#2016 elections

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Alix Kendall at Daily Kos:

We’re sorry to remind you of this, but it has officially been 10 years since Donald Trump announced his bid for presidency. Of course, he would have made the run a lot sooner if his spiritual adviser, Paula White, hadn’t told him that God thought it was too soon.  But when the now-convicted-felon announced his plans on June 16, 2015, he set in motion a whirlwind of changes to come over the next decade. 

"Quite simply, it is time to bring real leadership to Washington,” Trump’s press release said at the time. “The fact is, the American Dream is dead—but if I win, I will bring it back bigger and better and stronger than ever before. Together we will Make America Great Again!" In his efforts to Make America Great Again, the two-time president—who still might be vying for a third term—has done quite a bit of damage. Over the past ten years, Trump has made America healthy again by pulling out some weird tricks, like suggesting people inject bleach to fight off COVID-19. Then again, he did later appoint an anti-vax fanatic to head the department that oversees the production and promotion of vaccines, so at least he is consistent. 

And while he managed to make enemies out of a chunk of his first-term GOPers, like former Vice President Mike Pence—perhaps for almost getting him killed—he finally got to turn the White House into the reality show he always wanted. From “MTV Road Rules” to “Fox & Friends” the administration has its fair share of TV stars. 

10 years ago yesterday, Donald Trump made infamous escalator ride down to announce his run for President for the 2016 GOP nomination. Most Americans, including those who later supported Trump, dismissed the nomination as an unserious attempt at the time. However, as the campaign season went on, his run was a serious one that cannot be ignored.

In the space of the 10 years since, he was up for election 3 times, winning two (2016, 2024) and losing one (2020). He became the main figure of GOP elected politics and scrambled the political lines between pro-Trump and anti-Trump, leading to realignments going both ways.

[batboyblog]

There are certain moments your life you live in forever, a lot of mine are from 2016.

I can remember every detail of a day in the fall of 2016, standing in my Hillary For America office, a little store front off main street. And two people come in a middle aged husband and wife. They're looking to get a sign. If you've ever worked on a campaign you'll know how amazingly annoying it is to endlessly have people coming in for free stuff and never ever volunteering to help.

So I was sent to try to talk them into signing up to knock doors or make calls to elect the Candidate who's sign they were getting. I talked about something Hillary had said recently, that Trump could appoint up to 4 Justices to the Supreme Court and we'd lose Roe V Wade.

Till the day I die I will remember the husband rolling his eyes and saying "I know thats a good line, but you don't really believe that do you?" I was shocked speechless for a second before saying I did very much believe it. He insisted that the conservatives wouldn't really get rid of abortion. Idk if he believed or not that Trump could appoint so many Justices, but he definitely, and his wife seemed to agree, thought that even a Republican super majority would not be so crass and step on public opinion so much.

any ways the Republican super majority on the Supreme Court just ruled that lower courts can't block illegal orders from taking effect nationwide and can only block them for the parties that actually sue.

[illusive-delusions]

andrew cuomo getting less than 50% of the vote on italian cop island? zohran mamdani mandate of heaven confirmed

[imparateasa]

One thing to be said about elon is that he is fundamentally unable to think about the repercussions of his actions and it’s so awesome

[helenvaughans]

[dynamicity-keysmash]

As someone who was too young to vote in 2016, I just want it on the record that I hate ALL of y'all who could vote in 2016 but didn't vote for Hillary Clinton. If you voted for Jill Stein in 2016 or stayed home because she wasn't Bernie or you didn't like her emails or whatever I'm going to crawl through your screen and kill you like the girl from the ring.

[postelectionclarity]

[thashining]

Well ain't that the kettle calling the pot....a 34 count felon

[saywhat-politics]

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Emily Singer at Daily Kos:

In 2016, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. crapped all over Donald Trump and his supporters, agreeing that they were racist idiots too stupid to succeed, according to a trove of radio clips unearthed by CNN.

