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Chair of new Colo. mapmaking panel ousted for stop-the-steal views
Apr 06 2021
Colorado's inaugural congressional redistricting commission, which operates outside of the purview of politicians, has already faced its first partisan test.
Chairman Danny Moore was removed from his leadership position Monday after his fellow commissioners learned he had shared conspiracy theories about the 2020 election on social media. The 11 other commissioners voted unanimously to remove him from the chairmanship, but he will be allowed to continue serving on the commission.
While politicians still have mapmaking power in most of the country, Colorado is one of a handful of states that adopted a redistricting commission over the last decade. For the first time, these states will employ an independent panel to redraw congressional and state legislative maps in a more fair and transparent manner.
<p>In 2018, Colorado voters approved ballot initiatives to establish separate commissions for congressional and state legislative redistricting. Each commission has 12 members with even representation of Democrats, Republicans and unaffiliated members, none of them politicians.<br></p>
<p>Last month, Moore, a Republican military veteran from Colorado Springs, was elected by the commissioners to serve as chair. But soon after, local media outlets reported he had shared election conspiracy theories on his Facebook page.</p>
<p>His posts claimed, without evidence, that Joe Biden was not elected by the people, but "by the Democratic steal." He also erroneously claimed that absentee ballots can be modified by mail carriers and poll workers. And he encouraged Republicans to use the courts to "erase those gains" Democrats made in the 2020 election.</p>
<p><p style="text-align: center;" id="sufn"><a style="font-weight: bold;margin:40px auto;font-size:2rem" href="https://thefulcrum.us/st/newsletters">Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter </a></p></p><p>"How then can the people of Colorado believe Commissioner Moore will be able to determine fact from fiction, when he's repeatedly asserted unsubstantiated claims that the presidential election was stolen, the Colorado election in particular was fraudulent, and that 'Blue state officials' in Colorado disenfranchise some voters by manipulating the vote," said Democratic Commissioner Paula Espinoza.</p>
<p>Moore has also used social media to cast doubt on the seriousness of the coronavirus pandemic and has accused the media of lying about it. He defended calling Covid-19 "the Chinese virus," saying that was not racist. But critics of Moore's posts said his rhetoric has contributed to the trend of anti-Asian hate and violence.</p>
<p>Ahead of the commission's vote, Moore defended his posts, arguing he had the right to free speech and to his own opinions.</p>
<p>"My comments were intended to create a broader discussion around political correctness and the problems that are impacting our society. I meant no harm or malice against any group or any person," Moore said.</p>
<p><div class="x12"><div class="htlad-Desktop_Content_Banner"></div></div></p><p>Seven commissioners expressed their disappointment in Moore's actions and called on him to resign as chairman. But Moore refused to do so and instead asked the commission to vote on the matter. After some discussion and advice from the state attorney general's office, the commission proceeded to vote for his removal from the top spot..</p>
<p>Carly Hare, an unaffiliated member who previously served as vice chair, will now take over as chair of the commission.</p>
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Despite claims of bias, conservatives thrive on social media
Feb 01 2021
Social media has become a punching bag for conservatives, who claim Facebook and Twitter have been silencing them. But in reality, the political right thrives on such platforms, a new report found.
The 28-page study, released Monday by New York University's Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, debunks the claim of anti-conservative bias on social media and shows how well the GOP has used those platforms for messaging and fundraising.
While the false pretense that social media sites are anti-conservative is not new, Republican ire was reignited last month after Twitter and other platforms banned President Donald Trump just days before the end of his term. That crackdown has spurred debate over the role social media companies will play in regulating future content.
