Today’s Lineup
How billionaires are seeking to override our democratic institutions, why we should take Trump’s rantings seriously, Alexa claimed the 2020 elections were stolen, the cruelty of forced-birth advocates, reviewing how Elon Musk destroyed Twitter, the government is using facial recognition technology without safeguards, and Norwich City Football Club has an important message for all of us.
#1
Charles Koch’s audacious new $5 billion political scheme (Judd Legum and Tesnim Zekeria, Popular Information)
Billionaire Charles Koch, who will turn 88 on November 1, is funneling his wealth into two secretive organizations that can continue his right-wing political advocacy for years. Koch structured more than $5 billion in donations to exploit a loophole to allow him to avoid paying capital gains or gift taxes. It’s not surprising that Koch is familiar with the loophole — he spent hundreds of thousands of dollars lobbying to create it.
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
While far too many reporters still treat Charles Koch as if he was serious about following through on that ludicrous 2020 Wall Street Journal profile (in which Koch claimed he was leaving partisanship behind), financial records demonstrate that he has continued his overwhelming support of conservative causes. Koch has donated $5 billion to two 501(c)(4) organizations, which, since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, have been able to engage directly in political campaigns without disclosing their donors. As Legum and Zekeria note, these loopholes have led the IRS to give up on enforcing limits on political donations. Spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on lobbyists to save upwards of $2 billion in taxes proved a good investment for Koch. These donations will create another long-term political legacy for him. And these loopholes demonstrate how every billionaire’s existence is a policy failure in a country that claims to prioritize democracy because it gives people with no accountability far too much power over the country and world in which we live.
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#2
We Don’t Talk About Leonard: The Man Behind the Right’s Supreme Court Supermajority (by Andy Kroll, Andrea Bernstein and Ilya Marritz, ProPublica)
The party guests who arrived on the evening of June 23, 2022, at the Tudor-style mansion on the coast of Maine were a special group in a special place enjoying a special time. The attendees included some two dozen federal and state judges — a gathering that required U.S. marshals with earpieces to stand watch while a Coast Guard boat idled in a nearby cove.
Caterers served guests Pol Roger reserve, Winston Churchill’s favorite Champagne, a fitting choice for a group of conservative legal luminaries who had much to celebrate. The Supreme Court’s most recent term had delivered a series of huge victories with the possibility of a crowning one still to come. The decadeslong campaign to overturn Roe v. Wade, which a leaked draft opinion had said was “egregiously wrong from the start,” could come to fruition within days, if not hours.
Over dinner courses paired with wines chosen by the former food and beverage director of the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., the 70 or so attendees jockeyed for a word with the man who had done as much as anyone to make this moment possible: their host, Leonard Leo.
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
Yes, it would have been better for everyone if there had been a focus on Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society’s efforts with leading Republican politicians to remake the Supreme Court before it overturned Roe v. Wade. So, let’s not make that mistake again. Leo is continuing his efforts to reshape the U.S. judicial system by adding state Attorneys General and state judges to his remit. And as I have covered before, he now has $1.6 billion to spend from a single donor to allow him to pursue his Christian Nationalist dreams. This ProPublica story—and the related new podcast series co-produced with On the Media—explores how Leo has been the center of a conservative-financed effort to remake our nation’s courts. Leo and his backers learned from their disappointments as Republican-nominated Justices refused opportunities to overturn Roe v. Wade. In response, they created a pipeline to ensure the right people would be the Justices to hear a series of cases designed to ensure that a new conservative Supreme Court supermajority would not fail them again.
#3
The Former President’s Rants Are Promises
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the author of Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present, is one of the historians who have warned us for years about how democracies fall into authoritarian and fascism. In response to Nikki Haley—and other leading Republicans—refusal to condemn Donald Trump’s threat to execute Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley earlier this month, Ben-Ghiat told HuffPost’s Lee Moran, “Authoritarians always tell you what they are going to do as a kind of challenge and as a warning, and people don’t listen until it’s too late.” We must take Donald Trump’s rants seriously, even if too many political reporters won’t—because the rants are promises. He’s warned us. These are the stakes in 2024.
