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accidentalslayer · 9 months

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Hello there, weary traveler. 🎃

My name is Alice Hart (she/they, millennial) and you've come across my little pumpkin patch of a blog where I mostly autumn!post, reblog things I like, and share my 3 am thoughts. It's also become my bpd (& associated) vent cemetery. Look hard enough and you'll probably find where I buried the bodies. If you like my collection of aesthetics and weird shit, don't be afraid to follow me. Or send me an ask!

❌ DNI: Transphobes, racists, MAP & MAP sympathizers, sexists, ableists, radfems, homophobes, conservatives, slutshamers, Trump-supporters, fat-shamers, blank blogs, super boring porn blogs with thin conventionally pretty women that look like they could be porn stock photos, !!!ana/binge/ED/weight shaming blogs!!! Or anyone who spews hate against spirituality, witchcraft, and astrology. This includes anti-shifters!

Some random facts about me:

🕯️Am neurodivergent ADHD insomniac with intense hyperfixations that switch around every other week and BPD traits that make life insufferable at best. I'm more of a creature in the shape of a person. I'm just tired. I want to be a pumpkin and dance under moon instead of whatever this crap is.

🍁 I collect tea cups, tea pots, and tea accessories. I also have a massive collection of tea from all around the world.

🕸️ I practice witchcraft and have done oracle readings & birthchart interpretations for people since I was sixteen. I really feel intune with the stars and the moon.

🍬 I'm a system.

😈 Interests include: mythology, philosophy, psychology, travel, reading, video games, art, cooking & baking, sewing, sharing headcanons & lore with friends, and having conversations with the stars.

System Information:

[Wheels Within Wheels/The Burning Eyes System]

Body Age: 35

Collective Pronouns: It/Its

System Type/Origin: Traumagenic, formed because of a near-death experience at the age of 16.

Host & Personal Lore: Tired artist & neurospicy girl with way too many projects who gets super excited about many things. Invested in tarot cards, astrology, lucid dreaming, and spiritual exploration. Loves celebrating holidays (personal, global, and completely made-up!). Hates intense heat, eggs, poor communication styles, & season 5, 6, and 7 of Once Upon a Time. Avid traveler. Will one day be famous.

[Members of System & Information]

✨ Aestriel Iao Sabaoth ✨

Oldest & 1st member of the system. Holds the role of Protector, Gatekeeper, and Helper. Was formed as a direct response to childhood trauma. Presents as a being made of burning eyes, infinite wheels, and prismatic rainbow flame. Mostly dry, direct, emotionless. Gives amazing advice despite how much that advice hurts. Doesn't understand the messy condition of humanity. Sees the big picture. Claims to be a cosmological figure and not mortal in origin. Is very personally annoying to me, the host, who just wants to be a people. Will come out if host/my safety is threatened in some way. Or to give advice to others…although who the advice is given to and when is completely unpredictable.

🔪 The Author's Pen 🔪

Arguably as old as Aestriel; although stood in the background for quite some time until more recently. 2nd member of the system. Holds the role of Persecutor and Memory-Holder. Was formed as a direct response to hardship sustained while being homeless and emotional abuse. Presents as a being made of black ink, gnashing teeth, blood, and the sharp edge of a quill or sword. Antagonistic, manipulative, acutely socially aware, and willing to put itself before anything else. Interesting conversationalist but proceed with caution. Would rather delve into hedonism than uphold the moral stand that Aestriel or Host does. Just wants to see a reaction. Comes out more frequently than Aestriel and even upon request, although insists that upon some kind of compensation in return. Also gives advice, mostly bad. Less unpredictable, though. Claims to love humanity, is some kind of abomination formed when the first word of the first language was uttered.

Other important details: Would highly recommend that you do not talk to Pen. If it ever decides to pop out, that is. I try to keep it away from anyone else but myself.

About this blog:

🍯 Originally, this was a fandom blog for my newest obsession: The Vampire Diaries & The Originals. Somehow, it became a Halloween & Autumn!posting blog for times when I'm procrastinating on writing or bored. I use the tag #its always october in my brain.

⛈️ I'm currently working on a project called Dawn Misplaced. It's an Originals fanfiction featuring a Darling!Reader who's a vampire slayer. I post my chapters on here underneath the tag #dawn misplaced or #accidental writes. My A03 is here. If you have an interesting TVD or Originals imagine, I might consider writing it. Shoot me your idea into my asks! Yandere content, consider before engaging.

