…if anyone feels like it

Volume I

Volume II

Volume III

Volume IV

There’s virtually nothing new here. Trump’s temper tantrum was little more than a public wail that if people saw already-public documents about his plotting to run fake electors, it would swing the election.

https://www.emptywheel.net/2024/10/18/jack-smiths-appendix/

…or, if you prefer

In the years since the 2020 election, though, Musk had been following a number of his friends in the tech industry — some dating back to his earliest days in the business, when he helped found the company that became PayPal — on a journey to some of the more baroque regions of the far right. He was becoming increasingly outspoken about his views but had less to say about the daily scrum of partisan politics. He had quietly given more than $50 million to fund advertising campaigns attacking Democrats in the 2022 midterms, The Wall Street Journal has reported, and in 2023 he donated $10 million to an outside group that helped fund the presidential bid of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. Now he seemed open to doing a lot more.

Peltz gave Musk the honor of speaking first. He told the group that he had always been a Democrat, but no longer. And, despite being new to political campaigns, he had some ideas to share. What worked with his electric car company, Tesla, he said, was not paid advertising but word of mouth. If everyone in the room told two friends to vote for Trump — and told them to tell two friends — he would win. Then Musk underscored what he saw as the real stakes of the presidential race.

…”real stakes”

In the puzzle that is the 2024 election, many people are turning to prediction markets offered by Kalshi and rivals such asPolymarket or PredictIt. They lure some to put down money and others as an alternative readout on the state of the presidential race to those offered by conventional pollsters, pundits and the media.

Around $2 billion in cryptocurrency has been wagered on predicting the next president on Polymarket as of Friday. The New York-based company says it receives tens of millions of visits per month.

Billions in election bets raise the stakes of the presidential race [WaPo]

…& “I’m for the criminal”

Donald Trump has raised more money from the oil and gas industry than at this stage of his previous campaigns for the US presidency, with a surge of fossil fuel funding coming in the six months since he directly requested $1bn from oil executives and then promised he would scrap environmental rules if elected.

While the Republican nominee hasn’t quite managed to get to that $1bn figure, he has received $14.1m from the oil and gas industry in the period up to 31 August, donation filings show. This is more than he got from the industry at the same stage of his presidential campaigns in 2016 and 2020.

Support from just a handful of oil executives has become vital to the overall Trump campaign, with Kelcy Warren, the billionaire chief executive of the pipeline operator Energy Transfer, giving nearly $6m to help elect the former president and Timothy Dunn, boss of the Texas-based oil firm CrownQuest, handing $5m to a Trump-aligned Super Pac.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/18/election-trump-oil-gas-fundraising

…it’s

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2024/sep/06/presidential-election-climate-crisis-project-2025-trump

…sort of a squared circle, you see

Musk has always seen himself as the protagonist of his own science-fiction novel, on a hero’s quest to save humanity. It’s the legacy of a childhood as a geeky bookworm but also of his years in Silicon Valley during the great tech boom of the early 2000s. He and his fellow tech leaders were not just businessmen; as they saw it, they were visionary founders reinventing the world. They knew what to do and how to do it. The hundreds of billions of dollars that they accumulated along the way only confirmed the importance of their mission and validated their unique ability to carry it out.

Over the course of this election cycle, a group of these men have coalesced around a new mission: putting Donald Trump back in the White House. They are the Republican Party’s ascendant donor class, and they operate on a plane very different from that of the donors who preceded them. They have not only a seemingly limitless amount of money to help make this particular vision a reality but also their own media profiles and platforms to use toward that end. They are the opposite of private, dark-money donors, making a public show of their support for Trump and even sometimes announcing their donations on social media. It’s an ambitious and highly motivated group, powered by self-interest and self-regard and unencumbered by self-doubt.

…or…you know…unencumbered by…truth…justice…or what was explained to me as “the american dream”

For many years, Silicon Valley’s reactionary right orbited around one man: the venture capitalist Peter Thiel. Thiel was a right-wing libertarian before he was a billionaire. As an undergraduate at Stanford in the 1980s, he brought the “PC wars” to the West Coast, helping to found The Stanford Review, a student-run conservative newspaper whose many acts of editorial provocation included defending the conduct of a senior who pleaded no contest to the statutory rape of a first-year student. (Thiel declined to comment for this article.)