CNN reported that Kennedy—Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services—made the comments on his radio show “Ring of Fire,” where he regularly criticized Trump and those who backed him. For example, in an episode that aired in March 2016, Kennedy praised journalist Matt Taibbi’s criticism of Trump and his base. “One of the things that you write so beautifully, and your stuff is so fun to read, but you write about Trump, quote, ‘The way that you build a truly vicious nationalist movement is to wed a relatively small core of belligerent idiots to a much larger group of opportunists and spineless fellow travelers whose primary function is to turn a blind eye to things,’” Kennedy said, quoting Taibbi’s writing. “‘We may not have that many outright Nazis in America, but we have plenty of cowards and bootlickers, and once those fleshy dominoes start tumbling into the Trump camp, the game is up.’” Kennedy went on to say that Trump is a racist demagogue but isn’t smart enough to be effective like Adolf Hitler because Hitler had a "plan" and “was interested in policy,” while Trump is "non compos mentis"—Latin for "of unsound mind."

CNN reported that Kennedy also compared Trump to other past autocrats, like Benito Mussolini and Francisco Franco. “And you can see that every statement that Donald Trump makes is fear-based,” Kennedy said in an episode that aired in December 2016, according to CNN. “Every statement he makes. You know, we have to be fear of the Muslims. We have to be fear of the black people, and particularly the big Black guy Obama, who’s destroying this country, who’s making everybody miserable.” Kennedy went on: “And only one person has the genius and the capacity to solve these things. And I’m not gonna tell you how I’m gonna do it. Just trust in me, vote for me and everything will be great again. And of course, that whole thing is like a carnival barker.” He also called Trump racist and compared him with former Alabama Gov. George Wallace, an infamous segregationist.

“Wallace’s appeal … was to White middle-class men who had experienced the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s as a social demotion, and who found their lives in turmoil,” Kennedy said, according to CNN. “And that kind of insecurity, I think, is the target of the summons that Donald Trump has sent out to the American public.” Of course, Kennedy has now changed his tune, blaming his past comments on—you guessed it—the "mainstream media." “Like many Americans, I allowed myself to believe the mainstream media’s distorted, dystopian portrait of President Trump. I no longer hold this belief and now regret having made those statements,” he told CNN. “There’s apparently nothing that can’t be blamed on the mainstream media, even one’s own very public criticisms,” CNN reporter Jim Sciutto wrote in a post on X. Ultimately, Kennedy is one of a number of people now in Trump's orbit who slammed the president-elect in the past but have since retracted their statements in an effort to amass power.

During a March 2016 appearance on Ring Of Fire, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gave praise to journalist Matt Taibbi’s blunt criticisms of Donald Trump and his MAGA Cultists by calling them “belligerent idiots.”

Now, both Taibbi and RFK Jr. are on the Trump train (esp. RFK Jr.), or at least Trump-curious. Also, Trump’s VP pick, JD Vance, was once ardently critical of him, but now is a suck-up toady for him.

[ms-demeanor]

making my own post because nobody needs my bullshit on their post:

OP:

Reblog 1:

Reblog 2:

My response:

The IRA blogs were here and they were active and they were quite popular; their posting patterns did not match normal tumblr users (i was followed by lagonegirl and followed back only to be put off by the account reblogging the same five or ten posts every hour for a day before selecting another five or ten posts to reblog hourly the next day - it was clear engagement bait).

Tumblr has never been as transparent about these accounts as both Twitter and Facebook were, but several of the accounts had shared names across platforms and you can find a significant amount of data that was released by both facebook (ex: ads purchased by the IRA accounts) and twitter (over three million tweets from IRA accounts). Academic researchers have published papers on the data released from facebook and twitter. Several papers. So many papers. Soooooo many papers. We have a LOT of direct evidence that you can explore for yourself that there were hundreds (possibly thousands) of IRA accounts that were created on Facebook and Twitter. Of those accounts, some shared usernames across platforms, and of those accounts, a few had tumblr accounts that posted the same content on twitter and tumblr.

To quote a buzzfeed news article from the time:

The Russian-run Tumblr accounts used the same, or very similar, usernames as the account names contained on a list of confirmed IRA accounts Twitter submitted to congressional investigators. In some cases, the Tumblr and Twitter account has the same profile image or linked to each other in their bios. Some IRA Tumblrs and Twitter accounts also cross-promoted content between platforms, further linking them together.

Current tumblr user @ alwaysbewoke (who I don't want to tag because I'm sure he's got better things to do) is interviewed in that article and talks about following one of the blogs identified by tumblr as an IRA blog that had a matching account on twitter identified as an IRA account but unfollowing when the left-leaning blog supposedly run by a black creator started rooting for trump in the election.

