asymmetry no left equiv

820

no fox news of left

dirty tricks (pol -ops rove, atwater, manafort) hit man enforcer

beware false balance whataboutism

SEE CRM MANOSPHERE

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parasocial rogan manosphere no left equiv oliver stewart long form preach?

===

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Study confirms what many suspected: the 2024 election was rigged

U.S. President Donald Trump places a hand over his heart during a Veterans Day ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia, U.S., November 11, 2025. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

:{Thom HartmannJuly 10, 2026

It sure looks like tech billionaires and foreign dictatorships gave us Trump in 2024. This is as bad as the massive Russian bot presence on Facebook and Twitter back in 2016, which Robert Mueller documented gave Trump the presidency that time.

A peer-reviewed study released Thursday in Nature, the world’s most prestigious scientific journal, has finally put hard numbers to what a lot of us suspected the moment the 2024 election was called for Trump (and Republicans in Congress) by the big networks: the algorithms that control our largest social media platforms intentionally and explicitly tilted the playing field, and they tilted it for Donald Trump and the GOP.

Researchers at New York University Abu Dhabi created hundreds of “sock puppet” TikTok accounts in New York, Texas, and Georgia (via VPN), uploaded to them either pro-Democratic or pro-Republican videos to show their political leanings, and then watched what TikTok’s algorithm fed back to them every day over the 27 weeks leading up to Election Day.

Across more than 280,000 recommendations, Republican-seeded accounts received about 11.5 percent more “party-aligned content” than their Democratic counterparts, while the pro-Democratic accounts were force-fed 7.5 percent more attacks from the other side. As Professor Talal Rahwan put it:

“The algorithm wasn’t just giving people what they want; it was giving one side more of what the other side says about them.”

The pro-rightwing bias was even more dramatic when researchers looked at how the candidates’ own accounts did. Candidate Trump’s official TikTok videos were pushed to Democratic-leaning users 27 percent of the time, while Kamala Harris’s videos only reached Republican-leaning users just 15.3 percent of the time.

Translation: Leading up to the 2024 election, TikTok was working overtime to expose Democrats and lefties to MAGA’s most persuasive messaging, all while shielding rightwingers, independents, and Republican voters from Harris’s voice.

Making it even more astonishingly consequential, studies show that TikTok matters enormously to young people; roughly half of TikTok users under 30 say they use the app to keep up with politics and news, and that TikTok-engaged demographic shifted a mind-boggling full 10 percentage points toward Trump between 2020 and 2024 following this exposure.

Young men, for example, flipped from voting 56 percent Biden in 2020 to 56 percent choosing Trump in 2024, the kind of swing that decides battleground states.

Even more troubling, other research shows that TikTok isn’t an outlier. It’s one piece of a much larger algorithm-run social media ecosystem, and that system is now the main way a plurality of Americans engage with politics. Pew Research, for example, found that 42 percent of US social media users consider these platforms “important” for getting involved in political and social issues, and almost none of them have any idea how the top-secret social media algorithms decide what they see.

Sometimes it’s so obvious that it’s surprising it’s not a bigger news story.

Researchers at the Queensland University of Technology found a “structural break for Musk’s metrics around July 13th, 2024,” the exact day Elon Musk endorsed Trump. Overnight, algorithm-driven view counts on Musk’s own X posts jumped 138 percent and retweets exploded 237 percent, far above what any other major account experienced.

And it wasn’t just Musk’s own posts that got the boost; other pro-MAGA, pro-white supremacy, pro-GOP right-wing accounts across X were also systematically amplified. A separate peer-reviewed field experiment published this year in Nature randomly assigned active US users to either an algorithmic or chronological X feed for seven weeks. The result — what could only be called successful brainwashing of those being fed posts by the X algorithm — was astonishing.

The scientists noted that those on the algorithmic feed shifted “towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump, and views on the war in Ukraine.”

And once people are initially convinced of a worldview, changing their mind is a huge and usually unsuccessful undertaking, which is why rightwing billionaires were so eager to fund Charlie Kirk and other programs to indoctrinate schoolkids. Switching back to a chronological feed didn’t undo the damage.

This was on top of the roughly $277 million Musk personally spent electing Trump and Republicans, $239 million of it through his America PAC, making him by a wide margin the largest individual donor of the 2024 cycle.

Then there’s Mark Zuckerberg. After spending a decade telling Congress that Meta was politically neutral, Zuckerberg watched Trump win, metaphorically dropped to his knees, and immediately killed the fact-checking systems on Facebook and Instagram that kept identifying and calling out Trump’s and Republicans’ lies and misrepresentations.

Like a loyal puppy (or a terrified rabbit), Zuck called Trump’s reelection “a cultural tipping point,” wrote a $1 million check to Trump’s inaugural slush fund, replaced his head of global policy with longtime Bush-era Republican Joel Kaplan, and then announced he was moving Meta’s trust-and-safety operation from California to Texas. Meta’s institutional pivot toward Trump and MAGA wasn’t even subtle.

YouTube — also largely owned and run by right-wing billionaires — isn’t innocent either. A UC Davis audit using 100,000 sock-puppet accounts found that right-leaning users get systematically funneled into channels pushing rightwing extremism, conspiracy theories, and hard-right “otherwise problematic content,” while left-leaning users see nothing comparable.

A separate Brookings analysis found that YouTube’s algorithm tugs every user, regardless of where they start, “in a moderately conservative direction.”

I’ve been around digital media since the very beginning. My business partner Nigel Peacock and I were running forums on CompuServe back in the early 1980s, when “going online” meant a 300-baud modem screeching into your phone line and a connection bill that could put a small business under in a month.

The platforms were primitive, slow, and gloriously pluralistic; gatekeepers were a handful of sysops who worked with Nigel and me (CompuServe paid us) trying to keep the message boards clean and useful. Things were civil, the feed was chronological, and there was no anonymity; even political arguments were reasonable.

None of us back then imagined that one day a few billionaires would be able to flip a switch in Beijing, San Francisco, or Austin and successfully shift the political mood of an entire continent overnight. But that’s exactly where we are today, and it appears to have been the tipping point that brought us Trump and all the horrors that accompanied him.

The closest historical parallel is the era of William Randolph Hearst and the Yellow Press at the turn of the 20th century. Hearst’s chain of newspapers reached more readers than any information outlet in human history up to that point, and when he decided it would be in his interest for America to have a war with Spain in 1898, he largely manufactured one with wild, sensationalist coverage of an explosion in the boiler room of the USS Maine in Havana harbor, casting it as an attack against America.

He’s said to have cabled his illustrator in Cuba, “You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war.” And, sure enough, within just a few months, America was at war.