The author of that story was one of Thiel’s protégés at Stanford, David Sacks, a fellow ideologue on the make. In 1995, the two men jointly wrote a book attacking multiculturalism, “The Diversity Myth.” Several years later, they reunited at a company called Confinity, which became PayPal after merging with a competitor founded by a young Musk. Their revolutionary, techno-utopian vision was baked into the business plan: PayPal was designed to render the dollar obsolete. The road to utopia was rocky; Sacks led a coup to oust Musk and replace him with Thiel. But they soon sold the company to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2004, making them all fantastically rich and sending a diaspora of entrepreneurs and investors across Silicon Valley — the “PayPal Mafia” — to build more revolutionary, billion-dollar companies like YouTube and Yelp.

As the internet blossomed, Thiel began to encourage a new set of even more provocative thinkers. At their center was an ex-programmer named Curtis Yarvin, who blogged under the nom de plume Mencius Moldbug, sketching out the framework for a nascent reactionary movement — later called the new right — aimed at deposing the cabal of liberal elites running the country. Yarvin saw democracy as a “destructive” form of government, instead proposing a techno-monarchy run by a national chief executive. Americans, he said, had to “get over their dictator phobia.” He and Thiel grew close; Yarvin stayed in Thiel’s homes, and they watched the 2016 election returns together.

As Thiel became wealthier and more powerful, he continued to help like-minded men accumulate their own wealth and power. They included a lot of Stanford Review alumni, like Josh Hawley, now the 44-year-old senator from Missouri, but also others who came to him via different routes — most prominently JD Vance, who has cited Yarvin as an influence himself. Vance reached out to Thiel after hearing him deliver a talk at Yale Law School, and following his graduation, Thiel helped set him up in Silicon Valley, first recommending him for a job at a biotech firm whose founder he was close with and later helping him raise $120 million for his own venture firm, Narya Capital. When Vance ran for Senate in 2022, Thiel was by far the biggest donor to his super PAC, giving $15 million.

Thiel embraced Trump in 2016, speaking at the Republican National Convention, donating $1.25 million to support the campaign and even working alongside Steve Bannon on Trump’s transition team. Two of his associates came along: Trae Stephens, who worked at his venture firm, Founders Fund, and Blake Masters, the chief operations officer of Thiel Capital, who would later run for the U.S. Senate. Another PayPal and Stanford Review alum, Ken Howery, served as Trump’s ambassador to Sweden.

These men became the nucleus of the tech industry’s MAGA mafia, and in recent months, quite a few more have joined them. They don’t represent a majority in Silicon Valley, but they are a high-profile minority. Some, like Joe Lonsdale, are members of Thiel’s extended network and have long been committed to the cause. Lonsdale, who was editor of The Stanford Review and interned at PayPal, has used some of the fortune he built as a founder of Palantir to create a conservative think tank called the Cicero Institute, which is lobbying states to criminalize homelessness, and the University of Austin, which he has described as an antidote to universities that have been overtaken by “radical, far-left ideologues.”

…sure-jan.gif

As these new donors started gravitating toward Trump, he began making new promises on the campaign trail. He would make America “the crypto capital of the planet”; he would fire Biden’s Securities and Exchange Commission chair, Gary Gensler; he would steer more military contracts to the booming private defense-tech sector; he would repeal an executive order intended to provide some checks on the development of A.I. “In the matrix of people supporting Trump — a 2-by-2 matrix of ‘Are they purchasable?’ and ‘Can I purchase them?’ — Biden and Harris are not purchasable, and Trump is the most purchasable president in our lifetime,” says Reid Hoffman, one of PayPal’s early employees and a prominent Democratic donor.

…maybe all men are created equal…pretty sure nobody ever said that about podcasts, though

Sacks is one of the group’s most outspoken members, unremittingly championing Trump these days on his podcast, “All-In.” After his time at PayPal, he did a stint as a Hollywood producer before returning to tech as an entrepreneur, executive and venture capitalist. In recent years, he has also leveraged his wealth to become a modern media personality with “All-In,” which he started during the early days of the Covid lockdown with three of his rich V.C. friends. They have since turned the voice of the tech bro — with its unbounded expertise on everything from Texas hold ’em to the war in Ukraine — into a media brand. The Besties, as he and his co-hosts call themselves, now run their own conference and sell a $1,200 Besties tequila. (Sacks declined requests for an interview.)

…they seemingly won’t shut up until you ask them to answer for themselves…well…depends on who asks, I guess

By the beginning of the summer, the Republican Party’s new donor class was moving toward Trump, and they had a new item on their wish list: They wanted him to put one of their own on the ticket.

