Wednesday, October 23, 2024

Unleash the Power of Persuasion


One of the perennial leftist media columns is about how to talk to your knuckle-dragging MAGA uncle at Thanksgiving, which is weird since leftists hate Thanksgiving because it celebrates American power, plenty, and prosperity while implying the existence of a God that is not the government, but that’s another thing. They are very into having college sophomores back home from the University of College attempt to educate people who haven’t had the benefit of just completing a little more than a year of undergraduate work and who, instead, have to rely on decades of life experience to form their views. But the left is right about one thing. You need to go out and help friends, neighbors, and family come to the right conclusion on Election Day.

The right conclusion is to vote for Donald Trump and JD Vance and every Republican on the ballot.

Let me give you a little legal insight as a special Townhall VIP bonus. I convince people of things for a living. That’s what trial lawyers do. Sometimes, it’s a judge, but often, it’s a jury, and they don’t know me at all before I step up to the podium. Actually, I don’t usually use the podium. I typically pace in front of the jury box like a caged tiger unless the judge tells me to use the podium, in which case I use the podium.

So, how do I convince a bunch of people who don’t know me, who probably don’t like me because I’m a lawyer, and who probably don’t want to be sitting in a courtroom but are doing it anyway because they are patriotic and believe jury duty is something a citizen does?

I treat them as what they usually are: well-meaning human beings who come in with their own life experiences and prejudices. They generally want to get it right, and most of the normal people you will encounter in your life generally want to get it right when it comes to voting. Despite our institutions’ myriad failures and the disastrous governance we’ve experienced over recent decades, most Americans still want the best for this country and try to vote wisely. This advice on persuasion is directed towards convincing them.

It is not directed towards convincing lunatic Democrat partisans, who are too stupid or obnoxious or evil, or some combination of the three, to be swayed by reason and facts. You are not going to convince an MSNBC addict of anything. Now, that person may or may not someday convince herself – a lot of them are women – but you won’t convince them. They already have a pre-existing prejudice against you. They think you’re a fascist monster dedicated to forcing women to give birth to the babies of criminals while also wanting those criminals not to go to jail. These are not rational people. These are not good people. These are bad people with stupid ideas, and you are wasting your breath trying to convince them of anything. Again, some of them may convince themselves to emerge from their dark cloud of communist idiocy, but they will only do that on their own. When they come to you, questioning their faith in Marxist trash, be gentle and polite and allow them to work through the issues. You won’t make them into true believers; the must do it themselves. Just welcome them when they have completed their journey.

But people with an open mind are possible recruits to patriotism, freedom, and Americanism. The first thing you need to understand when you’re trying to persuade somebody to think the way you think is that you can’t directly tell them what to think as if they are some sort of idiot because they don’t see things exactly your way. I can’t walk up to a jury and say something to the effect of, “Only a drooling moron wouldn’t understand that the defendant is liable in this case!” The person you’re talking to will stop thinking about the actual argument and start thinking about how you just insulted him. And then you have lost any chance to persuade.

Here’s something I’ve noticed about persuading people for a living and also about talking to others about Donald Trump. You are not going to convince anybody. You are not going to do the heavy lifting of changing their minds. Only the juror, or the voter in this case, can do that. They must convince themselves. You are not going to make that process happen. You are simply going to set the conditions for it to happen. And a key condition is seeing enough facts to make them reject their preconceived notions. It’s a hard sell to get someone to change their mind, but it can be done.

How? First of all, you’re going to demonstrate by your own attitude and actions that someone who supports Donald Trump is a happy person. This has the benefit of being true. We are generally pretty upbeat. Leftists are depressed, sad, and bitter. Many are weird looking. Have you seen the statistics showing that something like 2/3 of young aspiring cat women have been diagnosed with some sort of mental illness or disorder? Frankly, a lot of Democrats are nuts. They certainly put lunatics on a pedestal – why do you think they have such a bizarre love of transgender nonsense and the mutilation that goes along with it?

When I go in front of a jury or try to convince somebody of something politically, I’m a happy warrior. I’m smiling and enjoying myself as much as appropriate – obviously, if you have a lawsuit involving a tragedy, you’ll have to temper your emotional portrayal. But you want to show that person that if they take the step across the line to your side, they can be happy too. And I am happy. I’m on the side of freedom, prosperity, and America. Democrats are on the side of racial grievance, excusing crime, poverty, and submission to Third World potentates. They are miserable, and no normal person wants to be miserable.