The difference between Hearst and the men running today’s platforms isn’t moral; it’s mechanical. Hearst had to print on physical paper and ship it on physical trains. Musk, Zuckerberg, and the executives at TikTok and Google/YouTube can rewrite the political information environment in which hundreds of millions of people are marinating in real time, with no editor, no copy desk, and — unless things change — exactly zero public accountability.

So what do we do about these men effortlessly swinging our elections invisibly and without spending a penny of their own money? Three things are at the top of the list that Democrats in Congress and Democratic candidates need to make priorities.

First, Congress needs to require algorithmic transparency, as I suggested in The Hidden History of Big Brother in America. Senators Markey and Blumenthal have introduced excellent bills demanding that platforms disclose how their recommendation systems weight political content and forcing them to submit to fully independent audits. Given the political power these platforms and their billionaire owners command and how they’ll fight to hang onto it, none of these types of bills will pass without sustained public pressure.

Second, we need to repeal or substantially reform Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act so that algorithm-driven platforms are treated legally like the publishers they are, rather than like the telephone wires they used to travel over.

Third, the Justice Department’s antitrust division needs to be unleashed against the handful of companies that now control the political conversation in America. Standard Oil was broken up in 1911. AT&T was broken up in 1984. There is nothing about Meta, X, or Google that makes them more sacred that these behemoths that preceded them.

Call your senators today through the Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and tell them you want algorithmic transparency legislation and Section 230 reform. Make sure your voter registration is current at vote.org, check on your state-level legislators at openstates.org, and start telling everyone you know that science has now proven that the 2024 election wasn’t a free and fair contest of ideas.

It was — based on this new research — a rigged information environment run by a handful of billionaires that put a corrupt, predatory fellow billionaire in the White House and helped install billionaire-friendly Republican lickspittles in Congress and state houses across the country.

We can fix this mess. But only if we stop scrolling and start demanding change.

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AN 2 26

Donald Trump is losing support from almost every voting bloc there is as his second term wears on, but according to a new analysis from Thomas Edsall, the richest Americans are sticking by him. These "superrich" donors are now fueling a "Republican financial juggernaut," and they want favors in return.

"Determined to get a piece of the action, the very wealthy are lining up in droves," Edsall wrote in his latest New York Times column. "Despite Trump’s having lost ground in almost every demographic during his second term, one group stands firmly in the president’s camp: the superrich who have their wallets open."

These superrich voters, Edsall explained, are standing by with Trump thanks to his economic policies, which "have reinforced and, in some cases, intensified trends toward the increasing concentration of wealth and income at the highest levels." Citing data from the Federal Reserve, he noted that by the third quarter of last year — months into Trump's second term and right around the time he signed the "One Big Beautiful Bill" — the richest 0.1 percent's share of all the wealth in the U.S. had grown to 14.4 percent, up from 8.6 percent in 1989, while the share for the rest of the richest 1 percent grew to 17.3 from 14.2 percent.

Edsall further broke down how these superrich voters made a striking shift towards overt support for Republicans in the 2024 election. In years prior, the split between donations they made to Republicans and Democrats was closer to even, though the GOP held the edge. Citing data from the Washington Post, Edsall demonstrated just how much they made a rightward shift in 2024.

"Then that pattern abruptly shifted," Edsalld wrote. "Contributions by the very rich to Republicans grew from roughly $300 million in 2022 to just under a billion in 2024, while donations to Democrats fell from roughly $300 million to less than $200 million."

The Post's original report noted that "more than 80 percent of the federal campaign spending by the 100 wealthiest Americans in 2024 went to Republicans." Reporting from OpenSecrets found that one-time Trump ally Elon Musk was the biggest contributor that year, donating nearly $300 million.

By way of contributions to Trump's MAGA Inc. super PAC, the wealthy have continued to flood Trump with more money. The committee currently boasts over $300 million in cash-on-hand, with 90 percent of that amount coming in donations over $1 million. Edsall cited another report from the New York Times earlier this month, which found that the GOP overall has "an unheard-of edge of more than $550 million" over Democrats.

"The wealthy have created what amounts to a Republican financial juggernaut," Edsall wrote.

That level of fundraising around a president like Trump, who has no legal path to running for a third term, seems odd on the surface. However, Edsall observed, these donors are backing Trump in exchange for preferential treatment, including regulatory changes and investments, and favors, such as pardons.

"Evidence of the pervasive corruption is endemic, in the presidential pardons to donors and the well connected, in the regulatory favoritism found at key agencies, in the flow of special interest and foreign investments into the Trump family’s cryptocurrencybusinesses."

===

mma 225

...And so that's the real word of caution and concern here. And the other piece, and you sort of got this in the first segment too, is the information asymmetry.

I mean, if you just look at sort of the monthly listens of podcasts, left-aligned and left-leaning versus right-aligned and right-leaning, you have about 60 million downloads, listens of left-leaning, left-aligned. We have 300 million for right and right-aligned.

And that's a very small universe, but that gives them a head start. And so that gives them the ability to take these unpopular moments and keep driving through, help, you know, block, and we shouldn't lose sight of that. That this is by design. This is intentional. This is a feature, so we can't feed into the infancy. And here's where the note of comfort and courage comes in.

And you sort of got to this too, which is think about that imbalance. Think about how wild that imbalance is. Now that's only one data point, and yet, it was still so close. Yeah. Power of the pop -- and then that's the thing. I'm not a wild eyed optimist here, but my point is is that we should stand firm in the recognition that -- and acknowledge -- that they are going to be driving undemocratic things....

===

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no lnx 11 24

alternet-

The end of left-leaning news?

'Maximum chaos and upset': Rachel Maddow describes nightmare election scenario

Thom Hartmann

November 23, 2024

Have you heard that Comcast is planning to sell MSNBC? Is Rupert Murdoch planning to buy it? Will America’s media landscape soon resemble those of Hungary and Russia?

Without the rightwing media juggernaut, Donald Trump probably wouldn’t be president next year and wouldn’t have won in 2016. That said, the progressive media landscape looks like it might be about to get a whole lot worse.

Comcast, which owns NBC and its subsidiaries CNBC and MSNBC (among other media outlets) announced this week that they’ll be spinning off MSNBC (among others) next year.

And the consequences are already showing up. It was reported this week that Rachel Maddow just took a substantial annual pay-cut because of the uncertain future of the network.

In part, this probably reflects a belt-tightening at Comcast, but is also an indication of how legacy media — which now includes cable properties — are taking a hit from newer digital media, from social media to podcasts to web-based networks and programs.

The principal analyst and VP of content for the market research company eMarketer, Paul Verna, told the AP that:

“The writing is on the wall that the cable TV business is a dwindling business,” and, the AP noted, is “predicting future consolidation of the networks or acquisitions through private equity.”