JD Vance left his venture capital firm when he was elected to the Senate in 2022, but he brought the V.C. agenda with him into office. He went to bat for the crypto industry, argued against A.I. regulation and championed the breakup of Google — the holy grail for some venture capitalists who believe that it has become a monopoly and is crushing the start-up market. Thanks largely to Thiel, Vance had already risen remarkably swiftly, jumping straight to the Senate in his mid-30s, and now he was on Trump’s short list for vice president. But there was a problem: Trump had finished the Republican primary being badly outspent by Joe Biden, and his legal expenses were still a drain on resources. He needed a running mate who could help him raise money. Being so new to politics, Vance didn’t seem to offer much help on that front. The party’s new donor class was ready to prove otherwise.

Sacks, who once threw a “Let Them Eat Cake”-themed 40th birthday party for himself, complete with 18th-century-style powdered wigs, took the lead, planning a Trump fund-raiser in his 21,888-square-foot home in San Francisco, with Vance in attendance. Sacks had initially been a DeSantis man, squiring the Florida governor around Silicon Valley in search of donors. He had also thrown fund-raisers for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Vivek Ramaswamy. But in March, he made the pivot to Trump and seemed poised to become more than just another donor. Vance had served as the intermediary. After Sacks introduced him at an awards dinner in Washington, Vance took him to a private dining room at the Conrad Hotel to meet Donald Trump Jr. and personally communicate his support.

Silicon Valley had not historically provided natural fund-raising terrain for Donald Trump. The last time he held a fund-raiser in the area, in 2019, the host withheld his name and address until hours before the event to avoid protests. This one, on June 6, was far more conspicuous: Sacks — whose house was in the heart of the Pacific Heights neighborhood, on a street sometimes known as Billionaire’s Row — boasted about it on his podcast, predicting that it would break the ice for more tech leaders to endorse Trump. One week earlier, Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to suppress a sex scandal. The day the verdict came down, Shaun Maguire, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist from Sequoia Capital, announced on X that he was giving $300,000 to Trump. But the real money was about to flow. The cheapest ticket to the fund-raiser was $50,000, and it was $300,000 to attend a smaller dinner with Trump after the opening reception. The money would go directly to the campaign via Trump’s main joint fund-raising committee with the R.N.C.

The guest list leaned heavily toward the crypto industry, and the event was carefully choreographed. Another person on the short list for vice-presidential candidate, Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota, was also in attendance, but it was Vance who introduced Trump before his remarks. Sacks seated himself next to Trump at the dinner that followed, taking the opportunity to make his pitch for Vance. One moment was unplanned: About two-thirds of the way through the meal, Trump asked the group whom he should choose as his running mate. Even though Burgum was sitting right there at the table, the response was unanimous: Vance.

…& maybe it’s not fair of me that I loathe some of them more than others

The Republican National Convention was now only days away, and tech’s MAGA cohort was ramping up its campaign for Vance. Musk called Trump on Vance’s behalf, telling him on the night before Vance was chosen that he would be a good “insurance policy” in case the next attempt on his life was successful. Thiel also made a personal call, and it was a tough conversation. He had been disappointed by Trump’s presidency, which he found insufficiently revolutionary, and he told friends that he was pained by the excommunication he suffered socially. In 2023, Trump asked him for a big donation; Thiel refused, and the two men hadn’t spoken since then. Now he encouraged Trump to not hold his anger at him against Vance. He also offered a form of penance, casually dropping into the conversation that he had in fact made a donation in the millions to a pro-Trump legal group.

…but…when it comes to the lessons people have learned about how to go about elections after the last few…it makes more sense to me than some?

[…] “WE HAVE A FORMER TECH VC IN THE WHITE HOUSE GREATEST COUNTRY ON EARTH BABY,” Delian Asparouhov, a partner at Thiel’s Founders Fund, wrote on X. With Vance on the ticket, Andreessen, who invested in Vance’s venture capital fund, and his partner Horowitz formally endorsed the ticket and immediately donated $2.5 million each to a Trump super PAC. “Sorry, Mom,” Horowitz said on their podcast, “The Ben & Marc Show.” “I know you’re going to be mad at me for this. But, like, we have to do it.” Sacks — who joined Vance, Don Jr. and Tucker Carlson in Trump’s red-and-white box before speaking during prime time — posted a list of 17 tech V.C.s and entrepreneurs who were supporting Trump on X, writing, “Come on in, the water’s warm.”

