If you want to know where they get their information,here’s the breakdown:YouTube 90%TikTok 63%Instagram 61%Snapchat 55%Facebook 32% (down from 71%)WhatsApp 23%X 17% (down from 33%)Reddit 14%Threads 6% I have to wonder about the Youtube use. It could just be music or some other very specific interest there but if they ever get caught up in something and go down the Youtube rabbit hole it’s very dangerous. That site is full of disinformation and it’s very compellingly presented. I don’t know what to do about it exactly. YouTube is extremely valuable. I use it constantly myself. But if you don’t know what you’re looking at it can be disorienting and destructive. I use Tik Tok much less, but I go there enough to see how much fun it is and understand why the kids like it so much. And from what I gather it’s full of disinformation too. If we weren’t working overtime to destroy the education system we might try something like this:
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The AP reports: A former FBI informant pleaded guilty on Monday to lying about a phony bribery scheme involving President Joe Biden and his son Hunter that became central to the Republican impeachment inquiry in Congress. […] Smirnov will get credit for the time he has served since his February arrest on charges that he told his FBI handler that executives from the Ukrainian energy company Burisma had paid President Biden and Hunter Biden $5 million each around 2015. Smirnov had been an informant for more than a decade when he made the explosive allegations about the Bidens in June 2020, after “expressing bias” about Joe Biden as a presidential candidate, prosecutors said. […] No evidence has emerged that Joe Biden acted corruptly or accepted bribes as president or in his previous office as vice president. While Smirnov’s identity wasn’t publicly known before the indictment, his claims played a major part in the Republican effort in Congress to investigate the president and his family, and helped spark a House impeachment inquiry into Biden.
Trump only cares about his agenda of deportation, revenge, tariffs and personal profits. He’s fine with Elon doing whatever as long as it doesn’t interfere with his own agenda. The Daily Beast reported in his last term that when pressed about the rising deficit, he would say: “Yeah, but I won’t be here,” the president bluntly said, according to a source who was in the room when Trump made this comment during discussions on the debt. The episode illustrates the extent of the president’s ambivalence toward tackling an issue that has previously animated the Republican Party from the days of Ronald Reagan to the presidency of Barack Obama. But for those who have worked with Trump, it was par for the course. Several people close to the president, both within and outside his administration, confirmed that the national debt has never bothered him in a truly meaningful way, despite his public lip service. “I never once heard him talk about the debt,” one former senior White House official attested. He never talked about it when he ran for reelection both times either.
They obey the call How many times have “Twilight Zone” references popped into your head lately? These times are as surreal as they are threatening. Except there’s no Rod Serling to offer a pithy observation on the human condition or to offer a moral coda to each day’s news. For those among the uninfected, there is only a collective shaking of heads, a silent prayer, at the behavior of MAGA millions, titans of industry, and newsies genuflecting before the Great Orange Oz. Witnessing this “Great Capitulation,” Michelle Goldberg writes: Different people have different reasons for falling in line. Some may simply lack the stomach for a fight or feel, not unreasonably, that it’s futile. Our tech overlords, however liberal they once appeared, seem to welcome the new order. Many hated wokeness, resented the demands of newly uppity employees and chafed at attempts by Joe Biden’s administration to regulate crypto and A.I., two industries with the potential to cause deep and lasting social harm.
How many Democrats does it take to change a light bulb? Lefties’ fondness for novelty goes only so far. Democrats are policy liberals (sort of) and campaign conservatives. Party culture is built around seniority and whose “turn” it is to move up the organizational ladder. There is ageism in that, but also resistance to generational change. (I wrote about our local changing of the guard a few years back.) That’s visible in real time in the contest for ranking member of the House Oversight Committee between Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-N.Y.). Politico: House Democrats have solidified the generational shake-up at the top of their committees, after significant behind-the-scenes influence from both current and former leaders of the caucus. The caucus faced tough races for the Agriculture, Oversight and Natural Resources Committees. Rep. Angie Craig (Minn.) won the nod for the top party spot on Agriculture, beating incumbent Rep. David Scott (Ga.), who’d faced long-standing questions about his health, and Rep. Jim Costa (Calif.). Rep. Gerry Connolly (Va.) won the Oversight recommendation over Rep.
