Trump is really going bonkers

In the latest move during the current purge of people in Trump’s administration, he has fired the person who said that the recent election was the most secure in US history. (I wrote about the official expecting to be fired two days days ago.)

Trump fired Christopher Krebs, who served as the director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa), in a tweet on Tuesday, saying Krebs “has been terminated” and that his recent statement defending the security of the election was “highly inaccurate”.

The firing of Krebs, a Trump appointee, comes as Trump is refusing to recognize the victory of the president-elect, Joe Biden, and removing high-level officials seen as insufficiently loyal. He fired Mark Esper, the defense secretary, on 9 November part of a broader shake-up that put Trump loyalists in senior Pentagon positions.

Krebs had indicated he expected to be fired. Last week, his agency released a statement refuting claims of widespread voter fraud. “The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history,” the statement read. “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”

Krebs, a former Microsoft executive, ran the agency, known as Cisa, from its creation in the wake of Russian interference with the 2016 election through the November election. He won bipartisan praise as Cisa coordinated federal state and local efforts to defend electoral systems from foreign or domestic interference.

[Read more…]

What will Trump say about the Wolverine Watchmen?

We know that Donald Trump cannot bear to say anything negative about white supremacists, white militia groups, QAnon crazies, and all the other flotsam and jetsam that can be found in the fever swamps of right wing extremism in the US who see in him the leader they have longed for. So it will be interesting to see his response to the reported plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan and attack the state capital building. (Back in May, Trump was calling on people to “Liberate Michigan” (presumably from their despotic governor who was mandated mask wearing) and spoke of the heavily armed Michigan militia members as ‘very good people’. It was after that episode that this plot apparently started gaining steam.)
[Read more…]

What’s the matter with Delaware Republicans?

Lauren Witzke is yet another QAnon supporter who has won a Republican primary and is going to be the party’s candidate for a federal office, this time for the senate seat in Delaware. But it appears that QAnon is not the only thing she believes in. She also has dabbled with flat-Earth and 9/11 conspiracy theories. She will challenge incumbent Democratic senator Chris Coons.
[Read more…]

Michele Bachmann resurfaces and hilarity ensues

Were you wondering what the nutty former Minnesota congresswoman and onetime contender for the Republican presidential nomination was up to these days? Me neither. After deciding not to seek re-election in 2018 where she faced a good chance of losing, she faded away. Or so I hoped. But there she is in the news again spouting one of her trademark nutty theories, and this one is a real doozy.
[Read more…]

The extinct ‘liberal Republican’

On NPR news yesterday that I listen to when I am in the kitchen doing various chores, I was startled when they announced the death of James Thompson, who had been the longest serving governor of Illinois. What startled me was not that he had died (at the age of 84, he had been out of politics for a long time) but that he was referred to as a ‘liberal Republican’, a political label that one never hears these days.

It made me realize how things have changed because there was a time, not that long ago, when that description was not obviously an oxymoron. There used to be John Lindsay, mayor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller, governor of New York, and Jacob Javits, New York senator, the first two of whom were considered potential Republican presidential material despite having views that were classified as liberal.

Nowadays, everyone in the Republican party runs as far away as possible from the liberal label. Even the labels ‘moderate’ and ‘centrist’ are seen as poison. Conversely, there seems to be no extreme right wing label that they will shy away from, even if it has racist and sexist and xenophobic overtones or is even outright bonkers such as being called a QAnon sympathizer.

The parties really know how to pick ’em

Just after virulently anti-gay Bob Good won the Republican nomination for a Virginia congressional seat, another hateful nutjob is likely to win the party’s nomination for a seat in Georgia. (Thanks to commenter Tadas.)

The House’s highest-ranking Republicans are racing to distance themselves from a leading GOP congressional candidate in Georgia after POLITICO uncovered hours of Facebook videos in which she expresses racist, Islamophobic and anti-Semitic views.

The candidate, Marjorie Taylor Greene, suggested that Muslims do not belong in government; thinks black people “are held slaves to the Democratic Party”; called George Soros, a Jewish Democratic megadonor, a Nazi; and said she would feel “proud” to see a Confederate monument if she were black because it symbolizes progress made since the Civil War.
[Read more…]

Primary races to watch

Jim Jewell in the newsletter The Surge looks at some interesting upcoming primary races that are worth watching, both on the Democratic and Republican sides.

Marjorie Greene, a Republican candidate for a congressional seat in Georgia, is even a believer in the QAnon conspiracy and given the state of that party, and that fact that Trump has endorsed her, she will likely win her party’s nomination on August 11. She led in the first round held on Tuesday and is currently in a runoff with the second place finisher.)

How the bizarre Venezuelan ‘Bay of Piglets’ plot fell apart

As more details emerge of the foiled attempt on Tuesday, May 5th at overthrowing the Venezuelan government of president Nicolas Maduro, the sheer ineptitude and hubris and arrogance of the plotters becomes ever more incredible to behold. Take this report about the ringleader, a former member of the US Special Forces Green Berets named Jordan Goudreau and how he worked with representatives of Juan Guaidó, the person the US treats as the president of that country even though, you know, he is not, to plan and implement the foiled attempt.
[Read more…]

The role of YouTube in spreading coronavirus and other hoaxes

I received a text from a friend in Sri Lanka who forwarded a link to a YouTube video and asked for my ‘professional opinion’ on whether it was credible, even though I am not a professional when it comes to analyzing such things. Even without looking at it I suspected that it was not credible because like many people, my friend is pretty credulous about things that are passed around on Facebook, and other social media, and gets easily alarmed. His last query to me a year ago was about the miracle of fish falling from the sky which consisted of a doctored video that was obviously fake. (He is also very religious.)
[Read more…]

8chan and the issue of speech on the internet

The website known as 8chan has served as a cesspool of bigoted and racist hate mongering for a long time in which posters seemed to be competing to see who could come up with the most offensive stuff, all while arguing that they were doing it ironically, ‘for the lulz’ as the kids say these days. They operated with impunity under the shield of free speech and things were going well for them (in terms of reaching their target audience) until three mass shooters in Christchurch (targeting Muslims), Poway, California (targeting Jews), and at a Texas Walmart (targeting Hispanics) posted their hateful manifestos on the website.

This proved to be too much for those companies that had been at least indirectly supporting the site and the internet security firm Cloudflare withdrew its support, thus enabling hackers to invade the site, overwhelm it, and shut it down. The creator of 8chan, an American who lives in the Philippines and seems to covet notoriety, vows to bring the site back in some form with a new name 8kun and different security firm backing it.

The NPR radio program On the Media had a fascinating 17-minute segment tying together 8chan, the people behind it, as well as Q and the QAnon conspiracy theories that spread its message via that site, and the problem of balancing free speech and deplatforming on the internet.

It raises some crucial questions: should tech companies stymie sites like 8chan? Can 8chan stay dead? And what happens to the dark content that flourished on the site — content like the QAnon conspiracy, whose purveyor vowed to only release definitive content on 8chan, lest his narrative gets drowned out by that of impersonators?