Private equity (like Bain Capital) and large media operation acquisitions have a long history of gutting media properties to increase their profitability; often this includes what a study by Stanford University researchers described as a trend to “substitute coverage of local politics for coverage of national politics, and use more conservative framing.”

Air America radio (for which I wrote the original business plan and which carried my program) was on the air in virtually every major market in the United States, having leased over 50 major, high-powered radio stations from Clear Channel.

My program regularly beat Rush Limbaugh in the ratings: When I was invited to the Obama White House following that election, one person associated with the campaign noted to me privately that they believed Air America had played a meaningful role in Obama’s 2008 election.

That same year, Mitt Romney’s private equity company, Bain Capital, acquired Clear Channel and, in 2009, began reclaiming their stations, replacing Air America content with mostly sports. By coincidence, around that same time it appears Romney decided he’d run against Obama in the next election.

As Air America lost station after station, its ability to earn revenue through selling advertising collapsed. By 2010, the entire network was bankrupt just in time for Romney to run for president.

Will the same thing happen to MSNBC? Stay tuned.

Similarly, Republicans in Congress are salivating over Elon Musk’s rhetorical war with NPR after the network stopped using Xitter when Musk labeled the news network as “state-affiliated” media.

As the headline on Fox Business notes:

“Elon Musk renews calls to defund NPR after clip of CEO resurfaces on X: 'Your tax dollars' are paying for this.’”

Musk, of course, will be in charge of identifying those parts of government or institutions funded by government which can be cut to help pay for Trump’s planned $4 trillion in tax cuts for billionaires.

While it won’t fit her proposed new role as UN Ambassador, Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, a top member of Republican House leadership, was unambiguous, posting to Xitter: “I will DEFUND NPR.”

This is nothing new: Republicans in the House voted this past July to remove all federal funding for NPR by 2026; Musk and Ramaswamy, working hand-in-glove with Marjorie Taylor Greene (who was just made chairperson of the new subcommittee charged with implementing their recommendations) could probably speed up that timeline.

While NPR goes to great lengths to avoid political bias in their news (the Corporation for Public Broadcasting even hired last month, “in response to right-wing criticism,” multiple editors specifically to spot and stamp out any progressive perspectives that may creep into their reporting), if they were crippled, it’s safe to assume the roughly 1,500 rightwing hate radio stations in the country stand more than ready and willing to pick up their radio audience.

Rightwing billionaires brought us Fox “News,” Sinclair, two other web- and cable-based rightwing TV channels, nationwide networks of hate radio (now also in Spanish), tens of millions of dollars in subsidies to rightwing podcast hosts, and the destruction of about half the nation’s local newspapers.

Not to mention an entire network of billionaire-funded hard-right phony “pink slime” newspapers that pop up around the country every election year.

There’s no equivalent politically-tilted media systems on the left; Democratic-leaning billionaires have stayed out of the media space ever since Romney’s company took down Air America.

The closest TV and radio counterparts we have are Free Speech TV (available on the web, Dish, Sling, Roku, AppleTV, and DirecTV) and the Progress Channel on SiriusXM (my daily program is carried on both).

In the print media space, Substack is growing (although they also carry hard-right content) and provides a solid community of progressive publications (like HartmannReport.com), but that’s a drop in a much larger ocean; even The Washington Post and The New York Times don’t come close to the strength of editorial bias found in the Murdoch family’s The New York Post or The Wall Street Journal.

Publications like The New Republic, Mother Jones, The Nation, and The Guardian provide solid progressive content, but all have funding bases that are trivial compared to conservative publications supported by rightwing billionaire networks. Ditto for websites like Raw Story, Common Dreams, Alternet, LA Progressive, Democratic Underground, and Daily Kos.

As my old friend and the former CEO/founder of Air America, Jon Sinton, noted on his excellent “reluctant” Substack newsletter:

“The left-wing silo is barren. A couple of old line newspapers and magazines. MSNBC and a handful of smallish digital platforms and shows. Pod Save America stands nearly alone as a left-leaning podcast with a large audience.

“By contrast, the right-wing silo is vast and deep. It houses YouTubians, TikTokkers, broadcasters on Fox, Newsmax, Sinclair TV stations, and talk radio stations; posters on social media; and narrowcasters on myriad podcasts.”

All, I would add, heavily supported by rightwing billionaires. As Politico reported in 2014, the Heritage Foundation used to give $1 million a year to Sean Hannity and $2 million a year to Rush Limbaugh alone.

A close acquaintance who was, for years, a mid-level rightwing talk show host told me how a dozen or more times a year he’d give a speech at a random high school and would receive a check for $20,000-$30,000 by a rightwing foundation as a “speaking fee” each time. It was their way of supporting conservative talk radio.

Again, there is literally nothing like that on the left. Not even close.

I’ve repeatedly called for progressive billionaires to jump into the media space, and perhaps the Musk/Trump assaults that are coming will provoke some to act. It may be wishful thinking, but if it does happen it can’t come too soon.

In the meantime, we all must support (and share with our friends) those outlets where we find useful news and information; if we fail to, America’s media landscape may soon mirror Hungary’s and Russia’s with every station and publication praising Dear Leader 24/7/365.

NOW READ: The America-attacking Trump is coming for our military — and then he's coming for us

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mail 11 24

here is a paradox of the 2024 election result: Democrats advanced what they believed to be a profoundly inclusive platform, but they read to many voters as an out-of-touch, elitist party. Meanwhile, Republicans advanced a flagrantly exclusionary agenda, almost exclusively favorably to the richest and most powerful Americans, and they read to many voters as a populist movement friendly to the working class.

There is no point in fact-checking what people perceive. Elections are not math tests. There are no “right answers.” What people hear is all that matters, not what you intended to say.

The.Ink

Some of this paradox is explained, I think, by an underappreciated difference between platform and posture. There is the matter of what you stand for, and the rather different issue of how you stand. We all have that friend who believes all the right and beautiful and just things, but wouldn’t help you in a pinch. We all also have that friend or relative or neighbor who believes awful things but would be the first person to offer to help us move.

For reasons we will still be examining for some time, Democrats have somehow ended up in a situation where their platform is all about openness, but their stance reads to many voters as closed. It feels — and whether rightly or wrongly is beside the point — like a judgmental movement for inclusion and equity. Republicans have, at the same time, chosen a platform devoted to closings — of the border, of the gates of citizenship, of the generosity of the safety net, of fundamental freedoms — but their stance reads to many voters as open, inviting, come-as-you-are. It feels to many like a nonjudgmental movement for exclusion.

