If Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice-Elect Brian Hagedorn’s upset win last month provided demonstrable proof that the state’s grassroots drive conservative success in this state, draft portions of the Republican Party of Wisconsin’s post-mortem of the 2018 midterm election should remove all doubt.
The documents obtained by the MacIver Institute paint a picture of a Party that had lost touch with its most loyal of supporters and as such lost every statewide election on the ballot in November.
“Over time, the Republican Party of Wisconsin (RPW) drifted from its roots as a grassroots organization and became a top-down bureaucracy, disconnected from local activists, recklessly reliant on outside consultants and took for granted money that was raised to keep the Party functioning properly,” the post-mortem found.
Local Republican Party leaders repeatedly expressed this concern, but were rebuffed and, more troublingly, “there was an additional problem concealed from the grassroots leaders—cash flow concerns, debt, and financial morass.”
The latest quarterly financial reporting figures from the Federal Election Commission show the Republican Party with $220,680.46 in cash on hand as of March 31, but the Party also held outstanding debt of $142,437.12.
This reflects the top-down organizational structure that, party leaders are concerned, hampered Governor Walker’s re-election effort last year.
“In calendar year 2018, a small handful of consultants were paid well over a half of a million dollars,” the post-mortem continued. “Some of this group performed valuable and necessary functions appropriately contracted for externally.”
“However, some of the consultants were providing services that are appropriately and more economically performed in-house in other states. Still others had few, if any, discernible job responsibilities or expectations of deliveries.”
This didn’t just drain the Party’s resources; it also “prevented RPW from building [its] farm team of future staff and young party leaders.”
Whether the over-reliance on outside consultants led to the alienation of grassroots leaders and in-house RPW staff or the consultants were hired because the staff and grassroots were unable to perform their assigned duties is still open to debate.
“Whether a failure in training, or a simple preference for paying a consultant rather than hiring the right staff, the end result was overpaying for services,” the post-mortem concluded.
As the RPW grew more dependent upon consultants, it also isolated itself from the grassroots volunteers on whom it had relied far more heavily during the 2010, 2011 and 2012 recall, and 2014 election cycles.
Those volunteers told RPW staff compiling the post-mortem that the organization didn’t effectively communicate with them and that its staff was “sometimes unhelpful, unresponsive [and] even rude.”
Additionally, they felt that the Party’s website was “cumbersome and not as useful as it should be.”
Fissures within the RPW were not secret in the wake of losses by Governor Scott Walker, Attorney General Brad Schimel, Senate candidate Leah Vukmir as well as Republican candidates for Secretary of State and State Treasurer. In late February, Mark Morgan resigned as the Party’s Executive Director. A week later, Party Chairman Brad Courtney stepped down as well.
When Mark Jefferson returned to serve as Executive Director—a position he held from 2007 to 2011—he immediately pledged to return the RPW to the bottom-up structure with which he felt more comfortable.
“Everybody has their lane and the best lane that the Republican Party has is the grassroots activation,” he told News/Talk 1130 WISN at the time. “We’re the one entity that can get people off the couch and knocking on doors and making phone calls.”
Andrew Hitt, elected Party Chairman in the wake of Courtney’s departure, concurred, and the new leadership team’s recommitment paid nearly immediate dividends with Hagedorn’s win less than a month later.
“There’s more bang for the buck in investing in grassroots and volunteer mobilization,” Jefferson told the MacIver Institute this week. “Is the money better spent getting a few more advertisements or in training people and engaging with people all over the state? We think that the money put into boots on the ground is better dollar-for-dollar than anything else you can spend money on.”
Jefferson admits that the Party’s debt is still an issue, but a manageable one since it continues to raise money ahead of the 2020 presidential election cycle. 18 months out, he is hopeful that the Party learned from the mistakes of 2018 and can build on the momentum of the Supreme Court race.
“There’s a renewed sense of enthusiasm on the ground because we have rededicated ourselves to building that enthusiasm and channeling it into action.”
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No comments on Why Walker lost and Hagedorn won
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The number one British single today in 1957 gave a name to a genre of music between country and rock (even though the song sounds as much like the genre as Kay Starr’s “Rock and Roll Waltz” sounds like rock and roll):
The number one single today in 1967:
The number one British album today in 1967 promised “More of the Monkees”:
(Interesting aside: “More of the Monkees” was one of only four albums to reach the British number one all year. The other three were the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” the soundtrack to “The Sound of Music,” and “The Monkees.”)
