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Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

The line between political reporting and fan fiction continues to blur.

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Republicans in disarray!

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

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Dear media: perhaps we ought to let Donald Trump speak for himself!

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You are here: Home / Archives for Politics / Information Warfare

Information Warfare

Late Night Open Thread: Peter Thiel Wants to Speak to *All* the Managers

by Anne Laurie|  January 13, 20253:04 am| 83 Comments

This post is in: Grifters Gonna Grift, Information Warfare, Open Threads

All I can say about this Peter Thiel op-ed in the Financial Times is that it reads like something he actually wrote. No comms team or AI chatbot is capable of producing this strange paranoid string of sentences www.ft.com/content/a46c…

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— Micah Loewinger (@micahloewinger.bsky.social) January 10, 2025 at 8:21 AM

Back on Friday, the Financial Times published an op-ed by Peter Thiel which has attracted a certain amount of internet scorn attention, even over the weekend. Some people say that Thiel, after spending lavishly of his own money & effort to install J.D. Vance on the incoming maladministration undercard, is just annoyed that his old running buddy Musk has side-stepped the official rules and moved into the top slot through the sheer leverage of money. Others point out that Thiel, like Elon, is a known (‘but of course he has a prescription’) ketamine user, and ketamine may assuage depression but it has concerning side effects.

Or then again, comes the rejoinder, maybe these Very Important Tech Dudes all got lucky — just happened to be standing outside with buckets when it started raining soup — and this is what the insides of their sweaty little brains have always looked like. In any case, here’s (ex South African) Thiel on A time for truth and reconciliation…

In 2016, President Barack Obama told his staff that Donald Trump’s election victory was “not the apocalypse”. By any definition, he was correct. But understood in the original sense of the Greek word apokálypsis, meaning “unveiling”, Obama could not give the same reassurance in 2025. Trump’s return to the White House augurs the apokálypsis of the ancien regime’s secrets. The new administration’s revelations need not justify vengeance — reconstruction can go hand in hand with reconciliation. But for reconciliation to take place, there must first be truth.

The apokálypsis is the most peaceful means of resolving the old guard’s war on the internet, a war the internet won. My friend and colleague Eric Weinstein calls the pre-internet custodians of secrets the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex (DISC) — the media organisations, bureaucracies, universities and government-funded NGOs that traditionally delimited public conversation. In hindsight, the internet had already begun our liberation from the DISC prison upon the prison death of financier and child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in 2019. Almost half of Americans polled that year mistrusted the official story that he died by suicide, suggesting that DISC had lost total control of the narrative…

We cannot wait six decades, however, to end the lockdown on a free discussion about Covid-19. In subpoenaed emails from Anthony Fauci’s senior adviser David Morens, we learnt that National Institutes of Health apparatchiks hid their correspondence from Freedom of Information Act scrutiny. “Nothing,” wrote Boccaccio in his medieval plague epic The Decameron, “is so indecent that it cannot be said to another person if the proper words are used to convey it.” …

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Our First Amendment frames the rules of engagement for domestic fights over free speech, but the global reach of the internet tempts its adversaries into a global war. Can we believe that a Brazilian judge banned X without American backing, in a tragicomic perversion of the Monroe Doctrine? Were we complicit in Australia’s recent legislation requiring age verification for social media users, the beginning of the end of internet anonymity? Did we muster up even two minutes’ criticism of the UK, which has arrested hundreds of people a year for online speech triggering, among other things, “annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety”? We may expect no better from Orwellian dictatorships in East Asia and Eurasia, but we must support a free internet in Oceania.

