#elon musk speech today

[new25us3]

Musk tells Germans to get over ‘past guilt’ in speech to far-right AfD rally

https://urlhub.pro/01bf53

[elonmuskode]

Love’ and ‘Ego’ cannot exist together

Do you agree with Me?

A.Yes

B. No

[sohan121]

Musk's hand gesture during Trump inauguration festivities draws scrutiny

Reed More

[thosemotivationalquotes]

I saw something in the news today that truly took my breath away. If you have been paying attention to U.S. politics over the past few days, you’ve most likely seen this woman:

This is Bishop Mariann Budde, and on Monday (Trump’s inauguration) she led an interfaith prayer for Trump and the incoming administration. During the service she asked him to have mercy for LGBTQ+ Americans and undocumented immigrants. This was badly received by the Trump administration (as expected).

After seeing headlines about this woman, I read something that I wanted to share. In 1998 a man named Matthew Shepard was murdered for being gay. I’m not going to get into the details of his death on this post, but please be warned it is extremely triggering if you do choose to read more on your own. Matthew Shepard’s death caused a lot of change in the U.S. regarding how LGBTQ hate crimes are handled, and laws that were passed to protect LGBTQ+ people.

Now you’re probably wondering what Matthew Shepard has to do with an Episcopal bishop. For years after Matthew Shepard’s murder, his family had held onto his remains, too scared to lay him to rest in fear of his final resting place being vandalized. In 2018, Budde had his remains interred at the National Cathedral, which is also the place where the interfaith prayer for Trump and his administration took place. The impact of this really had an effect on me. Budde could have led a non confrontational prayer service, and chosen not to mention the harm that will come to the people Trump and his administration are going after. Instead she chose to call out hate and fear in front of some of the most powerful people on the planet, and at a place that has such a large historic meaning to the LGBTQ community.

In the next few years there will be many challenges in protecting free speech, standing up against hate, and protecting those in our communities. But I would like to believe that for every Donald Trump and Elon Musk, there are people like Marianne Budde. There are those of us who can’t speak up for themselves, so it’s important for those of us who can to amplify our voices, even if it’s not the ‘popular’ thing to do.

“And he said you should apologize. Will you apologize?

I am not going to apologize for asking for mercy for others.” - Mariann Budde’s response in a Time interview

Link to articles: x x x

Link to the Matthew Shepard Foundation if you would like to donate

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Tesla's Dieselgate

Elon Musk lies a lot. He lies about being a “utopian socialist.” He lies about being a “free speech absolutist.” He lies about which companies he founded:

https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-cofounder-martin-eberhard-interview-history-elon-musk-ev-market-2023-2 He lies about being the “chief engineer” of those companies:

https://www.quora.com/Was-Elon-Musk-the-actual-engineer-behind-SpaceX-and-Tesla

He lies about really stupid stuff, like claiming that comsats that share the same spectrum will deliver steady broadband speeds as they add more users who each get a narrower slice of that spectrum:

https://www.eff.org/wp/case-fiber-home-today-why-fiber-superior-medium-21st-century-broadband

The fundamental laws of physics don’t care about this bullshit, but people do. The comsat lie convinced a bunch of people that pulling fiber to all our homes is literally impossible — as though the electrical and phone lines that come to our homes now were installed by an ancient, lost civilization. Pulling new cabling isn’t a mysterious art, like embalming pharaohs. We do it all the time. One of the poorest places in America installed universal fiber with a mule named “Ole Bub”:

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-one-traffic-light-town-with-some-of-the-fastest-internet-in-the-us

Previous tech barons had “reality distortion fields,” but Musk just blithely contradicts himself and pretends he isn’t doing so, like a budget Steve Jobs. There’s an entire site devoted to cataloging Musk’s public lies:

https://elonmusk.today/

But while Musk lacks the charm of earlier Silicon Valley grifters, he’s much better than they ever were at running a long con. For years, he’s been promising “full self driving…next year.”

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

He’s hasn’t delivered, but he keeps claiming he has, making Teslas some of the deadliest cars on the road:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/10/tesla-autopilot-crashes-elon-musk/

Tesla is a giant shell-game masquerading as a car company. The important thing about Tesla isn’t its cars, it’s Tesla’s business arrangement, the Tesla-Financial Complex:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/24/no-puedo-pagar-no-pagara/#Rat

Once you start unpacking Tesla’s balance sheets, you start to realize how much the company depends on government subsidies and tax-breaks, combined with selling carbon credits that make huge, planet-destroying SUVs possible, under the pretense that this is somehow good for the environment:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/14/for-sale-green-indulgences/#killer-analogy

But even with all those financial shenanigans, Tesla’s got an absurdly high valuation, soaring at times to 1600x its profitability:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/15/hoover-calling/#intangibles

That valuation represents a bet on Tesla’s ability to extract ever-higher rents from its customers. Take Tesla’s batteries: you pay for the battery when you buy your car, but you don’t own that battery. You have to rent the right to use its full capacity, with Tesla reserving the right to reduce how far you go on a charge based on your willingness to pay:

https://memex.craphound.com/2017/09/10/teslas-demon-haunted-cars-in-irmas-path-get-a-temporary-battery-life-boost/

That’s just one of the many rent-a-features that Tesla drivers have to shell out for. You don’t own your car at all: when you sell it as a used vehicle, Tesla strips out these features you paid for and makes the next driver pay again, reducing the value of your used car and transfering it to Tesla’s shareholders:

https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/6/21127243/tesla-model-s-autopilot-disabled-remotely-used-car-update

To maintain this rent-extraction racket, Tesla uses DRM that makes it a felony to alter your own car’s software without Tesla’s permission. This is the root of all autoenshittification:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

This is technofeudalism. Whereas capitalists seek profits (income from selling things), feudalists seek rents (income from owning the things other people use). If Telsa were a capitalist enterprise, then entrepreneurs could enter the market and sell mods that let you unlock the functionality in your own car:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/11/1-in-3/#boost-50

But because Tesla is a feudal enterprise, capitalists must first secure permission from the fief, Elon Musk, who decides which companies are allowed to compete with him, and how.

Once a company owns the right to decide which software you can run, there’s no limit to the ways it can extract rent from you. Blocking you from changing your device’s software lets a company run overt scams on you. For example, they can block you from getting your car independently repaired with third-party parts.