Dr. Jonathan Albright is heavily quoted in the article; the data review he collaborated on is one of the only reviews of this subject that includes data from Tumblr and Reddit.

One of the claims that I've seen is that tumblr just deleted funny black people, but these were blogs with thousands of followers on tumblr who never recreated, never popped up on another social media site, never started a reddit account after getting banned; nobody ever showed up saying "hey this is 4mysquad, I got banned on tumblr and twitter, follow me to pillowfort". These very popular blogs got deleted and, as far as I know, nobody ever popped up claiming to be a person who was deleted - and it's not like tumblr users haven't figured out how to evade bans.

What you are doing when you make posts saying that the IRA accounts on tumblr never existed is *absolving tumblr of guilt for their utter lack of transparency.*

Tumblr is not the only tech company that has tried to fly under the radar as its larger counterparts face regular scrutiny in Congress and in the press. Earlier this month, Reddit revealed it too had deleted hundreds of accounts with ties to the Internet Research Agency. A WIRED investigation found more than a thousand links to Russian propaganda websites are still live on Reddit, and unearthed two suspicious accounts that Reddit immediately shut down.

So should you believe what Tumblr says? No, because Tumblr has been functionally fucking silent on this issue and the information about this subject aside from the list of blogs has come from the hard work of data scientists, journalists, and researchers.

(For the record; some of those bot accounts that were recorded by Dr. Albright also had Google+ accounts in 2017 - there is every possibility that they had myspace accounts).

Now, the reason that I'm popping onto this post as an annoyed anarchist is that I was tracking a similar group of blogs for a while and was discussing them and I stopped precisely because of the galaxy-brained liberals who are now trying to dunk on communists for criticizing electoralism. One of the people who was following my project was one of the ones who started calling out the "joe biden kills dogs" posts as disinfo and I realized they were using some of the guidelines I'd written up to "identify" misinformation and that is very a rock fucking stupid approach to what was clearly a leftist making jokes and was horrified and realized there was no way that I could continue documenting what I was documenting without someone attempting to call actual leftists russian bots.

I've seen the post that OP is referencing [it's one where someone makes a very obvious joke about the democrat presidential ticket and people jump on to call them a bot and then someone tries to do the "AI tell me a story" thing and OP is just like "I don't want to :(", proving that they are in fact a person and not an AI] and have deeply enjoyed the humor of watching liberals a) not understand a very, VERY obvious joke and b) become the unwitting butt of a joke they were trying to make, but also I am so exhausted by watching normie dems call leftists AI bots after years of watching normie dems call real live actual leftists who hold actual political views that real people actually have, like prison abolition, russian bots.

But I am also so fucking tired of left conspiracism and how stupid it sounds when leftists dismiss a preponderance of evidence that is easily accessible and publicly available for analysis as "lol so you just trust everything tumblr tells you?"

No, dipshit, learn to click a fucking link or twelve.

[powerupcomicstonight]

[irenespring]

Really I think nothing shouts "my first Presidential election as a politically active person was 2016" more than the fact that when I feel hope and excitement for the future (possible President Harris) for more than five minutes I immediately get a crushing, all-consuming anxiety of "feeling this positive emotion now is going to make it so much worse when the worst thing possible happens" to the extent that I'll probably need my break-glass-in-case-of-emergency anxiety medication.

[fangirlinginleatherboots]

I feel like for a lot of people, this is going to sound pandering or pointless, but it's not for you.

US politics are not a reason to kill yourself. Just so you know. Especially young people!!!! You have been through so few elections you don't even know that it always feels like the world will end election year. Everyone is fighting. Everyone is afraid (often on all sides!!! Don't worry about their logic, they are still scared even if they are wrong to be). Your whole world feels like it is teetering on the brink and, especially when you are young, you may feel helpless.

It does pass. The world does change but it will keep going and you will get a chance to change it.

It is important to remain informed but it is also important to develop the self regulation to walk away from the fear mongering and doom spirals when you realize it is preventing you from functioning. It is okay to be afraid, but you should not let the fear make choices for you.

[ihateadulthood]

[batboyblog]

idk, feels like it should be slightly bigger news that a shady dictatorship with a crappy human rights record tried to illegally give Trump $10 million dollars to help win the 2016 election and then the Trump controlled Justice department stopped that from being fully investigated, that seems like a big fucking deal, but what do I know?