As was his self-lionizing, hands-on style, Musk was steaming ahead with his PAC, which he called America PAC. He was planning to provide the bulk of the funding himself — at least $140 million, he told vendors — in four tranches. But he also told friends throughout the year that when it came to supporting Trump, secrecy was very important to him. He wanted to wait until after July 1 to make his donations so that they wouldn’t become public until closer to the election. And so Lonsdale and his team, including his top adviser, Blake Brickman, set out in mid-April to start rounding up anchor investors to cover the initial costs. Lonsdale kicked in himself. Other initial recruits included Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who are being sued by the state of New York for their alleged role in defrauding 230,000 investors of more than $1 billion through their crypto exchange. And this was not going to be a traditional super PAC, steering the money it bundles toward paid media. It was going to play a vital, active role in securing the votes Trump needed to win.

Trump’s team had decided to do things very differently in 2024. It was doubling down on election denialism, using its campaign volunteers not to try to persuade voters but to lay a foundation for future legal challenges in districts won by Democrats. They would be trained to become poll watchers — standing outside voting precincts, tabulation centers and drop boxes. The work of getting out the vote would end up being largely done by paid canvassers, hired and run by Trump’s super PACs.

…speaking of which

It was a novel strategy made possible by a recent opinion from the Federal Election Commission. Like most F.E.C. opinions, this one was not exactly front-page news, but its electoral implications were huge: For the first time, campaigns could share voter data with super PACs, and vice versa, enabling PACs to run their own field teams. Historically, this was the work that won — or lost — elections: Barack Obama’s victory in 2008 was driven primarily by a sprawling network of local volunteers recruited by the campaign and the D.N.C. to engage voters in their own communities. Now independent groups could take the lead, relying on itinerant paid canvassers known as carnies, after traveling carnival workers. Trump’s super PACs would be a big part of the campaign’s ground game, using the money they raised — a theoretically limitless sum, thanks to Citizens United — to run their own field teams. And America PAC would be the biggest of the bunch.

…you don’t have to…but…maybe stick a pin in that part?

Musk envisioned an army of 5,500 canvassers turning out 800,000 to 1 million Trump voters across all the battleground states — quite possibly enough to swing the election. The emphasis would be on those who were either unregistered or had a spotty record of getting to the polls. The canvassing business is notoriously vulnerable to waste and overbilling; at one point, Musk reached out to Tucker Carlson for advice on how to ensure that his PAC didn’t become a gravy train for consultants.

…sure-jan.can-you-wear-a gif-out?

As is often the case in a start-up, management hit some rough patches. A few weeks after he requested memos from all the PAC’s vendors, Musk began to grow frustrated with the pace of the progress, a friend said, and Musk decided to make some changes. In July, he brought aboard two Republican operatives who had been cultivating him since the days of the DeSantis campaign, Generra Peck and Phil Cox. They led a sprawling communication and public affairs firm and had been intimately involved in DeSantis’s much-criticized decision to largely outsource his field operation to a super PAC, Never Back Down; it was an arrangement similar to what Musk was executing for Trump.

Peck and Cox quickly took control, firing the company running America PAC’s field operation, which had already been paid about $20 million, and stranding hundreds of carnies across the country. It was effectively dormant for several weeks in July and early August, as Peck and Cox worked to bring in canvassers mostly from their own affiliated firm, Blitz Canvassing. Musk’s defenders and friends say that he was doing what very few megadonors are willing to do and what Musk is famous for doing: fire people who he believes are failing. All that mattered was better positioning the PAC to help Trump win in November, and Musk was making that happen.

Musk was beginning to realize that he might need some additional help with his foray into politics. In late August, he hired an experienced G.O.P. field operative, Chris Young, to help him oversee the PAC. In September, after Young visited Nevada, America PAC shook things up again, cutting ties with the subcontractor it had hired to canvass both there and in Arizona because it believed the group wasn’t hitting enough doors. In October, it effectively acquired the Wisconsin assets of another Trump-aligned super PAC, Turning Point USA, taking on about 200 new canvassers in the state.

America PAC was becoming increasingly central to Trump’s ground game, which worried some people around the campaign. Some senior Trump advisers were privately sharing concerns with one another about America PAC playing such an outsize role in turning out voters. Even Musk was acknowledging that there were problems with his field operation. When one canvasser posted on X about a pay dispute, he replied: “Sorry, so many dumb things happening. Working on fixing.”