⚠️ UPDATE: This project and yandere content has been put on indefinite pause until I can find the inspiration to write about it/find a streaming service that has The Originals. 💀 Netflix axed it so I can't watch it anymore. I am very sad. ⚠️ UPDATE [11/23/2023]: This blog has begun to stray away from yandere fanfiction and onto being just my main blog where I shitpost at 3 am, share autumncore aesthetics, and hope to begin sharing my personal art. Also I expect there to be venting mixed in too. I should probably make a tag for that, shouldn't I?? I've also made a new blog for shifting, astral projection, and dream interpretation. ⚠️ UPDATE [12/31/2023]: I've decided that I'm going to put my shifting/astral projection blog on here. I've already started working on my Masterpost but have yet to think of an appropriate tag for it. It'll probably come next year. I'm so excited for 2024!!

🪦 Sometimes, I share my personal thoughts here. I'm sure I'm going to get more obnoxious about that the longer I have this blog running.

💀 If you like or reblog any of my posts, there's a chance that I'll look at your profile and follow you randomly. Feel free to block & softblock me if I'm not your vibe, I won't mind. Also, if you're a porn blog or one of those blogs without a title/literally nothing posted on it, I'm going to block you outright. Unless you have really artful porn on your blog.

My taglist:

#🔪 slayer says 🔪

My normal unhinged chatter about anything and everything that goes through my brain. Some might be a little vent-y and include tw warnings.

# 🎃 accidental asks 🎃

My responses to any questions & asks thrown at me.

#🩸 accidental art 🩸

My personal art dump where all my doodles go.

#its always october in my brain

Where all my Autumnposting and Halloween stuff goes.

#so relatable it's causing me 5+ psychic damage for every moment I stare at it

Things that are painfully relevant to me.

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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year

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The learned helplessness of Pete Buttigieg

The apocalyptic airline meltdown over the Christmas break stranded thousands of Americans, ruining their vacations and costing them a fortune in unexpected fees. It wasn't just Southwest Airlines' meltdown, either - as stranded fliers sought alternatives, airlines like AA raised the price of some domestic coach tickets to over $10,000.

This didn't come out of nowhere. Southwest's growth strategy has seen the airlines add more planes and routes without a comparable investment in back-end systems, including crew scheduling systems. SWA's unions have spent years warning the public that their employer's IT infrastructure was one crisis away from total collapse.

But successive administrations have failed to act on those warnings. Under Obama and Trump, the DoT was content to let "the market" discipline the monopoly carriers, though both administrations were happy to wave through anticompetitive mergers that weakened the power of markets to provide that discipline. Obama waved through the United/Continental merger and the Southwest/AirTran merger, while Trump waved through Virgin/Alaska.

While these firms were allowed to privatize their gains, Uncle Sucker paid for their losses. Trump handed the airlines $54 billion in covid relief, which the airlines squandered on stock buybacks and executive bonuses, while gutting their own employee rosters with early retirement buyouts:

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-05-04/airlines-got-the-sweetest-coronavirus-bailout-around

Incredibly, the airlines got even worse under the Biden administration. In the first six months of 2022, US airlines cancelled more flights than they had in all of 2021, while the airlines increased their profits by 45% - and kept it, rather than using it to pay back the $10b in unpaid refunds they owed to fliers:

https://www.economicliberties.us/press-release/economic-liberties-releases-model-legislation-to-eliminate-airlines-liability-shield/

Dozens of state attorneys general - Republicans and Democrats - wrote to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, begging him to take action on the airlines. After months without action, they wrote again, just days before the Christmas meltdown:

https://www.levernews.com/state-officials-warned-buttigieg-about-airline-mess/

For his part, Secretary Buttigieg claimed he was doing all he could, trumpeting the order to refund fliers as evidence of his muscular regulatory approach (recall that these refunds have not been paid). He assured Americans that the situation "is going to get better by the holidays."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FlD6fHq8-g&t=145s

But the numbers tell the tale. Under Buttigieg, the DOT "issued fewer enforcement orders in 2021 than in any single year of the Trump and Obama administrations."

https://www.economicliberties.us/press-release/economic-liberties-releases-model-legislation-to-eliminate-airlines-liability-shield/

