honest.abe

honest.abe's Journal

June 21, 2020

K-Pop Fans Sabotaged Trump's Under-Attended Tulsa Rally

Source: consequenceofsound.net

Coming into Saturday’s campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Donald Trump proudly boasted that over one million people had signed up for tickets. But when the day actually came, there were plenty of empty seats to be found inside the arena, and literally not one person showed up for the outdoor events. Trump’s campaign blamed the low attendance on protestors who blocked the entrance to the arena. However, as the New York Times reports, the inflated ticket requests may have been the direct result of a prank carried out by K-pop fans.

K-pop fans, along with their allies on TikTok, worked together to register potentially hundreds of thousands of fake ticket requests as a prank. One of the organizers behind the prank, a YouTube host named Elijah Daniel, told the Times that “It spread mostly through Alt TikTok — we kept it on the quiet side where people do pranks and a lot of activism. K-pop Twitter and Alt TikTok have a good alliance where they spread information amongst each other very quickly. They all know the algorithms and how they can boost videos to get where they want.”

Several young activists created video encouraging other K-pop fans and TikTok users to request tickets using fake names and phone numbers, and even offered instructions on how to generate phone numbers using Google Voice and other internet-connected phone services.

“We all know the Trump campaign feeds on data, they are constantly mining these rallies for data,” Mary Jo Laupp, a former employee of Pete Buttigieg’s campaign for president, told the Times. “Feeding them false data was a bonus. The data they think they have, the data they are collecting from this rally, isn’t accurate.”

Read more: https://consequenceofsound.net/2020/06/k-pop-fans-may-have-sabotaged-trumps-under-attended-tulsa-rally/

I just love this! Well done!

June 18, 2020

Bolton: Trump's not 'fit for office,' doesn't have 'competence to carry out the job'

President Donald Trump is not "fit for office" and doesn't have "the competence to carry out the job," his former national security adviser John Bolton told ABC News in an exclusive interview.

In an explosive new book about his 17 months at the White House, Bolton characterizes Trump as "stunningly uninformed," ignorant of basic facts and easily manipulated by foreign adversaries.

But his assessment that Trump is not "fit" to be president is among the most stunning indictments of a sitting president by one of their own top advisers in American history.

https://news.yahoo.com/bolton-trumps-not-fit-office-doesnt-competence-carry-100155284--abc-news-topstories.html

Wow.

June 17, 2020

Rubin (WP): Why Democrats have an extraordinary opening (filibuster, reforms, etc)

Democrats have a once-in-a-generation opportunity, akin to the first civil rights era, to reorder our politics. In the 1960s, southern whites shifted to the Republicans, while nonwhite voters in cities and young voters went to the Democrats. Now the tectonic plates are shifting once more. NBC News explains what has happened to the two parties:

Republicans have actually grown their advantage among white voters who do not have a college degree. They now hold a 24-point party ID edge with that group. In 2015, the GOP held a 21-point lead with them.
But among whites with a college degree, the numbers have moved sharply in the other direction. Democrats and Republicans drew equal support among that group in 2015, 47 percent identified with each party. But in the latest data whites with a college degree leaned Democratic by 12 points.

Many of those college-educated voters are the “suburban white women” you keep hearing about, who voted overwhelmingly for Democrats in 2018. That gender gap has widened into a canyon. (In 2015, Democrats had a 12-point advantage with women; now Democrats have a 18-point lead.) Simply put, the anti-science, white grievance, bully-boy politics of the Republican Party under President Trump turns off people who do not want to be viewed as uneducated, racist or mean. It turns out that is a very broad coalition.

<snip>

I suspect the Senate filibuster is on thinner ice than ever before. If Democrats win big (claiming the White House and the Senate majority), they will be in no mood to see an entire agenda stymied by a minority of senators from red states. I personally have grave reservations about doing away with the filibuster, but concern about minority rights is likely to be subsumed by enthusiasm for an aggressive agenda, one that might include some systemic changes in voting rights (automatic registration, voting by mail available in all 50 states, an end to voter ID laws, etc.) that would help Democrats down the road.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/15/why-democrats-have-an-extraordinary-opening/

I know Rubin is a conservative but I think this article is spot on.

I do wonder if Democrats will actually nuke the filibuster. That would be remarkable.

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