But they can also screw you in sneaky ways. Once a device has DRM on it, Section 1201 of the DMCA makes it a felony to bypass that DRM, even for legitimate purposes. That means that your DRM-locked device can spy on you, and because no one is allowed to explore how that surveillance works, the manufacturer can be incredibly sloppy with all the personal info they gather:

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/29/tesla-model-3-keeps-data-like-crash-videos-location-phone-contacts.html

All kinds of hidden anti-features can lurk in your DRM-locked car, protected from discovery, analysis and criticism by the illegality of bypassing the DRM. For example, Teslas have a hidden feature that lets them lock out their owners and summon a repo man to drive them away if you have a dispute about a late payment:

https://tiremeetsroad.com/2021/03/18/tesla-allegedly-remotely-unlocks-model-3-owners-car-uses-smart-summon-to-help-repo-agent/

DRM is a gun on the mantlepiece in Act I, and by Act III, it goes off, revealing some kind of ugly and often dangerous scam. Remember Dieselgate? Volkswagen created a line of demon-haunted cars: if they thought they were being scrutinized (by regulators measuring their emissions), they switched into a mode that traded performance for low emissions. But when they believed themselves to be unobserved, they reversed this, emitting deadly levels of NOX but delivering superior mileage.

The conversion of the VW diesel fleet into mobile gas-chambers wouldn’t have been possible without DRM. DRM adds a layer of serious criminal jeopardy to anyone attempting to reverse-engineer and study any device, from a phone to a car. DRM let Apple claim to be a champion of its users’ privacy even as it spied on them from asshole to appetite:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Now, Tesla is having its own Dieselgate scandal. A stunning investigation by Steve Stecklow and Norihiko Shirouzu for Reuters reveals how Tesla was able to create its own demon-haunted car, which systematically deceived drivers about its driving range, and the increasingly desperate measures the company turned to as customers discovered the ruse:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/tesla-batteries-range/

The root of the deception is very simple: Tesla mis-sells its cars by falsely claiming ranges that those cars can’t attain. Every person who ever bought a Tesla was defrauded.

But this fraud would be easy to detect. If you bought a Tesla rated for 353 miles on a charge, but the dashboard range predictor told you that your fully charged car could only go 150 miles, you’d immediately figure something was up. So your Telsa tells another lie: the range predictor tells you that you can go 353 miles.

But again, if the car continued to tell you it has 203 miles of range when it was about to run out of charge, you’d figure something was up pretty quick — like, the first time your car ran out of battery while the dashboard cheerily informed you that you had 203 miles of range left.

So Teslas tell a third lie: when the battery charge reached about 50%, the fake range is replaced with the real one. That way, drivers aren’t getting mass-stranded by the roadside, and the scam can continue.

But there’s a new problem: drivers whose cars are rated for 353 miles but can’t go anything like that far on a full charge naturally assume that something is wrong with their cars, so they start calling Tesla service and asking to have the car checked over.

This creates a problem for Tesla: those service calls can cost the company $1,000, and of course, there’s nothing wrong with the car. It’s performing exactly as designed. So Tesla created its boldest fraud yet: a boiler-room full of anti-salespeople charged with convincing people that their cars weren’t broken.

This new unit — the “diversion team” — was headquartered in a Nevada satellite office, which was equipped with a metal xylophone that would be rung in triumph every time a Tesla owner was successfully conned into thinking that their car wasn’t defrauding them.

When a Tesla owner called this boiler room, the diverter would run remote diagnostics on their car, then pronounce it fine, and chide the driver for having energy-hungry driving habits (shades of Steve Jobs’s “You’re holding it wrong”):

https://www.wired.com/2010/06/iphone-4-holding-it-wrong/

The drivers who called the Diversion Team weren’t just lied to, they were also punished. The Tesla app was silently altered so that anyone who filed a complaint about their car’s range was no longer able to book a service appointment for any reason. If their car malfunctioned, they’d have to request a callback, which could take several days.

Meanwhile, the diverters on the diversion team were instructed not to inform drivers if the remote diagnostics they performed detected any other defects in the cars.

The diversion team had a 750 complaint/week quota: to juke this stat, diverters would close the case for any driver who failed to answer the phone when they were eventually called back. The center received 2,000+ calls every week. Diverters were ordered to keep calls to five minutes or less.

Eventually, diverters were ordered to cease performing any remote diagnostics on drivers’ cars: a source told Reuters that “Thousands of customers were told there is nothing wrong with their car” without any diagnostics being performed.

Predicting EV range is an inexact science as many factors can affect battery life, notably whether a journey is uphill or downhill. Every EV automaker has to come up with a figure that represents some kind of best guess under a mix of conditions. But while other manufacturers err on the side of caution, Tesla has the most inaccurate mileage estimates in the industry, double the industry average.

Other countries’ regulators have taken note. In Korea, Tesla was fined millions and Elon Musk was personally required to state that he had deceived Tesla buyers. The Korean regulator found that the true range of Teslas under normal winter conditions was less than half of the claimed range.

Now, many companies have been run by malignant narcissists who lied compulsively — think of Thomas Edison, archnemesis of Nikola Tesla himself. The difference here isn’t merely that Musk is a deeply unfit monster of a human being — but rather, that DRM allows him to defraud his customers behind a state-enforced opaque veil. The digital computers at the heart of a Tesla aren’t just demons haunting the car, changing its performance based on whether it believes it is being observed — they also allow Musk to invoke the power of the US government to felonize anyone who tries to peer into the black box where he commits his frauds.

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/2023/07/28/edison-not-tesla/#demon-haunted-world

This Sunday (July 30) at 1530h, I’m appearing on a panel at Midsummer Scream in Long Beach, CA, to discuss the wonderful, award-winning “Ghost Post” Haunted Mansion project I worked on for Disney Imagineering.

Image ID [A scene out of an 11th century tome on demon-summoning called 'Compendium rarissimum totius Artis Magicae sistematisatae per celeberrimos Artis hujus Magistros. Anno 1057. Noli me tangere.' It depicts a demon tormenting two unlucky would-be demon-summoners who have dug up a grave in a graveyard. One summoner is held aloft by his hair, screaming; the other screams from inside the grave he is digging up. The scene has been altered to remove the demon's prominent, urinating penis, to add in a Tesla supercharger, and a red Tesla Model S nosing into the scene.]

Image: Steve Jurvetson (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tesla_Model_S_Indoors.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[mariacallous]

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden used his farewell address to the nation Wednesday to warn of an “oligarchy” of the ultra-wealthy taking root in the country and of a “tech-industrial complex” that is infringing on Americans’ rights and the future of democracy.

Speaking from the Oval Office as he prepares to hand over power Monday to President-elect Donald Trump, Biden sounded alarm over the accumulation of power and wealth among a small few.

“Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead,” Biden said, drawing attention to “a dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a few ultra-wealthy people. Dangerous consequences if their abuse of power is left unchecked.”

Invoking President Dwight Eisenhower’s warnings about the military-industrial complex when he left office, he added, “I’m equally concerned about the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers to our country as well.”

