We’ve got a lot to get to on today’s BradCast, as voters in Massachusetts go to the polls today with a couple of very interesting primary races (results tomorrow!), and as the rest of us are now counting the days (63 of them), until general Election Day, with both hope and trepidation. [Audio link to show is posted below summary.]
Among the mountains o’ stuff covered on today’s program…
- After years of our reporting on the very successful, perhaps irreversible, decades-long effort by the Right to brainwash its followers, we open today with a few thoughts about a similar, if not quite as successful (though it’s getting closer), effort to brainwash those on the Left. That effort to brainwash the Left, like the scheme on the Right, is also carried out by folks on the Right or those who support them. (And yes, that means we have a few words today about the still-misreported facts regarding the Hillary/Bernie race from 2016);
- We have more evidence of attempts to manipulate the Left in today’s announcement from Facebook that, based on a tip from the FBI, the social media outlet has shut down several fake accounts created to support a Russia-related propaganda scheme targeting the Left in hopes of undermining Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. The operation reportedly included a phony media outlet calling itself “Peace Data”, in hopes of appealing to progressives in advance of this year’s election;
- Information of that sort, as we discuss, is — or should be — useful to voters. Nonetheless, with just over two months until Election Day, with Donald Trump’s top intelligence officers having recently warned that Russia is taking active measures, once again, to undermine the Presidential election in support of Trump, his recently-appointed Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe notified Congress over the weekend that he will no longer offer in-person briefings to lawmakers regarding foreign attempts to interfere in the election. The claim, offered by Trump himself without facts to back it up, is that members of Congress were illegally leaking certain information from the intelligence community, and that the information leaked was also “wrong”. No evidence was given to support that charge, and while Trump claimed the decision to end intelligence briefings to Congress was made by him and Ratcliffe, evidence suggests that it was, instead, a directive from Trump himself. For some reason;
- Speaking of the November 3rd election, the dirty tricks are now underway, as revealed by a new robocall to some Democratic-leaning Michigan voters falsely warning that signing up to vote by mail will result in voters contact information being added to a database for tracking down arrest warrants, credit card debt collection and “mandatory vaccines”. None of that is true. Though you should expect much more of it in the weeks ahead;
- Also in Michigan, the state’s Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, recently won a court case filed by rightwingers attempting to prevent her from sending absentee ballot applications to all of the state’s 7.7 million voters. The ruling — in a state which Trump is said to have won by just over 11,000 votes in 2016 — comes in the wake of his misfired threat to withhold federal funding from Michigan in a tweet in which he falsely claimed the “rogue Secretary of State” was planning to send out actual ballots (as opposed to applications) to all voters;
- And while Trump and his minions have been suing in state after state in (usually failed) efforts to make voting more difficult during the global pandemic that he failed to control — even attempting to block the use of secure absentee ballot drop-boxes in key battleground states like Pennsylvania — another newly elected Democratic Sec. of State, Jena Griswold in Colorado, announced today that her state will offer “at least 368 mail ballot drop boxes for the General Election, an increase of 49% since I was elected in 2018!”;
- Also today, a somewhat bizarre comment from a reader/listener in response to our coverage yesterday of L.A. County’s disastrous, unverifiable new touchscreen voting system, in which the commenters offers several odd allegations amid of my nearly 20 years of critical coverage of e-voting and asks “whose side are you on?”;
- Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report in the wake of catastrophic week for the climate and the Republican National Convention…
The BradCast
with Brad Friedman
9/1/2020
Democracy, Disinformation, Dirty Tricks: ‘BradCast’ 9/1/2020 | Foreign and domestic election interference continues. So does our effort to help you make sense of what's actually going on... · · · · · Democracy, Disinformation, Dirty Tricks: ‘BradCast’ 9/1/2020 | Foreign and domestic election interference continues. So does our effort to help you make sense of what's actually going on...
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This disinformation, for liberals, information needs to get disseminated widely. I just received an article from a friend that looks suspicious….
https://eand.co/this-is-why-it-...e-7b96ad6e40a5
I asked him to verify the legitimacy of the article and I sent him this podcast.
You are doing incredible work,
Rouanna