Agree with them or not, the folks behind Cards Against Humanity certainly do have a penchant for flair. As you may recall, back during the Trump presidency, when we were still hearing about how a border wall would be built and then billed back to a sovereign nation that was absolutely never going to pay for it, the CAH folks decided to have some fun. As part of a campaign it dubbed “Cards Against Humanity Saves America,” CAH took proceeds from a portion of game sales to buy a plot of land in Texas along the Rio Grande, pledging to do every last thing in its power to keep a border wall from being built on that land. Again, whatever your politics, these folks certainly have some pluck to them.
And that’s where things have stood since 2017. Trump didn’t actually build all that much wall, certainly nothing remotely like a completed wall along the entire border. Mexico, to the surprise of precisely nobody, didn’t pay for any wall that was built. The land remained empty, untamed by man and still owned by CAH.
Until Elon Musk and SpaceX took it upon themselves to make use of the land as what looks to be part staging ground and part dumping zone. Reuters has a fascinating article about how SpaceX’s fabrication facility nearby in southern Texas has been expanding, finding itself in dire need of more land. It reads much as you would expect: public officials that own land nearby somehow are seeing their property values rise significantly, some of which received lobbying money from SpaceX, while your average citizen is getting lowball offers from SpaceX and being hung out to dry by those same public officials. One of those “average citizens” are the CAH folks.
Well, CAH isn’t simply letting their land be trespassed upon by Musk and SpaceX. Instead, they are suing SpaceX for $15 million, alleging that the parcel of land has been disrupted, used without right to store and stage equipment, and has otherwise had its value diminished. They even setup a website explaining that they’re doing and why, with a promise that it will send $100 to CAH’s original 15,000 backers if it wins the lawsuit.
We have terrible news. Seven years ago, 150,000 people paid us $15 to protect a pristine parcel of land on the US-Mexico border from racist billionaire Donald Trump’s very stupid wall.
Unfortunately, an even richer, more racist billionaire⸺Elon Musk⸺snuck up on us from behind and completely fucked that land with gravel, tractors, and space garbage.
How did this happen? Elon Musk’s SpaceX was building some space thing nearby, and he figured he could just dump his shit all over our gorgeous plot of land without asking. After we caught him, SpaceX gave us a 12-hour ultimatum to accept a lowball offer for less than half our land’s value. We said, “Go fuck yourself, Elon Musk. We’ll see you in court.”
You can read the entire filing below, but this one seems fairly cut and dried. SpaceX had no right to use CAH’s land, did so anyway, and then tried to strongarm the CAH into a lowball offer for the property. On their site, you can see pictures of what has been done to the land by SpaceX, and there are more in the lawsuit, but here’s one of the “before” pictures:
And here are some of the “after” pictures, showing what SpaceX has done to land that is not SpaceX’s land:
The $15 million is to cover the cost of repairing the property, to cover the devaluation of the property, and for the damage to CAH’s reputation and other losses.
SpaceX and/or its contractors entered the Property and, after erecting posts to mark the property line, proceeded to ignore any distinction based upon property ownership. The site was cleared of vegetation, and the soil was compacted with gravel or other substance to allow SpaceX and its contractors to run and park its vehicles all over the Property. Generators were brought in to run equipment and lights while work was being performed before and after daylight. An enormous mound of gravel was unloaded onto the Property; the gravel is being stored and used for the construction of buildings by SpaceX’s contractors along the road.
Large pieces of construction equipment and numerous construction-related vehicles are utilized and stored on the Property continuously. And, of course, workers are present performing construction work and staging materials and vehicles for work to be performed on other tracts. In short, SpaceX has treated the Property as its own for at least six (6) months without regard for CAH’s property rights nor the safety of anyone entering what has become a worksite that is presumably governed by OSHA safety requirements.
Ironically enough, it seems that the plot of land CAH bought to prevent Trump from building a wall to protect against a “Mexican invasion” was instead “invaded” by Trump’s new backer. That’s ironic enough that the CAH folks should be making cards around the whole situation.
In the bizarro world of MAGA politics, up is down, black is white, and apparently, fact-checking is now a form of election interference.
It is no secret that people across the political spectrum have a very warped view of what free speech or the First Amendment means. But I am particularly perplexed by the view of many lately (and this seems to run across the political spectrum, tragically) that fact checking is an attack on free speech and should be punished. It feels ridiculous to even bring this up, but fact checking is not just protected speech, it is the proverbial “more speech” that pretend defenders of the First Amendment always claim is the only possible answer to speech you disagree with.
Anyway, last week you might have heard there was a Presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump held on ABC. The CNN debate earlier this year between Trump and Biden included a vow from the moderators that they would do no fact-checking, which resulted in those moderators being roundly criticized.
On the other hand, ABC chose a few narrow points, when the lies were incredibly egregious, to provide simple fact-checks to blatantly false claims. I believe they responded just three times to make factual claims, even though the former President told an astounding number of blatant outright lies (not just exaggerations, but fully invented, made up bullshit).
This has set Republicans off on a ridiculous crusade, claiming that ABC was actively working with the Harris campaign to support it, which is not how any of this actually works. Then, Trump himself claimed that the debate was “rigged” (of course) and told Fox & Friends that (1) you “have to be licensed to” be a news organization and that (2) “they ought to take away their license for the way they did that” (i.e., fact-checked the debate).
Others in Trump’s circles claimed that the fact-checking was a form of “in-kind contribution” to the Harris campaign worth millions of dollars.
All of this is nonsense. First off, one of the complaints was that the moderators fact-checked Trump but didn’t fact-check Harris. There are a few responses to that, including that if you removed the three times they fact-checked Trump and compared things then, they still chose not to fact-check him on many, many more false claims and egregious lies. The second is that the fact-checking complaints around Harris are ones of leaving out context or having slight exaggerations. With Trump it was literal made-up nonsense, such as the false, bigoted claims about eating cats and dogs, or the idea that Democrats support killing babies after birth. Just out and out fearmongering bullshit.
But, again, fact-checking is free speech. The party that claims to be such a big believer in free speech should also support that.
However, even dumber is Trump’s false claim that ABC has to be licensed. That’s not how this works. It’s yet another false statement coming from the mind of a man who seems to only work in false statements. Individual affiliates can require licenses to obtain spectrum, but ABC itself is not something that needs licensing. You don’t need to be licensed to be a news organization.
Just ask Fox News.