Please don’t misread this on purpose. It is not an endorsement of the right’s methods. But I think we need to be straightforward about this paradox. It is a scandal to allow the most exclusionary platform in modern American history to be read as openhearted to so many. It is a scandal that so many of the very people it would degrade feel attracted to the cause.

Part of what’s going on here, I think, is the Republicans embracing an ethic that I first heard from progressive community organizers: Meet people where they are.

This is the organizer’s code, the idea behind all other ideas. But when I wrote my book The Persuaders, many of the organizers on the left whom I profiled were sounding an alarm through my book about their own movements turning away from this ethic. They worried about their movements seeming to have prerequisites to join. Linda Sarsour, the progressive activist, described her own movement as being like a prison where you have to enter one gate and have that gate close behind you to cross the next gate. You had to know the right terms, never mess up, not have questions about the right approach to advancing social justice for marginalized groups, and, frankly, silence concerns you might have about the best strategy.

That Republicans have ended up with more of a “meet people where they are” ethic is beyond ironic. Again, I’m speaking of posture, not policy; stance, not substance. But they have managed to create the sense of an open invitation to join this movement of closings. There is a thirst for converts, rather than a suspicion that they may not be aligned with you on every last issue. There is an understanding that a lot of politics is actually about vibes and having your cause be an aspirational brand people want to join; and the Republicans made inroads with many nontraditional voter groups this time around by having the MAGA hat function as a status symbol, allowing people to flex and separate themselves from other members of their own communities, showing people that they are winners who didn’t need the Democrats’ offers of help.

But what turbocharges these differences in stance is a gigantic media ecology on the right that functions as a voter radicalization funnel. Meeting people where they are means that you pull people into that funnel at its very wide end. As they enter, they are merely annoyed by things around them — upset about inflation, frustrated at not being able to own a home, feeling destabilized by the rising status of women and people of color, unsure of their role. And the funnel — consisting of traditional media, newer media like podcasts and video talk shows, social media, and YouTube content — slowly pulls them from annoyance with questions toward ever more radical and pungent certitude. It doesn’t require them to be at the pointy end of the funnel at the beginning. The point of the funnel is to pull in everyone. The movement is self-confident enough to think that it can turn anyone bothered by a pea under their mattress, whether valid or invalid, utterly racist or genuinely born of pain, into a believer.

The pro-democracy movement needs to build its own funnel, now. It cannot and should not be a mirror image of the right’s funnel. It should be grounded in truth, not lies, and generosity, not closedness. But it needs to be a total media ecology that can meet people at any level of annoyance, curiosity, irritation, gripe, doubt, with any question — and move them toward a more humane and magnanimous view of the world. It needs to take lost and lonely boys and men and move them toward a sense of how to be in a gender-equal world. It needs to invite people to see their own story in the story of a pluralist America of the future. It needs to be longer on invitation, shorter on blame. It needs to meet you where you are, and be confident enough to move you, over years even, toward greater consciousness.

There is simply no such media ecology right now, no such organizing infrastructure at the scale required. People who want to build things like this get no help from those who could help them. People sit around and fret about Tuesday but don’t have the vision to help build the mental infrastructure for a different future.

Let’s change that.

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aha

SPIN ON DEATH THREAT god WILL GET YOU

violence precursors threat and prop damage, DIRTY TRICK notE no left equiv

an 11 24

In Kenosha, the local Democratic Party office has received calls about residents who put up yard signs supporting Vice President Kamala Harris receiving letters, warning of reprisal and biblical hell fire if they don’t vote for former President Donald Trump.

Lori Hawkins, chair of the Kenosha County Democratic Party, said that people have been reporting the letters to the Kenosha Police Department. “There’s a couple different versions of it, but most people I know have gotten both of them,” Hawkins told Wisconsin Examiner.

One of the letters, images of which were shared with Wisconsin Examiner, opens with the line, “We see that you have Democrat signs on your property.” The letter asks, “are you not aware that when you die that you will be held accountablebefore almighty God for voting for an open border that allows millions of illegal immigrants to freely enter, many of which are felons and evil people that have been doing deadly harm and will continue to do so [?]” The letter goes on to warn that voters will be held accountable by God “for voting for communism to take over America,” ending that “we don’t want anyone going to horrible hell, but you are on a fast path to it.”

After receiving multiple reports about the letters, Hawkins said that the Kenosha County Democratic Party decided to make a social media post, to ensure that people knew that they weren’t alone. The letters are typed and unsigned. “We know that the people who are putting these letters in mailboxes really believe the topics or the issues that are in the letters, and they’re probably doing it because they are fearful,” said Hawkins. “We know that it’s a bigger organization that’s fomenting this kind of fear, and playing to people’s anxieties and worries.”

Hawkins feels that the letters are “twisting the platform of Democrats who are on the ballot in a way that is, you know, pretty vile and false.” Hawkins has also received reports of Democratic yard and barn signs being slashed, defaced, driven over, or stolen. “And let’s be clear, I have heard and seen none of that happening with the large political signs belonging to Republican Party candidates,” said Hawkins. “So this is just an attempt to silence people, and make people fearful.”

Still, hundreds of people turned out for recent canvassing days held by the Kenosha County Democratic Party. Nancy Locante, a volunteer with the Kenosha County Democratic Party, received one of the letters, mailed to her with no return address. “America is at a crossroads,” one of the letters she received stated. The letter described “transgender ideology infecting our children’s schools,” high grocery bills, immigration, and persecution of “Christian values.” The letter urged Locante to vote for “biblical truths.” Locante said, “that’s quite a bit of intimidation, but of course they don’t have the guts to put their names on it. It can be a little unsettling knowing that they are watching you. But it’s unfortunate that these people’s beliefs are so misguided.” Locante hasn’t been deterred. “I’m walking around with all my buttons and merch on,” she said.

Locante plans to continue helping the Kenosha County Democratic Party canvass neighborhoods ahead of Nov. 5.

In Milwaukee, Leaders Igniting Transformation (LIT)have knocked on over 600,000 doors urging people to get out and vote. LIT’s organizers said they have received reports of identical letters in communities between Milwaukee and Kenosha.

In early October, the Milwaukee suburban city of Wauwatosa experienced a string of sign vandalism, which targeted Democratic-endorsed yard signs. From Wauwatosa’s southeastern corner near 55th street and Wisconsin, all the way up to the northwestern corner of 81st street and Meinecke avenue, signs were defaced with red spray paint. The Republican Party of Milwaukee County denounced the vandalism in Wauwatosa, and said those responsible should be held accountable. In September, red spray paint was used to deface Democratic signs in Madison.

Both presidential campaigns continue to focus heavily on Wisconsin. Harris and Trump held competing rallies in Milwaukee Friday night ahead of Election Day on Tuesday.

