Trump and his boosters were telling the truth. It was that, in this state of heightened suspicion, truth itself—about Ukraine, impeachment, or anything else—felt more and more difficult to locate. With each swipe, the notion of observable reality drifted further out of reach.

What I was seeing was a strategy that has been deployed by illiberal political leaders around the world. Rather than shutting down dissenting voices, these leaders have learned to harness the democratizing power of social media for their own purposes—jamming the signals, sowing confusion. They no longer need to silence the dissident shouting in the streets; they can use a megaphone to drown him out. Scholars have a name for this: censorship through noise.

After the 2016 election, much was made of the threats posed to American democracy by foreign disinformation. Stories of Russian troll farms and Macedonian fake-news mills loomed in the national imagination. But while these shadowy outside forces preoccupied politicians and journalists, Trump and his domestic allies were beginning to adopt the same tactics of information warfare that have kept the world’s demagogues and strongmen in power.

[Read: What, exactly, were Russians trying to do with those Facebook ads?]

Every presidential campaign sees its share of spin and misdirection, but this year’s contest promises to be different. In conversations with political strategists and other experts, a dystopian picture of the general election comes into view—one shaped by coordinated bot attacks, Potemkin local-news sites, micro-targeted fearmongering, and anonymous mass texting. Both parties will have these tools at their disposal. But in the hands of a president who lies constantly, who traffics in conspiracy theories, and who readily manipulates the levers of government for his own gain, their potential to wreak havoc is enormous.

The Trump campaign is planning to spend more than $1 billion, and it will be aided by a vast coalition of partisan media, outside political groups, and enterprising freelance operatives. These pro-Trump forces are poised to wage what could be the most extensive disinformation campaign in U.S. history. Whether or not it succeeds in reelecting the president, the wreckage it leaves behind could be irreparable.

THE DEATH STAR

The campaign is run from the 14th floor of a gleaming, modern office tower in Rosslyn, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C. Glass-walled conference rooms look out on the Potomac River. Rows of sleek monitors line the main office space. Unlike the bootstrap operation that first got Trump elected—with its motley band of B-teamers toiling in an unfinished space in Trump Tower—his 2020 enterprise is heavily funded, technologically sophisticated, and staffed with dozens of experienced operatives. One Republican strategist referred to it, admiringly, as “the Death Star.”

Presiding over this effort is Brad Parscale, a 6-foot-8 Viking of a man with a shaved head and a triangular beard. As the digital director of Trump’s 2016 campaign, Parscale didn’t become a household name like Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway. But he played a crucial role in delivering Trump to the Oval Office—and his efforts will shape this year’s election.

In speeches and interviews, Parscale likes to tell his life story as a tidy rags-to-riches tale, embroidered with Trumpian embellishments. He grew up a simple “farm boy from Kansas” (read: son of an affluent lawyer from suburban Topeka) who managed to graduate from an “Ivy League” school (Trinity University, in San Antonio). After college, he went to work for a software company in California, only to watch the business collapse in the economic aftermath of 9/11 (not to mention allegations in a lawsuit that he and his parents, who owned the business, had illegally transferred company funds—claims that they disputed). Broke and desperate, Parscale took his “last $500” (not counting the value of three rental properties he owned) and used it to start a one-man web-design business in Texas.

Parscale Media was, by most accounts, a scrappy endeavor at the outset. Hustling to drum up clients, Parscale cold-pitched shoppers in the tech aisle of a Borders bookstore. Over time, he built enough websites for plumbers and gun shops that bigger clients took notice—including the Trump Organization. In 2011, Parscale was invited to bid on designing a website for Trump International Realty. An ardent fan of The Apprentice, he offered to do the job for $10,000, a fraction of the actual cost. “I just made up a price,” he later told The Washington Post. “I recognized that I was a nobody in San Antonio, but working for the Trumps would be everything.” The contract was his, and a lucrative relationship was born.

Over the next four years, he was hired to design websites for a range of Trump ventures—a winery, a skin-care line, and then a presidential campaign. By late 2015, Parscale—a man with no discernible politics, let alone campaign experience—was running the Republican front-runner’s digital operation from his personal laptop.

Parscale slid comfortably into Trump’s orbit. Not only was he cheap and unpretentious—with no hint of the savvier-than-thou smugness that characterized other political operatives—but he seemed to carry a chip on his shoulder that matched the candidate’s. “Brad was one of those people who wanted to prove the establishment wrong and show the world what he was made of,” says a former colleague from the campaign.

Perhaps most important, he seemed to have no reservations about the kind of campaign Trump wanted to run. The race-baiting, the immigrant-bashing, the truth-bending—none of it seemed to bother Parscale. While some Republicans wrung their hands over Trump’s inflammatory messages, Parscale came up with ideas to more effectively disseminate them.

[Read: Bots are destroying political discourse as we know it]

The campaign had little interest at first in cutting-edge ad technology, and for a while, Parscale’s most valued contribution was the merchandise page he built to sell MAGA hats. But that changed in the general election. Outgunned on the airwaves and lagging badly in fundraising, campaign officials turned to Google and Facebook, where ads were inexpensive and shock value was rewarded. As the campaign poured tens of millions into online advertising—amplifying themes such as Hillary Clinton’s criminality and the threat of radical Islamic terrorism—Parscale’s team, which was christened Project Alamo, grew to 100.

Parscale was generally well liked by his colleagues, who recall him as competent and intensely focused. “He was a get-shit-done type of person,” says A. J. Delgado, who worked with him. Perhaps just as important, he had a talent for ingratiating himself with the Trump family. “He was probably better at managing up,” Kurt Luidhardt, a consultant for the campaign, told me. He made sure to share credit for his work with the candidate’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and he excelled at using Trump’s digital ignorance to flatter him. “Parscale would come in and tell Trump he didn’t need to listen to the polls, because he’d crunched his data and they were going to win by six points,” one former campaign staffer told me. “I was like, ‘Come on, man, don’t bullshit a bullshitter.’ ” But Trump seemed to buy it. (Parscale declined to be interviewed for this story.)

[David A. Graham: The real problem with fake news]

James Barnes, a Facebook employee who was dispatched to work closely with the campaign, told me Parscale’s political inexperience made him open to experimenting with the platform’s new tools. “Whereas some grizzled campaign strategist who’d been around the block a few times might say, ‘Oh, that will never work,’ Brad’s predisposition was to say, ‘Yeah, let’s try it.’ ” From June to November, Trump’s campaign ran 5.9 million ads on Facebook, while Clinton’s ran just 66,000. A Facebook executive would later write in a leaked memo that Trump “got elected because he ran the single best digital ad campaign I’ve ever seen from any advertiser.”

Though some strategists questioned how much these ads actually mattered, Parscale was hailed for Trump’s surprise victory. Stories appeared in the press calling him a “genius” and the campaign’s “secret weapon,” and in 2018 he was tapped to lead the entire reelection effort. The promotion was widely viewed as a sign that the president’s 2020 strategy would hinge on the digital tactics that Parscale had mastered.

