…one of the things about having a brain that seems to think its principal occupation is to offer up a profusion of distractions at every turn…which may or may not be how it works for everyone but certainly seems to be of variable degree…is that one thing may very well lead to another but as often as not it’ll lead itself back around again…& sometimes it even seems like a useful detour…granted those times may be in the minority in my case…so it probably helps that I like the scenic route…still…not everyone does…so I probably ought to get to getting to something…but…there’s sort of method to the madness…because…sometimes it helps to start at the beginning…but sometimes it’s better to kick off in media res…& in this case…as far as my day goes…this actually passes for the latter…the former involved inadvertently considering the whole “easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven” business & involuntarily thinking “sure, it sounds like it’s obviously supposed to be a euphemism for impossible but the whole crucifixion/for our sins/clean slate combo bonus gratuity deal was kind of a get out of jail free card for rich people, too…on account of applying to everyone…so…if it were a fairly big needle…like for leatherwork or something…& it only had to look like the camel went through the eye…you could probably hold it close enough to let perspective pull the trick…probably be easier if you get to use a mirror or two…probably a cake walk if you get to use lenses”…& there I was halfway to lewis carroll’s six impossible things before breakfast & barely balanced upright, let alone awake

…& why…you are presumably asking yourselves about now…the ever-loving hell should anyone have been subjected to reading than utter nonsense…which, by the way, could quite easily be interpreted as highly offensive to a number of people?

…well…ummm…it’s like this

Our brains are famously flexible, or “plastic,” because neurons can do new things by forging new or stronger connections with other neurons. But if some connections strengthen, neuroscientists have reasoned, neurons must compensate lest they become overwhelmed with input. In a new study in Science, researchers at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT demonstrate for the first time how this balance is struck: when one connection, called a synapse, strengthens, immediately neighboring synapses weaken based on the action of a crucial protein called Arc.

MIT scientists discover fundamental rule of brain plasticity [MIT news]

…now…I’m pretty sure I misconstrue that stuff at least a bit & possibly a whole lot…because I always find it hard to follow when a friend who models those sorts of networks starts talking about how “weighting” works…but…basically the actual brain…the little grey cells & such…is…ummm…a bit like the millenium falcon? …bits can get damaged or blown out but somehow or other it gets the resident wookie to apply percussive maintenance techniques & more often than not when you need the hyperdrive to kick in you see all the white lines where the stars used to be…but one of the ways it does that involves…essentially…a reinforcement model as well as a high level of redundancy…&…well…I’ve been wondering a lot lately if maybe we ought to admit that in the metaphorical gestalt mind of humanity…we’ve kind of turned that feature into a bug?

The prospect that Mr. Trump will be president again is impossible to ignore. For liberals, this fact inspires dread. And for good reason. In a second term, Mr. Trump and his advisers have promised to weaponize the Justice Department against his enemies, go to war with Mexican drug cartels, detain and deport millions of immigrants and send federal troops into Democrat-run cities to fight crime and put down protests. We know this because conservative operatives have anticipated this outcome for years, developing plans for a better, smoother and more ideologically coherent Trump White House, capable of implementing the former president’s radical agenda and circumventing bureaucratic obstruction.

To achieve this vision, a Reagan-era shibboleth has come back into fashion in conservative circles: Personnel is policy. Conservative organizations have become, as one administration alum put it, “laser-focused on the staffing challenge.” Most prominently, rival think tanks — the Heritage Foundation and the America First Policy Institute — are collecting names for potential political appointees, putting forward detailed plans to staff the next Trump administration quickly and efficiently. Both have raised millions for this effort.
[…]
In office, Mr. Trump was notorious for favoring his most obsequious staffers, blithely firing many who challenged him and making personnel and policy decisions in consultation with his television. Though they are loath to admit it for fear of dooming the effort, the architects of these initiatives are working to preemptively contain Mr. Trump’s worst impulses: his capriciousness, his disdain for process and detail, his weakness for sycophancy.

But on the campaign trail this time, the former president seems more Trumpian than ever. He doesn’t want to be contained; he wants to be obeyed. And it has already begun to bedevil the transition plans. A shadow war is raging among former Trump officials, ensconced at their respective think tanks, each competing to serve as his White House in waiting. The king hasn’t returned from exile, but he is already inspiring acrimony and disarray among his courtiers.