Darker questions still emerge in these dusky final weeks of our interregnum. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen recently suggested on Joe Rogan’s podcast that the Biden administration debanked crypto entrepreneurs. How closely does our financial system resemble a social credit system? Were an IRS contractor’s illegal leaks of Trump’s tax records anomalous, or should Americans assume their right to financial privacy hinges on their politics? And can one speak of a right to privacy at all when Congress conserves Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, under which the FBI conducts tens of thousands of warrantless searches of Americans’ communications?…

The future demands fresh and strange ideas. New ideas might have saved the old regime, which barely acknowledged, let alone answered, our deepest questions — the causes of the 50-year slowdown in scientific and technological progress in the US, the racket of crescendoing real estate prices, and the explosion of public debt…

Identity politics endlessly relitigates ancient history. The study of recent history, to which the Trump administration is now called, is more treacherous — and more important. The apokálypsis cannot resolve our fights over 1619, but it can resolve our fights over Covid-19; it will not adjudicate the sins of our first rulers, but the sins of those who govern us today. The internet will not allow us to forget those sins — but with the truth, it will not prevent us from forgiving.

As we would say in the funky-scented dormitory lounges late at night, back in the early 1970s: Heavy, maaaan.

It is easy to picture him writing this, his face aglow with moisture of unclear provenance.

— Triplejake (@triplejake.bsky.social) January 10, 2025 at 10:24 AM

The Financial Times didn’t exactly use an eye-roll emoji, but its readers seem to have construed that its publication was not an endorsemnt:

Wow. I have never seen a comment hit 1,000+ "recommended" before
www.ft.com/content/a46c…

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— Librarian Capital (@librariancapital.bsky.social) January 11, 2025 at 7:58 AM

I cannot believe the FT agreed to publish this. This piece isn’t news. It is not even opinion. I is openly gaslighting the readers. This is unacceptable and unprofessional from the FT’s editorial team.

 
Be that as it may. Insert ‘Let them fight’ gif…

Steve Bannon: “Peter Thiel, David Sacks, Elon Musk, are all white South Africans…go back to South Africa. Why do we have the most racist people on earth, white South Africans making any comments at all on what goes on in the United States?” https://t.co/7PKxTFbovO

— (((DeanObeidallah))) (@DeanObeidallah) January 12, 2025

Late Night Open Thread: Peter Thiel Wants to Speak to *All* the ManagersPost + Comments (83)

Important Read: The Case for A Shadow Cabinet

by Anne Laurie|  January 6, 20256:23 pm| 179 Comments

This post is in: Excellent Links, Information As Power, Information Warfare

The case for a Shadow Cabinet – a positive form of opposition.
snyder.substack.com/p/shadow-cab…

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— Timothy Snyder (@timothysnyder.bsky.social) January 6, 2025 at 9:11 AM

Timothy Snyder, who famously warned us Do Not Comply in Advance, has a very interesting proposal in his latest SubStack post:

When I moved to Great Britain to study, I found the politics very exciting. The parliamentary system was different, so that new elections immediately led to new governments. The press was excellent but political, so that one could read the newspapers and be informed both of the facts and the sentiments. And, when reporting government policy, journalists always had an opposition voice to quote: members of the “shadow cabinet.”

Like so much else in British public life, the institution of the shadow cabinet was unfamiliar to me, but I soon grew to appreciate and admire it. The “cabinet,” of course, was the assembly of government ministers, led in Britain by the prime minister. The party in opposition (the Labour Party when I arrived in Britain in 1991) appointed its own leading members to “shadow” each government minister, including the prime minister.

Shadow
meant follow. The shadow ministers “shadowed” the actual ministers, in the sense of following their every move, criticizing policy and offering alternatives. Importantly, the shadow minister was always available to offer commentary to the press on his or her area of expertise. This greatly enriched public life. At any point a journalist, and thus the public, had access to an alternative point of view, one which was both pertinently expert and politically relevant. Shadow ministers did not always become real ministers after the next elections, but often they did.

Four years ago today, Donald Trump led an attempt to overthrow a democratic election and thereby undo our constitutional system. In two weeks, the same man will be inaugurated president of the United States, this time with a centibillionaire as the unelected de facto head of government and with anti-qualified anti-patriots as his cabinet nominees. What to do? People talk about resistance, and about opposition. What forms should these take? I have written elsewhere about what citizens can do. Leading politicians of the opposition party, the Democratic Party in the United States, have a special responsibility, and also special opportunities. One of these is to form a shadow cabinet. I want to join the voices of those advocating for this. (Here I am speaking for the idea on television a few weeks ago.)