[Read: What Facebook did to American democracy]

Through it all, the strategist has continued to show a preference for narrative over truth. Last May, Parscale regaled a crowd of donors and activists in Miami with the story of his ascent. When a ProPublica reporter confronted him about the many misleading details in his account, he shrugged off the fact-check. “When I give a speech, I tell it like a story,” he said. “My story is my story.”

DISINFORMATION ARCHITECTURE

In his book This Is Not Propaganda, Peter Pomerantsev, a researcher at the London School of Economics, writes about a young Filipino political consultant he calls “P.” In college, P had studied the “Little Albert experiment,” in which scientists conditioned a young child to fear furry animals by exposing him to loud noises every time he encountered a white lab rat. The experiment gave P an idea. He created a series of Facebook groups for Filipinos to discuss what was going on in their communities. Once the groups got big enough—about 100,000 members—he began posting local crime stories, and instructed his employees to leave comments falsely tying the grisly headlines to drug cartels. The pages lit up with frightened chatter. Rumors swirled; conspiracy theories metastasized. To many, all crimes became drug crimes.

Unbeknownst to their members, the Facebook groups were designed to boost Rodrigo Duterte, then a long-shot presidential candidate running on a pledge to brutally crack down on drug criminals. (Duterte once boasted that, as mayor of Davao City, he rode through the streets on his motorcycle and personally executed drug dealers.) P’s experiment was one plank in a larger “disinformation architecture”—which also included social-media influencers paid to mock opposing candidates, and mercenary trolls working out of former call centers—that experts say aided Duterte’s rise to power. Since assuming office in 2016, Duterte has reportedly ramped up these efforts while presiding over thousands of extrajudicial killings.

The campaign in the Philippines was emblematic of an emerging propaganda playbook, one that uses new tools for the age-old ends of autocracy. The Kremlin has long been an innovator in this area. (A 2011 manual for Russian civil servants favorably compared their methods of disinformation to “an invisible radiation” that takes effect while “the population doesn’t even feel it is being acted upon.”) But with the technological advances of the past decade, and the global proliferation of smartphones, governments around the world have found success deploying Kremlin-honed techniques against their own people.

[Read: Peter Pomerantsev on Russia and the menace of unreality]

In the United States, we tend to view such tools of oppression as the faraway problems of more fragile democracies. But the people working to reelect Trump understand the power of these tactics. They may use gentler terminology—muddy the waters; alternative facts—but they’re building a machine designed to exploit their own sprawling disinformation architecture.

Central to that effort is the campaign’s use of micro-targeting—the process of slicing up the electorate into distinct niches and then appealing to them with precisely tailored digital messages. The advantages of this approach are obvious: An ad that calls for defunding Planned Parenthood might get a mixed response from a large national audience, but serve it directly via Facebook to 800 Roman Catholic women in Dubuque, Iowa, and its reception will be much more positive. If candidates once had to shout their campaign promises from a soapbox, micro-targeting allows them to sidle up to millions of voters and whisper personalized messages in their ear.

Parscale didn’t invent this practice—Barack Obama’s campaign famously used it in 2012, and Clinton’s followed suit. But Trump’s effort in 2016 was unprecedented, in both its scale and its brazenness. In the final days of the 2016 race, for example, Trump’s team tried to suppress turnout among black voters in Florida by slipping ads into their News Feeds that read, “Hillary Thinks African-Americans Are Super Predators.” An unnamed campaign official boasted to Bloomberg Businessweek that it was one of “three major voter suppression operations underway.” (The other two targeted young women and white liberals.)

The weaponization of micro-targeting was pioneered in large part by the data scientists at Cambridge Analytica. The firm began as part of a nonpartisan military contractor that used digital psyops to target terrorist groups and drug cartels. In Pakistan, it worked to thwart jihadist recruitment efforts; in South America, it circulated disinformation to turn drug dealers against their bosses.

The emphasis shifted once the conservative billionaire Robert Mercer became a major investor and installed Steve Bannon as his point man. Using a massive trove of data it had gathered from Facebook and other sources—without users’ consent—Cambridge Analytica worked to develop detailed “psychographic profiles” for every voter in the U.S., and began experimenting with ways to stoke paranoia and bigotry by exploiting certain personality traits. In one exercise, the firm asked white men whether they would approve of their daughter marrying a Mexican immigrant; those who said yes were asked a follow-up question designed to provoke irritation at the constraints of political correctness: “Did you feel like you had to say that?”

Christopher Wylie, who was the director of research at Cambridge Analytica and later testified about the company to Congress, told me that “with the right kind of nudges,” people who exhibited certain psychological characteristics could be pushed into ever more extreme beliefs and conspiratorial thinking. “Rather than using data to interfere with the process of radicalization, Steve Bannon was able to invert that,” Wylie said. “We were essentially seeding an insurgency in the United States.”

Cambridge Analytica was dissolved in 2018, shortly after its CEO was caught on tape bragging about using bribery and sexual “honey traps” on behalf of clients. (The firm denied that it actually used such tactics.) Since then, some political scientists have questioned how much effect its “psychographic” targeting really had. But Wylie—who spoke with me from London, where he now works for H&M, as a fashion-trend forecaster—said the firm’s work in 2016 was a modest test run compared with what could come.

“What happens if North Korea or Iran picks up where Cambridge Analytica left off?” he said, noting that plenty of foreign actors will be looking for ways to interfere in this year’s election. “There are countless hostile states that have more than enough capacity to quickly replicate what we were able to do … and make it much more sophisticated.” These efforts may not come only from abroad: A group of former Cambridge Analytica employees have formed a new firm that, according to the Associated Press, is working with the Trump campaign. (The firm has denied this, and a campaign spokesperson declined to comment.)

After the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, Facebook was excoriated for its mishandling of user data and complicity in the viral spread of fake news. Mark Zuckerberg promised to do better, and rolled out a flurry of reforms. But then, last fall, he handed a major victory to lying politicians: Candidates, he said, would be allowed to continue running false ads on Facebook. (Commercial advertisers, by contrast, are subject to fact-checking.) In a speech at Georgetown University, the CEO argued that his company shouldn’t be responsible for arbitrating political speech, and that because political ads already receive so much scrutiny, candidates who choose to lie will be held accountable by journalists and watchdogs.

To bolster his case, Zuckerberg pointed to the recently launched—and publicly accessible—“library” where Facebook archives every political ad it publishes. The project has a certain democratic appeal: Why censor false or toxic content when a little sunlight can have the same effect? But spend some time scrolling through the archive of Trump reelection ads, and you quickly see the limits of this transparency.

[Read: The age of reverse censorship]

The campaign doesn’t run just one ad at a time on a given theme. It runs hundreds of iterations—adjusting the language, the music, even the colors of the “Donate” buttons. In the 10 weeks after the House of Representatives began its impeachment inquiry, the Trump campaign ran roughly 14,000 different ads containing the word impeachment. Sifting through all of them is virtually impossible.