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The number one single today in 1958:
Today in 1963, the producers of CBS-TV’s Ed Sullivan Shew told Bob Dylan he couldn’t perform his “Talking John Birch Society Blues” because it mocked the U.S. military.
So he didn’t. He walked out of rehearsals and didn’t appear on the show.
The number one album today in 1973 was Led Zeppelin’s “Houses of the Holy,” which probably didn’t make Zeppelin mad mad mad or sad sad sad:
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The number one British single today in 1958 was a cover of a song written in 1923:
The number one British album today in 1963 was the Beatles’ “Please Please Me,” which was number one for 30 weeks:
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Readers know how I feel about the band Chicago.
I mentioned here last week while compiling my own list of Chicago favorites that Chicago had two concerts next week, in Madison Sunday and in Appleton Tuesday.
I have three tickets to Sunday night’s show. I will be going for the fourth time, after the Dane County Coliseum in Madison in 1987, the Fond du Lac County Fairgrounds in 1997, and the EAA in Oshkosh in 2010. The house trumpet and trombone player will be going for their first time.
As you can imagine, I’m pretty amped about this. So maybe some concert music is appropriate here:
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The Milwaukee Bucks lost game one of their NBA Eastern Conference semifinal.
And that was the highlight for both the Boston Celtics and their former player-turned-commentator Paul Pierce.
First, the Celtics, reported by the Boston Globe:
The Celtics’ locker room was as quiet and sullen as it had been all year. Players dressed quietly at their stalls, or soaked their sore legs in ice buckets, or scrolled through their phones.
But none of the players talked to each other. They didn’t mention Giannis Antetokounmpo. They didn’t think about their missed opportunities. They didn’t talk about what comes next.
About seven months ago, they’d started on a journey that they believed would lead them to the NBA Finals. And if some bounces went their way and some young players continued to rise, maybe they would even win it.
No one envisioned an end like this, with the Bucks crushing them so thoroughly in Game 5 of the conference semifinals, 116-91, on Wednesday night that the Milwaukee fans were able to spend the better part of the fourth quarter reveling and partying while the most important players on both teams just watched from the bench.
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One of the two Car Chase Wonderland YouTube channels recently posted tributes to movies with car chases featuring Ford Mustangs …
… and Dodge Charger …
… both of which were featured in the greatest car chase of all time:
My exhaustive coverage of Corvettes on this blog has included the lamentation of the lack of great movies and TV shows that feature Corvettes as central to the setting.
Someone then reminded me of this movie:
It turns out Car Chase Wonderland also has footage of other Corvette chases …
… though the extent to which any of these Corvettes are central to the movie, except for the abominable “Corvette Summer,” is debatable.
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You may remember a couple weeks ago I noted the first known meeting of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Today in 1963, upon the advice of George Harrison, Decca Records signed the Rolling Stones to a contract.
Four years to the day later, Stones Keith Richard, Mick Jagger and Brian Jones celebrated by … getting arrested for drug possession.
I noted the 54th anniversary May 2 of WLS in Chicago going to Top 40. Today in 1982, WABC in New York (also owned by ABC, as one could conclude from their call letters) played its last record, which was …
Four years later, the number one song in America was, well, inspired by, though not based on, a popular movie of the day:
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First, a commercial: Some of the readers of this blog get blog links from Facebook. Some get blog links from Twitter. Some get it via email. Some have it bookmarked on their favorite browser.
Why should you sign up for email delivery? Because that way you won’t have to run the risk of not being able to read it in what some claim is a purge of conservatives from social media.
First, Robby Soave:
Last week, the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, a non-profit journalism and research organization, published a list of 500 unreliable new websites. But the list, which included many conservative news and think tank websites, was itself unreliable, and Poynter has since retracted it.
“Soon after we published, we received complaints from those on the list and readers who objected to the inclusion of certain sites, and the exclusion of others,” explained Poynter editor Barbara Allen in a statement. “We began an audit to test the accuracy and veracity of the list, and while we feel that many of the sites did have a track record of publishing unreliable information, our review found weaknesses in the methodology. We detected inconsistencies between the findings of the original databases that were the sources for the list and our own rendering of the final report.”
How exactly the list found its way onto the Poynter website in the first place is a bit of a mystery. Poynter confirmed that its author, Barrett Golding, is a freelancer rather than an employee, but did not answer other questions about the process of greenlighting this project.