You want to offer supporting facts where appropriate but don’t shove them down your audience’s throat. Don’t be a know-it-all. Try to state the facts clearly and reasonably objectively, though, of course, you will shade it some. We always emphasize the positive and minimize the negative. You want to provide them with information from which they can think and draw their own conclusions. I can’t emphasize it enough – when you try to force somebody to accept your conclusions, you are inviting them to be ornery and feisty. Nobody likes to be told what to do, except maybe Bulwark staffers in the bedroom, but that’s a different story. Genuinely open-minded people want to have something to think about. So, give them that.

Don’t be pushy. Don’t be rude. And don’t break the Alinksy rule that tells us that anything carried on too long becomes a drag. If they’re done talking about politics, stop talking about politics and talk about baseball, hunting, or any of the other things Tim Walz pretends to be into. Persuasion is a process; it is not like flipping a light switch. If you want somebody to come around genuinely and not merely superficially, your goal must be to help them see the truth over time. 

That’s what I do. I tell them the truth and let them come to their own conclusions. Yes, I emphasize the good facts, and I certainly explain why the bad facts – every case has both good and bad facts – are not significant. But I don’t browbeat them. I don’t shout at them. I try to help them see it correctly, which is the same way as I do. 

And I do a pretty good job of it. I’ve only been doing it for 30 years. But you only have to do it for about two more weeks. Trusted friends, neighbors, and family members are the best vehicle to convince a non-MAGA voter to come on over and vote for Donald Trump and the rest of the Republican ticket. So, don’t blow it by being a jerk – that’s for the college sophomores over turkey and mashed potatoes. Be like Fonzie. Be cool. And that’s the way you’ll persuade.



X22, And we Know, and more- Oct 23


 

As Attacks Intensify, Trump Becomes More Popular


It's hard to measure the intensity of negative media coverage of former President Donald Trump, but it's safe to say it's rising as Election Day approaches. What's interesting to note is that in the face of unrelentingly negative coverage -- at a high level now, but negative for a long time -- the public views Trump more favorably than it has since he entered politics.

Asking voters whether they have a favorable or unfavorable opinion of a politician is a staple of polling. The politician is referred to as being underwater if his unfavorable rating is higher than his favorable rating. When it comes to favorability, Trump has been underwater forever.

On this date in 2016, Trump's unfavorable rating exceeded his favorable rating by 26 points, according to the RealClearPolitics average of polls. That is huge. But, of course, Trump was elected president a short time later, indicating that favorable ratings are not everything.

On this date in 2020, Trump, after four years as president, had gotten more popular. But he was still underwater; his unfavorable rating exceeded his favorable rating by 11 points. Even though that was significantly better than four years earlier, he narrowly lost his bid for reelection.

Now, less than three weeks before Election Day, Trump's unfavorable rating exceeds his favorable rating by just seven points. "If you believe that Donald Trump has somehow become less popular over time, let me change your mind about that," CNN analyst Harry Enten said recently. "In fact, he is more popular at this point in the campaign than he was at this point in the 2020 campaign or the 2016 campaign."

What about his opponent? Vice President Kamala Harris has been on an entirely different trajectory than Trump, and it is not good news for her. The public viewed her favorably for her first six months as vice president. And then, when the inflation, border chaos and other results of the Biden-Harris administration began to kick in, Harris sank underwater. Quickly.

By January 2022, when she had been in office a year, Harris' unfavorable rating exceeded her favorable rating by 14 points, again according to the RealClearPolitics average of polls. By the start of this election year, January 2024, she was 20 points underwater. On July 21, the day President Joe Biden withdrew from the race, Harris was 14 points underwater.

And then -- whoosh! With the feeble and senescent Biden out of the reelection picture, Democratic enthusiasm and Harris' favorability soared. By late September, she was actually above water, albeit by a single percentage point. That was a big jump from having been 14 points underwater.

But now Harris' progress has stopped. She has slipped back underwater by a single point. "The momentum of Kamala Harris has stalled," Enten said. Her top aides "feel like they have to change something that's going on in their campaign because they were seeing a rise, and now it has stalled out."

That obviously does not mean Harris will lose; Trump himself has proven that an underwater candidate can win. And Trump is farther underwater than Harris. But the trend for Trump is up, and the trend for Harris is down.

Meanwhile, what is extraordinary is Trump's ability to improve his favorability rating in the face of relentlessly hostile media coverage. Back in August, at the end of Harris' first month of campaigning, the conservative Media Research Center found that Harris' media coverage had been 84% positive, higher than another other major party nominee ever, while Trump's media coverage was 89% negative. Against a headwind like that, Trump's improvement in favorability is remarkable.

