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A Letter To Elon Musk - by Francis Fukuyama - Persuasion
This is not the case: there are basically the same number of full-time federal employees today as there were back in 1969, about 2.3 million. This is despite the fact that the government now disburses more than five times as many dollars as it did back then. In fact, you can argue that the government is understaffed, due to relentless pressure over the decades to keep headcounts down. The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, for example, oversees the spending of $1.4 trillion, or one fifth of the entire federal budget, with a staff of only 6,400 full-time employees. These workers have to check for Medicare fraud, evaluate and certify tens of thousands of health providers, and make sure that payments to tens of millions of Americans are made in a timely manner. If you cut this staff, the amount of fraud and waste in the Medicare system is likely to go up, not down. The Office of Refugee Resettlement, which looks after the millions of refugees entering the country, has a staff of 150. By increasing the staff at the Internal Revenue Service, the government is expected to take in an additional $561 billion over the next decade.
Why Does No One Understand the Real Reason Trump Won? | The New Republic
To much of America, by the way, this is not understood as one side’s view of things. It’s simply “the news.” This is what people—white people, chiefly—watch in about two-thirds of the country. I trust that you’ve seen in your travels, as I have in mine, that in red or even some purple parts of the country, when you walk into a hotel lobby or a hospital waiting room or even a bar, where the TVs ought to be offering us some peace and just showing ESPN, at least one television is tuned to Fox. That’s reach, and that’s power. And then people get in their cars to drive home and listen to an iHeart, right-wing talk radio station. And then they get home and watch their local news and it’s owned by Sinclair, and it, too, has a clear right-wing slant. And then they pick up their local paper, if it still exists, and the oped page features Cal Thomas and Ben Shapiro.
Liberals, rich and otherwise, live in a bubble where they never see this stuff. I would beg them to see it. Watch some Fox. Listen to some Christian radio. Experience the news that millions of Americans are getting on a daily basis. You’ll pretty quickly come to understand what I’m saying here.
Trump Wins the First Influencer Election
But while both campaigns worked overtime to court influencers, their strategies were divergent. The Harris campaign prioritized shortform clips, investing in quick videos and viral remixes on TikTok and Instagram. The Trump campaign went deep and long, investing heavily in longform YouTube podcasts and building partnerships with livestreamers. Ultimately, the latter proved wildly more successful.
The Trump campaign traveled to meet with various content creators, while Harris sought to make influencers meet on her own turf. When she and Walz filmed an episode of creator Kareem Rahma’s hit series Subway Takes, for instance, which is meant to be shot on a New York City subway, the Harris campaign insisted on filming it on a bus in Pittsburgh. When Harris was invited on Joe Rogan’s podcast, the campaign responded by requesting that Rogan leave his studio in Austin, Texas and travel to them. They also wanted to cut the format to an hourlong interview, rather than his notoriously long discussions that usually last three to four hours. The interview did not happen. The Harris campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
"The Hungarian people must recognize what has been lost in placing these bets to begin with."
On my very first day in Hungary, when I stepped off the airplane from the United States, the government sent an unusually junior official to greet me. I didn’t notice. It was an attempted slight that went totally unnoticed by the United States, but speaks volumes about the grandiose smallness of Hungary’s approach to its allies.
"The Hungarian people must recognize what has been lost in placing these bets to begin with."
Prime Minister Orbán treated this election like a card game at a casino. And he placed a very big bet. Whether he believes that he won or lost this hand, he was gambling not with money, but with the U.S.-Hungary relationship. A relationship that has been altered by his gamesmanship. The damage caused runs deeper than a four-year term of a President, because it is rooted in an impulse to transform something big and lasting, a relationship between Allies – between strong nations – into something smaller and fleeting.
For the past several years, Hungary’s Prime Minister has told his people that seemingly all of their problems would go away when one political party wins one election … in another country. Were you to believe him, you might think his gamble on American politics was a good bet. Go all in on one foreign political ally and if he wins, you win big – or so the story goes. So Prime Minister Orbán chose to take his alliance with the United States of America into a casino – and he let it ride.
October 27, 2024 - by Heather Cox Richardson
Puerto Rican singer and actor Ricky Martin shared a clip from Hinchcliffe’s set with his 16 million followers. His caption read: “This is what they think of us.” Singer and actress Jennifer Lopez, who has 250 million Instagram followers, posted Harris’s plan. Later, singer-songwriter and actress Ariana Grande posted that she had voted for Harris. Grande has 376 million followers on Instagram. Singer Luis Fonsi, who has 16 million followers, also called out the “constant hate.”
October 27, 2024 - by Heather Cox Richardson
But Trump perhaps gave away the game with his inflammatory language and with an aside, seemingly aimed at House speaker Johnson. “I think with our little secret we are gonna do really well with the House, right? Our little secret is having a big impact, he and I have a secret, we will tell you what it is when the race is over,” Trump said.
Polymarket Whale Traders: How 1% of Bettors Are Boosting Trump’s Odds - Bloomberg
Among this subset of users, 16% of bets can be traced to just 10 whales. On Oct. 17, six of these whales drove 37% of predictions. In one 12-hour window, they placed $5.2 million in bets as Trump’s odds rose about four percentage points.