Golding’s LinkedIn account lists him as a freelance podcast producer for the Southern Poverty Law Center. The SPLC did not respond to my questions about whether other SPLC staff had any influence or involvement over the list. Golding did not immediately respond to my request for comment, either. According to his Twitter feed, he works with the SPLC’s “Teaching Tolerance” project. He was formerly a research fellow at the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute and a producer for NPR.
It’s worth trying to understand these connections because Poynter’s retracted list of news sites list was shoddy and overly broad in a manner reminiscent of the SPLC’s own work on tracking hate groups. As I explained in a recent piece for Reason detailing the group’s personnel issues, the SPLC tallies hate groups in a manner that suggests hate is always rising, even if it’s not:
According to the SPLC’s hate map, there were more than 1,000 hate groups in the U.S. in 2018—nearly twice as many as existed in 2000. The number has increased every year since 2014.
The map is littered with dots that provide more information on each specific group, and this is where the SPLC gives away the game. Consider a random state—Oklahoma, for example, is home to nine distinct hate groups, by the SPLC’s count. Five of them, though, are black nationalist groups: the Nation of Islam, Israel United in Christ, etc. The SPLC counts each chapter of these groups separately, so the Nation of Islam counts as two separate hate groups within Oklahoma (its various chapters in other states are also tallied separately). The map makes no attempt to contextualize all of this—no information is given on the relative size or influence of each group.
Additionally, the SPLC takes a very broad view of what constitutes hate: It considers the Alliance Defending Freedom, a legal group that defends religious liberty, as an extremist organization. It claims that American Enterprise Institute scholar Charles Murray is a white nationalist.
The Poynter list made similar errors. It included InfoWars (a literal conspiracy site) but also conservative new websites like The Washington Examiner, National Review, and The Washington Free Beacon. These sites get things wrong from to time, but so do mainstream and left-of-center news sources. (Indeed, this entire episode is a prominent example of a mainstream source making a mistake.) But those publications are not misleading in the same sense that Alex Jones is misleading.
Poynter has done some good work in the past. Moving forward, it should be more careful about outsourcing its fact-checking to people who work for the SPLC.
Dan O’Donnell posted this last week:
Wisconsin Conservative Union, a popular Facebook group for conservatives in the state, was apparently taken offline during Facebook’s targeting of offensive personalities and fan pages Thursday.
“I was surprised by this,” said Wisconsin Conservative Union administrator Bob Dohnal, who said on The Dan O’Donnell Show that a friend called him Thursday night to let him know that his page had vanished. “It’s about 2,000 of the conservative leaders around this state. Nobody is talking about revolution or anything like that. It’s just been a place where everybody can exchange ideas and talk about candidacies and stuff.”
Dohnal added that he never received any warnings about any of the group’s posts or any notice that it had violated Facebook standards. He isn’t even sure if the group has been suspended or permanently removed from Facebook. He merely logged on and found it was gone.
On Thursday, Facebook permanently banned a number of fringe right-wing figures, including Alex Jones, Laura Loomer, and Paul Nehlen in addition to Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Dohnal doesn’t know why (or even if) his group was lumped in with and removed alongside them.
“There’s never been anything [posted] against gays or anyone of any race or sex or anything like that,” he said. “If there were, I would take them off right away.”
As of the publication of this article, Dohnal was trying to contact Facebook to determine why Wisconsin Conservative Union was pulled.
As of Wednesday, however, the site is back on Facebook.
What about Twitter? Michael Van Der Galien reports:
Last weekend, conservatives discovered that both Twitter and Facebook had launched a grand purge of nationalist-populist (as they prefer to call themselves) users. Alex Jones, Milo, Paul Joseph Watson, Tommy Robinson, and Laura Loomer were all targeted, albeit not all by the same social media at the same time. The bans and suspensions inspired Human Events editor Raheem Kassam to predict that there were more waves to come:
Wave 1: Jones, Loomer, Milo, Watson, Robinson.
2: Posobiec, Kassam, Cernovich, Chamberlain, Draino, Fleccas.
3: Carlson, Hannity, Ingraham, Levin, Shapiro, Beck.
4: McConnell, McCarthy, Paul, Don Jr.
5: Trump.
This is Big Tech’s plan to kill conservatism of all stripes.
— Raheem Kassam (@RaheemKassam) May 4, 2019
This prediction is right on the money: Monday night, several other rightwing accounts were banned. Among them a parody account of Alexandra Occasio-Cortez, Jewish conservative @OfficeOfMike, and even the @MAGAphobia account whose admin was Jack Posobiec (the same Jack Posobiec mentioned by Kassam in his tweet about who’d be targeted next).