In Great Britain, the shadow cabinet represents “the loyal opposition.” The loyalty in question is to the state and to its head, the monarch. In the United States, a “loyal opposition” would be loyal to our Constitution — and, indeed, that could be the basis of its activity. We face the unusual situation of a government — a president and his cabinet — who seem indifferent to the rule of law itself. By beginning from the principle that we have a government of laws, not men, a shadow cabinet would reinforce the American way of politics. It would be a very good thing to have a constitutional lawyer or two on the shadow cabinet.

And a shadow cabinet would remind us of how much better things can be. The regular reactions of its members to Musk-Trump would flow from different sense of politics and policy. That is material that the press needs, and that we all need. As Trump and his cabinet undertake their unpredictable whorl of destructive policy, journalists and others will be at a loss as to what to say. The worse things get, the harder it is to think of an alternative. As time goes by, the chaos of Musk-Trump might seem like the only possible reality. That, of course, will be the goal of the new regime: to persuade us that government just means dysfunctionality, spectacle, and repression. At every moment, members of the shadow government can remind us what government could instead be doing, positively, for the people. They are there to remind us that a better America is always possible…

Yes, there is a problem in that we Democrats are infamously ‘not an organized political party’. But that can be its own strength — we’re not an intellectual monoculture, uniformly susceptible to every passing blight! In any case: Go read the whole thing, and let’s discuss.

Important Read: <em>The Case for A Shadow Cabinet</em>Post + Comments (179)

Late Night Interlude Open Thread: Smirnov Lied. So Did, and Will, Jim Comer

by Anne Laurie|  December 19, 202410:24 pm| 51 Comments

This post is in: Information Warfare, Republican Venality

BREAKING: A former FBI informant pleaded guilty to lying about a phony bribery scheme involving President Joe Biden and his son Hunter. https://t.co/lcbHf5HY1k

— The Associated Press (@AP) December 16, 2024

This story has been (temporarily) overwhelmed by the Great Budget Bullsh*t Kabuki, but I’m sure Jim ‘Second Time As Farce’ Comer is keeping his oversight gavel warm. So, getting it on the record: The whole ‘Burisma paid off Hunter and probably Joe Biden’ story was based on lies from an actual, breathing, self-identified Russian asset. And Comer’s Crew was either too dumb to pick that up, or too eager to impeach President Biden not to leap at the lies like a pig at a truffle…

A former FBI informant pleaded guilty on Monday to lying about a phony bribery scheme involving President Joe Biden and his son Hunter that became central to the Republican impeachment inquiry in Congress.

Alexander Smirnov entered his plea to a felony charge in connection with the bogus story, along with a tax evasion charge stemming from a separate indictment accusing him of concealing millions of dollars of income…

Smirnov will get credit for the time he has served since his February arrest on charges that he told his FBI handler that executives from the Ukrainian energy company Burisma had paid President Biden and Hunter Biden $5 million each around 2015.

Smirnov had been an informant for more than a decade when he made the explosive allegations about the Bidens in June 2020, after “expressing bias” about Joe Biden as a presidential candidate, prosecutors said.

But Smirnov had only routine business dealings with Burisma starting in 2017, according to court documents. An FBI field office investigated the allegations and recommended the case be closed in August 2020, according to charging documents.

No evidence has emerged that Joe Biden acted corruptly or accepted bribes as president or in his previous office as vice president.

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While Smirnov’s identity wasn’t publicly known before the indictment, his claims played a major part in the Republican effort in Congress to investigate the president and his family, and helped spark a House impeachment inquiry into Biden. Before Smirnov’s arrest, Republicans had demanded the FBI release the unredacted form documenting the unverified allegations, though they acknowledged they couldn’t confirm if they were true…

Smirnov claimed to have contacts with Russian intelligence-affiliated officials, and told authorities after his arrest this year that “officials associated with Russian intelligence were involved in passing a story” about Hunter Biden…

No wonder Comer couldn't find anything! Not that he'd have the decency to admit as much. It was always just a show. https://t.co/S2uV7cA0gJ

— Jessica Tarlov (@JessicaTarlov) December 16, 2024

This deserves a *lot* more attention. The Republicans rode their phony “informant” story for years. https://t.co/vgnDvEJjdj

— SpyTalk: Intelligence for Thinking People (@talk_spy) December 17, 2024

CNN: *plays clip of Comer saying an FBI informant who has now pleaded guilty to lying is "a very crucial piece of our investigation" of Hunter Biden*

PAMELA BROWN: Do you regret playing this FBI informant up?

