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In April 2019,The New York Times published a three-part investigation about the legacy ofRupert Murdoch that, among a number of juicy revelations, exposed the media moguls attempts to ease tensions among his children through group therapy sessions, including a therapeutic retreat at the family ranch in Australia. Roughly nine months earlier, a very similar scene played out on television screens during the first season ofSuccession. In Austerlitz, the HBO dramas seventh episode, the fictional Roy family begrudgingly gathered in New Mexico for a therapy session after middle son Kendalls failed attempt to knock his father, Logan, from poweronly to discover that the whole gathering was a publicity stunt.

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Successions creative team might not have realised they were so closely mirroring reality when they filmed that episode, but the goal has always been to tell a story that felt like it could be happening in real life too. If you read theFinancial Times andWall Street Journal, youd have a good sense of where we thought the show would go because its trying to reflect the world, show creator Jesse ArmstrongtoldThe New Yorker in February, when he also announced thatSuccessions upcoming fourth season would be its last. Indeed, many ofSuccessions characters and plotlines can be traced back to real people and events. Over the years, the show has employed journalists and writersmedia columnistFrank Rich is an executive producer, and novelistGary Shteyngart and business journalistMerissa Marr have served as consultantsto aid in the accuracy of its world-building.

Successions third season ended more than a year ago with the often at-odds Roy siblingsKendall (Jeremy Strong), Shiv (Sarah Snook), and Roman (Kieran Culkin)teaming up to try to stop their father (Brian Cox) from selling the family business. But an eleventh-hour heel turn from Shivs husband, Tom (Matthew Macfadyen), foiled their plans. HBO is keeping a tight lid on the events of the shows final seasonbeyond dropping a few breadcrumbs ina new trailerbut if previous seasons are any indication, there will be more than a few similarities to recent current events. Ahead, a breakdown of the real-world influences for the fictional world ofSuccession.

Jeremy Strong as Kendall Roy, Sarah Snook as Shiv Roy, and Kieran Culkin as Roman Roy.

Armstrong has said that he drew fromseveraldynastic familiesincluding the Redstones, the Sulzbergers, and the Hearstswhen creating the Roys. But none appear to have been more influential than the Murdochs. In fact, Armstrong first beganmining the lives of the rich and powerful for satire with a screenplay calledMurdoch, which imagined the family convening for the birthday of Rupert Murdoch. Itmade the rounds in Hollywood, even landing on the Black List of top unproduced screenplays in2010, but was never made.

Armstronghas said thatMurdoch is deeply in the background ofSuccession,its clear that his work on the former informed the latter. Like the Murdochs, the Roys are a patriarchal family with control over a large media conglomerate. Waystar Royco, which the Roys like to boast is the fifth-largest media company in the world, controls a Fox Newsesque conservative cable network called ATN; several newspapers; and a theme park and cruise ship business. Murdoch, meanwhile, has prevailed over News Corpa powerful print media business whose tentacles reach as far as the UK and Australiaand an entertainment business that, at its height, included broadcast and cable networks, a film and television studio, a live entertainment division, and an Indian television provider.

Even the family structures of the Murdochs and the Roys are similar. Rupert Murdoch has six children from his first three marriages, including an older daughter,Prudence, who has largely avoided wading into the power struggle that has consumed the three children from his second marriage:Elisabeth,Lachlan, andJames. The Roy Family, meanwhile, is made up of oldest son Connor (Alan Ruck)who instead of working for the family business announces a presidential campaign in the second seasonand his three younger siblings, who each believe they have what it takes to succeed their father as CEO of Waystar Royco.

Rupert Murdoch put to rest the succession questions swirling around his family in 2017, when he announced that he would sell much of his entertainment assets to Disney in adeal worth $71.3 billion.Following the sale, his oldest son, Lachlan, was named CEO of adiminished Fox Corp. In season three ofSuccession, Logan made a similar play, revealing that instead of naming one of his children as his successor, he planned to sell the company to (fictional) tech giant GoJo.