…increasingly central…uh huh

But now Musk controlled the dial. His Silicon Valley friends were ecstatic when he bought Twitter in late 2022 for $44 billion. Andreessen kicked in $400 million, and Sacks temporarily joined Musk’s leadership team, overseeing the release of the Twitter Files, the internal communications leaked to a handpicked group of sympathetic journalists in late 2022 and early 2023. Among the goals was to prove that the decision to block The Post’s Hunter Biden story was part of a larger collaboration between Twitter and the Biden administration to suppress potentially damaging content to his campaign. In the months that followed, Musk radically remade the platform, which he renamed X, significantly shrinking the large team of trust and safety employees whose job was to prevent disinformation and hate speech from spreading across the platform; restoring the accounts of users who had been barred for violating the platform’s rules; and bringing back political advertising.

…featured bugs, all

Musk, of course, was the platform’s most powerful driver of pro-Trump content. Trump, at his peak, had about 88 million followers. Musk has more than 200 million. And as the owner of X, he has free rein on the platform. On July 26, he reposted a deepfake video of Harris — in an apparent violation of X’s manipulated-media policy — in which a phony voice-over says, “I was selected because I am the ultimate diversity hire.”

With no meaningful guardrails to stop him, Musk freely championed MAGA’s election-denial crusade, falsely accusing the Democrats of flying illegal voters into swing states and claiming that Arizona was refusing to remove migrants from its voter rolls. In mid-August, he gave Trump two-plus hours of free, friendly media in the form of a livestreamed conversation during which Trump made numerous unchecked false claims. Trump also used the forum to propose that Musk join his administration to lead a “government efficiency commission.” The suggestion excited Musk, whose companies are currently under at least 20 federal investigations and inquiries by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the S.E.C. and other agencies, according to an analysis by The Times. The Trump campaign and X cross-promoted the event, with the campaign running banner ads on the platform’s main page for trending topics and X sending a notification to users featuring Trump’s picture, encouraging them to subscribe to the platform’s streaming service. Even as Musk was operationalizing his company to serve his political agenda, it did not appear to be serving his financial interests. According to an internal corporate document, U.S. advertising revenue, which had already dropped precipitously since his takeover, was $173 million for the three months ending Sept. 30, down 31 percent from the same period last year.

…it’s a long one…so I’ll swing back to it in a bit

…now…I’m not an authority on how to value stuff…I can barely follow how you get to the numbers they say houses cost…let alone quantify intangibles…but…here’s the thing…tricky though it might be

Each social media platform defines the ARPU differently. The difference makes comparing Facebook, Snap, Twitter and Pinterest a bit tricky.

Despite that, we still compare the ARPUs of Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter and Snapchat. This article tries to group the social media platforms with similar ARPU definitions as best as it can and then does a comparison.

Investors interested in the comparison of Monthly Active Users (MAUs) and Daily Active Users (DAUs) of the respective social media platforms may find more information on these pages: Pinterest MAU Vs Facebook and Snap And Twitter DAU Vs Facebook.

…basically…there are metrics that allow various sorts of comparison, albeit generally not direct ones to some extent

Twitter’s ARPU is defined as the total advertising revenue in a given geography during a period divided by the average monetizable Daily Active Usage or Users (mDAU).

Twitter defines its mDAU as people, organizations, or other accounts who logged in or were otherwise authenticated and accessed Twitter on any given day through twitter.com, Twitter applications that are able to show ads, or paid Twitter products, including subscriptions, according to the 2021 annual report.

Twitter’s average mDAU for a period represents the number of mDAU on each day of such period divided by the number of days for such period.

…uh huh

In fiscal 2023, Snap’s global ARPU of $11.49 was 11% lower than the 2022 result. Twitter’s worldwide ARPU of $18.71 in 2022 was 10% lower than the 2021 result.

https://stockdividendscreener.com/information-technology/comparison-of-average-revenue-per-user-for-social-media-companies/#O1

…now taking the whole mess private lets him hide his shame because they don’t have to show even the headline numbers…but…back when they did…as of ’22 basically twitter eked almost $60 a year out of a north american user once you averaged it out…&…it was broadly agreed that $44billion was more than it ought to have been said to be worth…but…if the indications are to be relied upon…the thing that used to be twitter is worth nearer $10billion than $40…& their revenue per user is…less…so…given the owner’s (or owners’, depending on how you see that part) project…there’s a number that seems like it has to be in the multiple-tens-of-billions-of-bucks column…that I’d argue is a pretty convoluted but ultimately straightforward in-kind contribution to the stay-out-of-jail campaign…&…even if it were all above board…that seems like it might be…problematic??

