The Free-Dumb Caucus boys and girls— yes, there are 6 women who joined: Debbie Lesko (AZ), Lauren Boebert (CO), Anna Paulina Luna (FL), Mary Miller (IL), Diana Harshbager (TN) and Harriet Hageman (WY), not counting Marjorie Traitor Greene, who was kicked out for threatening to shoot another member— thought they had replaced Kevin McCarthy with someone as extreme and radical as they are themselves, Mike Johnson, who Trump christened MAGA Mike. Now they’re already wondering if it’s too early to use their “vacate the chair” weapon McCarthy bribed them with. Yesterday Juliegrace Brufke reported that one of their internal memos compares him to John Boehner (who they ousted in 2015).
“The memo,” wrote Brufke, “calls this year's NDAA ‘an utter disaster for House Republicans and a massive unforced error from leadership,’ arguing it was a deal struck behind closed doors, side-skirts regular order and takes aim at the bill's extension of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)— which has sparked a strong divide within the conference. ‘This is an obvious play to end-run conservative objections and pass liberal woke military policy with the help of House Democrats— a page ripped from the Boehner playbook,’ they wrote.”
She noted that the honeymoon period with the neo-fascist fringe, the Freedom Caucus, appears to be over for MAGA Mike, although “there are no current plans to attempt to oust Johnson from his gavel, but they are ramping up the pressure on the Louisiana Republican.” Key word: “current.”
Keep in mind, with the neo-Nazi LinkedIn Project 2025 has developed for Trump, he must be thinking about how easy it would be to replace any member of Congress he feels isn’t cooperating with him fully enough. He wouldn’t do that? Think beyond just Liz Cheney being replaced by Harriet Hageman to mainstream anti-Trump Republicans John Katko (NY), Anthony Gonzalez (OH), Rodney Davis (IL) and Tom Rice (SC) being replaced, respectively, by MAGAts Brandon Williams, Max Miller, Mary Miller and Russell Fry. Trump also played a role in forcing out Adam Kinzinger (IL), Fred Upton (MI), Justin Amash/Peter Meijer (MI) and Jaime Herrera Beutler (WA) but they were all replaced by Democrats, not something Trump appears to care about one bit.
Yes, Trump has lots and lots of crackpots to chose from for any job he wants to give them… but Congress? In March of 1933, the German parties competed in their last free election until after World War II. They didn’t imagine they would be abolished soon after the election. The Nazis didn’t win a majority, but they did win a strong enough plurality (43.9%, up from 33.1%) to promulgate the Enabling Act (Law to Remedy the Distress of People and Reich) less than 3 weeks later, using a strategy of coercion and bribery. It passed and granted Hitler the authority to pass laws without the Reichstag's approval, bypassing any checks and balances and essentially marking the end of parliamentary democracy in Germany. Almost immediately, the Nazis began rounding up communists, labor union leaders, and other political dissidents to Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp. After that, the Reichstag was strictly ceremonial and the members were selected by Hitler and his cronies, not elected.
Yesterday, Ken Bensinger wrote about “a small circle of video meme-makers who have effectively served as a shadow online ad agency for [Trump’s] presidential campaign. Led by a little-known podcaster and life coach, this meme team has spent much of the year flooding social media with content that lionizes the former president, promotes his White House bid and brutally denigrates his opponents. Much of the group, which refers to itself as Trump’s Online War Machine, operates anonymously, adopting the cartoonish aesthetic and unrelenting cruelty of internet trolls. Cheered on by Trump, the group traffics freely in misinformation, artificial intelligence and digital forgeries known as deepfakes. Its memes are riddled with racist stereotypes, demeaning tropes about LGBTQ people and broad scatological humor. Their most vulgar invectives are often aimed at women, particularly those seen as enemies of Trump. In one video, the former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley’s face is pasted on the body of a nearly naked woman, who kicks a man with the face of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida in the groin. Another depicts Casey DeSantis, the governor’s wife, as a porn star. Women with ties to DeSantis are often shown with red knees, suggesting they have performed a sex act.”
And anyone from this circle could obviously replace any member of Congress as easily and seamlessly as MAGA Mike replaced Kevin McCarthy. They’d be as perfect in the role of GOP House candidate as was Joe Kent (WA), Bo Hines (NC), J.R. Majewski (OH), Yesli Vega (VA), John Gibbs (MI), Sarah Palin (AK) or any other cartoon-like MAGA candidate backed by Señor Trumpanzee.