Holly Hunter as Rhea Jarrell, and Cherry Jones as Nan Pierce.

The introduction of the Pierce family in season two allowed Armstrong and his creative team to create an old-money foil for the nouveau riche Roys. Led by matriarch Nan Pierce (Cherry Jones), the Pierces operate a multi-billion media company that owns left-leaning news network PGM. Those blue-blooded fucks, as Logan calls them, appear to be a blend ofpublishing families the Sulzbergers and the Bancrofts.

The Sulzberger family owns TheNew York Times, passing the role of publisher down to each new generation. (A.G. Sulzberger is the newspaper of records current publisher.) The Bancrofts, meanwhile, are the Boston socialites who soldWall Street Journal owner Dow Jones & Company to Murdochs News Corporation in 2007. InSuccessions second season, Logan makes his own move to acquire Pierce Global Media, but isnt as successful as his real-life counterpartthough the trailer for season four suggests Nan and her haughty clan will be back for a final showdown.

Alexander Skarsgrd as Lukas Matsson.

ThoughSuccession has occasionally ventured into the world of tech (see Vaulter below), it remained largely focused on legacy media until the introduction ofAlexander Skarsgrds temperamental tech mogul in season three. The billionaire CEO of streaming powerhouse GoJo enters the story first as a potential acquisition target. But by the end of the season, its clear that he has bigger aims from his dealings with the Roys. Because ofSkarsgrds Swedish heritage, themost obvious likely inspiration for his character is Spotify cofounder and CEODaniel Ekeven if GoJo appears to be a mix of Netflix, FanDuel, and Facebook. Matssons ruthless dealmakingand erratic tweetingsuggest hes also modelled at least in part onElon Musk.

Introduced in the third season, during a secretive Republican conclave where the partys leadersincluding Logan and his childrenselect their next presidential candidate, Jeryd Mencken (Justin Kirk) isSuccessions take on what comes afterDonald Trump. The shows sitting presidenta man never shown and only ever referred to as The Raisinseems to be a composite of Trump and a more traditional conservative president, and Gil Eavis (Eric Bogosian), the Democratic senator who wants to hire Shiv in season two, is an apparentBernie Sandersstand-in. Mencken, meanwhile, is an alt-right congressman whom Shiv refers to as a YouTube provocateur, suggesting the writers modelled him after conservative media personalities likeJordan Peterson and members of the far-right Freedom Caucus. Mencken is considered a dark horse in the presidential race until Logan decides to back him, perhaps a reference to Murdochs then close alliance with Trump.

The digital-media start-up that appeared during the first two seasons ofSuccession was so clearly modelled after Vice Media that even the struggling publisher had toacknowledge the similarities. The edgy internet publisher founded by Lawrence Yee (Rob Yang) that sold to Waystar Royco had all the hallmarks of mid-2000s new media brands, from the sleek open floor plan office to the company-owned beehives. Eventhe articles that Vaulter publishes5 Reasons Why Drinking Milk on the Toilet Is Kind of a Game-Changer and Wait, Is Every Taylor Swift Lyric Secretly Marxist?would feel right at home on the BuzzFeed or Gawker websites of yore. And Kendalls interest in the company even provides more evidence that the Roys are inspired by the Murdochs; James Murdochjoined the Vice board in 2013 after Fox acquired a stake in the business.

Though Vaulter doesnt survive its saleor the pivot-to-video era that rocked every major media outletSuccession isnt entirely done skewering the digital-media world. Keep an eye out for a not-so-subtle dig at sites like Axios and Semafor in theupcoming season.

This article first appeared on Vanityfair.com

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Succession: The real people who inspired the HBO hit - VOGUE India

27 March 2023

Numerous presenters have their own video channels on Rumble

A supporter of Donald Trump made headlines last year when he said: "We are uncancellable by big tech."