COMER: I never said he was a crucial part of the investigation pic.twitter.com/jMDYNXzizj

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 18, 2024

Goddess bless the Democrats pushing back on Comer’s lies…

NEW: RM @RepRaskin sent the following statement after @RepJamesComer’s star witness/Russian asset pled guilty in court to fabricating the central claims of the GOP’s collapsed impeachment drive which the Chairman, amazingly, still repeats on TV. https://t.co/ELnjcyaOWI pic.twitter.com/z1XNZnVIcV

— Oversight Committee Democrats (@OversightDems) December 18, 2024

For two years, House Republicans have used the false testimony of a Russian foreign agent, Alexander Smirnov, to improve their electoral prospects by spreading lies about President Joe Biden. Now, Smirnov is pleading guilty to lying to the FBI.

Read my full statement below. pic.twitter.com/LBwub4SW0N

— Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett (@RepJasmine) December 17, 2024

BREAKING: Alexander Smirnov given plea deal after years lying about President Biden & Hunter, causing sham investigation by Republicans. House Oversight Chair James Comer, Sen. Chuck Grassley, AG Bill Barr milked the false claims for political gain. It killed Hunter’s plea deal.… pic.twitter.com/iGu4fqkHQk

— Bryan Dawson???? (@BryanDawsonUSA) December 13, 2024

For those who don’t remember @ChuckGrassley ‘s role in the Smirnov nonsense, this may refresh your memory. Of course, Chuck knows no shame so is unlikely to apologize to anyone. https://t.co/xw9uzj9vL7

— Dave Loebsack for Iowa (@DaveForIowa) December 16, 2024

Remember the "Biden bribe" story? The guy who invented it just admitted to making it up.
Remember the "FBI did Jan. 6" thing? According to a new inspector general report, they didn't.
I'm sure Fox News et al will be suitably chastened.
www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202…

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— Philip Bump (@pbump.com) December 12, 2024 at 3:27 PM

Thus far neither ABC nor CNN bothered to tell readers abt the back story to this: The side channel set up by Bill Barr via which Rudy could launder his dirt from Russian spies, Scott Brady's alleged lies to Congress abt vetting it, Congress & Barr's role in reflating this claim. https://t.co/0rVHuNGLxn

— emptywheel (mr. blue sky) (@emptywheel) December 12, 2024

Late Night Interlude Open Thread: Smirnov Lied. So Did, and Will, Jim ComerPost + Comments (51)

Monday Evening Open Thread: Let Us Learn from the Koreans…

by Anne Laurie|  December 9, 20247:35 pm| 201 Comments

This post is in: Foreign Affairs, Information Warfare

To summarize: The Korean president told the army “hey guys, come over here, I’m doing a coup” and they came with unloaded guns and just kinda dicked around and when he was like “wtf is u doing” they were like “hey man, you said *you* were doing a coup.”

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— Starfish Who Can’t Think Something Witty (@irhottakes.bsky.social) December 5, 2024 at 11:56 PM

Trump and his henchmen have been saying a lot of terrible things, because ‘saying’ is all they’ve got at the moment, and the thought of doing terrible things to people who can’t retaliate is what gives them joy. But talk is cheap, and the actions they propose require coordination — a degree of cooperation we can make sure they don’t get.

Korea has, I am informed, a rather different social culture than ours (‘ornery’ seems to be the default term), a textbook dictatorship on its border, and a living memory of what civil war actually entails. These factors seem to have given the Korean public a head start on stopping the Six-Hour Coup. But we can learn from them!