Wisconsin Examiner is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Wisconsin Examiner maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Ruth Conniff for questions: info@wisconsinexaminer.com. Follow Wisconsin Examiner on Facebook and X.

===

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AN 10 24

Anyone who signs an online political petition is likely to be bombarded with fundraising requests. Donation pitches can be quite aggressive in presidential elections, and convince voters to dig deep even if their finances are stretched thin.

In a report published on October 22, nine CNN journalists detail Republican fundraising that targets seniors who are giving away much more than they can afford to.

According to CNN, "More than 1000 reports filed with government agencies and consumer advocacy groups reviewed by CNN, along with an analysis of campaign finance data and interviews with dozens of contributors and their family members, show how deceptive political fundraisers have victimized hundreds of elderly Americans and misled those battling dementia or other cognitive impairments into giving away millions of dollars — far more than they ever intended. Some unintentionally joined the ranks of the top grassroots political donors in the country as they tapped into retirement savings and went into debt, contributing six-figure sums through thousands of transactions."

On X, formerly Twitter, Politico's Nicholas Wu highlights one of the examples described in the report: an 82-year-old woman "who wore pajamas with holes in them because she didn't want to spend money on new ones" and "didn’t realize she had given Republicans more than $350,000 while living in a 1000-square-foot Baltimore condo since 2020.'"

CNN's report also describes "80-year-old communications engineer from Texas" who "had saved for decades, driving around in an old car and buying clothes from thrift stores so he'd have enough money to enjoy his retirement years."

"But as dementia robbed him of his reasoning abilities," CNN explains, "he began making online political donations over and over again — eventually telling his son he believed he was part of a network of political operatives communicating with key Republican leaders. In less than two years, the man became one of the country's largest grassroots supporters of the Republican Party, ultimately giving away nearly half a million dollars to former President Donald Trump and other candidates. Now, the savings account he spent his whole life building is practically empty."

According to CNN, the donors cited in the report "were often in their 80s and 90s."

"They included retired public workers, house cleaners and veterans, widows living alone, nursing home residents and people who donated more money than they paid for their homes, according to records and interviews," CNN explains. "The money they gave came from pensions, Social Security payments and retirement savings accounts meant to last decades."

CNN continues, "Donors took out new credit cards and mortgages to pay for the contributions. In some cases, they gave away most of their life savings. Their cell phones and email inboxes were so full of pleas for money that they missed photos of their grandkids and other important messages. At least one person continued to be charged for contributions after his death."

*Read CNN's full report at this link.

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federal overreach a kind of legal suppression, SEE RAGA

omg bizz 1 24 there is no pushback on this but dem admin DOJ and maybe good appellate circuit?!

SEE LEGAL SUPPRESSION

SEE NO ASYMMETRY

1 24 TRUMP SAYS HE WILL BE DICTATOR FOR A DAY, DRILL AND BORDER

with polarysis, esp with gop openly stated goal to make obama a one term president by gridlock, he had to move to executive order; neo-con had spend decades building up unitary /imperial presidency (nixon, if the prez does it, it is by def legal]see hypocrisy

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aha uniquely vulnerable to grift b/c not soc med savvy, ppl get more conserv as age, easy to scare /hype thus con

note no left equiv

https://www.alternet.org/gold-ira-right-wing-media/

no ln 7 23

How 'gold IRA' industry ads became a 'mainstay of right-wing media': report

Fox News' Laura Ingraham In July 2022 (Gage Skidmore).

Alex Henderson July 25, 2023

For many years, right-wing media outlets have been aggressively promoting gold as a safe haven for retirees. Anyone who has spent a lot of time consuming right-wing media, be it Fox News, Fox Business and Newsmax TV or AM talk radio, has likely come across gold commercials.

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In a report published by the Washington Post on July 25, journalists Jeremy B. Merrill and Hanna Kozlowska stress that the "gold retirement investment industry" has "become a mainstay of right-wing media."

"An analysis by The Post of political newsletters, social media, podcasts and a national database of television ads collected by the company AdImpact found that pitches to invest in gold coins are a daily presence in media that caters to a right-wing audience and often echo conservative talking points about looming economic and societal collapse," Merrill and Kozlowska explain. "The Post found no similar ads for gold retirement investments in mainstream or left-wing media sources in the databases."

READ MORE: Fox News' relationship with Turning Point USA is 'basically over': report

Lawsuits against "gold IRA" companies, according to Merrill and Kozlowska, are not uncommon. One of the companies that has been sued is Lear Capital, a Fox News advertiser that sells gold and silver coins.

The Washington Post reporters note that "over the past decade, more than 30 customers in 20 states have sued a dozen gold IRA companies."

Terry White, a disabled retiree, told the Post he invested $174,000 in gold coins with Lear and found out the company charges a 33 percent commission. White said he lost almost $80,000.

"For years," Merrill and Kozlowska report, "gold IRA industry advertising has echoed accusations against Democratic politicians commonly found in news segments on conservative outlets. The ads tout the coins as a safe haven from economic uncertainty and social upheaval. Most of the coins are manufactured by the Royal Canadian Mint, which says they're bullion — a kind of coin whose value is determined by the underlying metal. As such, they meet IRS rules for retirement investments."

READ MORE: 'They must comply': Newsmax employees subpoenaed in Smartmatic defamation lawsuit

According to Merrill and Kozlowska, an "analysis of ad data and financial records" shows that the"gold IRA" industry "spends millions of dollars a year to reach viewers of Fox, Newsmax and other conservative outlets."

"Former Fox News host Bill O'Reilly and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani have promoted the coins," the Post reporters observe, "while ads for Lear's competitors have appeared on a podcast hosted by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Newsmax broadcasts of former President Donald Trump's political rallies."

READ MORE: Tucker Carlson's Twitter viewership falling as battle with Fox News stalls: report

Find the Washington Post's full report at this link (subscription required).

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an 2 23

President Joe Biden has yet to say whether or not he plans to seek reelection in 2024. But during his 2023 State of the Union address on Tuesday night, February 7, Biden focused heavily on his economic record, bragging that unemployment in the United States is lower than it has been in more than half a century and calling out Republicans who want to "sunset" Social Security and Medicare.

Biden’s speech was followed by a GOP rebuttal from Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who was the Trump Administration’s second of four White House press secretaries (Sanders came after Sean Spicer and before Stephanie Grisham). While the economy dominated Biden’s speech, Sanders’ rebuttal was clearly aimed at MAGA culture warriors. And liberal economist Paul Krugman, in his February 9 column for the New York Times, argues that the dramatic contrast between Democrat Biden’s speech and Republican Sanders’ response speaks volumes about the priorities of the United States’ two main political parties.