Of course, we’ve been through this before with Trump, who has sued many news organizations he’s disliked (without much success) and has made this same bogus threat before. In 2017, he said that NBC should lose its (non-existent) license for reporting on former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson calling Trump a “moron.” A year later, he threatened to pull NBC’s (still non-existent) license over its reporting on Harvey Weinstein.
Earlier this year, he said both NBC and CNN should have their “licenses or whatever” taken away for not giving him free airtime by showing his victory speech following the Iowa caucuses.
All of this is ridiculous. It’s an attempt at intimidation. It’s an attempt to threaten and cajole news organizations to not speak, to not use their First Amendment rights, and to not fact check when the former President spews absolute fucking nonsense.
But, because MAGA world is making a big deal of this, even the FCC Chair, Jessica Rosenworcel, had to put out a statement on the very basics of the First Amendment:
“The FCC does not revoke licenses for broadcast stations simply because a political candidate disagrees with or dislikes content or coverage.”
It is true that there are some very, very, very limited and narrow circumstances under which the FCC can pull a local affiliate’s spectrum license (not the larger network). However, not liking how fact-checking happens is not even in the same zip code as those.
Indeed, if MAGA world is getting into the business of pulling affiliate licenses, they might not like where things end up. There has been an ongoing effort to pull the license from a Fox affiliate in Philadelphia, based specifically on Fox News admitting that it broadcast false information about the 2020 election.
I don’t support such efforts, which likely violate the First Amendment. Even if it’s a closer call when you’re dealing with a network that has effectively admitted to deliberately spreading false information the company knew was false. But here, the call from Trump to remove the license is simply because of a fact check. It was because they told the truth, not because they lied.
When that effort to remove the Fox affiliate’s license came about, MAGA world was furious. Senator Ted Cruz went on a rant about how “the job of policing so-called ‘misinformation’ belongs to the American people—not the federal government” and complained about how “the left” “want the FCC to be a truth commission & censor political discourse—a prospect that is unconstitutional.”
Hey Ted, care to comment on the claims from last week?
I see no similar statement from him about Trump and the MAGA world now demanding the same thing (for much more ridiculous reasons). I combed through his ExTwitter feed and surprisingly (well, not really) he seems to have no issue with his side calling to pull licenses. How typically hypocritical.
Tragically, this has become the modern Republican Party. They are total hypocrites on free speech. When they want to protect their own speech, they wrap themselves up in the cape of the First Amendment, but when someone who disagrees with them speaks up to contradict them with facts, they’re happy to push for censorship and punishment over speech.
Last month, we discussed the internet’s reaction to Donald Trump, well, Donald Trumping all over social media. He shared several images on social media, some of which were real, some of which were parody, and some of which were AI generated images, all of which appeared to suggest that Taylor Swift had endorsed him. In fact, his own contribution to that social media post were two whole words: “I accept.”
But there was nothing to accept, of course. And the internet’s reaction in far too many places was all in advocating legal action by Swift’s team, including utilizing new laws untested in the courtroom in order to sue Trump over this implied false endorsement. I suggested that would be a massive waste of time and money. Instead, if the actions Trump took irritated Swift, the sweetest revenge would be a highly publicized endorsement of Harris (Swift endorsed Biden last cycle) or, in lieu of that, at least a public rebuke of the social media posts. From that previous post:
But the larger point here is that all Swift really has to do here is respond, if she chooses, with her own political endorsement or thoughts. It’s not as though she didn’t do so in the last election cycle. If she’s annoyed at what Trump did and wants to punish him, she can solve that with more speech: her own. Hell, there aren’t a ton of people out there who can command an audience that rivals Donald Trump’s… but she almost certainly can!
Just point out that what he shared was fake. Mention, if she wishes, that she voted against him last time. If she likes, she might want to endorse a different candidate.
Now, I’m quite certain Her Swiftness didn’t actually read my post and take it as the advice it was designed to be, but she certainly has acted as though she had. Less than a month after Trump’s AI nonsense, and immediately after the debate between Trump and Harris, Taylor Swift took to social media herself both to address what Trump did and to endorse Harris.
Recently I was made aware that AI of ‘me’ falsely endorsing Donald Trump’s presidential run was posted to his site. It really conjured up my fears around AI, and the dangers of spreading misinformation. It brought me to the conclusion that I need to be very transparent about my actual plans for this election as a voter. The simplest way to combat misinformation is with the truth.
I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the 2024 Presidential Election. I’m voting for @kamalaharris because she fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them. I think she is a steady-handed, gifted leader and I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos. I was so heartened and impressed by her selection of running mate @timwalz, who has been standing up for LGBTQ+ rights, IVF, and a woman’s right to her own body for decades.
I’ve done my research, and I’ve made my choice. Your research is all yours to do, and the choice is yours to make. I also want to say, especially to first time voters: Remember that in order to vote, you have to be registered! I also find it’s much easier to vote early. I’ll link where to register and find early voting dates and info in my story.
With love and hope,
Taylor Swift Childless Cat Lady
Now, the focus of this post is not that Trump is the Big Bad, or to suggest that anyone view Swift’s endorsement as a gospel they themselves must follow. Instead, the point is the one we made originally: no lawsuit was needed for Swift to address this. As we said: “she can solve [this] with more speech: her own.” That lines up fairly well with Swift’s statement: “The simplest way to combat misinformation is with the truth.”
The real question is whether this endorsement ever would have happened without Trump’s online antics. We can’t know for certain, but it sure sounds from Swift like they may have lit the spark.
The Fraternal Order of Police isn’t here to protect cops from anything but accountability. It doesn’t actually care about the rank-and-file, not when it can leverage its power to secure even more power. It doesn’t care about law and order, despite being the definitive figurehead of that ideal.
No, the FOP is — and has always been — about securing its own power while providing a source for comments on police misconduct that journalists should never consider utilizing. It’s pure garbage. It’s the reason cops continue to dodge accountability. And it’s the reason law-and-order candidates keep getting elected, even when it’s clear literally anyone else would be a better option.
The FOP claims to be the voice of the rank-and-file. But the only officers it truly speaks for are the worst officers still capable of paying union dues. The presidential election is less than two months away. And, speaking only for itself, the Fraternal Order of Police has given its support to a candidate who cheered on supporters who openly assaulted police officers en route to invading a federal building.
Patrick Yoes, National President of the Fraternal Order of Police, announced today that the members of the FOP voted to endorse Donald J. Trump for President of the United States.