I'm gonna hit the Clausewitz bong for a sec
What we're trying to do is create friction.
Everything is very simple in war, and the simplest thing is difficult.

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— Sam (ABeardedPanda) (@abeardedpanda.bsky.social) December 8, 2024 at 4:06 PM

Those little speedbumps might individually mean little but in aggregate, they run down the clock and force the GOP to expend political capital where they don't want to

— Sam (ABeardedPanda) (@abeardedpanda.bsky.social) December 8, 2024 at 4:06 PM

If I'm gonna run with "war is politics by other means, therefore politics is war by other means" I need people to understand that tactical defeats do not result in strategic ones and the costs we can impose over the course of those tactical defeats will have consequences that can be exploited

— Sam (ABeardedPanda) (@abeardedpanda.bsky.social) December 8, 2024 at 4:33 PM

This wasn't over on November 5th, it won't be over on January 20th, and it won't be over if he declares himself god-emperor of America
It will be over when all of us are dead

— Sam (ABeardedPanda) (@abeardedpanda.bsky.social) December 8, 2024 at 4:34 PM

Monday Evening Open Thread: Let Us Learn from the Koreans…Post + Comments (201)

Late Night Schadenfreude Open Thread: They Did Nazi That Coming

by Anne Laurie|  December 1, 20244:32 am| 84 Comments

This post is in: Information Warfare, Open Threads, I Can't Believe We're Still Talking About Fucking Nazis, Schadenfreude

https://t.co/FHadEY4hUJ pic.twitter.com/lV6Fpl5Ae7

— vituperativeerb (@vituperativeerb) November 26, 2024

Per the Columbus Dispatch, “Body cam footage: Neo-Nazis who marched in Short North claimed to be victims of violence”:

A group of neo-Nazis who marched through the Short North this month were not arrested because police determined they were not the aggressors in a fight that broke out, according to documents and video footage.

In body camera footage Columbus police released Monday, the neo-Nazis told police they had never experienced a response like the one they received in Columbus. They said people pulled guns on them and threw cans and vegetables as they marched, waved flags and yelled racial slurs. One of the officers noted the men were “covered in” pepper spray.

The Nov. 16 march drew stern condemnation from city hall to the White House, but no arrests were made. A group of Black men organized a counter-march the next day, following the same route in the Short North with a message of peace. In a statement, Columbus police previously said they could not find sufficient probable cause to file any charges against the neo-Nazis.

Police initially made contact with the neo-Nazis in a chaotic scene on a sidewalk near Goodale Park at about 1:15 p.m., according to a radio log printout from Columbus police. There the neo-Nazis, wearing black and red clothing and carrying black flags with red swastikas, told police they were leaving because they were under attack. In the background, bystanders shouted at them to take off their masks.

They told police they were marching because “our country is being invaded and white people are being ostracized.” While they refused to tell police where they lived, they referenced past marches in other cities.

Police said they’d received a report that they were spraying people with pepper spray and hair spray. The neo-Nazis said they were pepper sprayed first, and hadn’t instigated any violence. Footage previously obtained by the Dispatch showed one of the neo-Nazis spraying something in a person’s face, and 911 callers said the neo-Nazis had pepper sprayed people.

Several officers, including multiple Black officers, were present at the scene on the sidewalk. One Black officer tried to reason with the marchers, pointing out that they were bound to see confrontation from people for shouting hateful things.

“I definitely feel your First Amendment rights to say whatever nonsense this is, but c’mon, man,” the officer said. “The Buckeyes are playing. Man, come on.”…

A police report identified the group as “Hate Club 1844.” The driver is the only neo-Nazi named in the report. The others are identified only as about 10-11 unknown white men.

“We do this all over the U.S., and we’ve never been attacked like this, man,” the driver told police from his seat in the U-Haul.

Late Night Schadenfreude Open Thread: They Did Nazi That ComingPost + Comments (84)

Tuesday Morning Open Thread: Joe Biden, Still Our President

by Anne Laurie|  November 19, 20249:49 am| 80 Comments

This post is in: Information Warfare, Open Threads, President Biden, Proud to Be A Democrat

63 days left of having a decent guy as President pic.twitter.com/DqBi34mZ1N

— Sibylle (@AHaschi) November 18, 2024

Our forests and national wonders are the heart and soul of the world.