Both parties will rely on micro-targeted ads this year, but the president is likely to have a distinct advantage. The Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign have reportedly compiled an average of 3,000 data points on every voter in America. They have spent years experimenting with ways to tweak their messages based not just on gender and geography, but on whether the recipient owns a gun or watches the Golf Channel.

While these ads can be used to try to win over undecided voters, they’re most often deployed for fundraising and for firing up the faithful—and Trump’s advisers believe this election will be decided by mobilization, not persuasion. To turn out the base, the campaign has signaled that it will return to familiar themes: the threat of “illegal aliens”—a term Parscale has reportedly encouraged Trump to use—and the corruption of the “swamp.”

Beyond Facebook, the campaign is also investing in a texting platform that could allow it to send anonymous messages directly to millions of voters’ phones without their permission. Until recently, people had to opt in before a campaign could include them in a mass text. But with new “peer to peer” texting apps—including one developed by Gary Coby, a senior Trump adviser—a single volunteer can send hundreds of messages an hour, skirting federal regulations by clicking “Send” one message at a time. Notably, these messages aren’t required to disclose who’s behind them, thanks to a 2002 ruling by the Federal Election Commission that cited the limited number of characters available in a text.

Most experts assume that these regulations will be overhauled sometime after the 2020 election. For now, campaigns from both parties are hoovering up as many cellphone numbers as possible, and Parscale has said texting will be at the center of Trump’s reelection strategy. The medium’s ability to reach voters is unparalleled: While robocalls get sent to voicemail and email blasts get trapped in spam folders, peer-to-peer texting companies say that at least 90 percent of their messages are opened.

The Trump campaign’s texts so far this cycle have focused on shouty fundraising pleas (“They have NOTHING! IMPEACHMENT IS OVER! Now let’s CRUSH our End of Month Goal”). But the potential for misuse by outside groups is clear—and shady political actors are already discovering how easy it is to wage an untraceable whisper campaign by text.

In 2018, as early voting got under way in Tennessee’s Republican gubernatorial primary, voters began receiving text messages attacking two of the candidates’ conservative credentials. The texts—written in a conversational style, as if they’d been sent from a friend—were unsigned, and people who tried calling the numbers received a busy signal. The local press covered the smear campaign. Law enforcement was notified. But the source of the texts was never discovered.

WAR ON THE PRESS

One afternoon last March, I was on the phone with a Republican operative close to the Trump family when he casually mentioned that a reporter at Business Insider was about to have a very bad day. The journalist, John Haltiwanger, had tweeted something that annoyed Donald Trump Jr., prompting the coterie of friends and allies surrounding the president’s son to drum up a hit piece. The story they had coming, the operative suggested to me, would demolish the reporter’s credibility.

I wasn’t sure what to make of this gloating—people in Trump’s circle have a tendency toward bluster. But a few hours later, the operative sent me a link to a Breitbart News article documenting Haltiwanger’s “history of intense Trump hatred.” The story was based on a series of Instagram posts—all of them from before Haltiwanger started working at Business Insider—in which he made fun of the president and expressed solidarity with liberal protesters.

The next morning, Don Jr. tweeted the story to his 3 million followers, denouncing Haltiwanger as a “raging lib.” Other conservatives piled on, and the reporter was bombarded with abusive messages and calls for him to be fired. His employer issued a statement conceding that the Instagram posts were “not appropriate.” Haltiwanger kept his job, but the experience, he told me later, “was bizarre and unsettling.”

The Breitbart story was part of a coordinated effort by a coalition of Trump allies to air embarrassing information about reporters who produce critical coverage of the president. (The New York Times first reported on this project last summer; since then, it’s been described to me in greater detail.) According to people with knowledge of the effort, pro-Trump operatives have scraped social-media accounts belonging to hundreds of political journalists and compiled years’ worth of posts into a dossier.

Often when a particular news story is deemed especially unfair—or politically damaging—to the president, Don Jr. will flag it in a text thread that he uses for this purpose. (Among those who text regularly with the president’s eldest son, someone close to him told me, are the conservative activist Charlie Kirk; two GOP strategists, Sergio Gor and Arthur Schwartz; Matthew Boyle, a Breitbart editor; and U.S. Ambassador Richard Grenell.) Once a story has been marked for attack, someone searches the dossier for material on the journalists involved. If something useful turns up—a problematic old joke; evidence of liberal political views—Boyle turns it into a Breitbart headline, which White House officials and campaign surrogates can then share on social media. (The White House has denied any involvement in this effort.)

Descriptions of the dossier vary. One source I spoke with said that a programmer in India had been paid to organize it into a searchable database, making posts that contain offensive keywords easier to find. Another told me the dossier had expanded to at least 2,000 people, including not just journalists but high-profile academics, politicians, celebrities, and other potential Trump foes. Some of this, of course, may be hyperbolic boasting—but the effort has yielded fruit.

In the past year, the operatives involved have gone after journalists at CNN, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. They exposed one reporter for using the word fag in college, and another for posting anti-Semitic and racist jokes a decade ago. These may not have been career-ending revelations, but people close to the project said they’re planning to unleash much more opposition research as the campaign intensifies. “This is innovative shit,” said Mike Cernovich, a right-wing activist with a history of trolling. “They’re appropriating call-out culture.”

What’s notable about this effort is not that it aims to expose media bias. Conservatives have been complaining—with some merit—about a liberal slant in the press for decades. But in the Trump era, an important shift has taken place. Instead of trying to reform the press, or critique its coverage, today’s most influential conservatives want to destroy the mainstream media altogether. “Journalistic integrity is dead,” Boyle declared in a 2017 speech at the Heritage Foundation. “There is no such thing anymore. So everything is about weaponization of information.”

It’s a lesson drawn from demagogues around the world: When the press as an institution is weakened, fact-based journalism becomes just one more drop in the daily deluge of content—no more or less credible than partisan propaganda. Relativism is the real goal of Trump’s assault on the press, and the more “enemies of the people” his allies can take out along the way, the better. “A culture war is a war,” Steve Bannon told the Times last year. “There are casualties in war.”

This attitude has permeated the president’s base. At rallies, people wear T-shirts that read rope. tree. journalist. some assembly required. A CBS News/YouGov poll has found that just 11 percent of strong Trump supporters trust the mainstream media—while 91 percent turn to the president for “accurate information.” This dynamic makes it all but impossible for the press to hold the president accountable, something Trump himself seems to understand. “Remember,” he told a crowd in 2018, “what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”

Bryan Lanza, who worked for the Trump campaign in 2016 and remains a White House surrogate, told me flatly that he sees no possibility of Americans establishing a common set of facts from which to conduct the big debates of this year’s election. Nor is that his goal. “It’s our job to sell our narrative louder than the media,” Lanza said. “They’re clearly advocating for a liberal-socialist position, and we’re never going to be in concert. So the war continues.”