The defiant claim came from Devin Nunes, who is the chief executive of Trump Media and Technology Group, the firm set up by Mr Trump in 2021 to run his social media app Truth Social.

His defiance is not based on the technology of Truth Social, rather it relies on a relatively unknown Canadian internet company called Rumble.

Rumble started out in 2013 as a video-streaming website. While that is still its main focus, in recent years it has branched into web-hosting - offering computing services for companies like Truth Social.

Rumble's main website is based around short videos, very much in the same style of YouTube

Aiming one day to rival the likes of Google and Facebook, what makes Rumble controversial is its pledge to rally against censorship, and allow freedom of speech as much as possible.

As a result of this, Rumble has become the home to a great many video channels - more often politically conservative - where people can say things that might get them kicked off other social media sites, like YouTube and Twitter.

A US-Canadian comedian and political commentator called Steven Crowder is a case in point. He is now predominantly to be found on Rumble after YouTube temporarily suspended him in 2021 for breaking its rules on "hate speech". This followed comments he made on transgender issues.

Rumble is now at the forefront of so-called "alt-tech" - internet service providers and social media sites that critics say are popular with conspiracy theorists and the alt-right.

But for Rumble's supporters, such as Mr Nunes, who moved Truth Social across to Rumble's infrastructure last year, it means "we are not relying on any tech tyrants".

Mr Nunes is on one side of a debate about how social media should be managed.

In one camp there are those who advocate for greater content moderation. They say that sites like Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube need to make a greater effort to tackle hate speech and misinformation on their platforms.

On the other side are the people who argue this has become too politicised, and see it as censorship.

For years, the battle has largely been played out on the big social media websites. Now, companies like Rumble are trying to change that.

In a note on its website, Rumble chief executive Chris Pavlovski wrote: "Rumble is creating the rails to a new infrastructure that will not be bullied by cancel culture."

In this vision of the future, there would be a rival, alternative internet, making its own rules. Yet at the same time, Rumble denies that it only attracts users with right-wing viewpoints.

It described itself to the BBC as a "neutral platform that welcomes a wide variety of views". For example, Rumble is now home to left-leaning UK comedian turned political commentator Russell Brand.

What is undeniable is that Rumble's user numbers have risen sharply in recent years, at the same time as its bigger rivals have raised their content moderation efforts. For example, in 2020, YouTube removed more than 34 million videos around the world. These included videos deemed to be harassment, incitement to violence, hate speech or misinformation.

"People get kicked off the major platforms, and they don't disappear," says Evelyn Douek, assistant professor at Stanford Law School, and an expert on the regulation of online speech. "They look for a new home."

Image source, Evelyn Douek

Prof Douek says Rumble will likely face legislation that forces it to censor more

There was a market opportunity and Rumble took it, emphasising its commitment to "free speech". Its monthly active user count reportedly jumped from 1.6 million in mid-2020 to 33 million at the start of 2021.

Prof Douek says that the events of 6 January 2021, when thousands of demonstrators stormed the US Capitol Building, gave Rumble and its plans for an independent internet a boost. She says the aftermath was "one of the radicalising moments for alt-tech".

She points in particular to Parler - a twitter-like platform popular with Trump supporters - being removed from the Apple and Google app stores. Parler's website was also dropped by Amazon, upon whose cloud-based Amazon Web Services servers it had been based.

"Losing access to the cloud and losing access to these app stores can really hamstring a platform," says Prof Douek. She adds that the episode showed people in the alt-tech space that their apps and websites couldn't rely on mainstream internet providers.

So, Rumble has been building its own infrastructure, which also includes its own advertising and payments-processing technology. To help fund all this, the firm raised $400m last year when it floated on the Nasdaq stock exchange in New York.

British comedian Russell Brand, left, moved to Rumble from YouTube a year ago

However, Prof Douek says there are big challenges ahead for Rumble. Perhaps most pressingly, while it might not want to censor content, governments may legislate to force it to.

