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Post by Cantab on Nov 9, 2024 8:23:52 GMT 12
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Post by muzled on Nov 10, 2024 11:57:21 GMT 12
Just subscribed to The Spectator, they have some interesting stuff.
I've never followed the merican election at all but this one is fascinating me.
Trump is the first person to lose and get back in since 1800 and something.
Garbage, the free press, and the war over apostrophes
The business of liberating free speech
3 November 2024
12:33 PM
The future of the free press, citizen journalism, and the public voice hangs in the balance. Elon Musk has made this clear with a bombardment of tweets.
After declaring, ‘This platform [X] is the top source of news on Earth!’ Musk said, ‘Legacy media sits upon a throne of lies!’ He further accused it of ‘relentlessly spreading hate and division’.
‘The legacy media is the propaganda arm of the radical leftists, so [it] will immediately go after anyone who merely wants centrist policies and fairness for all … the reason the public no longer trusts the legacy media is that the media has been exposed as lying too many times to count. Legacy media absolutely deserves the lack of respect and ridicule it gets.’
Musk has also made comments that this election ‘is a verdict on civilisation’ and he may be right. The way in which a government interprets freedom is the foundation of its laws. If freedom means freedom to agree with the government and everything else is dangerous misinformation and disinformation, then Western Civilisation is kindle for the communist fires.
During an interview earlier this year, Elon Musk explained exactly why he believes citizen journalism, which is being heavily promoted by X, is vastly superior to conventional journalism.
‘This is really going to be the new model of news, which is to gather information from people who are at the scene … you’ve got real-time aggregation of the collective wisdom of tens of millions of people. Although something may be said that is incorrect, it is very quickly corrected. Whereas a newspaper that is publishing, what happened yesterday, when you read the article, that article could be wrong, often is wrong, but there’s no rebuttal to the article.’
What Elon Musk says is true, there is a war against free speech. Unpopular governments are obsessed with controlling the press because they perceive criticism as a threat. If government is wrong about something, their God-like status is diminished. The closer a government is to a dictatorship, the more it fears the whispering of its people amplified in print. While Xi Jinping spent Halloween rounding up people dressed as Donald Trump, imagine how terrified our governments are of the day climate change is proven false. The public will want more than a pound of flesh to account for trillions of dollars in missing public money.
It is also true that protecting speech is a business concern for Elon Musk. He has decided to monetise freedom and his business model cannot survive in a world of tyrants and mentally fragile socialist parties.
There are worse things for rich people to do than make a business out of liberating human speech.
Saying that Elon Musk’s business goals align with the fundamental rights of the West is not to pick fault. If capitalism can save democracy, what better proof will we have that free markets are superior to interfering governments who, when appointing themselves to the task of ‘citizen safety’ choose ‘citizen slavery’ as their solution?
Earlier this week, President Joe Biden turned a PR stunt into a disaster for the Democrats when he re-hashed Clinton’s ‘deplorables’ line by calling Trump supporters ‘garbage’. The mainstream media, which Elon Musk calls the ‘disinformation press’, came out and laundered the headlines to say, Biden appears to insult Trump supporters as “garbage”. Or, as a direct quote, ‘The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters…’
While the use of ‘appears’ appears to aid the President by softening an insult, a fight has erupted over the use of apostrophes.
The original transcript mentioned ‘supporters’, implying that the President was calling Trump supporters ‘garbage’ – and that is how the live video plays. Well, as much as you can rely on a Biden speech for clarity. Panicking, the White House decided to change ‘supporters’ to ‘supporter’s’. The point made, rather inelegantly in grammar, is that Biden’s rambling mind was referring to Hinchcliffe instead of Trump supporters.
According to The AP:
The change was made after the press office “conferred with the President”, according to an internal email from the head of the stenographers’ office that was obtained by The AP. The authenticity of the email was confirmed by two government officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters. The supervisor, in the email, called the Press Office’s handling of the matter “a breach of protocol and spoliation of transcript integrity between the Stenography and Press Offices”.
The email goes on to say:
‘If there is a difference of interpretation, the Press Office may choose to withhold the transcript but cannot edit it independently,’ the supervisor wrote, adding. ‘Our Stenography Office transcript – released to our distro, which includes the National Archives – is now different than the version edited and released to the public by Press Office staff.’
Such is the power of Donald Trump’s election marketing that an apostrophe here and there from the irrelevant President Biden doesn’t matter. Trump hopped off his private plane and into a garbage truck, then gave his rally speech in a high-vis vest which he described as ‘slimming’ to a crowd that erupted into cheers.
If nothing else, Trump is a master at using the sneering nature of both the Democrats and the press against them.
The theatre is reminiscent of the ‘dogs and the cats’ comment where the press were certain they had a ‘racist gotcha moment’ against Donald Trump, which turned into a catchy theme song for the opening of rallies. ‘The Left can’t meme’ isn’t an innocent criticism. In a world where social media has become the press – an inability to crack jokes could sink the Left’s authoritarianism. They are headed to the bottom of the swamp, weighed down by ego.