Trump comes up with new slur against US: ‘We’re the garbage can for the world’
Trump has claimed that immigrants are bringing disease and “destroying the blood of our country” and vowed to deport millions of people in a mass expulsion event he suggested will be a “bloody story.” He’s falsely linked migrants to fentanyl coming into the US, even though the majority of those caught with and prosecuted for trafficking fentanyl across the border are US citizens.
Both he and his running mate, Senator JD Vance, helped spread a baseless conspiracy theory that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were eating neighborhood pets, a stance that was praised by local neo-Nazis but disavowed by local officials, who said there was no evidence behind the claims.
Military veterans support Trump by wide margin in 2024 election | Pew Research Center
63% of veteran voters identify with or lean toward the Republican Party, while 35% are Democrats or Democratic leaners.
As with voters overall, there are demographic differences in veterans’ partisan identification. For example, about seven-in-ten White veterans (72%) identify with or lean toward the GOP. That compares with just 11% of Black veterans, who overwhelmingly identify as or lean Democratic (82%).
Usha Vance Has Helped Her Husband J.D. Vance Chart His Political Path - The New York Times
In 2013, two students at Yale Law School decided to organize a discussion group on the subject of “social decline in white America.”
One of them was J.D. Vance, currently the Republican candidate in Ohio for a U.S. Senate seat.
For him, the subject matter was intensely personal: He had grown up in an economically depressed area of Ohio, and was raised in large part by his grandparents as his mother struggled with addiction.
He had lived the material.
The other student behind the project was Usha Chilukuri, the child of Indian immigrants, from an ethnically diverse San Diego suburb. For her, white social decline may have been an intellectual interest — but it was one with special significance. She was then Mr. Vance’s girlfriend, now his wife, known as Usha Vance.
Renewing American Purpose - The American Mind
The Right needs to throw off the precedents and legal paradigms that have wrongly developed over the last two hundred years and to study carefully the words of the Constitution and how the Founders would have responded in modern situations to the encroachments of other branches. Originalism should not just be interpreting the words in their original meaning. It should be to understand the logic of the original Constitution and how these authorities should be used unencumbered by the scar tissue resulting from decades of bad cases and bad statesmen.
Trump's Messianic Video About God Sending Him To Save World
I need somebody who can shape an ax but wield a sword. Who had the courage to step foot in North Korea? Who can make money from the tar of the sand turned liquid to gold? Who understands the difference between tariffs and inflation? We’ll finish this 40 hour week by Tuesday noon, but then put in another 72 hours. So God made Trump.
“You’re Telling Me That Thing Is Forged?”: The Inside Story of How Trump’s “Body Guy” Tried and Failed to Order a Massive Military Withdrawal | Vanity Fair
McEntee’s efforts to root out Trump infidels in the administration were often comically petty, but they came with the force of a presidential mandate. Just weeks before the 2020 presidential election, for example, somebody on McEntee’s staff discovered that a young woman in the office of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson had liked an Instagram post by pop star Taylor Swift that included a photo of Swift holding a tray of cookies decorated with the Biden-Harris campaign logo. The transgression was brought all the way to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, who placed a call to Carson’s top aide. The message: We can’t have our people liking the social media posts of a high‑profile Biden supporter like Taylor Swift.
'Trumpism isn't a cult'
How I define it in my class is by two benchmarks. The first is: Cults manage to shift people’s beliefs rapidly away from the broader society and away from the beliefs they had before they joined. The second thing I emphasize is that cult members act against their own interests and their families’ interests quite strikingly. The reason I highlight those two things is that when I’m talking about the psychology of cults, I’m interested in how the cult, and usually the cult leader, is able to have this kind of influence. Typically, the cult leader is benefiting in an exploitative way off of these two things, so many of those strange beliefs are about the leader being very important, often divine, the key to salvation against the apocalypse, etc. And then, more importantly, often the cult members’ labor is making the leader rich, or female cult members are expected to have sex with the leader and all men, besides the leader, have to be celibate. Cult members make extreme sacrifices that benefit the leader.
Does Hungary Offer a Glimpse of Our Authoritarian Future? | The New Yorker
Lauren Stokes, the Northwestern historian, is a leftist with her own radical critiques of liberalism; nonetheless, she, too, thinks that the right-wing post-liberals are playing with fire. “By hitching themselves to someone who has put himself forward as a post-liberal intellectual, I think American conservatives are starting to give themselves permission to discard liberal norms,” Stokes told me. “When a Hungarian court does something Orbán doesn’t like—something too pro-queer, too pro-immigrant—he can just say, ‘This court is an enemy of the people, I don’t have to listen to it.’ I think Republicans are setting themselves up to adopt a similar logic: if the system gives me a result I don’t like, I don’t have to abide by it.”
