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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Deep Fakes [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-01-30
We begin today with Paul Blumenthal of HuffPost and his revelation of a confidential OMB document showing the Trump Administration’s plan to provoke court challenges over the now-rescinded funding freeze.
The confidential Office of Management and Budget document outlining “regulatory misalignment” calls on Trump to issue executive orders blocking the release of appropriated funds in order to provoke a court challenge over the president’s power to impound such funds. “Use executive orders to impound funds exceeding legislative intent or conflicting with constitutional duties, citing national security, fiscal waste, or statutory ambiguities,” the document states. “Seek legal precedent to affirm the President’s Article II powers under the Take Care Clause and Executive Vesting Clause.” That is what is playing out with the now-rescinded OMB memo freezing federal grants, loans and financial assistance across the federal government. [...] This confusing series of events and conflicting statements and actions may be a fiasco, but the confidential OMB document makes clear that the administration intends on fomenting this very court challenge over the president’s power to not spend congressionally authorized funds.
Charles Blow of The New York Times thinks that now is the time for liberals to get reengaged with opposition and activism to Trump’s executive actions.
..Trump’s pace of dictatorial executive actions probably can’t be sustained. At some point things will slow down, and in the lull the damage will be assessed. Terror and destruction produce evidence, and his actions against immigrants and transgender individuals, among others, will eventually manifest as cruelty meant to inflict suffering. Then, I suspect, outrage will bubble and build as more citizens’ moral opposition to Trump’s methods gains clarity and purpose. People, especially young people, are simply not built to passively absorb oppression. At some point they inevitably react and resist. [...] We don’t know exactly how that resistance will be expressed, especially at this moment in which many Americans are still engaged in a “You touched the stove and now you’re learning what a burn is” kind of self-righteousness, as some members of demographic groups that shifted toward Trump reap the devastating dividends of their choices. [...] For those who weren’t, who voted against him and tried to get others to do the same, the sting and disappointment is palpable. And this can express itself as a lack of sympathy for those who voted for Trump and now regret it — an inclination to disengage politically, with a side of schadenfreude.
Charles is a more mature man than I am.
My impeccable intelligence source tells me that even now, my nephew has a Tammy Wynette-like loyalty to his choice for president.
But if you love him you'll forgive him/Even though he's hard to understand/And if you love him, oh be proud of him/'Cause after all he's just a man.
You tell ‘em nephew...that’s right!
My other Trump-voting relative (who works in a helping profession) is very much giving Trump the Mariah Carey treatment.
My impeccable source is unconvinced and unimpressed.
Isabella Cueto of STATnews covered the committee hearings to confirm Trump’s choice to head HHS, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Among the comments he was pressed on were those he had made about vaccines, including the debunked claim that they can cause autism — an idea RFK Jr. has persistently spread over many years, even as recently as 2021, according to private emails obtained by STAT. In multiple exchanges, members of the Senate Finance Committee mentioned a deadly outbreak of measles that occurred in Samoa shortly after Kennedy visited and that he has been blamed for fueling. RFK Jr. insisted he supports vaccines, that his previous comments had been taken out of context, and that he had nothing to do with the Samoa outbreak. “I support the measles vaccine, I support the polio vaccine. I will do nothing as HHS secretary that makes it difficult or discourages” people from receiving the vaccines, he said. Twice during Kennedy’s rebuttals, hecklers in the room stood up and shouted, once yelling, “You lie!” before being quickly escorted out. [...] Kennedy’s long-standing relationship with Children’s Health Defense, the vaccine-challenging nonprofit he helped found, also came under scrutiny during Wednesday’s hearing. Kennedy led the group until he launched his presidential campaign in 2023. Through the years, the organization has helped bolster and spread his critiques of vaccines. (Mary Holland, CEO of Children’s Health Defense, was in the room for Kennedy’s hearing, and greeted his relatives and allies during a break.) In perhaps the hearing’s most memorable exchange, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) displayed a posterboard with images of CHD merchandise — two baby onesies emblazoned with the slogans, “Unvaxxed Unafraid” and “No vax. No problem,” respectively. Sanders then asked Kennedy if he would pull the products off the market. “Are you supportive of these onesies?” Sanders repeated several times in the contentious exchange. RFK Jr. responded that he had no power over CHD’s products, and that he is “supportive of vaccines.”
Danielle Allen writes for The Washington Post refugee camp The Atlantic about all of the problems with the $TRUMP.
Americans have been yielding sovereignty to tech magnates and their money for years. The milestones are sometimes startling, even if one has long been aware of where things are heading. I was astonished and alarmed when I learned, in the summer of 2023, that Elon Musk had, within a span of five years, built an orbital network comprising more than half of the world’s active satellites. His share has now risen to more than 60 percent. Already in 2023, he controlled battlefield communications infrastructure used in the war between Ukraine and Russia. Musk is currently the head of Donald Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency, known as DOGE, which is taking over the U.S. Digital Service. At the same time, he may be making a bid for TikTok’s American platform. Ownership of TikTok brings immense power. In December, the Romanian elections were canceled in the middle of voting because of fears that propaganda from Russia, by means of TikTok, was driving the election results. [...] Last week, the DOGE homepage displayed the icon for Dogecoin, which Musk has declared to be his favorite coin, and which he holds. (He has faced litigation as a result of accusations that he sought to pump it up; the lawsuit was dismissed.) The icon appeared in vibrant color against a black background. It was removed within 24 hours. [...] What speculative futures are now possible? The president could easily organize a one-token, one-vote referendum—as many coins and decentralized autonomous organizations, which are built out of blockchain communities, already do—among asset holders on major U.S. public-policy issues. Think of it as a corporation giving shareholders their one vote per share. Yes, a corporation has to please its customers—in this analogy, American voters—but it really needs to please the shareholders who help sustain the share price. If $TRUMP were to introduce a voting mechanism for asset holders in this way, it would immediately implement the long-held anarcho-capitalist dream of converting global governance regimes into for-profit joint-stock corporations—minus any Securities and Exchange Commission disclosure requirements, which the president has hinted about relaxing. If other leaders do what Trump has done, then we would see global governance structures generally privatized—and political leaders provided with great incentives to collude with the common interest of capital holders, rather than governing for a true cross-class common good.