As the crisis raged, enraged fliers and opponents of unchecked corporate power blamed Buttigieg. So did opportunistic, bad-faith Republicans looking to score political points. The "liberal" media lumped all this criticism together, insisting that Buttigieg had done everything in his power and declaring it unreasonable to expect the Transport Secretary to prevent transportation catastrophes:

https://www.levernews.com/the-partisan-ghost-in-the-media-machine/

Buttigieg's defenders trotted out a laundry list of excuses for the failure, ranging from the nonsensical to the implausible to the contradictory - Pete's Army continued to claim that the aviation meltdown was the weather's fault, even after Buttigieg himself went on national TV to say this wasn't the case:

https://twitter.com/GMA/status/1608075800254767105?s=20&t=wmaJq3OWU0r0e6TS9V-9sA

Buttigieg is the Secretary of a powerful administrative agency, and as such, he has broad powers. Neither he nor his predecessors have had the courage to wield that power, all of them evincing a kind of learned helplessness in the face of industry lobbying. But there is a difference between being powerless and acting powerless.

To see what a fully operational battle-station looks like, cast your eye upon Lina Khan, chair of the FTC, another agency that has a long history of dormancy in the face of corporate power, but which Khan has transformed - not through ideology, but through competence. Khan - and her fellow Biden administration trustbusters Jonathan Kantor and the recently departed Tim Wu - have an encyclopedic knowledge of their powers, and they haven't been shy about using them:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff

Over the Christmas break, even as the airline industry was stranding Americans far from their families, Khan proposed a rule to ban noncompete agreements, which are widely used to prevent low-waged workers like fast-food cashiers from quitting their jobs and seeking better pay from competitors:

https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/antitrust-enforcers-to-ban-indentured

These are, as Matt Stoller writes, a form of indentured servitude, used by private equity crooks to lock in their workforces. "30% of hair stylists works under a non-compete, as do 45% of family physicians." Noncompetes destroy the livelihoods of workers who start their own businesses, too: "One comment to the FTC came from a graphic designers for signage who was bankrupted by a lawsuit from her control-hungry former boss and a small town judge":

https://www.regulations.gov/comment/FTC-2019-0093-0015

Noncompetes are a scourge, and there should be bipartisan agreement on this. If you're a Democrat who believes in labor rights, noncompetes are manifestly unfair. But that's also true if you're a Republican who believes in competition and the power of entrepreneurship.

Nevertheless, noncompetes have trundled on, with neither Congress nor the administrative branch showing the courage to act - until now. Khan's proposed rule bypasses Congressional inaction by invoking powers that she already has, under Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act.

Section 5 gives the FTC broad powers to prohibit "unfair methods of competition" - an incredibly broad power to wield, and one that the FTC hasn't bothered to use since the 1970s (!):

https://casetext.com/case/national-petroleum-refiners-assn-v-f-t-c

Which brings me back to Secretary Buttigieg and the airlines. Because Chair Khan isn't the only federal regulator with these broad powers. As David Dayen writes for The American Prospect, "the Department of Transportation has the exact same authority":

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/ftc-noncompete-airline-flight-cancellation-buttigieg/

Under USC40 Section 41712(a), Buttigieg has the power to unilaterally ban transportation industry practices that are "unfair and deceptive" or "unfair methods of competition." Per the DOT's own guidance, this provision is "modeled on Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act":

https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCODE-2020-title49/pdf/USCODE-2020-title49-subtitleVII-partA-subpartii-chap417-subchapI-sec41712.pdf

The are a lot more recent examples of the DOT using this power than there are of the FTC using its Section 5 authority, like the Tarmac Delay Rule. But as Robert Kuttner writes, the airlines reneged on their end of the $54b bailout, slashing staffing levels and failing to invest in IT modernization - examples of the "unfair and deceptive" practices that the DOT could intervene to prevent:

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/ftc-noncompete-airline-flight-cancellation-buttigieg/

As Dayen writes, "The definition of 'deceptive' is 'likely to mislead a consumer, acting reasonably under the circumstances.' If the airline scheduled a flight, took money for the flight, and knew it would have to cancel it (or, if you prefer, knew it would have to cancel some flights, all of which it took money for), that seems plainly deceptive."

This is the same authority that Buttigieg used to fine 5 non-US airlines (and Frontier, the tiny US carrier that flies 2% of domestic routes) for cancelling their flights - his signature achievement to date. But as Dayen points out, this authority isn't limited to taking action after the fact.

The DOT can - and should - act before Americans' flights are canceled. It can use its authority under 41712(a) to "say that the cancellation itself is an unfair and deceptive practice and issue a fine for each canceled flight." It could "promulgate a rule saying that cancellations due to insufficient crews, or due to dysfunctional computer scheduling systems, are unfair and deceptive, with stiff fines for each violation."

