1)Our 17 friend LOVES to have multiple meanings to just about everything so I thought I would cover one of those things in this thread. Today's cover is....

WATCH THE WATER.

Before President Trump took office China/DS was pressuring NK to use its newly acquired (from U1 Obama

Imagine it’s 2024, Trump runs for presidency again, and he wins.

The Democrats, surprised by the results in a few counties, ask for a forensic audit of the voting machines but some get denied, “there’s no evidence”.

1/N

2/ You, a Democrat, don’t like the answer, because the other party spent the last 4 years talking about interference during the elections.

3/ You get told to respect the democratic process.

But you do already want to respect it! Perhaps, you even believe that your candidate did lose, but now you get suspicions because the Republicans are dismissing the claims of foul play rather than investigating them.

4/ So, you begin asking question on social media.

But your posts get marked as “disputed”.

5/ At the beginning, you didn’t care too much about the result of the elections. But now, you see the fairness of the democratic process at stake.

How can you know that elections are fair, if claims of wrongdoing are dismissed?

You get angry.

Per Playbook:
Backstory on Raffensperger recording Trump's call:
After Graham's attempt in Nov to get him to throw it, Brad felt threatened, so he recorded Saturday's call
After Trump tweet attacked him yesterday, BR released it to WaPo & AJC
Here:

2-"It started on Saturday when Trump and his team reached out to talk to Raffensperger, who, according to an adviser, felt he would be unethically pressured by the president. Raffensperger had been here before:

3-"In November he accused Trump ally and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham of improperly exhorting him to meddle in the election to help Trump win Georgia. Graham later denied it.

4-"So why not record the call with the president, Raffensperger’s advisers thought, if nothing else for fact-checking purposes. “This is a man who has a history of reinventing history as it occurs,” one of them told Playbook.

5-"“So if he’s going to try to dispute anything on the call, it’s nice to have something like this, hard evidence, to dispute whatever he’s claiming about the secretary. Lindsey Graham asked us to throw out legally cast ballots.

1. I think that the ban of Donald Trump on Twitter is an unacceptable act of censorship (THREAD)

2. Of course, during his time in the office, Trump has been writing and saying very irresponsible things. And paid for it by not getting re-elected for a second term.

3. The election is a straightforward and competitive process. You can participate in it, you can appeal against the results, they're being monitored by millions of people. The ban on Twitter is a decision of people we don't know in accordance with a procedure we don't know.

4. In my opinion, the decision to ban Trump was based on emotions and personal political preferences.

5. Don't tell me he was banned for violating Twitter rules. I get death threats here every day for many years, and Twitter doesn't ban anyone (not that I ask for it).

I want you to understand something:

Twitter didn't just nuke @realdonaldtrump today

They nuked the top 35% of his most influential users/followers/thought-leaders.

Why did they take the dramatic and unprecedented step of doing this so suddenly, to perfectly rule-abiding users?

The Proud Boys, led by Enrique Tarrio, arrested today in DC, have built a bridge between the Alt-Right + the Trump wing of the GOP. While they include men of color, their ideology is centered around white hegemony + patriarchy + celebrating violence against 'the Left.' A thread.

After the 'Unite the Right' rally in Charlottesville, the Alt-Right right collapsed in 2018 admits mass antifascist opposition. Tens of thousands took to the streets and as Richard Spencer explained, the Alt-Right was "pushed off the streets."

Far-Right organizers like Joey Gibson, who had built pan-far-Right coalitions that included neo-Nazis, white nationalists, militias groups, and the Proud Boys, lamented this reality, and pushed for a new street fighting coalition that could fight the Left in the streets.

A short thread on the Nazi/Trump parallels, drawn from research from How To Stop Fascism (see bio): 1/ The modern far right grows from the same ideological rootstock as Hitler/Mussolini - Nietzsche, Sorel, Chamberlain - it's the same crap... but...

2/ In the immediate aftermath of WW1 the German far right was splintered, with the biggest action - not words - being perpetrated by the Freikorps, first against the Spartakist uprising (exactly 102 years ago), then Baltic States...

3/ ... then the Bavarian Soviet. So when Hitlers NSDAP took off it was as a magnet for all paramilitaries, militias, aristocratic fascists etc... but there still remained Trump-style authoritarian conservatives, some even "populist"...

4/ The Beer Hall Putsch was the result of the authoritarians bottling out of their own coup against the Stresemann government... crazed generals, a power-crazed triumvirate, and Hitler's SA and a big militia movement...

5/ The Munich police ended the BHP by opening fire on Hitler's armed mob (who fired first). That's an unfortunate lesson all modern police forces have to remember... so there are clear parallels but let\s be careful...

Big things are going down my patriots friends

Since the media refuses to cover any of the things that have happened today, I’m happy to oblige.

The FBI is raiding legislative offices and homes in Tennessee as we speak. Stay tuned for that.

It is possible to believe that Twitter and Facebook did the right thing to block Trump, and that, having done so, it lays bear a real problem for American democracy. The Biden Administration and the incoming Congress need urgently to address the power of online social media.

/1

First, Twitter’s cancellation of Trump is NOT a First Amendment violation. Twitter has a right to moderate the speech distributed on its network, and a responsibility to take the public interest into account.

/2

Moreover, Trump has not been deprived of the ability to speak. He has merely been deprived of the ability to speak on Twitter and Facebook. I am not overly troubled by the ability of private corporations to decide how consumers use those corporations’ resources.

/3

I am, however, troubled by the fact that depriving someone of access to Facebook and Twitter has an effect roughly equal to government censorship. It has that effect because we have allowed these two networks to become public goods, rather than merely private interests.