Let’s preserve them, for our time and forever, for the benefit of all humanity. pic.twitter.com/JL8oTOYKLl

— President Biden (@POTUS) November 19, 2024

Biden: I will leave my successor and my country with a strong foundation to build on if they choose to do so. It's true, some may seek to deny or delay the clean energy revolution that's under way in America, but nobody, nobody can reverse it. pic.twitter.com/n79Lv4X67c

— Acyn (@Acyn) November 17, 2024

Good news: Senate Dems are ramming through judge lifetime appointments at *lightning speed*. Remember, they can’t be removed. HUUUGE W! Keep pushing!!!

— Isaiah Martin (@isaiahrmartin) November 18, 2024

******

Tuesday Morning Open Thread 17

(Clay Bennett via GoComics.com)

 

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Not exactly happy breakfast reading, but informative… From the Forward, “Why Neo-Nazis marched in Ohio this weekend, and almost every weekend in the U.S.”:

About a dozen neo-Nazis marched on Saturday through downtown Columbus, Ohio waving swastika flags. The march was just the latest of hundreds of such rallies held across the nation in the past two years.

“Almost every single weekend, white supremacists are rallying in some neighborhood,” said Oren Segal, vice president of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. The group’s data found 282 such events in 2023. This summer alone, there were 64 white supremacist events across 25 states.

The regularity with which they happen can both numb and instill fear in Jewish communities. Segal said they are not part of a rising trend of antisemitism in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack in Israel, but have been occurring since 2016, “around the time of the first Trump administration.”

Segal said these rallies are usually organized by small groups hoping to get attention online, where they can attract new recruits. Additionally, the marches are sometimes the result of a turf war, almost a “soap opera” between competing white supremacist groups, as likely happened in Columbus…

The neo-Nazi march that had the most lasting impact was the one in August 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia. Called the “Unite the Right” rally, it was organized to protest the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general. Among the hundreds of attendees were a who’s who of extremists, including far-right militias, Klansmen, neo-Nazis and Richard Spencer, a supporter of then-President Donald Trump and a college friend of Trump adviser and incoming White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller. The following day turned violent when rally goers clashed with counter-protesters. Dozens were injured and a white supremacist rammed his car into a counter-protester, killing her…

Marches similar to the one in Columbus — led by a small group hoping to cause a big ruckus — are what the ADL sees on a regular basis. For example: last weekend outside a performance of The Diary of Anne Frank in Michigan; outside the Broadway theater hosting the Tony-winning Parade, a musical about antisemitism; and multiple times in front of Disney World in Orlando.

“I don’t think these groups are cooperating in the same way that they did around Charlottesville,” Segal said. Instead, it’s mostly infighting between white supremacist groups “competing for attention.”

The dozen or so marchers in Columbus this weekend belong to a newly formed white supremacist group based out of St. Louis, Segal said. A rival group is based in Ohio. “Essentially, this was perhaps part of a turf war,” Segal said. He called it a “soap opera amongst white supremacists,” where one group “is trying to antagonize another by showing up in their area.”…

The rallies are usually not announced in advance; a spontaneous gathering is less likely to draw local authorities or counter-protesters. “They’re quick: get people in and out,” Segal said. “It’s to create imagery and propaganda that then has an impact well beyond the community that they target.”

Videos of the events are quickly shared online. “This is what they want,” he said. “One of their ultimate goals is to get this attention. If there was no social media, we would not probably see as many of these rallies.”…

These groups are all “very similar in terms of not only their beliefs, but their tactics,” Segal said. “But we don’t really have the luxury to call them rinky dink.”

He explained that these small marches are used to recruit people online. “You never know who online is going to see what they do and say, ‘Oh, I need to not only be part of this, but take it to the next level.’”