"President Biden was evidently feeling feisty on Tuesday," Krugman writes. "In particular, he kept baiting Republicans with the suggestion that a number of them are threatening Medicare and Social Security — which they are. Delivering the Republican response, Sarah Huckabee Sanders claimed that the United States is divided between two parties, one of which is mainly focused on bread-and-butter issues that matter to regular people, while the other is obsessed with waging culture war. This is also true. But she got her parties mixed up — Republicans, not Democrats, are the culture warriors who’ve lost touch with ordinary Americans' concerns."

Sanders’ speech, according to **Krugman, was quite "revealing" — and not in a way that made the Republican Party look good.

"Sanders’ speech was a diatribe against wokeness," the New York Times columnist observes. “This is standard GOP fare these days and exactly what you’d expect in, say, an address at the Conservative Political Action Conference. But this wasn’t a CPAC speech; it was meant to address the nation as a whole and rebut the president of the United States…. Focus groups suggest that most people don’t know what 'wokeness' means, or why they should fear it.”

Krugman continues, "But wait, it gets worse. Sanders seemed to say — although her syntax was a bit garbled — that woke policy was responsible for 'high gas prices' and 'empty grocery shelves.' So, first of all, how does that work? How did critical race theory cause a global spike in crude oil prices, which raised prices at the pump all around the world? How did it snarl supply chains and cause a worldwide shortage of shipping containers?"

Comparing Biden and Sanders’ February 7 speeches, Krugman stresses, one saw a contrast between a Democratic president who got into concrete specifics on the U.S. economy and a Republican who didn’t.

"Just to be clear, there are culture warriors on the left, and some of them can be annoying even to social liberals," Krugman notes. "But few have significant power, and they certainly don’t rule the Democratic Party, which isn’t locked into a closed mental universe, impervious to inconvenient facts, whose denizens communicate in buzzwords nobody else recognizes. Republicans, however, do live in such a universe — and what Sarah Huckabee Sanders showed us was that they can’t step outside that universe even when they should have strong political incentives to sound like normal people and pretend to care about regular Americans’ concerns."

Read Paul Krugman’s full New York Times column at this link (subscription required)

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an 6 22

some establishment Republicans, when asked about the far-right extremism of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia or Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona, will engage in “whataboutism” — saying, “What about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rep. Ilhan Omar?” It’s a weak, totally disingenuous attempt to downplay the radicalization of the GOP; AOC and Omar can be combative debaters, but they haven’t threatened anyone — and they obviously want to have a conversationwith those they disagree with, not intimidate them into silence.

Nonetheless, bogus “whataboutist” comparisons of the AOC/Omar/Rashida Tlaib wing of the Democratic Party and the Greene/Gosar/Lauren Boebert wing of the GOP are common among establishment Republicans. But in an op-ed written by the New York Times’ Thomas B. Edsall and published on June 8, a GOP staffer offered a very different — and more honest and accurate — take on the Democratic Party’s left versus the “MAGA Caucus.”

The Republican staffer, described by Edsall as “high-ranking” and interviewed on condition of anonymity, told the journalist, “They are different in that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and The ‘Squad’ seem to me to be more ‘idealist.’ They actually do want to legislate/accomplish the very far-left social ideas they propose. They are willing to cause Pelosi headaches, but they have shown they are not going to go so far as to jeopardize the government (operations) and safety net that so many families depend on from a working government.”

The staffer went on to tell Edsall, “The ‘MAGA Caucus’ members operate more like bullies — legislative bullies. If they have the opportunity, they will gladly hold bills/government funding hostage for the sake of populism and social media. They would take pride in ‘shooting the hostage’ as that would be very popular with their tribal base and their social media.”

The Squad refers to a left/populist alliance of four Bernie Sanders allies, all Democrats, serving in the U.S. House of Representatives: AOC, Omar, Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts. The name “MAGA Caucus” is typically used to describe Greene, Boebert, Gosar, Rep. Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina (who recently lost a GOP primary) and other MAGA extremists in the House.

Referring to The Squad as “far left” is misleading; their idea of “socialism” is the social democracy of Sweden, Norway and Denmark, not communism as it is practiced in Cuba or North Korea. Nonetheless, the GOP staffer generally made a good-faith argument — the type that is usually absent when Republicans appear on Fox News or Fox Business.

“The Squad and the MAGA Caucus are best known for their most visible members, Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia,” Edsall explains. “Both factions have caused major headaches for their respective party leaders.”

Edsall continues, “Centrist Democrats contend — citing poll data from USA Today Ipsos, Pew Research, a FiveThirtyEight polling summary and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst Survey — that support from members of The Squad and their allies for defunding the police has undermined the reelection chances of moderate House Democrats running in purple districts. The participation of members of the MAGA Caucus in events linked to White supremacists have increased the vulnerability of the Republican Party to charges of racism, alienating moderate suburban voters.”

Edsall, adds, however, that there are “major dissimilarities” between The Squad’s methods and the Maga Caucus’ methods.

John Lawrence, former chief of staff to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, told Edsall, “The MAGA people seem far more focused on personal celebrity and staking out extremist stances, whereas The Squad — while pushing the policy envelope to some extent — remain reliable party members.”

Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann, authors of the book “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism,” also offered Edsall a Squad/MAGA Caucus comparison — and saw enormous differences between the two.

Mann told Edsall, “The MAGA Caucus is anti-democratic, authoritarian and completely divorced from reality and truth. The Squad embraces left views well within the democratic spectrum. What’s striking about the MAGA Caucus is that they are closer to the Republican mainstream these days, given the reticence of Republican officeholders to challenge Trump. We worry about the future of American democracy because the entire Republican Party has gone AWOL. The crazy extremists have taken over one of our two major parties.”

Ornstein told Edsall, “The true believers…. think Trump won, that there is rampant voter fraud, the country needs a caudillo, we have to crack down on trans people, critical race theory is an evil sweeping the country and more. The Squad is certainly on the left end of the party, but they do not have authoritarian tendencies and views.”

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an 10 21 amanda

wildest thing about Donald Trump's Big Lie is that his own supporters don't actually believe it.

Oh, they say they do to any pollster who will ask them. A recent Morning Consult poll, like so many before it, shows nearly "7 in 10 GOP voters don't believe the 2020 election was free and fair and/or have little to no trust in the U.S. election system, while 49 percent doubt that next year's midterms will be free and fair."

But when pollsters dug a little deeper, they found that Republican voters don't behavelike people who think the elections are rigged. On the contrary, Republicans are far more likely than Democrats to act like people who both believe that they will get a chance to vote and that their vote will be fairly counted.

