monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

The reality curated by “The Bearded Patriot” and “The Wolf of Washington” is dismal.

The websites tell of nonstop riots and “crazed leftists.” They warn of online censorship and the wiles of an “anarchist billionaire,” a reference to George Soros, the liberal investor and Holocaust survivor.

The material is tailor-made to inflame right-wing passions. But its underlying purpose is to collect email addresses and other personal information from impassioned readers, whose inboxes then fill up with narrowly targeted ads. The effect is to monetize the anger stoked by misleading political content — for as much as $2,500 per list of contacts.

An investigation by Alethea Group, an organization combating disinformation that draws its name from the Greek word for “truth,” has linked the operation to Mark S. Evans Jr., a self-proclaimed “online multimillionaire” who affixes “DM,” for “dealmaker,” to his name. The network of 178 sites, at least half of which are politically themed and share visual as well as technical features, is designed to harvest email addresses, which are then sold to commercial brands, according to Alethea Group’s analysis, and possibly also to political campaigns.
[...]
“This is for-profit fearmongering enhanced by aggressive data collection,” said Cindy Otis, Alethea Group’s vice president of analysis. The digital marketing apparatus made possible by the sites, including lucrative data profiles of their visitors, “comes with the capability to support political consulting or campaign work,” said Otis, a former CIA analyst and the author of “True or False: A CIA Analyst’s Guide to Spotting Fake News.”

Email marketing and campaign list-building are not cutting-edge tactics. But the findings by Alethea Group shed light on a practice further to the extreme, one devoid of any apparent newsgathering mission and unfolding almost entirely in the shadows, with recycled content and stock images.

Peter F. Aquart, an associate of Evans listed as an agent in several of his ventures, posted this summer about “skip tracing,” a practice associated with bounty hunters that involves determining a person’s whereabouts and other private information. “Who are you using?” he asked on Facebook. Around the same time, Aquart hinted at one possible use for the more robust records he was pursuing. He wrote on LinkedIn that he was seeking support for a mass-texting program, a service increasingly central to political campaigns.

“Pairing collected data with things like skip tracing software and bulk messaging apps — it’s where a lot of these networks are headed,” Otis said. “It is the future of political disinformation.”
[...]
Several LLCs operated by the two men, including Rightside Data and Direct Mailers Group, are set up to sell the data collected from the right-wing websites. The firms provide contact details that are also associated with some of the news sites, and a media and marketing specialist listed as a Rightside employee, Andy Pangerl, posted ads in May claiming access to “30 Conservative Leaning Email Lists.”

The lists, he wrote, include “1.5 million baby boomers.” Several months earlier, a Facebook page associated with the company advertised a list collected from one of its sites, Real American Pundit. It offered 173,000 email addresses for $2,500.

A LinkedIn profile for Rightside Data, which has also done business as Cash Flow Lead Gen, says it is “focused on delivering highly targeted, quality email leads … with our newsletter assets.”

The description adds, “We drive clicks.”
[...]
Partisan interests do not appear to be a primary motivation for the people behind the online network. Pangerl — whose LinkedIn profile indicates that he formerly worked for Newsmax Media, a conservative outlet whose email lists were tapped for online fundraising by President Trump’s campaign in 2016 — has made pro-Trump posts, including a tweet ridiculing a Democratic primary debate and tagging the president and his eldest son and daughter, along with a range of right-wing pundits.

Evans, however, rarely posts overtly political messages, though he does use news events to advance his business philosophy. Several days after Trump’s election in 2016, he titled a post, “President-Elect Trump’s 100-Day plan …” The eye-catching headline was only a hook to tell clients that the president’s plans were less important than the question of how they were bettering their own lives, as Evans wrote, asking, “So what’s your 100-day plan?”

The tactic speaks to Trump’s place at the center of viral clickbait.

“The worst of the Web used to be cat videos,” said Joshua Braun, a scholar of online media at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. “Now it’s Trump or viral hoaxes around coronavirus.”
... ... ...

MontereyJack wrote:

Under COVID-19, all the econonic gains have been lost., the economy is tanking, and unemployment is far higher than it was when he got obama's thriving economy.

Don't be an asshole and blame Trump for COVID and the results of shutting everything down.

I think Biden could well end up having the most progressive policies of any president. He will have a lot of progressives making it their business to hold him accountable.

https://www.vox.com/21322478/joe-biden-overton-window-bidenism

The Unique U.S. Failure to Control the Virus

A travel policy that fell short

In retrospect, one of Mr. Trump’s first policy responses to the virus appears to have been one of his most promising.

On Jan. 31, his administration announced that it was restricting entry to the United States from China: Many foreign nationals — be they citizens of China or other countries — would not be allowed into the United States if they had been to China in the previous two weeks.

It was still early in the spread of the virus. The first cases in Wuhan, China, had been diagnosed about a month before, and the first announced case in the United States had come on Jan. 21. In announcing the new travel policy, Alex M. Azar II, the secretary of health and human services, declared that the virus posed “a public health emergency.” Mr. Trump described the policy as his “China ban.”

