People had cultivated the habit of apathy

A couple days ago my friend and debate partner sent an email saying he had received emails that say computer hacking experts think the presidential election was cooked in the swing states. The fraud was done through votes that were entered electronically without a matching paper ballot. They were “bullet ballots” with a vote for the nasty guy but no votes for any other races. He asked if I had heard anything about it. I replied that I hadn’t. Shortly after replying to my friend I saw an email that mentioned bullet ballots. That email is from Gaslit Nation. As part of an episode’s description are notes for the show. That includes a link to an article posted on Free Speech for People. It describes a letter from computer hacking experts warning Harris of the ways the vote tally could be hacked and that she should ask for recounts. The article summarizes the letter saying that after the 2020 election nasty guy operatives accessed voting equipment to get copies of its software. In the years since they could have studied it for vulnerabilities, ways to introduce malware. While this sounds dire, the letter does not allege specific misdeeds or say whether or how the vote count was affected. It only says election fraud is possible and that a recount is highly recommended. I then got a link to an article on Snopes, the site dedicated to affirming or debunking internet stories. I’ve referenced Snopes in the past, though not for several years (is it now owned by msn?). This article is by Jordan Liles and is in response to allegations by Stephen Spoonamore made in a letter to Harris and posted on Spoutible that made much more specific descriptions of bullet ballot counts, which are high enough to overturn the election. The lengthy analysis by Liles, which I scanned, but did not entirely read, essentially says Spoonamore’s numbers don’t add up and he doesn’t back up his statements. Spoonamore made a claim of a particular count of ballots that voted for only president, but reported state statistics are well under the claimed number. Irontortoise of the Daily Kos community (not verified by DK staff) that (in two parts, here and here) linked to the Snopes report. They also ran the numbers and concluded the number of bullet ballots this year is not far from historical rates, which means there weren’t many extra bullet ballots and they weren’t enough of thems to change the election. Emily Singer of Kos wrote about Matt Gaetz’ withdrawal from the nomination for Attorney General. Singer said that withdrawal was actually pushed by the nasty guy, who recognized there are enough senators to block confirmation and they weren’t going to change their vote. Singer said Gaetz’ departure a mere eight days from nomination is out of character for a wannabe strongman who made “fight” his motto. It is also surprising the nasty guy didn’t use his threat of recess appointments, though Republicans have been telling him they won’t let him shred their advice and consent power. All this is typical for a man known for chaotic decisions. That prompted Jessica Sutherland of Kos to wonder which of the nasty guy’s other hasty and problematic picks will fall next. Sutherland lists plenty of reasons to reject Pete Hegseth for Defense, Robert Kennedy for Health and Human Services, Kristi Noem for Homeland Security, Linda McMahon for Education, Mehmet Oz for Medicare and Medicaid, Sean Duffy for Transportation, Tulsi Gabbard for national intelligence, and Elon Musk for that made up department. Maybe Republicans will assert themselves and reject them all. This morning Tamara Keith of NPR talked about the speed of the announcements for various cabinet positions. She also talked of the things the nasty guy has not done. There are three documents the transition team has not yet signed. The documents are not named. They were instituted after the disputed 2000 election shortened the transition time and also after the issuing of a report on the Sept. 11 terror attack which emphasized the need to have a fully functioning government as quickly as possible. They were designed to make the transition go smoothly. The FBI (still controlled by Biden) isn’t doing background checks on the nominees, something the Senate has required. There seems to be no effort to get the nominees properly vetted before confirmation hearings in January. In addition to the FBI check each nominee is supposed sign an ethics agreement that says they have resolved conflicts of interest, such as divesting stock or ending a business relationship. Since this takes weeks it is usually done before the nominee is announced. In 2017 many nominees were delayed because of the process. Did the nasty guy learn the wrong lesson and instead of starting earlier is trying to circumvent the process? Does he know some of them will not meet ethics rules, which his Department of Justice will not prosecute? So will the Senate demand these background checks and ethics declarations? We’ll see. In a pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted several people with interesting views. Heather Digby Parton of Salon wrote:

But for all the nuts and kooks Trump is appointing to some of the top jobs to accomplish his revenge agenda, there are some areas where he's stocking the administration with people who are determined to fulfill their own. Many of them are Project 2025 veterans.

So much for the nasty guy claiming he had nothing to do with Project 2025. Makena Kelly of Wired looked at one of those nominations. This one is Brendan Carr to head the Federal Communications Commission. Carr wrote the Project 2025 chapter on the FCC. And it looks like Carr, in addition to giving communication companies all the goodies they’ve been asking for, wants to transform these companies into speech police. Sam Wolfson of the Guardian discusses how destructive the “manosphere” might be because of its ability to corrupt youth. This couples with many people getting their news from influencers, rather than actual news sources, which I mentioned yesterday.

It’s not on one channel on a DirectTV box, but its audience is far bigger, potentially reaching 10 times as many people [as Fox News]. It’s an amorphous network of podcasts, YouTubers, Twitch streamers and meme accounts from Kill Tony to Joe Rogan to Dilley Meme Team. They encompass entertainment, comedy, sport, health, relationships – but a distrust of the Democrats and the mainstream media permeates them all. Like Fox News and conservative AM radio, the audiences of these podcasts are scared about a changing world, but their fears are very different from those of older viewers and listeners. They’re less susceptible to bogeymen stories of violent migrants, socialism or kids watching pornography (they are the kids watching pornography). They’re more worried about money in politics, ongoing wars, the #MeToo movement, and liberals who can’t take a joke. They’re also curious about heterodox thinking, history and the environment.

Kev objects to the word “heterodox.” These people are saying the same old stuff supremacists have always said. They simply have the luxury of being able to blast it out. Kristen Ghodsee of The New Republic discussed the people who lived behind the Iron Curtain and the dangers of withdrawing from public life.

Yes, escapism through art, culture, and nature helped East Europeans persevere despite the many hardships of life in a command economy. But it also left them uniquely unprepared to deal with the sudden changes that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall. Because people had cultivated the habit of apathy, they stood helpless as the lofty promises of free markets and democracy descended into kleptocratic chaos.

If you must retreat into a private sphere, do it with cherished others. Binge watch with a friend. Play board games. Stay active in your faith community. “Practice ‘scruffy hospitality’ by inviting friends and neighbors over even when your house is a mess and you can only serve a frozen pizza.” Joe Stanley-Smith of Politico Europe discussed a memoir by former German Chancellor Angela Merkel and what she had to say about the nasty guy. A bit of it:

“He judged everything from the perspective of the property entrepreneur he had been before politics,” she wrote of Trump. “Each property could only be allocated once. If he didn’t get it, someone else did. That was also how he looked at the world.” “For him, all countries were in competition with each other, in which the success of one was the failure of the other; he did not believe that the prosperity of all could be increased through co-operation.”

In the comments exlrrp posted a meme: “Let me get this straight, you want to know what is on Hunter’s laptop but not what is in the ethics investigation on Matt Gaetz.” Dennis Goris posted a cartoon of two men in a bar. One says, “After I posted the cartoon I realized my mistake was assuming disdain for Nazis was universal.” Another meme posted by exlrrp: “It’s really something to watch the party whose supporters poop on the floor in the Capitol and wipe their feces on the wall tell us which bathrooms to use.” A cartoon by Drew Sheneman shows a whale talking to a dolphin, “The oil companies want you to worry about theoretical wind turbines when our stomachs are full of actual plastic.”