Musk and his fellow techno-utopianists may be dreamers, but they are also pragmatists. When an independent journalist, Ken Klippenstein, published a hacked dossier that the Trump campaign compiled while vetting Vance and then tried to promote his story on X, the campaign reached out to the platform — which did exactly what the Republicans accused Twitter of doing in 2020, suppressing the potentially damaging information by blocking the link and suspending Klippenstein. (Musk later reinstated Klippenstein’s account, saying he wanted to “stay true to free speech principles,” according to messages seen by The Times.) Earlier this month, Musk used his account to solicit signatures, cellphone numbers and addresses for a petition on the PAC’s website, offering $47 to anyone who referred a signatory in a swing state.

…but…theyr’e not buying votes or registrations…it’s very important that you understand they’re onny throwing money adjacent to the problem…not at the problem…which would be…checks notes…straightforwardly illegal

Whatever was happening, or not happening, on the ground in the swing states, Musk had turned his social media platform into a 24-hour-a-day persuasion machine, pummeling voters with messages, images and videos on their electronic devices. There was no precedent for this. The Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United ushered in a new era in American politics, giving billionaires a previously unimaginable level of influence over candidates and elections. But this was the first time that one of those billionaires had used the largely unregulated modern communications platform he controlled to advance his political interests.

Musk was way ahead of America’s campaign finance laws, which have not been overhauled since the rise of social media. “If you look at the series of court cases that enabled all of this, one of the underlying assumptions was the reason to allow a corporation like X to spend unlimited amounts of money and say whatever it wants is because corporate America represents a giant sector of our society and our economy,” says Daniel Weiner, the director of the elections and government program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan law and policy institute. “But it doesn’t take into account a billionaire using this incredibly important communications platform as a tool to advance his own personal agenda.”

…in a big enough bucket even the drops can make a big splash

[…] As of the end of September, Sacks and his wife had given a total of $550,000 to Trump’s election effort, less than the price of a couple of tickets to Sacks’s own fund-raiser back in June. Musk had given $75 million to America PAC, a huge sum for anyone else, but not so much for a man now worth roughly $250 billion. “The hilarious aspect is that they are feeding Trump crumbs,” says Michael Moritz, a veteran Silicon Valley V.C. and one of the earliest investors in the company that would become PayPal. “It’s a fantastic return on investment.”

…so…compared to the whole veni, vidi, vici bit

He and the Silicon Valley MAGA cohort were finished with Democrats, regulators, stability, all of it. They were opting instead for the freewheeling, fortune-generating chaos that they knew from the startup world. They had big dreams and had made the calculus that Trump would create a more hospitable environment in which to realize them. They were going to plant devices in people’s brains, replace national currencies with unregulated digital tokens, replace generals with artificial intelligence systems and much more. “Technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress and the realization of our potential,” Andreessen wrote in his manifesto. “We are not victims, we are conquerors.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/18/magazine/trump-donors-silicon-valley.html

…what if…you skipped the first two…& pre-empted the third…by going the lesser-travelled route of let’s-don’t-&-say-we-did?

Donald Trump’s campaign may be failing to reach thousands of voters they hope to turn out in Arizona and Nevada, with roughly a quarter of door-knocks done by America Pac flagged by its canvassing app as potentially fraudulent, according to leaked data and people familiar with the matter.
[…]
The Trump campaign earlier this year outsourced the bulk of its ground game to America Pac, the political action committee founded by Elon Musk, betting that spending millions to turn out Trump supporters, especially those who don’t typically vote, would boost returns.

But leaked America Pac data obtained by the Guardian shows that roughly 24% of the door-knocks in Arizona and 25% of the door-knocks in Nevada this week were flagged under “unusual survey logs” by the Campaign Sidekick canvassing app.

The Arizona data, for example, shows that out of 35,692 doors hit by 442 canvassers working for Blitz Canvassing in the America Pac operation on Wednesday, 8,511 doors were flagged under the unusual survey logs.
[…]
The unusual activity logs, for instance, showed a canvasser who was marked by GPS as sitting at a Guayo’s On the Trail restaurant half a mile away from the doors he was supposedly hitting in Globe, Arizona. Another canvasser was recorded marking voters as “not home” two blocks away from that apartment.