So is there a cause and effect here? It's entirely possible that wildly negative media coverage is actually causing many Americans to view Trump more favorably. After all, the media is one of the least-trusted institutions in American public life, and if top media figures say something, millions of Americans are likely to believe the opposite. It's hard to see Trump-bashing as helping Trump, but that might be what is going on.



Trump Is Right. There Is an ‘Enemy Within’ the United States


One of my kids asked me the other day why this particular Democrat lied in her television commercial. It was Angela Alsobrooks, running for Senate from Maryland, who was lying about cheating on her taxes and getting a sweetheart deal to pay what she’d dodged, so my kid wasn’t wrong. I told my daughter that she had to lie because the truth did her no favors. That’s true not only for a tax cheat like Alsobrooks, it’s true for all of them, and it is really what’s at stake in two weeks.

Think about it: is there anything Democrats aren’t lying about? The answer is no. Is there anything Democrats could tell the truth about that would help them win an election? That answer is also no. Outside of small pockets in the northeast and California, there isn’t anywhere in the country where people will cheer for the genital mutilation of children, and most of those who do are parents who’ve passed the point of no return by supporting what amounts to the chemical castration of their children. Once you’ve gone there, no matter what comes to light afterwards, you have to convince yourself you did the right thing, otherwise, how could you live with yourself?

The rest of the support for that idea are people unaffected by it but in desperate need of a cause to give their lives meaning or people who see political advantage to being a scold who corrects how everyone else talks and uses pronouns. Miserable people, really.

Other lies this election season include the idea that Donald Trump threatened to use the US military against his political opponents. That one is so stupid that you really have to be Mika-level dumb to even try to sell it. 

Trump was clearly talking about BLM/ANTIFA and the violence the political left happily embraces and encourages from their Brownshirts. They take to the streets at every perceived injustice Democrats can manufacture, burning large parts of majority black cities before receding to their suburban sanctuaries to await the next manufactured outrage. 

They rioted on inauguration day in 2017, assaulting people and burning property. Arrests were made and charges were, after an acceptable amount of time had passed, dropped against everyone. Why? Because what good does going after your own people do? They were needed throughout the Trump administration to riot over false claims of police brutality and junkie overdoses. And they’re ready to do it again.

These fascists have gotten away with almost everything, as Democrats drop charges like Leo DiCaprio drops women when they turn 26. And, like Leo, violent leftists only learned they can continue to get away with it, as there is always another aspiring Victoria’s Secret model awaiting their moment in the tabloids and there is always another manufactured social injustice around the corner. The idea that those people might try to use violence to impact the election is so realistic that it should be considered probable, especially if it’s close. 

Funnier still is the idea that “Trump would use the military against his enemies on election day,” since that’s what the question was about – election day violence. Donald Trump, win or lose, will not be President on election day. I realize reality has no impact on the pearl-clutching class on Morning Joe, but for everyone else that should be an important factoid. 

While the goon squad mob on the left are undoubtedly an enemy within our country, so too is the left-wing industrial complex that props it up. The media – so-called journalists – people who coined and echoed the phrase “mostly peaceful” as people’s lives were destroyed, businesses were destroyed and dozens were murdered. Anyone who could look at that and turn an indifferent eye has something broken in them nothing will fix.

While the left is lying about what Trump said regarding what he said about the “enemy within,” there is a very dangerous enemy within this country. They are members of the radical left trying to do horrible, inhumane things to children under the banner of “tolerance” and those who enable and run cover for them. They are truly awful people who desperately need to be defeated in two weeks. Nothing else matters.



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When Did Google Search Become Totally Useless?


Why bother with making information accessible and usable if you can tell people what you want them to hear instead?



When Google launched in the late 1990s, it quickly overtook the market for search engines. Its proprietary method of indexing led users to results they were actually looking for rather than producing the hodgepodge of results offered by other search engines of the time. Within just a few years, it was dominating the market. Today, it is a money-printing machine.

It’s also increasingly horrible at the core mission that produced such success. The company’s leadership may have realized early on that to dominate they needed to maximize the marketing angle of search, but over time that side of the business — the one that produces revenue — swallowed the informative results that drove the search engine’s success.

Now, Google’s true product, its users, are drowning in a sea of partisan slop and sponsored content rather than getting the results we’re looking for when we take to the World Wide Web. By doing so, Google is making it pointless for us to continue to allow ourselves to be the product.