"We have seen a proliferation of legislation, bills, proposals over the last few years from governments around the world," says Prof Douek. "The big package - possibly the most consequential - is the European Digital Services Act."

This is due to fully come into force in 2024, and Prof Douek says it may mean that Rumble has to change the way it operates in the EU, including publishing more information about how it's applying the rules.

Rumble has already shown that it will fight what it sees as government overreach. When the French government told it to remove Russian state broadcasters from its platform, following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Rumble refused.

New Tech Economy is a series exploring how technological innovation is set to shape the new emerging economic landscape.

Rumble is also in a legal battle with Google, which it accuses of "unfairly rigging its search algorithms" towards YouTube, which Google owns. Google counters that Rumble content is ranked as highly as it deserves on the search engine.

"This is going to be years of litigation," says Prof Douek. "There are going to be fights... and I don't know what our internet is going to look like in a few years as a result of these."

As the alt-tech space develops, some think the internet could divide further into political spheres - left and right.

"Do I think that it is a good future if we have red platforms and blue platforms?," says Prof Douek, referring to the colours of the two main political parties in the US. "I don't think that that is necessarily how we want public debate to play out."

Katerina Eva Matsa, an associate director at the Pew Research Centre think tank in New York, says that while people with different politics "are living in very different media worlds", there is also "overlap".

Pew recently conducted a study into alternative social media sites, including Rumble and six of its peers - BitChute, Gab, Gettr, Parler, Telegram, and Truth Social. It found that nearly three quarters of Americans who consume news on these sites also get news from YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter.

"So they haven't completely abandoned the larger sites," says Ms Matsa.

This raises questions about how separate a potential future alternative internet ecosystem would be, if its user base straddles both alt-tech and the mainstream.

"I think it's a very difficult space to pinpoint whether we're going into further polarisation or less," Ms Matsa adds. "We honestly don't know the outcome."

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The web firm that wants to stop you getting 'cancelled' - BBC

Is every Dutch farmer an elected official now? Not quite, but the Farmer-Citizen Movement (BBB) secured a massive victory in last weeks provincial elections in the Netherlands. Despite the countrys farmers only making up around 1 percent of the population, it is now the largest party in every provincial legislature. These newly elected provincial legislators will in turn elect the upper chamber in May and make the BBB the largest party there, with around 17 of 75 seats.

These results represent yet another convulsion on the right of the Dutch political spectrum. It is a remarkable debut for a party that is not currently represented in the Senate, and the second time in a row that a new party has become the largest party in the Dutch Senate after the radical-right Forum for Democracys surprise win in 2019. BBB leader Caroline van der Plasher first name pronounced as one would in English, which in the Netherlands is a marker of coming from the non-elite classesfounded the BBB that year in cooperation with a marketing agency for the agricultural industry. Van der Plas was the partys sole elected official at the start of this week, having won a seat in Parliament in the 2021 general election. The party has presented itself as the voice of the forgotten man, as one does, in particular if that man (or woman) resides outside the Amsterdam-Rotterdam-The Hague-Utrecht megapolis known as the Randstad.

The partys signature policy issue is opposition to planned curbs on nitrogen emissions. This may sound like a niche issue, but last summer was marked by widespread farmer protests against the restrictions that could count on the sympathy of significant numbers of voters, especially outside the Randstad. The urban-rural cleavage is easily visible in Wednesdays election results. For example, the BBB finished in eighth position in the city of Utrecht, in the urban core, with 5.2 percent of the vote, while still winning the province. In contrast, the largely rural province of Overijssel gave it 31.3 percent of the vote, almost four times the vote share of its closest competitor. To be clear, there are significant numbers of voters who care passionately about environmental policy on the other side of the issue as well. While the GreenLeft and the Party for the Animals may have secured only 11.1 percent of the vote in Overijssel, they were the options selected by 31 percent of voters in Utrecht.

