Category: Politics

Who would want to cripple a government cybersecurity org? 🤔

This is obviously not suspicious in any way….

The Cyber Safety Review Board — a Department of Homeland Security investigatory body stood up under a Biden-era cybersecurity executive order to probe major cybersecurity incidents — has been cleared of non-government members as part of a DHS-wide push to cut costs under the Trump administration, according to three people familiar with the matter.

And what was the CSRB looking into?

The terminations will likely delay an ongoing CSRB investigation into the Salt Typhoon hacks, which involved a wide-ranging Chinese infiltration into a number of telecom providers in the U.S. and around the world. The hackers also targeted the communications of a number of high-profile political individuals, including people tied to President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance. 

Yup. Not suspicious at all. Pass the popcorn.

Echos of the 1930s

This is how normalization works.

People are quickly discovering what they once professed to find unacceptable might not be so bad. And it will be felt as a relief. No longer will they have to echo bien-pensant hypocrisies, they can engage in frank, honest assertions of their self-interest.

And:

“Plutot Trump que le Wokisme” seems to be the slogan of the center-right that once whinged about the Constitution and our sacred norms.

From https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/welcome-to-vichy-america . Read the whole thing.

How not to behave as a Democrat

My Congressional rep, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D), attended today’s Inauguration and posted happy selfies on her FB page. I would have understood if she had turned up wearing dark colored clothing, with a black arm band to mark the mourning for President Carter, and spoken of our debt to Martin Luther King for whom today is a national holiday. If she had approached it as a civic duty on behalf of her constituents, but one undertaken with regret.

But she didn’t.

#primary2026

“Mob” thinking among the oligarchs

This:

“The rich rabble is marked by the ‘corruptness’ which manifests in the fact that the rabble ‘takes everything for granted for itself’ because he denies the right to any of the ethical, legal, or statist institutions…[it assumes] an economically determined state of nature, in which it can also assume the economic right of the fittest.” It also believes in conspiracy, because it experiences itself politically as a conspirator, as part of a self-interested group only working for its own ends.

(Frank Ruda, quoted by John Ganz. )

Thoughts on personal social media strategy

Quite a few of my friends have been posting about their uncertainty about if and how to use social media going forward. Musk rendered X/Twitter toxic, and now Zuckerberg is capitulating to MAGA and abandoning moderation on Facebook. I posted the following as a comment on one of these threads, and decided to repeat it here:

I think the best approach is going to be dual-track: Bluesky plus personal blog. Longer form content on the blog, ephemeral interactions (plus notifications of blog updates) on Bluesky. (Or whatever supersedes Bluesky.) This is what folks like Scalzi and Emptywheel are doing.

What FB and Twitter have taught us is that relying on a single platform is risky/unwise/disappointing. Migrating old content is awful, but do you really want to lose your history? And setting up and running a WordPress instance is operationally trivial and pretty affordable.

Right now, I have four daily feed sources. (Too many, but 🤷?)
– Email, for all of the newsletters (including many Substack sources).
– Feedly, for all of the blogs and news sources that provide RSS feeds.
– Facebook, for family and friends.
– Bluesky, for ephemeral stuff.

Maybe it was the propaganda, not the campaign

I’ve always been careful to play by the rules on Facebook. I’ve avoided posting the kind of content which has led some of my friends to have posts taken down or spend time in “FB jail”. However, over the last couple of months (yes, during the election season), I had several of my FB posts deleted for violating “guidelines“, for “trying to get likes“. The common element in all of these was that I posted a link to a piece in a mainstream media channel, with a short introduction on the subject and why I thought it mattered. (I never post bare links.) Well, we now know that this was a deliberate policy change by Meta to “depoliticize” FB. Of course, channels like X didn’t do anything of the kind (quite the reverse), and so the effect was to shift the overall sharing of content rightwards.

I’m also posting this on FB, and to avoid that FB policy I’ll use a comment to share the link to the Emptywheel piece that includes hard numbers to back up this claim. I’ll also link to this blog piece from Bluesky.

As Marcy points out, “If I’m right about that dynamic — that politics worked but propaganda worked far better — then it means much of the post-election soul-searching is misplaced (and, indeed, a dangerous misallocation of focus). That’s because Harris lost, in part, because of media disfunction, because electoral choice became dissociated from political persuasion more than any recent US election, largely due to an assault on the press and rational thought.”

Actions speak louder than words

It occurs to me that the political consequences of the failure of the Washington Post and LA Times to endorse Harris have been much more significant, and immediately positive, than their endorsements would have been. This is almost certainly unintentional, but let’s run with it.

If the papers had published their endorsements, it would have had almost no impact. It would have been predictable, unremarkable, and instantly forgettable. Instead, we have a dramatic and effective demonstration of the reality of the central message of the Harris campaign: that Trump is a fascist whose disrespect for the rule of law causes even oligarchs to bend the knee, and this event is reverberating widely. Actions speak louder than words: Bezos signaling that he is scared of Trump is much more potent than yet another politician using the “F” word.

From NYmag:

When Donald Trump first ran for president, he began to threaten that Amazon and Jeff Bezos would pay the price. “If I become president — oh, do they have problems. They’re going to have such problems,” he warned. Trump’s grievance with Amazon was centered on Bezos’s ownership of the Washington Post, a connection the president did nothing to disguise. […]

In 2019, Trump found his lever. Amazon was due to receive a $10 billion cloud-computing contract from the Pentagon. The Pentagon suddenly shifted course and denied Amazon the contract. A former speechwriter for Defense Secretary James Mattis reported that Trump had directed Mattis to “screw Amazon.”

This is the context in which the Post’s decision to spike its planned endorsement of Kamala Harris should be considered.

The timelessness of privileged anxiety

Facebook’s current outage is a great impetus to do more with my blog….

There’s a great little piece in today’s Sift that is worth highlighting:

Conservative rhetoric seems to be timeless. I ran across this quote in the book Freedom: an unruly history by Annelien de Dijn (which I will say more about after I finish it). Cato the Elder, speaking in 195 BC in favor of an anti-luxury law that the women of Rome wanted to see repealed (because it specially targeted women’s jewelry), warned against allowing women to have a voice in government:

The moment they begin to be your equals, they will be your superiors.

We still hear that point today from every overprivileged class, directed at every underprivileged class. Whether the subject is women, people of color, non-Christians, gays and lesbians, non-English speakers, transfolk, or what have you, the message is the same: There’s no such thing as equality. So if men, Whites, Christians et al. stop being the masters, they’ll become the slaves.

In spite of Cato’s efforts, the Lex Oppia was repealed. But Rome never did become a matriarchy. In more than two thousand years of testing, Cato’s they’ll-take-over theory has never proved out. And yet we still hear it.