#Exit polls 2021

[beardedmrbean]

Sen. John Fetterman could land himself in trouble with voters after he doubled down on his claims that he is not a progressive Democrat, despite comments he made during his election campaign.

"I'm not a progressive, I'm just a regular Democrat," Fetterman said on X, formerly Twitter.

The statement was contradicted by the website's community notes feature, referencing tweets from Fetterman in 2016 and 2020 in which he clearly said he was a progressive.

Despite the contradiction, Fetterman has noticeably shifted away from the position upon which he narrowly defeated Donald Trump-endorsed Dr. Mehmet Oz in the 2022 midterms.

Politicians such as Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent closely aligned with the left of the Democratic Party, have called for a ceasefire in Gaza, whereas Fetterman has said he supports the Israeli response to the attack by the Palestinian militant group Hamas on October 7 "unequivocally," despite criticism that it has been too strong.

"I just think I'm a Democrat that is very committed to choice and other things. But with Israel, I'm going to be on the right side of that," Fetterman said.

The Pennsylvania senator's stance on Israel is a particular source of ire for many who consider themselves part of the progressive movement, largely younger voters.

A November 2021 poll by Pew Research recorded that 71 percent of the progressive left movement is made up of people aged 18 to 49.

It is young voters that favored Fetterman in his 2022 Senate race against Oz. According to an exit poll taken by Statista, 72 percent of voters aged 18-24 who answered said they voted for the Democrat. The figure was similar for voters aged 25 to 29, at 68 percent.

His position on Israel-Gaza could spell trouble among this voter demographic. According to a New York Times/Siena poll published on Tuesday, 45 percent of people aged 18 to 29 think President Joe Biden is "too supportive" of Israel. In the same age group, 46 percent of people who responded said they were supportive of Palestine, compared to 27 percent favoring Israel.

The same poll said that just 20 percent of all voters aged 18 to 29 believe Biden is handling the conflict well. Asked about the result on CNN on Tuesday, Fetterman said: "If you're getting your perspective on the world on TikTok, it's going to tend to be kinda warped."

He added: "Sometimes you may alienate some voters, but it is really most important to be on the right side on that. That's where I am at."

A total of 16 of his former campaign staffers wrote him an open letter, asking him to change his stance.

"It is not too late to change your stance and stand on the righteous side of history," it said.

An op-ed in news outlet PennLive was published in November by Mireille Rebeiz, Ph.D., chair of Middle East Studies and associate professor at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in which his position on the issue was labeled "disturbing" and saying he was "unworthy of my trust."

Fetterman has called for humanitarian aid to be sent to Gaza, but criticized pro-Palestinian protesters when they staged a demonstration outside a Jewish-owned store in Philadelphia in December, calling the gathering antisemitic.

Immigration is also a divisive issue in Congress, and Fetterman has made it clear he wants to work with Senate Republicans and says it is a "reasonable conversation" to have. The GOP has pushed for stricter measures along the southern border with Mexico.

"It's a reasonable conversation—until somebody can say there's an explanation on what we can do when 270,000 people are being encountered on the border, not including the ones, of course, that we don't know about," Fetterman said to NBC. "To put that in reference, that is essentially the size of Pittsburgh, the second-largest city in Pennsylvania."

His wife, Gisele Fetterman, arrived undocumented from Brazil as a 7-year-old and was an important part of his Senate campaign. Some accused him of throwing his wife under the bus because of his stance.

Newsweek has reached out to Fetterman via email through his Senate office for comment.

"Fetterman has never been progressive, but endorsing talks for tougher immigration laws when he's married to an incredible woman who was once an illegal immigrant and who kept his campaign alive while he was recovering from a stroke is actually sickening," said Alexandra Hunt, a former Democrat candidate for Pennsylvania's 3rd Congressional District.

The conversation around Fetterman has some such as left-leaning commentator Mehdi Hasan questioning if he is the "new Kyrsten Sinema," the Arizona senator who became an independent in 2022.

"Fetterman has been a pleasant surprise for his Republican colleagues and a thorn in the side of progressive Democrat," Hasan wrote in British news magazine The Spectator in December. He added: "One still has to wonder if he might follow in Sinema's footsteps and officially extricate himself from the two-party system."

Sinema cited a "deeply broken two-party system" as the reason she left the Democratic Party in 2022.

However, Heath Mayo, a conservative who founded the anti-Trump nonprofit Principles First, praised Fetterman.

"John Fetterman is testing a lot of new boundaries for the Democratic Party right now. Aggressively pro-Israel, pro-border security, anti-corruption in his own party[...]That's principled leadership and Dems should embrace it. He is speaking to a lot of us," Mayo said.

On X, Hasan said Fetterman's comments on him not being aligned with the progressive movement was "a total attack on the people who worked hard to elect him."

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Solving the Moderator's Trilemma with Federation

The classic trilemma goes: “Fast, cheap or good, pick any two.” The Moderator’s Trilemma goes, “Large, diverse userbase; centralized platforms; don’t anger users — pick any two.” The Moderator’s Trilemma is introduced in “Moderating the Fediverse: Content Moderation on Distributed Social Media,” a superb paper from Alan Rozenshtein of U of Minnesota Law, forthcoming in the journal Free Speech Law, available as a prepub on SSRN:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4213674#maincontent

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/04/pick-all-three/#agonism

Rozenshtein proposes a solution (of sorts) to the Moderator’s Trilemma: federation. De-siloing social media, breaking it out of centralized walled gardens and recomposing it as a bunch of small servers run by a diversity of operators with a diversity of content moderation approaches. The Fediverse, in other words.

In Albert Hirschman’s classic treatise Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, stakeholders in an institution who are dissatisfied with its direction have two choices: voice (arguing for changes) or exit (going elsewhere). Rozenshtein argues that Fediverse users (especially users of Mastodon, the most popular part of the Fediverse) have more voice and more “freedom of exit”:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty

Large platforms — think Twitter, Facebook, etc — are very unresponsive to users. Most famously, Facebook polled its users on whether they wanted to be spied on. Faced with overwhelming opposition to commercial surveillance, Facebook ignored the poll result and cranked the surveillance dial up to a million:

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/facebook-ignores-minimal-user-vote-adopts-new-privacy-policy-flna1c7559683

A decade later, Musk performed the same stunt, asking users whether they wanted him to fuck all the way off from the company, then ignored the vox populi, which, in this instance, was not vox Dei:

https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-twitter-inc-technology-business-8dac8ae023444ef9c37ca1d8fe1c14df

Facebook, Twitter and other walled gardens are designed to be sticky-traps, relying on high switching costs to keep users locked within their garden walls which are really prison walls. Internal memos from the companies reveal that this strategy is deliberate, designed to keep users from defecting even as the service degrades:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

By contrast, the Fediverse is designed for ease of exit. With one click, users can export the list of the accounts they follow, block and mute, as well as the accounts that follow them. With one more click, users can import that data into any other Fediverse server and be back up and running with almost no cost or hassle:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/23/semipermeable-membranes/

Last month, “Nathan,” the volunteer operator of mastodon.lol, announced that he was pulling the plug on the server because he was sick of his users’ arguments about the new Harry Potter game. Many commentators pointed to this as a mark against federated social media, “You can’t rely on random, thin-skinned volunteer sysops for your online social life!”

https://mastodon.lol/@nathan/109836633022272265

But the mastodon.lol saga demonstrates the strength of federated social media, not its weakness. After all, 450 million Twitter users are also at the mercy of a thin-skinned sysop — but when he enshittifies his platform, they can’t just export their data and re-establish their social lives elsewhere in two clicks:

Mastodon.lol shows us how, if you don’t like your host’s content moderation policies, you can exercise voice — even to the extent of making him so upset that he shuts off his server — and where voice fails, exit steps in to fill the gap, providing a soft landing for users who find the moderation policies untenable:

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

Traditionally, centralization has been posed as beneficial to content moderation. As Rozenshtein writes, a company that can “enclose” its users and lock them in has an incentive to invest in better user experience, while companies whose users can easily migrate to rivals are less invested in those users.

And centralized platforms are more nimble. The operators of centralized systems can add hundreds of knobs and sliders to their back end and twiddle them at will. They act unilaterally, without having to convince other members of a federation to back their changes.

Centralized platforms claim that their most powerful benefit to users is extensive content moderation. As Tarleton Gillespie writes, “Moderation is central to what platforms do, not peripheral… [it] is, in many ways, the commodity that platforms offer”:

https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300261431/custodians-of-the-internet/

Centralized systems claim that their enclosure keeps users safe — from bad code and bad people. Though Rozenshtein doesn’t say so, it’s important to note that this claim is wildly oversold. Platforms routinely fail at preventing abuse:

https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/sexual-assault-harassment-bullying-trans-students-say-targeted-school-rcna7803

And they also fail at blocking malicious code:

https://www.scmagazine.com/news/threats/apple-bugs-ios-macos_new_class

But even where platforms do act to “keep users safe,” they fail, thanks to the Moderator’s Trilemma. Setting speech standards for millions or even billions of users is an impossible task. Some users will always feel like speech is being underblocked — while others will feel it’s overblocked (and both will be right!):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/07/right-or-left-you-should-be-worried-about-big-tech-censorship

And platforms play very fast and loose with their definition of “malicious code” — as when Apple blocked OG App, an Instagram ad-blocker that gave you a simple feed consisting of just the posts from the people you followed:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/05/battery-vampire/#drained

To resolve the Moderator’s Trilemma, we need to embrace subsidiarity: “decisions should be made at the lowest organizational level capable of making such decisions.”

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/07/full-stack-luddites/#subsidiarity

For Rozenshtein, “content-moderation subsidiarity devolves decisions to the individual instances that make up the overall network.” The fact that users can leave a server and set up somewhere else means that when a user gets pissed off enough about a moderation policy, they don’t have to choose between leaving social media or tolerating the policy — they can simply choose another server that’s part of the same federation.