After the Trump administration acted, several other countries quickly announced their own restrictions on travel from China, including Japan, Vietnam and Australia.

But it quickly became clear that the United States’ policy was full of holes. It did not apply to immediate family members of American citizens and permanent residents returning from China, for example. In the two months after the policy went into place, almost 40,000 people arrived in the United States on direct flights from China.

Even more important, the policy failed to take into account that the virus had spread well beyond China by early February. Later data would show that many infected people arriving in the United States came from Europe. (The Trump administration did not restrict travel from Europe until March and exempted Britain from that ban despite a high infection rate there.)

The administration’s policy also did little to create quarantines for people who entered the United States and may have had the virus.

Authorities in some other places took a far more rigorous approach to travel restrictions.

South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan largely restricted entry to residents returning home. Those residents then had to quarantine for two weeks upon arrival, with the government keeping close tabs to ensure they did not leave their home or hotel. South Korea and Hong Kong also tested for the virus at the airport and transferred anyone who was positive to a government facility.

Australia offers a telling comparison. Like the United States, it is separated from China by an ocean and is run by a conservative leader — Scott Morrison, the prime minister. Unlike the United States, it put travel restrictions at the center of its virus response.

Australian officials noticed in March that the travel restrictions they had announced on Feb. 1 were not preventing the virus from spreading. So they went further.

On March 27, Mr. Morrison announced that Australia would no longer trust travelers to isolate themselves voluntarily. The country would instead mandate that everyone arriving from overseas, including Australian citizens, spend two weeks quarantined in a hotel.

The protocols were strict. As people arrived at an airport, the authorities transported them directly to hotels nearby. People were not even allowed to leave their hotel to exercise. The Australian military helped enforce the rules.

Around the same time, several Australian states with minor outbreaks shut their own borders to keep out Australians from regions with higher rates of infection. That hardening of internal boundaries had not happened since the 1918 flu pandemic, said Ian Mackay, a virologist in Queensland, one of the first states to block entry from other areas.

The United States, by comparison, imposed few travel restrictions, either for foreigners or American citizens. Individual states did little to enforce the rules they did impose.

“People need a bit more than a suggestion to look after their own health,” said Dr. Mackay, who has been working with Australian officials on their pandemic response. “They need guidelines, they need rules — and they need to be enforced.”

There is a difference between a parliamentary system and a presidential one, and in the latter resignations over policy failures are rare. But as an American I can’t help but be struck that Diab and his colleagues resigned over the deaths of some 200 Lebanese, while the death toll from COVID-19 in the US, according to Johns Hopkins, has reached 163,462. Trump and his cabinet cannot be blamed for all of those deaths. They are, however, responsible for a hefty chunk of them, often estimated at 40 percent. That percentage is based on Trump’s reluctance to initiate a lockdown in late February, waiting instead until mid-March. But since then there have been many more missteps, and new information has surfaced.

It turns out that we didn’t have a national response to the pandemic in part because Jared Kushner concluded that it would mainly hit states that usually vote Democratic, like New York. We still don’t have a nationally backed system of rapid testing, and we don’t have nearly enough contact tracers. There is in short no Federal policy or significant Federal aid and coordination to country health departments. Then, Trump rushed the country to reopen on Memorial Day, before the curve had been flattened. He persuaded his lackeys, who hope to succeed him, like Florida governor Ron DeSantis, to open too early. He bullied and threatened governors like Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer, who would not go along, and in the latter case encouraged the occupation of the State House by armed right wing Trumpies. He has politicized wearing masks, which reduce transmission by 80%, and discouraged people from wearing them. He has held large rallies in Tulsa and elsewhere, which certainly spread the disease.

Lebanon’s Leaders Resign over deaths of 200, but Trump refuses Accountability for 163,462 Deaths

Report: New York State’s Corona Nursing Home Deaths Under-Counted By Thousands

Unlike other states, New York will not count a CoronaVirus death as a nursing home death, if the patent has left the premises before thy pass. In other words, if a patient catches China Virus while living in a New York State nursing home and sent to a hospital where they die, it does not count as a nursing home death. nursing home corona deaths

If New York States tracked COVID-19 nursing home deaths like other states, its CoronaVirus nursing home death toll would be significantly higher than the 6,600+ reported.

No Wonder Why Cuomo Rejects An Independent Investigation

Mark Levin Exposes 'Shocking Lie' the Washington Post Wrote About His Interview With AG Barr

Mark R. Levin
@marklevinshow
Replying to @marklevinshow
2. "Despite Barr’s claims, there have been no arrests or solid proof connecting antifa to violence at BLM protests, Wash Post’s Fact Checker reported in June. The far-right boogaloo movement, meanwhile, has been tied to a murder & several bomb plots aimed at escalating violence."
8:07 AM · Aug 10, 2020

OUTRAGEOUS! Xfinity-Comcast Bans GOP Candidate Laura Loomer from Sending Texts and Emails

An executive should not be rewarded with reelection for violating his oath of office.