#4
Amazon’s Alexa has been claiming the 2020 election was stolen (Cat Zakrzewski, The Washington Post)
Amid concerns the rise of artificial intelligence will supercharge the spread of misinformation comes a wild fabrication from a more prosaic source: Amazon’s Alexa, which declared that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.
Asked about fraud in the race — in which Joe Biden defeated President Donald Trump with 306 electoral college votes — the popular voice assistant said it was “stolen by a massive amount of election fraud,” citing Rumble, a video-streaming service favored by conservatives.
The 2020 races were “notorious for many incidents of irregularities and indications pointing to electoral fraud taking place in major metro centers,” according to Alexa, referencing Substack, a subscription newsletter service. Alexa contended that Trump won Pennsylvania, citing “an Alexa answers contributor.”
Multiple investigations into the 2020 election have revealed no evidence of fraud, and Trump faces federal criminal charges connected to his efforts to overturn the election. Yet Alexa disseminates misinformation about the race, even as parent company Amazon promotes the tool as a reliable election news source to more than 70 million estimated users.
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
We are not ready for how bad actors will use artificial intelligence and other tools in disinformation efforts to try to influence the 2024 elections worldwide. An Amazon spokesperson claims only a small number of users heard these lies. Does that make it okay it happened? The fact that people lie about the 2020 election results should not be a surprise. We should be alarmed that Alexa and other seemingly legitimate sources of information do not have strong protections in place to prevent the dissemination of these lies. How will they keep up next year when we see fake photos, audio clips, and stories constantly pushed out by accounts on X/Twitter and other online platforms?
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#5
Calculated Cruelty (Jessica Valenti, Abortion, Every Day)
More than a year after Roe’s demise, Americans are still furious and Republicans are still losing at the polls—but the anti-abortion movement is full steam ahead. They’re thinking bigger than ever, cultural and political backlash be damned.
In addition to maintaining and expanding their state bans, activists are pushing for federal legislation, working to restrict birth control, funneling money to extremist crisis pregnancy centers, and making plans to open a national network of ‘maternity homes’. That’s to say nothing of their cultural campaigns to redefine birth control and preemptively blame doctors for the inevitable increases in maternal and infant death.
And while it’s hard to imagine anything crueler than the suffering we’ve already seen, the movement’s latest project may give all of their other efforts a run for their money.
The activists that decimated abortion rights have quietly rolled out a new initiative to pressure and force American women to carry doomed pregnancies to term.
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
One of the defining explanations for political developments in the Trump era was Adam Serwer’s observation that for Trump and his supporters, “the cruelty is the point.” The horrifying policies pushed by forced-birth supporters around the country highlight this observation. Jessica Valenti has been warning her Abortion, Every Day newsletter readers about the rise of policies designed to control and harm women and people who can become pregnant. The forced-birth activists are trying to keep women from having the information they need to make informed healthcare choices. We must be aware of these efforts to manipulate medical language to justify lying to pregnant people. We will hear more of them as forced-birth politicians seek to pass travel bans, enact contraception restrictions, and use misleading language to make voters think abortion bans are not real.
#6
Join Me Over on BlueSky and Post
Elon Musk’s decisions have made Twitter/X unusable, as anyone trying to use the service to get accurate information about the Israel-Hamas War has learned. It is difficult to shift through all of the disinformation and fake accounts to find the news.
So, I have moved to BlueSky and Post to follow news and politics. Many of my favorite writers and political analysts have also moved to one or both of these Twitter alternatives. BlueSky is still invite-only, while Post is open to everyone.
I have a few BlueSky invitation codes I wanted to give the readers of this newsletter the first chance to use. Just go to this website and create an account by using one of the codes below. Each code can be used once, so if you get an error message, try another one. If all the codes are gone, email me at craigcheslog@substack.com, and I’ll send you an invite code directly as I get more of them.