I started @Magaphobia as an acct to track violence against Trump supporters all in one place
Today Twitter banned it pic.twitter.com/lencaWfWR9
— Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) May 7, 2019
In its explanation of the ban on the AOC parody account, Twitter pretended that it wasn’t made clear in the user’s name and bio that it was indeed parody. However, that’s not true at all:
So @twitter has today suspended @AOCPress, which had “parody” in both its name AND its bio. Yet they claim to allow parody in the suspension email itself. Hey @realdonaldtrump your followers are now being mass culled ahead of the election. #meddlingpic.twitter.com/XguTnO28jP
— Raheem Kassam (@RaheemKassam) May 7, 2019
Conservative Millennial writer Courtney Holland adds:
.@OfficeOfMike has confirmed to me that he has been PERMANENTLY suspended from Twitter.
He also ran the @AOCpress account which is also permanently suspended.
Twitter claims he violated the rules with creating @AOCpress even though it clearly stated it was a parody account pic.twitter.com/ecMopPfE4w
— Courtney Holland 🇺🇸 (@hollandcourtney) May 7, 2019
As former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani rightfully puts it, these purges are nothing less than censorship.
‘AOC Press’ Parody Killed in Latest Big Tech Election Interference. WHAT IS HAPPENING TO FREE SPEECH? THIS IS CENSORSHIP! https://t.co/eTQREYKw6j
— Rudy Giuliani (@RudyGiuliani) May 7, 2019
It’s clear: liberal Silicon Valley has picked a side with regards to the upcoming 2020 elections. All those who dare disagree are at risk of losing their accounts and therefore their audience.
This issue is, to use a word I hate, problematic. To no one’s surprise, Facebook is trying to have this both ways, as Jane Coaston reports:
For years, social media giants tried to avoid the question altogether, recognizing that under American law, digital platforms have unique protections that guard against lawsuits aimed at the content posted on those platforms. But users complained about extremism and misinformation weaponized on Facebook and elsewhere, putting Facebook, Twitter, and other tech companies under immense pressure to increase moderation and close the accounts of bad actors — the same way a publisher might reject an article or a writer.
In doing so, they’ve gotten sucked into the political fray they wanted to avoid. Conservatives, pointing out that Facebook and Twitter are self-described platforms, are arguing that banning some users while permitting others based on a “vague and malleable” rubric is infringing on free expression on sites that they view as more like a town square where all voices should be heard. …
Infowars is a publisher. Alex Jones, who has been the publisher and director of Infowars since its launch in 1999, can publish what he wants on it. If I pitched Alex Jones on an article for Infowars, he would be under no obligation whatsoever to publish it.
Amazon Kindle is a platform, which means Amazon provides the means by which to create or engage with content, but it doesn’t create most of the content itself — or do a lot of policing of it. If I wanted to read Mein Kampf on my Amazon Kindle, Amazon would be unable to stop me from doing so.
An even better example of a platform might be a company like Verizon or T-Mobile, which provides software and the network for you to make phone calls or send texts, but doesn’t censor your phone calls or texts even if you’re arranging to commit a crime.
But for Facebook, and all similar social media sites, this seemingly dense legal question is deeply important — for how it treats figures like Jones and Farrakhan, and even how Facebook arbitrates speech at all.
If Facebook is a platform, it then has legal protections that make it almost impossible to sue over content hosted on the site. That’s because of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects websites like Facebook from being sued for what users say or do on those sites.
Passed in 1996, the act reads in part, “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”
Back in 2006, the act protected the website MySpace when it was sued after a teen met an adult male on the site who then sexually assaulted her. The court found that the teen’s claims that MySpace failed to protect her would imply MySpace was liable for content posted on the site — claims that butted up against Section 230.
But if Facebook is a publisher, then it can exercise editorial control over its content — and for Facebook, its content is your posts, photos, and videos. That would give Facebook carte blanche to monitor, edit, and even delete content (and users) it considered offensive or unwelcome according to its terms of service — which, to be clear, the company already does — but would make it vulnerable to same types of lawsuits as media companies are more generally.
If the New York Times or the Washington Post published a violent screed aimed at me or published blatantly false information about me, I could hypothetically sue the New York Times for doing so (and some people have).
So instead, Facebook has tried to thread an almost impossible needle: performing the same content moderation tasks as a media company might, while arguing that it isn’t a media company at all.
Facebook is trying to have its cake and eat it too
At times, Facebook has argued that it’s a platform, but at other times — like in court — that it’s a publisher.