Biden sounded the alarm as some of the world’s richest individuals and titans of its technology industry have flocked to Trump’s side in recent months, particularly after his November victory. Billionaire Elon Musk spent more than $100 million on helping Trump get elected, and executives like Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos have donated to Trump’s inaugural committee and made pilgrimages to Trump’s private club in Florida for an audience with the president-elect.

Biden also called for a constitutional amendment to end immunity for sitting presidents, after the Supreme Court granted Trump sweeping protections last year from criminal liability over his role in trying to undermine his 2020 defeat to Biden.

[business-as-usual-bats]

"Give Elon Musk the benefit of the doubt-"

Except here's the thing- I did.

Because I heard about it before I saw it. I never particularly liked Musk, but I moreso felt fairly ambivalent toward him. I certainly did not picture him as a Nazi.

When I first heard about the Nazi salute I was surprised. And when that person told me, "Oh, but they're saying it was unintentional, just him being awkward-"

I believed that. I believed it was most likely a mistake, and people were exaggerating because so many are upset and panicked.

And then I saw the video.

Immediately it was so much worse than I had imagined. I was shocked. Everything about the video to his body language to his facial expression. How he did it twice. It was so obviously intentional and undeniable. And even then I compared it to multiple other videos of Nazis doing the salute, including modern-day Nazis. It's identical.

He didn't even deny it immediately afterward???

Not even a simple, "Ha, obviously that's not what I meant-" He avoided the question and laughed it off altogether, to imply MAYBE it wasn't on purpose. And yet you can't help but notice he still didn't deny it.

And the arguments defending him are INSANE. They capture pictures of other politicians mid-wave, mid-gesture and say, "See??? See??? They've all done it!"

No. They haven't. Not like that. Not a salute like that. Not even close to being so intentional and obvious.

Or they go, "It was him throwing his heart out to the crowd-"

No. There's multiple videos of him doing that during other speeches of his, and it's nowhere near this Nazi salute. Palms turned upward, or using both arms, etc, etc. It's not as if he's not used to giving speeches, as if he has not been coached and had training on what to do or not to do when public speaking.

"Noooo it's the Roman Salute!"

The Nazi Salute is based off the Roman Salute specifically (the arm is just dipped slightly lower-) AND EITHER WAY THEY'RE BOTH CONSIDERED HATE SYMBOLS??

The cognitive dissonance of people trying and trying and trying to excuse him. And to be clear- I would love if there was a good excuse! I don't want him to have thrown up a Nazi salute on live national television!

But he did. I cannot deny my own eyes. No matter what I am told, I know what I see as clear as day.

I'm not even saying he's a Nazi, I'm not claiming to know what his beliefs are or why he did a Nazi salute on Live television. Hell, maybe he did it as a dare, or a challenge to himself to see what he can get away with, but it doesn't really matter why.

What I know:

1. For whatever reason, Elon Musk intentionally did the Nazi Salute on Live television.

2. He did not immediately deny doing so or apologize.

3. Because of this, today's Nazis are praising him for it. They are saying "We're back!" And "This is our time!" And various celebratory phrases.

4. Even if you argue this was unintentional (even though I can tell by his body language it was) the damage has been done. Nazis are rallying behind him, encouraged, excited. This is going to have consequences.

Nazis have already been parading around my city. Now they're going to be bolder. The damage has been done.

TLDR: I was fully prepared to believe Elon doing the Nazi salute was an awkward mistake but one look at the video and I cannot fool myself into believing otherwise. And now we have to pay the price for his stupid actions.

[pintadorartist]

Musk and Republicans are still pushing KOSA in the SENATE as well

The bill is still being pushed at the end of the year for both chambers of Congress, either as part of an end-of-the-year spending bill or on its own. We need to keep up the pressure to stop KOSA from passing.

This is more pressing with FTC Commissioner Andrew Ferguson (whose agenda has been revealed to be very transphobic) being selected as Trump's nominee for Chairman of the FTC. If KOSA passes, this will give him and the Trump administration the power to attack online platforms that "harm children," making it harder to share progressive content and organize online.

So this week, keep making calls, emailing, and faxing your Senators and these Senate leaders as well.

In addition to your senators, call the Democrat and Republican Senate Leaders:

Republican Senate Leaders:

Mitch McConnell:

Phone: (202) 224-2541 Fax: (202) 224-2499

John Thune:

Phone: (202) 224-2321

Fax: (202) 228-5429

John Barrasso:

Main: 202-224-6441 Fax: 202-224-1724

Joni Ernst:

PHONE: (319) 365-4504

FAX: (319) 365-4683

Shelley Capito:

Phone: 202-224-6472

Steve Daines:

p: (202) 224-2651 f: 202-228-1236

Democrat Senate Leaders:

Chuck Schumer:

Phone: (202) 224-6542

Fax: (202) 228-3027

Dick Durbin:

Phone: 202-224-2152

Debbie Stabenow:

Phone:(202) 224-4822

Elizabeth Warren:

Phone: (202) 224-4543

Mark R. Warner:

Phone: 202-224-2023

Amy Klobuchar:

Phone: 202-224-3244

Fax: 202-228-2186

Bernie Sanders:

Phone: 202-224-5141 Fax: 202-228-0776

Catherine Cortez Masto:

Phone: (202) 224-3542

Joe Manchin:

Phone: 202-224-3954 Fax: 202-228-0002

Cory A. Booker:

Phone: (202) 224-3224

Fax: (202) 224-8378

Tammy Baldwin:

Phone: (202) 224-5653

Brian Schatz:

Phone: (202) 224-3934

Find Your Senator:

Or you can call the Congressional switchboard today and ask to be connected with each of your Senators’ offices. Demand they vote against this bill: (202) 224-3121

If you don’t like talking to people, you can call after their offices close so you can leave a message

you can also Text RESIST to 50409 to send your message into a fax and email to your senator

Call tools:

FFTF:

Fax:

Here are scripts to use for the calls:

DEMOCRATIC VERSION:

I am urging you not to include KOSA in any end of year spending bills and to keep it from passing. With Trump ascending into office, this bill will give the FTC power to control speech online. FTC Commissioner Andrew Ferguson just came out with an agenda that will focus on going after online platforms for displaying LGBT content. With KOSA, this would only give them and republican attorney generals even more power to remove any content they deem “harmful”, which we know is an excuse to censor everything they don’t like. Suicide rates will skyrocket for marginalized youth with this bill restricting content.

200 human rights and LGBT organizations total came out in an open letter opposing it. The ACLU is against it. Hundreds of thousands of Gen Z are against it. We know the harms of social media, and we do not want this. Major news have reported that this bill actively harms kids. 

