#the Supreme Court is rigged

[captainpirateface]

“So this is how liberty dies…with thunderous applause.”

- Padme Amidala -

Fuck the Supreme Court.

Fuck the United States.

Fuck Independence Day.

Fuck Donald Trump.

Fuck this.

I'm fucking horrified.

[Presidential Immunity]

Good fuckin' job.

[godisarepublican]

[stephen-barry]

https://meidasnews.com/news/new-york-times-report-shows-coordination-between-twitter-and-trump-campaign

Isn't this illegal?

If so, please prosecute. Or at least order influence campaign to end immediately.

[tinkkles]

Every time there's like a major event signalling the impending downfall of our democracy I have to do my silly little recurring meeting with my lead and be like "yeah I'm hanging in there, crazy news this week 🙂" and it's just so incredibly clear that he has no idea what I'm talking about and has never bothered to even tangentially care about politics not once in his life

[m-50a]

AOC Delivers DEVASTATING News To Clarence Thomas And Samuel Alito

[hellyeahheroes]

Law & Order's Biggest Lie by Skip Intro

[thisismenow3]

With Republicans, EAIAC (every accusation is a confession)

[potofsoup]

i love your fourth of july comics every year but this years feels extremely optimistic about biden’s abilities in the face of him letting roe get overturned and funding a gen*cide at worst or letting it happen at best by taking the bare minimum of regulatory action… i mean can he really be trusted at all anymore to do the right thing or act in line with the people’s demands? and how do we know the people behind project 2025 won’t just rig the election again to get in under false pretenses?

Hihi! Thank you for reading and enjoying my July 4th comics every year! I am in a non-US airport en route to a month-long trip in a place with sketchy internet, so sorry in advance for sloppiness in my response (and potentially going radio silent).

But:

I don't think he "let" Roe get overturned, since that was the Supreme Court's overwhelming conservative majority, which really started with Mitch McConnell refusing to approve Obama's appointee and forcing it into a 2016 election issue. The fact that Trump got to appoint 3 Supreme Court Justices is what got us here.

Re: Biden and the Israel/Hamas war ... on the one hand, there's definitely more that he could have done, but on the other hand, they are a whole other country over there. It's Hamas that initiated the Oct 7 attacks and took the hostages. It's Netanyahu and his right-wing government who decided to retaliate to such extreme extent. Biden can talk about how he would really like Netanyahu to stop fighting and step down, but at the end of the day that's not his call, any more than he can stop the Sudan fighting that is near-genocidal either.

So, to come to your question #1: "Can he really be trusted at all anymore to do the right thing or act in line with the people’s demands"?

For me, it's a resounding YES. Guyz, he has passed so much good domestic policies. My spouse works in green energy and the passing of the Inflation Reduction Act halved his anxiety and gave him legitimate hope. The tumblr post I linked to in my comic has links to many of the other great things that Biden has done. Tbh I voted for him in 2020 because "a moldy onion is still better than Trump", and I've been pleasantly surprised. Like how he tried to cancel student loans, the Supreme Court overturned it, and then he came back 6 months later with a different way to do it that didn't lead to a court challenge.

Is he perfect? Hell no. There's tons of stuff that I wish he did more about, or he went further on, but also he's just one guy heading one branch of government who is heading into an election year. (Just like FDR promising not joining WWII, while behind the scenes doing all the Lend-Lease Act stuff). And "the people" have lots of demands, many of them conflicting.

I'd also like to push at the unspoken part of your question... "Can he really be trusted to do the right thing..." compared to whom? Because right now the answer is "compared to Trump." And compared to Trump... I don't even trust Trump to respect the results of a legitimate election. Heck, he might just take his favorite state secrets, sell them to the highest bidder (or just show them off to someone for funzies), and then claim Presidential immunity. A decent Democrat who got stuff done vs someone who probably wants to pardon himself and all his friends and do Project 2025 stuff is not even on the same level. (Do I wish that there was a viable Democratic alternative to Biden? Sure! But who?) Heck, at this point -- imagine if it's Kamala Harris vs. Trump. Who would you vote for?

As for your question #2: "How do we know the people behind project 2025 won’t just rig the election again to get in under false pretenses?"

We don't. But also what can we do besides showing up to vote?