Let’s say you have an artistic daughter who wants some oil paints for Christmas, but you’re unsure about which brand to buy or even what the definition of oil paint is. You head over to Google and type in “oil paint.” Is your first result a definition or even the Wikipedia page? Nope, it’s ads. You have to scroll to get to Wikipedia.

Similarly, you might find yourself hungry while on the road, so someone in the car Googles “restaurants near me.” There was a time when this feature was useful. Now, the restaurants are paying to play and the resulting results are ridiculously skewed. While I’m not going to dox myself here with screenshots of the results I get when I Google “restaurants near me” while sitting in my house, suffice it to say that the top results aren’t necessarily the closest, or even highest-rated, eateries. Some that I know are there — because I live in this area! — aren’t even listed. 

Granted, these aren’t extremely pressing issues. People researched oil paints and found places to eat for decades upon decades without the assistance of the internet. What is a bigger deal is how nakedly partisan Google has become. Former President Trump has even complained about it, taking time to call CEO Sundar Pichai to point out the problem.

Naturally, his complaints were downplayed, but your Google search is supposedly tailored to your interests. As I am not suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome and have written positively about him (and used Google to find info for such articles), my results should be reflective of that. Instead, I get the latest anti-Trump bromides of the day.

The same search on another day was slightly different, including some horse race articles.

When I clicked on the “more news” section, though …

At least those results are timely, if not all actually news, but what if the search is expanded to “What are some good things about Donald Trump?”

Points to Google for pointing to the National Archives in the first hit, I suppose. The second, though, is largely a list of things writers at Politico deem negative with the “upshot” being that President Biden was going to undo them. What if the search is changed to “Donald Trump achievements?”

Okay, Google really likes that Politico piece and has deemed anything Donald Trump did ever before becoming president irrelevant, but what about “Donald Trump achievements as president?” Surely, its algorithm can pop up a few pieces about the economy or immigration or Trump helping grow The Washington Post’s subscriber base so as to help keep democracy from dying in darkness or whatever.

Super cool, super helpful, super neutral. Now, let’s check in on Kamala Harris.

Well, that’s weird. Whereas Trump’s campaign website is pushed down the page when his name is Googled, beneath mostly negative opinion pieces, Harris’ website is right there, with the “top stories” below it. I’m sure that’s just how search engines work, with no biases programmed in whatsoever. The completely neutral algorithm just happens to display the info the campaign would prefer to be displayed first at the top of the page, with the top stories about the candidate being answers to questions people might have about her, as well as a hit piece on Bret Baier thrown in for good measure.

This isn’t just about the election, though, but also about the changing nature between users — again, the product — and the online services we allow ourselves to be pimped out for. The disparities between the results for Trump and Harris simply highlight how stark the problem is.

Whether it’s Google or Facebook or Instagram, the initial premise of expanding easy access to information and apprising us of stories we might have otherwise missed has been largely destroyed. Google and Meta show us what they want us to see, not what we signed up to see, and it’s starting to turn people off. Maybe that’s a good thing, because most people need to spend more time in the real world. But when we’re trying to find a restaurant or information about voting or see pictures of a friend’s new landscaping or figure out how to get Elmer’s glue off the hardwood floors, burying those things under a mountain of nonsense makes us more likely to tune out.

Which is probably not just a good thing but a great thing — but initially the internet and social media were supposed to be about connecting us, about decreasing barriers to information. It would be nice if our tech overlords could remember what their initial goals were — in Google’s case, it was “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” — and return to those ideals instead of pushing us toward full “Idiocracy.”

I’m not holding my breath waiting for that to happen, though, particularly as Google itself deems such queries unworthy of answering.


How Kamala Harris' British Advisors Aim to Take Down Elon Musk and Twitter


Susie Moore reporting for RedState 

It's long been painfully obvious that the party that once championed free speech in the United States with full-throated ferocity has "evolved" (devolved?) and become the party of narrative gatekeeping and outright censorship. As someone who was raised a liberal Democrat and remained a liberal Democrat until my mid-thirties, the 180 my former party has done on the First Amendment and free speech has set my head spinning. I left my party roughly 20 years ago — but had I not done so first, it would have left me completely in the dust on matters of civil liberties in the interim. 

Despite my not-all-that-recent migration from "the left," I've still been stunned at the zeal with which "mainstream" Democrats have, in recent years, embraced the notion that our "betters" know better and we lowly everyday schmoes ought to shut up and listen — and if we don't, the power of the government should be brought to bear upon us. No more "agree to disagree" — it's "agree or be silenced." 