<p>"Trump's being exiled from the most popular social media channels should not be misconstrued as confirmation of the claim he and others on the right have long made about platform bias," the report says. "The Trump bans, while unprecedented, were based on reasonable determinations that he violated platform rules against sabotaging election results and inciting violence."<br></p>
<p>Before Trump was kicked off Facebook, user engagement on his page dwarfed that of Joe Biden. Paul Barrett, the report's primary author and deputy director of the Stern Center, found that from Sept. 3, 2020, to Election Day, there were 307 million likes, comments and shares between the two pages — and Trump elicited 87 percent of them.</p>
<p><p style="text-align: center;" id="sufn"><a style="font-weight: bold;margin:40px auto;font-size:2rem" href="https://thefulcrum.us/st/newsletters">Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter </a></p></p><p>His dominance of social media goes back to his first campaign: Facebook and Twitter were actually key to his 2016 victory because targeted political ads on those platforms allowed him to rake in a huge chunk of campaign cash.</p>
<p>And it's not just Trump's activity that's been popular on social media. Right-leaning pages almost always dominate the list of profiles with the highest engagement on Facebook, the report found. Fox News, Breitbart and The Daily Caller consistently held the top three spots from Jan. 1, 2020, to Election Day. These three conservative news outlets collectively generated 839 million interactions — beating the total engagement from seven of the top mainstream media pages (CNN, ABC News, BBC News, NBC News, NPR, Now This and The New York Times).</p>
<p>"The claim of anti-conservative animus is itself a form of disinformation: a falsehood with no reliable evidence to support it," Barrett writes in the report.</p>
<p>The NYU report isn't the only evidence that claims of anti-conservative bias on social media are unfounded.</p>
<p><div class="x12"><div class="htlad-Desktop_Content_Banner"></div></div></p><p>Kevin Roose, a columnist for The New York Times, tweets daily list of the top-performing links on Facebook — data routinely dominated by the right.</p>
<div id="038f6" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="4bbb6536bfda35b292111bc2124e59c3"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet twitter-custom-tweet" data-twitter-tweet-id="1356280317573701632" data-partner="rebelmouse"><div style="margin:1em 0">The top-performing link posts by U.S. Facebook pages in the last 24 hours are from:
1. Fox News
2. Fox News
3. For… https://t.co/GDBEg1OC9w</div> — Facebook's Top 10 (@Facebook's Top 10)<a href="https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10/statuses/1356280317573701632">1612197400.0</a></blockquote></div>
<p>Moving forward, the report recommends that social media companies provide greater disclosure for content moderation actions, offer users a choice among algorithms, hire more human moderators to oversee high-profile accounts and release more data for researchers.</p><p>For the Biden administration, the report recommends pursuing a constructive reform agenda for social media, creating a new agency charged with digital content oversight and working with Congress to update the so-called Section 230, which protects online platforms from potential liability.</p><p><span></span>"What is needed is a robust reform agenda that addresses the very real problems of social media content regulation as it currently exists," Barrett said. "Only by moving forward from these false claims can we begin to pursue that agenda in earnest."</p>
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Douglass Mackey has been accused of using Twitter and Facebook to defraud nearly 5,000 people who attempted to vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Far-right Trump fan faces rare criminal charge for '16 social media vote scam
Jan 28 2021
It's taken four years and a second presidential election, but one of the most notorious disinformation spreaders helping to boost Donald Trump's 2016 candidacy has been charged with federal election fraud.
The arrest Wednesday of 31-year-old Douglass Mackey, who was long a far-right force on social media using the pseudonym Ricky Vaughn, marks one of the few times an American individual has been accused of spreading voting misinformation — and one of the most prominent cases in years alleging criminal election cheating.
Trump, of course, left the Oval Office last week still spreading lies and fabrications about pervasive ballot manipulation and illegal voting, not only in the election he lost but also the time he won. The Justice Department says it's found no credible evidence to back him up, but does have evidence to prove Mackey deprived Hillary Clinton of at least 4,900 ballots four years ago.