Actually, I need bullet points for this:

The 2022 midterm elections brought in fewer-than-expected election-deniers into crucial electoral offices at the state level, which means that hopefully most state electoral boards will continue to have integrity

Yes, voting is harder but at least we can still vote. So it's about getting out there and getting your vote counted. For some states, it involves waiting in 8 hour lines. For some states, it involves bringing 2 forms of ID. Document. Track. Make sure it's dropped off in a real ballot box and not a fake one. Don't believe messaging that the voting is happening on a different day or location, etc.

A 50.1% majority is easily challenged. A 55% majority, less so. Which means getting people out to vote.

The more people know about and think about the reality of a second Trump term (versus being disappointed by a Biden term), the more they will be motivated to vote against Trump.

Finally, let's be real here: I'm braced for a 2nd Trump term. That said:

I'm still going to go and vote for Biden, because the only way to prevent a 2nd Trump term is to vote.

A Trump term where either the House or Senate is controlled by the Democrats will be *very* different from a clean Republican sweep.

Even with a clean Republican sweep on the federal level, States have so much more power now, and voting the state level stuff will help shore up Democratic goals for the future. States get to draw voting districts however they want. States get to decide on abortion policies. If you live in a deep Red state, there still might be things to vote for that make it easier to live in now, and turn it purple a few elections down the line.

So at the end of the day, it's "Vote AND". Vote and keep living your best life. Vote and tell others about Project 2025. Vote and have hope. Even if Trump wins, at least you'll have voted against him. Vote and stay to build up a progressive wave for the next election.

[robertreich]

Who’s to Blame for Out-Of-Control Corporate Power?    

One man is especially to blame for why corporate power is out of control. And I knew him! He was my professor, then my boss. His name… Robert Bork.

Robert Bork was a notorious conservative who believed the only legitimate purpose of antitrust — that is, anti-monopoly — law is to lower prices for consumers, no matter how big corporations get. His philosophy came to dominate the federal courts and conservative economics.

I met him in 1971, when I took his antitrust class at Yale Law School. He was a large, imposing man, with a red beard and a perpetual scowl. He seemed impatient and bored with me and my classmates, who included Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham, as we challenged him repeatedly on his antitrust views.

We argued with Bork that ever-expanding corporations had too much power. Not only could they undercut rivals with lower prices and suppress wages, but they were using their spoils to influence our politics with campaign contributions. Wasn’t this cause for greater antitrust enforcement?

He had a retort for everything. Undercutting rival businesses with lower prices was a good thing because consumers like lower prices. Suppressing wages didn’t matter because employees are always free to find better jobs. He argued that courts could not possibly measure political power, so why should that matter?

Even in my mid-20s, I knew this was hogwash.

But Bork’s ideology began to spread. A few years after I took his class, he wrote a book called The Antitrust Paradox summarizing his ideas. The book heavily influenced Ronald Reagan and later helped form a basic tenet of Reaganomics — the bogus theory that says government should get out of the way and allow corporations to do as they please, including growing as big and powerful as they want.

Despite our law school sparring, Bork later gave me a job in the Department of Justice when he was solicitor general for Gerald Ford. Even though we didn’t agree on much, I enjoyed his wry sense of humor. I respected his intellect. Hell, I even came to like him.

Once President Reagan appointed Bork as an appeals court judge, his rulings further dismantled antitrust. And while his later Supreme Court nomination failed, his influence over the courts continued to grow.  

Bork’s legacy is the enormous corporate power we see today, whether it’s Ticketmaster and Live Nation consolidating control over live performances, Kroger and Albertsons dominating the grocery market, or Amazon, Google, and Meta taking over the tech world.

It’s not just these high-profile companies either: in most industries, a handful of companies now control more of their markets than they did twenty years ago.

This corporate concentration costs the typical American household an estimated extra $5,000 per year. Companies have been able to jack up prices without losing customers to competitors because there is often no meaningful competition.

And huge corporations also have the power to suppress wages because workers have fewer employers from whom to get better jobs.

And how can we forget the massive flow of money these corporate giants are funneling into politics, rigging our democracy in their favor?

But the tide is beginning to turn under the Biden Administration. The Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission are fighting the monopolization of America in court, and proposing new merger guidelines to protect consumers, workers, and society.

It’s the implementation of the view that I and my law school classmates argued for back in the 1970s — one that sees corporate concentration as a problem that outweighs any theoretical benefits Bork claimed might exist.