While most of the attention will go to the newcomers dramatic victory, the results have important implications for long-standing Prime Minister Mark Rutte, in office since 2010, and his centrist government as well. His coalition consists of the prime ministers center-right Peoples Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), the once-almighty Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA), the social liberals of Democrats 66 (D66), and the do-gooder Protestants of the increasingly diverse Christian Union.

The new composition of the Senate may complicate the governments ability to secure majorities for its legislative initiatives there, especially in areas like immigration and environmental policy. At the same time, ironically, it solidifies Ruttes indispensable position at the heart of Dutch politics. It is harder than ever to see how anyone but him will be able to cobble together a majority in Parliament, the dominant lower chamber of the States General, in the foreseeable future. From todays vantage point, the longest-serving prime minister in Dutch history looks like he could remain prime minister for another decade if he chooses to. After all, at only 56 years old he would be one of the younger U.S. senators.

Wednesdays results were a shock to the political system, but not a surprise. BBB had been polling well and van der Plas is omnipresent in the Dutch media. At the same time, the most prominent representative of the previous (and third, since the turn of the century) wave of populism on the Dutch right imploded after its 2019 victories. Opposition to an association agreement between the European Union and Ukraine brought Thierry Baudet and his Forum for Democracy (FvD) party into the limelight in the marquee national conservative year of 2016 and eventual big wins in 2019 in both provincial and Senate elections.

Since 2019, the FvD has experienced constant turmoil triggered by Baudets stances on vaccines (opposed) and Putin (not so much), and by widespread antisemitism and white nationalism within the party. In just three years, 11 of its 12 senators, as well as almost half of its MPs and all of its elected MEPs, have left the FvD, leaving space for new entrants on the right. The Farmer-Citizen Movement has filled much of that space for now, and then seats, representing the most heavily online denizens of the alt-right, with obsessions not that different from their Anglo-Saxon counterparts. The earlier second wave of Dutch right-wing populism, driven by anti-immigrant and anti-Islam sentiment, has not gone away, either: Geert Wilderss Party for Freedom (PVV) held on to four seats in the Senate this week, speaking for voters whose personality is that they dislike Muslims.

And even the first wave retains a presence: An FvD spinoff called JA-21 will occupy three Senate seats. Its leader in Parliament was first elected in 2002 on the List Pim Fortuyn ticket, shortly after Pim Fortuyn himself was assassinated by an animal rights activist. The List Pim Fortuyn was similar in some ways to the BBB, playing off general discontent with the functioning of the public sector without alienating the center-right entirely, though it lacked the BBBs rural orientation. JA-21 is perhaps best characterized as a party for folks who enjoy all the right-wing populist stuff, but only if served with a side of respectability politics. All these different niche flavors of right-wing populism add up, and these three parties combined will occupy nine seats in the new Dutch Senate. Add in the BBB and you are at 25, a third of the total, all to the governments right.

The governing coalition has been reduced to 22 Senate seats. All but three of the remaining senators are to the coalitions left. To pass legislation, the government will need to be able to count on the support of at least 16 senators in addition to their own. That is not necessarily a problemin his 13 years as prime minister, Rutte has had a Senate majority for just two years. There are two natural paths for passing legislation in the new Senate. One is to convince the Labour Party and the GreenLeft, who will caucus together, plus one additional senator from the number of parties present under the Dutch system of proportional representation. The other one is to appeal to BBB. How much use will be made of the latter route remains to be seen and will depend on the new partys internal stability and whether it manages or even strives to become a serious governing partner. The BBB route will be difficult if not impossible in key areas such as environmental policy or immigration.

Regardless, the results represent a further narrowing down of the broad center that has long dominated Dutch politics and a rightward drift. And that is what really drives Ruttes strong, in fact strengthened, position. With the CDA decimated and D66 (let Labour, the GreenLeft, the Party for the Animals, the left-neoliberals of Volt or the anti-racists of Bij1) unwilling to govern with parties to the VVDs right, there is no future coalition in sight that gets anywhere near a majority in Parliament without Rutte and the VVD. (Unless Rutte becomes secretary-general of NATO, in which case all bets are off.)