Ask Washington conservatives what went wrong with Mr. Trump’s first term, and they’ll almost certainly tell you a version of the same story: He was surrounded by the wrong people. His campaign was a shocking insurgency within the G.O.P.; it broke with decades of orthodoxy — on trade, immigration, entitlements, war — scandalizing and alienating much of the credentialed D.C. policymaker class. As a result, his White House was hastily staffed by a mix of underqualified true believers, opportunistic hacks and experienced but disloyal swamp creatures who colluded with journalists and permanent bureaucrats to undermine the president’s populist agenda.
[…]
Both groups are trying to make Mr. Trump a “better” president: more effective, more ruthless, more beholden to conservative dogma. But Heritage and A.F.P.I. represent different cliques in the Trump universe, and each is suspicious of the other. A.F.P.I. partisans see Heritage as a latecomer to the Trump train, establishment wolves in “America First” clothing. Some at Heritage see A.F.P.I. as a redoubt of precisely those unreliable Trump appointees — grifters and RINOs — who trade on their relationships with the president to ensure they can continue to run the show.

“A.F.P.I. and Heritage hate each other with a passion,” a Trump operative told The Daily Beast in November. “The Heritage people look down on the A.F.P.I. people like they’re a joke. And the A.F.P.I. people look at the Heritage people like they’re phony MAGA.” In September, one of Mr. McEntee’s colleagues sent a blistering email to the leader of A.F.P.I.’s transition project, calling the outfit a “Trojan horse by which the establishment can retake control of personnel.” “I understand that all the America Last Republicans are afraid of being cut out of the next administration,” he sneered. “They should be.”
[…]
This discord is a symptom of a deeper problem. The sociologist Dylan Riley, relying on a typology from Max Weber, has proposed thinking of Mr. Trump as a charismatic leader (deriving his authority from the force of his personality) whose model of governance is essentially patrimonial. In other words, Mr. Trump ran his White House more like a mafia boss (or a king) than a president, treating affairs of state as his personal affairs, as if he were managing his family — his patrimony.

During his first term, that mode of rule proved utterly incapable of running a large, rational, bureaucratic state apparatus. Mr. Trump’s personal network of friends, family and advisers, writes Mr. Riley, was “simply too small” to staff federal agencies with people who were both competent and loyal. Meanwhile, the bureaucracy treated Trumpian patrimonialism as a “foreign body” within its structure, a pathogen to be expelled. The friction that dynamic created, as incompatible modes of governance ground against one another, accounts for the dysfunction and, ultimately, the weakness of the first Trump administration.
[…]
If he continues on as he always has, hiring loyal incompetents and business-world cronies all while refusing to cede control to the eggheads, the second Trump administration may resemble the first: with all the internal dysfunction and recrimination that hampered his agenda last time. That means four more years of bureaucratic paralysis and friction, lots of sparks and light but little fundamental change — a system of government too busy attacking itself to help most Americans, and just functional enough to bestow financial rewards on Mr. Trump’s friends while inflicting sporadic pain on his preferred enemies: immigrants, the nonwhite poor, trans kids and university professors.

Despite all the contradictions I’ve noted, it’s not impossible to imagine something worse. Neither Heritage nor A.F.P.I. is likely to get its way entirely; the transition will involve a division of spoils among various constituencies: think tanks, the corporate world, Trump cronies and big donors. But there is little doubt that a second Trump White House would be better prepared to seize the reins of power, to “hit the beaches” on Day 1, as Steve Bannon recently put it in conversation with the Project 2025 director Paul Dans on Mr. Bannon’s podcast. As Heritage’s own transformation attests, movement conservatism has been reshaped in Mr. Trump’s image. The backbench of policy entrepreneurs dedicated to Mr. Trump’s agenda is orders of magnitude deeper than it was in 2016. And many fewer moderate G.O.P. officials are likely to join (or to be permitted to join) the administration with the goal of constraining Mr. Trump.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/10/opinion/shadow-war-trump-transition.html

…uh huh

This is the fascist argument they're crafting to cover up for the fact that AMONG OTHER THINGS, Daddy released a WHOLE BUNCH of intelligence on Iran that likely helped Iran attack American ships. pic.twitter.com/3U5zDre0k4

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) January 16, 2024

…all due respect to dr wheeler & all…& quite a lot of that is, as it goes…certainly more than…well…let’s just say they aren’t sending their best…or maybe they are but they certainly wouldn’t want to admit it, if so

Reading through the Maine opinion and one thing that always strikes me is how shoddy and unserious Trump's lawyers always seem to be.
Like, they barely try. They co-counsel contradicts each other. They don't seem to know all the rules. They just appear really bad. https://t.co/fuGJnqDjd2

— Elie Mystal (@ElieNYC) December 29, 2023

…still…I rather fear that might be only the start of it

https://www.mediaite.com/trump/trump-shares-messianic-video-about-god-sending-him-to-save-world/

…I mean…if you want to get all textual originalist about it…the phantom of the d’oh-pe-era checks off more anti-christ boxes on the armageddon bingo-card than he does for the second coming…&…what would he be saving himself us “his people” from?