Robert Bork would likely regard the Biden administration’s antitrust efforts with the same disdain he had for my arguments in his class all those years ago. But instead of a few outspoken law students, Bork’s philosophy is now being challenged by the full force of the federal government.

The public is waking up to the outsized power corporations wield over our economy and democracy. It’s about time.

[deadpresidents]

I just hope these next 4 years go by fast

This election isn't just about the next four years. With Trump in the White House and a Republican Senate at his side, the MAGA movement can pick up where they left off when it comes to packing the federal judiciary with right-wing judges who will control the Supreme Court and appellate courts throughout the country potentially for the rest of the lives of everyone reading this right now. It's the perfect recipe for them to continue stripping reproductive rights away from women nationwide and gives them the opportunity to turn their attention to the other issues that they have been dying to attack, from voting rights to gay marriage and every other extension of personal freedom that has been won by minorities and marginalized people in hard-fought battles over the past 60 years. This is the nightmare scenario that people have been warning folks about for the past few elections. It's here. And there isn't going to be a way to put the toothpaste back in the tube.

The consequences of this election will have a direct, negative impact on your life -- possibly on the entire remainder of your life. This country just re-elected a President with authoritarian tendencies who is the willing puppet of a dangerous Christian nationalist movement that figured out exactly how to manipulate him (through flattery) for their aims. They have created the perfect vehicle for a genuine cult of personality that they can use to achieve the goals they have been very clear about striving for over the past few years. And you can't blame anybody other than the American voters because they not only elected Trump, but they gave him a fucking mandate, with a Republican Senate and potentially a Republican House. They already have a right-wing dominated Supreme Court for the next few decades, and now they are going to ensure that the entire federal judiciary is in their control for years to come. And don't forget the fact that a few months ago, the Supreme Court handed down a decision that gave Presidents sweeping immunity for a broad (and conveniently undefined) range of "official" acts, so Trump is going to go into this second term knowing that not only does he not have to deal with the "guardrails" of responsible adults he had around him in his first term (Mattis, Tillerson, Kelly, General Milley, etc), but he knows he can get away with virtually anything and everything that he wants to do this time around. If you thought that Trump's first term was bad, just understand that they are prepared this time and now he's surrounded himself with people who will do his bidding -- people who are perfectly willing to let Trump be Donald Trump.

I wish there was a reason to cry foul, lodge protests, and challenge the election's results. But this wasn't a rigged election. There isn't any confusion about what the voters really wanted. The American people did this. People you know and care about and who say they care about you are the people who did this. We need to recognize that these elections aren't outliers anymore. Trump's supporters aren't simply chaos agents who got lucky on a bad day for the Democrats. That's the country we live in now and we have to find a way to resist it that actually makes a difference because now they have the keys to all the doors and all of the alarm codes. This country has normalized the conspiracy theories and nativism and racism that has powered the MAGA movement since the moment Trump came down the elevator at Trump Tower in 2015. He's given those people permission to be open with their hatred towards people who aren't like them, and it's actually become surprising to see how many Americans have been eager to take advantage of that. I didn't think I had any misconceptions about this country before Donald Trump because I recognized this nation's history, but I clearly had some misconceptions about people I thought I knew until I saw them wearing a red MAGA hat or noticed they had a gigantic flag with Trump's name hanging where their U.S. flag used to hang. Once that happened, it was like a switch went off with them and they started saying things in ways that I'd never heard them speak. I feel like that's happened to the entire country. It breaks my heart and it pisses me off.

For the past few years, I've been warning everybody about how elections have consequences. I imagine that there are hundreds of posts on this blog with that phrase in all caps listed with the tags. Now the elections have happened, and we have to live with real fucking consequences. And we're going to pass these consequences on to other generations because this is the one that you can't get a do-over on. When you give a movement like this the power and the mandate that this country just gave them, there is no easily rolling back the things that they end up doing. They are going to fundamentally change the lives of people in this nation and especially change the way the younger generations of Americans live and love and learn for years to come. And you have people in your life who made that happen. It's another disgusting day in America -- a prelude to another reprehensible four years (at the very least) -- and I'm ashamed of tens of millions of my fellow Americans because this one is on them. They know exactly who the man is that they voted for, and now we know exactly who they are, too.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

UK publishers suing Google for $17.4b over rigged ad markets

THIS WEEKEND (June 7–9), I'm in AMHERST, NEW YORK to keynote the 25th Annual Media Ecology Association Convention and accept the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity.