The rewritten bill is still very dangerous, and giving any more power to Donald Trump to silence people he deems his “enemies” is a horrible move. With people like Donald Trump Jr. and Elon Musk supporting KOSA, this is enough of a sign to not push it forward. 

Multiple experts agree this bill pushes age verification, even with the new language. KOSA hands more private data of children to third party companies. The updated language threatens encryption. How is this protecting children’s privacy?  KOSA actively harms kids. Do NOT support this bill. Thank you.

REPUBLICAN VERSION: (pretend you’re GOP)

I am urging you VOTE NO on KOSA, the Kid’s Online Safety Act. Even with the rewritten language, this is still a dangerous bill that will harm children and censor pro-life content on the internet. Even with the new language, this bill still gives state Attorney Generals power to censor any content they don’t like. This bill would be weaponized by unelected bureaucrats to censor Americans, why else do you think Democrats are pushing it so hard? Why else would Biden and Kamala Harris support it?

Many news organizations have reported that this bill actively harms kids by exposing their private data to strangers under the guise of protecting them. We need to hold Big Tech accountable, but KOSA is not the solution.

The bill let any state attorney general and the FTC to sue any website for “harmful” content. Do we really want blue state lawyers deciding what can and can’t be allowed online? Big Tech is already censoring us. That’s why they support KOSA. This is massive government overreach. We need a bill that actually protects children by creating better security measures instead of bringing about more censorship to everyone. 

Multiple experts agree this bill pushes age verification, even with the new language. KOSA hands more private data of children to third-party companies, which would put them in further danger. This also exposes everyone else. How is this protecting children’s privacy? What parent would want their child’s private data in the hands of strangers like this? KOSA is actively putting kids in danger. It censors our freedom of speech. Do NOT support this bill. Thank you.

——————————————————————————-------------------

Here's the HOUSE version of this post:

Make sure to share this around to get more people involved.

I also ask that if you have an account with these other sites, you share and upvote these posts(they're different posts):

Reddit-

-Instagram:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Fight For The Future (@fightfortheftr)

-Bsky:

-Twitter:

-Tiktok: (i dont have tiktok so i cant link a kosa video here, my bad)

[misfitwashere]

How we get rid of the American oligarchy

ROBERT REICH

JAN 16

Friends,

In what was billed as his “farewell address,” President Biden yesterday warned America that the nation is succumbing to an “oligarchy” of the ultra-wealthy, and the “dangerous concentration of power” they pose to democratic ideals:

“Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.”

He’s right, of course. 

Fascism starts with the Trump derriere-kissing we’re now witnessing by the wealthiest people in America, who own the biggest megaphones and thereby determine what information Americans get. What they get back from Trump is raw power to do whatever they want. 

Elon Musk — the richest person in the world — controls X, which under his leadership has become a cesspool of lies and bigotry. 

Musk has posted or replied to more than 80 posts about the Los Angeles fires, many of which downplayed the role of climate change — placing blame instead on individual female firefighters of color and lesbian firefighters, including posting their names and faces. 

He boosted an hour-long propaganda video by right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones that claimed the fires were “part of a larger globalist plot” to cause the collapse of the United States; Musk replied simply, “True.” 

He repeatedly amplified claims that the Los Angeles Fire Department’s investments in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs cost lives by wasting money that could have been spent on disaster response, suggesting that the destruction could have been mitigated if more white men had been retained.

Musk has made it clear that his platform’s main role during the upcoming Trump regime will be to back whatever Trump chooses to do and criticize Trump’s critics with more lies and bigotry. 

Jeff Bezos — the second-richest person in America — owns Amazon. His Prime Video just announced it will spend a whopping $40 million for a documentary about Melania Trump, for which she is an executive producer, and stream it on Amazon Prime. 

What else will Amazon promote or censor, to curry favor with Trump? 

Bezos also owns The Washington Post. Just before the election, he killed a Post endorsement of Kamala Harris. Earlier this month, a Post cartoonist quit after the newspaper spiked a cartoon showing Bezos and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg kneeling before Trump.

Mark Zuckerberg — the third-richest person in America — owns Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. He’s sucking up to Trump by ridding his platforms of content moderation so that they, too, can amplify Trump’s lies and bigotry. 

Announcing the end of fact-checking on his platforms, Zuckerberg says he thinks it will “take another ten years” of fact-free operation before Meta is “back to the place that it maybe could have been if I hadn’t messed that up in the first place.”

Zuckerberg says the deciding factor was the “cultural tipping point” of Trump’s election. 

Not only will Zuckerberg fire most of the 40,000 fact-checkers who have screened his platforms’ posts for accuracy, but he will be moving the few who remain from California to Texas, “where there’s less concern about the bias of our teams.”

So Texas workers will be less “biased” than California workers? As Dan Evon of the nonprofit News Literacy Project notes, the move “provides an air of legitimacy to a popular disinformation narrative: that fact-checking is politically biased.”

Training materials for Meta’s remaining trust and safety workers include examples of speech that Zuckerberg now wants permitted: 

“Immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of shit.”

“Gays are freaks.”

“Look at that tranny (beneath photo of 17 year old girl).”

Trump praised the move, saying “I think they’ve come a long way.” 

A reporter asked Trump if his threats to put Zuckerberg in prison caused the change in policy. “Probably,” Trump responded. Perhaps the Federal Trade Commission’s lawsuit against Meta played a role as well?

Zuckerberg has also promoted prominent Republican Joel Kaplan to be Meta’s chief global affairs officer and put Dana White, CEO of Ultimate Fighting Championship and a close friend of Trump, on its board.

My friends, none of this has anything to do with freedom of speech. It has everything to do with the power of money. 

The three richest Americans want to decide what the rest of us will know about the coming Trump regime. 

Concentrated wealth is the enemy of democracy. As the great jurist Louis Brandeis is reputed to have said, “America has a choice. We can either have great wealth in the hands of a few, or we can have a democracy. But we cannot have both.” 

As we slouch into the darkness of Trump II, America needs people and institutions that speak truth to power, not align themselves with it. 

When we the people regain power, three reforms are critically necessary to begin to tame the oligarchy:

X, Amazon, Meta, and other giant tech media platforms must either be busted up or treated as public utilities, responsible to the public. 

Hugely wealthy individuals must not be permitted to own critical media. 

Large accumulations of individual wealth must be taxed. 

My friends, we will prevail. 

[carrotcakecrumble]

Talking to anyone in the UK that is dismissive of the things Trump said in his inauguration speech because ‘it’s Trump, what do you expect?’:

If an American president had acted the way Trump has/is acting say, 15 years ago or something, it would be being made a much bigger deal of over here in the Uk than it is being made of today. It would be unthinkable that a Labour government would cosy up with a world leader who incited a coup and disrupted the peaceful transition of power, yet we have Kier Starmer intent of having a relationship with the Trump administration. And hardly anyone bats an eyelid. No one expects anyone to bat an eyelid.

