What I learned from six months on Truth Social

I mentioned back in April that I had tried to get an account on Truth Social, Devin Nunes' shitty conservative answer to Twitter (the social media site where Trump ran to after Twitter banned him). When I wrote that post in early April they still had not approved my account, but it did go through by the end of that month. Since I was approved, I have occasionally gone on to try to create a ruckus. Despite all my rucki, I have not been banned yet, although a lot of people have blocked me.

Anyway, last month, on roughly my sixth monthaversary on the site, I did my first TS thread, listing all the stuff I learned about TS users from my time on the site. I'm not sure how long TS will be around. Its finances are shaky and it has stopped paying its host. Also the only thing TS has going for it is Trump's presence. But Trump is only over there before he is banned from Twitter, a ban that Elon Musk may lift now that he owns it. Plus, Trump's brand itself might start failing as Republicans turn on him after their red waved failed to materialize this week. So, to preserve for posterity my "what I learned about Truth Socialistanis" thread, here it is in all its glory:

For those with access to the shittiest social media site on the internet, the thread can be found here.

The real problem with Truth Social

Trump's new social media app, Truth Social, is failing  Downloads from the app store are down, engagement stats are low, and people are complaining online about how the app doesn't work.

But maybe that's not the only problem. On February 24, 2022, I downloaded the app and tried to create an account using my Russian email address. (I have a free email account with @mail.ru that I use to register on rightwing sites) After I "verified" the account, I got a notice that I was wait-listed for the service.

(I love how it assures me that that "you're not just another number to us" and then it gives me a number)

Two weeks later, I got an email with an "update" that didn't really tell me much:

And that's it. It's almost a month later and as far as I can tell I haven't moved on the waiting list at all. If the service is really shedding users, surely they have room to let me in!

Trump tweets* that he is not following the law when he imposes tariffs on China

I know, I know, in the Trump era there are no laws anymore. But I still think it is worth noting that the President has the right to impose tariffs under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act to protect national security, or under Section 201 of the Trade Act of 1974 if the International Trade Commission concludes that a surge of imports is threatening serious injury to a U.S. domestic injury, or under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 if the foreign country violates a trade agreement with the U.S. or restricts U.S. commerce in an unjustified, unreasonable, or discriminatory way, or Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 to make up for a missed payment from a foreign country, or under Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930 to address discrimination against U.S. commerce, or under the International Emergency Economic Power Act of 1977 to address a foreign national security threat.

What he doesn't have is the right to impose tariffs because of "a lack of respect... shown to the world's markets."

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*Okay, not technically a "tweet" because it is on Truth Social where they are called "truths." But I'm not going to use that orwellian lingo in my blog title.

google+

i like facebook. i'm on it every day. it's a great time-waster and a lot of my social life now relies on the site (whether for keeping up to date with people, or because so many invites to live events are now through FB).  but the launch of a potentially serious competitor, google+, is also pretty appealing to me.

there's a lot of things to be annoyed about with FB. i posted this video as a joke, but there's some truth in it as well. FB revamps its site every 6-12 months. the revamps themselves don't bother me, but what does is that each time it happens FB resets your privacy settings to the most permissive setting. so after each revamp, i eventually learn about the setting change and then have to follow an unreasonably complicated series of steps to make it more private.

i also really don't like how FB tries to decide which information about my friends is worth showing me. a lot of people aren't even aware that FB defaults to only displaying the posts from your friends that you interact with the most. (to fix it, scroll down to the bottom of your news feed and hit the "edit options" button. next to the words "show posts from" select the "all your friends and pages" from the pull down menu. getting to the "edit options" button may be a little tricky and the current version of FB will add posts to your feed as you scroll down). even then, FB will try to pick the stuff it thinks you want to see the most as the default display option for your news feed is "top news." to see everything, you need to click on "most recent" from near the top of the page, and then reclick on it ever few days as it keeps defaulting back to "top news" automatically, no matter how often you make your preference clear.