“Public safety and border security will be important issues in the last months of this campaign,” Yoes said. “Our members carefully considered the positions of the candidates on the issues and there was no doubt—zero doubt—as to who they want as our President for the next four years: Donald J. Trump.”
Gross. That’s a terrible decision by the FOP. Worse than that is Patrick Yoes’ claim this is representative of the view of a majority of officers who are union members. This is just the view of those leading FOP chapters. The rank-and-file aren’t exactly happy the FOP has endorsed a candidate who continues to unequivocally support the people who attacked their fellow officers during the raid of the Capitol building.
In its endorsement announcement, FOP called Trump a partner and a leader, saying the organization stands with him.
During a Harris-Walz press call, Birkhead called out the group for supporting a convicted felon over a former prosecutor. He said she “understands the needs of the communities like mine, and has always had our back.”
That’s not exactly welcome news for Kamala Harris, who has been trying to downplay her former career as a prosecutor. But, in all fairness, Harris never expressed support for criminals who attacked Capitol police officers. And, despite her past efforts to jail as many people as possible, she’s never suggested insurrectionists should be pardoned, much less hailed as “hostages” of an unfair government. That’s Trump’s territory. And despite his history of supporting lawlessness (and violating laws!), the top cop shop in the nation says Trump’s their man.
This endorsement shits on a ton of cops, especially those who had to deal with the aftermath of Trump’s refusal to engage in a peaceful transition of power in 2020. Here’s how the union, that claims to speak for hundreds of thousands of police officers, responded to the officers who were attacked during the January 6th Capitol raid:
As Officer Michael Fanone told Don Lemon, the FOP didn’t even reach out to him after the attack, despite his appearances on CNN. Fanone said that he was the one who had to reach out to the FOP about the incident. A whopping 140 members of the Capitol Police and D.C. Metro Police were injured that day and some are still out on medical leave. Others will never be able to work in their jobs again.
“I finally picked up the phone and called the president of the national FOP, Patrick Yoes and, and described to him the displeasure I felt that there was no outreach being done not only to myself but to other officers,” said Fanone. “And I asked him to do a few things to make up for that lack of support, and he was unwilling to do any of them. I asked him to publicly denounce the 21 house Republicans that voted against the gold medal bill.”
Democrats had a bill that would given the highest congressional honor to the officers who risked their lives that day. The FOP refused to speak out in support of that or against the Republicans who opposed it.
This alone should make it clear the FOP is not so much a police union as it is a political action committee. It doesn’t care about officers who are attacked by people who slap thin blue line bumper stickers on their trucks before mouthing off at city council meetings about their refusal to comply to with gun possession laws. The FOP is in business for itself, but it continues to make all officers pay for things they may not actually support. That sounds more like a political entity than a worker-focused entity that does everything it can to ensure all union members are treated fairly and are well-represented by their local union leaders.
Trump said if he wins in November, he would sign legislation to “strengthen protections for police officers” and would “crack down on Marxist prosecutors,” citing district attorneys in Philadelphia and Los Angeles specifically.
He also called for a return to “proven crime fighting methods, including stop and frisk and broken windows policing.” Trump has previously praised the use of stop and frisk policing and its use in New York City under former Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R).
These are the policies that were in place during the period where violent crime rates were at their highest. To say they didn’t work undersells the actual level of failure. We’re still in a period of historically low crime rates and yet we’re constantly being told by people like Trump and his supporters that America has reached record levels of lawlessness — something that can only be brought under control by expanding police powers and further limiting the rights of Americans. The support of the FOP only encourages this sort of thinking.
These two garbage entities were made for each other. They want more power and less accountability. And they claim they’re doing this for the little people — rank-and-file officers and/or millions of American voters. But they’re only doing it for themselves. And they’re only doing it because it will allow them to return to the open bigotry and casual rights violations that have long defined policing in America.
Call me crazy, but I don’t think it’s a good thing when political leaders go around calling for the arresting or punishing of people for their speech, even when that speech is terrible. But apparently, former Clinton cabinet member Robert Reich feels differently.
Indeed, it would be nice if the leadership of either major political party in the US didn’t think that censoring people they disagreed with was a great idea, but it seems to keep happening. Republicans love to censor all sorts of speech they dislike. But Democrats are similarly super quick to push for the silencing of all kinds of speech they dislike. Tragically, neither party has any sort of moral superiority here.
Sometimes it gets beyond stupid. For example, former Secretary of Labor (under Clinton), Robert Reich’s latest angry screed in the Guardian freaking about Elon Musk and suggesting a host of ridiculous ways to “rein in” Musk. Half of his suggestions are either obviously unconstitutional censorship, or just disgustingly censorial.
The column first calls out Musk for his partisan shift (which hasn’t actually been much of a shift at all), though it makes it clear that Reich thinks part of the reason why Elon is “out of control” is because of his political views. I may agree that Musk is out of control, but not because of his political views.
As ridiculous a character as Musk may be these days, and as silly and cynical his support of Donald Trump may be, calling for silencing someone over their political views is pretty fucking authoritarian. Yes, Trump himself does it, but that doesn’t mean others should follow Trump’s lead.
After spending a bunch of words to basically say that Musk’s support of Trump and other right-wing causes means he’s “out of control,” Reich then suggests “six ways to rein in Musk.” The first two are pretty straightforward versions of boycotting his businesses like ExTwitter and Tesla. And, sure, yeah, those are perfectly fine ideas, but as I write this, I see Reich himself has posted ten times to ExTwitter himself in the past 24 hours.
Be the change you want to see in the world, Robert.
But then the column goes completely off the rails with two obviously nonsense ideas. First, threats of jailtime:
3.Regulators around the world should threaten Musk with arrest if he doesn’t stop disseminating lies and hate on X.
Global regulators may be on the way to doing this, as evidenced by the 24 August arrest in France of Pavel Durov, who founded the online communications tool Telegram, which French authorities have found complicit in hate crimes and disinformation. Like Musk, Durov has styled himself as a free speech absolutist.
So, technically, this might not be a First Amendment violation, as he’s asking regulators “around the world” to do this, and outside of the US, they are obviously not bound by the First Amendment. But, also, holy shit, is this an authoritarian nonsense suggestion.
Note that Reich does not outline any actual crimes from around the world for which Musk should be threatened with arrest. He just compares it to Telegram and Durov, where the actual details still remain unclear, but from what’s been revealed so far, they appear to suggest actions that are not at all similar to what Musk is doing with ExTwitter (e.g., refusing to even respond to law enforcement requests regarding child sexual abuse material).