In 2023 there were more than 6,000 air alerts in Ukraine. Last month alone, Russia launched some 624 drones carrying explosives, according to official sources. On Dec. 29, more than 120 Russian missiles and drones targeted towns across the country, killing 44 people. It was the deadliest attack on civilians in Kyiv since the beginning of the war.

In all of December, there was just one night without an attack.

Russia’s strikes increased as attempts to authorize more funding for Ukraine stalled in the U.S. Congress and in Europe. Since the fall, Kyiv’s western allies have reportedly been quietly pushing for negotiations to end the war. By the end of December, Vladimir Putin was also reportedly signaling that he, too, was ready to make a deal.

A Russian political observer I talked to suggested that these signals from Mr. Putin were calibrated to capitalize on the sense of gloom among Ukraine’s allies in Europe and the United States; to further delay military aid when Ukraine was already low on ammunition and vulnerable, and to allow Russia to further press its advantage.
[…]
Peace would require a genuine guarantee that the Kremlin won’t use a cease-fire simply to rearm and launch a renewed assault from the occupied Ukrainian territories. According to recent polling, most Ukrainians are still against any territorial concessions to Russia and many say any peace deal must also bring Crimea back under Ukraine’s control, lest the threat of invasion continue indefinitely.

What Mr. Putin is offering — according to The Times, a cease-fire that “freezes the fighting along the current lines” — is not peace but occupation, and occupation is just a different kind of war.

The Reckoning Project, which investigates and documents potential war crimes in Ukraine — I am one of its co-founders — has investigated the deaths of hundreds of civilians in attacks on towns far from the battlefield, strikes on residential areas, shopping malls and restaurants and attacks that used precise ammunition on civilians evacuating train stations.

…of which more, anon

…hmm

There is no question that Donald Trump appears at least indifferent when his supporters engage in violence on his behalf. There are numerous examples and compilations of those examples, to an extent that barely warrants recapitulation.
[…]
On Tuesday, Trump appeared in court in Washington as his attorneys argued that he had immunity from prosecution for his actions after the 2020 election. It went poorly, as might be expected. (When your lawyer is arguing that a president could have an opponent assassinated without facing criminal charges, you should assume that your position isn’t that solid.)

…well…unless…you were using a rule-book translated from…maybe a cyrillic script…but…nah?

“I think they feel this is the way they are going to try and win,” Trump said, referring to the criminal cases. “And that’s not the way it goes. It will be bedlam in the country.”

“It’s a very bad thing,” he continued. “Very bad precedent. As we said, it’s the opening of a Pandora’s box. That’s a very sad thing that’s happened with this whole situation. When they talk about threat to democracy, that’s your real threat to democracy.”

…that’ll be the product of an overactive imagination, never you fear

1) Here we see yet another secessionist movement gaining traction. They want to make Texas into its own country, basically. So I did a little digging and guess what? They appear to have some ties with Russia, which is not surprising. ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/UbN5VkwutD

— Jack’s 🇺🇦House of The Way (@FluteMagician) December 28, 2023

…anyway…where were we?

https://www.emptywheel.net/2024/01/08/the-first-time-trump-colluded-with-russia-was-to-help-bibi-netanyahu/

…oh, yeah…threatening democracy…right you are

Suffolk also asked people two questions centered on their acceptance of Trump’s claims about fraud in 2020: whether they were confident the results of this year’s election would be counted correctly and whether they thought Biden’s election was legitimate. Among those who were not confident in this year’s results or in the results from 2020, significantly more respondents said they were concerned “a great deal” about democracy.

Overall, an equivalent number of respondents said they thought Democrats posed the bigger threat as said that Republicans did. Among independents, slightly more pointed at Democrats, though the difference wasn’t significant.
[…]
Suffolk also asked why those who were concerned about democracy had that concern. Among Democrats and overall, a plurality of respondents pointed to Trump. Three in 10 respondents overall and two-thirds of Democrats identified Trump, Republicans, MAGA supporters or general concerns about dictatorship. Only 7 percent of Republicans identified those factors.
[…]
None of these responses (individual responses categorized by Suffolk) gets specifically at Trump’s insistence that his indictments are an erosion of democracy. But he’s already been effective at convincing his base that those indictments are meant to hobble him politically so that he couldn’t fight on their behalf. His comments Tuesday both reframe that argument and muddy the water on what the threat to democracy actually looks like.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/01/10/trump-often-passively-encourages-violence-actively-rationalizes-it/

…what with all the places (& people) getting reduced to piles of rubble & all…it’s fair to say that some democracies look more threatened than others…not…& bear with me while I torture this metaphor some more…unlike brain cells resisting the eternal assault of the forces of entropy

Historically, it was believed that the neurobiology of normal ageing was marked by massive cell loss and deterioration of dendritic arborization. However, the application of stereological principles to cell counting methods led to the conclusion that significant cell loss does not occur during normal ageing and that changes in dendritic complexity are subtle and region-specific.