Bill Ackman tweeted:
The election is fundamentally about what kind of world do we want to live in… Do we want free speech, common sense immigration policies, safe streets, peace in Europe and the Middle East, sensible and appropriately limited regulation, a stronger and faster-growing economy, merit-based employment, reduced waste in government, and a healthier populace. Or… Do we want the opposite? In other words, a continuation of the last four years. Please vote accordingly.
Normally the US election is a curiosity to the rest of the world – certainly it has always been a security concern where nations dependent on the ships, planes, and guns of the US hold their breath to see if the lumbering policeman of the world will keep his post.
This time it is different.
The ideology of the Democrats and Republicans has been torn apart. They are separate continents – entirely different countries.
In one world we have the Californian Utopia – a US consumed by drugs, debauchery, and dystopia where the Obama legacy can rule peacefully over a nation of serfs. The other is a frightening world of freedom where the big problems created by politicians have to be addressed. Free speech hurts. Free speech is going to lead to the restructuring of government. It will strip out the layers of corruption and shine spotlights into the darkest crannies of corporate backrooms. Free speech scares the hell of out the powerful, but the prize is the restoration of our civilisation. It is the re-orienting of the board and the correcting of the list that has seen ordinary people slide off the edge.
While our government in Australia is busy in bed with Silicon Valley tech giants to create technology designed to enslave us and oppress us, Elon Musk has insisted that ‘the goal of any given technology that’s developed should be to help humanity and bring joy to people and help people’. We have to wait and see which future America leans toward.
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Post by ComfortZone on Nov 11, 2024 7:59:27 GMT 12
Part 2 of Kiwi in America's analysis of Trump's victory, the message is that Trump had alot of smart people around him and they had learned the lessons from their mistakes in the 2020 campaign
it's a long read, a few notable excerpts (my underlining)
Ballot harvesting. There are legal variations as to the extent of ballot harvesting that can be done depending on relevant state law but regardless of that, in 2020 Republican campaigns engaged in zero ballot harvesting. That changed dramatically in 2024. Both the formal Trump campaign and various offshoots such as Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point Action and Scott Pressler hired hundreds of young people across most of the swing states to actively chase ballots. This was encouraging low propensity voters to register and vote early in states that allowed it and the chasing of high propensity voters on election day to ensure they voted. Each used sophisticated Apps that fed from real data from state election offices that identify voters yet to cast a vote by party affiliation where allowed. These groups wrung out 10,000’s of votes many of them from people who had either never voted or rarely voted. The most dramatic example of this was Pressler’s efforts just in Pennsylvania where he and his team registered 180,000 Amish! The Amish traditionally don’t vote but regulatory overreach by the Democrat administration in Pennsylvania in seizing and destroying raw milk so upset the Amish that they were propelled into political activism and voted en-mass for Trump.
Campus outreach. Charlie Kirk, as a young 30-year-old articulate and knowledgeable debater, had for years visited large university campuses across America but in the run up to 2024, he ramped up his efforts. Often all it involved was setting up a TPUSA tent and advertising that he was there to answer any questions from student voters with a particular emphasis on Harris or non-committed voters. Kirk’s exchanges are legendary and as the swell of support for Trump grew, these events attracted thousands of students each time and Kirk gave away 1,000s of MAGA hats each time at literally hundreds of events over the years. Exit polls show that Trump made huge inroads into the Gen Z vote and won a plurality of Gen Z males, and this result was largely because of Charlie Kirk’s efforts, and this campus outreached was barely matched by the Democrats.
Defensive lawfare. Trump’s campaign in 2020 ran out of money 3 weeks out from the election for anything other than his huge rallies. Media advertising almost dried up and there was no money to pay lawyers to defend the vote from illegal actions by mostly Democrat election officials at the state and county level. In contrast, in 2024 a vast sum was spent recruiting hundreds of lawyers and hundreds of thousands of poll watchers and these lawyers were judiciously deployed in battleground states and were phenomenally successful. Various incidents cropped up in the weeks leading up to the election and on the day itself from shutting down early voting lines too early, to deliberately malfunctioning machines to barring Republican poll watchers. The lawyers were specific to each states’ election laws and swiftly intervened and the threat of legal action was often enough to get a behaviour change and when legal action made it to court, the well documented evidence was almost always sufficient to have a capricious and incorrect ruling or procedure overturned or aligned with state law. NONE of this was possible in 2020. There were myriads of acts of fraud and election malfeasance committed in 2020 and none of them could be intercepted on or before election day and often they were left to be litigated after the event when courts often ruled against Trump and the GOP due to out of time filing or lack of standing. This time around small, localised attempts at fraud were intercepted and quickly dealt with. Whilst there was undoubtedly fraud in places on November 5th, this time it was far less impactful because of the aggressive defensive lawfare waged by the Trump campaign.