Rozenshtein asks whether Reddit is an example of this, because moderators of individual subreddits are given broad latitude to set their own policies and anyone can fork a subreddit into a competing community with different moderation norms. But Reddit’s devolution is a matter of policy, not architecture — subreddits exist at the sufferance of Reddit’s owners (and Reddit is poised to go public, meaning those owners will include activist investors and large institutions that might not care about your little community). You might be happy about Reddit banning /r_TheDonald, but if they can ban that subreddit, they can ban any subreddit. Policy works well, but fails badly.

By moving subsidiarity into technical architecture, rather than human policy, the fediverse can move from antagonism (the “zero-sum destructiveness” that dominates current online debate) to agonism, where your opponent isn’t an enemy — they are a “political adversary”:

https://www.yalelawjournal.org/article/the-administrative-agon

Here, Rozenshtein cites Aymeric Mansoux and Roel Roscam Abbing’s “Seven Theses On The Fediverse And The Becoming Of Floss”:

https://test.roelof.info/seven-theses.html

For this to happen, different ideologies must be allowed to materialize via different channels and platforms. An important prerequisite is that the goal of political consensus must be abandoned and replaced with conflictual consensus…

So your chosen Mastodon server “may have rules that are far more restrictive than those of the major social media platforms.” But the whole Fediverse “is substantially more speech protective than are any of the major social media platforms, since no user or content can be permanently banned from the network and anyone is free to start an instance that communicates both with the major Mastodon instances and the peripheral, shunned instances.”

A good case-study here is Gab, a Fediverse server by and for far-right cranks, conspiratorialists and white nationalists. Most Fediverse servers have defederated (that is, blocked) Gab, but Gab is still there, and Gab has actually defederated from many of the remaining servers, leaving its users to speak freely — but only to people who want to hear what they have to say.

This is true meaning of “freedom of speech isn’t freedom of reach.” Willing listeners aren’t blocked from willing speakers — but you don’t have the right to be heard by people who don’t want to talk to you:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

Fediverse servers are (thus far) nonprofits or hobbyist sites, and don’t have the same incentives to drive “engagement” to maximize the opportunties to show advertisements. Fediverse applications are frequently designed to be antiviral — that is, to prevent spectacular spreads of information across the system.

It’s possible — likely, even — that future Fediverse servers will be operated by commercial operators seeking to maximize attention in order to maximize revenue — but the users of these servers will still have the freedom of exit that they enjoy on today’s Jeffersonian volunteer-run servers — and so commercial servers will have to either curb their worst impulses or lose their users to better systems.

I’ll note here that this is a progressive story of the benefits of competition — not the capitalist’s fetishization of competition for its own sake, but rather, competition as a means of disciplining capital. It can be readily complemented by discipline through regulation — for example, extending today’s burgeoning crop of data-protection laws to require servers to furnish users with exports of their follow/follower data so they can go elsewhere.

There’s another dimension to decentralized content moderation that exit and voice don’t address — moderating “harmful” content. Some kinds of harm can be mitigated through exit — if a server tolerates hate speech or harassment, you can go elsewhere, preferably somewhere that blocks your previous server.

But there are other kinds of speech that must not exist — either because they are illegal or because they enact harms that can’t be mitigated by going elsewhere (or both). The most spectacular version of this is Child Sex Abuse Material (CSAM), a modern term-of-art to replace the more familiar “child porn.”

Rozenshtein says there are “reasons for optimism” when it comes to the Fediverse’s ability to police this content, though as he unpacked this idea, I found it much weaker than his other material. Rozenshtein proposes that Fediverse hosts could avail themselves of PhotoDNA, Microsoft’s automated scanning tool, to block and purge themselves of CSAM, while noting that this is “hardly foolproof.”

If automated scanning fails, Rozenshtein allows that this could cause “greater consolidation” of Mastodon servers to create the economies of scale to pay for more active, human moderation, which he compares to the consolidation of email that arose as a result of the spam-wars. But the spam-wars have been catastrophic for email as a federated system and produced all kinds of opportunities for mischief by the big players:

https://doctorow.medium.com/dead-letters-73924aa19f9d

Rozenshtein: “There is a tradeoff between a vibrant and diverse communication system and the degree of centralized control that would be necessary to ensure 100% filtering of content. The question, as yet unknown, is how stark that tradeoff is.”

The situation is much simpler when it comes to servers hosted by moderators who are complicit in illegal conduct: “the Fediverse may live in the cloud, its servers, moderators, and users are physically located in nations whose governments are more than capable of enforcing local law.” That is, people who operate “rogue” servers dedicated to facilitating assassination, CSAM, or what-have-you will be arrested, and their servers will be seized.

Fair enough! But of course, this butts up against one of the Fediverse’s shortcomings: it isn’t particularly useful for promoting illegal speech that should be legal, like the communications of sex workers who were purged from the internet en masse following the passage of SESTA/FOSTA. When sex workers tried to establish a new home in the fediverse on a server called Switter, it was effectively crushed.

This simply reinforces the idea that code is no substitute for law, and while code can interpret bad law as damage and route around it, it can only do so for a short while. The best use of speech-enabling code isn’t to avoid the unjust suppression of speech — it’s to organize resistance to that injustice, including, if necessary, the replacement of the governments that enacted it:

https://onezero.medium.com/rubber-hoses-fd685385dcd4

Rozenshtein briefly addresses the question of “filter bubbles,” and notes that there is compelling research that filter bubbles don’t really exist, or at least, aren’t as important to our political lives as once thought:

https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/nor-2021-0002

Rozenshtein closes by addressing the role policy can play in encouraging the Fediverse. First, he proposes that governments could host their own servers and use them for official communications, as the EU Commission did following Musk’s Twitter takeover:

https://social.network.europa.eu

He endorses interoperability mandates which would required dominant platforms to connect to the fediverse (facilitating their users’ departure), like the ones in the EU’s DSA and DMA, and proposed in US legislation like the ACCESS Act:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/04/eu-digital-markets-acts-interoperability-rule-addresses-important-need-raises

To get a sense of how that would work, check out “Interoperable Facebook,” a video and essay I put together with EFF to act as a kind of “design fiction,” in the form of a user manual for a federated, interoperable Facebook:

https://www.eff.org/interoperablefacebook

He points out that this kind of mandatory interop is a preferable alternative to the unconstitutional (and unworkable!) speech bans proposed by Florida and Texas, which limit the ability of platforms to moderate speech. Indeed, this is an either-or proposition — under the terms proposed by Florida and Texas, the Fediverse couldn’t operate.

This is likewise true of proposals to eliminate Section 230, the law that immunizes platforms from federal liability for most criminal speech acts committed by their users. While this law is incorrectly smeared as a gift to Big Tech, it is most needed by small services that can’t possibly afford to monitor everything their users say:

https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-section-230-communications-decency-act/

One more recommendation from Rozenshtein: treat interop mandates as an alternative (or adjunct) to antitrust enforcement. Competition agencies could weigh interoperability with the Fediverse by big platforms to determine whether to enforce against them, and enforcement orders could include mandates to interoperate with the Fediverse. This is a much faster remedy than break-ups, which Rozenshtein is dubious of because they are “legally risky” and “controversial.”

To this, I’d add that even for people who would welcome break-ups (like me!) they are sloooow. The breakup of AT&T took 69 years. By contrast, interop remedies would give relief to users right now:

https://onezero.medium.com/jam-to-day-46b74d5b1da4

On Tue (Mar 7), I’m doing a remote talk for TU Wien.

On Mar 9, you can catch me in person in Austin at the UT School of Design and Creative Technologies, and remotely at U Manitoba’s Ethics of Emerging Tech Lecture.

On Mar 10, Rebecca Giblin and I kick off the SXSW reading series.

[Image ID: A trilemma Venn diagram, showing three ovoids in a triangular form, which intersect at their tips, but not in the middle. The ovoids are labeled 'Avoid angering users,' 'Diverse userbase,' 'Centralized platforms.' In the center of the ovoids is the Mastodon mascot. The background is composed of dead Twitter birds on their backs with exes for eyes.]

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Igor Bobic and Liz Skalka at HuffPost:

Former President Donald Trump spoke for over an hour in a rambling press conference on Thursday, making dozens of false and outrageous claims in an effort to wrest the spotlight away from Vice President Kamala Harris’ surging 2024 presidential campaign. Addressing reporters at his ritzy Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, the GOP presidential nominee insisted his campaign was the one drawing large, enthusiastic crowds on the campaign trail — even though Harris’ rallies attracted tens of thousands this week — and claimed that the vice president wasn’t “smart enough” to take questions from the media as he was doing. “She’s not smart enough to do a news conference,” Trump said.

Trump also claimed he was willing to do three debates with Harris: Sept. 4 with Fox News, Sept. 10 with ABC News, and Sept. 25 with NBC News (the announcement required a clarification from Trump’s campaign regarding the host networks). Both campaigns had agreed to the Sept. 10 debate when President Joe Biden was still the presumptive nominee, but Trump canceled when Harris replaced Biden. Harris’ campaign hasn’t said whether it’s agreed to all three dates.

Harris, meanwhile, hasn’t done a sit-down with reporters since Biden exited the race and endorsed her for the nomination. But she’s marginally improved on Biden’s position in the polls, and Democrats, at least, appear enthused to have a candidate besides the president. “The honeymoon period is gonna end,” Trump said of Harris’ standing in the race. “She’s got a little period, the convention is coming up [...] Everything she’s touched has turned bad.” It was the first time Trump took questions from reporters since Harris announced Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate on Tuesday. Trump called both Harris and Walz too liberal and dangerous to run the country.