Now, to be fair, Rutte does not have an immense amount of choice in the matter, either. If this weeks results or something close to them were to materialize in the next general election, he would have to cobble together a coalition of six or so parties, and beggars cant be choosers.

None of this is particularly helpful either for those looking for electoral competition or political accountability. Ruttes previous government fell over a scandal at the tax agency involving the relentless hounding, partially on ethnic grounds, of low-income families that in many cases were permanently torn apart. With no alternative in sight, the same prime minister, leading the same coalition, was back in the saddle soon enough.

Earlier this week on a podcast about that sleeping giant of Dutch soccer, NAC Breda, one of the hosts insulted the players, was reprimanded by his co-host, and immediately apologized. Just like Rutte, was the response. As a friend joked on Election Day: The only thing Rutte hasnt apologized for is his apology for the Dutch role in the slave trade.

That does not change the fact that this seeming inevitability is convenient to the Netherlands allies and partners overseas. Just as it is hard to see an alternative to Rutte, it is difficult to imagine a move away from the current strong Dutch support for strengthening the EU, for preserving the transatlantic alliance, for arming and supporting Ukraine, for LGBT rights, for the climate transition, and for international law (such as it is). The waves of populism continue to lap at the shores, but the coastline remains the same.

Original post:
Dutch Elections Produce Another Popular Wave But the Same Prime ... - Foreign Policy

The images appeared on Twitter in late 2016 just as the presidential campaign was entering its final stretch. Some featured the message vote for Hillaryand thephrases avoid the line and vote from home.

Aimed at Democratic voters, and sometimes singling out Black people, the messages were actually intended to help Donald J. Trump, not Hillary Clinton. The goal, federal prosecutors said, was to suppress votes for Mrs.Clinton by persuading her supporters to falsely believe they could cast presidential ballots by text message.

The misinformation campaign was carried out by a group of conspirators, prosecutors said, including a man in his 20s who called himself Ricky Vaughn. On Monday he went on trial in Federal District Court in Brooklyn under his real name, Douglass Mackey, after being charged with conspiring to spread misinformation designed to deprive others of their right to vote.

The defendant, Douglass Mackey, tried to steal peoples right to vote, a prosecutor, Turner Buford, told jurors Monday morning during his opening statement. He did it by spreading a fraud.

A few minutes later, a defense lawyer, Andrew J. Frisch, said that Mr. Mackey, a staunch political conservative, would testify in his own defense. Mr. Frisch added that his client had been trying only to attract attention to himself by posting memes, not carry out a clandestine conspiracy.

Mr. Mackey did not share these memes as some sort of grand plan, he said, adding that it was not a crime to vigorously support your candidate of choice.

Prosecutors have said that Mr. Mackey, who went to Middlebury College in Vermont and said helived on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, used hashtags and memes as part of his deception and outlined his strategies publicly on Twitter and with co-conspirators in private Twitter group chats.

Obviously we can win Pennsylvania, Mr. Mackey said on Twitter, using one of his pseudonymous accounts less than a week before the election, according to a complaint and affidavit. The key is to drive up turnout with non-college whites, and limit black turnout.

That tweet, court papers said, came a day after Mr. Mackey tweeted an image showing a Black woman in front of a sign supporting Mrs. Clinton. That tweet told viewers they could vote for Mrs. Clinton by text message.

Prosecutors said nearly 5,000 people texted the number shown in the deceptive images, adding that the images stated they had been paid for by the Clinton campaign and had been viewed by people in the New York City area.

On the trials first day of testimony, prosecutors presented several witnesses.