That is, potentially (again, details are not fully known!) very, very different than “complicit in hate crimes.” Threatening to arrest social media CEOs because “hate crimes” happen on their platforms is a very, very stupid and dangerous idea. It would lead to much less speech allowed online overall as the risk of criminal liability for speech you had no say in appears on your site.
Even worse, note that Reich includes at the end of this that “Like Musk, Durov has styled himself as a free speech absolutist.” Neither are actually free speech absolutists. We’ve written many words on Musk’s free speech hypocrisy (which, I guess, is similar to the politicians mentioned above). Durov just seems like he doesn’t care, not that he’s taking any sort of principled stance.
But either way, Reich seems to be implying that styling yourself a free speech absolutist is an arrestable offense. What the actual fuck is he thinking?
While the conservative media has (for once) rightly gone apeshit over this part of Reich’s column, I think his second suggestion is potentially even worse:
4.In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission should demand that Musk take down lies that are likely to endanger individuals – and if he does not, sue him under Section Five of the FTC Act.
Musk’s free-speech rights under the first amendment don’t take precedence over the public interest. Two months ago, the US supreme court said federal agencies may pressure social media platforms to take down misinformation – a technical win for the public good (technical because the court based its ruling on the plaintiff’s lack of standing to sue).
While the “rest of the world’s” regulators aren’t bound by the First Amendment, US officials absolutely are. And, no, the FTC cannot (under the First Amendment) demand that Elon remove “lies” from ExTwitter. Reich tries to cover himself with “lies that are likely to endanger individuals,” and there is a very narrow exception in extreme cases, but most lies that are likely to endanger individuals are still protected speech.
And, while some will likely disagree, this remains important. Because lots of people will falsely claim that any sort of speech is a “lie that endangers individuals.” In this very column, Reich is lying in a way that some could argue could “endanger” Elon Musk. Should the FTC be able to order it be taken down?
Would Reich be okay with a Donald Trump-controlled FTC ordering websites to take down content it deems likely to “endanger” people? That could include information on diversity, equity, and inclusion. It could include information on LGBTQ rights and medical support. It could include information on climate change. Or abortion. And Reich is suggesting that the FTC should have the ability to order the removal of it all.
Reich then is also pointing to the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Murthy case, though it’s clear he has no idea what that case was about or what the court actually said. He claims that it made it okay for federal agencies to “pressure social media platforms to take down information,” but that’s not fully accurate. It does say they can try to persuade. “Pressure” is a bit amorphous, as pressure could violate the First Amendment if it crosses over into coercion.
And, um, demanding content be removed with a threat of a Section Five lawsuit very much crosses the very, very, very obvious line beyond persuasion into coercion. Apparently, in Reich’s skimming of First Amendment cases from the Supreme Court, he completely skipped over the Vullo case that was heard the same day as Murthy and was decided a few weeks earlier. The Vullo case made it clear that outright threats of legal action over speech clearly violate the First Amendment.
Reich’s next suggestion is that the US government should terminate its contracts with SpaceX. There are many actual reasons to consider doing this, though it’s a lot more complicated than Reich makes out, in part because SpaceX is simply way further advanced than any other option.
But, the fact that Reich is suggesting that this be done in response to Musk’s political activity reveals that he wants it done for unconstitutional reasons. There are legitimate reasons to look for alternatives, around national security and redundancy. But since this whole column is about how the real problem with Musk is his support of right wing causes, Reich is saying the quiet part aloud: he wants to punish Musk for his political speech.
And that shouldn’t be how any of this works, no matter your feelings on Musk, Trump, or the current MAGA GOP.
Was Mark Zuckerberg’s cringey spinelessness just an attempt to grovel before Donald Trump to avoid a vindictive criminal lawsuit? Given the timing of the letter coming out just before Trump’s new book that threatens to imprison Zuckerberg in a bout of authoritarian vindictiveness, it sounds like the reason Zuck is feeding the MAGA conspiracy theories is to try to appease Trump.
Earlier this week, I wrote about Mark Zuckerberg’s preposterously spineless letter to Jim Jordan, in which he repeats a bunch of things that were already public knowledge about the White House suggesting that Facebook could help save lives by not promoting dangerous anti-vax information. However, he did so in a manner that would allow people like Jim Jordan and Donald Trump to pretend that he moderated content because the Biden White House ordered him to, and that this was a big scandal that Meta would not let happen again.
In that post, I noted a key part of Zuckerberg’s letter: the claim that now he would stand up to government coercion. But that’s laughable, given that the letter itself is him caving in to threats of coercion by Jim Jordan.
Multiple people saw the news of the letter and claimed that it was an admission by Zuckerberg that he wanted Donald Trump to win. I don’t know if that’s true, but it seemed pretty clear that the entire intent of the letter was to position himself as a suck-up to Trump in case Trump wins.
Now there’s a bit more evidence for that. Politico reported that Donald Trump has a new book coming out next week in which he not only blames Mark Zuckerberg for apparently trying to rig the election against him, but also talks about wanting to put Zuckerberg in jail for the rest of his life if he dares do anything to influence this election.
This is ridiculous (and dangerous) on multiple levels. The claim that he helped rig the election is nonsense, based on Zuck’s charity spending a bunch of money on better election infrastructure. As Zuckerberg said in his spineless letter, that was on a non-partisan basis.
The only way spending on secure election infrastructure is biased towards one party is if the other party was planning to abuse insecure voting infrastructure to steal an election. So one way to read this is a Trump admission that Zuckerberg’s effort to make the election more secure foiled his plans to steal it.
Either way, part of Zuckerberg’s attempt to get back in the good graces of Trump was to claim he wouldn’t do that again merely because some people thought it looked biased in one direction.
One of those “some people” appears to be Trump:
Trump writes that Zuckerberg “would come to the Oval Office to see me. He would bring his very nice wife to dinners, be as nice as anyone could be, while always plotting to install shameful Lock Boxes in a true PLOT AGAINST THE PRESIDENT,” Trump added, referring to a $420 million contribution Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, made during the 2020 election to fund election infrastructure.
So, first off, funding election infrastructure is not plotting against the President. I mean, that’s simply unhinged. But then he claims that if it happened again, he’d put Zuckerberg in jail:
“He told me there was nobody like Trump on Facebook. But at the same time, and for whatever reason, steered it against me,” Trump continues. “We are watching him closely, and if he does anything illegal this time he will spend the rest of his life in prison — as will others who cheat in the 2024 Presidential Election.”
