#tucker carlson putin speech

[kneedeepincynade]

New article is out,this time we briefly talk about the Carlson interview with Putin

[gudguy1a]

Vivek Ramaswamy republican presidential candidate – Not A Good Choice, Nor Are Others…

Wow…!!  Vivek would have been the first Indian American to hold the office of President of America (I still refuse to say “United States of America” due to all of the craziness taking place in this country, further dividing it) and I was thrilled to hear about something like this. Until I found out more of his background… He wants to run on the platform of fighting ‘wokefulness’. He wants to…

[odinsblog]

This is the homophobic racist CNN had hosting their Donald Trump “Town Hall”

When I said before that I would not be giving CNN any views, I meant that. CNN is hiring white supremacists and calling them journalists.

I understand that the saying, “we are living in perilous times” might seem overused, but goddamnit, we have a racist, traitorous, former occupant of the White House—LOL, I’ll never call him president—who stacked the Supreme Court with Federalist Society nut jobs, and fomented an insurrection, and very likely sold or freely gave national secrets to Vladimir Putin, and all Chris Licht & CNN sees are dollar signs, just like Les Moonves did.

Conservatives, Republicans and Libertarians find hate and cruelty toward marginalized groups amusing.

For those who don’t know, the Daily Caller is a white nationalist-lite publication, founded by Tucker Carlson, that right wingers love to read. Apparently that was Kaitlan’s only previous “job” experience before CNN hired her.

This is not new. Look at Elon Musk and Twitter. Every time some rich old white guy lies and says they want their outlet to have “more balanced viewpoints,” they almost always mean they want it to have more racists to have more freedom of hate speech. Now Chris Licht is running the same okie doke.

Trash ass media outlet.

👉🏿 https://dailycaller.com/2015/11/18/13-syrian-refugees-wed-take-immediately-photos/

👉🏿 https://www.adweek.com/tvnewser/kaitlan-collins-joins-cnn-from-the-daily-caller/332413/

[mariacallous]

A few weeks ago, a Russian autocrat addressed millions of Western citizens in a propaganda event that would have been unthinkable a generation ago—yet is so normal today as to be almost unremarkable. Tucker Carlson’s interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin has now been viewed more than 120 million times on YouTube and X, formerly known as Twitter. Despite the tedium of Putin’s two-hour-long lecture about an imaginary Russian and Ukrainian history, the streaming and promotion of the interview by Western platforms is only the latest successful foray in Russia’s information war against the West, which Moscow is showing every sign of winning. And in this war, the Kremlin is not just weaponizing social media, but relying on Westerners themselves to spread its messages far and wide.

A decade into Russia’s all-out information war, the social media companies seem to have forgotten their promises to act after the 2016 U.S. presidential election interference scandal, when Russian-sponsored posts reached 126 million Americans on Facebook alone. Policymakers not only seem oblivious to the full breadth and scope of Russia’s information war, but fears about stifling freedom of speech and contributing to political polarization have led them and the social media companies to largely refrain from any action to stop Russia’s ongoing campaign.

This inaction comes amid growing signs of Russian influence operations that have deeply penetrated Western politics and society. Dozens—if not hundreds or more—of Russian agents have been observed everywhere from English towns to Canadian universities. Many of these agents are low-level and appear to achieve little individually, but occasionally they penetrate institutions, companies, and governments. Meanwhile, a flood of money props up Moscow’s ambitions, including hundreds of millions of dollars the Kremlin is pouring into influencing elections, with some of that money covertly (and overtly) funneled to political parties and individual politicians. For many decades, Western societies have been deluged with every sort of influence imaginable.

While there have been some countermeasures since the start of Russia’s latest war—including the United States and European Union shutting off access to Russian media networks such as RT and Sputnik in early 2022—these small, ineffective steps are the equivalent of information war virtue signaling. They do not fundamentally change Western governments’ lack of any coherent approach to the many vectors of Russian disinformation and hybrid warfare. At the very moment when Kremlin narratives on social media are beginning to seriously undermine support for Ukraine, Western governments’ handle on the disinformation crisis seems to be getting weaker by the day.

For Putin’s Russia, “information-psychological warfare”—as a Russian military textbook calls it—is intended to “erode the morale and psychological spirit” of an enemy population. A central aspect of a wider war against the West, it is conducted online through relentless barrages of fake, real, and misrepresented news, through a cultivated network of witting and unwitting shills such as Carlson. The Kremlin’s messaging has an extraordinary reach: In the first year of the Ukraine war alone, posts by Kremlin-linked accounts were viewed at least 16 billion times by Westerners. Every one of those views is part of a full-spectrum attack against the West designed not just to undermine support for Ukraine, but to actively damage Western democratic systems.