Most biophysical properties of neurons remain the same during ageing. In the hippocampus and the PFC there are no differences between old and young neurons in resting membrane potential, membrane time constant, threshold to elicit an action potential, and rise time and duration of an action potential. In both regions, however, there is a significant increase in Ca2+ conductance, which probably contributes to age-related changes in plasticity (long-term potentiation (LTP) and long-term depression (LTD)).
[…]
The mechanisms involved in plasticity in the nervous system are thought to support cognition, and some of these processes are affected during normal ageing. Notably, cognitive functions that rely on the medial temporal lobe and prefrontal cortex, such as learning, memory and executive function, show considerable age-related decline. It is therefore not surprising that several neural mechanisms in these brain areas also seem to be particularly vulnerable during the ageing process. In this review, we discuss major advances in our understanding of age-related changes in the medial temporal lobe and prefrontal cortex and how these changes in functional plasticity contribute to behavioural impairments in the absence of significant pathology.

Neural plasticity in the ageing brain [Nature]

…so…if…say…you extrapolate along a few parallel lines

Doing your own research is a good way to end up being wrong [WaPo]

…one set of tracks we’d be back around to would be

I understand the emotional fatigue of watching the Russian war against Ukraine from a distance. I understand how a sense of powerlessness can engender disappointment and cynicism.
[…]
Last year, Russia started attacking more often in January and February, when the temperature went down. It used drones to target the power grid, weaponizing the cold against civilians. People had to use generators, and power cuts were frequent. This year, the power grid is less vulnerable, and people have needed generators less.

Putin Is Making His Plans Brutally Clear [NYT]

…& last year vlad wasn’t playing second fiddle in the brutality on display…which alone could drive you to drink…even if you don’t live in the sort of places where a half-pint bottle of vodka is part of the price of some set breakfasts…true story…but probably best left for another time…maybe when true & story are less uneasy bedfellows?

Richard Haass, a president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations and a former director of policy planning at the State Department, responded, “So is the U.S. at a critical juncture? And is this juncture qualitatively different from previous difficult moments in our history?”

What worries Haass most is

the decline in a common American identity. Americans lead increasingly separate and different lives. From “out of many one” no longer applies. This is truly dangerous, as this is a country founded on an idea (rather than class or demographic homogeneity), and that idea is no longer agreed on, much less widely held. I am no longer confident there is the necessary desire and ability to make this country succeed. As a result, I cannot rule out continued paralysis and dysfunction at best and widespread political violence or even dissolution at worst.

[…]
All of which lays the groundwork for the acceptance of false claims.
[…]
Jack Goldstone, a professor of public policy at George Mason University, sees other factors driving intensified conflict. In an email, he wrote: […]

From the late 1940s to the mid-1970s, output and wages moved together. But slowly from the mid-1970s and then rapidly from the 1980s, they diverged. By 2023, we’ve had 40 years in which the output of the economy has grown enormously, with output per worker hour growing by 126 percent, while compensation per worker has grown only 27 percent.

[…]
Isabel Sawhill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, wrote in an email that pessimism has become endemic in some quarters: “I find that many of my friends, relatives and colleagues are equally concerned about the future of the country. The worst part of this is that we feel quite helpless — unable to find ways to improve matters.”

That the leaders of one of our two major political parties “would support a corrupt, self-interested and deranged former president,” Sawhill continued, “is certainly part of the problem, but even more concerning is the fact that a majority of the public currently says they would vote for him in 2024.”

The biggest challenge, she wrote, “is what I have called the great misalignment between the institutions we have and those we need to deal with most of these problems.”

…maybe she’s right…& if so that’s more than slightly daunting…what with me finding the challenge of even studied optimism to be be biting off more than I can chew a lot of the time

Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard and the author of “Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress,” was the most optimistic — or, perhaps, the least pessimistic — of those I contacted for this essay. He replied by email to my query:

One can always think one is in an unprecedented crisis by listing the worst things happening in the country at the time. But this is a nonrandom sample, and selecting the worst developments in a given year will always make it seem as if a catastrophe is imminent. It’s good to remember the apparently existential crises of decades that you and I lived through, including:
[I’ll skip the list]

Pinker has repeatedly made his case in recent days on the X platform, posting “177 Ways the World Got Better in 2023” on Jan. 2, “From David Byrne’s Reasons to Be Cheerful” on the same day and “No, 2023 Wasn’t All Bad, and Here Are 23 Reasons Why Not” on Jan. 4.

Pinker, however, is an outlier.