In public-facing venues, Facebook refers to itself as a platform or just a “tech company,” not a publisher. Take this Senate committee hearing from April 2018, for example, where Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg argues that while Facebook is responsible for the content people place on the platform, it’s not a “media company” or a publisher that creates content.
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But in court, Facebook’s own attorneys have argued the opposite. In court proceedings stemming from a lawsuit filed by an app developer in 2018, a Facebook attorney argued that because Facebook was a publisher, it could work like a newspaper — and thus have the ability to determine what to publish and what not to. “The publisher discretion is a free speech right irrespective of what technological means is used. A newspaper has a publisher function whether they are doing it on their website, in a printed copy or through the news alerts.”
And even the language Zuckerberg has used about Facebook when appearing before Congress, as he did last spring, shows that he thinks of the service as a publisher — while his company simultaneously argues that it’s not.
In his opening statement to committee members, Zuckerberg said, “We didn’t take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake. It was my mistake, and I’m sorry. I started Facebook, I run it, and I’m responsible for what happens here.” And then he added, “I agree we are responsible for the content” on Facebook, while noting again that Facebook doesn’t produce content itself.
Why the line between platform and publisher matters
Facebook is far from alone in attempting to walk an almost impossible line between responding to users’ demands for moderation and editing while attempting to avoid the legal responsibilities of being a publisher.
Take Tumblr’s recent ban on nudity, Twitter’s continued back-and-forth on suspending and banning extremist users, Facebook’s recent efforts to curtail misleading ads that may have contributed to misinformation surrounding the 2016 presidential campaign: All of these moderating efforts are attempts to get out ahead of users who are dismayed by a constant cavalcade of bad actors and bots that make these sites less enjoyable to use (and less profitable for ad companies that post on these platforms, and thus, for the platforms).
And with the threat of impending regulations arising from European courts where American digital media protections don’t exist, Facebook is keener than ever to stay within the good graces of American users — and politicians.
So companies like Facebook, YouTube, and Tumblr are trying to be more, as Zuckerberg put it, “responsible.” But that’s landed them in a supercharged political environment, drawing the ire of the figures they’ve deemed dangerous and many others. For companies like Facebook, they’re damned if they do moderate content — both legally and politically — and damned if they don’t. …
Facebook wants to enjoy the benefits of being a content publisher — major moderation and editing powers along with the power to ban users for whatever reasons it wants — while also accessing the legal freedoms that come with being a platform under American law. And right now, Facebook is basically a publisher that keeps arguing that it isn’t.
That muddy legal territory has people worried that the social media giant will fail on both accounts — that it won’t handle material on its site as responsibly as a media outlet might, but will also stop providing an online “town square” where controversial voices can be heard.Since Facebook is now apparently reviewing the actions of users even when they’re not on Facebook, some are arguing that the stated terms of service that should dictate what’s permitted on Facebook and Instagram don’t do so in reality. That’s why organizations focused on digital civil liberties are just as concerned about Facebook’s decisions as some on the right.
Jillian York, a Electronic Freedom Foundation director, said in a statement, “Given the concentrated power that a handful of social media platforms wield, those companies owe their users a clear explanation of their rules, clear notice to users when they violate those rules, and an opportunity to appeal decisions.”
In April 2018, Facebook launched the “Facebook Here Together” campaign, stating that Facebook would “do more to keep you safe” from privacy violations and seemingly from bad content.
But that’s the role of a publisher — one that Facebook has argued time and time again that it doesn’t have. And that’s a big, big problem for the world’s most powerful social media company.
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London’s Daily Mail claims:
The birth of Prince Harry and Meghan‘s baby boy has signalled the first time that a person has had the right to become both the British monarch and the US President.
Baby Sussex is automatically a British citizen based on the Duke of Sussex’s citizenship status and also due to being born in the UK.
But assuming Meghan did not voluntarily give up her own US citizenship when she married Harry, which she was no required to do by law, the baby will also be granted American citizenship himself.
The implication of being naturally-born citizen of the United States means Baby Sussex could one day run for office as US President.
However the US constitution states that any runner for the job must also have lived in the US for at least 14 years, as well as be over the age of 35.
In order for a child who was born abroad to a US citizen parent who is married to a non-US citizen, the citizen, who would be Meghan in this case, must have lived in the United States for at least five years, and two of those years must have been after the age of 14.
The birth of Baby Sussex must then be officially reported to an American consulate in order for him to obtain US citizenship.
US law does not officially recognize dual citizenship, but it doesn’t prohibit it either.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 