"A full 92 percent of self-identified Republican voters said that they planned to vote in the 2022 elections, with just 4 percent saying they did not plan to," explains Meredith McGraw at Politico. "By contrast, just 70 percent of self-identified Democrats said they planned to vote, and 29 percent said they did not plan to."

People who think their vote doesn't matter don't get fired up to vote. So Democratic demoralization, for instance, is perfectly explicable in light of both widespread voter suppression and the rapidly dwindling possibility that President Joe Biden's bold economic promises will ever come to pass. Feeling like your vote never changes anything isn't unreasonable for Democratic voters, and they are accordingly less enthused about voting.

Republicans, on the other hand, are acting very much like people who believe their vote matters. Indeed, as the poll reports, GOP voters who espouse faith in the Big Lie are more likely to believe their vote has power[twt stat]

what gives? How can people both "believe" elections are rigged against them, but behave like people who have total faith in the system?

The likeliest answer is also the simplest one: They're lying.

Like their hero, Donald Trump, Trump voters know full well that the 2020 election wasn't stolen. They just repeat the lie, like a bunch of trolls. It's a useful cover for their true agenda, which is seizing power in 2022 and 2024 by any means necessary — even if doing so requires cheating.

As Greg Sargent of the Washington Postnoted on Twitter Thursday morning, "Their collective agreement to pretend the lies about 1/6 and 2020 are true is best understood as a collective unshackling of themselves from any obligation to abide by future election losses -- the precondition to overturning them by whatever means are necessary."

Sargent was responding to reports that Tucker Carlson of Fox News plans to do a "special" to amplify conspiracy theories that the January 6 insurrection was a "false flag" operation. As with the claims that the 2020 election was "rigged," it's important to understand that not only does Carlson not believe this, neither do his viewers — even as they eat up and repeat these conspiracy theories.

We know this for a very simple reason: The same people making claims that January 6 was a "false flag" will, depending on the situation, flip around and make the contradictory claim that the insurrectionists were patriots and martyrs. It's why Carlson will claim one minute that QAnon is a mythliberals made up to smear conservatives, and then the next minute defend the very real QAnon as a bunch of freethinkers resisting liberal hegemony. It's how MyPillow CEO-turned-fascist-propagandist Mike Lindell can keep moving the date for Trump's miraculous reinstallation in the White House without most of his followers starting to ask questions about why his predictions never pan out. It's why Republicans aren't rattled by the failure to turn up any real incidents of "voter fraud" for Biden. It wasn't something they ever believed to begin with.

Contradictions don't faze right-wingers for the same reason they don't change their minds in the face of facts: The truth does not matter. All that matters is power. Trolling through lies and contradictory claims is viewed as a crucial weapon in getting power.

To be certain, there is absolutely nothing new about this observation. On the contrary, it's quite clear that Trumpism is just fascism by another name, and the rhetorical game-playing of fascists is a subject that's been well-scrutinized. Semiotician Umberto Eco wrote in his 1995 analysis of fascist rhetoric, fascism is "a beehive of contradictions," because the point is to destroy rational discourse. To the fascist, Eco writes, "Thinking is a form of emasculation" and should be rejected in favor of a raw will to power. And, of course, there's the popular quote from philosopherJean-Paul Sartreabout how fascists "know that their remarks are frivolous" and they "are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words."

This is why conservatives are so impervious to facts and become more so as the GOP slides further and further down the fascist path. Facts are only persuasive to people who believe that truth and empiricism matter. For the authoritarian right, however, facts are understood as inconveniences and obstacles. In that light, it makes sense why they take so much delight in rejecting facts and driving liberals bonkers by doing so. It's a show of power, to relish how reality itself cannot defeat them.

Like many on the left, I was amused watching perennial GOP troll Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia freaking out at the possibility that her robotic repetition of the Big Lie might actually cause her followers to believe it and choose not to vote. And certainly, there are a small percentage of numpty-heads in the GOP coalition who don't realize it's all a big con and might elect to sit out elections because of it. In close elections, that extremely small percentage of Republicans who aren't in on the joke may matter. But that 92% of Republicans are feeling confident and excited about voting in future elections shows that the faith in the Big Lie is, for the vast majority of them, an act performed for the cameras and not a sincerely held belief.

Republican voters are not misled by Trump's Big Lie. They are empowered by the opportunity to join in. If there's any chance of beating back the rising fascist movement in America, it starts with understanding this crucial difference.

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an 1020 cdv eric alterman:

Why this obsessive narrative and all these expeditions out to Trumplandia to talk with "white working class" and other Trump followers by the mainstream American news media? What is there left to learn? The research shows that Trump's voters are driven by racism, white supremacy, misogyny and authoritarianism, if not outright fascism and in some cases Nazism.

They just have to be defeated. Enough is enough. We have to beat them into the ground as hard as we can and let them start over. For example, the Lincoln Project is seeking to destroy every single Republican senator because they believe that the Republican Party cannot be saved. It's been taken over by crazy people, by corrupt people, by the equivalent of a mafia gang, and they just have to be beaten. There is no sense in trying to talk sense into them anymore.

Fox News really is sports talk radio for conservatives. What are the implications of how American politics is now treated like some type of sport by the right wing?

I recall an observation that Noam Chomsky made when I was writing my first book. He said, "What we need in this country is a politics where people care as much about sports as they do about politics, because if you listen to people on sports radio, they're very knowledgeable in a way that people did not have the same passion about the Democratic and Republican candidates."And then there was the rise of talk radio and the internet and it brought in all this passion — but it seems to only exist on one side. The conservative side is driven like mad to care about every little thing. By comparison liberals do not feel that way. Liberals would let the people who are in charge do the right thing.

Liberals trust scientists and want to let them be the experts. Almost every single-issue group is a conservative group. They win. 90% of the country wants stronger gun control, but we're not getting it because the 5-10% that doesn't want it has a stronger voice than the 90% because they're so dedicated. They vote only on this issue, and you can't say that about really any issue for liberals. We see this on Fox News and on right-wing talk radio.

When Trumpists say that "all politicians lie" and "Trump is no worse than Obama," and the news media is being "mean" and "unfair" to Donald Trump, how do you respond?

The New York Times tried to answer that question about Obama. Trump followers say that, "Why all the fuss about Donald Trump lying? Why don't you explain that Obama lied too?" The New York Times looked at the entire eight-year record of Obama's presidency and they found 12 false claims over eight years, none of which he repeated, all of which he then corrected when he found out that what he had said was not true. Trump can tell 12 falsehoods in 10 minutes. He does it all the time. There is no comparison between Trump and Obama. Some presidents lied a lot. Trump is in his own category. Trump lies about absolutely everything, and he gives his cabinet and his advisors permission in doing so to lie about everything as well.