…gotta respect the commitment to the bit, too

[…]
Allen Matusow, a historian at Rice and the author of “The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s,” wrote by email that he belongs “to the school that believes that our democracy has not been in such peril since the Civil War, and the easy explanation is Trump. But the real question is why such a despicable demagogue commands the support of so many.”

Matusow cited “income inequality and “the cultural resentments of those left behind.”
[…]
Bruce Cain, a political scientist at Stanford, shares Matusow’s concerns over the detrimental impact of inequality. Cain emailed me to say:

The recent growing dissatisfaction with democracy is a reminder that people judge the fairness of their political system by how they are doing in it. Downward mobility and the loss of political and social status leads to alienation from democratic norms and distrust in government. We believe that democracy is a better form of government because it will produce better policies by being accountable to the people. But when it does not perform well, democratic legitimacy erodes across the political spectrum.

Perhaps the most trenchant comment I received was from Theda Skocpol, a professor of government and sociology at Harvard, who replied to my inquiry at the height of the controversy over the former Harvard president Claudine Gay:

I have thought for some time that America was suffering multiple elite-driven institutional breakdowns across the board, opening the door to a national and global maelstrom. But now I find myself so overwhelmingly distressed by it all, including the collapse of core values at my own university, that I cannot write coherently about it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/10/opinion/trump-populism-great-misalignment.html

…but that’s probably only a concern if you were writing coherently in the first place…& I can hardly make that sort of boast, now can I?

Neural plasticity (also known as brain plasticity or neuroplasticity) is the capacity of the brain to compensate for injury and adjust its activity in response to new situations or changes in behaviour or environment [note 1]. This is achieved through the promotion of brain reorganisation. This capacity is not necessarily restricted to infancy, and is typically retained by the individual throughout the lifespan [note 2]. The changes occurring in the brain take place mostly at the level of the connections between neurons. New connections can form or old ones can be rewired so that the overall organisation of existing synaptic connections can change. This process typically leads to structural (anatomical/morphological), functional (physiological) and neurochemical changes in our brains, but also – sometimes – to the generation of new neurons. This latter phenomenon is called neurogenesis, and it has been proved to exist across all mammalian species. Recent neuroscientific research has confirmed the central role of neural plasticity in human cognition, and highlighted how training and intensive practice can cause such changes (structural and functional). 

https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/publishing/review/30/neural-plasticity-dont-fall-for-hype/

…it’s…counter-intuitive

While Judge Florence Pan was asking, over and over, if Trump attorney John Sauer really was saying that a President could assassinate his rival and, if not impeached, avoid any accountability, Judge Karen Henderson expressed her disagreement with Sauer’s argument more circumspectly.

But she did express disagreement.

If I read her comments right, they mean that, at worst, Henderson would support remanding the case to Judge Chutkan to figure out whether the things of which Trump is accused are official acts. Indeed, by the end of a brutal set of questions, that seemed to be what Sauer was begging for, which at least would produce the delay his client seeks.
[…]
It’s clear that she was bothered by Sauer’s Take Care Clause arguments, which argued that everything included in the indictment might be covered by the Take Care Clause requiring that the President enforce the law.

Sauer seemed to recognize defeat: as he finished he asked again for a stay so Trump can appeal.

As mentioned, Judge Henderson asked the same question about Marbury of James Pearce, arguing for Jack Smith.[…]

That seemed to get Henderson where she wanted to go to decide the case. Then she revealed her worry: That in deciding against Trump, it will unleash a floodgate of similar criminal prosecutions.
[…]
Henderson has been sympathetic to Trump’s past claims that he’s being treated differently, politically. So I can understand how it would concern her.

But as noted, once you’re dealing with a former President, that shouldn’t be an issue.

https://www.emptywheel.net/2024/01/09/judge-karen-hendersons-floodgate-concerns/

…probably…or possibly…or…probatively…potentially?

But I think we have a much bigger problem with threats of violence than we do with actual violence. Trumpist threats seem to be everywhere these days. Public officials at all levels regularly receive them by mail, email, social media or, quaintly, even voice mail. And there are the attempted “swattings,” where callers report nonexistent crimes to trigger a response by law enforcement, and other forms of harassment. Of course, these must be taken seriously because there’s always the chance that some disturbed person will act on a threat. But I know from professional — and, unfortunately, personal — experience that people mostly tend to threaten because they want to live rent-free in your head, impacting the way you live even if they never come near you. It’s a difficult thing to ask of frightened poll workers, school board members or judges, but they must find a way to take prudent precautions while not letting the threateners achieve their goal of warping life. Don’t let them own you.