[From December 2019: The dark psychology of social networks]

Parscale has indicated that he plans to open up a new front in this war: local news. Last year, he said the campaign intends to train “swarms of surrogates” to undermine negative coverage from local TV stations and newspapers. Polls have long found that Americans across the political spectrum trust local news more than national media. If the campaign has its way, that trust will be eroded by November. “We can actually build up and fight with the local newspapers,” Parscale told donors, according to a recording provided by The Palm Beach Post. “So we’re not just fighting on Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC with the same 700,000 people watching every day.”

Running parallel to this effort, some conservatives have been experimenting with a scheme to exploit the credibility of local journalism. Over the past few years, hundreds of websites with innocuous-sounding names like the Arizona Monitor and The Kalamazoo Times have begun popping up. At first glance, they look like regular publications, complete with community notices and coverage of schools. But look closer and you’ll find that there are often no mastheads, few if any bylines, and no addresses for local offices. Many of them are organs of Republican lobbying groups; others belong to a mysterious company called Locality Labs, which is run by a conservative activist in Illinois. Readers are given no indication that these sites have political agendas—which is precisely what makes them valuable.

According to one longtime strategist, candidates looking to plant a negative story about an opponent can pay to have their desired headlines posted on some of these Potemkin news sites. By working through a third-party consulting firm—instead of paying the sites directly—candidates are able to obscure their involvement in the scheme when they file expenditures to the Federal Election Commission. Even if the stories don’t fool savvy readers, the headlines are convincing enough to be flashed across the screen in a campaign commercial or slipped into fundraising emails.

DIGITAL DIRTY TRICKS

Shortly after polls closed in Kentucky’s gubernatorial election last November, an anonymous Twitter user named @Overlordkraken1 announced to his 19 followers that he had “just shredded a box of Republican mail in ballots” in Louisville.

There was little reason to take this claim at face value, and plenty of reason to doubt it (beginning with the fact that he’d misspelled Louisville). But the race was tight, and as incumbent Governor Matt Bevin began to fall behind in the vote total, an army of Twitter bots began spreading the election-rigging claim.

The original post was removed by Twitter, but by then thousands of automated accounts were circulating screenshots of it with the hashtag #StoptheSteal. Popular right-wing internet personalities jumped on the narrative, and soon the Bevin campaign was making noise about unspecified voting “irregularities.” When the race was called for his opponent, the governor refused to concede, and asked for a statewide review of the vote. (No evidence of ballot-shredding was found, and he finally admitted defeat nine days later.)

The Election Night disinformation blitz had all the markings of a foreign influence operation. In 2016, Russian trolls had worked in similar ways to contaminate U.S. political discourse—posing as Black Lives Matter activists in an attempt to inflame racial divisions, and fanning pro-Trump conspiracy theories. (They even used Facebook to organize rallies, including one for Muslim supporters of Clinton in Washington, D.C., where they got someone to hold up a sign attributing a fictional quote to the candidate: “I think Sharia law will be a powerful new direction of freedom.”)

But when Twitter employees later reviewed the activity surrounding Kentucky’s election, they concluded that the bots were largely based in America—a sign that political operatives here were learning to mimic Russian trolling tactics.

Of course, dirty tricks aren’t new to American politics. From Lee Atwater and Roger Stone to the crooked machine Democrats of Chicago, the country has a long history of underhanded operatives smearing opponents and meddling in elections. And, in fact, Samuel Woolley, a scholar who studies digital propaganda, told me that the first documented deployment of politicized Twitter bots was in the U.S. In 2010, an Iowa-based conservative group set up a small network of automated accounts with names like @BrianD82 to promote the idea that Martha Coakley, a Democrat running for Senate in Massachusetts, was anti-Catholic.

Since then, the tactics of Twitter warfare have grown more sophisticated, as regimes around the world experiment with new ways to deploy their cybermilitias. In Mexico, supporters of then-President Enrique Peña Nieto created “sock puppet” accounts to pose as protesters and sabotage the opposition movement. In Azerbaijan, a pro-government youth group waged coordinated harassment campaigns against journalists, flooding their Twitter feeds with graphic threats and insults. When these techniques prove successful, Woolley told me, Americans improve upon them. “It’s almost as if there’s a Columbian exchange between developing-world authoritarian regimes and the West,” he said.

Parscale has denied that the campaign uses bots, saying in a 60 Minutes interview, “I don’t think [they] work.” He may be right—it’s unlikely that these nebulous networks of trolls and bots could swing a national election. But they do have their uses. They can simulate false consensus, derail sincere debate, and hound people out of the public square.

According to one study, bots accounted for roughly 20 percent of all the tweets posted about the 2016 election during one five-week period that year. And Twitter is already infested with bots that seem designed to boost Trump’s reelection prospects. Regardless of where they’re coming from, they have tremendous potential to divide, radicalize, and stoke hatred that lasts long after the votes are cast.

Rob Flaherty, who served as the digital director for Beto O’Rourke’s presidential campaign, told me that Twitter in 2020 is a “hall of mirrors.” He said one mysterious account started a viral rumor that the gunman who killed seven people in Odessa, Texas, last summer had a beto bumper sticker on his car. Another masqueraded as an O’Rourke supporter and hurled racist invective at a journalist. Some of these tactics echoed 2016, when Russian agitators posed as Bernie Sanders supporters and stirred up anger toward Hillary Clinton.

Flaherty said he didn’t know who was behind the efforts targeting O’Rourke, and the candidate dropped out before they could make a real difference. “But you can’t watch this landscape and not get the feeling that someone’s fucking with something,” he told me. Flaherty has since joined Joe Biden’s campaign, which has had to contend with similar distortions: Last year, a website resembling an official Biden campaign page appeared on the internet. It emphasized elements of the candidate’s legislative record likely to hurt him in the Democratic primary—opposition to same-sex marriage, support for the Iraq War—and featured video clips of his awkward encounters with women. The site quickly became one of the most-visited Biden-related sites on the web. It was designed by a Trump consultant.

FIGHTING FIRE WITH FIRE

As the president’s reelection machine ramps up, Democratic strategists have found themselves debating an urgent question: Can they defeat the Trump coalition without adopting its tactics?

On one side of this argument is Dmitri Mehlhorn, a consultant notorious for his willingness to experiment with digital subterfuge. During Alabama’s special election in 2017, Mehlhorn helped fund at least two “false flag” operations against the Republican Senate candidate, Roy Moore. For one scheme, faux Russian Twitter bots followed the candidate’s account to make it look like the Kremlin was backing Moore. For another, a fake social-media campaign, dubbed “Dry Alabama,” was designed to link Moore to fictional Baptist teetotalers trying to ban alcohol. (Mehlhorn has claimed that he unaware of the Russian bot effort and does not support the use of misinformation.)

When The New York Times uncovered the second plot, one of the activists involved, Matt Osborne, contended that Democrats had no choice but to employ such unscrupulous techniques. “If you don’t do it, you’re fighting with one hand tied behind your back,” Osborne said. “You have a moral imperative to do this—to do whatever it takes.”

