• 25 Posts
  • 333 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: August 26th, 2023
  • Substance_P@lemmy.worldOPtopolitics @lemmy.world•Bill and Hilary Clinton refuse to testify in Epstein probe as Republicans threaten contempt chargesEnglish
    39·
    21 hours ago

    Here’s why the Clintons say they won’t testify.

    They just told James Comer to go ahead and hold them in contempt - they’ll wait. Their letter, dated today, is four pages of “we see exactly what you’re doing.” The Clintons point out that Comer subpoenaed eight people in his Epstein investigation, dismissed seven without a word, and has interviewed a grand total of two witnesses. Two.

    They’ve got lawyers saying his subpoenas are legally invalid, and they’re calling out the obvious: Comer said nothing when Trump took the exact same position three years ago. The Epstein files only came out because four Republicans broke ranks to force a vote. Comer wasn’t one of them. He won’t subpoena the Attorney General to make DOJ comply with the law Congress passed. But he’s ready to bring the whole chamber to a halt for contempt charges against the Clintons.

    The threat is barely veiled.

    They’re prepared to take this public, make their case to all 45 committee members, and frame the whole thing as Comer protecting his friends while punishing his enemies. They’re basically saying: if you want to grind Congress to a standstill over us instead of passing laws, that works too - we’ll call it our contribution to slowing down the Republican agenda. The letter ends with the kind of line you write when you want it quoted: “Continue to abet the dismantling of America, and you will learn that it takes more than a wrecking ball to demolish what Americans have built over 250 years.”

    • Rachael Hurley -

  • Substance_P@lemmy.worldtopolitics @lemmy.world•Video Shows ICE Breaking Into Home Guns Drawn Without WarrantEnglish
    2·
    1 day ago

    You are right and I think its more nuanced than this. I originally heard it on a reddit post HERE, I think its more like

    An immediate $10,000 signing bonus upon joining.

    An additional $10,000 is paid if the application is completed before an early August deadline.

    The remaining $30,000 is distributed as $10,000 annually over the subsequent three years.

    So I was wrong according to reddit, sadly the specific details are not easy to find without getting in a quagmire of MSM news websites that only give thin overviews.

  • Substance_P@lemmy.worldtopolitics @lemmy.world•Video Shows ICE Breaking Into Home Guns Drawn Without WarrantEnglish
    142·
    2 days ago

    This administration is pretty much tossing every part of the Constitution aside. I can’t help but wonder what the founding fathers would think after just fighting a long war to get these rights written down…

    You can’t protest what they’re doing. Only their supporters should have guns (remember when Trump said, ‘Take their guns’?)

    If you don’t let ICE crash at your place, you can’t do business, MAGA will dox it.

    ICE can stop and hold you whenever they feel like it.

    They can keep you locked up without charging you, so forget about due process.

    They can deport you before you even get a chance to go to court, even if the court says not to.

    ICE claims they can use military courts instead of regular juries, and they say they’re immune to all laws.

    Citizens can be deported without a trial.

    You are starting to lose the right to just be out and about without showing ID (if ICE even asks to see it). Soon you’ll need a driver’s license just to walk to the store.

    ICE, as a federal agency, has more power than the states, even though states should have rights over the federal government.

    This is a tipping point in history.

  • Substance_P@lemmy.worldtopolitics @lemmy.world•Internet erupts as MAGA influencers exposed for being based in other countriesEnglish
    45·
    2 months ago

    Here is a great writeup by Brent Molnar.

    The Great MAGA Bot Unmasking and Why X Suddenly Flipped On Its Own Army of Fakes…

    Let me take a deep breath before diving into this swamp, because what just happened on X is not a glitch and it is not random. It is the political equivalent of kicking over a rotten log and watching thousands of beetles scatter into the light. The new “About This Account” feature exposing where profiles are actually based is already revealing that many of the loudest MAGA screamers are not in Ohio, not in Texas, not in Florida, and not in any diner Fox News pretends to interview. They are overseas. They include accounts registering from Russia, Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, and other low-cost troll-farm regions.

    And no, this is not a surprise to anyone who has been watching this ecosystem since Trump stepped onto that escalator in 2015. The only surprise is that X finally let the public see it. The question is why. The answer takes us through the economics of bot amplification, the politics of foreign influence, the global regulatory environment closing in on Musk, and the fact that even the biggest con artists eventually realize they have to show a little transparency if they want to avoid getting hauled into court.

    The first thing to understand is that X has been under growing international pressure. The EU’s Digital Services Act has been tightening the screws on platforms that fail to disclose bot activity, foreign influence, or coordinated political campaigns. X is already being investigated by Brussels for disinformation failures. This transparency feature is not a gift. It is a survival maneuver. Musk can tell regulators that he provided the tools. Whether users fall for foreign propaganda or not becomes “their problem.”

    Next comes the advertiser problem. X has been hemorrhaging ad revenue. Most major brands do not want their name appearing next to a flood of anonymous accounts screaming about “civil war” or cheering for authoritarianism. By showing where accounts are actually based, Musk can claim the platform is safer, cleaner, and more accountable. Advertisers love the word “accountable” almost as much as they love avoiding lawsuits.

    But here’s the real core of it. The feature exposes something Trump’s movement desperately needs to hide. Much of its online enthusiasm has always been artificial. The volume never matched the number of real humans willing to say these things in public. The trolling, the pile-ons, the artificial virality, the coordinated amplification of Trump’s worst rhetoric, the constant harassment of journalists and critics, the sudden explosion of identical talking points across thousands of accounts in minutes. Real humans do not behave like that. Bot networks do. Troll farms do. Foreign political influence operations do.

    And now ordinary users can click a button and see that the loud “America First” account screaming about patriotism is posting from Moscow. The guy demanding “DEFEND OUR COUNTRY” is posting from the Philippines on a six-cent-per-hour content farm. The account accusing Biden of corruption is registered in a country run by oligarchs who would like nothing more than to put a puppet in the Oval Office again.

    The next question is why Musk would risk blowing up the ecosystem that props up Trump’s movement. The answer is timing. It is late 2025. Elections are coming around the world. Regulators are circling. Evidence of foreign influence has been publicly documented again and again. Musk knows that if he does nothing, X becomes the center of the next major election interference scandal. If he adds the visibility, he can shrug and say, “We told you where they were. What more do you want from us?”

    This is liability management, not integrity. It is legal positioning, not enlightenment. It is cover-your-ass insurance disguised as transparency.

    And here is the final twist. The Trump regime is now directly tied to foreign actors in ways that are getting harder to hide. We just watched a “peace plan” for Ukraine circulate that appears to have been drafted by Kremlin-adjacent figures and laundered through U.S. political channels. We just saw senators admit that proposals they thought were American actually came from Russia. We just saw Trump take public positions that map perfectly onto Moscow’s demands.

    Now imagine what happens when the public can see, in real time, that much of the social-media support for these positions comes from accounts not based in the United States at all.

    The timing is not a coincidence. The pressure is not imaginary. The exposure is not accidental. The authoritarian ecosystem that helped build Trump’s movement is suddenly visible. The “America First” crowd is being revealed as one of the most foreign-amplified political factions in modern American history. And the panic on the right is already loud enough to hear through the screen. The darkness is being dragged into daylight. And daylight is not kind to parasites.

    A subscription or donation is the only thing that keeps this voice standing. They want pages like mine erased and your support right now is the firewall that stops that from happening. If this work matters, this is the moment it genuinely counts. I left the corporate grind to speak the truth without permission, but independent media has no protection and the platforms are actively suppressing it every day.