As a country, we need to strike the same balance by refusing to let our imaginations give threats power over our national life. We must not let the idea of Trumpian violence become some kind of boogeyman, frightening us away from our commitment to the rule of law.
[…]
The rule of law must be vindicated regardless of the threat, which is why public servants at all levels around the country are soldiering on despite the torrent of individual abuse. Terrorists, gangsters and drug lords have long been held accountable in this country even when their organizations posed a serious risk of violence aimed at those who operate our legal system. Fortunately, that’s not what we face today. Trump and his legions are not coming for us. The rule of law is finally coming for him.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/01/10/trump-comey-rule-of-law/

…uh huh…uh huh…sounds good

https://www.emptywheel.net/2024/01/10/refusing-to-take-yes-for-an-answer-remember-the-pardons-in-the-desk-drawer/

…oh…yeah…now you mention it…how quickly we forget?

For Almost a Year, “Jim Jordan” Has Been Saying Hunter Biden Didn’t Need to Testify

Keep this […] in mind as you read the following discussion, about the extent to which much of what we visibly see in the Republican slide to fascism is just the public manifestation of a far more instrumental and far uglier infrastructure that exists in chat rooms.
[…]
As I’ve written here and here, the far right efforts to set a narrative that would (and did) help Trump win the presidency started over a year before the election. Both Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer — the webmaster for Daily Stormer — and Microchip worked hard in early months to professionalize the effort. They planned campaigns that would bridge from reddit, 4Chan, and The Donald onto Twitter, including efforts that started at Daily Stormer. This effort was transnational: the trolls reached back to efforts made during Brexit and looked ahead to EU elections, and planned to build a bigger bot army. They complained about Twitter’s shoddy efforts to moderate and plotted ways to defeat any moderation.

The effort by far right trolls to hijack the virality of Twitter to get mainstream journalists to echo their far right themes had at least two direct ties to Trump’s campaign. Anthime “Baked Alaska” Gionet, whom Microchip alerted when the FBI first came calling, claimed to be part of a Trump campaign Slack, to which he invited others.

More importantly, Don Jr has confessed he was part of this network (curiously, when the Mackey took the stand at trial, he claimed to know nothing about the identities of his unindicted co-conspirators. As I have noted, there’s a troll in that channel who used the moniker P0TUSTrump and whom other trolls called Donald that was pushing hashtags pushing stolen documents on the same days Don Jr was doing so on his eponymous Twitter account. From there, trolls like Microchip made them go viral. If P0TUSTrump is Don Jr, then, it shows that he was a key channel between WikiLeaks through this far right channel to make things go viral.

Between 2016 and 2020, people associated with this far right group orchestrated PizzaGate, may have had a hand in QAnon, and helped disseminated documents stolen by GRU from Emmanuel Macron. PizzaGate and QAnon served as powerful recruiting narratives. I’ve shown how Doug Jensen, the QAnoner who chased Officer Eugene Goodman up the Senate stairs on January 6, went from a lifelong union Democrat to hating Hillary to throwing away his life in QAnon to attacking the Capitol via that process of radicalization. Early prosecutions, at least, suggested that QAnon was actually more successful at getting bodies where they could obstruct the vote certification than the militias.

But even as that cult narrative of QAnon was radicalizing people from all walks of life, the same network was replicating networks of more overtly partisan, paramilitary mobilization.

I suppose I or someone else should draw a network map of this.

But we know that Roger Stone had a Signal list call Friends of Stone, which included among its 47 members Stewart Rhodes, Enrique Tarrio, Ali Alexander, and Owen Shroyer, along with anti-vaxxers, Bundyists, Mike Flynn associate Ivan Raiklin, and longtime aides Jacobs Engels and Tyler Ziolkowski (who, along with Tarrio, were both implicated in the meme targeting Amy Berman Jackson during Stone’s prosecution).

Both Rhodes and Tarrio ran parallel sets of communication leading up to the insurrection — more public, accessible communications, and more select lists (on Signal in Rhodes’ case and on Telegram in Tarrio’s) that planned for the operation. Unlike Twitter, Signal and Telegram would only be accessible to law enforcement after exploiting the phones on which they were used, and only then if the comms hadn’t been successfully deleted.
[…]
Ali Alexander and Brandon Straka provided the January 6 Committee (entirely unreliable) descriptions of the all-important Stop the Steal threads on which Alexander organized — first — early mob scenes at state capitols and then events around January 6 itself (though unlike Alexander, who fully attributed getting the brand from Roger Stone, Straka disclaimed knowledge of all that). Straka did acknowledge that Paul Gosar had ties to the Stop the Steal effort. The sentencing memorandum for Alan Hostetter, a key player in the SoCal anti-vax community with ties to 3Percenters, actually contacted Alexander on December 16, 2020, to suggest Stop the Steal organize a rally for January 6, though it’s not clear via what channel he knew him. While the leaders of the Stop the Steal effort were on Twitter until a late move to Signal (again, if we can believe unreliable J6C testimony), it spawned a massive viral effort on other platforms, including Facebook.