The Guardian also conducted its own test to see whether manually removing instances of “false positives” – doors wrongly marked as fraudulent – would show the unusual activity logs were too sensitive. Using a randomly picked sample of 26 canvassers in Arizona, the rate of suspected fakes was in line with the overall rate.
[…]
A​s a result of its heavy investment, America Pac has been able to post impressive numbers of door-knocks in only a matter of months through its network of several vendors and dozens of subcontractors under those vendors in each of the battleground states.

But in the final stretch toward the election, as the total door-knocks have increased, so too have suspected fakes, according to the leaked data. On 15 October, 20.1% of doors in Arizona were flagged under the unusual activity logs. On 16 October, it rose to 23.8% and on 17 October, it hit 26.9%.

The uptick was also reflected in Nevada. On 15 October, 21.2% were flagged by the unusual survey log, a figure that rose on 16 October to 23.8% and then jumped dramatically on 17 October to 30.1%.
[…]
The app has built-in tolerances and generates an unusual survey report after taking into account several factors, such as how quickly the canvasser at issue is supposedly hitting doors and whether the responses are recorded more than 100ft away from the target door.
[…]
“We are fully confident in the authenticity of our door counts thanks to the rigorous auditing infrastructure each canvassing firm deploys to supplement Campaign Sidekick’s strong capabilities, and we are on pace to exceed every single one of our door goals,” the statement said.

But that auditing system used in Arizona and Nevada only works if the fraudulent canvassers are caught quickly, which has not always been the case. In one instance, one canvasser was terminated for blatant fraud only after he had worked for five days and supposedly hit 796 doors – with every single one flagged as suspicious.

Part of the problem with paid canvassing, in general, is that canvassing vendors are disincentivized to fire canvassers the more doors they hit because the vendors are paid by the door. If the doors are not hit, the vendor owes money back to the client or owes that many “free” doors.

For America Pac, there is further disincentive for vendors to fire canvassers who might only be frauding one door out of every 10 – effectively someone who just cuts corners – because the labor supply of canvassers is diminished this late in the cycle and hiring a replacement is increasingly difficult, two people familiar with the situation said.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/19/trump-campaign-leaked-data-voters-elon-musk

…now…you might be tempted to draw some conclusions at this point

I’d stopped in Walker while driving a slow, winding path across Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, from Grand Rapids to Detroit, pulling over to chat with people in some of the swingiest spots of this notoriously swingy state. I was looking for undecided, or at least conflicted, voters — a hazily understood group that has taken on tremendous significance in tossup states like Michigan, where polling suggests 15 electoral votes still hang within reach of either Ms. Harris or Mr. Trump.

I met plenty of people who, in their first breath, told me they were undecided — only to admit or make plain, the longer we talked, that their presidential choice had already come together in their minds, even if they weren’t exactly saying it aloud. Many people seemed reluctant to admit — even perhaps to themselves — that they were really going to vote for that person.

Most of the time, that person was Mr. Trump, but not always. A pleasant, middle-aged woman working the register of a small-town sandwich shop told me she had generally been a Republican voter. This election, though, she was balking. She talked loudly and freely about her indecision before finally whispering to me, so that her co-workers and customers couldn’t hear, that she was probably going to end up voting for Ms. Harris because she really, really couldn’t stand Mr. Trump. Then she grimaced, as if to say: What have we come to? Then she declined to tell me her name.

These exchanges suggest that “undecided” is not the best word for many of these voters. They are uncomfortable, even disgusted. They described the election as presenting an unpleasant choice that must be made. Mr. Trump’s image, full of chaos and invective, has clearly soured, even in the minds of voters who voted for him before and are likely to vote for him again. As for Ms. Harris, I heard over and over again that people didn’t know who she was or what she wanted to do. There was an unfamiliarity so vast that for some, it gave way to distrust.

I am familiar, of course, with the indignant howls of colleagues, neighbors, television pundits: Who could be undecided at a moment like this? The conflicted voters I met seemed unlikely to be won over — they are too far gone for that — but were instead bobbing back and forth on the eddies of their own revulsion. That, too, creates movement, albeit an uninspiring movement.

This election may be an experiment in the power of the negative — the inverse of the charismatic politician whose gravitational pull tugs voters across party lines and assembles them in a formerly improbable bloc. That was Barack Obama in the optimistic flush of 2008, rallying a broad coalition in which independents and some Republicans joined the Democrats.