“She picked a radical left man,” Trump said. “He’s got things done that he’s … he has positions that are just not, it’s not even possible to believe that they exist. He’s going for things that nobody’s ever even heard of, heavy into the transgender world, heavy into lots of different worlds having to do with safety. He doesn’t want to have borders. He doesn’t want to have walls. He doesn’t want to have any form of safety for our country.” Trump said he wouldn’t change anything about his campaign or attacks now that he’s running against Harris. “I haven’t recalibrated strategy at all. It’s the same policies — open borders and crime. I think she’s worse than Biden,” he said.

During his press conference, which ran just short of 90 minutes, Trump compared the crowd size at the White House on Jan. 6, 2021, to the audience for Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 “I Have A Dream” speech on the National Mall, where about 260,000 people showed up. “Nobody’s spoken to crowds bigger than me,” he said. “If you look at Martin Luther King, when he did his great speech, and you look at ours, same real estate, same everything, same number of people, if not, we had more. And they said he had a million people, but I had 25,000 people.” Trump also falsely claimed that “nobody died” during the attack on the Capitol by hundreds of his supporters seeking to overturn the 2020 election he had lost. At least seven people died in connection to the riot, including several Trump supporters.

[...] Trump gave a head-scratcher of an answer to a question about whether he believed the Federal Drug Administration should restrict access to the abortion pill mifepristone, which survived a right-wing attack before the Supreme Court earlier this year. Some conservatives want the FDA to regulate the pill out of circulation in a future GOP presidential administration. “You could do things that would supplement. Absolutely,” Trump said. “And those things are pretty open and humane.” He added: “But you have to have a vote. The people are going to decide.” Harris’ campaign responded to Trump’s press conference with sarcasm, calling it “very good” and “very normal.” “He hasn’t campaigned all week. He isn’t going to a single swing state this week. But he sure is mad Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are getting big crowds across the battlegrounds,” the campaign said in a press release. “The facts were hard to track and harder to find in Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago meltdown this afternoon.”

DonOld Trump’s chaotic and unhinged presser at Mar-A-Lago yesterday was the same old bullcrap of greatest hits mixed with new lies and delusions, such as falsely stating that he had more crowds than Martin Luther King Jr., baselessly stated that “no one died” on Janauary 6th, 2021, and hinted that he could regulate mifepristone out of existence.

4 more years of DonOld would be embarrassing.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

By Jess Coleman

When, in December 2021, West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin announced he would vote “no” on President Biden’s signature legislative proposal, the Build Back Better Act, the reaction boiled down to: “Well, what did you expect?” After all, Manchin, despite being a Democrat, is from deep-red West Virginia, and politicians from deep-red states simply cannot vote in favor of major progressive policies championed by the leader of the Democratic Party. That’s just politics, dummy. That Biden and his fellow Democrats even tried was treated in some circles as painfully naïve: Unless Democrats learn that basic lesson and bring centrists into the fold, they’ll never achieve a vibrant, sustainable majority. Or so sayeth the conventional wisdom.

So when Manchin announced last week that he is considering leaving the Democratic Party to become an independent, his rationale was hardly difficult to predict. “The brand has become so bad,” he said, drawing on the oft-repeated talking point that the Democrats have lept too far left. In other words—and in contravention of all logic, given the results of the 2022 midterms—Manchin simply cannot in good conscience remain with a party that, in substance and style, provides no room for leaders seeking to appeal to a moderate, bipartisan electorate.

Don’t be fooled. Manchin’s charade is hardly one of principle. It’s one of total desperation.

There are no secrets about Manchin’s political situation at home. After being reelected in 2018 by just 3%, in a year in which Democrats vastly outperformed expectations nationally, Manchin has an enormous hill to climb with his reelection looming in 2024. But the West Virginia Senator doesn’t seem to have much interest in taking responsibility for the electoral crisis in which he has enmeshed himself. Instead, he’d like us to believe the political forces around him have simply left him no choice: Both sides have drawn too far to the extremes, leaving no political home for the critical mass of centrist West Virginians who sent him to Washington. Hence the need to chart a new path on his own.

The framing echoes a convenient perspective that is adored by the media and political establishment: Elections are not won with base voters, but through a small slice of persuadable, moderate swing voters, perpetually lurking just outside of frame. Democrats, in turn, need to have some Joe Manchins—those politicians who embody the voters who are key to electoral success—lying around to be taken seriously. The failure to keep these soi-disant moderate saviors on hand reveals a fundamental structural deficiency for the party writ large.

But if it’s true that Manchin is such a political genius—uniquely capable of surviving as a Democrat in a deep red state—you would expect that his victory is owed to a broad cross section of voters from a variety of political camps. Alas, that’s the complete opposite of what happened in 2018. According to CNN exit polls, Manchin garnered the votes of 64% of those who identify as moderates, and just 23% of conservatives. Those numbers are roughly in line with what New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand achieved that same year: 70% and 18%, respectively. The reality is Manchin barely made it over the finish line in roughly the same way Democrats all around the country win their seats: by running up the numbers with voters on the political left—Manchin won 80% of self-identified liberals in 2018.

Indeed, as The New Republic’s Alex Pareene observed in 2021, Manchin is actually far more reliant on Democratic voters than many of his blue state counterparts. While someone like Gillibrand can afford to lose large swaths of Democrats in a state where they are in ample supply, Manchin needs to pull virtually every registered Democrat in his state to win. Against all logic, Manchin approached Biden’s first term as if the rules that governed his electoral hopes were precisely opposite to reality. Instead of rewarding his most loyal voters—dyed-in-the-wool liberal Democrats—by delivering for them in Washington, Manchin has spent his latest term going out of his way to alienate his base and position himself in a political no man’s land: personally steamrolling key Democratic priorities while siding with his party on most routine issues and appointments.

In short, Manchin made a bet. He believed he could rely on the support of Democrats and spent nearly all his time trying to appeal to a tiny, if not nonexistent, group of voters who are up for grabs and have no real allegiance to either of the two dominant political parties. It hasn’t worked out the way Manchin anticipated, and this is where he now finds himself—orchestrating a last-ditch, hopeless effort to create a new political reality from thin air.

It is possible Manchin never had a shot at reelection, had fortune and circumstance not permitted him to avail himself of 2018’s political trends, we’d already have a Republican holding that West Virginia Senate seat. But the broader lesson is crucial for those in the media and elected leadership who constantly insist that disregarding the Democratic base in service of pursuing the allegedly vast rewards that come from focusing solely on the views of the so-called centrist, swing voters is the only viable path to victory in American politics. Those who subscribe to this view should explain why the two most notable Democrats who aggressively pursued this approach—Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin—are currently fighting for their political lives, while other red-state Democratic senators such as Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Jon Tester of Montana have consistently survived—and remain loyal to the party’s big priorities even when their electoral hopes face massive headwinds.

Mostly, we have to understand something simple about Manchin: We are not watching a political genius at work. He’s not on the verge of revealing a masterful plan to pull off another miracle in West Virginia. This is a desperate politician squirming for his political life after making a series of catastrophic political decisions. Manchin has hardly proven that the Democratic Party is mortally wounded due to its failure to leave room for the center left. All he’s done is reinforce a very basic rule in politics: Doing the opposite of what your voters want is an idiotic election strategy.

[coffehbeans]

Nobody asked but I wanted to share anyway, a little bit more about the new stories from This Poll:

The marine biologist and the sea merman

This one is actually a very old story ahsuhsu one of my oldest, actually! I even have art of them posted here when I was much worse at art ahsuhs the two main characters even have stablished designs, that I'm sure I wanna show y'all someday!

Anyway this story has beggining, middle and end and is divided in three main parts. It's a world where mercreatures are things from legends because they purposefully hide themselves from humanity. The merfolk are divided in seven kingdoms, in each kingdom, only one merperson is giant, the Chosen Heir, mers with special powers that are meant to be the rulers and protectors of the seven seas. One of the main characters is a chosen heir from the North Atlantic Ocean called Aegir Sonhavet. He's an young, introverted and kind of naive individual who doesn't understand the true responsibility behind his powers yet. He also feels very isolated.

But the protagonist herself is Caitlyn Brooke, a marine biologist who's studying at a prestigious university by the coast. She loves sailing and decides to go one day alone. Guess what happens? ;)

This story is winning so far so it'll be fun to show a world and characters I'm so familiar with and very attached to <3

2. My own take on a g/t society, high school setting

This is a story of mine that went through SO many changes over the years. I have little stuff written about it, but it has a solid concept. Aaand, catch this: It happens in the same universe as Ethan's, but years later. So yep! This is the hyperon syndrome situation after years of development. A larger percentage of people are giants but the mutation still happens within some humans. So that means most of the giants are still related to the people who retained their human size.

It follows the story of Carol Hopkins, a human who has no mutated DNA in her, which means she'll never become a giant (the syndrome happens to about 20% of the human population). She suffers from Megalophobia due to a trauma from the past.

The story happens when she moves back to her hometown and has to go to a mixed-sizes school, to her dismay. She is the most terrified character I have written yet and I really want to explore the experience of having a phobia, so that's fun.

Oh and she has a childhood friend that became a giant and lied to her that he did so, there's that as well. It's about rekindling connection and dealing with fear, which won't be easy!

3. High school of superpowers with two sizeshifters

This story was my OBSSESSION back at around 2020 - 2021. It's about six characters in a world with superpowers. They study at a high school that has this training program, since everyone in this world develop superpowers at around 19. So we have:

A guy with superstrength

A guy with ice powers

A girl with fire powers (she's the ice guy's rival)

A girl with telekinesis

A girl that can shrink

A guy that can grow

They're all friends but I paired them up. The girl who shrinks is closer to the guy with superstrength, so there's this conflict if she would trust him to handle her with care, considering his power.

The two element friends are rivals and they're in their own little world tbh

As for the guy that can grow and the girl that has telekinesis, they're the main focus and conflict of this story because y'sll know me ahsuhs At the special training exam to awaken their powers, these two are paired up. But the school hides a dark secret, since everyone with superpowers is ranked based on levels of strength. The school oftentimes puts their students in stressful situations so that they can awaken a stronger power.