Look, no one wants to kick Big Tech to the curb more than I do, but, also: it's good that Google indexes the news so people can find it, and it's good that Facebook provides forums where people can talk about the news.

It's not news if you can't find it. It's not news if you can't talk about it. We don't call information you can't find or discuss "news" – we call it "secrets."

And yet, the most popular – and widely deployed – anti-Big Tech tactic promulgated by the news industry and supported by many of my fellow trustbusters is premised on making Big Tech pay to index the news and/or provide a forum to discuss news articles. These "news bargaining codes" (or, less charitably, "link taxes") have been mooted or introduced in the EU, France, Spain, Australia, and Canada. There are proposals to introduce these in the US (through the JCPA) and in California (the CJPA).

These US bills are probably dead on arrival, for reasons that can be easily understood by the Canadian experience with them. After Canada introduced Bill C-18 – its own news bargaining code – Meta did exactly what it had done in many other places where this had been tried: blocked all news from Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and other Meta properties.

This has been a disaster for the news industry and a disaster for Canadians' ability to discuss the news. Oh, it makes Meta look like assholes, too, but Meta is the poster child for "too big to care" and is palpably indifferent to the PR costs of this boycott.

Frustrated lawmakers are now trying to figure out what to do next. The most common proposal is to order Meta to carry the news. Canadians should be worried about this, because the next government will almost certainly be helmed by the far-right conspiratorialist culture warrior Pierre Poilievre, who will doubtless use this power to order Facebook to platform "news sites" to give prominence to Canada's rotten bushel of crypto-fascist (and openly fascist) "news" sites.

Americans should worry about this too. A Donald Trump 2028 presidency combined with a must-carry rule for news would see Trump's cabinet appointees deciding what is (and is not) news, and ordering large social media platforms to cram the Daily Caller (or, you know, the Daily Stormer) into our eyeballs.

But there's another, more fundamental reason that must-carry is incompatible with the American system: the First Amendment. The government simply can't issue a blanket legal order to platforms requiring them to carry certain speech. They can strongly encourage it. A court can order limited compelled speech (say, a retraction following a finding of libel). Under emergency conditions, the government might be able to compel the transmission of urgent messages. But there's just no way the First Amendment can be squared with a blanket, ongoing order issued by the government to communications platforms requiring them to reproduce, and make available, everything published by some collection of their favorite news outlets.

This might also be illegal in Canada, but it's harder to be definitive. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was enshrined in 1982, and Canada's Supreme Court is still figuring out what it means. Section Two of the Charter enshrines a free expression right, but it's worded in less absolute terms than the First Amendment, and that's deliberate. During the debate over the wording of the Charter, Canadian scholars and policymakers specifically invoked problems with First Amendment absolutism and tried to chart a middle course between strong protections for free expression and problems with the First Amendment's brook-no-exceptions language.

So maybe Canada's Supreme Court would find a must-carry order to Meta to be a violation of the Charter, but it's hard to say for sure. The Charter is both young and ambiguous, so it's harder to be definitive about what it would say about this hypothetical. But when it comes to the US and the First Amendment, that's categorically untrue. The US Constitution is centuries older than the Canadian Charter, and the First Amendment is extremely definitive, and there are reams of precedent interpreting it. The JPCA and CJPA are totally incompatible with the US Constitution. Passing them isn't as silly as passing a law declaring that Pi equals three or that water isn't wet, but it's in the neighborhood.

But all that isn't to say that the news industry shouldn't be attacking Big Tech. Far from it. Big Tech compulsively steals from the news!

But what Big Tech steals from the news isn't content.

It's money.

Big Tech steals money from the news. Take social media: when a news outlet invests in building a subscriber base on a social media platform, they're giving that platform a stick to beat them with. The more subscribers you have on social media, the more you'll be willing to pay to reach those subscribers, and the more incentive there is for the platform to suppress the reach of your articles unless you pay to "boost" your content.