Others have argued that this is precisely the wrong moment for Democrats to start abandoning ideals of honesty and fairness. “It’s just not in my values to go out there making shit up and tricking voters,” Flaherty told me. “I know there’s this whole fight-fire-with-fire contingent, but generally when you ask them what they mean, they’re like, ‘Lie!’ ” Some also note that the president has already handed them plenty of ammunition. “I don’t think the Democratic campaign is going to need to make stuff up about Trump,” Judd Legum, the author of a progressive newsletter about digital politics, told me. “They can stick to things that are true.”

One Democrat straddling these two camps is a young, tech-savvy strategist named Tara McGowan. Last fall, she and the former Obama adviser David Plouffe launched a political-action committee with a pledge to spend $75 million attacking Trump online. At the time, the president’s campaign was running more ads on Facebook and Google than the top four Democratic candidates combined. McGowan’s plans to return fire included such ads, but she also had more creative—and controversial—measures in mind.

For example, she established a media organization with a staff of writers to produce left-leaning “hometown news” stories that can be micro-targeted to persuadable voters on Facebook without any indication that they’re paid for by a political group. Though she insists that the reporting is strictly factual, some see the enterprise as a too-close-for-comfort co-opting of right-wing tactics.

When I spoke with McGowan, she was open about her willingness to push boundaries that might make some Democrats queasy. As far as she was concerned, the “super-predator” ads Trump ran to depress black turnout in 2016 were “fair game” because they had some basis in fact. (Clinton did use the term in 1996, to refer to gang members.) McGowan suggested that a similar approach could be taken with conservatives. She ruled out attempts to misinform Republicans about when and where to vote—a tactic Mehlhorn reportedly considered, though he later said he was joking—but said she would pursue any strategy that was “in the bounds of the law.”

“We are in a radically disruptive moment right now,” McGowan told me. “We have a president that lies every day, unabashedly … I think Trump is so desperate to win this election that he will do anything. There will be no bar too low for him.”

This intraparty split was highlighted last year when state officials urged the Democratic National Committee to formally disavow the use of bots, troll farms, and “deepfakes” (digitally manipulated videos that can, with alarming precision, make a person appear to do or say anything). Supporters saw the proposed pledge as a way of contrasting their party’s values with those of the GOP. But after months of lobbying, the committee refused to adopt the pledge.

[From May 2018: The era of fake video begins]

Meanwhile, experts worried about domestic disinformation are looking to other countries for lessons. The most successful recent example may be Indonesia, which cracked down on the problem after a wave of viral lies and conspiracy theories pushed by hard-line Islamists led to the defeat of a popular Christian Chinese candidate for governor in 2016. To prevent a similar disruption in last year’s presidential election, a coalition of journalists from more than two dozen top Indonesian news outlets worked together to identify and debunk hoaxes before they gained traction online. But while that may sound like a promising model, it was paired with aggressive efforts by the state to monitor and arrest purveyors of fake news—an approach that would run afoul of the First Amendment if attempted in the U.S.

Richard Stengel, who served as the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy under President Obama, spent almost three years trying to counter digital propaganda from the Islamic State and Russia. By the time he left office, he told me, he was convinced that disinformation would continue to thrive until big tech companies were forced to take responsibility for it. Stengel has proposed amending the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which shields online platforms from liability for messages posted by third parties. Companies such as Facebook and Twitter, he believes, should be required by law to police their platforms for disinformation and abusive trolling. “It’s not going to solve the whole problem,” he told me, “but it’s going to help with volume.”

There is one other case study to consider. During the Ukrainian revolution in 2014, pro-democracy activists found that they could defang much of the false information about their movement by repeatedly exposing its Russian origins. But this kind of transparency comes with a cost, Stengel observed. Over time, alertness to the prevalence of propaganda can curdle into paranoia. Russian operatives have been known to encourage such anxiety by spreading rumors that exaggerate their own influence. Eventually, the fear of covert propaganda inflicts as much damage as the propaganda itself.

Once you internalize the possibility that you’re being manipulated by some hidden hand, nothing can be trusted. Every dissenting voice on Twitter becomes a Russian bot, every uncomfortable headline a false flag, every political development part of an ever-deepening conspiracy. By the time the information ecosystem collapses under the weight of all this cynicism, you’re too vigilant to notice that the disinformationists have won.

POWERS OF INCUMBENCY

If there’s one thing that can be said for Brad Parscale, it’s that he runs a tight ship. Unauthorized leaks from inside the campaign are rare; press stories on palace intrigue are virtually nonexistent. When the staff first moved into its new offices last year, journalists were periodically invited to tour the facility—but Parscale put an end to the practice: He didn’t want them glimpsing a scrap of paper or a whiteboard scribble that they weren’t supposed to see.

Notably, while the Trump White House has endured a seemingly endless procession of shake-ups, the Trump reelection campaign has seen very little turnover since Parscale took charge. His staying power is one reason many Republicans—inside the organization or out—hesitate to talk about him on the record. But among allies of the president, there appears to be a growing skepticism.

Former colleagues began noticing a change in Parscale after his promotion. Suddenly, the quiet guy with his face buried in a laptop was wearing designer suits, tossing out MAGA hats at campaign rallies, and traveling to Europe to speak at a political-marketing conference. In the past few years, Parscale has bought a BMW, a Range Rover, a condo, and a $2.4 million waterfront house in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. “He knows he has the confidence of the family,” one former colleague told me, “which gives him more swagger.” When the U.K.’s Daily Mail ran a story spotlighting Parscale’s spending spree, he attempted deflection through flattery. “The president is an excellent businessman,” he told the tabloid, “and being associated with him for years has been extremely beneficial to my family.”

But according to a former White House official with knowledge of the incident, Trump was irritated by the coverage, and the impression it created that his campaign manager was getting rich off him. For a moment, Parscale’s standing appeared to be in peril, but then Trump’s attention was diverted by the G7 summit in France, and he never returned to the issue. (A spokesperson for the campaign disputed this account.)

Some Republicans worry that for all Parscale’s digital expertise, he doesn’t have the vision to guide Trump to reelection. The president is historically unpopular, and even in red states, he has struggled to mobilize his base for special elections. If Trump’s message is growing stale with voters, is Parscale the man to help overhaul it? “People start to ask the question—you’re building this apparatus, and that’s great, but what’s the overarching narrative?” said a former campaign staffer.

But whether Trump finds a new narrative or not, he has something this time around that he didn’t have in 2016—the powers of the presidency. While every commander in chief looks for ways to leverage his incumbency for reelection, Trump has shown that he’s willing to go much further than most. In the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections, he seized on reports of a migrant caravan traveling to the U.S. from Central America to claim that the southern border was facing a national-security crisis. Trump warned of a coming “invasion” and claimed, without evidence, that the caravan had been infiltrated by gang members.