One, Jess Morales Rocketto, said she was working for the Clinton campaign when the deceptive images urging viewers to vote by text began circulating in late 2016. She testified that those images had used a hashtag from the campaign as well as a logo that closely resembled the campaigns own logo.

Its a very sneaky graphic, she said. Its definitely designed to look very close to a legitimate ad.

Mr. Mackeys trial is expected to provide a window into a small part of what the authorities have described as broad efforts to sway the 2016 election through lies and disinformation. While some of those attempts were orchestrated by Russian security services, others were said to have emanated from American internet trolls.

People whose names may surface during the trial or who are expected to testify include a man who tweeted about Jews and Black people and was then disinvited from the DeploraBall, a far-right event in Washington, D.C., the night before Mr. Trumps inauguration and an obscure federal cooperator who will be allowed to testify under a code name.

As the trial has approached, people sympathetic to Mr. Mackey have cast his case as part of a political and cultural war, a depiction driven in part by precisely the sort of partisan social media-fueled effort that he is accused of engineering.

Mr. Mackeys fans have portrayed him as a harmless prankster who is being treated unfairly by the state for engaging in a form of free expression. That notion, perhaps predictably, has proliferated on Twitter, advanced by people using some of the same tools that prosecutors said Mr. Mackey used to disseminate lies. Mackey supporters have referred to him on social media as a meme martyr and spread a meme showing him wearing a red MAGA hat and accompanied by the hashtag #FreeRicky.

Some tweets about Mr. Mackey from prominent figures have included apocalyptic-sounding language. The Fox personality Tucker Carlson posted a video of himself on Twitter calling the trial the single greatest assault on free speech and human rights in this countrys modern history.

Joe Lonsdale, a founder of Palantir Technologies, retweeted an assertion that Mr. Mackey was being persecuted by the Biden DOJ for posting memes and added: This sounds concerning. Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of Twitter, replied with a one word affirmation: Yeah.

Mr. Mackey is accused of participating in private direct message groups on Twitter called Fed Free Hatechat, War Room and Infowars Madman to discuss how to influence the election.

Prosecutors said people in those groups discussed sharing memes suggesting that celebrities were supporting Mr. Trump and that Mrs. Clinton would start wars and draft women to fight them.

One exchange in the Madman group centered on an image that falsely told opponents of Brexit that they could vote remain in that British referendum through Facebook or Twitter, according to investigators. One participant in the group asked whether they could make something similar for Mrs. Clinton, investigators wrote, adding that another replied: Typical that all the dopey minorities fell for it.

Last summer, defense lawyers asked that Mr. Mackeys case be dismissed, referring to Twitter as a no-holds-barred-free-for-all and saying the allegedlydeceptive memes had been protected by the First Amendmentas satirical speech.

They wrote to the court that it was highly unlikely that the memes had fooled any voters and added that any harm was in any event far outweighed by the chilling of the marketplace of ideas where consumers can assess the value of political expression as provocation, satire, commentary, or otherwise.

Prosecutors countered that illegal conduct is not protected by the First Amendment merely because it is carried out by language and added that the charge against Mr. Mackey was not based on his political viewpoint or advocacy. Rather, they wrote, it was focused on intentional spreading of false information calculated to mislead and misinform voters about how, where and when to cast a vote in a federal election.

Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis ruled that the case should continue, saying it was about conspiracy and injury, not speech and adding that Mr. Mackeys contention that his speech was protected as satire was a question of fact reserved for the jury.

The prosecutions star witness is likely to be a man known as Microchip, a shadowy online figure who spread misinformation about the 2016 election, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Microchip was a prominent player in alt-right Twitter around the time of the election, and Judge Garaufis allowed him to testify under his online handle in part because prosecutors say he is helping the F.B.I. with several other covert investigations. Sunday, the case was reassigned to U.S. District Judge Ann M. Donnelly.

In court papers filed last month, prosecutors said they intended to ask the witness to explain to the jury how Mr. Mackey and his allies used Twitter direct messaging groups to come up with deceptive images discussing the time, place, and manner of voting.

