Oct 17, 2024
Today's Word Safari
Given Trump's lack of verbal discipline, it may be a bit of a stretch to latch onto "We vs They" as an absolute.
But also given Trump's predatory cunning, it's hard to avoid concluding that's exactly what he meant.
Oh, Elmo
Trump campaign worked with Musk’s X to keep leaked JD Vance file off platform
Journalist who published vetting document on Republican running mate was kicked off site formerly known as Twitter
Donald Trump’s presidential campaign worked with X to prevent information about JD Vance from being posted on the social media platform, a move that resulted in the journalist who revealed the information being kicked off the site, according to reports.
The former president’s team contacted X, owned by the billionaire Trump backer Elon Musk, about a 271-page document compiled by his campaign to vet his running mate that was linked to by Ken Klippenstein, an independent journalist, the New York Times has reported.
X responded by blocking links to the material, claiming that it contained sensitive personal information such as the Ohio US senator’s social security number, and banned Klippenstein from the platform.
The materials published by Klippenstein on his Substack in September appear to be related to a hack of the Trump campaign earlier this year, which the FBI has linked to Iran. Documents from the hack have been shared with several media outlets, which have chosen to not publish them.
Media outlets did not reach the same decision when they gave significant attention to files from Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign that had been hacked and leaked by Russian intelligence before she ultimately lost that election to Trump. At one point, Trump had said he hoped Russia would be “able to find” some of Clinton’s files.
The removal of the material from X has highlighted the increasingly strident support of Musk, the world’s richest person, for Trump’s attempt to return to the White House after losing the 2020 election to Joe Biden. After buying Twitter in 2022, Musk said that he was an advocate of free speech and the open sharing of information, even if it offended either political party.
Last week, Musk appeared at a Pennsylvania rally alongside the former president, performing an awkward jump on stage before declaring that “I’m not just Maga – I’m dark Maga” while invoking the Republican nominee’s Make America Great Again slogan.
Musk added that “this will be the last election” if Trump doesn’t win in November against Kamala Harris, complaining that she and her fellow Democrats want “to take away your freedom of speech, they want to take away your right to bear arms, they want to take away your right to vote, effectively”.
Klippenstein, whose X account was restored following the New York Times reporting, said in a Substack post on Friday that Musk had purchased political influence and “is wielding that influence in increasingly brazen ways”.
“The real election interference here is that a social media corporation can decree certain information unfit for the American electorate,” he wrote.
“Two of our most sacred rights as Americans are the freedoms of speech and assembly, online or otherwise. It is a national humiliation that these rights can be curtailed by anyone with enough digits in their bank account.”
Musk is set to appear at further Trump rallies – and he may even knock on voters’ doors for the campaign in Pennsylvania in the coming week. He has funded a political action entity called America Pac that has spent around $80m to help Trump reach voters in crucial swing states like Pennsylvania.
Today's TweeXt
Free for the line crews - because it's always free for them.
Standard rates when they send it in to FEMA for reimbursement.
Trump gave free hotel rooms to lineman ahead of Hurricane Milton, or did he? pic.twitter.com/WRtQ8sfGPu
— TizzyEnt (@TizzyEnt) October 16, 2024
Today's Ad
"Being corrupt is bad.
— BrooklynDad_Defiant!☮️ (@mmpadellan) October 12, 2024
Being corrupt and senile is worse."
-- Laura Ingraham, Fox News
It's time to have a serious talk about trump's advancing dementia, and the need to see his medical report NOW.pic.twitter.com/K6J930xgj6
Oct 16, 2024
Today's TweeXt
How do these fuckin' idiots manage to feed themselves?
Dude shoots his own Cybertruck, and is shocked to learn it’s not bulletproof pic.twitter.com/tJNaiRobdx
— Hamish Mitchell (@H_MitchellPhoto) October 16, 2024
Who's Your Guy?
If we're talkin' about MAGA's bullshit measures of maniless, I'm with Belle - I gotta ask, between Trump and Walz:
- Which one knows how to change the oil in his car?