Both of these were within Buttigieg's power months ago, when the State AGs begged him to take action to prevent the mounting epidemic of cancellations. Both of these are within his power now. Heads of federal agencies are among the most powerful people in the world and they can use that power to materially improve the lives of the American people.

Just ask Lina Khan.

Image: Gage Skidmore (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/gageskidmore/49560191032

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

[Image ID: A vector drawing of a man slumped at a desk with his face on his laptop. The man's face has been replaced with that of Transport Secretary Pete Buttigieg. He has a DOT logo on his shoulder. There are also DOT logos on a coffee-cup on the desk and behind the desk, on the wall.]

#pete buttigieg #lina khan #ftc #dot #regulation #Section 41712a #airlines #noncompetes #mayo pete #david dayen #the american prospect #matt stoller

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moderat50 · 12 hours

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DJT Stock: Truth Social Crashes. Trump & Exexcutives Plan On Bailing

Trump & the executives plan on bailing when their stock lock expires. Supporters will be left holding the bag. Analyst warned the stock was way over priced & the business' financials were not good. At current prices, Trump & the executives will make a lot of money. The remaining stock holders will be the losers. The executives are trying to blame shorters for drastic price drop. No surprise.

#democrats #republicans #election #trump #Biden #investing #stock market #catholic #christians #nba #mlb #swifties

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bernardlepson · 17 days

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US stock trading sharing

As long as you have any investment questions, you can ask me and I can help you solve any investment problems. My confidence comes from the recognition of my abilities

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 1 year

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Max Gustafson

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

March 12, 2023

Heather Cox Richardson

At 6:15 this evening, Secretary of the Treasury Janet L. Yellen, Federal Reserve Board Chair Jerome H. Powell, and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) Chairman Martin J. Gruenberg announced that Secretary Yellen has signed off on measures to enable the FDIC to fully protect everyone who had money in Silicon Valley Bank, Santa Clara, California, and Signature Bank, New York. They will have access to all of their money starting Monday, March 13. None of the losses associated with this resolution, the statement said, “will be borne by the taxpayer.”

But, it continued, “Shareholders and certain unsecured debtholders will not be protected. Senior management has also been removed. Any losses to the Deposit Insurance Fund to support uninsured depositors will be recovered by a special assessment on banks, as required by law.”

The statement ended by assuring Americans that “the U.S. banking system remains resilient and on a solid foundation, in large part due to reforms that were made after the financial crisis that ensured better safeguards for the banking industry. Those reforms combined with today's actions demonstrate our commitment to take the necessary steps to ensure that depositors' savings remain safe.”

It’s been quite a weekend.

On Friday, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) failed in the largest bank failure since 2008. At the end of December 2022, SVB appears to have had about $209 billion in total assets and about $175 billion in deposits. This made SVB the sixteenth largest bank in the U.S., big in its sector but small compared with the more than $3 trillion JPMorgan Chase. This is the first bank failure of the Biden presidency (while Donald Trump Jr. tweeted that he had not heard of any bank failures during his father’s presidency, there were sixteen, eight of which happened before the pandemic). In fact, generally, a few banks fail every year; it is an oddity that none failed in 2021 or 2022.

The failure of SVB created shock waves for three reasons. First, SVB was the major bank for technology start-ups, so it involved much of a single sector of the economy. Second, only about $8 billion of the $173 billion worth of deposits in SVB were less than the $250,000 that the FDIC insures, meaning that the companies who had made those deposits might not get their money back quickly and thus might not be able to make payrolls, sparking a larger crisis. Third, there was concern that the problems that plagued SVB might cause other banks to fail, as well.

What seems to have happened, though, appears to be specific to SVB. Bloomberg’s Matt Levine explained it most clearly:

As the bank for start-ups, which have a lot of cash from investors and the initial public offering of stock, SVB had lots of deposits. But start-up companies don’t need much in the way of loans because they’ve just gotten so much cash and they don’t yet have fixed assets. So, rather than balancing deposits with loans that fluctuate with interest rates and thus keep a bank on an even keel, SVB’s directors took a gamble that the Federal Reserve would not raise interest rates. They invested in long-term Treasury bonds that paid better interest rates than short-term securities. But when, in fact, interest rates went up, the value of those long-term bonds sank.

For most banks, higher interest rates are good news because they can charge more for loans. But for SVB, they hurt.