in the broad scheme of things, that stuff is not a big deal. FB is a free service so i can't really complain, but it is really annoying. (okay, yes i can complain!)i suspect if you surveyed most FB users most would not prefer the defaults that the site imposes on us, and i bet most casual users have their settings set for those defaults without being aware of it. and even when you do know, it takes constant vigilance to keep fighting back against the defaults.

the main benefit of google+ is that it might end up being a less anti-privacy, less decide-for-me-what-i-want-to-see kind of site. if that becomes the main selling point, then that would both give google+ and advantage in its competition with FB and raising the possibility that the better site would supplant FB, or (probably more likely) get FB to copy the better features of G+, making FB a better site. G+ is already better at allowing you to control who sees the things you post by permitting you to restrict anything you put on the site to specific "circles". that's a major privacy improvement over FB in my mind (and addresses problem #3 from the video).

FB has a huge advantage in any competition with G+. social network sites are only useful if a lot of my friends are on them. a lot of my friends are already on FB, so right away it is by definition more useful than G+. until G+ somehow reaches a magic tipping point and gets everyone to dump FB as they once did friendster. but competition also has a down side. what i don't want is two social network sites with a critical mass of friends on both. the last thing i need are two major wastes of time to keep up with.

ICE in airports is really stupid political move for Trump

Sending ICE officers to the airport because of long lines at security checkpoints is a hilariously bad idea. When Trump announced the ICE deployment via Truth Social over the weekend, people immediately wondered what exactly ICE could do to address the problem. It did not seem like he was saying that ICE personnel would help screen passengers (ICE are not trained on any of the equipment that TSA uses to screen passengers). So what would they be doing other than standing around and making crowded airports even more crowded?

Apparently yes, that is exactly what they are doing.

But the thing that makes Trump's decision to assign ICE to airports so ridiculous is that is is an astoundingly bad political move for Trump, for at least these reasons:

1. ICE is really unpopular. If you are the President and want to bolster support for your go-to thuggish organization, having them go to where people are really frustrated and then stand there and do nothing to relieve the frustration is just going to make people hate them more.
2. It links ICE to TSA funding. The whole reason that TSA funding has not passed is because the Democrats will only pass funding for the Department of Homeland Security (which includes the TSA) if the funding bill includes legal restrictions on ICE. Even though ICE is really unpopular, there is some risk to that strategy because the Administration can argue that because ICE funding had already passed last year, Democrats' condition for funding the TSA had nothing to do with that organization. By sending ICE to "assist" the TSA, Trump is making an ICE-TSA connection that makes the funding conditions seem to make more sense.
3. It undermines the Administration's argument that ICE officers must wear masks. Since Trump regained the presidency, ICE agents started wearing masks when they made their immigration arrests. Masked law enforcement officers is associated with human rights violations across the world. But the Trump Administration has argued it is necessary to make sure that ICE agents don't get doxxed. (Meaning publicly identified. That is not really what "doxxing" means, but that is what the Administration now claims doxxing is). The masking of ICE agents is a big deal. A ban on their masks is one of the conditions that Democrats have attached to their Homeland Security funding bills. And yet, ICE agents are not wearing masks in the airport. So now it is pretty clear that the Administration doesn't care if ICE officers can be publicly identified. They just don't want them to be publicly identified when they are abusing the civil rights of immigrants and minorities on the streets, which makes Democrats' condition for DHS funding seem a whole lot more reasonable.
4. It will help groups identify ICE officers who have committed illegal acts and human rights violations. A bunch of groups I follow have urged people to photograph unmasked ICE agents in airports and to send the photos to groups who are trying to identify the perpetrators of abusive conduct by masked agents. In other words, this deployment is helping Trump's opponents to build a database of ICE agents which will help those groups identify individuals who commit human rights abuses at other places, the very conduct the Trump Administration is trying to hide by having them wear masks in the first place.
5. Sending ICE to chaotic airports reinforces the idea that ICE is an agent of chaos not law and order.
6. It wastes ICE's time and money. Every ICE officer standing around doing nothing in an airport hallway is one less officer who can raid someone's home or snatch them from a car. This deployment also costs money which will help spend down the obscene budget that Congress passed for ICE last year. Very few undocumented people ever fly. So this might slow down the Steve Miller ethnic cleansing program, at least by a little bit.