- bsky-social-vleyd-lrlfr
- bsky-social-gz5ad-m32jx
- bsky-social-xe6ux-4ltvm
- bsky-social-hyg4i-vjec6
- bsky-social-ieloo-r6cj3
#7
Elon Musk, Innovator (Ed Zitron, Ed Zitron’s Where’s Your Ed At)
Most companies eventually fail. The only real variable is the speed in which they do so..
While the slow declines of Blackberry and Nokia (at least, as consumer brands) were agonizing to watch, both were a result of a lack of foresight and an outright failure to recognize the significance of the threat that Android and iPhone devices posed. While they made many extremely questionable decisions, both companies died because their CEO (or Co-CEOs) refused to change with the times. One could say the same of AOL, or Blockbuster, or Radioshack, or any number of businesses that were blindsided by somebody a little leaner and more aggressive, and ultimately atrophied. This is oftentimes how a company fails — not as a result of pure boneheaded decisionmaking, but through a lack of awareness of what the market needs and a lack of willingness (or ability) to provide it.
In many ways, this makes Elon Musk one of the most innovative minds of the 21st Century.
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
Speaking of Elon, Ed Zitron explains just how remarkable it is to see how quickly a CEO can destroy a company. Every major decision Musk has made since taking over Twitter has made it a worse place for anyone who isn’t an alt-right or facist activist.
Musk spent $44 billion to ruin a social media company and his reputation. Zitron gives us a blow-by-blow review.
#8
GAO Report Shows the Government Uses Face Recognition with No Accountability, Transparency, or Training (Beryl Lipton and Matthew Guariglia, Electronic Frontier Foundation)
Thousands of face recognition searches have been conducted by the federal agents without training or policies. In the period GAO studied, at least 63,000 searches had happened, but this number is a known undercount. A complete count of face recognition use is not possible. The number of federal agents with access to face recognition, the number of searches conducted, and the reasons for the searches does not exist, because some systems used by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) don’t track these numbers.
Our faces are unique and mostly permanent — people don’t usually just get a new one— and face recognition technology, particularly when used by law enforcement and government, puts into jeopardy many of our important rights. Privacy, free expression, information security, and social justice are all at risk. The technology facilitates covert mass surveillance of the places we frequent and the people we know. It can be used to make judgments about how we feel and behave. Mass adoption of face recognition means being able to track people automatically as they go about their day visiting doctors, lawyers, houses of worship, as well as friends and family. It also means that law enforcement could, for example, fly a drone over a protest against police violence and walk away with a list of everyone in attendance. Either instance would create a chilling effect wherein people would be hesitant to attend protests or visit certain friends or romantic partners knowing there would be a permanent record of it.
WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING:
We should only allow our government agencies to use facial recognition technology with significant safeguards in place. The Constitution’s protections should still apply when it comes to technology, especially technology that fails more often when used to (mis)identify people of color. Private companies are using this technology to punish critics. People have been falsely accused, arrested, and served time in jail because of mistakes made by facial recognition programs. We also should not be surprised how things can go wrong, given that an omnipotent surveillance state is a frequent plot in books, television shows, and movies. We have been warned. Now what?
The Closer
The social media team for the Norwich City Football Club, currently playing in the English Football League’s second-tier, produced this outstanding video for World Mental Health Day earlier this month. As the club noted, “At times, it can be obvious when someone is struggling to cope. But sometimes the signs are harder to spot. Check in on those around you.”
Yep. That’s worth doing every day. I hope you’ll watch this video.
Post-Game Comments
Today’s Thought from my Readwise collection:
“This is how elected autocrats subvert democracy—packing and “weaponizing” the courts and other neutral agencies, buying off the media and the private sector (or bullying them into silence), and rewriting the rules of politics to tilt the playing field against opponents. The tragic paradox of the electoral route to authoritarianism is that democracy’s assassins use the very institutions of democracy—gradually, subtly, and even legally—to kill it.” (Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die)
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