“It’s Afraid”

Raw Egg Nationalist 04.29.20241/2(really long only posting 2 pages)

Both the Left and Right are targeting anonymous users online—and ultimately free speech. (TOO FUNNY)

“Anonymous users are dominating right-wing discussions online,” ran a headline at the Associated Press a week ago. “They also spread false information.”

The story focused on thespread of a claim about voter registrationin key election states. According to an anonymous user on Twitter whom the AP declined either to name or to link, huge numbers of voters are registering in those states without the use of photographic ID, providing social security numbers instead. The implication is that this is a prelude to large-scale voter fraud of the kind that obviously didn’t take place during the 2020 election and could only take place in countries that aren’t America. Especially countries whose rulers the State Department has decided it doesn’t like: places like Venezuela, Uganda, and Russia.

The offending tweet went viral, and pretty soon X/Twitter’s billionaire owner, Elon Musk, was pitching in. “Extremely concerning,” he replied. So concerned was Musk about the claim that he came back later to reply for a second time. “Extremely concerning,” he posted again.

Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene commented on the post, which had now leapt from X to Instagram, like a spark carried on the wind into a bed of dry leaves. Not long after, Donald Trump carried the fire to his own social media platform, Truth Social. “Who are all those voters registering without a Photo ID in Texas, Pennsylvania, and Arizona??? What is going on???”

Despite valiant attempts by state election officials to disprove the initial claim—which they said was based not on actual figures for voter registration but on requests made to the Social Security Administration to verify the identity of persons who had registered to vote using their social security number—the post attracted 63 million views in three days on Twitter alone. A detailed rebuttal from Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richter, by contrast, received just 2.4 million views.

In 2024, it seems, fake news gets halfway around the internet before the fact-checkers have a chance to get their pants on.

According to the Associated Press,

The incident sheds light on how social media accounts that shield the identities of the people or groups behind them throughclever slogans and cartoon avatars have come to dominate right-wing politicaldiscussion online even as they spread false information. The accounts enjoy a massive reach that is boosted by engagement algorithms, by social media companies greatly reducing or eliminating efforts to remove phony or harmful material, and by endorsements from high-profile figures such as Musk. They also can generate substantial financial rewards from X and other platforms by ginning up outrage against Democrats.

These anonymous muck-spreaders enjoy certain innate advantages as well as the favor of powerful algorithms and powerful patrons. They’re exploiting a “long history of trust in American whistleblowers and anonymous sources,” an academic expert told the AP. (you mean like Julian Assange? KEK) Their very anonymity provides a kind of “allure of covertness” that just makes people believe they “know something that other people don’t.”

It wasn’t always thus. In the past, the article notes, anonymous internet profiles were often used for good. “People have used anonymity on social media to avoid persecution by repressive authorities or to speak freely about sensitive experiences.” Left-wingers have used anonymity to their advantage in the U.S. as well, such as during the Occupy Wall Street protests over a decade ago. Any potential implications of this last fact, including that U.S. authorities might also be seen as “repressive,” remain completely unexamined. No mention is made either of prominent anonymous missives from the Left during the first Trump presidency, including a 2018 New York Times opinion piece, “I am part of the resistance inside the Trump administration,” by a man who two years later would reveal himself to be Miles Taylor, Chief of Staff in the Department of Homeland Security. “I work for the president but like-minded colleagues and I have vowed to thwart parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.”With friends like these, Trump hardly needed enemies.

https://americanmind.org/salvo/its-afraid/

>>20804192

2/2

Therise of the right-wing anonymous disinformation-poster, by contrast, is a much newer phenomenon. It’s tied, the Associated Press tells us, to “a decline in public trust in government and media through the 2020 presidential election and the COVID-19 pandemic.”Trump is to blame, of course—when isn’t he?—but so is Elon Musk. Musk has protected anonymity on his new platform, including by updating X’s privacy policy to ban people who “doxx” anonymous users (reveal their identity), and has provided financial incentives for posts to reach as many other users as possible.

The article stops short of arguing that internet anonymity should be abolished, but itmakes clear that users “shouldn’t be allowed to spread lies without accountability.” Exactly what “accountability” means in this case isn’t explained, beyond reference to enforcement of “terms of service” and “content policies that promote election integrity and information integrity generally.”

Okay, then. Should anonymous users be sanctioned or banned if they say something that later turns out to be false or only partially true?Does their access to information and their intention in making such posts matter—and how would these things even be judged? Should algorithms be used to prevent users from posting at all on certain topics—say, racial crime statistics or adverse effects from vaccinesor names in Jeffrey Epstein’s “little black book”? Or what about the health benefits of eating meat and eggs? Who gets to decide? Why? How? These are all serious questions, and there are plenty of others.

Ultimately, what matters according to the Associated Press are the consequences of not doing something. This isn’t just about social harmony or the health of Americandemocracy. It’s about national security. Because behind it all lurk America’s enemies, China and Russia, with their shadowy bot armies and Byzantine networks of disinformation, always looking “to sow domestic discord because they think weakening our social fabric gives their countries a competitive advantage.”

It’s no wonder thatanonymous posters are under attack again. It’s an election year. The looming spectre of another four years of Trump rule, facilitated in some part by anonymous figures with funny names like “Raw Egg Nationalist,” is causing great worry among the liberal regime. Terror, actually. Which is why the attacks on Trump, on his family, friends, and allies, and on the modes of communication and organization he uses so well,are becoming more and more desperate by the hour.