He said this is what led to the mass shootings at synagogues in Pittsburgh (2018) and Poway, California, (2019) and at supermarkets in El Paso (2019) and Buffalo (2022). None of the shooters “were card-carrying members of any of these alphabet soup of groups, but they subscribed to the exact same ideology,” Segal said. “Hundreds of these types of events, even as small as they are, are just normalizing the hatred of Jews and other minority communities. And there are consequences to that.”

Tuesday Morning Open Thread: Joe Biden, Still Our PresidentPost + Comments (80)

(Extremely) TGIFriday Morning Open Thread

by Anne Laurie|  September 6, 20247:41 am| 295 Comments

This post is in: Elections 2024, Information Warfare, Kamala Harris for President, Open Threads, Russia

This is happening… #bydhttmwfi https://t.co/LFMEaKTzEY

— LeVar Burton (@levarburton) September 6, 2024

VP @KamalaHarris taped a radio interview with @RickeySmiley. The interview will air Friday morning.

— Akayla Gardner (@gardnerakayla) September 4, 2024

"It does not have to be this way" — Kamala Harris in New Hampshire goes "off script" to discuss how during her recent meetings with college students, almost all of them acknowledged they've had to do active shooter drills pic.twitter.com/diHTv2p2gb

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 4, 2024

This is pathetic. We can’t quit on our kids — they deserve better. https://t.co/ozYdvpDJ4u

— Tim Walz (@Tim_Walz) September 6, 2024

President Biden begins his remarks by acknowledging the school shooting in Georgia yesterday.

He calls to ban assault weapons and enact universal background checks. pic.twitter.com/xwGMRmc0Hr

— Vanessa Kjeldsen (@VanessaKjeldsen) September 5, 2024

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The fact that she actively called out the petulant practice of writing in someone instead of actually using your vote to contribute to a win is tremendously important, and should have a pretty hefty ripple effect… https://t.co/jPTiQle6O9

— Andy #HarrisWalz2024 ?????????? (@mpersandy) September 4, 2024

More Republican men have to show the kind of courage that Republican women have shown, from Liz Cheney to witnesses at the jan 6 committee hearings

I don't mean the spineless toadies like chris sununu, I mean the ones who won't vote for trump but won't publicly endorse harris. https://t.co/UNsJay1BdI

— Greg Dworkin (@DemFromCT) September 4, 2024

They are rooting against America. He is correct. https://t.co/SgQqKr5Ah9

— LadyGrey ???????????? (@TWLadyGrey) September 4, 2024

========
Since we all deserve a little schadenfreudalicious treat…

??Tim Pool advocates for the death penalty for people found to have accepted money for Treason.

RT if you agree…?? pic.twitter.com/Gu9mybfhMy

— Dean Blundell???? (@ItsDeanBlundell) September 5, 2024

Upon reflection I now understand that Tim Pool can go f himself pic.twitter.com/THqGabL3N7

— David Leavitt ??????????? (@David_Leavitt) September 5, 2024

No, Vladimir Putin bought a Cybertruck pic.twitter.com/xTFKUA4Fww

— Liam Nissan™ (@theliamnissan) September 4, 2024

Weird how "just asking questions" never includes asking "who are these people giving me a lot of money and what do they want?"

— Nicholas Grossman (@NGrossman81) September 5, 2024

I sure am looking at this Junior clip with Tim Pool with a fresh set of eyes now! https://t.co/DS0Pox9J4F

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) September 5, 2024

tbh my current working theory is that it was the Russians that grassed him up in a sheer fit of vodka fueled rage when they saw that they had paid out hard earned and scarce US dollar reserves for shit like this pic.twitter.com/VKcwXC1agf

— Dan Davies (@dsquareddigest) September 4, 2024

What’s that you say, Mr. Musk?…

think tankers funded entirely by Saudi Arabia looking down on the guys getting paid by Russia pic.twitter.com/XSJeWbWjJf

— ¦O¦S¦I¦N¦T¦I¦N¦B¦I¦O¦ (@GorillaOSINT) September 5, 2024

(Extremely) TGIFriday Morning Open ThreadPost + Comments (295)

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