I hear people talking about the ‘Gulf of America’ thing and, for the most part, calling it crazy. But partnered with crazy I keep hear again and again & hand in hand, ‘it’s hilarious’

is it?

Overtons window is the idea that (as I understand it) a political leader will act within a certain window of what the majority public deems as acceptable. Over the last decade, a lot of us have been watching hopelessly as misinformation and propaganda push this window further and further right. Widening and widening it until it’s just a gaping void full of Elon Musk’s sieg heiling on national television and American presidents disregarding repeatedly the rule of a law they evidently have very little understanding of. A lot of the events that spurred this migration right was met with laughter and disbelief in this country.

After Roe V Wade, do you still disbelieve ?

When we laugh at how insane Trump / Musk / Vance is, we dilute how serious the situation actually is, which in return allows this soft-core fascism to enter our mainstream. Someone with that much power opening their mouth and consistently, unintentionally making us laugh should shock us so much more than it is??? A president openingly stating he is willing to disregard current science and research and cut funding to thousands (millions?) of Transgender American citizens should see other progressive western countries angry, intervening, doing something. A billionaire thrusting out a Nazi salute towards the American flag at a presidential inauguration should incite something close to riots. An American president openingly declaring the country an Oligarchy should be on front pages everywhere!!! For weeks!!! For months!!! Yet it’s been days and the buzz around it is already starting to die out. Trump said something 🤪🩷crazy and 🫣😅laughable again so now that’s all we can talk about, of course.

We need to remember that as shockingly unbelievable the things Trumps says are, that it is still reality. It’s not a joke. It has real world consequences. He means it. A lot of American people want him to mean it. A lot of people in this country want him to mean it. We must remember to challenge these things when we hear them, remember to make it clear how dangerous it is. Make a fuss. Make a noise. Make it unacceptable once again.

Most importantly, we must remember: It is not funny.

They (fascists in all their forms) want you find it funny, because then you’ll hardly be able to believe it’s actually happening until it’s already far too late. We should never laugh so loud that we fail to hear the real threat being whispered beneath.

Take everything he and his henchmen say with sincerity and, for god’s sake, act like it’s the most powerful men in the Western world saying it.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Nobody

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

August 2, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Aug 03, 2024

Today, Aaron C. Davis and Carol D. Leonnig of the Washington Post reported that there is reason to believe that when Trump’s 2016 campaign was running low on funds, Trump accepted a $10 million injection of cash from Egypt’s authoritarian leader Abdel Fatah al-Sisi. It is against the law to accept direct or indirect financial support from foreign nationals or foreign governments for a political campaign in the United States.

In early 2017, CIA officials told Justice Department officials that a confidential informant had told them of such a cash exchange, and those officials handed the matter off to Robert Mueller, the special counsel who was already looking at the links between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russian operatives. FBI agents noted that on September 16, Trump had met with Sisi when the Egyptian leader was at the U.N. General Assembly in New York City. 

After the meeting, Trump broke with U.S. policy to praise Sisi, calling him a “fantastic guy.” 

Trump’s campaign had been dogged with a lack of funds, and his advisers had begged him to put some of his own money into it. He refused until October 28, when he loaned the campaign $10 million.

An FBI investigation took years to get records, but Davis and Leonnig reported that in 2019 the FBI learned of a key withdrawal from an Egypt bank. In January 2017, five days before Trump took office, an organization linked to Egypt’s intelligence service asked a manager at a branch of the state-run National Bank of Egypt to “kindly withdraw” $9,998,000 in U.S. currency. The bundles of $100 bills filled two bags and weighed more than 200 pounds. 

Once in office, Trump embraced Sisi and, in a reversal of U.S. policy, invited him to be one of his first guests at the White House. “I just want to let everybody know, in case there was any doubt, that we are very much behind President al-Sissi,” Trump said. 

Mueller had gotten that far in pursuit of the connection between Trump and Sisi when he was winding down his investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. He handed the Egypt investigation off to the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, D C., where it appears then–attorney general William Barr killed it. 

Today, Brian Schwartz of CNBC reported that Elon Musk and other tech executives are putting their money behind a social media ad campaign for Trump and Vance, and are creating targeted ads in swing states by collecting information about voters under false pretenses. According to Schwartz, their America PAC, or political action committee, says it helps viewers register to vote. And, indeed, the ads direct would-be voters in nonswing states to voter registration sites.

But people responding to the ad in swing states are not sent to registration sites. Instead, they are presented with “a highly detailed personal information form [and] prompted to enter their address, cellphone number and age,” handing over “priceless personal data to a political operation” that can then create ads aimed at that person’s demographic and target them personally in door-to-door campaigns. After getting the information, the site simply says, “Thank you,” without directing the viewer toward a registration site.

Forbes estimates Musk’s wealth at more than $235 billion. 

In June the Trump Organization announced a $500 million deal with Saudi real estate developer Dar Global to build a Trump International hotel in Oman. 

In January 2011, when he was director of the FBI, Robert Mueller gave a speech to the Citizens Crime Commission of New York. He explained that globalization and modern technology had changed the nature of organized crime. Rather than being regional networks with a clear structure, he said, organized crime had become international, fluid, and sophisticated and had multibillion-dollar stakes. Its operators were cross-pollinating across countries, religions, and political affiliations, sharing only their greed. They did not care about ideology; they cared about money. They would do anything for a price.

These criminals “may be former members of nation-state governments, security services, or the military,” he said. “They are capitalists and entrepreneurs. But they are also master criminals who move easily between the licit and illicit worlds. And in some cases, these organizations are as forward-leaning as Fortune 500 companies.”

In order to corner international markets, Mueller explained, these criminal enterprises "may infiltrate our businesses. They may provide logistical support to hostile foreign powers. They may try to manipulate those at the highest levels of government. Indeed, these so-called 'iron triangles' of organized criminals, corrupt government officials, and business leaders pose a significant national security threat."

In a new book called Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, journalist Anne Applebaum carries that story forward into the present, examining how today’s autocrats work together to undermine democracy. She says that “the language of the democratic world, meaning rights, laws, rule of law, justice, accountability, [and] transparency…[is]  harmful to them,” especially as those are the words that their internal opposition uses. “And so they need to undermine the people who use it and, if they can, discredit it.” 

Those people, Applebaum says, “believe they are owed power, they deserve power.” When they lose elections, they “come back in a second term and say, right, this time, I'm not going to make that mistake again, and…then change their electoral system, or…change the constitution, change the judicial system, in order to make sure that they never lose.”