In addition to being the big draw for the donation from Publix heir Julie Fancelli, Alex Jones has his own media infrastructure. Organizers claim some percentage — a fifth or a third — of those at the Capitol were there for Jones, not Trump. Like Alexander, he also mobilized the earlier mobs in the states.

It’s not entire clear how Baked Alaska continues to fit into this network. But in order to avoid felony charges (as Straka had earlier), he reportedly agreed to share the kind of network information that would further elucidate these networks.

And that network of lists and threads maps onto this one, the list of people who, in 2020, were the most effective at spreading disinformation on Twitter.
[…]
I’m always most fascinated by the role of Mike Roman on this list, punching well above his modest Twitter following of 29,610 people. Roman, a charged co-conspirator in Trump’s Georgia indictment, is claiming Fani Willis has a conflict arising from a personal relationship with one of the prosecutors she brought in for the case. He’s often thought of someone who ferried documents from fake electors around, but before that he was a kind of internal intelligence service for Trump targeting Republicans, and before that, the Kochs. Like Grenell, he has branched out to push far right policies internationally, in Canada. None of those activities, however, explain what chat rooms he was in that allowed him to help spread the Big Lie in 2020. They must exist, and yet they’re not yet visible.

Mike Roman is one of the Trump associates whose phone DOJ seized before Jack Smith was appointed. To the extent he didn’t delete them, that should disclose his networks to prosecutors.

As I noted above, increasingly, these networks have moved to platforms, especially Telegram and Signal, that are harder to investigate, particularly without advance notice. It took years (starting before January 6, with the seizure of Tarrio’s phone, which nevertheless took a full year to exploit) before the government had collected at least three sets of the Friends of Stone list.
[…]
This post is part of a Ball of Thread I’m putting together before I attempt to explain how Trump trained Republicans to hate rule of law. See this post for an explanation of my Ball of Thread.

https://www.emptywheel.net/2024/01/15/the-non-visible-networks-behind-the-more-visible-networks-of-fascism/

…fun times…still…use it or lose it?

Google location data was used to find Jan. 6 rioters. It’s disappearing. [WaPo]

…wait…are we talking about neural pathways brains again?

(neural plasticity) n. the ability of the brain to develop new neurons and/or new synapses in response to stimulation and learning. Recent research shows that the brain retains its plasticity throughout life, more or less, depending on the person’s state of health, etc. Following injury to the brain, neuroplasticity may allow uninjured areas to take over the processes previously carried out by the injured areas.

https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100230276

…make them stop talking about brains…it’s hurting my…brain…see, now you’ve got me doing it…where will it end?

https://ecfr.eu/publication/a-crisis-of-ones-own-the-politics-of-trauma-in-europes-election-year/

…what’s that got to do with it?

Europe’s voters are no longer divided into left or right, pro- or anti-EU camps, a survey suggests, but into five distinct tribes whose conflicting concerns are likely to dominate nearly 20 elections across the continent this year.

The polling suggests 2024’s European parliament and national elections will be fought over attitudes to five major crises that have affected voters’ lives in recent years: the climate emergency, the 2015 migration crisis, global economic turmoil, the war in Ukraine and Covid.

The report’s authors argue that all five of these crises “were felt across Europe, although to varying intensities in different corners of the continent; experienced as an existential threat by many Europeans; dramatically affected government policies – and are by no means over”.
[…]
“This time around, it will be a contest between competing fears of rising temperatures, immigration, inflation, and military conflict,” Leonard, the director of the Berlin-based European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) thinktank, said.
[…]
The study found, however, that these voter “tribes” were not evenly distributed either geographically, by age or by education. Voters in Germany, for example, felt immigration was the most transformative crisis (31%), whereas in France it was climate change (27%).
[…]
Older generations were most worried by immigration as a vital issue, with 13% of 50- to 69-year-olds and 16% of respondents aged 70-plus ranking it as their biggest concern. Among highly educated voters, the climate crisis was the chief concern (22%).

For supporters of far-right parties in countries where they are not in power immigration was the issue that had most changed the way they look at their future, for example Reconquête (76%) in France, AfD in Germany (66%) and Reform in Great Britain (63%).

In countries where the far right is in government, however, such as Italy, barely 10% of survey respondents reported immigration as their biggest concern, including only 17% of voters aligned with the Brothers of Italy party of Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni.