This moment is not that. American optimism is, at least for now, in short supply. The public’s view of politics and elected officials is “unrelentingly negative,” a Pew Research Center study concluded last year. More than a quarter of the respondents (28 percent) had unfavorable views of both parties; 63 percent had little or no confidence in the future of the political system.

…but…there’s flip-sides to catch you out

But, as the researchers at Pew pointed out, the general unhappiness with politics coincided with historically high levels of voter turnout. People may take a jaundiced view of the candidates and the resulting governance, but many of them still vote.

…I mean…it’s more profitable just to be able to say you did something than to actually do it…providing you can convince enough people that it’s held to be true for legal purposes that you did…& if you avoid getting sued for being full of shit until after the sack of shit you got down & dirty with can shit all over any attempt to come after you in earnest…then your loser’s idea of a winner calls that a “win-win” no matter how many Ls you gotta take to say you got over the line without crossing any you weren’t allowed to

“I might just put ‘undecided’ for that race. I don’t think either one of them is necessarily going to ….” She trailed off, and I recognized a note of disappointment in her voice. “I’m feeling some type of way about it.”

These Undecided Michigan Voters Really Aren’t All That Undecided [NYT]

…un-committed? …un-aligned? …un-willing? …un-informed?? …un-intelligible? …un-derhand? …un…presidented?

…un-fucking-holy?

“I decree in Jesus’s mighty name, and I decree it by faith,” said Ahn, “that Trump will win on November the fifth, he will be our 47th president, and Kamala Harris will be cast out and she will lose in Jesus’s name.”

The Bible story Ahn invoked is extremely violent. In it, Jehu throws the Phoenician princess Jezebel from a window. She is then trampled by horses, her corpse left to be eaten by dogs. Ahn did not get into the particulars of this story at the DC event, but he likely didn’t need to: in his world of charismatic and evangelical preachers, pastors, self-styled prophets and apostles, and their many followers, the story of Jezebel is a key narrative.

The rally on the mall on 12 October, advertised under the name A Million Women, was billed as a gathering for women to wage spiritual warfare against changing gender norms in the US. Drawing tens of thousands, the event showcased the ability of leaders from the New Apostolic Reformation, a growing movement on the Christian right, to mobilize followers – and ply them with militant political rhetoric.

Experts fear their spiritual message has the potential to spur real-world political violence, especially if Trump were to lose the November election.

…if we could go on ahead & pause this LARP of “the day they came to arrest the book“…how can I put this

Matthew Taylor, a scholar whose work has focused on the New Apostolic Reformation, said veiled calls for violence cloaked in religious rhetoric are common in the NAR, a loosely-affiliated network on the Christian right that embraces modern-day apostles and prophets.
[…]
Leaders in the NAR “believe themselves to be what they call kings and priests and [members of] a royal nation”, said Jonathon Sawyer, an academic whose research focuses on religious and political extremism. Such figures “have the sense that when they offer some type of decree such as this, that there is a tangible impact that will happen in the ‘natural sphere’ and in politics”, he added.

Because pastors like Ahn lean so heavily on biblical allegory, they are afforded a degree of plausible deniability if followers interpret their speech as an incitement to violence. And in the world that Ahn occupies, this kind of language has been thick in the air for years. Ahn’s decree itself was likely familiar to some: on 5 January 2021, Ahn issued a nearly identical one at a Stop the Steal rally in Washington DC.

The notion that Harris herself embodies the spirit of Jezebel has also become commonplace among preachers in the NAR.

Why experts say Christian nationalists’ rhetoric may spur violence [Guardian]

…it’s…maybe not as bad as what happens to the levite’s concubine…which is the memorable example of biblical…not-exactly-nuance…that shows up in the day they came to arrest the book…as a bit of the good book the people trying to say which books were no good on account of the stuff in them found…inconvenient enough to rip out of bibles in libraries lest kids notice the strong whiff of implied hypocrisy…but…in case it’s been a while…it doesn’t go great for jezebel

…so…be careful out there…there’s a whole lot of smoting that seems overdue & I wouldn’t want any of you lot winding up as collateral smitees?

…anyway…that’s time…so…I’ll try to find a few tunes &…attempt to rest up…these last few steps to the finish are some right, proper bastards…so…might see if I can find something to brace myself with while I’m about it?