Then, because SVB concentrated on start-ups, they had another problem. Start-ups are also hurt by rising interest rates because they tend to promise to deliver returns in the long term, which is fine so long as interest rates stay steadily low, as they have been now for years. But as interest rates go up, investors tend to like faster returns than most start-ups can deliver. They take their money to places that are going to see returns sooner. For SVB, that meant their depositors began to need some of that money they had dumped into the bank and started to withdraw their deposits.

So SVB sold securities at a loss to cover those deposits. Other investors panicked as they saw SVB selling at a loss and losing deposits, and they, too, started yanking their money out of the bank, collapsing it. Banks that have a more diverse client base are less likely to lose everyone all at once.

The FDIC took control of the bank on Friday. On Sunday, regulators also shut down Signature Bank, based in New York, which was a major bank for the cryptocurrency industry. Another crypto-friendly bank, Silvergate, failed last week.

Congress created the FDIC under the Banking Act of 1933 to restore trust in the American banking system after more than a third of U.S. banks failed after the Great Crash of 1929, sparking runs on banks as depositors rushed to take out their money whenever rumors suggested a bank was in trouble, thus causing more failures. The FDIC is an independent agency that insures deposits, examines and supervises banks to make sure they’re healthy, and manages the fallout when they’re not. The FDIC is backed by the full faith and credit of the government, but it is not funded by the government. Member banks pay insurance dues to cover bank failures, and when that isn’t enough money, the FDIC can borrow from the federal government or issue debt.

Over the weekend, the crisis at SVB became a larger argument over the role of government in the protection of the economy. Tech leaders took to social media to insist that the government must cover all the deposits in the failed bank, not just the ones covered under FDIC. They warned that the companies whose deposits were uninsured would fail, taking down the rest of the economy with them.

Others noted that the very men who were arguing the government should protect all the depositors’ money, not just that protected under the FDIC, have been vocal in opposing both government regulation of their industry and government relief for student loan debt, suggesting that they hate government action…except for themselves. They also pointed out that in 2018, under Trump, Congress weakened government regulations for banks like SVB and that SVB’s president had been a leading advocate for weakening those regulations. Had those regulations been in place, they argue, SVB would have remained solvent.

It appears that Yellen, Powell, and Gruenberg, in consultation with the president (as required), concluded that the collapse of SVB and Signature Bank was a systemic threat to the nation’s whole financial system, or perhaps they concluded that the panic over that collapse—which is a different thing than the collapse itself—was a threat to the nation’s financial system. They apparently decided to backstop the banks to prevent more damage. But they are eager to remind people that they are not using taxpayer money to shore up a poorly managed bank.

Right now, this appears to leave us with two takeaways. The Biden administration had been considering tightening the banking regulations that were loosened under Trump, and it seems likely that the need for the federal government to step in to protect the depositors at SVB and Signature Bank will make it much harder for those opposed to regulation to keep that from happening. There will likely be increased pressure on the Biden administration to guard against helping out the wealthy and corporations rather than ordinary Americans.

And, perhaps even more important, the weekend of panic and fear over the collapse of just one major bank should make it clear that the Republicans’ threat to default on the U.S. debt, thus pulling the rug out from under the entire U.S. economy unless they get their way, is simply unthinkable.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#Finance #the economy #Heather Cox Richardson #Letters From An American #Banking regulation #bank collapse #bank failure #Max Gustafson #debt #student loan debt #venture capitalists

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ridenwithbiden · 1 month

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Just a few months ago, it was hard to see the ingredients of a Joe Biden comeback—even while squinting at the recipe.

The president began the election year with his approval rating at historic lows. He was trailing Donald Trump in almost all of the key battleground states, as well as in national polling averages. Influential liberals were so concerned that the octogenarian incumbent did not have another campaign in him that some were openly calling for him to be replaced as the nominee.

As the general election kicks off this spring, however, those calls have quieted—because Biden’s resurgence is coming into focus. While the president still faces serious obstacles to a second term, several important data points are lining up to demonstrate he is picking up badly needed momentum.

For the first time in a long time, there’s good news for Biden on the polling front. Gradual improvements in the battleground states along with an uptick in his approval rating led one Democratic strategist, Simon Rosenberg, to declare “the Biden bump.”

The boost is at the very least correlated with Biden’s fiery State of the Union address on March 7, when he repeatedly went after his “predecessor” and made sure to mix it up with Republicans in the chamber on a few occasions.

Since then, Biden’s team has continued the punchy, combative tone on display that night, using press releases to cheekily slam their legally challenged opponent as “Broke Don.”

On top of that, the Biden campaign has continued to flex what has always been its core strength: fundraising.