An investigation by Bellingcat’s Financial Investigations team reveals that cryptocurrencies and tech companies appear to be the ones behind a series of deep fake porn sites.
The MrDeepFakes website contains no information about who is behind the operation, and its administrators appear to have gone to great lengths to keep their identities secret. Since its inception, the site’s hosting providers have bounced around the globe. Its financial operations also point to a calculated effort to obscure ownership. Premium memberships can be bought with cryptocurrency via a system that uses a new address for each transaction, making it virtually impossible to track the beneficial owners. Transactions through PayPal, intermittently available on the site, link to numerous accounts under unverifiable names. While it has not yet been possible to uncover who is behind MrDeepfakes, the website reveals some clues about two independent apps that have been prominently advertised on the site. One leads back to a Chinese fintech firm that conducts business globally and is traded on the Hong Kong stock exchange. The other is owned by a Maltese company led by the co-founder of a major Australian pet-sitting platform.
Dara Kerr of the Guardian reports about Meta’s settlement with the tacky shoe salesman for suspending his Facebook accounts after the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
The majority of the settlement, $22m, will go toward a fund to pay for Trump’s presidential library, according to the Wall Street Journal. The remainder will pay for legal fees and go to other plaintiffs listed in the case. The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Trump’s lawsuit against Facebook, which is now under parent company Meta , was one of several he brought against social media companies in the wake of January 6. He also sued YouTube, Twitter (now renamed X) and those companies’ executives. A federal judge dismissed the suit against Twitter. The Google suit was closed in 2023, but has the option to be reopened. Shortly after the insurrection at the Capitol, Facebook suspended Trump’s accounts. At the time, the president was using the platform to spread false claims around election fraud and to repeatedly say he won the 2020 election. Facebook broke with its hands-off approach for political leaders and updated its rules to allow for suspensions of lawmakers to be used in “exceptional cases” during periods of civil unrest and violence. Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook CEO, said the company came to the decision because, “we believe the risks of allowing the President to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great.”
Dominik Stecula, Kristin Lunz Trujillo, Matt Motta write for The Conversation about some of the reasons why Americans have a particular disdains for scientific expertise.
Why, then, is disdain for scientific experts appealing to so many Americans? Much of the public supports this worldview because of perceived ineffectiveness and moral wrongs made by the elites. Factors such as the opioid crisis encouraged by predatory pharmaceutical companies, public confusion and dissatisfaction with changing health guidance in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the frequently prohibitive cost of health care and medicine have given some Americans reason to question their trust in science and medicine. Populists have embraced popular and science-backed policies that align with an anti-elite stance. Kennedy, for example, supports decreasing the amount of ultra-processed foods in public school lunches and reducing toxic chemicals in the food supply and natural environment. These stances are backed by scientific evidence about how to improve public health. At the same time, they point to the harmful actions of a perceived corrupt elite – the profit-driven food industry. It is, of course, reasonable to want to hold accountable both public officials for their policy decisions and scientists and pharmaceutical companies who engage in unethical behavior. Scientists should by no means be immune from scrutiny.
Finally today, a seven-reporter team writing for Der Spiegel details all the attempts to mis-inform the German public in advance of February’s parliamentary snap elections.
The internet is currently full of countless...manipulations, all with a single goal: to trigger chaos and uncertainty ahead of German elections in an effort to strengthen the political fringes. There have likely never before been so many and such extensive external attempts to influence a German parliamentary election. Previous elections, to be sure, have also seen their fair share of fake, Russian-controlled social media accounts spreading lies and half-truths. Since then, though, technology has become far more sophisticated. Artificial intelligence tools are making it easier and easier to produce fake videos and put false words into the mouths of politicians. Lies have found their way into the German campaign. How deep will the poison seep in? The attacks aren’t just coming from the east, but also from the west, from the U.S., the erstwhile beacon of freedom and democracy. Elon Musk, the wealthiest man in the world and the owner of both X and Tesla, a man who has developed an almost manic interest in German politics of late, has become a new heavyweight distributor of disinformation. He recently livestreamed a bizarre discussion on X with Alice Weidel, the head of the radical right-wing party Alternative for Germany (AfD) and has repeatedly encouraged voters to back extremist parties. He has also used X to disseminate conspiracy theories designed to boost the fortunes of right-wing populist and right-wing extremist parties around the world. He has never been as politically active as he is now, providing his assistance to the authoritarian-minded to gain more reach and attention. In Germany as well.
I’m out!
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