I must admit, as we trudged through COVID, I became quite discouraged. We seemed to be sliding down a slippery censorship slope at an ever-increasing velocity, with nowhere to grab a foothold. And then...Elon Musk bought Twitter. Musk did so under the guise of protecting/restoring free speech. I didn't know much about him at the time other than he was extraordinarily rich and seemed rather eccentric, but I did like his stated aims. And then, the Twitter Files broke, compliments of Matt Taibbi and several other independent journalists. And those revelations, combined with the layers slowly peeled back by Murthy v. Missouri (f/k/a Missouri v. Biden), seemingly lifted a huge weight off the public discourse. It felt a bit like we could breathe again. 

It was clear from the reaction of many on the left — and particularly in the legacy media — when Musk first made overtures toward Twitter that the prospect of a platform that allowed for free (or freer) speech was anathema — which made it all the more critical that the purchase proceed. It did, of course, and Musk faced all manner of roadblocks in the form of regulations and lawfare lobbed at him, along with advertising boycotts. And the animosity aimed at Musk and the social media juggernaut has only accelerated in the face of his endorsement of former President and current GOP nominee Donald Trump. 

Now, thanks to an exclusive report from Paul Thacker of The Disinformation Chronicle and Taibbi/Racket News, we know some of the major players behind the push for those boycotts (UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer's Labour Party, the Biden/Harris administration, the Kamala Harris campaign, to name a few) — and their ultimate aim: to "kill Musk's Twitter."

In an explosive leak with ramifications for the upcoming U.S. presidential election, internal documents from the Center for Countering Digital Hate—whose founder is British political operative Morgan McSweeney, now advising the Kamala Harris campaign—show the group plans in writing to “kill Musk’s Twitter” while strengthening ties with the Biden/Harris administration and Democrats like Senator Amy Klobuchar, who has introduced multiple bills to regulate online “misinformation.”

I encourage you to read the entire report, but Thacker lays out the broad outlines on X/Twitter:


This isn't our first introduction to the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH). In fact, after Musk threatened to take legal action against the outfit, X/Twitter filed suit against it in July of 2023.

In April, a federal judge dismissed the lawsuit, ruling that the suit was itself an attempt to silence the CCDH. 

U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer dismissed the lawsuit and wrote that it was an attempt to silence the center for its reports about rising hate speech and conspiracy theories on X. 

...

Musk, who has called himself a free speech absolutist, targeted the Center for Countering Digital Hate after it released a report called “Toxic Twitter” last year, when X was known as Twitter. That report said that Twitter under Musk’s ownership had reinstated the accounts of previously suspended “neo-Nazis, white supremacists, misogynists and spreaders of dangerous conspiracy theories,” and that Twitter stood to profit from additional advertising as a result. 

sued the center and a separate nonprofit, the European Climate Foundation, which X’s lawyers said conspired with the center to illegally obtain data about the platform’s advertising. The lawsuit said that the organizations had “cherry-picked” information and that they were unlawfully interfering with X’s relationship with advertisers. 

X/Twitter appealed the ruling, and the appeal is currently pending before the Ninth Circuit. 

But now, with the whistleblower documents obtained by Thacker and Taibbi, the agenda of the CCDH and its Democrat compadres on this side of the pond is laid bare. As the report demonstrates, the goal is to kill the platform — and with it, one of the last bastions of free speech. 

That Labour is arm in arm with the Biden/Harris administration and the Harris campaign has already been quite obvious. 


The British Are Coming! Labour Party Openly Commits Foreign Election Interference by Campaigning for Kamala


But now we have an even clearer view of the connections between them — and the inescapable whiff of election interference from a purported ally. 

The CCDH documents carry particular importance because McSweeney’s Labour Together operatives have been teaching election strategy to Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, leading Politico to call Labour and the Democrats “sister parties.” CCDH’s focus on “Kill Musk’s Twitter” also adds to legal questions about the nonprofit’s tax-exempt status as a 501(c)(3) organization.

...

In the last two months, the Washington Post and Politico, among others, have run a series of features about British advisors from Labour Together rescuing the distressed political damsel that is the Harris/Walz campaign. Politico casts McSweeney as the “election mastermind” who first helped Keir Starmer defeat leftist Jeremy Corbyn to become the head of Labour, all the way to Starmer’s “landslide” win over Conservatives to become Prime Minister this past July, implying that McSweeney and his team can perform a similar miracle for Harris.