The problem with basically all of this is that it’s made-up nonsense, pushed by the MAGA faithful to try to make sure that no one ever calls them on their bullshit.
And the “thanks” that Zuckerberg gets for all that is to be accused of interfering against Trump in the election and being threatened with a vindictive criminal trial.
Zuckerberg was likely aware of this book when he sent the letter earlier this week, which makes that letter so much more pathetic. It’s not even that Zuckerberg can’t stand up to the lies and bullshit framing of Jim Jordan — which is only there to pressure Zuckerberg to again favor Trump & Friends over Democrats — but that Zuckerberg feels the need to do this fake show of groveling to appease Trump, because Trump is so stupid he believes the made up theory that Zuckerberg was against him all this time.
Of course, lots of billionaires support one candidate or another. Elon, obviously, has gone all in for Trump, leading ExTwitter to becoming a non-stop campaign ad for Trump while pushing nonsense conspiracy theories (often pushed by Elon himself) against Harris and Walz.
The hypocrisy is staggering. If Zuckerberg deserves life in prison for supposedly favoring Biden (despite plenty of evidence to the contrary), then by that logic, doesn’t Musk deserve the same for openly turning ExTwitter into a 24/7 Trump propaganda machine? Of course not. In Trump’s world, it’s only a crime when the other side does it. But last I checked, billionaires on both sides of the aisle have the right to free speech and political preferences – even if Zuck is too spineless to stand up for his.
But, really, the timing of Zuck’s letter suggests it was done on purpose to try to get back in Trump’s good graces at the same time this book was coming out. It just reinforces that Zuckerberg is willing to cave to political pressure. And that pressure is from Trump.
At the same time, Trump’s claims in the book suggest this latest pathetic political ploy won’t even work. Imagine being as rich and as powerful as Zuckerberg, and feeling the need to feed a nonsense conspiracy theory, which you know is a nonsense conspiracy theory, just in the hopes that maybe Trump and his crew will stop falsely claiming you rigged the election (another nonsense conspiracy theory).
It’s a masterclass in spinelessness: groveling to appease a conspiracy theory that you yourself know is baseless, all in the vain hope of avoiding the wrath of a vindictive ex-president.
Two bits of news came out of the letter Mark Zuckerberg sent to Rep. Jim Jordan this week (and how people responded to it), neither of which are what you’re likely to have heard about. First, Donald Trump seems to be accusing himself of rigging the 2020 election against himself.
And, second, Mark Zuckerberg has absolutely no spine when it comes to Republican pressure on Meta’s moderation practices. He falsely plays into their fundamentally misleading framing, all to win some temporary political favors by immediately caving to pressure from the GOP.
You may have seen a bunch of headlines in the past couple of days claiming that Mark Zuckerberg “admitted” that the Biden White House pressured him about “censoring” content and he wished he’d stood up to them more. It got plenty of coverage. Unfortunately, almost none of that coverage is accurately reporting what happened, what’s new, and what was actually said.
The reality is pretty straightforward: Mark Zuckerberg folded like a cheap card table, facing coercive pressure from Rep. Jim Jordan to modify Meta’s moderation practices. What he says misleadingly plays into Jordan’s mendaciously misleading campaign. In short, Zuckerberg’s claim that he would stand up to government pressure on moderation is undermined by the fact that he’s revealing this literally while caving to government pressure on moderation.
First, it’s necessary to understand the history. It’s no secret that the White House sought to persuade social media companies to adjust their content moderation practices. They said so publicly. Hell, there was just a big, giant, massive Supreme Court case about that, where the details of government requests to social media were on full display.
But, as the Supreme Court Justices themselves made clear during the oral arguments, the White House reaching out to media providers and trying to persuade them on editorial decisions is nothing new, nor is it problematic. The only thing that matters is if the government uses coercive techniques, in which it threatened the company or punished the company if it failed to comply.
Justices Kavanaugh and Kagan were talking about this during the oral arguments:
JUSTICE KAVANAUGH: You’re speaking on behalf of the United States. Again, my experience is the United States, in all its manifestations, has regular communications with the media to talk about things they don’t like or don’t want to see or are complaining about factual inaccuracies.
[….]
JUSTICE KAGAN: I mean, can I just understand because it seems like an extremely expansive argument, I must say, encouraging people basically to suppress their own speech. So, like Justice Kavanaugh, I’ve had some experience encouraging press to suppress their own speech.
You just wrote about editorial. Here are the five reasons you shouldn’t write another one. You just wrote a story that’s filled with factual errors. Here are the 10 reasons why you shouldn’t do that again.
I mean, this happens literally thousands of times a day in the federal government.
And just the fact that the Supreme Court did not see any evidence of this being coercive should say something.
Nothing in what Zuckerberg said changes any of that. He simply repeats what was already known and already public: that, yes, White House officials sought to persuade Meta in how it handled some moderation elements. Much of that pressure was public, and even the pressure that was private has been revealed before.
Remember, Jim Jordan has spent the last couple of years weaponizing the House Judiciary Committee to misleadingly claim that the government was “weaponized” to suppress conservative speech. He’s sent dozens upon dozens of subpoenas, almost all of which misleadingly demand responses or data based on his false belief that basic, fundamental trust & safety work is somehow an attack on free speech rights.
But make no mistake about Jordan’s end goal here: it is to prevent websites from ever doing anything to try to counter the spread of disinformation. We’re not even talking about removing or blocking content. He doesn’t want there to be any effort to fact check or debunk nonsense. And that’s because the party that he is a part of is the largest producer and purveyor of complete and utter bullshit. And having people point that out is seen as an attack.
So Jordan has framed any attempt to refute nonsense as “an attack on free speech.” Tragically, much of the media (and plenty of tech execs) have fallen into this trap and accepted Jordan’s framing.
Finally, that brings us to Zuckerberg’s letter from this week. In it, he admits (again) what has been widely known and widely reported on, and was central to the Murthy v. Missouri Supreme Court case: that some people in the White House sought to persuade Meta to take Covid misinfo more seriously.
In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree. Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decisions, including COVID-19-related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of this pressure. I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it. I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today. Like I said to our teams at the time, I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any Administration in either direction and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again.
So what is actually revealed here? Literally nothing new at all. It was already widely reported that the White House tried to persuade Meta to be more responsive. And there were reasons for this. People were dying from Covid, and internal documents show that Zuckerberg himself was hoping that Facebook would be helpful in getting people vaccinated. But the platform was being bombarded with conspiracy theories, lies, and nonsense that was misleading people into putting lives at risk.