For these two, they got stuck in a square room, with no exits and no way of escaping. Then the guy starts to grow. Y'all can guess what happens.

They survive, of course, but these two are full of problems now ahsuhs and their budding romance falls apart. So the story is about their reconnection! With the other friends acting as subplots.

4. A spin on Jack and The Beanstalk (or whatever this story was supposed to be)

This one story is very recent, I was using it as writing practice. Since I was very busy, I didn't want to lose the habit of writing, so I created this silly little chaotic story just to spark my imagination and keep the creative juices flowing.

So, little of this silly little idea makes any sense lmao

It follows a girl, who has no name yet, that longed to explore the world outside of her book. She lives in a story book, where there's a fissure in the sky that resembles pages, so she cross through this crack and finds herself tiny in a giant library, filled with books like the one she came from.

Then she finds a Grinder (no idea why I named them this lmaoo), mythological creatures that are basically evil giants like the one from Jack and The Beanstalk. Except... This Grinder is an young man the same age as hers, with a pleasant voice and a handsome appearance, and who's as confused about her existence as she is about his.

The rest is a series of very confusing adventures as this young man goes on a journey to find what the heck a Grinder means, and to see the girl from the book again.

If you reached till the end, thank you! If you haven't voted yet, make sure you do so I can know what story you guys will enjoy the most! Regardless of which idea wins, I'll be happy to write it and share with y'all <3

[mightyflamethrower]

In 2021, Joe Biden was elected after a bitterly fought campaign that deposed the incumbent Donald Trump. Democrats eventually captured, for a time, both the House and Senate, ensuring the most left-wing government in modern American history.

Americans were then set to witness a great experiment. For the first time in their lives, a truly radical socialist program would supposedly fundamentally transform the way America dealt with the border, immigration, the economy, race relations, foreign policy, energy, law enforcement, crime, education, and social questions such as religion, gender, abortion, and schooling.

In a sense, we were all to be lab rats of sorts, to be experimented on by the radical left and their various critical theories. Now in the last year of the Biden term, we can see the results of that experiment—and the unfortunate disasters that followed.

But first, how was such a radical move to the left even possible in a center-right America?

The Democratic nominee, Biden, had earlier united the left, but only through a Faustian deal. The handlers of a nearly non compos mentis Biden had ushered all his 2020 primary rivals out of the primary races in unison.

But in exchange for their exits that ensured Biden the nomination, the left took over his general campaign—in which Biden was virtually relegated to his basement—and then set his agenda.

Who was running things?

The mysterious architects of White House ideology included, inter alia, the omnipresent, now-Washington-DC-dwelling Obamas, the old socialist gadfly Bernie Sanders, the fossilized tribunes of the black and Latino congressional caucuses, the DEI firebrand Squad, and the neo-socialist scold Elizabeth Warren.

As a result, for one of the few times in American history, the hard left now had undreamt of power. And it was enhanced by a chorus in our compliant media, academia, corporations, the administrative state, foundations, entertainment, and popular culture.

So we were all to embark on a great adventure led by the foot soldiers of DEI, the Chicken-Little green extremists, the critical race and critical legal theory crowd, the modern monetary theorists, the woke commissars, the transgendered zealots, Antifa, BLM, the hate-Israel lobby, and the Trump Derangement Syndrome media sorts.

Ostensibly, America was to be reset financially, economically, socially, culturally, militarily, and politically. The nation would be arbitrarily divided into oppressors and oppressed—with one caveat: hyper-rich, left-wing white architects had to be exempt from the damage inflicted on those they targeted. Thus, like Orwellian pigs who walked on their two hind legs, they were free to fly their private jets, get their kids into racially quota-bound Ivy League schools, burn lots of fossil fuels to heat and cool their massive homes, and be protected by their walls, security details, and zip codes from the crime wave they would soon unleash on others.

Now, as we enter the fourth year of the great experiment, America is $35 trillion in debt, borrowing $1 trillion every 100 days. Home mortgages are at 7 percent. Key prices for food, insurance, rent, and fuels are 30-40 percent higher than when Biden entered office.

The nation has been humiliated and emasculated abroad. Racial relations are the worst in a half-century. The military is in virtual receivership. Biden is polling about 40 percent approval and is behind in key swing states in most of the 2024 polls.

As a result, the Biden administration is furiously trying to find a way to release more of its hated oil and natural gas on the world market. It stopped refilling the strategic petroleum reserve that it had earlier drained to lower gas prices before the 2022 midterms.

So it will quietly pump more oil and gas, appease Iran in fear of a war in the oil-producing Middle East, plead with the once “pariah” Saudis, and order the Ukrainians not to hit Russian oil installations—all to get more oil produced to lower November 2024 gas prices.

It will head nod to eliminating fossil fuels, mandating EVs, banning natural gas stoves, and subsidizing more inefficient wind and solar farms. But it now realizes that its green agenda on its watch will wreck the United States economy and throw the left out of power. So it pivots to an old-fashioned “Drill, World, Drill” mantra—at least until the election is over.

Biden fulfilled his agenda of getting 10 million illegal aliens into the United States by destroying the southern border. The point was to swarm America with poor, unaudited migrants, all in need of massive federal and state assistance, all supposedly now loyal to their entitlement benefactors. Who could stop them from voting as repayment to their enablers in the new age of 70 percent mail-in ballots, same-day registration, inadequate authentication and audit of ballots, third-party vote harvesting, ballot curing, and Zuckbucks pouring into key precincts to absorb the work of the registrars?

Most of the illegals went to Texas and Florida, key swing states that the left still thinks it can flip to blue status. Long term, the 10 million will recalibrate congressional districts to favor neo-socialist agendas. Short-term, millions of new arrivals unlawfully may still try to vote in 2024.

Any who object to or publicize this agenda will be dammed with boilerplate smears of “election deniers,” “voter suppressions,” “racists,” and “xenophobes,” Yet all that said, the administration is now desperately trying to distance itself from its greatest “new Democratic Majority” border success, given that public opinion abhors what Biden had done at the border to the country at large.

So it floated a phony “bipartisan border security” bill in hopes of luring naïve Republicans to support a stealth de facto amnesty agenda that would have still allowed 5,000 illegals in a day rather than the now customary 10-15,000. The hope was that when it failed (and the left knew it would), to blame Republicans for what the left had wrought.

Biden knows destroying the border will ruin America for generations to come, costing billions of dollars in subsidies and legal and policing costs to integrate the massive influx. So until the election, it is thrashing about, claiming that it never did such a thing at all. Its duplicity is again proof that the open borders agenda was hated by the public, a human catastrophe, and not sustainable before an impending election.

Biden’s foreign policy is also in ruins. Biden destroyed deterrence in an effort to beg, appease, and buy off America’s enemies to behave and not cause an election-losing war. But the more it fled from Afghanistan in humiliation, the more it appeased Russia as it massed on Ukraine’s border, the more it snored as a Chinese spy balloon traversed the United States, the more it put early holds on aid to Ukraine, the more it assured Putin a “minor” offensive into Ukraine would not elicit a US response, so all the more it convinced Putin that he could take Ukraine without an American pushback, the Chinese to threaten Taiwan, and Hamas to prepare for massacring Jews.

So here we are in Ukraine with nearly 800,000 dead, wounded, and missing Ukrainians and Russians. The administration has no clue how to stop the Verdun that its appeasement birthed. The entire therapeutic approach to foreign policy lies in ruins.

Ditto the Middle East. National security advisor Jack Sullivan’s “quiet” portfolio that he inherited from the Trump administration simply blew up. Biden is now scrambling to stop the Israeli response to the encircled Hamas remnants, trapped in their last redoubt in Rafah.

Biden is now replaying the 1950s CIA-stereotype of the “Ugly American,” as he does his best to overthrow the Netanyahu government, and to allow the trapped Hamas remnants to escape and claim they defeated the Zionist entity, despite butchering more Jews in a single day than any time since the Holocaust. No matter: the Biden administration is stealthily communicating with the Israeli opposition concerning the best joint strategies to force Netanyahu out. Mass protests in the streets of Tel Aviv attest to the success of destabilizing the current Israeli government.

Team Biden whispers to the media about slow-walking or stopping key arms shipments, abdicating America’s once protective role in the UN, or encouraging the “international community” to go after Netanyahu for “war crimes” for accidentally hitting a civilian team in Gaza. (By such logic, are Biden and Gen. Mark (“righteous strike”) Milley equally culpable for being in charge when a US strike in Kabul blew up 10 innocent civilians by similarly mistaken targeting?). Meanwhile, Biden keeps courting Muslim-American Michigan voters, who repay his appeasement with cries of “Death to Israel! Death to America!”.

The release of violent criminals and an uptick in property crimes, murders and assault follow a similar script. The Biden administration outsourced criminal justice to defund the police/critical legal theorists at the federal, state, and local levels. No bail arrests led to violent offenders released the next day. Thousands were let go from jails and prisons.

The word spread in the criminal community that in the new Biden years, there were no real consequences, no serious punishments for violent assault or major felonies.

So in 2021-2023, crime exploded. When it reached the point of making life unlivable in the major cities and began to max out, the administration declared “crime is declining”—in the same way that hyper-inflation supposedly did so on the economic front.

After spiking the prices of key food staples, insurance, fuel, and interest rates, such hikes could not go too much higher without destroying outright the American way of life. So as the rate of inflation slowed, Biden bragged about “lowering inflation”—but not the 30-40 percent higher food prices since his own inauguration.

The common denominator for these disasters is the embrace of left-wing “theory.”

Critical legal theory mandates that jurisprudence is a construct. Laws have no morality since they favor the powerful. The latter use “white privilege” arbitrarily to invent crimes and punishments to protect their own power hierarchies. All that nonsense has now led to a pre-civilizational free-for-all in our dirty, dangerous, and dysfunctional cities.