With a $53 million haul in February, the Biden campaign built on their already impressive financial advantage over Trump, who brought in only $20 million over the same period. The Biden campaign has $71 million in cash on hand, compared to just $33.5 million for Trump.

The tide is turning, a Biden adviser argued to The Daily Beast, and although they aren’t putting too much stock into any recent polling upticks, the president’s team is ready to seize upon April and May as a crucial time to ambush a wounded Trump campaign.

“It’s aggressive,” a source within the Biden campaign said, requesting anonymity to speak candidly of the mood inside the re-election team. “There’s a lot of travel, there’s a lot of work. It’s all exciting. We’re heading into this final fundraiser of the month with the former presidents [Obama and Clinton], but it’s aggressive.”

Taking advantage of a substantial fundraising lead, the Biden campaign is focusing on two key areas: travel and organizing.

Since his State of the Union, Biden has visited every major battleground state—typically pairing official White House stops with separate private campaign events—in an effort to demonstrate his ability to keep an energetic schedule.

Trump, on the other hand, has only done a rally in Ohio and another in the battleground state of Georgia since Super Tuesday. Otherwise, he’s mostly been confined to his Mar-a-Lago estate as he prepares to spend the second half of April and most of May stuck in a Manhattan court four days a week for the upcoming Stormy Daniels hush money trial.

Second, the Biden campaign is going full steam ahead on hiring in the battleground states, approaching 100 field offices with more than 130 staffers spread across eight major battleground states: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada, as well as North Carolina and New Hampshire.

Such investments mean that Biden can begin the crucial work of mobilizing voters early. The Trump campaign, by comparison, could not tell The Daily Beast whether they have made any additional hires or opened any field offices in the battleground states, beyond shifting over the same team focused on early primary and Super Tuesday states.

In an election which will likely be decided by less than tens of thousands of votes in a handful of battlegrounds, the Biden campaign is focusing on gaining as much as they can at the margins now to catch up to Trump.

Ramping up their field organizing, along with getting Biden on the road and in front of cameras to show he still has the energy to campaign at full throttle, is an opportunity they can’t afford to miss while Trump remains mired in legal and financial problems.

“I think the president is beginning to do the very important work that wins elections, which is travel the country, set the tone for what this election will be about, and build a coalition and build an operation that builds a winning coalition,” Kevin Munoz, Biden’s national campaign spokesperson, told The Daily Beast in a phone interview.

“At the same time that Donald Trump has very real infrastructure issues, has no interest in building a winning coalition and is actively attacking the voters that will decide this election, ultimately this will come down to those voters,” Munoz said.

Chris LaCivita—a top Trump campaign adviser who is also the chief operating officer of the Republican National Committee—rejected the idea that the former president’s team should disclose its organizing plans.

“By combining forces and operations, The Trump campaign and RNC are deploying operations that are fueled by passionate volunteers who care about saving America and firing Joe Biden. We do not feel obligated however to discuss the specifics of our strategy, timing and tactics with members of the News Media,” LaCivita told The Daily Beast.

“Democrats want to talk process because they don’t want to talk about Broken Braindead Biden and his absolute failure,” LaCivita argued. “The media should not do Democrats’ bidding and should focus on the issues the American people care about.”

Still, for a Trump operation obsessed with polls, the first cracks in the former president’s so-far dominant lead are beginning to appear.

Biden’s approval rating has seen an uptick in the FiveThirtyEight rolling average—jumping up from under 38 percent on March 12 to over 40 percent approval just two weeks later—and pulling ahead in The Economist’s head-to-head polling average for the first time since September.

To add to the Biden campaign’s morale boost—even though his team tends to reject the value of polls this far out from an election—Biden led Trump in three polls last week alone.

While there remain undecided voters in key states, the Biden campaign will worry more about them later, given the abundant data on how undecided voters are very often late deciding voters as well.

The Biden campaign is eyeing the late spring and early summer to start focusing their messaging on persuading undecided voters, according to the senior aide, with the present focus continuing to be building out their door knocking infrastructure to make sure core voters show up to cast their ballot no matter what.

“That’s what matters at this point in the cycle,” Munoz said. “And I think we have a very good story to tell, not only on the operation we’re building, but also on the issues that we’re fighting for. These are the issues that when Americans go to the ballot box, they care most about, and Donald Trump is running on an agenda that people actively root against when they go to the ballot box.”

The Trump campaign has their own version of such an argument—one they believe will make Biden’s campaign hires irrelevant.