Those are the things that immediately come to mind for me. I am sure there are more.

Kavanaugh is remarkably unqualified for the Supreme Court

Matthew Yglesias touches on a really good point here. We have heard repeatedly that Brett Kavanaugh has an impressive resume and is "highly qualified" for the Supreme Court. I have heard it mostly from conservatives, but also quite a few liberals. But what is the basis for calling him "highly qualified"? I just don't see it in his record. I'm not just being partisan here. I could see Neil Gorsuch's qualifications even though I still opposed that nomination (mostly on the basis of his jurisprudence and the fact that he was placed in a stolen seat). But with Kavanaugh? He just seems more highly connected than highly qualified. Ygelsias does a good summary of his career:

Born into a privileged family that was well-connected in Republican Party politics, Kavanaugh coasted from Georgetown Prep, where he was apparently a hard partier, into Yale, where he joined the notoriously hard-partying secret society Truth & Courage, and then on to Yale Law School.

Soon after graduating, he got a gig working for independent counsel Ken Starr — a plum position for a Republican lawyer on the make because the Starr inquiry was supposed to take down the Clinton administration. Instead, it ended up an ignominious, embarrassing failure, generating an impeachment process that was so spectacularly misguided and unpopular that Democrats pulled off the nearly impossible feat of gaining seats during a midterm election when they controlled the White House.

Kavanaugh clerked for Alex Kozinski, an appeals court judge who was well known to the lay public for his witty opinions and well known to the legal community as a sexual harasser. When the sexual harassment became a matter of public embarrassment in the wake of the #MeToo movement, Kavanaugh professed to have simply not noticed anything amiss — including somehow not remembering Kozinski’s dirty jokes email distribution list.

Despite this inattention to detail, Kavanaugh ended up in the George W. Bush White House, playing a critical behind-the-scenes role as staff secretary to an administration that suffered the worst terrorist attack in American history, let the perpetrator get away, invaded Iraq to halt the country’s nonexistent nuclear weapons program, and destroyed the global economy.

Kavanaugh then landed a seat on the DC Circuit Court, though to do so, he had to offer testimony that we now know to have been misleading regarding his role in both William Pryor’s nomination for a different federal judgeship and the handling of some emails stolen from Democratic Party committee staff. On the DC Circuit, he issued some normal GOP party-line rulings befitting his career as a Republican Party foot soldier.

Now he may end up as a Supreme Court justice despite never in his life having been involved in anything that was actually successful. He has never meaningfully taken responsibility for the substantive failures of the Starr inquiry or the Bush White House, where his tenure as staff secretary coincided with both Hurricane Katrina and failed Social Security privatization plan as well as the email shenanigans he misled Congress about, or for his personal failure as a bystander to Kozinski’s abuses.

The main reason that people think that Brett Kavanaugh is qualified to sit on the Supreme Court is because proponents of the nomination keep saying that he is well-qualified. But nothing in his actual record makes him a legal superstar. Instead, whether we are talking about his time as a student, or working on the now-disgraced Starr investigation, or working for the failed Bush administration, or his lackluster recent years on the Court of Appeals, I am just not seeing a particularly talented individual, or any remarkable intellect. Instead, Kavanaugh's story seems to be the story of how in America privilege delivers. No matter what you do, if you are born into a privileged class, you will fall up throughout your career.

I submit this makes Kavanaugh particularly unqualified for the high court. He had many more opportunities to do great things that most and yet he didn't do anything great or even mildly remarkable.¹ There is nothing in Kavanaugh's history that suggest he should be on the most important court in the country.  And that is without considering the the other reasons to oppose his nomination (i.e. the perjury, the attempted rape, the gambling debts that were paid under mysterious circumstances, and the massive amounts of withheld records). Even if you push all that aside, Kavanaugh is a terrible nominee, eerie parallels to the history of privilege of our own "falling up" president.

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1-At least not remarkable in a good sense. His "investigation" of Vince Foster's death and what he put Foster's family through is remarkable in that other not-at-all-good way.