Moscow launches its attacks using a playbook familiar to anyone who watched the disinformation campaigns linked to the 2014 invasion of Crimea and the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Bots, trolls, targeted ad campaigns, fake news organizations, and doppelganger accounts of real Western politicians and pundits spread stories concocted in Moscow—or in St. Petersburg, where then-Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin ran an army of trolls posting on Western social media. If the specific technologies are new, Russia’s strategy of information warfare is not. During World War II, Soviet propagandist Ilya Ehrenburg memorably described the pen as “a weapon made not for anthologies, but for war.” From the early Bolshevik era to the end of the Cold War, his peers spent decades spreading disinformation abroad in hopes that countries targeted by Russia would be unable to “defend … themselves, their family, their community, and their country,” as Soviet journalist turned defector Yuri Bezmenov put it.

What is undoubtedly new is a polarized Western public’s enthusiasm for re-centering its own identity around Moscow’s narratives—and becoming an unwitting weapon in the information war. Take, for example, the QAnon movement, whose supporters have long gathered critical energy from talking points supplied and amplified by Moscow through social media. QAnon supporters espouse a range of grievances familiar from Russian propaganda: anti-LGBTQ+, anti-liberal, and especially anti-Ukraine sentiments. QAnon channels on the messaging app Telegram, for example, rapidly turned into fora for anti-Ukraine and pro-war sentiment.

While ordinary users are certain that they are merely speaking their minds, a domestic policy issue has ultimately turned into a vehicle for Moscow to exert influence over national security decisions. QAnon support has spread from the United States to countries across the West—and each group of adherents, regardless of location and platform, seems to espouse the same pro-Putin sentiments and the same skepticism about providing support for Ukraine.

Such phenomena are all too familiar, whether they relate to the U.S. presidential election influence scandal, to the constant reiteration of Moscow’s talking points about NATO, or to the web of useful idiots—from quasi-journalists to rappers—who seem to function as mouthpieces for the Kremlin by consistently spreading favorable narratives under the guise of asking questions or presenting two sides of a story.

Moscow also exploits non-Western networks, such as Telegram and TikTok, to its own advantage. Today, 14 percent of adult Americans regularly consume news from Chinese-owned TikTok, where thousands of fake accounts spread Russian talking points—and where Russian propagandists can count hundreds of thousands of followers. TikTok has occasionally revealed Russian bot networks, but its efforts to stop the spread of Kremlin-aligned content have been lackluster and ineffective. Millions of Americans hoover up material created by Moscow’s propagandists, bonding with influencers and other users who also share this material, constantly propagating Moscow’s viewpoint on Ukraine. TikTok’s unwillingness to cooperate on countering such disinformation has left U.S. lawmakers with little choice but to mull an outright ban of the network—and even then, that would largely be over China-related concerns, not because lawmakers recognize the crucial role TikTok plays for the Kremlin.

Even where they ostensibly have more control, U.S. policymakers have been unwilling to do much to stem the tide of pro-Russian propaganda. Since Elon Musk took over Twitter and renamed it X, the network has all but openly welcomed Russian influence campaigns onto its servers. The platform even hosts Kremlin-aligned neo-fascists such as Alexander Dugin, who uses it to spread his apocalyptic vision of the war in Ukraine to his 180,000 followers, including via discussion spaces in English. Hundreds of accounts—many belonging to ordinary Westerners—boost Dugin’s reach (and that of similar figures) by following him as well as liking or commenting on posts. X’s streaming and promotion of the Carlson interview and Musk’s own echoing of Russian talking points—such as highly specific claims about Ukraine using phrasing normally employed only by Russian officials—have come in for heavy criticism. But just as damaging are the smaller communities created around figures such as Dugin, where Western users do much to spread an anti-Ukraine message.

As we enter the third year of Russia’s attempt to conquer Ukraine, it has become apparent that the Kremlin’s information war is fully integrated into the military one. Some of that is aimed at Ukraine, with Russian disinformation campaigns attempting to sow distrust in the country’s political and military leadership. But for the Kremlin, the information war against the West is key. That’s because Putin’s theory of victory in Ukraine runs through Western capitals: If Western support can be undermined over time, Kyiv will lack the weapons and resources to keep fighting. The war over Western opinion is therefore at least as existential for Putin as the fight on the ground in Ukraine.

Yet despite abundant examples of Russian narratives showing up in Western debates, there is almost no serious discussion within governments or among the public about how to end Russia’s information war on the West. Many in the West worry that interfering online will lead them down the slippery slope of repressing free speech. Perhaps they cannot see the conceptual link between information war and military war—and refuse to recognize that the West is already at war with Russia, even if that war is not a military one.

If anything, there are signs that governments are taking Russia’s influence campaigns less seriously today than in the past. The British government first stymied the release of a damning report on Russian interference in British politics—and once the report was released, it did little to act on the findings. In Washington, the Biden administration is scaling back its efforts to head off Russian disinformation. Flummoxed by a barrage of criticism reflecting freedom of speech concerns, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security shuttered its Disinformation Governance Board in August 2022, even as Americans were being barraged by an unprecedented wave of pro-war and anti-Ukraine propaganda on social media. Since then, the U.S. State Department’s parsimonious funding has chiefly gone to small-scale nongovernmental organizations offering fact-checking and disinformation tracking services—a drop in the bucket at best.