This is plainly fraudulent. When I sign up to follow a news outlet on a social media site, I'm telling the platform to show me the things the news outlet publishes. When the platform uses that subscription as the basis for a blackmail plot, holding my desire to read the news to ransom, they are breaking their implied promise to me to show me the things I asked to see:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/save-news-we-need-end-end-web

This is stealing money from the news. It's the definition of an "unfair method of competition." Article 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act gives the FTC the power to step in and ban this practice, and they should:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

Big Tech also steals money from the news via the App Tax: the 30% rake that the mobile OS duopoly (Apple/Google) requires for every in-app purchase (Apple/Google also have policies that punish app vendors who take you to the web to make payments without paying the App Tax). 30% out of every subscriber dollar sent via an app is highway robbery! By contrast, the hyperconcentrated, price-gouging payment processing cartel charges 2-5% – about a tenth of the Big Tech tax. This is Big Tech stealing money from the news:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/save-news-we-must-open-app-stores

Finally, Big Tech steals money by monopolizing the ad market. The Google-Meta ad duopoly takes 51% out of every ad-dollar spent. The historic share going to advertising "intermediaries" is 10-15%. In other words, Google/Meta cornered the market on ads and then tripled the bite they were taking out of publishers' advertising revenue. They even have an illegal, collusive arrangement to rig this market, codenamed "Jedi Blue":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue

There's two ways to unrig the ad market, and we should do both of them.

First, we should trustbust both Google and Meta and force them to sell off parts of their advertising businesses. Currently, both Google and Meta operate a "full stack" of ad services. They have an arm that represents advertisers buying space for ads. Another arm represents publishers selling space to advertisers. A third arm operates the marketplace where these sales take place. All three arms collect fees. On top of that: Google/Meta are both publishers and advertisers, competing with their own customers!

This is as if you were in court for a divorce and you discovered that the same lawyer representing your soon-to-be ex was also representing you…while serving as the judge…and trying to match with you both on Tinder. It shouldn't surprise you if at the end of that divorce, the court ruled that the family home should go to the lawyer.

So yeah, we should break up ad-tech:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-shatter-ad-tech

Also: we should ban surveillance advertising. Surveillance advertising gives ad-tech companies a permanent advantage over publishers. Ad-tech will always know more about readers' behavior than publishers do, because Big Tech engages in continuous, highly invasive surveillance of every internet user in the world. Surveillance ads perform a little better than "content-based ads" (ads sold based on the content of a web-page, not the behavior of the person looking at the page), but publishers will always know more about their content than ad-tech does. That means that even if content-based ads command a slightly lower price than surveillance ads, a much larger share of that payment will go to publishers:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-ban-surveillance-advertising

Banning surveillance advertising isn't just good business, it's good politics. The potential coalition for banning surveillance ads is everyone who is harmed by commercial surveillance. That's a coalition that's orders of magnitude larger than the pool of people who merely care about fairness in the ad/news industries. It's everyone who's worried about their grandparents being brainwashed on Facebook, or their teens becoming anorexic because of Instagram. It includes people angry about deepfake porn, and people angry about Black Lives Matter protesters' identities being handed to the cops by Google (see also: Jan 6 insurrectionists).

It also includes everyone who discovers that they're paying higher prices because a vendor is using surveillance data to determine how much they'll pay – like when McDonald's raises the price of your "meal deal" on your payday, based on the assumption that you will spend more when your bank account is at its highest monthly level:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/05/your-price-named/#privacy-first-again

Attacking Big Tech for stealing money is much smarter than pretending that the problem is Big Tech stealing content. We want Big Tech to make the news easy to find and discuss. We just want them to stop pocketing 30 cents out of every subscriber dollar and 51 cents out of ever ad dollar, and ransoming subscribers' social media subscriptions to extort publishers.

And there's amazing news on this front: a consortium of UK web-publishers called Ad Tech Collective Action has just triumphed in a high-stakes proceeding, and can now go ahead with a suit against Google, seeking damages of GBP13.6b ($17.4b) for the rigged ad-tech market:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/17-bln-uk-adtech-lawsuit-against-google-can-go-ahead-tribunal-rules-2024-06-05/

The ruling, from the Competition Appeal Tribunal, paves the way for a frontal assault on the thing Big Tech actually steals from publishers: money, not content.

This is exactly what publishing should be doing. Targeting the method by which tech steals from the news is a benefit to all kinds of news organizations, including the independent, journalist-owned publishers that are doing the best news work today. These independents do not have the same interests as corporate news, which is dominated by hedge funds and private equity raiders, who have spent decades buying up and hollowing out news outlets, and blaming the resulting decline in readership and profits on Craiglist.