Parscale aided this effort by creating a 30-second commercial that interspersed footage of Hispanic migrants with clips of a convicted cop-killer. The ad ended with an urgent call to action: stop the caravan. vote republican. In a final maneuver before the election, Trump dispatched U.S. troops to the border. The president insisted that the operation was necessary to keep America safe—but within weeks the troops were quietly called back, the “crisis” having apparently ended once votes were cast. Skeptics were left to wonder: If Trump is willing to militarize the border to pick up a few extra seats in the midterms, what will he and his supporters do when his reelection is on the line?

[Read: McKay Coppins on the conservatives trying to ditch fake news]

It doesn’t require an overactive imagination to envision a worst-case scenario: On Election Day, anonymous text messages direct voters to the wrong polling locations, or maybe even circulate rumors of security threats. Deepfakes of the Democratic nominee using racial slurs crop up faster than social-media platforms can remove them. As news outlets scramble to correct the inaccuracies, hordes of Twitter bots respond by smearing and threatening reporters. Meanwhile, the Trump campaign has spent the final days of the race pumping out Facebook ads at such a high rate that no one can keep track of what they’re injecting into the bloodstream.

After the first round of exit polls is released, a mysteriously sourced video surfaces purporting to show undocumented immigrants at the ballot box. Trump begins retweeting rumors of voter fraud and suggests that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers should be dispatched to polling stations. are illegals stealing the election? reads the Fox News chyron. are russians behind false videos? demands MSNBC.

The votes haven’t even been counted yet, and much of the country is ready to throw out the result.

NOTHING IS TRUE

There is perhaps no better place to witness what the culture of disinformation has already wrought in America than a Trump campaign rally. One night in November, I navigated through a parking-lot maze of folding tables covered in MAGA merch and entered the BancorpSouth Arena in Tupelo, Mississippi. The election was still a year away, but thousands of sign-waving supporters had crowded into the venue to cheer on the president in person.

Once Trump took the stage, he let loose a familiar flurry of lies, half-lies, hyperbole, and nonsense. He spun his revisionist history of the Ukraine scandal—the one in which Joe Biden is the villain—and claimed, falsely, that the Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams wanted to “give illegal aliens the right to vote.” At one point, during a riff on abortion, Trump casually asserted that “the governor of Virginia executed a baby”—prompting a woman in the crowd to scream, “Murderer!”

This incendiary fabrication didn’t seem to register with my companions in the press pen, who were busy writing stories and shooting B-roll. I opened Twitter, expecting to see a torrent of fact-checks laying out the truth of the case—that the governor had been answering a hypothetical question about late-term abortion; that a national firestorm had ensued; that there were certainly different ways to interpret his comments but that not even the most ardent anti-abortion activist thought the governor of Virginia had personally “executed a baby.”

But Twitter was uncharacteristically quiet (apparently the president had said this before), and the most widely shared tweet I found on the subject was from his own campaign, which had blasted out a context-free clip of the governor’s abortion comments to back up Trump’s smear.

After the rally, I loitered near one of the exits, chatting with people as they filed out of the arena. Among liberals, there is a comforting caricature of Trump supporters as gullible personality cultists who have been hypnotized into believing whatever their leader says. The appeal of this theory is the implication that the spell can be broken, that truth can still triumph over lies, that someday everything could go back to normal—if only these voters were exposed to the facts. But the people I spoke with in Tupelo seemed to treat matters of fact as beside the point.

One woman told me that, given the president’s accomplishments, she didn’t care if he “fabricates a little bit.” A man responded to my questions about Trump’s dishonest attacks on the press with a shrug and a suggestion that the media “ought to try telling the truth once in a while.” Tony Willnow, a 34-year-old maintenance worker who had an American flag wrapped around his head, observed that Trump had won because he said things no other politician would say. When I asked him if it mattered whether those things were true, he thought for a moment before answering. “He tells you what you want to hear,” Willnow said. “And I don’t know if it’s true or not—but it sounds good, so fuck it.”

The political theorist Hannah Arendt once wrote that the most successful totalitarian leaders of the 20th century instilled in their followers “a mixture of gullibility and cynicism.” When they were lied to, they chose to believe it. When a lie was debunked, they claimed they’d known all along—and would then “admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.” Over time, Arendt wrote, the onslaught of propaganda conditioned people to “believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.”

Leaving the rally, I thought about Arendt, and the swaths of the country that are already gripped by the ethos she described. Should it prevail in 2020, the election’s legacy will be clear—not a choice between parties or candidates or policy platforms, but a referendum on reality itself.

---

This article appears in the March 2020 print edition with the headline “The 2020 Disinformation War.”

Supporters of President Donald Trump reportedly flooded a telephone hotline used by Democratic precinct chairs to report results following Monday’s Iowa Caucus. This was after the hotline number was posted on the right-wing message board 4chan along with a plea to “clog the lines.”

Bloomberg News reports: On Thursday morning, the Iowa Democratic Party confirmed it “experienced an unusually high volume of inbound phone calls to its caucus hotline,” which included “supporters of President Trump who called to express their displeasure with the Democratic Party.” “The unexplained, and at times hostile, calls contributed to the delay in the Iowa Democratic Party’s collection of results, but in no way affected the integrity of information gathered or the accuracy of data sets reported,“ the party statement said. The Trump campaign said Wednesday night it had no knowledge of its supporters calling the hotline.

More from NBC News: An Iowa Democratic Party official said the influx of calls to the reporting hotline included “supporters of President Trump who called to express their displeasure with the Democratic Party.” The party official’s comments were first reported late Wednesday by Bloomberg News. Users on a politics-focused section of the fringe 4chan message board repeatedly posted the phone number for the Iowa Democratic Party, which was found by a simple Google search, both as screenshots and in plain text, alongside instructions. “They have to call in the results now. Very long hold times being reported. Phone line being clogged,” one user posted at about 11 p.m. ET on Monday, two hours after the caucuses began. “Uh oh how unfortunate it would be for a bunch of mischief makers to start clogging the lines,” responded another anonymous user, sarcastically. Some users chimed in, posting alleged wait times on hold, imploring others to “clog the lines [and] make the call lads.”

The post Trump Supporters Hacked Iowa Caucus Results by ‘Clogging the Lines’ appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

An Uber driver in San Diego reportedly called police on two gay dads after insisting that their crying infant son needed a mother.

James Moed reported Tuesday on Twitter that the incident occurred last Wednesday, Jan. 29. Moed said police knocked on the door of their hotel room at the Marriott Marina at about 1:30 a.m., demanding identification.

“It turns out the Uber driver who had taken us to the hotel had called the cops — accusing us of.. child trafficking? endangerment?” Moed wrote. “The same @Uber driver who told us our crying baby needed his mother, and didn’t back down when we tried to explain that our son has 2 dads.”

Following the encounter with police, the couple “stayed awake freaking out,” according to Moed. They wondered what would have happened if they hadn’t been carrying their son’s passport, or if the officers had been less agreeable.

“Where can my #queerfamily travel safely?” Moed wrote.

When Moed reported the incident to Uber, the company’s automated system sent him a refund and a form letter. But he said, “we want proof that you keep #LGBTQ riders safe from homophobic drivers.”