When Western governments do address foreign hybrid threats, such as cybersecurity and election interference, they are increasingly focused on China. And invariably, they still identify such threats merely as “influence” or “interference,” rather than as part of a larger, concerted military effort. Their responses thus mistakenly circumscribe Russia’s hybrid warfare as a discrete, restricted, and targeted policy of disruption. In reality, it is an ongoing, fluid, and broad phenomenon that invites continued violence.

Any Western vision for future peace in Ukraine—and any discussion of a return to business as usual with Russia—must be paired with restrictions on Russian interference and influence in Western daily life. Ukraine, which has been actively battling Russian influence as part of its war against Moscow since 2014, has already developed approaches from which the West could learn.

First, Ukraine has taken to heart that “information is a weapon that Russia is using against the West,” as Ihor Solovey, head of Ukraine’s Center for Strategic Communications and Information Security, put it to Foreign Policy. The West, too, must reframe Russia’s disinformation campaigns and other influence activities in the language of war. Academics arrested in Norway and Estonia, Western politicians serving Kremlin-controlled companies, and fake Facebook groups all function—for Moscow—as part of the same military spectrum that includes soldiers and tanks. When an agent or influence operation is uncovered—such as the German Wirecard executive exposed as a Russian spy—politicians should be clear in stating that the West is under attack from Russia.

Second, Western policymakers must act in concert—forming a coalition analogous to the Ramstein group that coordinates military aid to Ukraine—to pass laws and take other measures to ensure that Russia is not able to feed its information directly to Western citizens through social media. Although citizens should be free to discuss any stories they like, enemy combatants should not have the right to free speech in the West. That means that figures such as ultranationalist Dugin should not be welcome on Western social media. The platforms should be threatened with paralyzing penalties for allowing Moscow’s propaganda to spread.

The U.S. State Department’s recently released framework for combatting disinformation falls far short in this regard. When Moscow is already fighting its hybrid war deep inside Western societies, restricting Moscow’s access to social media portals is an urgent and essential act of national defense. The time for vague plans, investigations, and reports is over. It is time to use the West’s superior technical capacity to ensure that no Russian bots, trolls, or fake accounts are able to access X, Facebook, and other platforms again.

Finally, Western governments must move beyond ineffective fact-checking to embark on a mass program of civic education through schools, universities, and public advertising. Such a program should relentlessly emphasize the threat that Russia’s influence poses, clearly label it as an ongoing war, and give the public tools for understanding and countering Russian attacks in their varied forms. A recent Canadian government campaign was a good start, but framed disinformation as a vague threat that “hides well”—rather than exposing it as the tool of a foreign government attacking Western societies. Ukraine’s program of anti-disinformation education has proved robust and could serve as a model.

Of course, some Western citizens could still choose to access Russian propaganda through non-Western services, such as Telegram and TikTok. A truly bold government would respond to the Russian threat not just defensively but in kind—for instance, by flooding pro-Russian channels on Telegram with Western messaging and establishing other channels that subtly spread anti-Russian narratives.

When Russia invaded Crimea in 2014, the Kremlin spent millions of dollars on trolls to spread its messaging online. For Putin, the money was well spent. Since then, Russia’s approach has been constantly refined, reaching deeply into electoral processes and public debates—ultimately affecting decisions about how and whether to aid Ukraine. Yet Western policymakers are still letting themselves be caught on the back foot, because they either do not or will not confront the reality that the Kremlin is waging a war on the West in which all citizens are already a part. Resolving this problem will require bold and potentially unpopular action.

As artificial intelligence and other technologies make the dissemination of messaging to Western audiences ever easier—and as the tide appears to be turning in Moscow’s favor on the battlefield in Ukraine—it is time for Western governments to act. Otherwise, Moscow will win not only a military war in Ukraine but a hybrid one all across the West.

[darkmaga-retard]

One of my pet peeves is to observe and chronicle how the 200-year idea of “liberal democracy” is disappearing before our very eyes due to the various new social conditions arising from technological innovations. I have written about it several times, but we have added one more data point to the idea that “free speech” as a concept is functionally dead or dying in the Euro-Atlantic. The founder of Telegram, Pavel Durov, was arrested in France on trumped-up charges that his platform “facilitated” human trafficking and pedophilic activity. 

I say “trumped-up” because we have seen previous instances of actual sexual grooming and other such criminal deviance on social media platforms before (and even currently), but none of their founders have been arrested. No, the real reason is that Telegram, like X, or previously RarBG, or Pirate Bay, is committed to an old-school, mid-’90s throwback idea of zero censorship and total freedom of speech—a callback to a time when the internet was imagined to be the ultimate high-tech frontier of Utopia. That dream is dead: Durov refused the Europeans’ demands to crack his app, and is now facing the consequences.

Tucker Carlson conducted an interview with Durov a while back, and tweeted it out again following the arrest. 

Pavel Durov left Russia when the government tried to control his social media company, Telegram. But in the end, it wasn’t Putin who arrested him for allowing the public to exercise free speech. It was a western country, a Biden administration ally and enthusiastic NATO member, that locked him away. Pavel Durov sits in a French jail tonight, a living warning to any platform owner who refuses to censor the truth at the behest of governments and intel agencies. Darkness is descending fast on the formerly free world.