Does Hungary Offer a Glimpse of Our Authoritarian Future? | The New Yorker
The lights came up, and Szánthó walked to the lectern, waving stiffly. “Hungary has fought wars, suffered unthinkable oppression, to gain and regain our liberty,” he said. In the current war, he went on, the enemy was “woke totalitarianism,” personified by George Soros (he paused for boos); the hero was “one of the true champions of liberty, a man you know well, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán” (a generous round of applause). He praised “President Trump” and tried to initiate a cheer of “Let’s go Brandon,” a substitute for “Fuck Joe Biden” used by right-wing culture warriors who spend too much time on the Internet. He quoted the old chestnut “Hard times create strong men,” although, the way he said it, it sounded like “strongmen.” And he invited the audience to join him at the next CPAC conference, the first to be hosted on European soil: CPAC Hungary.
#StopTheSteal: Timeline of Social Media and Extremist Activities Leading to 1/6 Insurrection
Most of the material found in this report was posted in plain sight on social media platforms and online forums, designed to convince more Americans of falsehoods about the 2020 elections. The Stop the Steal movement was far from monolithic, though, and included groups across a spectrum of radicalization: hyperpartisan pro-Trump activists and media outlets; the neo-fascist Proud Boys, a group with chapters committed to racism and the promotion of street violence; unlawful militias from around the country with a high degree of command and control, including the so-called Three Percenters movement; adherents to the collective delusion of QAnon; individuals identifying with the Boogaloo Bois, a loosely organized anti-government group that has called for a second civil war; and ideological fellow travelers of the far-right, who wanted to witness something they believed would be spectacular.
How Science Explains Trump's Grip on White Males - Scientific American
“Individuals selectively credit and dismiss asserted dangers in a manner supportive of their preferred form of social organization,” wrote Slovic and collaborators in a 2007 research paper that rings no less true today. In other words, for certain individuals, supporting Trump is a psychologically palliative response to perceived risks.
The Plot Against George Soros
It began in 2008, when Orbán decided to seek reelection. His old friend Bibi — as Netanyahu is known — introduced him to the two people who would guide his success. Before long, Finkelstein and Birnbaum were applying their formula to Orbán’s election campaign — and then turbocharging it.
Enemies were easy to find in Hungary. The country was an economic basket case and had to be bailed out in 2008. Austerity measures were demanded by their creditors at the World Bank, the EU, and the IMF. Finkelstein and Birnbaum told Orbán to target “the bureaucrats” and “foreign capital.”
Orbán won the 2010 election with a two-thirds majority as the country shifted to the right. Birnbaum is still amazed today how easy it was: “We blew the Socialist party off the table even before the election.”
What Donald Trump Could Learn From Playing Poker - POLITICO
In 2004, the game of poker in full boom, Trump once again gave an interview about the game, when he graced the cover of the newly launched Bluff magazine. He still hadn’t found time to play, he admitted. But he did know where he would direct his invitations if he had to pick six historical figures to play with: Winston Churchill, Napoleon, Abraham Lincoln, Robert Moses, Leonardo da Vinci and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. He reckoned he would be a favorite in the lineup. “Would I win?” came his musings. “Most likely.”
An interesting assumption, given that at least one of his imaginary opponents, Churchill, was no poker slouch. But that’s the thing about bad players—they always think they’re going to win. Right until the moment they lose.
Tinker, Tailor, Mobster, Trump - PREVAIL by Greg Olear
The only way to know for sure if Donald John Trump is a Confidential Informant is if he admits it himself (unlikely), or if law enforcement comes forward (illegal). But the circumstantial evidence is compelling. The pattern is: 1) Trump deals with mobsters as usual; 2) Law enforcement begins investigating Trump; 3) Mobsters suddenly get busted, while 4) investigation into Trump is scuttled. This happened three times that we know about. I’m not counting the first known instance of Trump providing information to prosecutors, concerning Cody and concrete, in the late 70s[…] I can conceive of no scenario in which Trump was not a CI, and a top echelon one at that. He’s avoided indictment too many times. No one is that lucky.
Pence Will Control All Coronavirus Messaging From Health Officials - The New York Times
The White House moved on Thursday to tighten control of coronavirus messaging by government health officials and scientists, directing them to clear all statements and public appearance with the office of Vice President Mike Pence, according to several officials familiar with the new approach.
The Mueller Report Is Much Worse For Trump Than Barr Let On | WIRED
Barr previously had quoted in his summary the second half of a single sentence on the first page of volume I, telling Congress that "the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference efforts." The full sentence is decidedly more troubling. As Mueller actually wrote: "Although the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts, the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference efforts."
Thanking and apologizing: Talk that isn't cheap -- ScienceDaily
The researchers proposed that, for the communicator, all four types of communications involve a trade-off between projecting competence and projecting warmth. Thanking and apologizing make the speaker appear caring or generous, but usually at the cost of seeming incompetent or weak. The opposite is true of bragging and blaming, which can bolster the speaker's perceived competence and status, but at the cost of seeming selfish or inconsiderate. The recipient of the communication experiences a different impact on their image: Thanking and apologizing elevate both perceived competence and warmth for the recipient, while bragging and blaming decrease both.
Sticking to your narrative: drumming in someone's face as peacemaking
Neither do they detail the fact that Phillips only walked near the writhing mass of sneering young white men as a way to try and calm them.