One of the people whom Microchip might mention from the stand is Anthime Gionet, better known by his Twitter name, Baked Alaska; he attended the violent Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., in August 2017. He was barred from the DeploraBall after sending a tweet that included stereotypes about Jews and Black people.

In January, Mr. Gionet was sentenced to two months in prison for his role in storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

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Trial of 2016 Twitter Troll to Test Limits of Online Speech - The New York Times

Some people just love, love, love being conned.

I hear from them all the time, folks who swallow the most preposterous nonsense and yet remain convinced that they are worldly sages, the only ones who see whats really going on.

A recent example came from a correspondent who lives in Kokomo. He wrote in response to something Id written about former Vice President Mike Pences break with former President Donald Trump.

The correspondent offered two predictions in his latest missive.

The first was that Trump would be elected president again in 2024. The second was that President Joe Biden would be imprisoned for unspecified crimes.

These were but the latest in a series of predictions the email writer has offered all of them spawned by the hallucinatory atmosphere of the alt-right media biosphere. Dark fantasies spring up in that strange soil faster than weeds in an untended garden.

This same guy has predicted at different times that former President Barack Obama and former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also would serve prison time, that Trump would lead Republicans to surging triumphs in 2018, 2020 and 2022, that Trump would be re-elected, that COVID would be nothing but a blip .

You get the idea.

There is no fact related to Donald Trump or the political scene these days to which this guy does not seem to have a natural immunity.

Hes typical in that way of a lot of my correspondents. They all see the world through Trump-filtered glasses, all the while accusing the rest of us of being myopic.

The reason Im focusing on him is that in all other ways he seems to be an intelligent and accomplished man. He has held positions of responsibility in his community and seems to command respect there.

Yet, when it comes to Donald Trump, his senses seem to flee him.

If the former president offered to sell him oceanfront property in Nebraska, this guy would slap his money down, set up his beach chair somewhere just west of Omaha and wait for the tide to roll in.

And, when the waves refused to lap at his toes, this same guy would buy without question or qualm Trumps explanation that someone a Democrat or a RINO (Republican in name only) had stolen the Pacific Ocean from them.

Because the fact that someone had pocketed a body of water that covers 30% of the earths surface is so much easier to believe than accepting the idea that a guy who has a well-documented history of lying might have misled him is.

In fact, its just as easy to swallow that as it is to buy the notion that someone could engineer a massive conspiracy to deny Trump the 2020 presidential election and yet somehow leave every other election in every other state untouched.

This is what puzzles me.

This guy and many others like him clearly arent dumb. They seem capable of exercising discernment and judgement in all other areas of their lives.

But they cannot process evidence when it comes to Donald Trump.

Do they not notice when things they have been promised assured, over and over again would happen do not occur?

Do they not realize, for example, that, even when Trumps party controlled the presidency, Congress and the courts, the former president still couldnt find grounds to bring charges against Obama and Clinton?

Or that, if Trump had anything on Biden, the former president wouldnt have needed to extort such dirt from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy?

This blindness goes beyond partisanship.

Partisanship can prompt a rational person to argue that Bidens inflation-reduction program is or isnt working, depending upon his or her political leanings.

It cannot persuade anyone rational, though, to contend that inflation doesnt exist. Partisanship does not provide adequate explanation or justification for denying plain facts.

But that is what Trump lovers do again and again and again.

They are so enraptured by the former presidents fantasy construct of effortless omnipotence and endless victimhood that they eat it all up, then ask for seconds and thirds. They love the taste so much they dont even notice the contradiction that someone so powerful shouldnt be so easily victimized.

Why are they so blind?

Because they want to believe they could have bought the ocean for a song if only someone hadnt taken it from them.

Some people just love, love, love being conned.

Original post:
John Krull: Waiting for the waves in Nebraska - Kokomo Tribune