But it’s not just in the U.S. There’s a general assault on internet anonymity across the Western world. In the E.U., there have been determined attempts to eliminate internet anonymity for over a decade, with bans on anonymous sites and proposals for far-reaching laws that could allow the state access to all private electronic communication, ostensibly as a means of combatting child sexual abuse. The European courts have struck occasional blows in favor of anonymity, however. One prominent example is the case of Standard Verlagsgesellschaft MBH v. Austria (No.3), from December 2021, in which the European Court of Human Rights decided that theright to freedom of expression within the E.U. includes the right to post anonymously on the internet

France’s Emmanuel Macron has made himself perhaps the most prominent foe of internet anonymity in the E.U. The French president voiced his opposition to internet anonymity during the 2022 presidential election. “In a democratic society, there should be no anonymity,” he said. “You can’t walk around in the street wearing a hood. On the internet, people allow themselves, because they are hooded behind a pseudonym, to say the most appalling things.”This wasn’t the first time Macronspoke out against the hood-wearers of the internet. In 2019, during the “Great National Debate,” a series of debates organizedin response to the Yellow Vest protest movement, he wanted to move “towards a progressive lifting of all forms of anonymity.”…..

Macron found a vigorous opponent in his own secretary of state Cédric O, who wrote an article at Medium in 2020, a few days after the ghastly beheading of French schoolteacher Samuel Paty by a Chechen refugee in a Paris suburb.

In his Medium essay,O stated firmly that “the issue of ‘anonymity’ online is a very bad fight.” Sometimes anonymity is courageous and necessary, when an individual is placed in a situation where they “dare not take responsibility for their words.” Furthermore, most anonymous posters aren’t really anonymous at all: they are pseudonymous. The state always has ways to find people who post online and break the law….continue at link

https://americanmind.org/salvo/its-afraid/

>>20804259

really long article but worthwhile reading

Make Patriotism Great Again!

https://x.com/mualphaxi/status/1785481782525153345

Kristi Noem has ‘no shot’ as Trump’s VP pick after puppy-killing controversy: sources

Diana Glebova April 29, 2024

South Dakota Republican Gov. Kristi Noem has “no shot” at being Donald Trump’s running mate after revealing in a forthcoming book that she shot and killed her puppy,sources close to the 45th presidenttell The Post. (Gossip, no one asked him)

One ally of the presumptive Republican nominee said Trump’s team was “bewildered” to hear of Noem’s account in her tome “No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward.” (Oh this is funny, is this her solution, “just shooting them?”)

“She was already unlikely to be picked as VP, but had a shot,”the person said of Noem, who has been widely projected to be on Trump’s shortlist. “After this, it’s just impossible.”

Noem writes, according to the Guardian, that she executed Cricket, a 14-month-old wirehaired pointer, after determining that the pooch’s “aggressive personality” made her “untrainable” as a hunting dog. “It was not a pleasant job,” the 52-year-old recounts, “but it had to be done.”

The source who spoke to The Post noted that 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney is still remembered for sticking his dog in a crate set on top of the family’s station wagon for a 1983 trip from Boston to Canada.

“Trump isn’t a dog person necessarily,” this person said, “but I think he understands that you can’t choose a puppy killer as your pick, for blatantly obvious reasons.” (KEK)

A second source told The Post that Trump “likes Kristi a lot,” but was “disappointed when hearing the ‘dog’ story.” “It certainly has not enhanced her chances,but no decision has been made concerning any of the VP candidates,”this source added.

Noem, in her second term as South Dakota governor, recounted that the final straw for Cricket came when the dog jumped out of her truck while she was visiting some neighbors. Unfettered, Cricket attacked the family’s chickens, “grabb[ing] one chicken at a time, crunching it to death with one bite, then dropping it to attack another,” according to the governor.

When Noem tried to restrain the dog, Cricket “whipped around to bite me,” and was “the picture of pure joy” during the fowl-killing spree. In the same excerpt, Noem described in graphic detail her killing a male goat who was “nasty and mean” because it was uncastrated, and “loved to chase” her children around. To kill the goat, she “dragged him to the gravel pit” where she disposed of Cricket and had to shoot him repeatedly to finish the job.

Noem writes that she tells the grisly stories to illustrate her willingness to do necessary things that are “difficult, messy and ugly” — but also admitted that “I guess if I were a better politician I wouldn’t tell the story here.” The governor has since doubled down on her decisions in the face of outrage from animal lovers.

“I can understand why some people are upset about a 20 year old story of Cricket, one of the working dogs at our ranch, in my upcoming book — No Going Back. The book is filled with many honest stories of my life, good and bad days, challenges, painful decisions, and lessons learned,” Noem wrote on X Sunday.

“The fact is, South Dakota law states that dogs who attack and kill livestock can be put down. Given that Cricket had shown aggressive behavior toward people by biting them, I decided what I did,” she added. The animal-killing story is the latest controversy involving Noem.

In September, The Post and other outlets reported that Noem had engaged in a years-long affair with longtime Trump adviser Corey Lewandowski.

(I doubt she was ever on the VP list. I still cannot understand why she would put those stories in the book, it makes no sense, or political sense.See the quote on her book: “Well Behaved Women Rarely Make History”)

https://nypost.com/2024/04/29/us-news/kristi-noem-has-no-shot-as-trumps-vp-pick-after-puppy-killing-controversy-sources/

>>20804409

I guess if there was a position under Trump, it would be somewhere in the Special Forces, that does the dirty work.

>>20804313

Isn't the whole world sick and tired of this arrogant 1/2 breed biggot?

>>20804488

She is not a true patriot for Trump, I really doubt that, including that info in the book was a mistake. Further I don't trust women based on how many betrayed Melania. A low key but trustworthy person has to support him in the second term which is The Final Battle!

>>20804514

KEK

>>20804488

Everyone in the admin would be afraid she'd take out her gun and threaten them!