luka

Well-known member
"an informal alliance of left-wing activists and business titans"

:ROFLMAO:

Muu-uum!!! The communists and the capitalists are ganging up on me again!
this is very twitter style and tone @shiels you should analyse this. the mocking laughter emoji. i don't know what Muu-umm!!! means but it's very twitter.
 

luka

Well-known member
a lot of twitter is given over to this sort of thing. rigidly partisan. basically just throwing bananas and jeering at the other side.
 

luka

Well-known member
writing as though all you really want to do is either make someone cry or send them into a uncontrolled tailspin of rage
 

luka

Well-known member
this is a great bit

"it’s massively important for the country to understand that it didn’t happen accidentally. The system didn’t work magically. Democracy is not self-executing.”


That’s why the participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream–a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information. They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it. And they believe the public needs to understand the system’s fragility in order to ensure that democracy in America endures.
 

luka

Well-known member
"Protecting the election would require an effort of unprecedented scale. As 2020 progressed, it stretched to Congress, Silicon Valley and the nation’s statehouses. It drew energy from the summer’s racial-justice protests, many of whose leaders were a key part of the liberal alliance. And eventually it reached across the aisle, into the world of Trump-skeptical Republicans appalled by his attacks on democracy."
 

luka

Well-known member
it's interesting in that it's obvious that the battles are fought and won online and the rules of engagement are evolving and are themselves being fought over

"In November 2019, Mark Zuckerberg invited nine civil rights leaders to dinner at his home, where they warned him about the danger of the election-related falsehoods that were already spreading unchecked. “It took pushing, urging, conversations, brainstorming, all of that to get to a place where we ended up with more rigorous rules and enforcement,” says Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, who attended the dinner and also met with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and others. (Gupta has been nominated for Associate Attorney General by President Biden.) “It was a struggle, but we got to the point where they understood the problem. Was it enough? Probably not. Was it later than we wanted? Yes. But it was really important, given the level of official disinformation, that they had those rules in place and were tagging things and taking them down.”
 

luka

Well-known member
it's really good at giving an insight into how elections are fought and won in the internet age. what 'democracy' actually consists of.
 

luka

Well-known member
“We wanted to be mindful of when was the right time to call for moving masses of people into the street,” Peoples says. As much as they were eager to mount a show of strength, mobilizing immediately could backfire and put people at risk. Protests that devolved into violent clashes would give Trump a pretext to send in federal agents or troops as he had over the summer. And rather than elevate Trump’s complaints by continuing to fight him, the alliance wanted to send the message that the people had spoken.


So the word went out: stand down. Protect the Results announced that it would “not be activating the entire national mobilization network today, but remains ready to activate if necessary.”
 

luka

Well-known member
this is brilliant too as an example of how the media works

If Trump were to offer something in exchange for a personal favor, that would likely constitute bribery, Bassin reasoned. He phoned Richard Primus, a law professor at the University of Michigan, to see if Primus agreed and would make the argument publicly. Primus said he thought the meeting itself was inappropriate, and got to work on an op-ed for Politico warning that the state attorney general–a Democrat–would have no choice but to investigate. When the piece posted on Nov. 19, the attorney general’s communications director tweeted it. Protect Democracy soon got word that the lawmakers planned to bring lawyers to the meeting with Trump the next day.
 

luka

Well-known member
There was one last milestone on Podhorzer’s mind: Jan. 6. On the day Congress would meet to tally the electoral count, Trump summoned his supporters to D.C. for a rally.


Much to their surprise, the thousands who answered his call were met by virtually no counterdemonstrators. To preserve safety and ensure they couldn’t be blamed for any mayhem, the activist left was “strenuously discouraging counter activity,” Podhorzer texted me the morning of Jan. 6, with a crossed-fingers emoji.
 

luka

Well-known member
in one sense its just a glimpse at how elections are fought and won but its telling that any time anyone gets that glimpse, whether its here or with Brexit, they dont get a warm glow of reassurance they think wtf this is nothing like democracy this is the wild west
 

luka

Well-known member
one of the other things it does is that it makes those claims about Biden controlling a BLM street army sound a lot less comical.
 
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