“The Trump campaign will raise the money, deploy the necessary assets, and win because President Trump will secure the border, make American families more prosperous, and make our nation respected on the world stage,” Trump campaign spokesperson Danielle Alvarez said in a statement to The Daily Beast.

Veterans of the presidential campaign trail, however, think these seemingly small moves in isolation can make quite a big difference when put together over the long haul.

Jim Messina, who served as Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign manager, argued that Biden is in a stronger position to win than Trump given the cards they’ve been dealt.

“I like to play poker and I would simply much rather have Biden’s cards than Trump’s,” Messina said.

Biden’s two key advantages, according to Messina, are on the economy and the legal front.

“The economy is improving and people are feeling it, Biden has an affirmative message, and Trump will continue to remind independents why they voted against him in 2020 by campaigning from a courtroom,” he said.

Matt Grossman, a political scientist with Michigan State University, said it very well could be the case that March marks the nadir of Biden’s polling woes, but added a note of caution for the president’s campaign.

“My question has been what kind of message is likely to work this time,” Grossman said. “In 2020 we had strong evidence people had already made up their mind about Donald Trump, but not Joe Biden… Now we have two very well-known candidates, so it would make me expect the efficacy of any persuasion effort would be less.”

With two such well-known candidates and some 70 percent of the public weary of a 2020 rematch, the little things could count even more this time around.

“If it’s close to a 50-50 election, then minor things can still move the outcome. And certainly overall, there’s evidence that more contact is better, to deliver both turnout and persuasion messages more is better,” Grossman said.

“They’re just trying to get any small advantage they can.”

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mariacallous · 22 days

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On Reddit and Truth Social, users have been trying to re-create the meme-stock magic for Trump Media and Technology Group—the company behind Truth Social—that boosted companies like GameStop in 2021. So far, they haven’t been too successful.

Truth Social, former president Donald Trump’s Twitter copycat, lacks two essential ingredients to the narrative of previous campaigns: underlying fundamentals and the foil of institutional investors. Large hedge funds had shorted GameStop, betting that the price would go down. This time, the stock is owned primarily by retail investors.

Unlike other social media companies, the Truth Social doesn’t disclose how many users it has, but has said previously that just 9 million people have signed up for the site, compared with over 3 billion monthly active users on Facebook. TruthSocial visitors have declined from 5.4 million in January to around 5 million in February, according to web analytics firm SimilarWeb. The site’s lack of users has contributed to poor financial performance.

On the r/wallstreetbets subreddit, home of meme-stock boosterism, most users aren’t buying what Truth Social is selling. “If you invest in this on a long enough timeline you will lose everything. Thus is strictly a movement play,” wrote Reddit user Rich4718. “If you think Donald Trump is going to create an income positive social media platform you are an absolute fucking moron.”

The company started trading publicly on March 26 under the ticker symbol DJT and has already experienced wild swings in price. On Monday, the stock slid nearly 20 percent, erasing $2 billion in value.

In a filing on Monday, the company said it had just over $4 million in revenue and $58 million in net losses. This comes after the auditor for Trump Media and Technology Group made a startling admission: The company’s losses “raise substantial doubt about its ability to continue,” according to a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on March 25. And yet the company is valued at around $7 billion, despite reporting these sizable losses. The valuation is propped up in part by Trump fans who see investing in the company as a way to support the former president. In some cases, these investors hold a genuine belief that Truth Social could become a major social media player.

Albert Choi, a professor of Law at the University of Michigan, says investors in Trump Media may be motivated by factors beyond traditional financial logic, like boosting the price through generating hype.

“If that’s your primary motivating factor, then you’re not going to care too much about whether the company is actually making money,” says Choi.

“I believe DJT is an investment in Donald Trump, not just Truth Social,” Reddit user autsauce, who declined to share their real name, tells WIRED. “If market participants start asking that question, which I am betting they will, they will likely arrive at a very different price valuing Truth Social in a silo.”

Choi noted that Trump winning the Presidential election could actually hurt the company’s stock, as investors' perceived need to support the former president financially by investing could fade.

“My guess is that the interest in the stock would largely disappear,” Choi said.

Some Truth Social fans have spun the company’s entry into the public market as a fresh start. The infusion of capital from people buying shares in the company will enable Truth Social to post an improved financial performance, they argue.

“With $300M to properly grow a company and Trump’s impending win in 2024, the entire situation has changed,” Chad Nedohin, who regularly livestreams about his support for the company while wearing a Jack Sparrow costume, wrote on Truth Social.