So, yes, of course the White House would reach out to Meta and suggest that the platform should do better in stopping the flood of misleading, dangerous info. None of that should be revelatory or even noteworthy.
And if you read what Zuckerberg says here, he still says that they didn’t do anything because of pressure from the White House: “Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decision, including COVID-19-related changes we made to our enforcement…”
But then he says, “I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it.”
And what does that even mean? First of all, Meta was pretty fucking outspoken. When Joe Biden accused Meta of “killing people,” Meta went all out in calling that claim crazy. They said that the Biden administration was “looking for scapegoats for missing their vaccine goals” and “we will not be distracted by accusations which aren’t supported by the facts.”
So, what’s new here? It was widely known that the White House wanted Meta to be more responsible about Covid and vaccine misinfo. They said so publicly and privately. The private emails were widely reported on and subject to a landmark Supreme Court case that was just decided less than two months ago. None of that is new.
Zuckerberg also says that they made their own decisions and it wasn’t due to White House pressure, which confirms what was said during the Supreme Court case.
The only “new” thing here is Zuck suggesting he regrets not being more aggressive in… what…? In making sure more people saw misinformation that might lead them to make bad decisions and get sick and possibly die? And again, it’s not even that Meta didn’t push back. They pushed back hard.
And yet, Jim Jordan and the House Judiciary are claiming that this was some big revelation:
So, again, neither of the first two points are new or even meaningful. It was public knowledge that the White House spoke to Meta. And, of course Meta moderated (not censored) the speech of Americans, because those Americans violated Meta’s policies. And, as a private entity, they’re free to do that. That’s American freedom, something Jim Jordan seems unable to comprehend.
Regarding the Hunter Biden laptop story, that’s the next paragraph of Zuckerberg’s letter:
In a separate situation, the FBI warned us about a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma in the lead up to the 2020 election. That fall, when we saw a New York Post story reporting on corruption allegations involving then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s family, we sent that story to fact-checkers for review and temporarily demoted it while waiting for a reply. It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story. We’ve changed our policies and processes to make sure this doesn’t happen again for instance, we no longer temporarily demote things in the U.S. while waiting for fact-checkers.
Again, literally nothing in this is new. All of this was known at the time. Indeed, Meta admitted it at the time and admitted that it had probably been too quick to limit the spread of the story (just as Twitter had done, admitting the very next day that the policy was a bad one and needed to change). We’ve covered all this in great detail before.
Furthermore, Zuckerberg said this exact same thing on Joe Rogan two years ago. This also led people to falsely claim that he admitted that they blocked the spreading of that NY Post story due to pressure from the White House, even though he said no such thing.
Both times, he said that the FBI gave general warnings about “hack and leak” operations that the Russians were working on, which is no surprise given that the Russians did exactly that during the 2016 election in releasing the DNC emails. The FBI (unsurprisingly!) also said that there were a number of potential targets, including Hunter Biden. And that was also obvious. Anyone in the President’s family and political circle would be obvious targets. At no point has anyone suggested that the FBI said that they should suppress this particular story.
And, remember, the original Hunter Biden story was weakly sourced. Multiple news organizations, including Fox News, had turned down the story. That was because there were all sorts of questions about its legitimacy. And given what had happened in the past, it seemed wise to be cautious.
Indeed, these days Republicans seem oddly quiet about news organizations still holding back on reporting on the documents that were hacked from top Republicans like Roger Stone by the Iranians in this election cycle. Is Jim Jordan going to accuse companies of illegally interfering in the election because they won’t publish those documents that are embarrassing to Trump? Why the silence Jim? Oh right.
Even more to the point, at the time of that NY Post story, the Trump administration was in charge. It was October of 2020, a month before the 2020 election. So, this “truth” from Donald Trump is absolutely insane, because he appears to be accusing himself of “rigging” the election against himself:
If you can’t see that, it’s Donald Trump posting on Truth Social:
“Zuckerberg admits that the White House pushed to SUPPRESS HUNTER BIDEN LAPTOP STORY (& much more!). IN OTHER WORDS, THE 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION WAS RIGGED. FoxNews, New York Post, Rep. Laurel Lee, House Judiciary Committee.
Again, that is Trump saying “the White House” in 2020 “rigged” the Presidential election. So far, the only reporter I’ve seen call this out is Philip Bump at the Washington Post. This is Trump being so confused, he’s accusing himself of rigging the election.
Finally, Zuckerberg’s letter concludes with even more nonsense.
Apart from content moderation, I want to address the contributions I made during the last presidential cycle to support electoral infrastructure. The idea here was to make sure local election jurisdictions across the country had the resources they needed to help people vote safely during a global pandemic. I made these contributions through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. They were designed to be non-partisan spread across urban, rural, and suburban communities. Still, despite the analyses I’ve seen showing otherwise, I know that some people believe this work benefited one party over the other. My goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or another or to even appear to be playing a role. So I don’t plan on making a similar contribution this cycle.
Why is he even bringing up his personal donations if this is about Meta? And, furthermore, is he really saying that he won’t do any more donations simply because “some people believe” that donations for safe voting benefit one party or another?
This is the most spineless response to a mendacious, targeted campaign by a politician who is weaponizing the power of the government to pressure a media company over its editorial policies. And Zuck folds like a cheap card table. And it’s doubly ironic, because part of that folding is claiming he won’t fold again (something he didn’t even do in the first place, but is doing now).
Oh, and of course, Elon jumps in to say this “sounds like a First Amendment violation.”
Dude, the Supreme Court literally just covered this in a case that talked quite a bit about your own site and said (pretty fucking clearly) that the record did not support any claim of a First Amendment violation.
All of this is stupid. That letter is written in the worst possible way. While it does not state anything fundamentally false, it makes it sound like things that have been public knowledge for years are somehow a new admission. It further directly enables idiots like Trump, Jordan, and Musk to claim false things about what happened. And, finally, it just contributes to a totally unnecessary news cycle.
The only actual “news” out of all this is (1) Zuckerberg has no spine and simply cannot stand up to bad faith government pressure to change his moderation practices when it comes from Republicans (he was fine doing so when it came from Democrats) and (2) Donald Trump has accused himself of rigging his own election against himself.
Zuckerberg has to know how this would play out. After all, the same misleading reaction happened two years ago when he went on Rogan’s podcast. The only reasonable interpretation of this is that he sent this letter, knowing how it would be interpreted, to give Jordan/Trump red meat to continue believing their own false and misleading claims in case Trump wins in the fall. It’s stupid and cynical, but that’s the kind of politics Meta seems to play these days.