- Which one knows how to clean a fish? Or a deer? Or dress a hog?
- Which one knows about building a fire and where to pitch the tent?
- Which one knows how to clean a shotgun?
And one more:
Which one knows that you don't lust after
your own goddamned daughter?
Is This Infighting?
No, not really. Nobody is arguing the actual policy points - although there are some differences - they're only arguing about how hard they should push the thing.
Translating:
"We plan on doing every shitty thing the Dems say we're planning to do, but we know we need to dial back the stridency in public so the unwashed hoards of idiots we need to vote for this pile of dog shit will be less frightened by it."
Paul Dans, who led the project until July, also called on JD Vance to withdraw his foreword for Heritage President Kevin Roberts’s book.
The former director of the right-wing policy and personnel blueprint known as Project 2025 is condemning what he sees as “violent rhetoric” from Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts and calling on Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance to retract the foreword he wrote for Roberts’s book.
“If we’re going to ask the left to tone it down, we have to do our part as well,” Paul Dans, who led Project 2025 until July, said in an interview. “There’s no place for this sort of violent rhetoric and bellicose taunting, especially in light of the fact that President Trump has now been subject to not one but two assassination attempts.”
Roberts, who took over Washington’s preeminent conservative think tank in 2021, declared a “second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless, if the left allows it to be,” during an appearance on a pro-Trump podcast in July, before a gunman attempted to assassinate Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania. That same month, Roberts started marketing his book, whose cover proposed “Burning Down Washington” and featured an image of a match.
Roberts declined to be interviewed. Heritage spokesman Noah Weinrich said Roberts’s remark on the podcast was meant to warn of left-wing violence. “Any attempt to mischaracterize Dr. Roberts’s comments as supportive of violence is grotesque and completely contrary to the observation he was making,” he said.
Roberts used similar language in online promotional materials for his book. In early versions of the text reviewed by The Washington Post, Roberts called for “a political revolution” to “overthrow today’s incarnation of the ruling class,” argued that the nation “must be destroyed and replaced,” and supported the elimination of institutions including the Ivy League, the FBI, Fairfax County Public Schools and the Boy Scouts.
Dans and Roberts disagreed over the direction of Project 2025, a collaboration among more than 100 right-wing groups that was convened by Heritage and run by Dans. Dans blames Roberts for much of the backlash that the effort has received. He said he warned Roberts against provocative media interviews and hyperbolic language, especially after the Trump campaign repeatedly disavowed Project 2025 and warned participants to stop talking to reporters about plans for a second Trump administration. Over the summer, Democrats turned Project 2025 into a byword for Trump’s second-term agenda and argued that voters should oppose it.
“There’s really no place for this level of rhetoric, let alone from the head of an august think tank,” Dans said. “And by doing that, he’s essentially besmirched the professional reputations of everyone involved in Project 2025.”
A lawyer representing Heritage dismissed Dans’s criticisms and suggested he is motivated by a dispute with his former employer. Dans declined to comment on the circumstances of his departure.
After a gunman opened fire at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania on July 13, wounding the former president and killing one attendee, the promotional text for Roberts’s book was revised to soften some of the most inflammatory phrases. Gone was a reference to overthrowing the ruling class; the revolution was specified as “peaceful”; and Fairfax County schools and the Boy Scouts were spared. The subtitle changed from “Burning Down Washington” to “Taking Back Washington,” and the match disappeared from the cover.
In August, Roberts said he would delay the book’s publication, originally scheduled for September, until after the election.
“Dr. Roberts initially was using a rhetorical turn of phrase to emphasize the need for certain aspects of the federal government to be restored to a citizen-centered balance, rather than being the captive of a small minority from the Left,” Weinrich said of the changes. “However, following the slanderous media coverage of Project 2025, Dr. Roberts did not want to allow the same voices to attribute false allegations of violence to his book as well.”