You can read more about Big Finance's raid on the news in Margot Susca's Hedged: How Private Investment Funds Helped Destroy American Newspapers and Undermine Democracy:

https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p087561

You can also watch/listen to Adam Conover's excellent interview with Susca:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N21YfWy0-bA

Frankly, the looters and billionaires who bought and gutted our great papers are no more interested in the health of the news industry or democracy than Big Tech is. We should care about the news and the workers who produce the news, not the profits of the hedge-funds that own the news. An assault on Big Tech's monetary theft levels the playing field, making it easier for news workers and indies to compete directly with financialized news outlets and billionaire playthings, by letting indies keep more of every ad-dollar and more of every subscriber-dollar – and to reach their subscribers without paying ransom to social media.

Ending monetary theft – rather than licensing news search and discussion – is something that workers are far more interested in than their bosses. Any time you see workers and their bosses on the same side as a fight against Big Tech, you should look more closely. Bosses are not on their workers' side. If bosses get more money out of Big Tech, they will not share those gains with workers unless someone forces them to.

That's where antitrust comes in. Antitrust is designed to strike at power, and enforcers have broad authority to blunt the power of corporate juggernauts. Remember Article 5 of the FTC Act, the one that lets the FTC block "unfair methods of competition?" FTC Chair Lina Khan has proposed using it to regulate training AI, specifically to craft rules that address the labor and privacy issues with AI:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mh8Z5pcJpg

This is an approach that can put creative workers where they belong, in a coalition with other workers, rather than with their bosses. The copyright approach to curbing AI training is beloved of the same media companies that are eagerly screwing their workers. If we manage to make copyright – a transferrable right that a worker can be forced to turn over their employer – into the system that regulates AI training, it won't stop training. It'll just trigger every entertainment company changing their boilerplate contract so that creative workers have to sign over their AI rights or be shown the door:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/13/spooky-action-at-a-close-up/#invisible-hand

Then those same entertainment and news companies will train AI models and try to fire most of their workers and slash the pay of the remainder using those models' output. Using copyright to regulate AI training makes changes to who gets to benefit from workers' misery, shifting some of our stolen wages from AI companies to entertainment companies. But it won't stop them from ruining our lives.

By contrast, focusing on actual labor rights – say, through an FTCA 5 rulemaking – has the potential to protect those rights from all parties, and puts us on the same side as call-center workers, train drivers, radiologists and anyone else whose wages are being targeted by AI companies and their customers.

Policy fights are a recurring monkey's paw nightmare in which we try to do something to fight corruption and bullying, only to be outmaneuvered by corrupt bullies. Making good policy is no guarantee of a good outcome, but it sure helps – and good policy starts with targeting the thing you want to fix. If we're worried that news is being financially starved by Big Tech, then we should go after the money, not the links.

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/2024/06/06/stealing-money-not-content/#content-free

[iwritethingssometimes]

I'm seeing some posting about a feeling of fishiness about the recently completed US Election.

In the attempt to do something more productive than my last post, I'm gonna do an adhoc examination of how feasible I think a "rigged election" actually is, looking at a few methods that could have been used. So, to start with, what is the actual evidence here?

Most of it is... honestly vibes based, which I get, but don't put a lot of stock in, There was a lot of energy around the Harris campaign, and she had some good polls, but Donald Trump has proved nothing else in the past fucking decade, its that the polls literally do not matter for him, and he can outperform them by a hundred miles.

But. There's also some numbers.

None of this has been verified yet, and I want to make that clear, but this year has largely reported record turnout in a ton of states, especially the swing states, and yet, so far.

The number of votes seems much lower this year.

Not republican votes, not democrat votes, all votes. Hell, third party voting collapsed this year--whatever else you take from this election, this was not a case of the left splitting the vote.

Now, it's true that the vote count hasn't been completed, and it's possible that the numbers will make more sense once that's done. It's also true that the states didn't have quite the same turn-out as last year... but it was only a percentage point or two lower.

Add that to the frequent postings about people having their ballots rejected for... questionable reasons, and.

Well. It starts going from a "the moon is fake!" conspiracy to "Epstein had sex slaves" conspiracy.