Modern monetary theory—printing lots of money to spread around to those who have none while diminishing the value of money of those who have it—only led to hyperinflation and high interest rates.

When DEI theories were unleashed on the military, potential recruits hesitated, and thousands quit. After Pentagon grandees virtue signaled their fear of “white rage” and “white privilege,” after DEI made promotions and assessments often contingent on race, gender, and sexual orientation, and after the new military was humiliated in Afghanistan, it found it could no longer deter the enemy, recruit sufficient soldiers, or win back the confidence of the American people.

In all these cases, the woke genie left the bottle—and won’t go back in. So it will be hard for the administration to assure a long-suffering public that things are just wonderful, much less to reverse these policies, if indeed they are reversible, before November.

Expect instead nonstop distraction as the left beats the January 6 horse to death, calls for abortion on demand, and waits for its underling judges, prosecutors, and juries to jail or bankrupt Trump and therefore do what balloting cannot.

In other words, the long-awaited Great Fundamental Transformation finally got its moment, crashed, and now has torched the nation—middle-class Americans most of all.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Mike Luckovich

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

March 19, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

MAR 20, 2024

In Florida, Kansas, Ohio, Illinois, and Arizona, Republican voters chose their presidential candidate today. The results highlight the weaknesses former president Trump is bringing to the 2024 presidential contest.

Trump, who is the only person still in the Republican race, won all five of today’s Republican races. But the results showed that his support is soft. Results are still coming in, but as I write this, former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, who has suspended her campaign, received between 13% and 20% of the vote, Florida governor Ron DeSantis—who has also suspended his campaign—picked up votes, and “none of the names shown” got more than 5% in Kansas. 

Even in Ohio, where Trump’s preferred Senate candidate won, Trump received less than 80% of the Republican vote. After NBC News conducted an exit poll in Ohio, MSNBC producer Kyle Griffin reported that of Ohio Republican primary voters—who are typically the most committed party members—11% said they would vote for Biden in November and another 8% said they wouldn’t vote for either Trump or Biden.

Trump has money problems, too. This morning, Brian Schwartz of CNBC reported that while Trump has pushed Haley voters away, Biden’s team has courted both voters and Haley donors to help Biden defeat Trump. Schwartz said that at least a half dozen former Haley fundraisers have decided to help Biden. 

Aside from the Haley supporters who are moving to Biden, Trump’s campaign faces a money crunch. As Schwartz reported yesterday, small donors have slowed down their financial support for Trump considerably, possibly because of fatigue after 9 years of Trump’s supercharged fundraising pitches. Big donors have also been holding back funds out of concern that they will not go toward electing Republicans, but rather will be used to pay Trump’s legal fees.

On March 14, Trump’s people organized a new joint fundraising committee, called the Trump 47 Committee. It is designed to split the money it gets between state Republican parties, the Republican National Committee, and Trump’s Save America Political Action Committee (PAC). As Schwartz notes, Save America spent $24 million on Trump’s legal bills in the last six months of 2023.

While running for president is pricey, so is breaking the law. The former president continues to rail against the law that he must deposit either money or a bond to cover the court-ordered $454 million he owes in penalties, disgorgement of ill-gotten gains, and interest, after he and the Trump Organization were found liable for fraud. “I would be forced to mortgage or sell Great Assets, perhaps at Fire Sale prices, and if and when I win the Appeal, they would be gone. Does that make sense? WITCH HUNT. ELECTION INTERFERENCE!” Trump posted on his social media channel. 

Lisa Mascaro, Mary Clare Jalonick, and Jill Colvin of the Associated Press wrote today that Trump is putting the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol at the heart of his presidential campaign, rewriting the five deaths and the destruction to claim that the rioters were “unbelievable patriots” whom he will pardon as soon as he takes office again. His new hires at the Republican National Committee to replace staff he fired are strengthening the idea that Biden stole the 2020 election. 

He’s being helped by loyalists in Congress who are trying to rewrite the history of that day to claim that Trump and the rioters have been persecuted by the Department of Justice. They are attacking the testimony of witnesses like Cassidy Hutchinson, former aide to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, about what she saw that day, although she testified under oath and they are not similarly bound to tell the truth. Trump has said former Wyoming representative Liz Cheney, a Republican who served as vice chair of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, “should go to Jail along with the rest of the Unselect Committee!” 

But while Trump’s supporters are willing to sing along to a recording of incarcerated participants in the riots singing their version of the national anthem—the song lyrics are credited to “Donald J. Trump and J6 Prison Choir”—the fact that more than 1,200 people have been charged for their actions that day and many of them have been sentenced to prison seems likely to dampen enthusiasm for trying something like that again. 

Today, former Trump advisor Peter Navarro also had to report to prison, in his case a federal prison in Miami, for refusing to comply with a subpoena from the January 6th committee for documents and testimony. Last September, a jury found Navarro guilty of contempt of Congress, rejecting his insistence that he didn’t have to answer to Congress because Trump had invoked executive privilege over their conversations about overturning the 2020 presidential election. 

Navarro vowed to take the case all the way to the Supreme Court, but a federal appeals court agreed with the verdict, and yesterday, for the Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Roberts rejected Navarro’s plea to stay his sentence. “I am pissed—that’s what I am feeling right now,” Navarro told reporters just before he reported to prison for his four-month sentence. 

Trump is also facing renewed scrutiny on his past behavior. With the election interference case in Manhattan heating up, Trump sought to block his former fixer Michael Cohen, adult film actress Stormy Daniels, and former model Karen McDougal from testifying. All of them say Trump paid to keep voters from hearing negative stories about him before the 2016 election. Judge Juan Merchan denied those motions.

And there was a surprise announcement today. Tomorrow, the House Oversight Committee will hold another hearing in the Republicans’ ongoing attempt to impeach President Joe Biden. Today the Democrats on the committee announced they have invited Lev Parnas as their witness. The Ukrainian-born Parnas was an associate of Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and was deeply involved in the effort to create dirt to smear Biden before the 2020 election. 

In 2022, Parnas was convicted of wire fraud, false statements, and breaking campaign finance laws by funneling money illegally to Trump and other Republican lawmakers. Since he broke with Giuliani, he has been eager to explain what happened and how. He will likely bring up stories that Trump would prefer that voters forget.

Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, told reporters: “Lev Parnas can debunk the bogus claims at the heart of the impeachment probe and, in the process, explain how the GOP ended up in this degraded and embarrassing place.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[mariacallous]

BRATISLAVA—On Sept. 30, many Slovaks went to sleep having presumed that the country would be led by perhaps the most progressive government in its modern history. The next morning, however, they woke up to an alternate universe with a new winner: a scandal-battered political veteran, who, in a number of ways, has risen like a phoenix from the ashes.

This emotional roller coaster was caused by the dramatic inaccuracy of a local exit poll, which predicted a certain victory for Progressive Slovakia, a liberal and urban elite party led by Michal Simecka. It eventually came second to Robert Fico’s Smer-SD, a social democratic party that has over the last several years turned more nationalistic and populist. With all the votes counted, Smer-SD won 42 of the parliament’s 150 seats. Progressive Slovakia secured 32.

Fico, unlike 39-year-old relative newcomer Simecka, has been shaping Slovak politics since the mid-2000s. Having resigned in early 2018—and with a series of electoral defeats for Smer in European, presidential, and parliamentary races, as well as a split within his party in between—he has made a stunning comeback, boosting his party’s support from just 9 percent in January 2021 to almost 23 percent in 2023.

In many ways, his return was paved by the previous anti-corruption coalition, which due to its chaotic style of governance dampened voters’ enthusiasm. In a time of Russian invasion of Ukraine and galloping inflation, Fico—Slovakia’s longest-serving prime minister (2006-2010 and 2012-2018)—could pitch himself as a guarantor of stability and consistent decision-making.

His triumph is all the more impressive as he has done little to distance himself from his past deeds that pushed not only his party but the entire country to perhaps the darkest place it’s been in its modern history. Almost six years ago, he was swept away by a wave of public anger inspired by the massive protests that erupted after the murder of investigative journalist Jan Kuciak and his fiancée, Martina Kusnirova. Now, symbolically, Fico’s close collaborators—Robert Kalinak and Tibor Gaspar, whose behavior as interior minister and police chief, respectively, at the time of Kuciak’s murder was under scrutiny—entered parliament with one of the best results in this election.

This crime—committed on Fico’s watch and ordered by a local millionaire, his former neighbor—shed light on the way he ruled the country. The image of Smer-SD emerged as a hermetic and highly opaque clique that grabbed control of major institutions in the country, including in justice and police, rewarded loyalists by distributing public assets, and was influenced from behind the scenes by shady businessmen (some with ties to organized crime) who operated with impunity.

This is, of course, a recipe that both Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Polish ruling party head Jaroslaw Kaczynski have long been successfully implementing in Hungary and Poland, respectively, on a much larger scale. For instance, Fico never attempted to turn the public broadcaster into a hard-line propaganda mouthpiece or use it to discredit opponents, as his two neighbors have. Nor did he try to create a homogenous nationalist-ideological umbrella for his appetite for power. Nor did he make the West a favorite attack target, being a rather quiet but loyal EU and NATO member. In a nutshell, the main headache for Slovakia under Fico was corruption and clientelism, not authoritarianism.

His attitude toward Russia is also far more complex than Orban’s indiscriminate support. Many international outlets tend to label Fico as “pro-Russian,” but, as usual, they have looked at rhetoric and symbolic gestures. And these rarely match Fico’s deeds. After all, it was he who purchased American weapons, including F-16 fighter aircraft and Black Hawk helicopters, to replace Slovakia’s ageing Soviet-era military equipment. And, although he did not succeed in decreasing the country’s dependence on Russia’s natural gas, oil, and nuclear fuel, it was his governments that introduced far-reaching investments in infrastructure that drastically limited Slovakia’s vulnerability to gas supply disruption.