<p>He did so, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn said, by successfully conning that many supporters into believing they were casting a valid ballot for Clinton by posting a specific hashtag on Twitter or Facebook or by texting Clinton's name to a fake text code. </p><p>"Avoid the line. Vote from home," was the message he and unnamed co-conspirators allegedly worked to spread using an array of social media accounts, at least once tweeting the doctored image of a Black woman promoting the improper voting methods.</p><p><p style="text-align: center;" id="sufn"><a style="font-weight: bold;margin:40px auto;font-size:2rem" href="https://thefulcrum.us/st/newsletters">Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter </a></p></p><p>The alleged scheme "amounted to nothing short of vote theft," said William Sweeney, who runs the FBI office in New York City. "It is illegal behavior and contributes to the erosion of the public's trust in our electoral processes."</p><p>The Justice Department spent four years enduring whither criticism from Trump about its approach toward election crimes, most notably Robert Mueller's expansive inquiry into Russia's interference in the 2016 race and whether people in Trump's orbit conspired with those efforts.</p><p>"There is no place in public discourse for lies and misinformation to defraud citizens of their right to vote," said Seth DuCharme, the acting U.S. attorney in Brooklyn and a holdover from the Trump administration. "With Mackey's arrest, we serve notice that those who would subvert the democratic process in this manner cannot rely on the cloak of Internet anonymity to evade responsibility for their crimes."</p><p>The charging documents say that Mackey's main Twitter accounts, @Ricky_Vaughn99, had 58,000 followers at the time the social media behemoth got wind of his efforts and suspended the account just days before the 2016 election. Many of his posts that fall retweeted Trump and promoted white nationalist and racist views and conspiracy theories about voter fraud by Democrats. </p><p><div class="x12"><div class="htlad-Desktop_Content_Banner"></div></div></p><p>The MIT Media Lab had rated it the 107th most important influencer of the upcoming presidential contest — ahead of such accounts as those belonging to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, "Late Show" host Stephen Colbert and NBC News.</p><p>In 2018, HuffPost revealed Mackey was the person posing as Vaughn and detailed his connections to the far right, labeling him "Trump's most influential white nationalist troll."</p><p>The alias for Mackey, who lives in Vermont but was arrested in Florida, appears to be a reference to Charlie Sheen's character in the 1989 film "Major League," a convicted car thief with bad eyesight but significant pitching talent. If convicted, he faces up to 10 years in prison. </p>
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Franklin Jácome/ACG/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Donald Trump reminds Botsford of how other autocrats, like Ecuador's Rafael Correa, combined falsehoods and grievance politics to create an enemy.
It can happen here: Latin America's lessons about autocrats unpunished
Jan 21 2021
Botsford, a contributing editor, for The Fulcrum, has spent most of his career providing strategic advice to more than a dozen Fortune 500 companies doing business in Latin America.
<p>
Living and working in Latin America most of the time since the 1970s has meant living through dozens of governmental switches — among democratic, communist and fascist systems.<br>
</p><p>
Witnessing the forces that ebbed and flowed with the political winds, democratic institutions created in the early 19th century were repeatedly assaulted.
</p><p>
And in recent weeks, I've become afraid the United States has chosen to follow that region's sorry lead. It's a fear that will not go away any time soon — even though Donald Trump is at last safely far from the White House and, in Joe Biden, the Oval Office is once again occupied by someone totally committed to upholding democratic norms and the rule of law.
</p><p>
Not even an American president can single handedly, let alone quickly, reverse the toxic national creep toward autocracy we have suffered the past four years.
</p><p>
That's why witnessing the insurrection in the Capitol on live TV this month, and the memories that have haunted us all since, brought me back immediately to my life south of the border. The similarities are striking.
</p><p><p style="text-align: center;" id="sufn"><a style="font-weight: bold;margin:40px auto;font-size:2rem" href="https://thefulcrum.us/st/newsletters">Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter </a></p></p><p>
In Latin America, bloody insurrections are the currency of ruthless political ambition.
</p><p>
The call to come to Washington to hear the executive's command for a march on the legislature was reminiscent of other regimes' call for rallies in their capitals — from Brazil in 1979 to Peru in 1992, Mexico in 1995 to Argentina in 2016.