Last week, the NY Times had an article about how Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, is being targeted in a SLAPP suit by a “podcaster” who claims Raffensperger defamed her in his book about the 2020 election. (For reasons unknown, the NY Times links to none of the legal filings in the case, but we’ll rectify all that below).
The case is a perfect example of why we desperately need a federal anti-SLAPP law that protects everyone from vexatious litigation designed to suppress speech.
Raffensperger has been a target for the MAGA crowd ever since he turned down Donald Trump’s January 2, 2021 request to “find 11,780 votes” for him to win in Georgia by noting that none of the conspiracy theory ideas Trump was pushing about the election in Georgia had proven true. Given that Raffensperger ally Georgia Governor Brian Kemp has something of a history with pro-GOP shenanigans in how they conduct elections, the fact that even he wouldn’t humor this kind of nonsense from Trump says something.
Later that year, Raffensperger published “Integrity Counts,” a book that attempts to explain his side of what happened during the 2020 election.
Eleven months later, Jacki Pick sued Raffensperger for defamation in Judge Reed O’Connor’s court in Texas. She claimed that the book, which does not mention her, defames her. From the complaint:
In the Book, Raffensperger refers to the video presented to the Committee as a “SLICED-AND-DICED VIDEO.” Raffensperger states that the State Farm Arena video—presented to the Committee by Ms. Pick alone—“had been deceptively sliced and edited so that it appeared to show the exact opposite of reality.” Book, p. 138…. That is, he called Ms. Pick a liar and accused her of actions constituting a crime under Georgia law
Raffensperger further claimed that Ms. Pick’s presentation “showed a slice of video that had removed the clear evidence that Fulton County election workers had protected the ballots and the process as required by law.” Raffensperger later again referred to the video as a “chopped-up video.” Book, p. 139 …
In later public statements, Raffensperger described the video shown by Ms. Pick as “doctored” and “false.”
In his motion to dismiss, Raffensperger rightly focused on the fact that Texas had no jurisdiction over him for such a case.
In sum, Defendant had no contacts with Texas. Even his distributor had no contacts with Texas in connection with his book. All Plaintiff has been able to establish through jurisdictional discovery is that independent third-party retailers had contacts with Texas when selling Defendant’s book, and those contacts cannot be imputed to Defendant.
And thus, Judge O’Connor tossed the case over this issue last year:
First, Defendant did not reference Texas in the Book, nor did he reference any Texas-based activities of Plaintiff. See Revell, 317 F.3d at 473. Instead, Defendant’s statements concerned issues exclusively related to Georgia and Plaintiff’s testimony at the Hearing in the Georgia legislature. Second, when making the allegedly defamatory comments, Defendant does not appear to rely on any Texas sources. Third, Defendant’s comments in the Book and in nationally public statements do not concern Texas. For these reasons, the Court concludes that it does not possess specific jurisdiction over Defendant.
But, that didn’t stop Pick who refiled the case in Georgia earlier this year.
In the new motion to dismiss he filed last week, Raffensperger points out that Pick is never even mentioned in the book.
Here, nowhere in the book is there any specific mention of plaintiff. In discussing the December 3 legislative hearing—in a section pointedly titled, GIULIANI’S SLICED-AND-DICED VIDEO—the book refers only to the presentation “of witnesses and a video” by “Rudy Giuliani and other lawyers for President Trump,” a category that plaintiff’s original complaint took pains to make clear did not include plaintiff….
GIULIANI’S SLICED-AND-DICED VIDEO does not single out any editor or presenter of the videotape other than, of course, Giuliani. And it is Giuliani and Giuliani alone whom the book accuses of using the selective portions of the videotape shown during the hearing to mislead the Georgia legislature: “Giuliani intentionally misled our senators.” Ex. 1 at 139. In its numerous discussions of Giuliani’s “suitcases full of fraudulent ballots” claim, the book never identifies any individual on the Trump team, paid or volunteer, lawyer or otherwise, other than Giuliani. Whenever Integrity Counts mentions the State Farm security videotape, it is never ambiguous about the individual upon whom it places responsibility and opprobrium for the misleading excerpts and their use: Giuliani.
And then he argues that nothing he said in the book was false:
Plaintiff’s first contention seems to be that Integrity Counts falsely implied that the State Farm videotape presented to the General Assembly had been physically altered prior to its presentation or, to have been presented in a nondeceptive manner, was required to have been played in full, all 20 plus hours of it. Am. Compl. ¶¶ 3-5, 86. This contention is entirely without merit. The book makes neither implication. Rather, it accurately states that by using some segments of the State Farm video to arouse suspicions while ignoring other segments that made clear those suspicions were baseless, “Rudy Giuliani and other lawyers for President Trump presented witnesses and a video that had been deceptively sliced and edited so that it appeared to show the exact opposite of reality.” Ex. 1 at 138. The context makes clear that the descriptors “sliced and diced,” “chopped up,” and the like were used to emphasize the point that key portions of the video disproving Giuliani’s assertion of fraudulent ballots had not been shown to the legislature or tweeted to the public. Those descriptors were figurative, not literal, and under wellestablished law, not actionable. Horsley, 292 F.3d at 701-02 & n.2; Bryant, 311 Ga. App. at 243.
Plaintiff’s second contention, that two “suitcases” references in the book falsely defamed her, is also meritless. Whether or not, as plaintiff claims, it was common for Fulton County election officials and others to colloquially refer to ballot containers as “suitcases,” it cannot be denied that Giuliani and others, including the president himself, were using the term to falsely assert that the boxes were not official and the ballots within them fraudulent. See, e.g., Ex. 1 at 168-69 (Trump: “[t]hey weren’t in an official voter box; they were in what looked to be suitcases or trunks. Suitcases.”). The statements plaintiff challenges—an investigative reporter’s ‘not suitcases’ tweet and Gabriel Sterling’s ‘secret suitcase’ discussion—were countering these assertions and, as the critical omitted segment of the State Farm video makes clear, were plainly correct and accurate in doing so. Plaintiff was not defamed by the statements nor were they in any way false.
