Fire Hydrant of Freedom

I receive mail as a landlord (coming to past tenants) the rest of you may not see.

The ACLU (and every other Left group) is going after the felon vote.  Obviously they see them as liberal Democrat voters, but why?

'Brave' search reveals this:

"In Minnesota, felons who are on probation or parole are now eligible to vote once they are out of prison. The ACLU’s efforts have helped to challenge the state’s voting restrictions and promote voting rights for all citizens, regardless of their criminal history."

This gives me an idea.  We get on our soapbox here but need to get out where someone might listen. Where is a more captive audience than your local prison?  Why not offer freedom seminars in the prisons?  Like the people who formerly lived under communism, maybe a good number of inmates would be receptive to the idea of living under greater freedom.

The Left is aggressively going after the felon vote and winning.  What is their message, soft on crime, shorter sentences, free stuff??

What is our message?  We favor a robust entrepreneurial, ownership, freedom-based economy that favors those willing to take risks and work the hardest.  Felons very end up in gig work or owning their own businesses, as the largest employers require background checks.

How about putting a message of economic freedom up against the hope you will get ahead dependent on government programs?  If we were to win half of them, the Left's get-out-the-felon-vote operation would lose its value.

Is this worth it?  2020 was decided by 40,000 votes(?). In 2019, there were 631,000 releases from state and federal prisons in the United States (per Vera Institute of Justice).

Apparently the authorization is SOP, but given the Secret Service protection, SOP was highly inappropriate.

Can't say I agree with him but I do respect his opinion.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2024/05/21/ranking_trumps_vice-presidential_options_150980.html

(His analysis of the same state issue is different than what I understood.

Yes, Republicans will take the Senate, just not by as wide a margin as we hoped  - as it sits today..

Given Tabbi’s work breaking the Twitter Files I suspect this bodes some very interesting revelations:

Note to Readers: That Eerie Silence
Getcha popcorn ready.
MATT TAIBBI
MAY 21, 2024

“THE AI ELECTION”: Forget Russians, domestic terrorists, or “Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior.” This year’s censorship hobby horse is AI

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Racket readers may have noticed it’s been a bit quiet in here of late. That’s because I’ve been spending the last few weeks on an investigative series in cooperation with another site. What seemed like a cut-and-dried report turned into a bit of a rabbit hole on us; hence the delay.

When I first started publishing the Twitter Files in 2022-2023 along with Michael Shellenberger, Bari Weiss, Lee Fang, David Zweig, Paul Thacker, and others, there was an emphasis on speed. Once we saw phrases like “flagged by DHS,” I knew the project was temporary, and guessed we’d probably need to stay ahead of the news cycle in order to avoid seeing material drown in blowback. So, we set aside some explosive bigger-picture storylines to focus on things that could be confirmed and published quickly. There were also topics we didn’t fully understand at the time.

Some of those broader stories will begin coming out now, hopefully starting this week. There’s a reason for working back through this material now. Sources tell me at least two different active groups are working on political content moderation programs for the November election that tactically would go a step or two beyond what we observed with groups like Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership, proposing not just deamplification or removals, but fakery, use of bots, and other “offensive” forms of manipulation.

If the recent rush of news stories about the horror of foreign-inspired AI deepfakes (“No one can stop them,” gasps the Washington Post) creating intolerable risk to the coming “AI election” sounds a bit off to you, you’re not alone. This is one of many potential threats pro-censorship groups are playing up in hopes of deploying more aggressive “counter-messaging” tools. Some early proposals along those lines are in the unpublished Twitter Files documents we’ve been working on. Again, more on this topic soon.

Also: beginning around the time we published the “Report on the Censorship-Industrial Complex,” Racket in partnership with UndeadFOIA began issuing Freedom of Information requests in bulk. The goal was to identify inexcusably secret contractors of content-policing agencies like the State Department’s Global Engagement Center. The FOIA system is designed to exhaust citizens, but our idea was to match the irritating resolve of FOIA officers by pre-committing resources for inevitable court disputes, fights over production costs, etc. Thanks to UndeadFOIA’s great work, we now have a sizable library of documents about publicly-funded censorship programs (and a few private ones scooped up in official correspondence).

We’ll be releasing those, too, focusing on a few emails per batch, and publishing the rest in bulk. There’s so much material that a quick global summary here would be difficult, but suffice to say that the anti-disinformation/content control world is much bigger than I thought, enjoying cancer-like growth on campuses in particular, in the same way military research became primary sources of grants and took over universities in the fifties and sixties. Some of these FOIA documents are damning, some entertaining, some just interesting, but all of them belong to the public. We’re going to start the process of turning them over, hopefully today.

In any case, thanks to Racket readers for their patience. I’m very appreciative of the commitment every subscriber makes, especially in this narrowing media environment, which is why I want to make sure readers understand what’s usually going on when things go dark around here. My idea of a vacation is one or two days. If you don’t hear from me for six, I’m working on something. Back soon, and thanks again.

https://www.racket.news/p/note-to-readers-that-eerie-silence