Carlson would know. His own life is now on the line: consider that the Department of Justice has begun a broad criminal investigation into Americans who have worked with Russia’s state television networks. This is an easy way to tamp down on any dissenting voices, such as those of Carlson or Elon Musk; if carried out, the effect would be chilling. That’s the aim. The same goes for the anti-X crusade in Brazil and Europe. X is ostensibly the only platform to provide zero censorship, and thus alternative viewpoints. The Telegram arrest is just a practice run. 

[tahoedirt]

TRUNT IS A COMMUNIST

On Monday night's "The Daily Show," Jon Stewart called out one of the worst pieces of pro-Russia propaganda we've ever seen.

As part of his "journalism" about Russia, Tucker Carlson showed clips of an ornate, clean subway in Moscow. He posted a video of shopping in a Russian grocery store, extolling the wonderful amenities and the basketful of food he bought for just $104. Carlson praised dictator Vladimir Putin and Russian society and accused our "woke" government of not doing as well for us.1

But what Carlson failed to mention, as Stewart pointed out, is that Russians earn on average just $200 a week, making those groceries exorbitantly expensive. Carlson also didn't talk about Russia's draconian anti-LGBTQ+ policies or the absolute absence of free speech

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s surprise arrival in Washington on Wednesday for a meeting with President Joe Biden and a speech before Congress has unhinged the always-seething anti-Ukraine Trumpian right, triggering a deluge of snark and grievance. For instance, after the Washington Examiner’s Byron York tut-tutted that Zelensky was about to tell Congress that U.S. aid to Ukraine so far was not enough, the former First Son weighed in with this:

“National conservative” pundit and Newsweek opinion editor Josh Hammer, who played the “obviously Putin is a thug and Ukraine is the victim here, but . . .” game in the early days of the war, went full Putin this time around.

To top it off, Hammer, who shares Zelensky’s Jewish heritage, also accused the Ukrainian President of being a bad Jew—unseemly under any circumstances, but all the more so considering that only a few days earlier, Hammer had been spotted at a New York Young Republicans’ Club Gala in the company of various alt-right types with, shall we say, a complicated relationship to anti-Semitism. (Among them: Rep. Marjorie “Jewish Space Lasers” Taylor Greene, the founders of the white-nationalist website VDARE, and erstwhile Jew-baiting troll Jack Posobiec.)

Hammer’s deputy op-ed editor, progressive-turned-populist Batya Ungar-Sargon (for whom, I must mention, I used to write during her stint as an editor at the Forward), at least made an effort to stay classy while making a de facto pitch for throwing Ukraine under the bus:

That’s more than can be said for the vast majority of the “no money for Ukraine” crowd, from the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh (“Get this grifting leech out of our country please”) to Tucker Carlson, who referred to Zelensky as a “Ukrainian strip club manager”—apparently because he was dressed in a olive-drab sweatshirt—and asserted that “it may be impossible to imagine a more humiliating scenario for the greatest country on Earth.” He also insisted that Zelensky is seeking not just to “push the Russian army back to pre-invasion borders,” which even Carlson conceded “sounds reasonable,” but to topple Vladimir Putin and bring about “regime change” in Russia. After Zelensky’s speech to Congress, Carlson brought on former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, the “maverick” Democrat from Hawaii, to sing along with his assertions that Zelensky was actually an autocrat muzzling critical media outlets, jailing opposition politicians, and now trying to shut down an entire church because he finds it insufficiently loyal.

(In reality, the situation involving the Moscow-affiliated branch of the Orthodox Church—one of the two Orthodox denominations in Ukraine—is massively complicated; in wartime, there are legitimate security concerns about its clergy’s reported activities in support of the invaders. However, a quote Carlson attributes to Zelensky, threatening “economic and restrictive sanctions [on] any Christian caught worshiping in unapproved ways,” does not seem to have any source other than Carlson himself.)

Then there was this from Red State commentator Brandon Morse, asserting that Zelensky has done much more damage to the United States than the January 6th rioters:

A few other right-wing pundits, including career plagiarist-turned-conspiracy-theory-peddler Benny Johnson and Turning Point USA grifting leech Charlie Kirk, homed in on the really important stuff: Zelensky’s outfit.

Of course Zelensky’s clothes were meant to visually convey the fact that he’s in the middle of a brutal war. When you’re just back from a visit to the front lines in an area that looks like a ghost warscape from World War I come back to life, you’ve earned the right to make that particular fashion statement—even on a visit to Washington, D.C.

But wait, is it a military outfit or a mafia one? The American Spectator’s Melissa Mackenzie has got the goods:

I could go on and on. But perhaps this parade of indecency should come back full circle to a literal obscenity from Don Jr.: a photoshopped image that put a naked Hunter Biden next to Zelensky on the podium addressing Congress. (Warning: this tweet may be hazardous to your eyes.) It’s vile, of course. It’s also the sort of thing you post when you have no substantive way to attack someone.