Also, back in 2014 it was Fico’s Slovakia that, to Russia’s dismay, came to Ukraine’s rescue by opening up reverse flow of gas after Russia annexed Crimea and increased prices for its gas.

For years, Fico has cast himself as an arbitrator between the country’s strong economic rooting in the West and rather pro-Russian public sympathies, which, in political terms, have been utilized mainly by the Slovak National Party (SNS), Fico’s former and now new junior coalition partner. This chaotic group of rather obnoxious individuals, many with far-right views and obscure ties to Russia, has long pushed for halting Ukraine military aid—something that Fico also promised in the campaign to attract radical voters.

Even if he delivers, which is expected, it wouldn’t necessarily mean that Slovakia is turning east, as some warn. It’s still more likely for Fico to continue to play the same game, with the goal of keeping the country close to the EU mainstream (and the flow of money from Brussels) but rhetorically satisfying both the SNS and pro-Russian figures from his own circle, such as Lubos Blaha, Marian Kery, and Juraj Blanar. Back in April, at the meeting with U.S. Ambassador he supported Ukraine’s accession to the EU, while in his first post-election public appearance, he reminded citizens that under his leadership, Slovakia joined the eurozone and Schengen Area, which both could be seen as signs to Brussels that no major turns in the country’s foreign agenda are expected.

Of course, the attempt to take the country into more heavy-handed directions may be too captivating. In many ways, he’s a different man now. The long and toxic campaign has proved that, having had a near-death experience, in both political and human terms (back in 2016, he underwent heart surgery), Fico has become angrier, perhaps more eager to take revenge, and less fussy about the optics of his support base. These were not only older voters from small towns lured by his generous social welfare policy and socially traditional agenda whom he had remobilized that gave him victory, but also anti-vaxxers and other consumers of the far-right playbook.

Still, the hope that Fico will pocket his more radical image from the campaign—despite his personal grudge and a noxious coalition partner—is not based on his good will, but arithmetic. To form a stable government, he needed not only SNS (10 seats), but mainly the Hlas-SD party (27), created by a group of defectors from Smer-SD and led by moderate Peter Pellegrini, who is at odds with some of Smer-SD’s most contentious figures. The three-party coalition now has 79 seats, just three votes above a majority—enough for it to fill major posts and pass laws, but not enough to make constitutional amendments.

This shaky advantage will deny Fico the latitude that both Orban and Kaczynski have enjoyed in their countries. What’s more, relatively collectively ruled Smer-SD is by no means a mass party comparable to Orban’s iron-fisted Fidesz or Kaczynski’s Law and Justice, which both have, year by year, expanded their voter bases so as to depict themselves as the voice of the nation. This year, Smer-SD won with just 681,000 votes. Putting aside the 2020 campaign shaped by Kuciak’s murder, it is the party’s worst result since 2006.

With all these limits in mind, it’s doubtful that Fico will succeed in transforming Slovakia into a Hungary-like single party monolith, at least not in the next four years. What he can do, though, is to attempt to restore his influence over public institutions—especially judicial ones—and among economic actors, verbally antagonize journalists, take control over the narrative provided by the public broadcaster, and further divide and radicalize the society—all of which could serve as solid foundations for more Orbanesque approach in the future.

Whether he succeeds or not will depend on the Slovaks themselves—especially the sensible members of his coalition government and those motivated by the memory of Kuciak and Kusnirova.

[maaarine]

Far-right party set to win most seats in Dutch elections, exit polls show (Jon Henley and Pjotr Sauer and Senay Boztas, The Guardian, Nov 22 2023)

"Geert Wilders’ far-right, anti-Islam Party for Freedom (PVV) is on course to be the largest party in the Dutch parliament, according to exit polls, in a major electoral upset whose reverberations will be felt around Europe.

The PVV, whose manifesto includes calls for bans on mosques, the Qur’an and Islamic headscarves in government buildings, was predicted to win 37 seats in the 150-seat parliament, more than double the number it won in the previous ballot in 2021.

However, it is unclear whether Wilders – whose party has finished second and third in previous elections, but always been shut out of government – will be able to win enough support to form a coalition with a working parliamentary majority. (…)

Although the party that wins the most seats traditionally provides the next prime minister, it is by no means guaranteed to do so.

Rutte will remain in a caretaker role until a new government is installed, which might not be before next spring.

The outcome of the election, set to usher in the Netherlands’ first new prime minister in 13 years after four consecutive Rutte-led coalitions, could lead to “constitutional stalemate”, said Kate Parker of the Economist Intelligence Unit.

Analysts have predicted that coalition negotiations could prove even longer and more complex than after the previous 2021 election, when four coalition partners took a record 271 days to hammer out an agreement.

The shape of the new coalition could have a major impact on the Netherlands’ immigration and climate policies, as well as relations with its European partners.

The country was a founding EU member and punches above its weight in the bloc.

Rutte’s fourth and final coalition resigned in July after failing to agree on measures to rein in migration, one of the key issues of the campaign, along with a housing crisis that especially affects Dutch youth, the cost of living, and voter trust in politicians.

Wilders is an outspoken Eurosceptic and has long campaigned for the Dutch government to take back control of the country’s borders to reduce immigration, slash payments into the union’s budget and veto any further expansion of the EU.

He has also demanded the Netherlands stop sending arms to Ukraine."

[202105961caic2223]

‘The Bird That Was Freed’, and The Destructive Hate Speech That Followed

After Elon Musk expanded the reach of his dominant and groundbreaking empire, as the Space X, and Tesla CEO bought Twitter for a jaw-dropping $44 billion, it seemed as if Musk’s reign as “the world’s richest man" was an invincible force of nature. However, the tides have turned for the worst, as Musk, announced that he would be stepping down as Twitter CEO only months after taking over the company. This resulted from a Twitter poll, where Musk asked users of the site whether he should step down as CEO, promising that he would abide by the results of the poll. The results of the poll concluded that 57.5% of users of the site opted for Musk’s resignation, while only 42.5% of users wished for him to remain. (Take a look at the poll results down below:)

It also seems that Musk’s other companies took a severe hit, following his ownership of Twitter, as well as his exit, and it gets worst… as his net worth has plunged dramatically. Musk’s net worth has reportedly also taken a severe bullet to the chest, with it dropping in value by a reported record-breaking loss of “$200 billion” according to Bloomberg. Danny Goldman from CNN has stated in an online newspaper article that “The CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, and Twitter is worth $137 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, good enough for second place on the list of the world's richest behind LVMH Chairman Bernard Arnault. But at its peak in November 2021, Musk's net worth was $340 billion. That makes Musk the first person ever to lose $200 billion in wealth, Bloomberg reported last week. The bulk of Musk's wealth is tied up in Tesla, whose stock plunged 65% in 2022. Demand for Teslas weakened as competition in electric vehicles from established automakers surged last year. The company missed its growth targets and scaled back production in China.” 

READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE: 

Here’s how it happened:

On October 27th, Musk announced his takeover of the company with a cryptic tweet on Twitter itself, saying; “the bird is freed”. (See his tweet down below:)

Following this Tweet, the world was fascinated by what the new Twitter CEO’s first business move would be, and I should probably point out that the current executives and employees of Twitter were extremely nervous (no surprises there!), and this is what followed…

His Victorious entrance into the Twitter HQ:

Upon his arrival at the Twitter Headquarters in San Francisco, Musk victoriously Tweeted a video of him strolling in cheerfully to his new office, bizarrely carrying a kitchen sink leaving many people in complete confusion over his antics. Musk captioned the Tweet; “Entering Twitter HQ - let that sink in!”. Hilarious right?!

Although you really shouldn’t be surprised by Elon’s seemingly weird antics, as he is no stranger to playing the role of an internet troll on social media, and he was simply just gloating over his seemingly ever-expanding world dominance, like the James Bond Villian role he so well lives up to. 

See his full Tweet and video down below:

Employee Cuts and Resignations:

You could undoubtedly say that Musk wasted no time in asserting his status as a ruthless businessman towards his new business endeavor, as he controversially and immediately fired Twitter’s former boss Parag Agrawal and numerous other leading executives within the company. He ruthlessly demanded that employee cuts needed to be made, leaving many employees worrying about the stability of their current employment. Nobody was safe from the ruthlessness of Musk’s business strategy, who had effectively turned the company upside down to create a better one in the long run. 

A news story published on the ‘Los Angeles Times’ website reported; “Musk had asked workers to commit to his more “hardcore” version of the company or leave.” Unsurprisingly many employees handed in their resignation form’s pretty swiftly (SHOCK!), as many employees didn’t see sustainably fruitful employment underneath their new boss, as he was firing employers left, right and center. Just to put these details of Musk’s obliteration of employees into perspective, the ‘Los Angeles Times’ also stated that “An internal counter of employees currently reads 2,750, one person said, though some resignations and cuts may still be in the process of being counted. Twitter had more than 7,000 employees before Musk took over in late October.” Judging from these figures alone, it's obvious that Elon takes no prisoners…  I also don’t think I’ll be looking for a job at the Twitter headquarters anytime soon, and you probably shouldn't either.

Read the Full article here:

Elon’s Changes To Twitter:

Within his first week as the new CEO of Twitter, Musk immediately made numerous plans to change the social media network. One of the first changes he wished to make was to charge users of Twitter $8 for the Blue Tick verification symbol to appear on their profile, and the idea behind this was to reward the content creators of the app with more profit. Musk also believed that paying 8$ for the Blue Tick had reward benefits for the consumer, as those who are verified will be able to claim reduced advertisements, and increased quality of presence on the app, and they will be able to lengthen the duration of recorded videos. 