Moed later reported he had spoken to an Uber customer support representative. He said he requested an apology from the driver — but not his dismissal from the company — as well as evidence of an LGBTQ sensitivity training program.

“Awaiting response,” Moed wrote Wednesday, Feb. 5.

Moed could not immediately be reached for further comment. According to his Twitter bio, he works as “a service designer and innovation wrangler trying to make better stuff for people in emerging markets.”

Moed previously worked for IDEO in London, and has served as Seedcamp’s Expert in Residence, according to published reports.

Read Moed’s full Twitter thread about the incident below.

Last Wed, husband, infant son, and I were staying at @MarriottMarina. At 1:30 AM the @SanDiegoPD knocked on our door, demanding our IDs

— James Moed (@jamesmoed) February 5, 2020

It turns out the @Uber driver who had taken us to the hotel had called the cops – accusing us of.. child trafficking? endangerment?

— James Moed (@jamesmoed) February 5, 2020

The same @Uber driver who told us our crying baby needed his mother, and didn’t back down when we tried to explain that our son has 2 dads.

— James Moed (@jamesmoed) February 5, 2020

Stayed awake freaking out – what if we hadn’t had his passport? ..the cops had been less agreeable? Where can my #queerfamily travel safely?

— James Moed (@jamesmoed) February 5, 2020

Wrote to @Uber. Algorithm sent a refund + formletter. Keep yr $10, we want proof that you keep #LGBTQ riders safe from homophobic drivers

— James Moed (@jamesmoed) February 5, 2020

Spoke to @Uber_Support. Requested apology from the driver (not his dismissal) + evidence of LGBTQ sensitivity training program. Awaiting response.

— James Moed (@jamesmoed) February 5, 2020

The post Uber Driver Calls Police on Gay Dads After Insisting That Their Crying Son Needed a Mother appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

House impeachment managers Adam Schiff, Zoe Lofgren, Jason Crow, and Sylvia Garcia walk to the Senate chamber on February 5, 2020. | Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

The 48 senators who voted to remove Trump represent 53 percent of the nation.

On the surface, President Donald Trump can claim popular vindication after Wednesday’s impeachment vote. Senators voted 52-48 to acquit him on charges that he abused power, and 53-47 to acquit him on obstruction of Congress charges.

The reality, though, is that the only reason a majority of the Senate voted to keep Trump in office is that the body is configured in a way that systemically advantages Republicans. The blue state of California has 68 times as many people as the red state of Wyoming, for example, but both states still receive two senators.

Democrats actually control a majority of the Senate seats (26-24) representing the most populous half of the states. Republicans owe their majority in the Senate as a whole to their 29-21 lead in the least populous half of the states. This means that overall, the current Republican Senate “majority” represents about 15 million fewer people than the Democratic “minority.”

On the first article of impeachment, abuse of power, Republican Sen. Mitt Romney joined every member of the Democratic caucus to vote to remove President Trump from office. That means that the senators voting to convict represent about 170 million individuals — 18 million more people than the bloc of senators who voted to acquit.

I derived these numbers using a fairly simple method. Using 2016 US Census data for each state’s population, I created a two-column spreadsheet, with columns labeled “acquit” and “convict.” In each state where both senators voted to acquit, I allocated the full population of the state to the “acquit” column. I also allocated the full population of the state to the “convict” column in states where both senators voted to convict.

In states where the two senators split their vote, I allocated half the state’s population to one column and half to the other. All told, the senators voting to acquit represent about 152 million individuals, while senators voting to convict represent about 170 million individuals.

You can check my work here.

As a practical matter, Trump likely would remain in office even if the Senate were not malapportioned. The Constitution provides that, in an impeachment trial, “no person shall be convicted without the concurrence of two thirds of the members present.” In a Senate fairly apportioned by population, Democrats would have a majority, but they almost certainly would not have a large enough majority to remove a president.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that senators representing about 53 percent of the nation voted to remove Trump from office. That’s a far different narrative than the raw vote in the Senate suggests.

schwit1 quotes a report from Ars Technica: AT&T's decision to prevent Time Warner-owned shows from streaming on Netflix and other non-AT&T services reduced the company's quarterly revenue by $1.2 billion, a sacrifice that AT&T is making to give its planned HBO Max service more exclusive content. AT&T took the $1.2-billion hit despite previously telling Congress that it would not restrict distribution of Time Warner content, claiming that would be "irrational business behavior." AT&T's actual Q4 2019 revenue was $46.8 billion, but the company said it would have been $48 billion if not for "HBO Max investments in the form of foregone WarnerMedia content licensing revenues." An AT&T spokesperson told Ars that the $1.2 billion in lost revenue was primarily caused by the decision "not to sell existing content -- mainly Friends, The Big Bang Theory, and Fresh Prince -- to third parties such as Netflix." As we've previously reported, AT&T took Time Warner shows off Netflix in order to give the exclusive streaming rights to AT&T's HBO Max, which is scheduled to debut in May 2020 for $14.99 a month. The amount of forgone revenue could grow in future quarters, as Friends just left Netflix on January 1. The Big Bang Theory and Fresh Prince were not on Netflix in the United States, so in those cases the forgone revenue is apparently from not entering into licensing deals instead of ending them. AT&T also pulled Pretty Little Liars off Netflix in mid-2019 in order to give HBO Max the exclusive streaming rights.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Former Energy Secretary Rick Perry will skirt questioning by Congress during the impeachment of President Donald Trump despite his central role in the administration's contacts with Ukraine.

Perry stonewalled all requests from lawmakers for information in the investigation, defying a House subpoena and limiting his public comments to friendly media outlets. And despite a lawsuit that's yielded a trickle of internal records from the Energy Department and allegations from Rudy Giuliani's associate Lev Parnas that Perry played a central role in conveying Trump's demands for investigations into political rival Joe Biden, the Senate is poised to acquit Trump Wednesday with no clear answers about the former Cabinet member’s activities.

While the Senate may be ending its trial, Democrats in the House say they will keep pursuing the issue.

“The president has escaped accountability and so have all the president’s men. Secretary Perry has still major accounting to do about his activities in Ukraine,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), a member of the House Judiciary and Oversight committees, told POLITICO. “The Senate may have surrendered their constitutional responsibilities but the House of Representatives will not.”

But Raskin cautioned that Democrats haven't yet charted a course on how to proceed with any Perry inquiries, and lawmakers face “a lot of strategic decisions to make about how to use our resources” following the conclusion of the Senate trial.

Perry, who departed the administration on Dec. 1, was one of the “three amigos,” along with EU Ambassador Gordon Sondland and former special envoy Kurt Volker, who directed the administration's outreach to Ukraine — and the former Texas governor was the only one of the three not to testify in the impeachment proceedings. Along with his former chief of staff, Brian McCormack, Perry defied a congressional subpoena and, until a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by American Oversight, had successfully resisted turning over a single document.