* * *

The extent and purpose of U.S. military aid to Ukraine is certainly a legitimate subject for debate. Right now, there is a powerful consensus in the United States and Europe that Ukraine, for all the flaws and imperfections of its still-young democracy, is fighting for freedom against an authoritarian Goliath and that its fight is also a fight for the free world and its values.

The question of why the Trumpian populist right is so consumed with hatred for Ukraine—a hatred that clearly goes beyond concerns about U.S. spending, a very small portion of our military budget, or about the nonexistent involvement of American troops—doesn’t have a simple answer. Partly, it’s simply partisanship: If the libs are for it, we’re against it, and the more offensively the better. (And if the pre-Trump Republican establishment is also for it, then we’re even more against it.) Partly, it’s the belief that Ukrainian democracy is a Biden/Obama/Hillary Clinton/”Deep State” project, all the more suspect because it’s related to Trump’s first impeachment. Partly, it’s the “national conservative” distaste for liberalism—not only in its American progressive iteration, but in the more fundamental sense that includes conservatives like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: the outlook based on individual freedom and personal autonomy, equality before the law, limited government, and an international order rooted in those values. Many NatCons are far more sympathetic to Russia’s crusade against secular liberalism than to Ukraine’s desire for integration into liberal, secular Europe.

Whatever the reason, the anti-Ukraine animus on the right is quite real and widespread. (When journalist Bari Weiss, who has a largely “anti-woke” following, retweeted a Hanukkah greeting from Zelensky, the responses from her followers in the thread were mostly hostile.) But right now, it also smells of desperation. Ukraine’s cause is still massively popular in the United States, with two-thirds of Americans supportive of sending money and arms. Disingenuous laments about the poor Ukrainians exploited by American and European globalists ring hollow and false when the vast majority of Ukrainians are so clearly determined to resist the invasion. And Zelensky, as the smarter among the aid opponents, like Ungar-Sargon, can see, is a genuine hero: patriotic, incredibly courageous and charismatic, and a speaker so compelling that even congressional right-wingers who initially refused to join in the standing ovations (including Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, and Andrew Clyde) finally rose up during the last portions of his speech.

There’s a nineteenth-century Russian fable called “The Elephant and the Pug” in which a pug yaps furiously at an elephant to get attention and show off how tough it is, while the elephant simply ignores it. Zelensky would obviously be the elephant in this scenario; but that would make the Zelensky haters the pugs—and that’s frankly a hideous insult to pugs.

[jeintalu]

Carlson on Durov's Arrest

"Pavel Durov left Russia when the government tried to control his social media company, Telegram. But in the end, it wasn’t Putin who arrested him for allowing the public to exercise free speech. It was a Western country, a Biden administration ally and enthusiastic NATO member, that locked him away. Pavel Durov sits in a French jail tonight, a living warning to any platform owner who refuses to censor the truth at the behest of governments and intelligence agencies. Darkness is descending fast on the formerly free world."

- Tucker Carlson

[mokhosz-nafo]

Putin's Bet on U.S. Disinterest in Ukraine, — The New York Times

Putin is counting on the weakening of U.S. interest in Ukraine, which could be a winning bet, according to The New York Times.

Journalists note that the U.S. presidential race and political crisis could play in Putin's favor. President Biden, Ukraine's key ally, is under pressure from fellow Democrats to withdraw from the race, while his opponent, Donald Trump, a leading poll candidate, has chosen one of the strongest critics of U.S. aid to Kyiv as his running mate.

"The trajectory of American foreign policy may align with Putin's expectations: a more inward-looking U.S. It's only a matter of time before Washington might give up on Kyiv, just as critics say it abandoned Afghanistan in 2021," the article states.

Putin's strategy hinges on the belief that Americans will eventually tire, according to Russian analysts. Polls show that while most Americans support maintaining or increasing aid to Ukraine, they don't see it as a key election issue. In April, 50% of Americans said limiting Russia's influence should be a top priority, but only 23% said the same about supporting Ukraine. Additionally, there is low support for the Biden administration's proposal of 10 years of military aid to Ukraine.

"You have border problems, migration issues, and national debt concerns. Isn't it better to negotiate with Russia?" Putin suggested in an interview with Tucker Carlson, indicating his strategy.

However, journalists emphasize it's too early for Putin to celebrate. His assumptions about U.S. politics have been wrong before. The Kremlin supported Trump in 2016, but he ended up arming Ukraine and tightening sanctions against Russia. In 2022, Russia was unprepared for the West's harsh reaction to its invasion of Ukraine, resulting in the freezing of billions of dollars in Russian Central Bank reserves in Europe and the U.S.

The Kremlin is now more cautious about Trump's potential re-election. Putin's press secretary Peskov mentioned that "not much good was done for Russia" under Trump. Russian analysts see no way to improve U.S.-Russia relations, regardless of the U.S. president.