Other substantial changes Musk wished to introduce to the site were rules and regulations updates, the banning of Twitters advertisements to endorse other apps (in an attempt to stop users from focusing their attention on rival sites), and the most important one being the banishment of ‘doxxing’ (location sharing). I think that most people will agree that this was one of Elon’s better ideas, as users across social media put themselves at a much higher risk of theft and physical violence due to sharing their physical whereabouts. However unfortunately for Elon, this wasn't enough to allow his Twitter endeavor to be a success.

The Destructive Hate speech That Followed:

Free Speech, Removing Censorship, and Reinstating Previously Banned Accounts Of Controversial Figures Such As Ex-President Trump and Ye (Kanye West) were also at the top of Elon’s to-do list. We already knew way before Musk’s ownership of Twitter that he was an advocate of the free speech movement. So you can easily put two and two together and conclude that Musk intended to allow free speech to be accepted on Twitter also, as he has always believed that censorship on social media platforms is more negative and that everyone has a right to their opinion. But this had many Twitter users extremely concerned and worried, which is understandable as many believe that there is merit to censorship, as it disables hateful speech such as bullying, racism, and distasteful images to the site. This argument is very true, as I can imagine most parents won't want their impressionable children to be influenced by potentially dangerous users of the site.

And this is where I bring former President Donald Trump into the discussion. Before Elon’s takeover of Twitter, it is quite hard to forget the events that occurred on January 6th, 2021, following Trump’s loss in the general election to current president Joe Biden. Most people will agree that Trump’s tweets after losing the election were responsible for the storming of the U.S. Capitol, which it is hard to argue why his Twitter account was banned from the site, due to breaching the site's guidelines. Twitter issued a statement explaining the banning of his account, stating “ we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence.” So you could argue that Trump’s account was permanently suspended for good reason and that the repercussions of such hateful speech on Twitter simply outway the benefits.

Click on the link to see the full statement (Trump’s Tweets are also included to provide context):

Then finally that leaves me with Elon’s extremely controversial decision to reinstate the account of Ye (formerly known as Kanye West). And, well unsurprisingly this decision from Elon quickly came crashing down in flames, after Ye (who leans heavily toward the far right) caused an extreme amount of controversy, after coming out with many Anit's Semitic outbursts directed toward Jewish people. Despite Elon Musk being an advocate of “freedom of speech”, after Ye outrageously Tweeted a picture of a Swastika on his account it seemed that he had no choice but to remove Ye from Twitter, and thankfully he did. In response to Ye’s Anti Semitic outburst, Musk Tweeted; 

While you could argue that Musk made the right call, you could also argue as to why he would even have thought it was possibly a good idea to even reinstate Ye’s account, considering this is the man who claimed: “ 400 years of slavery was a choice”, back in 2018. This left many questioning Musk’s capabilities of responsibility and judgment as a CEO, with many debating as to what extent “freedom of speech” is acceptable. Just to put it into perspective, hate speech on Twitter has severely increased since Elon Musk’s ownership of Twitter. Studies carried out by Montclair State University, within the Faculty; School of Communication and Media News had proven that hate speech had dramatically spiked upwards only hours after Elon took office. (Have a look for yourself at the graph data down below:)

MSU, School of Communication and Media News Hate Speech Study:

 Here are some of the key findings from the study:

“The seven-day average of Tweets using the studied hate terms prior to Musk’s acquisition was never higher than 84 times per hour.”

 “However, on October 28 from midnight to noon (immediately following Musk’s acquisition), the studied hate speech was Tweeted some 4,778 times.”

“Terms studied included vulgar and hostile terms for individuals based on race, religion, ethnicity, and orientation.”

“The potential impact of this hate speech (the potential number of times a term posted in Twitter could have been viewed) was more than 3 million.”

“Elon Musk has promised to reduce restrictions on the platform and “free the bird.” From these results, this directive represents an obvious danger to young people using the platform.”

“Platforms with lax or no moderation are frequently spaces filled with racism, homophobia, transphobia, and antisemitism.”

“Recorded data indicating the spike in hate speech:”

Judging from these figures alone, you can clearly see how potentially damaging posts and comments on Twitter can really be if they are uncensored. If millions of users, including kids, are within reach of consuming hate speech online, it can have a severely damaging impact on their mental health and general well-being, not to mention that many young kids are impressionable and may possibly decide to copy the behavior that they see online. This is where unlimited “free speech” becomes a problem, as negative behavior and hate speech online becomes normalized, due to the lack of punishment for their actions, which leaves those responsible for spreading hate speech to not be held accountable for their actions. So this inevitably causes children to think that this type of behavior is acceptable, and therefore become influenced to copy the type of language they see online. So you have to wonder… do you really want your vulnerable children to be within reach of a social media site where hate speech seems totally acceptable? Personally, I think not.

During the period before Elon Musk announced that he was going to be stepping down as Twitter CEO, many predicted that Twitter was going to suffer from extreme loss of users due to the new technological changes and the offensive content that had increased since Musk began his Twitter Endeavour. ‘The Guardian news website published an article predicting; “More than 30 million users are expected to leave Twitter over the next two years as concerns mount over technical issues and the proliferation of offensive content, after Elon Musk’s $44bn takeover, according to a forecast”. So this makes you wonder… how beneficial was Musk’s ownership of Twitter really going to be? When you weigh up the positives and the disadvantages of Elon Musk’s stint as Twitter CEO, you could definitely make a strong argument that agrees with the fact that the disadvantages out the benefits. (Read the full article in the link down below)

According to an article published by the MIT Technology Review Website “The firm Bot Sentinel, which tracks inauthentic behavior on Twitter by analyzing more than 3.1 million accounts and their activity daily, believes that around 877,000 accounts were deactivated and a further 497,000 were suspended between October 27 and November 1.” The article states that this was a result of the severe increase in “hate speech” on the platform, leaving many users wishing to become effectively disassociated with the site. The article also states; “We also believe the increase in suspensions is from Twitter taking action on accounts purposely violating Twitter’s rules to see if they can push the limits of ‘free speech,’” This particular statistic is arguably very important, as it highlights the issues within a site that pushes the boundaries too far with “free speech”. Users who use offensive language, such as racism, antisemitism, homophobia, bullying, etc, will attempt to see how far they can push the rules and regulations of Twitter before they get themselves suspended. This unfortunately is the price you pay for allowing a more lenient approach to “free speech”. (Be sure to read the full article in the link down below)

Following the results of the Twitter poll, Musk Tweeted; “I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job! After that, I will just run the software & servers teams.” (See Musk’s Tweet down below)

Despite his intentions being good… it seems he has only forced Twitter on track to its potential grave, and unfortunately, the coffin might already be nailed. You can decide for yourself whether you think Elon Musk was the right person to take on the role of CEO, but because he himself had decided to step down as a result of the Twitter poll, I think it is quite telling that even as a man who has created such a successful and wealthy empire, even he believes deep down within himself that he has failed. It seems as if Musk had simply placed too much on his plate, and that he wasn’t able to transfer his successes from his other companies to Twitter. As a result of this, he faces the consequences, both to his reputation and financially. We will have to wait and see how he bounces back from this… and for some reason, I think he will come back with a vengeance. Who knows, maybe he will design his own social media platform, I think that could be interesting!

[theyoungturks]

As part of a new documentary that is coming out soon, unearthed footage shows Donald Trump using an anti-semitic stereotype. Ana Kasparian and John Iadarola discuss on The Young Turks. Watch LIVE weekdays 6-8 pm ET. http://youtube.com/theyoungturks/live Read more HERE: https://forward.com/fast-forward/521752/new-video-leaks-of-trump-disparaging-jewish-americans-repeating-antisemitic-tropes/ "Former President Donald Trump asked, “Is this a good Jewish character right here?” and described Persian Jews as “very good salesmen,” according to a new clip released Wednesday by a British documentary filmmaker and reported by Maggie Haberman of The New York Times. The video was recorded on May 20, 2021, at Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, by Alex Holder, a filmmaker who testified before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Holder had access to and filmed interviews with Trump and his family before and after the 2020 presidential election. The finished product was called “Unprecedented,” a documentary available on the Discovery+ streaming service. Trump was reportedly complaining to a group of people — including one wearing a yarmulke — about the lack of support he got from American Jews in his reelection bid, despite how popular he was in Israel. Trump received between 21% and 30% of the Jewish vote in 2020, according to exit polls. A recent survey showed only 19% of Jewish voters hold a favorable opinion of Trump. Trump compared the share of votes to the overwhelming support he got from the Orthodox community, who traditionally vote Republican in national elections — Trump received 82% of the Orthodox vote in Borough Park in 2020 — and his popularity in Israel. A recent Pew Research survey showed an overwhelming majority of Israelis saw Trump as a strong leader and trusted his handling of world affairs." *** The largest online progressive news show in the world. Hosted by Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian. LIVE weekdays 6-8 pm ET. Help support our mission and get perks. Membership protects TYT's independence from corporate ownership and allows us to provide free live shows that speak truth to power for people around the world. See Perks: ▶ https://www.youtube.com/TheYoungTurks/join SUBSCRIBE on YOUTUBE: ☞ http://www.youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=theyoungturks FACEBOOK: ☞ http://www.facebook.com/TheYoungTurks TWITTER: ☞ http://www.twitter.com/TheYoungTurks INSTAGRAM: ☞ http://www.instagram.com/TheYoungTurks TWITCH: ☞ http://www.twitch.com/tyt 👕 Merch: http://shoptyt.com ❤ Donate: http://www.tyt.com/go 🔗 Website: https://www.tyt.com 📱App: http://www.tyt.com/app 📬 Newsletters: https://www.tyt.com/newsletters/ If you want to watch more videos from TYT, consider subscribing to other channels in our network: The Damage Report ▶ https://www.youtube.com/thedamagereport TYT Sports ▶ https://www.youtube.com/tytsports The Conversation ▶ https://www.youtube.com/tytconversation Rebel HQ ▶ https://www.youtube.com/rebelhq TYT Investigates ▶ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwNJt9PYyN1uyw2XhNIQMMA #TYT #TheYoungTurks #BreakingNews 221019__TB01 by The Young Turks

[ausetkmt]

Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock is defending his Senate seat against Republican challenger Herschel Walker in a runoff election in Georgia Tuesday, after days of record-breaking early voting in the state. Polls close in Georgia at 7 p.m. ET on Tuesday 12/06/2022. 