But, okay, is it even possible for Trump to have faked the vote like this? People talked about it, but it was mostly in terms of legal challenges trying to overturn a Harris victory, or pulling in the supreme court to decide narrow districts. This, by all accounts, seems to be a straight forward Trump sweep.

So if there is shenanigans afoot, how could he have done it?

There's three feasible(ish) pathways, in my opinion:

Voter suppression and manipulation pre-ballot: Yeah this happened. It's also irrelevant to any possibility that the vote counts were tampered with. Look, this election was flooded with misinformation, legal suits, court cases, and election officials doing everything in their power to fuck with people's right to vote. It was filled with ballot boxes being lit on fire. Elon Musk did a fucking paid vote scheme! Of course there was voter suppression! But there always is, and although it was worse this year than many others, it wouldn't cause any numerical mismatch between turn out and votes, and there's not much that can be done now for this election. Even if someone voted because Musk slipped them $100, no court will ever be able to prove they didn't just happen upon $100 bucks and then voted for Trump.

Voting machines were manipulated: A few hours ago I would have said this was practically impossible, but apparently a bunch of election officials and cyber-security experts were sounding the alarm about this a few months ago, so, uh. That being said, I've seen people claiming that Starlink or whatever hacked voting machines, and no. No, Starlink did not hack voting machines. No one "hacked" voting machines. They weren't connected to the internet, or any wireless communication systems, because anyone with any degree of cybersecurity knowledge will tell you that's how you create an insecure system. Now, it's not impossible, technically speaking, than Elon Musk or fucking Russia managed to hire engineers and somehow bribe enough officals to get access to the machines and install hardware that would allow external access, but in that case we live in a Bond movie and somehow have bigger problems. So, if the voting machines themselves were compromised in any technological way, it would have required direct, physical access, which should be basically impossible, unless...

Ballot officials fucked with the vote This is the one I think is plausible. Basically, in this case, what could have happened is that various election officials at different levels of the process more or less lied about the vote count. This could have happened in a lot of different ways--they could have found reasons to reject mail-in ballots, which several states attempted to make legal, they could have found reasons to reject in-person ballots, which several states attempted to make legal. They could have, if the corruption ran deep enough to make this feasible, just... not counted or reported votes that swung for Harris. They could have, if the election machines work similar to the ones up here in BC, seen the results from the machines, then called the central election office over the phone--because remember, the ballot boxes should not be connected to anything. I don't know. There's a lot of options, and it varies from state to state, because remember, each state runs their own elections, and has their own rules and procedures.

So yeah, three explanations, only one of which is really plausible.

Now, I want to be clear, I don't think this election was fraudulent. Not yet, at least, I need to see actual evidence, or this is nothing more than a theory, but I also want to be clear.

...3 makes sense.

3 would explain why urban areas seemed to be underrepresented in this election, while rural areas surged. 3 would explain a discrepancy between voter turn out and votes counted. 3 would fit the strategy Trump and MAGA loyalists have been describing for the last four years, of infiltrating the election machinery and manipulating it to their own ends.

So I'm not saying it's likely that Trump fucked with the vote, not without evidence. Not yet.

But I will say this looks a hell of a lot more plausible than any claims made in the aftermath of the 2020 election.

[godisarepublican]

No President had ever been prosecuted for official acts, nor *Any* acts! The closest we came was Richard Nixon and that was a political hit, not a "Demand for justice."

And Trump doesn't hold a candle to most Presidents, as far as what anyone wants to call a "Crime" goes.

Obama conducted secret war, assassinations of American citizens, surveillance on American citizens, went from not even being a millionaire before running for Senate to "Earning" like $80 million in office...

[stephen-barry]

Smartmatic and Newsmax settle defamation case involving 2020 election

https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/media/2024/09/26/smartmatic-newsmax-settlement-defamation-2020-election-voting/

[eugenedebs1920]

I was going through my pictures from 2020, I’m a little embarrassed to say that there’s probably more memes, posts, articles, and pictures taken of whatever I was trying to make a point of on the tv, than there is actual pictures.

This is a Tweet (remember those!? I don’t know what they’re called now. Hates?) from Robert Reich ( no sh*t Eugene!? Get to the point!)on the morning of Election Day 2020. It’s the same plan then, as it is now.

Donald Trump has no respect for America, it’s institutions that have endured 248 years, our systems of government or democracy in general.