They also highlight the unpredictability of Trump and his team. Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, despite criticizing aid to Ukraine, didn't mention the war in his convention speech. Trump himself hasn't detailed how he plans to end the war, leaving much uncertainty.

"In America, they talk about Russia much less than Russia talks about America. In Russia, they would love for America to take more interest," concludes Russian-American commentator Ekaterina Moore from Washington.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

David Smith and Hugo Lowell at The Guardian:

With political winds at his back, Donald Trump on Thursday is expected to use his first speech since surviving an assassination attempt to plead for national unity. Strategists view the Republican national convention address, likely to be watched by tens of millions of Americans on prime time television, as a unique opportunity to redefine the former US president as more palatable to moderate voters. But critics remain sceptical that a Trump reset can last, citing past supposed “pivots” that were hyped by the media only for the septuagenarian to soon revert to dark, divisive and incendiary outbursts. “That was a profound existential moment and I’m sure it’s impacted him in the short run, but you are who you are,” David Axelrod, a former chief strategist for President Barack Obama, said. “He isn’t by habit or orientation a unifier.

“Maybe so long as the race is going well others can persuade him that it’s better to be quiet than noisy. But you never know what happens in two in the morning when he’s got his phone in his hand and an impulse in his head.” In opinion polls, Trump is running 11 percentage points ahead of where he was nationally in the 2020 race of the White House. He is surfing a wave of sympathy and adulation after his right ear was injured by a would-be assassin’s bullet at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday. Two days later, his ear bandaged, Trump received a hero’s welcome from cheering, sign-waving supporters at the convention in Milwaukee. Some echoed Trump’s initial response to “Fight! Fight! Fight!” Speaker after speaker suggested that Trump’s life was spared by God’s providence so that he can continue a sacred mission for the nation. But they backed away from early accusations that Democrats were to blame for the shooting.

[...] Trump’s near-death experience, and the ensuing national attention, present an opportunity when he formally accepts the party’s nomination to face Biden in a rematch of 2020. His wife Melania and daughter Ivanka, both of whom have been mostly missing from the campaign trail, are expected to attend. Some Republicans hope that Trump can recreate Ronald Reagan’s defiant optimism after he survived an assassination attempt in 1981, casting himself as unifier-in-chief. On Sunday Trump told the New York Post newspaper that he had intended to deliver biting remarks against Biden until the shooting prompted him to throw them out. Trump is understood to have been reworking his remarks with his speechwriter Ross Worthington since the shooting, according to a person close to Trump, and has discussed making himself sound like he is still the president, as opposed to just a candidate.

But at an event hosted by the Axios website, Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr, suggested that even if Trump shifted to a gentler tone, his core political attacks were likely to continue. “You can be nicer on the margins but you still have to call out insanity when you see insanity,” Trump Jr said when asked about more caustic language turning off potential voters, for instance on transgender issues. “That’s different, that’s not about tone.” Trump Jr also said that, even though he believed that Trump’s unity tone would last until the vice-presidential debate, he expected Trump to counter-punch if attacked by Biden, who recently urged the country to tone down the political rhetoric in a televised address from the Oval Office.

[...] Indeed, for all the talk of a softer, more inclusive Trump, he has sat in a box in the convention hall alongside extremists such as Tucker Carlson, a broadcaster who has promoted white nationalism and praised Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, the representative who once floated a conspiracy theory involving “Jewish space lasers”.

Donald Trump will close out the 2024 RNC tonight with a speech that is supposedly a call for unity in the wake of facing an assassination attempt Saturday.

The question is, will that hold true? Or will he revert to his usual demagoguery in his speech? Stay tuned later this evening. #RNC2024

[tabileaks]

As Exhaust Carlson prepares to meet with Vladimir Putin, the world anticipates the outcome of this encounter and its potential implications for international relations. While it remains to be seen how the meeting will unfold, one thing is certain: the dialogue between these two influential figures has the potential to shape perceptions, influence policy debates, and contribute to the evolving dynamics of global politics.

[meandmybigmouth]

A Game Of Who Said It: Putin Or MAGA Republican?

Can you tell the difference between what comes out of Putin's vile, lying mouth and DeSantis's, Ingraham's, Carlson's, or even Santorum's?

https://resolutesquare.com/articles/4bDuJmoydkXcn2UP9qILRg/a-game-of-who-said-it-putin-or-maga-republicans

Let’s play a simple game: Who said it? Which of these quotes are from Vladimir Putin’s recent speech, and which are from a MAGA Republican?

They never stop lying and distorting historical facts as they attack our culture

We believe in teaching kids facts and how to think, but we don't believe they should have an agenda imposed on them.

It is all about the destruction of the family, of cultural and national identity.

What you're seeing is a coordinated attack on the family and on children.

We must protect our children, which we will do. We will protect our children from degradation and degeneration.

It's all about pushing a sexual agenda on little children. This is propaganda for grooming.

They are forcing the priests to bless same-sex marriages. Look at the holy scripture and the main books of other world religions. They say it all, including that family is the union of a man and a woman, but these sacred texts are now being questioned.

In every society, the definition of marriage has not included homosexuality. It's not man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be.