Bensinger wrote that “Late last month, Trump sent personalized notes to several of the group’s members, thanking them for their work. In September, Jason Miller, a senior Trump campaign adviser, posted that the meme team was ‘single-handedly changing the landscape of politics and social media.’… At the center of Trump’s meme militia is Brenden Dilley, a 41-year-old podcaster, failed congressional candidate and self-described social media and political influencer. Dilley doesn’t create the memes himself, but he provides the organizing force and smash-mouth ethos driving the crew. ‘It doesn’t have to be true. It just has to go viral,’ he has said on his podcast. The group’s more than two dozen members, posting under the hashtag #DilleyMemeTeam, convene in a private Telegram channel to share ideas and pick targets. Many also faithfully tune into Dilley’s daily podcast, where he talks at length about the group’s activities, interacts with a small but devoted audience and promotes his 2013 self-help book, Still Breathin’: The Wisdom and Teachings of a Perfectly Flawed Man. Most of the meme-makers post anonymously... In an interview, [GOP Frank] Luntz said he worried that such spots would soon become commonplace. ‘They have figured out how to manipulate the public,’ Luntz said, ‘and they frankly don’t care about the consequences.’”
[Dilley] and his team have posted numerous photos of themselves posing with Trump, spending time with his advisers and attending events at Trump properties.
Like many other influencers, Dilley appears to receive talking points from the campaign. He also claims more exclusive access, describing phone calls from advisers to Trump to discuss memes his team is producing and whether they strike the desired tone.
In July, one of the group’s most prolific contributors— a musician from outside San Diego named Michael Beatty, who goes by the handle Miguelifornia— mentioned that Scavino and Miller “gave us tons of great video” shot at a Trump rally in South Carolina.
Days later, the team released a clip that appeared to use behind-the-scenes footage of Trump at a rally. The moody meme, cast in blue monochrome and set to a Phil Collins song, cast Trump as a serious, heroic leader and concluded with information on how to text a donation to the campaign.
“This is a campaign ad if I’ve ever seen one,” one team member, who goes by MAGADevilDog, wrote on Twitter.
Because the Dilley Meme Team’s content is shared on the internet, rather than on television or radio, it generally isn’t subject to laws requiring ads to include disclosure about who paid for them.
“If it goes on the internet, there’s essentially no regulation,” said Richard Hasen, an elections law expert at the University of California, Los Angeles. And without regulation, he added, it’s impossible to know who is paying for the content.
But campaign finance experts pointed to two other unknowns about the Dilley Meme Team’s operations: coordination and compensation.
If a group is receiving compensation to help a candidate get elected, then it could be considered a super PAC and should be registered and reporting its donors and spending.
If it is not compensated but is coordinating with the campaign, then it may run afoul of strict limits on in-kind contributions, said Paul Ryan, who serves as deputy executive director of the pro-democracy group Funders’ Committee for Civic Participation.
Ryan said receiving video footage that was not publicly available could be considered coordination.
Memes created with input from the campaign, he said, “are just as good as a direct contribution to the campaign” and may be worth far more than the $6,600 individual limit per election cycle.
Dilley and other members of the meme team often claim they receive no financial compensation for their efforts.
“Everything they do, they do it for free and out of love of country,” said Alex Bruesewitz, a Republican strategist close to Mr. Trump, who frequently shares Dilley Meme Team posts.
Dilley, who in 2019 was found to have failed to pay more than $24,000 in child support and interest, says he now makes “multiple six figures” a year. That income, he said on his podcast last month, comes from a combination of sources: podcast subscriptions and sponsors, sales of apparel, his life-coaching business and streaming revenue from the video platform Rumble, where the Dilley Show has more than 12,000 subscribers.
This is part of a press release I got yesterday from Public Citizen: “FEC Must Regulate Campaign Deepfakes Before the 2024 Election.”
The Federal Election Commission (FEC) is dithering in the face of a clear and present danger to the integrity of our elections.
Saturday, Dec. 16, marks two months since the comment deadline on an FEC petition to regulate deepfakes in political campaigns by requiring clear disclosure.
Extraordinary advances in artificial intelligence (A.I.) now provide political operatives with the means to produce campaign ads and other communications with computer-generated fake images, audio, or video of candidates that appear real-life-- fraudulently misrepresenting what candidates say or do.
A deepfake released shortly before Election Day— perhaps showing a candidate drunk, or speaking incoherently, or consorting with a disreputable figure— could easily sway a close election. A torrent of deepfakes could leave voters unable to distinguish what’s real from what’s synthetic, undermining effective democratic discourse and worsening the worst political tribalist tendencies. And the prevalence of deepfakes could enable candidates to deny the validity of authentic content, dismissing it simply as fake.
The worst perils of political deepfakes can be mitigated by requiring them to be labeled as generated or altered by A.I. A label informs voters and empowers them to evaluate the content of a deepfake appropriately— it may convey a point of view, but it’s not rendering a recording of an actual event or statement.
The FEC has the authority to require such labels, but it has not moved to act.
…The stakes of an unregulated and undisclosed Wild West of A.I.-generated campaign communications are far more than the impact on candidates. It will further erode the public’s confidence in the integrity of the electoral process itself. If voters cannot discern fact from fiction in campaign messages, they will increasingly doubt the value of casting a ballot— or the value of ballots cast by others.