Still, Truth Social doesn’t really provide anything unique. The company’s defining feature is that it's the website where Trump is currently posting, and it is, unsurprisingly, home to many posts discussing conspiracy theories about QAnon, stolen elections, and deep state plots.

But Devin Nunes, Truth Social CEO and former Republican US representative, said in an interview last week with the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk that the company plans to combine features from other social networks.

“We’re trying to take the best of all platforms and put it into one,” Nunes said, “whether it be Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, et cetera.”

Truth Social still needs to comply with Apple’s and Google’s terms of service to remain in its respective app stores. Nunes claims, however, that Truth Social “doesn’t use any of the woke companies, referencing Parler, the social media company that was kicked off Apple’s and Google’s mobile app stores in the wake of the January 6 riot at the Capitol. “It’s kind of an interesting investment, because you’re really investing in your constitutional rights,” Nunes said. “We’re the only company out there that can’t be shut down by woke companies.”

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reality-detective · 1 year

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Just to let you know things ARE happening behind the scenes, I'll leave this here 👇

Operation Warp Speed Architect Arrested

U.S. Army Rangers on Saturday arrested Operation Warp Speed architect Moncef Slaoui, the Moroccan-born pharmaceutical mogul who in May 2020 spearheaded the administration’s efforts to poison 300 million Americans by January 2021, a source in General Eric M. Smith’s said.

Slaoui largely flew under the radar throughout the Plandemic. The media seldom mentioned his name, focusing instead on publicly influential figures like Fauci, Birx, and Collins, articulate public servants who spoke better English. Our source said Slaoui was relegated to media obscurity because the administration thought he looked shady and that Americans wouldn’t trust him.

And Americans would have been right not to trust a man who spent 30 years as GlaxoSmithKline’s head of vaccines department and was working at Moderna when Trump picked him to helm Warp Speed. At the time, Trump called Slaoui “one of the most respected men in the world in the production and, really, on the formulation of vaccines,” but was merely parroting what subordinates Michael Pence, Alex Azar, Admiral Brett Giroir, and Robert Redfield told him. They and others, our source said, were part of a major conspiracy to deceive President Trump into putting Slaoui in charge of OWS.

Slaoui faced criticism for holding $10 million in Moderna stock options and working as an advisor to Brii Biosciences, a firm with sizable Chinese investments. To avoid a conflict of interest, he begrudgingly resigned from those positions, then began working with then-Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar—who praised Slaoui as “arguably the world’s most experienced and successful vaccine developer”—to hasten Warp Speed.

Our source said that Slaoui, despite resigning from Moderna, continued receiving payouts exceeding $56 million after the FDA granted Moderna emergency-use authorization on December 8, 2020.

However, the military was less interested in Slaoui’s financial motivations than his knowledge that Moderna’s experimental vaccine had killed 34 of 600 Phase II trial participants in June 2020. White Hats, our source said, now have a wealth of evidence—physical and digital documents authored by Slaoui—proving he knew the vaccine caused myocarditis and potentially lethal blood clots but never publicly disclosed that information, even after Trump personally asked him if the shots were truly safe and effective.

“We have a treasure chest of incriminating evidence on Slaoui. This guy was one of the biggest violators of the Plandemic. We got a letter he wrote to Pence, saying he knew vaccines would kill people and that they could blame Trump for pushing Operation Warp Speed on the public. We have tons more that will be made available when he faces a military tribunal and hopefully gets hanged. We had more than enough proof to get him,” our source said.

The arrest, he added, came after Gen. Smith talked with Colonel J.D. Keirsey, a White Hat council member and commander of the 75th Ranger Regiment, the U.S. Army’s premier light infantry unit and special operations force within the United States Army Special Operations Command.

On Saturday morning, Rangers bashed down the door to Slaoui’s 7,500-sq-ft home in Zebulon, North Carolina. One of his three sons, Hussein Mohamad Abdul Slaoui, was present and pulled a pistol on the Rangers. He was shot dead, and the Rangers took Slaoui into custody. He shouted, “sayantaqim li allah,” or “Allah will avenge me,” as the Rangers shoved him into a civilian vehicle.

“We got him. We got the bastard,” our source said. “He’s just one of many. But we’re chipping away at them.”

As an aside, Slaoui was fired from chairman of the board of directors of Galvani Bioelectronics, a subsidiary of GlaxoSmithKline, in March 2021 after several young male employees accused him of sexual harassment.

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