Answer key:

1. Vladimir Putin 2. Ron DeSantis 3. Vladimir Putin 4. Tucker Carlson 5. Vladimir Putin 6. Laura Ingraham 7. Vladimir Putin 8. Rick Santorum

[davidpwilson2564]

Bloglet

Wednesday, February 21, 2024

Still getting over a cold.

The Republicans say they have found the man who will give important evidence for impeaching Biden. The plan fizzles and Jim Jordon, cornered, tries to salvage part of the story and starts chattering like a monkey.

Trump considering vice presidential candidates. DeSantis appears on the short list. Even after being insulted he would be made to grovel, to bow down before the cult leader.

But...a bit later...DeSantis says no. He's more interested in the Big Prize and is willing to wait four years to give it a shot.

Thursday, February 22, 2024

Note: When I told Dan Block I played "Sinfonia India" last Sunday he came up with a great story about Bernstein conducting it at Juilliard. The student orchestra...Bernstein wearing a dashiki (!)...chain smoking (of course)...and probably a bit drunk. That was Lennie. Bigger than life.

Elaborate dream about a difficult piece I am to play. The music (very hard to decipher) comes with a CD and a blooklet, explaining what the work is about. All of this quite odd and unsettling.

Note: The dream brought to mind Tom Wolfe's "The Painted Word." Content in inverse proportion to explanation.

Friday, February 23, 2024

Other possible Republican vice presidential candidates (now that DeSantis said no): Tucker Carlson, Kari Lake, Vance, Elise... Trump is enjoying this. The ass-kissing especially.

OMG. Alabama Supreme Court has ruled that embryos are children.

Saturday, February 24, 2024

Trump wins over Haley (by a lot) in South Carolina. But Haley has not yet quit the race. Super Tuesday is coming.

So hoping to get rid of this persistent cough.

Interesting piece in the N Y Times. It is estimated that 44 per cent of the population doesn't bother to vote. (Do all of the Trumpers vote or are some of them just in for the show?)

Trump makeing speech to Blacks. Says he, like them, is discriminated against. He brings up the mug shot ("Never Surrender") and the indictments. Another appearance shows him kissing the flag. This is beyond bad taste.

Putin's invasion of Ukraine reaches two year mark. Estimated loss of Ukrainian soliders (so says Zalensky): 31,000.

[pan-era-musings]

Random thoughts on a cold blustery day.

I am not particularly concerned about trump's business fraud trial outcome. I'm sure he will find the cash from some source: Saudi's, Kushner, Russians, his followers, raping the coffers of the GOP.

What I am concerned about is trump's movement to wanting to be a dictator. He's making all the dictator speeches about the system being out to get him, how we need to return to a “better” time when whites were all powerful, how non-whites, especially immigrants are the enemy and must be destroyed.

The thought of rounding people up and putting them in camps must disturb some although I'm not seeing a lot of press about those camps or the “citizens” trump will get to round everyone up and get them behind bars (or razor wire).

What disturbs me most is how the GOP has totally blown off what it means to be a Republican, deciding power is much more important than civil values or civic responsibility.

I blame Republicans for trump and the chaos he causes.

One day this will all come crashing down for trump, the GOP and the MAGA's. We will see the remnants of the GOP crawl from underneath their rocks and claim they were duped, begging to come back into society and the political process.

In my world these people have no place in society. They enabled trump and the MAGA's for their own gain.

Losing means you don't get the spoils. It means you go back to the drawing board and start over.

It concerns me that right wing pro MAGA commentator Tucker Carlson is singing the praises of Russia to all who will listen.

Why is he doing this? Has he decided Russia will eventually take over the world and he wants to be in on the spoils?

Do what's left of his listeners really believe Russia is some sort of paradise for the people of Russia?

Time will tell but I predict Carlson will be used by Putin until Putin no longer needs him. Then poor Tucker will get a Navalny on the lovely streets of Moscow.

#trump. #tucker.

[mariacallous]

Authorities in France arrested Pavel Durov, the founder and CEO of the messaging app Telegram, on Saturday, sparking a public controversy over online speech, encryption, and digital rights as well as a potential diplomatic fallout in Europe. 

Prosecutors in Paris released a list of charges against a “person unnamed” in a criminal investigation in connection with which Durov is being questioned. Those charges include possession of child pornography, money laundering, and association with organized crime. Durov has not been charged but is being detained and questioned; French authorities can keep Durov in custody until Wednesday, at which time they must either release him or charge him with a crime. 

Telegram struck a defiant tone in a statement posted to its platform Sunday, saying that its moderation policies were in line with industry standards “and constantly improving” while adding that Durov had “nothing to hide.”

“It is absurd to claim that a platform or its owner are responsible for abuse of that platform,” the company said. 

Durov, who founded Telegram in 2013 in his native Russia, has long styled himself as a champion of unfettered free speech online. The platform has adopted a lighter-touch approach to content moderation than many of its social media peers, even as it has grown to nearly a billion global users. 