This will be Americas 60th presidential election. You know how many of those were accused by one side or the other of being “rigged”? Three!!! Before a single vote had been cast in 2016, the election was said to be “rigged”. The 2020 election there was accusations of fraud and a stolen election that were prominent. The other election that had claims of being “rigged” is this one, the 2024 election. What is the common variable in all three of these elections? 🤔

I can already see the comments now, ‘People said that Hilary won’, and ‘Democrats said the 2000 election was stolen’, and to an extent they’re not wrong, but they’re not right either (well they’re right wing but, you know). The Florida recount in 2000 was a bit interesting how that conclusion came, to be to say the least, but, Gore went on television and conceded (I would recommend looking up Gores 2000 concession speech on YouTube, THATS what class looks like. THATS what politics used to be before reality tv people became involved.). In an utter display of class he told the American people that the Supreme Court had ruled, and that it was time, for the sake of Americans good, to move forward. He went to the inauguration of George W Bush. The 2016 election, I think everyone was in shock that Hilary was defeated in the electoral college by a failed businessman and two bit reality tv personality. Hilary won the popular vote by over 3.5 million votes but that doesn’t count (no pun intended) for whatever reason. (I know the reason, but it’s too much to go in to at this moment) Yet Hilary conceded when the counting was finished, and had the grace to show up at the inauguration of Trump, which I sure was utterly painful.

We all know how the 2020 election went. Trump and his allies doing everything they could to stop the vote before all the ballots were counted. That’s not how it works. That’s like a sports team getting a lead in the game and saying, ‘we won! Games over!” It’s not how real life works. You “play” till the end.

Trump is going to do the same thing this time. Because Democrats work (😉) Trump will be up in many states throughout the day and early evening. As the night goes on, Kamala’s numbers will continue to rise until her eventual victory, which will take several days to count and officially be over.

I want to say this now, to liberals, Republicans and especially MAGA. THE ELECTION ISNT DONE UNTIL ALL THE VOTES HAVE BEEN COUNTED. THATS HOW IT WORKS, WE ALL HAVE A VOTE AND IT IS ENTITLED TO BE COUNTED. DESPITE WHAT YOU MAY HAVE HEARD, MIDNIGHT IS NOT WHEN ELECTION DAY IS OVER, IT IS OVER WHEN EVERY SINGLE VOTE HAS BEEN TALLIED AND IS COUNTED FOR ITS RESPECTIVE SIDE.

This is going to be an ongoing issue until, somewhere between the 7th and the 10th. This is perfectly normal. This has happened in almost every modern election. It’s Trump and his narcissism, Republicans grasping on to relevancy, and powers that wish to benefit themselves, not the nation that will be pushing the narrative that it’s “illegal” or the “election is being stolen behind closed doors”. In all actuality it’s professionals, doing their job, to ensure every Americans voice is heard.

Trump is going to lie and lie and lie some more. He will throw wild accusations out there, he already is, he will tout crazy conspiracy theories, he already is, he will whine and b*tch and complain, he already is. Don’t listen.

For 57 presidential elections, our system has been the envy of the world. The most accurate and fair system developed. It’s only 3 that have EVER has accusations of fraud, or being rigged or stolen. The common denominator in those 3 elections is Donald Trump.

Donald Trump is a traitor, a selfish human being, and a terrible person. He does not deserve to be anywhere near the White House. Let’s keep it that way and vote for a real leader, Kamala Harris.

[wilwheaton]

DeSantis was the heir apparent, but as I've said along, he is a limp, wet noodle who will wither in the national spotlight. Trump is the main attraction, and the base belongs to him until he's dead or in prison. That's the reality the GOP establishment and big, conservative money machine doesn't want to admit or acknowledge. Due to a rigged Supreme Court, the electoral college, and voter suppression, it is a possibility that Trump could still return to power even if he, yet again, loses the popular vote. For mainstream media, many are not built for this moment or made for this fight. They, unfortunately, can't adapt or evolve to the changing political reality where the GOP is no longer a normal political party. They continue to distort reality with a skewed, "both sides" lens that mainstreams extremism. Example: ABC News recently referred to extremist group Moms for Liberty as "joyful warriors" who are "fighting back." Lovely. It's like Groundhog's Day if it were remade as a dystopian horror movie. No one has learned the lessons of the past 8 years.

From John Birch to Donald Trump: How the GOP got "devoured by their own Frankenstein monster"