</p><p>
The people heeded those calls out of coercion and in fervor.
</p><p>
Many get coerced through the threatened loss of government benefits, always tempered with free food, merchandise and even transportation. And because casting a ballot is a legal (if generally pointless) obligation across the region, local organizers not only delivered people to the rallies but then made sure they deliver their votes.
</p><p>
Fervor is readily achieved at these rallies, and no more easily than when the marquee speaker is a pathological liar. Trump's technique was startlingly reminiscent of how earlier autocrats — think Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega since the 1980s and Ecuador's Rafael Correa for a decade ending in 2015 — combined blatant falsehoods and grievance politics to concoct a convenient enemy. (The news media as "the enemy of the people" is always first in line.) The strongmen invent facts and concoct conspiracies in order to brainwash or gaslight their core supporters so they can be kept under the leader's command and control.
</p><p><div class="x12"><div class="htlad-Desktop_Content_Banner"></div></div></p><p>
But, to be fair to the Latin American leaders of the past, their words have usually been more nuanced (or coded) than the blatant orders issued by Trump and his allies on Jan. 6. And, once the throng he exhorted had arrived on Capitol Hill, they found alarmingly little resistance — so reminiscent of "free zones," as they're called in Latin America.
</p><p>
Those are when demagogues utilize loyal civilian armed militias to intimidate the masses, often by embedding them within the crowds at their rallies to incite passions and perform the dirty work. The strongmen use these militias to give themselves plausible deniability. Law enforcement is told to stand down, or to offer only the most perfunctory resistance, so the militias can operate in these free zones.
</p><p>
Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, for example, has used such paramilitary mobs to his benefit since 2017, ever since his party lost elections. Just last year he had them occupy the Palacio Federal Legislativo in order to block access by the majority of legislators opposed to him.
</p><p>
Free to act, the autocrats escalate. They find excuses to lock down Congress whenever their party loses power at the ballot box. To prevent that from happening again, they rig the elections and suppress the vote to assure their party wins — and Congress reopens, with opposition leaders imprisoned and the political rights of the people denied.
</p><p>
Another lesson from the region's history: Trump is out of power, but maybe not for long unless there's accountability for his and others' role in fomenting a coup against a legitimate democratic government. All who were involved in whipping up the base, and aiding and abetting the lies, must be called out.
</p><p>
If not, either Trump or future dictators will feel empowered to advance their agenda. That's what's happened across Latin America over the past half-century when out-of-control regimes went unpunished.
</p><p>
Accountability can take different forms. The political sort can be swift, but the judicial kind takes more time.
</p><p>
And so the autocrat must be stripped of power immediately. In this, we are fortunate Trump's time was up just two nerve-wracking weeks after the Capitol siege. But the Senate should still follow the House and send a message to his followers that there are consequences for his actions.
</p><p>
Concern that following through on impeachment will only enrage and infuriate his followers is naive at a minimum — and a form of complicity from those who now aim to victimize, distract or obstruct.
</p><p>
There is no difference between the terrorist mob and those who enabled and unleashed it with the Big Lie. Apologetic rhetoric now is too late.
</p><p>
Trump left office with his allies still laying the groundwork for reclaiming power in 2024 — replicating exactly how dictators I've lived under assured their return. (It took only four years on the outs before Cristina Fernandez returned to power in Argentina last year.) That many years go by very fast in a country where an autocrat's opponents focus only on putting out the most obvious fires left behind.
</p><p>
The time for finding remedies can come later — and the solutions will be the same as those offered up to Latin American nations when their democracies were imperiled. Strengthening institutions is where it must always begin.
</p><p>
But the history of that region shows very clearly that there must be accountability right away, or the United States will not be able to successfully move on from these events. If Trump and his allies still in authority face no consequences, then Jan. 6, 2021, will be remembered as only the beginning.
</p>
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