But the few dozen documents that have been released have so far revealed little about Perry’s role, especially since DOE sent most of the paperwork to the State Department for review and redacted much of the content from the documents it did publicly release. A final batch of documents will be released by DOE on March 16 and American Oversight has said it will seek the release of the the documents withheld by the State Department.

The Energy Department’s stonewalling kept Perry out of the spotlight while testimony from Sondland, Volker and former Ukraine Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch dragged the State Department into the picture, said America Oversight chief oversight counsel Molly Claflin. Since no one from DOE offered testimony, Perry drifted into the background, she added.

“The problem with investigating this administration is it’s like oversight whack-a-mole,” Claflin said. “Perry slipped through the cracks. He’s really capitalized on that.”

Government experts said the refusal of Perry and others in the administration to comply with congressional document requests and subpoenas was unprecedented, and could permanently weaken Congress’ ability to hold the executive branch accountable.

“The consequences of Trump’s blanket obstruction, should it become a precedent for the future, are sweeping,” said Douglas Kriner, a professor at Cornell University who co-authored the book "Investigating the President: Congressional Checks on Presidential Power."

Meanwhile, Perry has settled back into Texas life and has rejoined the board of directors of Energy Transfer LP, the company that operates the Dakota Access pipeline, according to an SEC filing. He’s also returned to the political fold, offering up endorsements in Texas Republican primary contests and lending his Trump administration star power to GOP events across the country.

His upcoming attendance at a local GOP dinner in Gaston County, N.C. on Feb. 22 has helped boost ticket sales, according to county Republican Chairman Johnathan Fletcher.

“Everyone in Gaston County loves Trump,” Fletcher said. “Having someone from the Trump administration would be a huge draw, so he’s one of the ones we reached out to."

Perry’s involvement with Ukraine is well known among the local Republicans, said Fletcher, and didn't hurt his ability to draw a crowd.

“At this point, either people believe the whole thing [with Ukraine] is true and everyone’s guilty, or it’s another thing the Democrats have concocted,” Fletcher said.

Perry also continues to stick close to the Trump administration, serving as a surrogate for Trump at the Iowa caucuses Monday.

A spokesman for Perry did not respond to a request for comment.

The former Texas governor has repeatedly asserted that he pressed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate corruption in the country’s energy sector, but never heard Trump or any administration official mention demands that the government investigate former Vice President Joe Biden or his son Hunter during their conversations with Ukraine. Perry has never made similar comments under oath or before Congress.

Congressional Democrats prioritized the testimony of officials like former national security adviser John Bolton and acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney over Perry's, though they have said they believe he has relevant information to their inquiries.

“What about the third amigo? Wouldn't you like to know if the third amigo was in the loop?” House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) asked Jan. 21 on the Senate floor. “Don't you think the American people have a right to know what the third amigo knew about this scheme? I would like to know.”

At the same time, Parnas, the indicted associate of Giuliani, continues to make allegations about Perry. He told MSNBC last month that the president's personal lawyer directed Perry to demand that Zelenksy announce investigations into the Bidens when he attended the new Ukrainian president's inauguration.

Parnas’ lawyer reasserted his client’s direct knowledge of Perry’s activities in Ukraine in a letter Friday.

“Mr. Parnas would explain the conversation he overheard between Mr. Giuliani and then-Energy Department Secretary Rick Perry, who attended the inauguration in lieu of Vice President Pence, and the quid pro quo that Mr. Perry conveyed while there,” Parnas’ attorney Joseph Bondy wrote in a Friday letter to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Additional information on Perry is almost sure to come out. Bolton’s book, intended for release March 17, is expected to detail key White House meetings and conversations involving Perry.

IMPEACHMENT. Trump acquitted in sham Senate impeachment “trial”. “In a pair of votes whose outcome was never in doubt, the Senate fell well short of the two-thirds margin that would have been needed to remove Mr. Trump, formally concluding the three-week-long trial of the 45th president that has roiled Washington and threatened the presidency. The verdicts came down almost entirely upon party lines, with every Democrat voting ‘guilty’ on both charges and Republicans uniformly voting ‘not guilty’ on the obstruction of Congress charge.”

Republican Senators denied the Senate's right to examine relevant evidence, to call witnesses and documents, to properly try the impeachment of President Trump.

The verdict will be meaningless.

This wasn't a trial by any stretch of the definition. The American people know it. pic.twitter.com/OlVCDe4bpX

— Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer) February 5, 2020

DEMOCRATIC PARTY, MICHAEL BLOOMBERG, ANYONE WITH $$? Run this ad everywhere.

holy shit this ad pic.twitter.com/DAoYxfkeya

— Adam Parkhomenko (@AdamParkhomenko) February 5, 2020

NO CONTEST. Julia Louis-Dreyfus trashes “idiot” Trump, says Veep could never compete.

LEGENDARY. Jameela Jamil responds to backlash over her participation in HBO’s reality show about vogueing and the ballroom scene.

AND THEN. Comes out as queer.

pic.twitter.com/YcB6H7YCT0

— Jameela Jamil (@jameelajamil) February 5, 2020

FRED GUTTENBERG. Father of Parkland shooting victim ejected from State of the Union after shouting at Trump.

WATCH: This father of a Parkland shooting victim was kicked out of last night's State of the Union after shouting at President Trump during the section of his piece on defending the Second Amendment. He was there as Nancy Pelosi's guest. https://t.co/Dfp6JlgLwV pic.twitter.com/qnvfhlMvN8

— CBS News (@CBSNews) February 5, 2020

RIP. Orlando activist Terry DeCarlo. “Terry DeCarlo ran Orlando’s LGBT Center. And after the mass shooting at a gay club in 2016, he helped parents and families of the victims. Some rushed to Orlando in such a hurry, they didn’t even bring a change of clothes.”

MAURITANIA. 10 men jailed over “gay marriage” video. “Authorities in Mauritania have arrested 10 men after a video appeared on social media of a gay couple appearing to take part in a traditional wedding ceremony, human rights groups said. Police later determined the gathering was a birthday party but the men remain in custody with no trial date set yet.”

CENTRAL PARK WEST. Madonna wants Prince Harry and Meghan Markle to sublet her NYC pad. “Don’t run off to Canada. It’s so boring there.”

PLAYHOUSE. There’s a new gay bar in Greenwich Village: “In December, the owners of Pieces on Christopher Street and Hardware in Hell’s Kitchen took over the former Boots & Saddle space — a block south of the Stonewall National Monument — and reopened it as Playhouse Bar, a drag-filled and dance-happy nightclub that appeals to New Yorkers and tourists alike.”

TRAILER OF THE DAY. The Booksellers.

HUMP DAY HAIRY. Beef Dip 2020, Mantamar Beach Club, Puerto Vallarta.

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Bears are on . . . #HaveItAll #LoveMantamar #BeachClub #BeefDip2020 #PuertoVallarta #BearWeek

A post shared by Mantamar Beach Club (@mantamarbc) on Jan 30, 2020 at 8:38am PST

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