What is a runoff election, and how will it work in Georgia's Senate race?   

Since Democrats flipped the seat in Pennsylvania and successfully defended the other seats in play in the November midterm elections, Democrats will retain control of the Senate, regardless of the outcome on Tuesday. But they will have more power if they control the chamber 51-49 since they will not have to work out a power-sharing agreement with Republicans. This will be the last election of the 2022 midterm cycle. 

Polls close in Georgia at 7 p.m. ET on Tuesday 12/06/2022. 

Although Warnock held a narrow lead over Walker on Election Day, he did not win more than 50% of the vote, which is required to avoid a runoff in Georgia. 

According to exit polls on Election Day, voters in Georgia were split in their views of the most important qualities in a candidate: 36% said it was most important that the candidate shared their values, while 32% said a candidate's honesty and integrity were most important to them.

Ahead of the general election, Walker's campaign was rocked in October by allegations that he paid for at least one woman to have an abortion. He has denied the allegations, and national Republicans stuck by him. 

A record-breaking number of early voters have turned out in the runoff, smashing all previous records. 

Former President Barack Obama campaigned with Warnock last week, although President Biden, who flipped the state in 2020, has not visited the Peach State to stump for Warnock. Former President Donald Trump has not campaigned in person with Walker in the runoff but was scheduled to hold a tele-rally for Walker Monday night.

Georgia played a key role in the 2020 elections, when the races for both Senate seats went into special runoff elections in January 2021, ultimately flipping both seats from Republican to Democratic. Republican incumbent Sen. David Perdue led Jon Ossoff after Election Night with 49.7% of the vote, but he ended up falling short in the runoff on Jan. 5, 2021. In the race for the other seat, Warnock led incumbent Sen. Kelly Loeffler in a 21-person race on Election Day, and he prevailed in the special election to fill the vacancy left when Sen. Johnny Isakson stepped down.

[usa-journal]

Biden Stands Defiant on Critical Night Despite Gaffes

Joe Biden took to the stage at his Thursday night news conference with everything on the line: his presidency, re-election hopes, and political future. The hour-long session marked the end of a NATO summit and came after a contentious debate with his rival, Donald Trump. The debate had led to calls from several Democratic politicians and donors for Biden to drop out of the race.

At 81, Biden has faced continuous questions about his age and ability to serve another term. These concerns intensified following the debate. Despite this, Biden dismissed the questions about his campaign from a room full of reporters and promised he was fighting not for his legacy but to finish the job he started in 2021.

“If I slow down and can’t get the job done, that’s a sign I shouldn’t be doing it,” he said. “But there’s no indication of that yet.”

Biden's defiance could be seen as either dogged determination or a refusal to acknowledge his dire situation. Minutes after the news conference, several more Democratic members of Congress publicly called on Biden to step down, joining at least a dozen other lawmakers in his party who have done so.

The situation is compounded by two major gaffes during the NATO summit. In his first answer, Biden referred to Vice-President Kamala Harris as "Vice-President Trump," a mistake made in front of a national television audience. This followed an earlier error at a NATO event where he introduced Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as "President Putin," prompting gasps from the audience. While he quickly corrected the first mistake, he missed the second one, leaving reporters and his top Cabinet secretaries visibly surprised.

These moments, though brief, will likely cause nervous Democrats to worry about more potential gaffes if Biden continues his campaign. However, Biden appeared upbeat, laughing and smiling as he fielded questions. He asserted that he could keep up with Russia's Vladimir Putin and China's Xi Jinping, despite a lingering hoarseness and cough from his debate two weeks ago. He also reiterated that he did not need cognitive tests, saying that no number of doctors would satisfy his critics.

Biden emphasized that the election campaign had barely started and expressed confidence in his ability to defeat Donald Trump in November's election. He reassured Democratic delegates that they were free to change their minds at next month's convention but mockingly whispered, "It's not going to happen."

He stated he would consider stepping aside if his staff provided data showing he couldn’t win, but current polls still show the race as a dead heat. An Ipsos survey released earlier on Thursday had Biden only one point behind his opponent, within the margin of error. Despite the drama, support for both candidates has remained stable.

However, polling alone won’t calm the panic among Democratic officials. Reports suggest more Democratic politicians are poised to announce their own break with Biden, waiting until the conclusion of the NATO summit to voice their concerns. Biden also faces another high-profile interview with NBC’s Lester Holt on Monday. Donors are anxious, and some reports indicate that even figures within Biden's campaign are exploring ways to gently push him toward exiting the race.

Despite these challenges, Biden made it clear that it would be difficult to pry the nomination from him. The 81-year-old insisted he was the "best-qualified person" to run the country and showed no intention of exiting the stage quietly.

[stickyfestivalnight]

02/14/2024

Remember to mention the identity theft, unlawful administration, medical interfering 2/9/24 prime storage sign up missing. Amidacare sign up missing 2/8/24 wages and benefits stolen 2/7/24 department of labor incomplete website, no direct deposit info access. All websites are limited and cater to a business profile/ employer portal with no option to use consumer portal. Every device is afflicted by this.denied medical treatment on 2/8/24 at montefior and record. 1/29/24 lost apartment, menacing and intimidation. 2/14/24 I’m geld reaponsible for a storage unit that I had never utilized and had been issued a refund for that I haven’t recieved. $147 orginal $117!refund(hasnt processed) $166 is the new charge for same unit after only a couple of days. They are in the same neighborhood and have been encouraged against me. 2/9/24 attempted to receive my belongings from apartment unit but was unable to due to harassment while in the lobby (manager was going to “bring belongings out into the hallway for me” instead of letting me in to collect my things including what I had in a locked closet. He mentioned breaking into closet and would bring be what was “left” in the apartment which meant that the apartment had already been looted and I would only receive the things the other tenants had left behind for me. This has happened the year before during a vacate order. Tenants looted half of everything I owned in the apartment including big items like mattress, storage containers m, artwork (personal and recovered) documents, power tools, etc. This lead to a bigger identity theft issue especially with another “Steven Castro” haven moved into the building the year prior. Radiation exposure is ongoing by family in /or was apt 1b Kieran Williams apartment above 3b Rodríguez on left facing exit. 2015 possession of my stolen MacBook. 2021 possession of stolen iPhone. 2/11/24 I’m harrassed while staying at a friends after losing my apartment due to her influence. I’m still pursue and even after putting distance between us. 3/1/2023 Killed my cat. 2/13/24 disrupted employment and stalked me while working for the special election. Blocked me from accessing my payroll app and stole benefits and wages for Election Day work and CDPAP ( Benefits included)(restricted poll worker site and salary information online, represented earnings as being below the minimum wage. 07/2020 placed me under hyper surveillance (ACTIVE DUTY SON IN LAW) and monitors and limits my phone/apps, reports my location to and fro places, hired/ encouraged menacing behavior to follow me to my new current address who again took my clothes and infested them with louse and parasites…

[bitcoincables]

El Salvador's Bitcoin-Friendly President Wins Re-Election, Donald Trump Voices AI Concerns

A crypto-friendly country's election results are in, and Naib Kele, the Bitcoin-friendly President of El Salvador, is set to win another five-year term, according to exit polls. El Salvador made history in 2021 by becoming the first nation to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender. Kele's overwhelming lead in the election further solidifies his position as a supporter of cryptocurrency in the country. 📊🇸🇻

In other news, the former Chief Financial Officer of Terraform Labs, He Chung Juon, has been extradited from Montenegro to South Korea. The extradition is related to multiple criminal offenses, including fraud and financial investment services. He Chung was arrested alongside Tara co-founder Do Kwon in March 2023 while attempting to travel with falsified documents. This development reflects ongoing efforts to hold individuals accountable for fraudulent activities in the crypto space. ⚖️👨‍⚖️

Meanwhile, former US President Donald Trump has voiced concerns about artificial intelligence (AI) during an interview on Fox Business. Trump described AI as "dangerous and scary," primarily highlighting the potential threats posed by deep fakes. He expressed worry over the possibility of false product endorsements resulting from this technology. Additionally, Trump criticized CBD CS, although he did not provide further details regarding his concerns about them. 🤖😨

To read more about these updates, you can visit the original article on CoinDesk's website. Stay informed with the latest news in the crypto world! 💻🌐

Read the original article ElSalvador Bitcoin DonaldTrump ArtificialIntelligence

[cryptofansty]

Digifinex Labs: Bitcoin Advocate Nayib Bukele Claims Victory for Second Term as President of El Salvador

Nayib Bukele, the pro-bitcoin president of El Salvador, declared his victory in the 2024 presidential election on Sunday, pre-empting the official announcement by the electoral body. Bukele confidently stated, “According to our numbers, we won the presidential election with more than 85% of the votes and a minimum of 58 out of 60 Assembly deputies.” Exit poll data from X. CID Gallup also indicated strong support, with 87% of voters favoring Bukele.

Bukele played a pivotal role in El Salvador’s decision to adopt bitcoin as legal tender in September 2021. The country has since been actively acquiring bitcoin, amassing a portfolio valued at $131 million and generating a profit of $3.6 million as of early December last year, as reported by Bukele.

In December, El Salvador introduced the “Freedom Visa,” offering residency or citizenship to up to 1,000 applicants annually in exchange for a $1 million investment in bitcoin or USDT.

It’s important to note that The Block, the source of this information, operates independently and provides objective reporting on the crypto industry. As of November 2023, Foresight Ventures is a majority investor in The Block, and The Block maintains its independence to deliver impartial and timely information about the crypto space.

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