Finally, with respect to plaintiff’s overall contention, that Integrity Counts somehow singled her out, which it did not, and specifically accused her, which it did not, of having presented misleading evidence to the Georgia legislature, the fact is that she did present misleading evidence to the Georgia legislature. Her presentation distorted affidavits and played a videotape to raise suspicions about the “chain of custody” of “suitcases of ballots” that goes to “fraud or misrepresentation” that other portions of the videotape that she did not play showed to be baseless. See pages 4-7, supra. Plaintiff did not go so far as Giuliani in claiming that her presentation conclusively established the existence of criminal fraud, but it was her presentation and its critical omission that served to justify and propagate the claim.
As the NY Times article points out, Raffensperger has spent around $500,000 out of his own pocket defending the lawsuit:
Mr. Raffensperger, who self-published his book, is paying legal expenses out of his own pocket. He has recently launched a legal-defense fund to help defray the costs.
[….]
“I have incurred over $500,000 in legal fees to fight these frivolous claims,” Mr. Raffensperger said in a statement. “Not every election official is going to be able to withstand that type of pressure,” he said. “This should send alarms to every election official across the country.”
The NY Times piece also notes that Pick has offered to settle the case, but only if Raffensperger makes a statement that he doesn’t believe is true:
Ms. Pick’s lawyers let it be known that if Mr. Raffensperger wanted to settle the case, he would first have to say publicly that her presentation of the video was not deceptive. In other words, Mr. Raffensperger says, he would effectively have to tell his own new lie.
This all appears to be a classic SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation). Raffensperger spoke out about what happened with the 2020 election in Georgia, which is obviously a topic of immense public interest. Pick’s lawsuits appear very much designed to suppress that speech and pressure Raffensperger to say something he does not believe is true.
Pick also has vast resources because she is married to a mega-millionaire GOP donor Doug Deason. The wealthy can file these lawsuits at no significant expense, but defending them is way more expensive in money, time, and overall stress. Note that Raffensperger has already spent half a million dollars, just covering an easily dismissed over jurisdiction case in Texas, and just getting to the motion to dismiss stage in the case in Georgia (basically the very first step). The cost can only go up, and potentially massively, from here.
This is exactly what anti-SLAPP laws were supposed to protect against. Wealthy litigants can file vexatious and resource-intensive litigation against people for their speech in an effort to get them to suppress their speech. Notably, both Texas and Georgia have pretty strong anti-SLAPP laws. Those laws allow defendants to quickly stop costly discovery and make a motion to get the case kicked out quickly and (importantly) make the SLAPPing plaintiff pay the legal fees of the defendant.
Tragically, both the 5th Circuit (covering Texas) and the 11th Circuit (covering Georgia) have decided that anti-SLAPP laws cannot be used in federal court (where both of Pick’s lawsuits have been filed). That means those laws are useless here.
This is why we absolutely needa federal anti-SLAPP law that can be applied in these kinds of cases. Such anti-SLAPP laws are a necessary component to make sure that the free speech rights we all supposedly have under the First Amendment are actually achievable in practice. They are desperately needed to protect freedom of expression around the country, but certainly in cases like this, involving election officials.
In the NY Times article, Raffensperger notes that these kinds of attacks are only likely to become more common against election officials, but they’re already all too common against all sorts of people. This is why a federal anti-SLAPP law (and good state anti-SLAPP laws in every state) is such a critical need. And yet… none of the recent attempts to pass one has gone anywhere.
Without such laws, lawsuits like this can drain both the time and the wallets of anyone, even public officials like Raffensperger.
For as long as the evening news has existed, America has been portrayed as a dangerous place to live. Reminding people we’re a very safe country — especially over the past 30 years — doesn’t draw in viewers.
I think our country right now is in the most dangerous position it’s ever been in from an economic standpoint, from a safety standpoint, both gangs on the street and frankly, gangs outside of our country in the form of other countries that are, frankly, very powerful. They’re very powerful countries.
I won’t speculate as to the nature of “gangs outside of our country,” especially those in the “frankly very powerful” countries. But it’s patently false to claim the US is in the “most dangerous position it’s ever been in… from a safety standpoint.”
This sort of thing has been said repeatedly by Trump. There are variations on the theme, but the theme remains the same, no matter what the data actually says. While there was a noticeable increase in crime in 2020 during the COVID pandemic, crime rates did not increase everywhere in the country. What spikes were observed during that year have mostly receded. And, it must be noted, this happened during Donald Trump’s presidency, despite the promise he made at the beginning of his term to turn this country into a nation that automatically gives officers all the respect they’ve failed to earn on their own.
Meanwhile, social media and legacy news media outlets have contributed their part to this false narrative by insisting that viral videos of anomalous criminal behavior is representative of the nation as a whole.
A comparison of data from agencies that voluntarily submitted at least two or more common months of data for January through March 2023 and 2024 indicates reported violent crime decreased by 15.2 percent. Murder decreased by 26.4 percent, rape decreased by 25.7 percent, robbery decreased by 17.8 percent, and aggravated assault decreased by 12.5 percent. Reported property crime also decreased by 15.1 percent.
This report is far from complete. Participation by US law enforcement agencies is barely over 70%. Additionally, the FBI revamped its crime categorization, which may result in some crimes being over- or under-reported until every reporting law enforcement agency is on the same page in terms of crime classification.
But it still looks like pretty good news, even though you’ll never hear it from the alarmists and opportunists who seem to always have access to the largest megaphones.
More data has been released by another agency that compiles its own crime rate reporting. The Major Cities Chiefs Association’s report [PDF] covers 69 of the nation’s largest cities. And the drops in crime rates covered here are precipitous.
54 of the 69 major cities in the report saw drops in violent crime — defined as homicide, rape, robbery and aggravated assault — in the first half of 2024, according to the Axios review.
Columbus, Ohio, experienced the largest percentage decline in violent crime in the nation, with a massive 41% drop so far in 2024. Omaha, Nebraska, was second with a 30% decrease.
Miami and Washington, D.C., so far, have seen 29% declines in violent crime.
Austin, Texas, saw a 28% drop, followed by New Orleans with a 26% decrease.
On top of that, Boston saw a 78% decrease in homicides. And Philadelphia — a city tough-on-crime types like to bash because of its election of a “progressive” district attorney — saw a 42% drop in homicides over the same period.
The data contradicts the narrative. But the narrative is often the only thing most people will pay attention to. Crime rates peaked in the early-1990s and have been decreasing steadily since then. Contrary to Trump’s assertions, this nation is in the safest position it’s ever been in, in terms of crime rates. More people should be made aware of these facts and adjust their actions accordingly. There’s no reason we, as a nation, should continue to put up with powerful and influential people who continue to insist otherwise.