The 2024 European parliament elections would be “about projections rather than projects”, the study’s authors said. “Each of Europe’s five crises will have many lives, but it is at the ballot box where they will live, die or be resurrected.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/17/crises-have-split-european-voters-into-five-tribes-survey-suggests

…or…possibly rejuvenated under false pretenses

The Kids Are Alt Right? [BBC Sounds (ongoing)]

…or…some sort of recombinant/recursive sort of frankenstein’s monster of a thing

The calendars overlap. His overarching strategy is not so much calculated to defeat his feeble Republican opponents but to delay his trials by any gambit necessary. The delays give him space to depict himself as a martyr, taking the slings and arrows for his believers, who are his hope to rescue him.

So long as the band plays, he doesn’t have to face the music. Once it stops, his primary voters are replaced by a jury. He can rant all he likes on his Truth Social account, but the evidence will finally speak for itself. Trump strains to exploit the political campaign as his shield to avoid the day of judgment. Plus, it’s a cash cow.
[…]
During the 2016 Iowa caucuses, the most prominent evangelical leader of the Christian right in the state, Bob Vander Plaats, endorsed Ted Cruz. This time he backed DeSantis. Trump was so confident of evangelical backing that two days before the caucuses, he laid into him, tweeting: “Bob Vander Plaats, the former High School Accountant from Iowa, will do anything to win, something which he hasn’t done in many years. He’s more known for scamming Candidates than he is for Victory, but now he’s going around using Disinformation from the Champions of that Art, the Democrats.”

Trump in Iowa conflated his pressing legal troubles with the imaginary oppression of Christians. “Under crooked Joe Biden, Christians and Americans of faith are being persecuted and government has been weaponized against religion like never before. And also presidents like never before,” Trump said on 19 December. Referring to the mafia kingpin who was finally nailed on income tax evasion, he added: “I always say Al Capone was treated better than I was treated.” Vander Plaats’ grip was broken.

Of all the odd occurrences in the campaign so far, one of the strangest was a stray cogent remark from Ron DeSantis, who has been relentlessly clueless to the point that after his last debate with Nikki Haley he approached the audience from the stage to shake his wife’s hand. In trying to explain why he was failing, without mentioning that he spent more on private jets than on advertising, he blathered into coherence. “It’s all a racket – they’re trying to get clicks, they’re trying to do all this stuff,” he said. “Big causes start out as a movement, end up a business and degenerate into a racket. That’s just human nature.”

Not exactly. DeSantis was paraphrasing a social philosopher on the psychological basis of authoritarian movements. Eric Hoffer was an itinerant longshoreman whose book The True Believer, on the mentality of Naziism and Communism, published in 1951, drew praise from President Dwight Eisenhower in one of his first press conferences. Hoffer described how individuals erased their volition and critical thinking by submerging themselves into movements led by demagogues.

“The fanatic,” Hoffer wrote, “is perpetually incomplete and insecure. He cannot generate self-assurance out of his individual resources – out of his rejected self – but finds it only by clinging passionately to whatever support he happens to embrace.” The demagogue appeals to restoring the good old days. “A glorification of the past can serve as a means to belittle the present.” Through propaganda, “people can be made to believe only in what they already ‘know’”. Enemies must be identified as the source of decay. “Finally, it seems, the ideal devil is a foreigner. To qualify as a devil, a domestic enemy must be given a foreign ancestry.” But, Hoffer wrote, it would be a mistake to give too much credence to the ideas of demagogues. “The quality of ideas seems to play a minor role in mass movement leadership. What counts is the arrogant gesture, the complete disregard of the opinion of others, the singlehanded defiance of the world.”

Eisenhower, who had led the armies that defeated Hitler, wrote a letter in 1958 warning against authoritarianism. Citing Hoffer, he stated that “dictatorial systems make one contribution to their people which leads them to tend to support such systems – freedom from the necessity of informing themselves and making up their own minds concerning these tremendous complex and difficult questions”.

DeSantis, who has attempted and failed to supplant Trump by whipping up hysteria against the menace of “wokeness”, more or less got one of Hoffer’s memorable quotes right. “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”

In Georgia, on 14 August 2023, Trump was indicted on 41 felony counts with 18 co-defendants for conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election results under the state’s Rico statute – the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.

The problem in applying Hoffer’s aphorism to Trump is that with him it was always a racket.

Donald Trump beat his opponents. But can he beat the courts? [Guardian]

…but…it probably depends how you look at it?

Half a day in reviewing Immunity hearing, I can't stop thinking that I'm listening to three women–one a lawyer/judge before it was normal, the two others women of color–presiding over arguments of two men appealing the order of a woman of color pertaining to white billionaire.

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) January 9, 2024

…still…if it comes down to the eye of the beholder…I guess we maybe need to hope they’re beholding a big fucking needle…of one sort or another…because I feel like the evidence of my own neuroplasticity is threatening to be when my molten brains flow out of my ears & leave a whistling void between them I immediately christen my happy place…if perhaps less happy a place than this to most people…what with this place being the end of whatever that was?