Nancy Mace says she is concerned that the drone sightings off NJ is either aliens from another planet or Russia/Iran/China searching for a missing nuclear warhead. pic.twitter.com/Uf6GiEm84v — Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) December 17, 2024 These are elected GOP officials. They are not fake tweets.
It looks like Kash Patel isn’t the only one implementing the vengeance agenda and Russ Vought won’t be the only ones demanding total loyalty in the executive branch. Others are helping with the dirty work: Staffers working for the DOGE duo, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, have contacted some of Trump’s first-term cabinet secretaries and asked them to prepare two lists of people they served with: one for political appointees and the other for career officials. The listmakers are then to write an “A” by the names of those they believe Trump should bring back or keep, and a “B” by the names of those they think should be blacklisted or fired. Of course, civil servants (the career officials) are typically protected from political raids at agencies, but Trump has vowed to use Schedule F, an executive order that would make them fireable—and these plans for mass layoffs will almost certainly wind up before the courts. I would have thought those two would be huddled over spreadsheets and policy papers deciding the BIG QUESTION of how to slash a third of the government in the first year.
Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who’s supported this site this year. It’s a validation of the work we put into it and I appreciate it so much. It appears that indy media, however small, is going to be more important than ever in these next few years. Thanks to you, we’ll be here doing our best to make sense of it all. I don’t honestly know what most people care about anymore but I do know that some of us still find Trump’s attempted coup one of the most shocking events we’ve ever witnessed. A president inciting a mob to storm the Capitol during a joint session of Congress to overturn the presidential election is the most destabilizing event in recent memory. That we’ve put that president back in the White House is a very disturbing sign that this country has lost its moorings. Trump discussed his plans to pardon the insurrectionists in his recent TIME Magazine interview: Well, we’re going to look at each individual case, and we’re going to do it very quickly, and it’s going to start in the first hour that I get into office. And a vast majority of them should not be in jail.
As Tom mentioned this morning in this excellent piece, it sure feels as if whatever resistance there was to Trump during the past 8 years is evaporating. Most of those who haven’t decided to jump on the MAGA bandwagon just don’t want to hear about it. CNN reported yesterday that its latest poll shows that 72% of those polled say they’re paying little to no attention to Trump-related news. I wrote about one early bright spot in all this a while back: the Blue State Governors. At the moment they seem to be the only ones showing a willingness to fight. Rolling Stone took a deep dive into their plans: Among governors, [Illinois Governor] Pritzker has been out in front — positioning himself as the blue-state anti-Trump. The Hyatt hotel heir is a billionaire himself, worth nearly $4 billion, which counts as fuck-you money in an age when opposing Trump can carry significant costs, from increased security to the risk of retaliatory litigation, or “lawfare.” In November, Pritzker launched a new organization, called Governors Safeguarding Democracy, that seeks to unify state-based opposition to Trump’s agenda. Unveiled with co-chair Gov.
If you’re like me, this whole crypto craze is somewhat mystifying. And I really don’t understand the necessity for it. Paul Krugman at his Substack has the answer: crime. The tech bros who helped put Trump back in power expect many favors in return; one of the more interesting is their demand that the government intervene to guarantee crypto players the right to a checking account, stopping the “debanking” they claim has hit many of their friends. He goes on to point out that this is actually the opposite of what the whole Bitcoin revolution was supposed to do which was eliminate the need for banks: What’s going on here? Elon Musk, Marc Andreesen and others claim that there’s a deep state conspiracy to undermine crypto, because of course they do. But the real reason banks don’t want to be financially connected to crypto is that they believe, with good reason, that to the extent that cryptocurrencies are used for anything besides speculation, much of that activity is criminal — and they don’t want to be accused of acting as accessories.