/4

In other words, the impact of Facebook and Twitter is not limited to the private benefit enjoyed by their users, employees and shareholders. As we have seen, these and other networks can unintentionally become a powerful force for liberation - or for fascism.

/5

Hi Guys!

Thought I would give you an explanation of what is happening tonight and more importantly, tomorrow!

For many, this is all passing by without notice "Biden won, Trump lost and is a bad loser", which is 45% of the USA and probably 85% of the rest of the world.

1/14

This is what is happening:

1. Today is the senate run-off vote. There are 2 congressional seats up for grabs, both happen to be in the state of Georgia.
The US Senate has 100 seats. The party with the most seats has a majority and therefore is in

2/14

control of legislation in the USA.
At this time the Republicans hold 50 seats, the democrats hold 48. 2 are up for grabs today.
These two seats are extremely important. The republicans need 1 of the 2 to be able to stop an eventual Biden presidency to push through all of

3/14

his ideas (as he already would control the house). He will immediately start by rejoining the Paris climate accord (the green new deal) that effectively kills the oil industry and nuclear power industry over the next few years.
So make sure you keep an eye out for the

4/14

winners!
It's live on CNN, FOX, and others right now.

2. Tomorrow, is in my view, one of the most important days of our lifetime. It will decide if the WORLD will end up with THE NEW WORLD ORDER or if we will be witnessing the GREAT AWAKENING.

5/14

In 11 years, Donald Trump tweeted 57,160

📌 Questioning Barack Obama's birth certificate 📌

Donald Trump was the biggest public booster of the nonsense theory that President Barack Obama's birth certificate was fake, and that he had secretly been born in Kenya.

It put doubt in the minds of a quarter of Americans

📌 Rattling the stock market 📌

Donald Trump used the power of his position to target private companies.

Bank of America found that the stock market tended to fall on days when Trump tweeted more than 35 times, and rise when he tweeted less than 5

📌 Anyone for covfefe? 📌

This bizarre half-tweet was meme-ified at lightning speed and became obnoxious just as quickly, inspiring merchandise, a race horse name and a ban on "COVFEFE" licence plates in the state of Georgia

📌 Punching CNN 📌

To some, this video of Trump beating CNN in a wrestling match was a joke; to others, it was a threat to journalists.

Extremists took notice. They drew attention to their communities by injecting their ideas into the Twitter feeds of Trump's 89m followers

he's on

https://t.co/F3cnLl3Lqa

1/ Trump doesn't care about legacy, family, or duty. He sure as fuck doesn't care about the law, or even money (he knows the illusion of money is just as good).

Trump only cares about himself, and his only motivation is power. An illegitimate "win" is a win to him.

2/ Imagine Trump playing a video game.

He'd try for 30 seconds, get destroyed, and quickly resort to cheat codes to get by.

After celebrating his ill-gotten victory, he'd quickly realize that he's empty inside. There would be no sense of accomplishment.

3/ From here it could go in two directions. He gets bored of the game and does something else, or he plays again.

Because he has no interest in developing any skills, he would continue to cheat using more elaborate codes.

He'll never be satisfied, so he'll continue to escalate.

4/ Games aren't designed to be played this way. If you keep piling on cheat codes the systems stop working how they're supposed to.

If you keep at it, the game becomes almost unplayable.

The issue is, Trump treats the Presidency and government this way.

5/ Trump has trapped himself in a nightmare. He's stuck playing a glitched out game he hates. He knows if he stops, he'll go to prison.

He's miserable as President, truly hates it, but he's cheating to stay in power out of necessity. He doesn't care what breaks in the process.

For so long social media companies have been disguising themselves as a method of free speech to hide their true corporate nature. This is why they have avoided censoring @realDonaldTrump and others.

Social Media companies want us to see twitter/Facebook/Reddit/Instagram like a public-use bulletin board when they are really more analogous to the Target intercom system. This keeps the users from realizing they are generating content for corporations for free.

But, most importantly, when social media corporations disguise themselves as public-use bulletin boards they confuse the public into thinking first amendment protections should apply to user-generated content AND THEREFORE we should not regulate social media as a whole.

Plainly, twitter (et al) wants to be seen more like your right to self-publish a manifesto and less like a corporation for whom we work for zero wages while they steal our data. They are hiding behind the Bill of Rights which, simply, does not apply to them whatsoever.

As a result, users like @realDonaldTrump are allowed free range to “say whatever they want” in “the name of free speech.” That right is not guaranteed by the BOR, but rather, it is promised by the terms and conditions of this corporate entity.

https://t.co/4N44Gnm1zn

Still lots of concern about what happens on January 6, given the recent conduct of President Trump and many in the House and Senate.

Bottom line: It'll be a ridiculous (maybe worse) political circus but legally it absolutely will not change the outcome of the election.

Thread:

1) Let's start with this VP business (Trump saying he hopes Pence "comes through," the Gohmert lawsuit). That's a big nothing. Under the Constitution, the VP's only role is to "open all the certificates" and, under federal law, to "read" them. It's entirely ceremonial. That's it.

2) Imagine if the VP actually did have the power to unilaterally reject votes. Any VP, in any year, could simply declare his own party the winner. Biden could have declared Hillary Clinton in Jan. 2017 over Trump; Cheney could have declared Romney in Jan. 2009 over Obama; etc.

3) I don't believe Pence will try it. And if he does, it'll be about as effective, constitutionally and legally, as using one of those oversized ceremonial "keys to the city" to actually open up the bank building.

4) Now, Congress. There's a federal law called the Electoral Count Act of 1887. (Note: this is a law but *not* part of the Constitution itself; this comes up again). That law says if one member of the House and one member of the Senate raise objections, Congress must debate.