Social Media: Trump became very adept at using new media despite his age. His youngest son Barron, who is an 18-year-old college student in New York, mingles with all the big conservative Gen Z and Millennial influencers from the so-called Manosphere including Theo Von, the Nelk Boys, Adin Ross, Andrew Schulz and Shawn Ryan. Trump appeared on all their shows each with millions of views and came across as natural and funny to huge audiences of disaffected young males. Of course, the grand poohbah of the Manasphere is former UFC executive Joe Rogan whose centrist Spotify show has the biggest reach of any podcast in the world, each with an average viewing audience of 16 million. Trump’s famous 3-hour unscripted riff with Rogan where Rogan asked whatever questions he wanted (and Trump answered without ducking and diving) garnered across Spotify, You Tube and Twitter almost 100 million views! These appearances helped propel Trump to dominating the under 30 male vote in a way that Harris couldn’t come close
Democrat Lawfare:I covered this topic more extensively in these two posts. In summary, Trump’s opponents thought they had him on the ropes with all the various indictments when in actual fact, the politically motivated lawfare against Trump worked in his favour. When Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis insisted Trump be arraigned in person at the County Jail in a seedy inner city part of Atlanta, Trump’s defiant mug shot became a viral sensation but, much more significantly, it helped cement Trump’s record level of black male support that helped propel him to victory in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia. The footage of thousands of poor blacks lining the streets to the jail to cheer Trump as he exited the arraignment went viral in the African American community.
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Post by GO30 on Nov 11, 2024 12:40:53 GMT 12
Some of the post election analysis stuff is very interesting. Having a suss around last evening and the number of analysts, on the media that supported Kamala, that are blaming X, Elon, Biden anyone and everyone except the very ones they should.
There was one lady, who was a Demo strategist, who nailed it smack on the honker only to be told by the MSM panel she was wrong. The strategist reckoned the messaging was the key and the Dems totally failed to understand what the dude on the street was most concerned about. The panel said the Dems messaging was spot on just the public was too stupid and blinded by X to listen. It was noted most on the panel get paid millions of bucks and lived in the MSM bubble so the chance they knew what the man of the street really wanted/needed was pretty slim.
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Post by Cantab on Nov 11, 2024 16:28:13 GMT 12
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Post by ComfortZone on Nov 11, 2024 17:36:44 GMT 12
The panel said the Dems messaging was spot on just the public was too stupid and blinded by X to listen. This is just classic lefty mindset including Liebour here and in Australia, "we know what is best for you plebs, but you are just too dumb to understand it". |
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Post by em on Nov 11, 2024 19:58:00 GMT 12
It’s interesting watching the evolution of Musk over the last few days . He’s stated that Trudeau will lose the upcoming Canadian election , he’s been on the phone for a group chat with Putin which was a violation of the Logan act again as he’s not the head of state , wait , maybe he is ? ?
Also interesting that Trump has warned Putin not to escalate before he gets into office . Meanwhile RT has broadcast nude photos of Melania Trump on public television for a laugh . I don’t think Elons “let’s be bros and do business” approach will work with the Russians , he may have to resort to threats of weapons to ultimately get his way .
I think Musks over involvement in the decision making is going to create deep divisions in the Republican Party , for awhile . How he deals with it will be interesting , him and Trump are pushing for Recession appointments of heads of the federal and judicial agencies basically avoiding a vote and canvassing of possible candidates . Recession appointments aren’t a new thing but sounds like these guys want to do a wholesale appointment spree in one go .
I’m keeping an eye out for Elon to start flexing on the Europe and NATO situation and also the UK on the back of his success with the US election . Im half expecting him to start holding forth on X about the Treaty principles bill too
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Post by muzled on Nov 12, 2024 17:43:53 GMT 12
Some people need to get out more... |
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Post by Cantab on Nov 13, 2024 5:54:02 GMT 12
The squirrel turning up on the stage at Kamala's last speech was just a coincidence? Bit like the George Floyd mural story.
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Post by muzled on Nov 13, 2024 9:11:18 GMT 12
Sound familiar? If you get up and drive around at six in the morning, he told me, you’ll see Border Patrol arresting people, with helicopters flying overhead; it’s as routine as an early morning traffic jam in a big city. His friend David Porras, a former watermelon farmer and botanist who just switched from Democrat to Republican this year, told me he has seen Chinese nationals wandering around his backyard, while Border Patrol officers were “just watching them—couldn’t do anything about it,” because they didn’t have the support of the Biden administration.
Barrera described legal immigrants who have been in the community for years, and who waited as long as a decade to become naturalized. Now, they’re watching new arrivals buy groceries with government assistance, while the naturalized citizens struggle to pay their own way in the face of skyrocketing prices. “It’s dividing our people,” he said.
www.thefp.com/p/latino-democrats-flipped-starr-county-for-trump-republicansMaybe losing their stranglehold on power will bring them (the left) to their senses about what the average joe wants? |
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