Almost exactly a year ago, on August 1, 2023, a grand jury in Washington, D.C., indicted former president Donald J. Trump for conspiring to defraud the United States, conspiring to disenfranchise voters, and conspiring and attempting to obstruct an official proceeding. The charges stemmed from Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election. A grand jury is made up of 23 ordinary citizens who weigh evidence of criminal activity and produce an indictment if 12 or more of them vote in favor. 

The grand jury indicted Trump for “conspiracy to defraud the United States by using dishonesty, fraud, and deceit to impair, obstruct, and defeat the lawful federal government function by which the results of the presidential election are collected, counted, and certified by the government”; “conspiracy to corruptly obstruct and impede the January 6 congressional proceeding at which the collected results of the presidential election are counted and certified”; and “conspiracy against the right to vote and to have one’s vote counted.” 

“Each of these conspiracies,” the indictment reads, “targeted a bedrock function of the United States federal government: the nation’s process of collecting, counting, and certifying the results of the presidential election.” “This federal government function…is foundational to the United States’ democratic process, and until 2021, had operated in a peaceful and orderly manner for more than 130 years.” 

The case of the United States of America v. Donald J. Trump was randomly assigned to Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, who was appointed by President Obama in 2014 and confirmed 95–0 in the Senate. Trump pleaded not guilty on August 3, after which his lawyers repeatedly delayed their pretrial motions until, on December 7, Trump asked the Washington, D.C., Circuit Court of Appeals to decide whether he was immune from prosecution. Chutkan had to put off her initial trial date of March 4, 2024, and said she would not reschedule until the court decided the question of Trump’s immunity. 

In February the appeals court decided he was not immune. Trump appealed to the Supreme Court, which waited until July 1, 2024, to decide that Trump enjoys broad immunity from prosecution for crimes committed as part of his official acts. Today the Washington, D.C., Circuit Court of Appeals sent the case back to Chutkan, almost exactly a year after it was first brought.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[sirfrogsworth]

Today in, "Conservatives keep making me side with Disney"...

So, Gina Carano is suing Disney. And Elon Musk is paying for her lawyers. And they released the complaint document.

It's... a doozy.

I can't decide if her lawyers are not taking this seriously at all or if they are taking it super duper extra seriously.

Like, that's a real thing that a lawyer wrote.

As you know, judges are famous for enjoying levity in official court documents. I think in law school you are encouraged to add comedy bits. True facts.

Gina wants money for emotional damages. But she also wants to be rehired, which sounds like another funny comedy bit. They scrapped an entire show because of her nonsense.

Most are saying this will get thrown out with haste due to the fact that Gina wasn't actually fired. She had already done her contracted work. Disney decided not to hire her for any *new* work. So I guess she wants them to honor an imaginary contract that was in her head.

The entire document is just as ridiculous as the opening crawl. It starts out by listing Gina's show biz bona fides. Her myriad accomplishments in Hollywood were listed one by one in a section titled...

Well, I'm intrigued.

Let's take a look at this illustrious career, according to this document.

"Carano is the first-ever female star in mixed martial arts cage fighting to successfully transition to a career in movies, breaking down substantial barriers for women in the sport."

Off to an interesting start.

All the cage fighting gals can act in movies now and they all have Gina to thank for barrier busting.

"Carano received roles in Hollywood and independent film productions such as Haywire, Fast & Furious 6, Heist, Deadpool, Almost Human, Extraction, Daughter of the Wolf, and Madness in the Method."

I've heard of several of those things! And I think I almost remember her in Deadpool! Very impressive.

Oh wait, they're not done...

"On May 13, 2008, “Gina Carano” was the fastest rising search on Google and third most searched person on Yahoo! while being ranked no. 5 on Yahoo!’s “Top Ten Influential Women of 2008” list."

In 2008 she was popular on Yahoo for a bit. Got it.

Has she won any awards?

"In 2012, Carano was the first recipient of the ActionFest Film Festival’s Chuck Norris Award for Best Female Action Star.

In 2017, Carano received the Artemis Action Warrior Award.

In 2019, Carano received The Rising Star award at Ischia Film Festival."

Very prestigious. I'm sure Chuck Norris has a lovely basement where that ceremony was almost certainly held.

You know what, why don't we just skip to The Mandalorian?

"Although her character instantly became one of the most recognized and popular characters in the series..."

Gina, no... that was the little green puppet.

You were the one who couldn't act very well but you made up for it by punching things good.

"Carano was again instrumental in the success of Season 2 of The Mandalorian."

Nope, still the puppet.

End of "accomplishments."

The next section is titled

For some reason they left out "bigoted" before speech. Weird.

In most of it, it legit sounds like they are making a case *against* her. They show that everyone at Disney and Lucasfilm tried very hard to give her chance after chance. They did everything but point blank tell her, "Either learn and relieve yourself of this ignorance or stop posting shit online."

She totally had the option to keep her shitty views to herself and shut the heck up for the duration and enjoy the money and success a Star Wars show can bring. It's like swatting away a lottery ticket.

I'm all for free speech. And if the government tried to arrest her for saying dumb shit, I'd be against that. But that freedom to speak does not mean there are never consequences. People are also free to not like what you have to say.

The entire last section of the document is just tweets that Gina screencapped. Like, her lawyers didn't even redo them so they had consistent formatting or pixel dimensions. They were literally just off Gina's phone.

She thought she was collecting receipts but it was mostly just her co-stars standing up for marginalized groups.

Based Pedro Pascal posted this...

And the document commented...

"Pascal was not disciplined, required to review documentaries on any of these topics or speak to individuals with contrary points of view, or pressured to apologize for any of his posts. His employment was not terminated, and Defendants made no public statements about his social media posts, much less refer to them as “abhorrent.”"

Yes, why wasn't Pedro forced to listen to MAGA dipshits tell him why they hate his sister? Why wasn't he told to watch a Dinesh D'Souza documentary? Why wasn't he told to apologize for posting cool ass muppet memes?

The most telling part of the document for me... the part that really showed her ignorance... was when she compared one of her tweets to one of Carl Weathers'.

First, her infamous tweet comparing the holocaust to conservatives being moderated on social media for spreading misinformation...

And then Carl posted this in response to conservatives banning books...

And the document says...

"Even Carano’s male co-star, the late Carl Weathers posted the exact same message, but no action was taken against him. Nor was Weathers accused by Defendants of denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identity."

THE EXACT SAME MESSAGE

THE. EXACT. SAME. MESSAGE.

[unsolicited-opinions]

Father Calvin Robinson finished his remarks at the National Pro-Life Summit by throwing an Elon Musk salute, much to the delight of the crowd.