“Unless they cross red lines, I don’t think that we should be policing people in the way they express themselves,” Durov told the Financial Times in a rare interview in March this year, saying the platform planned to improve its content moderation without elaborating on what he considers a red line. 

In another interview in April with right-wing media personality Tucker Carlson, Durov said the company would cooperate with “legitimate” demands to take down content. 

“If there was a group of people who were promoting violence, there was terrorist activity that was spreading violence in some parts of the world, publicly posting things that any decent human being would disallow or wouldn’t want to be posted, we would help them,” he said. “But in some other cases where we thought it would be crossing the line, it wouldn’t be in line with our values of freedom of speech and protecting people’s private correspondence, we would ignore those.”

That approach has seen Telegram being used by protesters and dissidents around the world as well as the authoritarian governments they are often fighting against, and it has become a leading source of information and intelligence in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. 

Despite Russia’s historical baggage with Durov and Telegram (the Russian government unsuccessfully tried to ban the app in 2018), the country’s military has become dependent on the app for battlefield communication as well as propaganda in support of Russian President Vladimir Putin. “In the last two years of the war, no platform has played a greater role in helping us get insight into Russian thinking about the war than Telegram,” said Eto Buziashvili, a Tbilisi, Georgia-based researcher with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.

Multiple Russian officials have expressed outrage at Durov’s detention. Unless France provides strong evidence to back up its claims, “we are witnessing a direct attempt to restrict freedom of communication and, one might even say, direct intimidation of the head of a large company,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters in a briefing on Tuesday, adding that Moscow is “ready to provide all necessary assistance and support” to Durov.

Durov’s arrest was also slammed by X owner and fellow tech billionaire Elon Musk—who has espoused a similarly unbridled approach to online speech and is engaged in his own content moderation fight against European authorities—as well as former U.S. National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, who called it “​​an assault on the basic human rights of speech and association.” 

French President Emmanuel Macron sought to quell accusations of government censorship on Monday, pushing back in a post on X against what he referred to as “false information” about Durov’s arrest. “The arrest of the president of Telegram on French soil took place as part of an ongoing judicial investigation,” Macron wrote. “It is in no way a political decision.” He also added that France remained “deeply committed to freedom of expression and communication, to innovation, and to the spirit of entrepreneurship.” 

Both Russia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have requested consular access to Durov. Durov is a citizen of both countries as well as France. A spokesperson for the UAE foreign ministry said the country is “closely following” his case.

Durov has a complicated relationship with Russia, having fled the country in 2014 after refusing (in his own telling) to share data from VK—another hugely popular social network that he founded—with the Russian government. He sold his stake in VK and eventually moved to Dubai, where he has largely been based since and where Telegram is now located. 

But the geopolitical implications of Durov’s arrest go beyond his citizenships. Countries around the world, particularly in Europe, have been grappling with how to regulate social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, X, and TikTok, attempting to draw the line between free expression and illegal content. Governments in many cases have also sought to break through the end-to-end encryption provided by messaging services such as WhatsApp and Signal to protect user privacy, citing a need to police potentially illegal content. 

Telegram sits at the intersection of both of those debates. It allows users to exchange private messages (though its encryption is somewhat weaker than other messengers) while also letting them create public broadcast channels that function more like social networks, albeit with far less content moderation. 

“In a lot of use cases around the world, especially where we see the use of Telegram in conflict zones and for broader public messaging, it very much hedges more toward a social media app than a point-to-point communications app,” said Graham Brookie, vice president for technology programs at the Atlantic Council and senior director of the Digital Forensic Research Lab. “Telegram has very intentionally taken a very, very light touch to what the rest of the industry would refer to as trust and safety or content moderation,” he added. 

That combination of privacy and lax oversight has made the platform a haven for bad actors, including cyber criminals, drug dealers, and even terrorist groups such as the Islamic State. 

France appears to be taking issue with multiple aspects of Telegram’s model, calling out the illegal activity and content available on the platform in its statement on Monday detailing the charges against the “unnamed” person that Durov is being questioned about, which include three charges related to “cryptology” and the provision of encryption services. 

But the broad nature of the charges and the lack of detail from the French government leave room for the case to be distorted in the public eye, according to Brookie. “We’re in this dangerous gray area where a lot of projection can be put onto whatever the reason [is] for his apprehension in France,” he said. 

Durov’s arrest and the conversation around it could create misconceptions about encryption and hurt activists and dissidents around the world who rely on encrypted messaging for safety, said Mallory Knodel, a researcher at New York University who studies cryptography. “These kinds of violations could happen on any platform … and these alleged crimes are not related to whether the service is encrypted,” she said. “I do worry about this sort of perception of encrypted applications as being a place that enables these kinds of crimes to be committed.” 

And despite the proliferation of harmful content on Telegram and what she terms a lack of “duty of care” for vulnerable users on the part of its leadership, Knodel said arresting a technology executive for content shared on their platform sets another dangerous precedent. 

“Arresting a CEO is a harsh measure in any country,” she said. “It’s definitely an extreme measure, and it feels like it’s intended to send a message.”