Roberts’s book includes a foreword by Vance, whom Roberts has described as a friend. Dans said Vance should distance himself from Roberts by withdrawing his foreword for the book. A spokesman for Vance declined to comment.
The notoriety surrounding Project 2025 has been a fundraising boon for Heritage, helping the foundation collect a record $150 million in 2023, according to the group’s public disclosures. Although Heritage publicly promoted Project 2025 as a $22 million initiative, its actual budget was less than $2 million, according to people familiar with the figures. Weinrich said $22 million reflected the annual spending across all Heritage departments and events to support the project, not only the budget for the project’s dedicated staff, and only 1.1 percent of the foundation’s 2023 fundraising was specifically directed to Project 2025.
“Project 2025 was and is an all-of-Heritage effort,” he said.
Trump has repeatedly expressed frustration with Heritage and other think tanks, such as the America First Policy Institute and the Center for Renewing America, that he viewed as raising money off him. Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation especially drew the wrath of Trump and his advisers because of their ongoing self-promotion amid intensifying Democratic attacks.
“Project 2025 is radioactive to the Trump-Vance transition,” said Howard Lutnick, a billionaire investor who is co-chair of the official transition. “Zero. Total ban. Radioactive. Any of those words, feel free to pick them.”
Dans reiterated that Trump was never involved in Project 2025. He called it ironic that the project has become a political liability for him, because Roberts initially supported Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Trump’s rival in the GOP nominating contest. The Heritage Foundation unveiled Project 2025’s 900-page book of policy proposals at a 2023 conference that featured DeSantis as the marquee speaker. Trump was not invited to that event. He has participated in other Heritage Foundation gatherings and took a private flight with Roberts to a summit in 2022.
In August 2023, Roberts attended the DeSantis campaign’s after-party at the first Republican presidential debate. He contributed $1,246.97 to DeSantis’s campaign. (Roberts and his wife have also donated to Trump.) Several Heritage staffers, including Roberts’s personal press secretary, left to work for DeSantis. Once the Florida governor dropped out of the race in January, Roberts quickly shifted emphasis, presenting Heritage’s work as “institutionalizing Trumpism.”
Weinrich stressed Heritage’s nonprofit status, which restricts partisan activities, to deny that the foundation favored candidates or coordinated with campaigns. “Heritage did not raise money in the name of staffing a second Trump administration,” he said.
Roberts’s ties to DeSantis were part of the reason that Trump’s campaign rebuked Project 2025 in public statements in November and December. Dans said he wished Trump’s advisers had weighed in privately. But he insisted he never heard from them, disputing previous reporting that said Trump co-campaign manager Susie Wiles complained to him and other Heritage leaders. The public admonitions served to draw more attention to the controversy, he said, and invite further Democratic attacks.
“We took the instruction, as we had before, to lay low,” Dans said. “But in the case of Kevin, he didn’t.”
Roberts’s continuing publicity efforts gave Democrats an opportunity to tie Project 2025, and by extension Trump, to more controversial positions supported by some Heritage employees but not by the Project 2025 policy book or the Trump campaign. Some articles and social media posts from Heritage have advocated stricter abortion bans than Trump has and cuts to Social Security. Dans said he warned others at Heritage to remove statements that were contrary to Trump’s position and would embolden Democrats to claim Trump would cut Social Security.
Roberts’s book also departed from Trump’s positions by criticizing in vitro fertilization and contraception, according to an advance copy obtained by the liberal group Media Matters.
“Heritage cannot and does not take direction from any political campaign,” Weinrich said. “Dr. Roberts was not seeking publicity: We were speaking regularly to other conservative leaders and supporters who desperately wanted — and still want — a plan for governance.”
Roberts has showed no sign of changing course because of the blowback.
“We allowed the radical left to define the brand Project 2025,” Roberts said at the New York Times Climate Forward conference on Sept. 25. “We should have — figuratively speaking — punched back. Lesson learned.”
Oct 15, 2024
Coach D Speaks
How do we hide our bigotry and make white supremacy seem OK?
Put a brown face on it.
Coach D explains:
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