The Anglican Catholic Church put out this statement to advise they'd defrocked him:

A Statement on Calvin Robinson At approximately 3:00 pm today (1/29) members of the College of Bishops of the ACC were made aware of a post made on X showing the end of a speech made by Calvin Robinson at the National Pro-Life Summit in Washington, DC. In it, he closed his comments with a gesture that many have interpreted as a pro-Nazi salute. While we cannot say what was in Mr. Robinson’s heart when he did this, his action appears to have been an attempt to curry favor with certain elements of the American political right by provoking its opposition. Mr. Robinson had been warned that online trolling and other such actions (whether in service of the left or right) are incompatible with a priestly vocation and was told to desist. Clearly, he has not, and as such, his license in this Church has been revoked. He is no longer serving as a priest in the ACC. Furthermore, we understand that this is not just an administrative matter. The Holocaust was an episode of unspeakable horror, enacted by a regime of evil men. We condemn Nazi ideology and anti-Semitism in all its forms. And we believe that those who mimic the Nazi salute, even as a joke or an attempt to troll their opponents, trivialize the horror of the Holocaust and diminish the sacrifice of those who fought against its perpetrators. Such actions are harmful, divisive, and contrary to the tenets of Christian charity. Finally, we pray that God will give us grace to lay aside our unhappy divisions, and we commend our nation and ourselves to his Almighty protection.

[darkmaga-returns]

Thoughts in the Immediate Election Aftermath

The Prudentialist

Nov 06, 2024

"The demons cunningly withdraw for a time in the hope that we will cease to guard our heart, thinking we have now attained peace; then they suddenly attack our unhappy soul and seize it like a sparrow."

- St. Isaiah the Solitary

As the Associated Press has called the presidential race for Donald Trump, (with Kamala yet to emerge to offer a concession speech, at least at the time of writing this) I’m left with a huge shit-eating grin on my face. However I can’t say it’ll last forever, chasing a high from so many years ago will never be quite the same once you get a hold of it again. I sent my vote for Donald Trump during early voting, and if you include the primaries (and for the sake of disclosure) I have voted for Donald Trump six times now with this election being the last. I had voted for a bull in the china shop in 2016, thinking he would be safer in terms of foreign policy over Hillary Clinton, and my politics moved further to the right as I saw the bureaucracy, the media, big business, etc., rally against him and people who voted for him. 2020 of course happened, but we’ll get into that later on today.

And here we are.

The results as of this morning:

While the Spirit of 2016 crackles through the air like the spirit of radio did in 80s and the glass ceiling still stands without a crack, the nagging feeling of “I’ve been here before” lingers in my mind. Trump and his supporters have been called Hitler, fascists, racists, all the rest, and have seen conservative aligned businesses targeted, and any elite defections have lawfare and the like as Elon Musk and his companies have. Had the economic conditions been better, had the borders not been opened up for millions to pour in and to get better treatment than actual Americans, the constant preference for the foreigner over the citizen, the mandates, the inflation, all of it…this election could potentially have gone a different direction and this isn’t even mentioning the attempts on Trump’s life.

There are some key items as to how we got to here, in no particular order.

Biden dropping out of the race.

Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter (now X.)

Kamala’s poor quality as a candidate

Rampant inflation

Foreign Policy (Shipping Lanes, Israel, Ukraine)

Regime preference for foreigners

Lawlessness/Anarcho-Tyranny (Law and Order)

Open Borders - Every State a Border State

Countless more factors are included, but one thing that I think is really worth mentioning here is just how millennial coded this election was, especially for Kamala’s campaigns. From “Brat” to her appearance on the “Call Her Daddy” Podcast, her staffers going on TikTok to talk their “MAGA Uncles” as if they were literal preschoolers shows us that the mid-thirties schoolmarm schtick wasn’t going to sit well. Kamala was a piss poor candidate in 2020, and was already tied to an unpopular (and illegitimately elected) President Biden, and her lack of policy positions and presupposed “vibes” weren’t going to go far enough when the average person’s quality of life had gone down, costs have gone up, and the worship of lawlessness meant what they did have was very much at risk especially in urban areas. California has opted to be tougher on crime based on the results of Prop 36.

[theconstitutionisgayculture]

Sorry, I just have to complain about something.

I have a casual acquaintance with this guy from NC, and I think he's pretty cool. He's more than ten years younger than me, but we have a lot of similar interests and viewpoints, and he strikes me as a genuinely kind person who's very easy to get along with. I always avoid politics with him because I assume most of Gen Z is left leaning, as per the usual with the youth of our culture, and I never wanted to find out about his political views and consequently lose respect for him.

I ran into him today, having not seen him since before Christmas, and I was eager to catch up a bit, but unfortunately, the first words out of his mouth were about how he's been distracted by the inauguration, alarmed specifically that Elon Musk gave a proper Nazi salute during his speech, and that he's afraid for the future of our country.

I am so put out with the TDS. I have been a libertarian and a middlest for a long time, and I used to pride myself on my ability to find common ground with most folks. But more and more, over the last ten years, I have come to feel like I have to close myself off from people, and often young people in particular, because they are constantly revealing their inability to think for themselves and their utter lack of tolerance towards what are, in my opinion, perfectly valid viewpoints and concerns.

Long of it short, I would rather not automatically assume that young people, in spite of how intelligent and reasonable they may seem when first met, are not worth getting to know, but I am genuinely bothered by their penchant to assume that everyone thinks the way they do, and that anyone who doesn't is evil.

I think often about something you're fond of saying, which is that if a person can't accept me for who I am, they are not a true friend. There are still people I love and am hurt to think of losing whom I believe would want nothing to do with me if we honestly discussed politics, but as the culture wars drag on and intensify, I also notice how much resentment towards them has blossomed in my heart.

I am looking forward to four years of Trump and truly hoping that, in time, America can heal.

It is sad, I agree. But there are signs of hope. Young men are trending conservative, and Trump won the young male vote. He won gains in every demographic, some of those gains being historic numbers in groups that haven't gone right in nearly 50 years. There's growing backlash to far right policies in deep blue states like California and deep blue cities like Chicago. Divisive, evil ideologies like DEI and wokeism are on the decline. The media is rapidly losing what little influence, and viewership, it has left. For the first time since the early 90s, everything is trending in the right direction in the US. And not just the US, either. Right wing populism is on the rise all across Europe, too.

This isn't to say that you should live and die by political trends. It's just to show that things are changing. Your friend is going to wake up one day and find that his circle has shrunken to just himself and a few miserable people who see Nazis and death squads around every corner. It will be up to him to decide if he wants to cling to irrational fear that everyone else has long since thrown off, or keep wallowing in that misery because it's comfortable and familiar. And no one can make that choice for him. Just like no one can make any of the screeching pearl clutchers on the left see reality as it actually exists. That's a journey they need to make, or reject, on their own.