Are our expectations of the American public too high or too low in terms of their understanding of politics, generally, and capacity to intervene against and reject Trump's lies, specifically?

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/networks-warned-the-republican-national-convention-will-be-a-disinformation-cesspool/

In a letter to the presidents of major news networks Monday, a coalition of progressive groups asked that the airing of the Republican National Convention be delayed by one minute in order to “help prevent the spread of dangerous disinformation in real time.”

Members of the coalition—including UltraViolet Action, ACRONYM, BlackPAC, Color of Change PAC, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and others—warn that a number of scheduled speakers at the RNC, with speeches and prime time coverage kicking off Monday night, have actively spread disinformation about the coronavirus pandemic, police violence, and abortion.

“As our nation battles the dual crises of systemic racism and the coronavirus pandemic, relying on the media for factual, life-saving information is crucial to the health of the American people and our democracy,” the letter to the presidents of CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBCUniversal and CBS reads:[twt]

the letter highlights Abby Johnson, an anti-abortion activist who has advocated against wearing masks to curb the spread of Covid-19, Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the couple made famous when a photo of the pair waving guns at Black Lives Matter protesters went viral, and Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), who has compared Covid-19 deaths to deaths from influenza while pushing the theory that the coronavirus was developed in a lab in Wuhan, China, according to the letter.

The groups called out President Donald Trump for pushing a “birther” conspiracy against former President Barack Obama and, more recently, about Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris.

“The best way to combat the spread of disinformation is to stop it at its source,” the letter reads. “By putting the Republican National Convention on a one-minute time delay, your network will be able to actively correct disinformation in real time, and prevent the American people from being lied to on your airwaves. The future of our country, our people, and our democracy are at stake.”

CNN‘s Brian Stelter warned that news outlets would have to deal with“asymmetric lying” by the nation’s political parties, noting CNN fact-checks of the DNC convention last week showed the Democrats spoke mostly in “generalities or offered subjective opinions” but that factual assertions made by convention speakers “have largely been accurate.”

“We have seen throughout history how false theories and misinformation have been used to justify oppression and racism if they are not countered and debunked in real time,” said Kimberly Peeler-Allen, director of Higher Heights Political Fund. “The rhetoric that is anticipated to come from the RNC will put lives in danger whether it is misinformation about Covid-19 or language that can be used to justify attacks on Black and brown people. We strongly implore all of the major networks to institute a time delay and fact checking because it can and will save lives.”

Bridget Todd, a spokesperson for UltraViolet Action, warned the GOP gathering would be a “disinformation cesspool filled with toxic misogyny, virulent racism, and flat out lies about the coronavirus pandemic.”

Todd said that while it’s not possible to keep the networks from airing the convention, “we can ask that they do their part to correct disinformation in real time and help stop its spread.”

“CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBC, and CBS have previously cut away or run fact-checks in real-time during coronavirus briefings, and this should be no different,” Todd added. “We’ve seen what happens when disinformation is allowed to spread unchecked, and the risks are just too great.”

...

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ref

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/conservative-circles-scams-abound

former Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) has used his mailing list as a lucrative tool for many years, and it’s a habit he’s apparently reluctant to break. Even after the Arkansas Republican gave up his Fox News program, apparently to pursue another White House campaign, Huckabee continued to send out emails with “really questionable ads.”

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R) isn’t running for anything, but as discovered last week, he’s also using his list to send out spam-like messages that appear to be scams.

It’s against this backdrop that Kenneth P. Vogel had a great piece this week on the rise of “scam PACs” that target conservative donors.

Since the tea party burst onto the political landscape in 2009, the conservative movement has been plagued by an explosion of PACs that critics say exist mostly to pad the pockets of the consultants who run them. Combining sophisticated targeting techniques with fundraising appeals that resonate deeply among grass-roots activists, they collect large piles of small checks that, taken together, add up to enough money to potentially sway a Senate race. But the PACs plow most of their cash back into payments to consulting firms for additional fundraising efforts.

A POLITICO analysis of reports filed with the Federal Election Commission covering the 2014 cycle found that 33 PACs that court small donors with tea party-oriented email and direct-mail appeals raised $43 million – 74 percent of which came from small donors. The PACs spent only $3 million on ads and contributions to boost the long-shot candidates often touted in the appeals, compared to $39.5 million on operating expenses, including $6 million to firms owned or managed by the operatives who run the PACs.

I’m reminded of a line Chris Hayes used a couple of years ago, which continues to ring true: “[M]uch of movement conservatism is a con and the base are the marks.”

Eric Hananoki added soon after, “Media Matters has previously documented how conservatives have scammed their followers. [Erick Erickson], for example, was caught sending a plagiarized email (from Ann Coulter) endorsing a newsletter which purported to reveal a ‘secret’ system to become ‘instant millionaires.’”

And just yesterday, Ben Dimiero noted, “Erick Erickson’s email list subscribers have received a bizarre array of pitches from conspiracy theorists and dubious practitioners warning of the impending death of millions of Americans and promising ‘cures’ to cancer, Alzheimer’s, and aging.”

To be sure, there are some specific differences among these dubious appeals. The Politico piece, for example, highlighted the activities of suspicious political action committees, while the Huckabee, Gingrich, and Erickson examples focus on use of regular ol’ email lists, outside of PAC control.

But the bottom line remains the same: a dynamic now exists in which many conservatives are receiving dubious messages through lists operated by Republican leaders they trust.

The basic idea isn’t entirely new – for decades, groups and political figures sent out direct-mail letters, which regularly included unsavory appeals for cash – but the old model relied on slow and expensive distribution through the mail. It’s cheaper, faster, and easier for these unsavory schemes to be put in motion electronically.

Kevin Drum, meanwhile, asked the question that was on my mind:

So here’s my question: why is this so much more common on the right than on the left? It would be nice to chalk it up to the superior intelligence of liberal audiences and call it a day, but that won’t wash…. One possibility is that a lot of this stuff is aimed at the elderly, and conservatives tend to skew older than liberals. And while that’s probably part of the answer, it’s hardly satisfying. There are plenty of elderly liberals, after all – certainly enough to make them worth targeting with the same kind of fraudulent appeals that infest the right.

Another possibility is that it’s basically a supply-side phenomenon. Maybe liberal outlets simply tend to be less ruthless, less willing to set up scam fundraising organizations than conservative outlets. In fact, that actually does seem to be the case. But again: why?

I honestly have no idea, so let’s open it up to some discussion. Why do these scams seem so much more common on the right than the left?

Explore:

The MaddowBlog, Elections, Erick Erickson, Fundraising, Mike Huckabee, Money in Politics and Newt Gingrich