...

McSweeney’s Labour Together colleague Imran Ahmed opened a CCDH office in DC three years ago and began working with American journalists to suppress dissent and enforce narratives friendly to Democrats and the Biden/Harris administration.

Musk reacted to the revelation as one might expect:

One of the best aspects of X/Twitter is its free-wheeling nature — not that there are no guardrails at all, but that its users are much freer to express their thoughts and, more importantly, their opposition to those in power. Whether via straightforward discourse or meme-filled mockery, X/Twitter plays a critical role in the ability to exercise one of our most fundamental rights. 

CCDH and its censorious cohorts may have aimed to kill the mocking bird, but with their agenda exposed, they've shot wide and bought themselves a war. 



Democrat Lawfare Shifts Fire From Donald Trump to Elon Musk


streiff reporting for RedState 

A group of eleven former Republican prosecutors and elected officials have asked Attorney General Merrick Garland to open an investigation into Elon Musk for paying registered voters in seven states to sign a petition supporting the First and Second Amendments. See Elon Musk Giving Away Millions to Promote Petition Supporting First and Second Amendments.

Mr Musk’s campaign group America PAC, which was set up to support Donald Trump in the presidential contest, calls on registered voters in seven swing states to sign a petition. Each day until the election, one signatory is selected at random and awarded a million-dollar prize.

But legal experts and several Democrats have suggested the giveaway may break American law by offering money for an act that requires someone to be signed up as a voter.

The US Justice Department has confirmed to BBC's US partner, CBS News, that they have received the request from former Republican officials and officeholders urging an investigation into Mr Musk's financial incentives to voters.

The signatories of the letter are a regular rogues' gallery of non-entities.

Donald Ayer, Deputy Attorney General under President George H.W. Bush (1989-1990) 

Phillip Lacovara, Counsel to the Special Prosecutor, Watergate Special Prosecutor’s Office (1973-1974) 

John McKay, U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Washington in the George W. Bush Administration (2001-2007) 

Richard Painter, Chief Ethics Lawyer to President George W. Bush (2005-2007) 

Carter Phillips, Assistant to the Solicitor General under President Ronald Reagan (1981-1984) 

Trevor Potter, Republican former Chairman of the Federal Election Commission (1991-1995) 

Alan Charles Raul, Associate Counsel to President Ronald Reagan (1986-1988) 

Claudine Schnieder, Representative of the 2nd Congressional District of Rhode Island (R) (1981-1991) 

Olivia Troye, Special Advisor to Vice President Mike Pence (2018-2020) 

William Weld, Assistant United States Attorney General, Criminal Division (1986-1988) 

Christine Todd Whitman, Governor of New Jersey (1994-2001

So far, the Department of Justice hasn't commented, but it is hard to believe that someone in Garland's Sicherheitsdienst won't seize the opportunity to launch a pre-dawn raid on one of Musk's homes just for the photo-op.

The whole issue is rather nuts, so it is no great shock that UCLA Law Professor Rick Hasen is up to his unibrow in this lawfare.


Hasen dishonestly tries to bootstrap gifting registered voters of either party, whether or not they have ever voted, for signing a petition into "vote buying" or paying people to register to vote. I suppose if you tie any law to the rack and torture it hard enough that you could claim that Musk is paying people to register to vote, but given the experience of the Department of Justice in wildly overinterpreting laws (see The Supreme Court Firebombs the Administrative State and Tells Congress to Get Off Its Butt and Work and Merrick Garland's Petulant Response to SCOTUS's Fischer Decision Is a Metaphor for Garland Himself), Garland's stooges may be reluctant to go down that path again until they know the outcome of this election.

As Musk has elevated his profile in politics (see 'To Hell With Them': Elon Knocks Those Who Are 'Fundamentally Anti-American' As He Stumps for Trump in PA), he has become a target of the US government. Sunday, the New York Times wrote a gleeful story on all the federal agencies investigating either Musk or his business ventures, complete with a helpful infographic.

The obstruction that he encountered from run-of-the-mill federal bureaucratic oversight has grown exponentially since Musk has wandered off the Tame Leftist Billionaire reservation; see SpaceX Files Blistering Lawsuit Against California Coastal Commission Alleging Political Retaliation. Last summer, the Department of Justice sued SpaceX for NOT hiring illegals.

If Harris wins in November, Musk's grim prediction to Tucker Carlson will probably be vindicated: "If he loses, I’m fucked.”