Your choice is a more difficult one. You can observe the world through eyes that aren't covered with ideological blinders. You can see all the good parts of your friend, as well as the bad. And you need to decide if holding onto that friendship, if betting that those good parts will win out in the end, is worth dealing with all the bad and hiding a part of yourself from your friend. If the enjoyment you get from being his friend outweighs always needing to be on your toes in case he finds out you hold an opinion he can't handle. That's a choice only you can make.

But while you're thinking about that, consider this. This young man considers you a friend. That seems to mean he thinks you agree with him on everything, and that anyone who disagrees with him is evil in some fundamental, visible way. If you talk to him about your beliefs, that may force him to come to terms with the fact that someone he likes can also have "evil" beliefs. It may ruin the friendship, but it also might be something he desperately needs to find out. A black man named Daryl Davis once dissolved an entire KKK chapter just by making friends with its members and showing them that their beliefs about black people were wrong. I'm not saying you, or anyone else, needs to be Daryl Davis for young leftists, but personal relationships can be a powerful tool for change.

Just something to think about.

[mariacallous]

At around 5 pm on a Thursday in December 2022, a privacy- and information-freedom-focused programmer named Micah Lee learned, to his shock, that he had just been banned from Twitter. His crime: posting a link to @Elonjets, an account on the competing social media service Mastodon that tracked the location of the private jet of Twitter’s new billionaire owner, Elon Musk—a link that Musk would later claim amounted to “doxing” despite the jet’s location info being publicly available.

For a moment, Lee grieved the loss of an account he'd spent years building, with more than 50,000 followers. Then, almost immediately, that feeling was replaced with relief to have escaped a platform he felt was already in precipitous moral decline. Since Musk had taken it over two months earlier, Twitter's new owner had already allowed previously banned far-right and even neo-Nazi figures back onto the service in the name of free speech—while simultaneously axing the accounts of leftists. Perhaps getting banned for offending the mercurial mogul behind those partisan decisions was “a good way to go,” Lee decided.

He hasn't looked back. Twitter eventually told Lee he could return to the service if he deleted his @Elonjets tweet. Instead, he stayed off the platform for eight months before finally deleting that post, but only so that he could log in and delete his entire history on the platform. A few months later, after Twitter had become X, he wrote a few messages promoting a book he'd written—all now deleted, too—and says he has barely touch the service otherwise. “Honestly, my mental health is much better since then,” he adds.

Now, Lee wants to help you achieve that same cleansing release. Today, he launched Cyd—an acronym for “Claw back Your Data”—a desktop application designed to give users more control over their X history: archiving it, trimming it to their preferences, or destroying it altogether. In the free version of Cyd, the program allows anyone to download their X posts—Cyd can save up to 2,000 of your most recent posts itself, or you can use X's built-in feature that allows you to download your entire archive—and then automatically delete them. For $36 a year, users can access Cyd's premium features, like erasing the contents of their account with more fine-grained filters based on variables like date, number of likes or retweets, or keywords, un-retweeting or removing likes from posts en masse, and unfollowing all X users.

While Cyd for now is designed specifically for managing—or emptying out—your X account, Lee says he hopes to eventually add other features for carrying out the same archiving and deletion functions on services like Facebook and Reddit. “A handful of billionaires like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos control all the platforms that we use all the time and where we have all our data,” Lee says. “I want to basically make it so that the users of these platforms—everybody else who isn't one of these really rich tech billionaires—has a bit more power.”

Lee is launching Cyd in the midst of a mass X exodus: Millions of users have fled the service in the wake of the election of Donald Trump, many turned off by Elon Musk's support for Trump in the form of both campaign contributions and in his own nonstop political posts, as well as the increasingly conservative bent of X's remaining user base. The social media Bluesky, in particular, appears to have gained most of those X refugees, adding at least 8 million users in the weeks after the election.

“I think it's incredibly timely for people to delete as much as they can, as much as they want to, off of X, and just stop using the platform,” Lee says, “and try to take some of its influence away and move it to better platforms like Bluesky or Mastodon.”

Cyd is only one of several apps like TweetDeleter and Redact.dev that offer to archive and prune your X account. But unlike TweetDeleter, Cyd allows mass deletion of posts in its free version. While Redact.dev offers more free deletion features than Cyd, Cyd's $36 paid version is about half the price of Redact's $6 a month premium plan. It also offers some features that Redact doesn't, like deleting posts based on number of likes or retweets, so that users can, for instance, scrub all but their most viral posts.

Despite Cyd's timeliness, Lee says he's been working on a social media archiving and deletion tool for years, even before Musk acquired Twitter. In 2019, he released Semiphemeral, an earlier app with social media management features similar to Cyd, partially in response to his own experience of becoming the target of harassment and antisemitic tweets in the previous years. To perform its social media archiving and curation, Semiphemeral tapped into Twitter's API, an interface to its backend data provided to developers.

A few months after Musk acquired Twitter, however—and after the site summarily banned Lee and a handful of other journalists for linking to @Elonjets—Twitter ended free access to that API, killing Semiphemeral. A year later, however, Lee was laid off from his job as the director of information security at the news outlet the Intercept, along with about a third of the newsroom, and started looking for projects to work on. He soon figured out that he could revive Semiphemeral by designing it to automatically view and scrape X pages from a web browser instead of using X's API. “Everything it does is actually something you can do yourself in a web browser,” Lee says. “It would just take you a lot more time.” He also rebranded the app to Cyd in an attempt to make its name easier to remember and spell, and created a cute blue bird in a pirate mask (also named Cyd) to serve as its animated logo.

Though it's cheaper than some other options, Cyd's annual cost of $36 for its premium features will no doubt still be too steep for many users. Lee says he plans to work with organizations that represent at-risk groups to offer the tool for free to those who need it. He also points out, perhaps only half-jokingly, that $36 is less than half the annual cost of a Twitter blue account.

More to the point, he says that he hopes that unlike some of his previous software projects—the secure and anonymous file-sharing tool Onionshare and the safe-download protection app Dangerzone—he hopes this one will have a business model that gives him time to work on it and expand its feature set to include other social media platforms. “I would love to make it so that it can pay for itself,” Lee says, “so that I can make it bigger.”

Despite those big ambitions, Lee says that he hadn't quite intended to launch Cyd just as Bluesky experiences a user explosion at X's expense—and as more users than ever consider the motives and power of the tech billionaires who control the platforms they use.

“I knew that X was going down the drain, and I knew that people would be pissed off about it. I didn't really quite realize that people would be quitting en masse like they are now," says Lee. “It just happens to be perfect timing.”