8 ms·

Steve Bannon Proposes Using ICE in Elections

140 points by SilverElfin 9mo ago

SilverElfin 9mo ago
A lot of people have been concerned that ICE is turning into a personal army for Trump. This year they will expand ICE to over 40,000 agents allegedly. This is enough to overwhelm police departments in every jurisdiction. There is a real possibility that these agents will continue detainment of people, even if they are US citizens, as they are trying to vote. Perhaps they will use their facial recognition app, Mobile Fortify (built by NEC), to identify people and decide if they’re a likely GOP voter or not. Who knows. Whatever they do, this feels like a serious threat to American democracy.
- convolvatron 9mo ago
  the swing is small enough that one doesn't even have to target individuals. delaying some mail from particular zip codes might be enough. suppressing urban voting a little might be enough. a few of these and you're done.
- rawgabbit 9mo ago
  On Election Day, they will deploy ICE to traditionally Democratic voting precincts. This is how they will "solve" electoral fraud.
  - OutOfHere 9mo ago
    It is the swing precincts and states that they will deploy it to.
    - dragonwriter 9mo ago
      No, if it was maximizing suppression bang for the buck it would be the Democratic precincts in swing states, not “swing precincts and states”, because electoral votes (except for 5—out of the 9 in Nebraska and Maine—that are determined by Congressional district) are decided by statewide (not precinct level) outcomes, so you get the maximum effect on the outcome by suppressing the vote in Democratic-leaning areas of swing states, not by targeting precincts that are near parity in the same states.
      - SilverElfin 9mo ago
        That’s for the presidential elections right? For midterms wouldn’t they target swing districts that determine House seats?
        dragonwriter 9mo ago
        Sure, I was thinking in terms of the presidential; but its pretty similar for midterms, you'd still mostly want to target Democratic and not swing precincts, but those in swing congressional districts rather than swing states; precincts are typically on the several hundred to a few thousand people; congressional districts are several hundred thousand to just over a million people.
  - breakpointalpha 9mo ago
    1. Deploy ICE agents wearing milsim gear to key Dem voting locations. 2. Allow the crowd to yell at them. 3. Use the crowd agitation as an opportunity to escalate and go "hands on". 4. Cause a ruckus. 5. Use the ruckus as justification for closing the polling location for the rest of the day. 6. Count the Republican votes, discard the Dem votes. 7. Declare landslide victory. 8. Ignore calls for extended voting or recounts.
cf100clunk 9mo ago
Voter intimidation is against the law.
- dyauspitr 9mo ago
  This administration is lawless.
  - an0malous 9mo ago
    Can anyone downvoting this comment explain why? It seems like an objective fact at this point that this administration is lawless. Trump himself has stated that anything he does as president is by definition legal and that the only bounds on what he can do are "[his] own morality"
  - deepfriedchokes 9mo ago
    This is a systems problem, not a human problem. It was inevitable that any weaknesses in the system would eventually be exploited. We should focus on fixing the system so this cannot happen again.
    - Analemma_ 9mo ago
      I disagree completely. There are a lot of tweaks which need to be made to the various mechanisms of American government, but ultimately there's no system you can design which can fix the problem of "approximately half the country is in a personality cult to one guy who demands absolute power, and his supporters in government refuse to enforce the law against him". Or at least no system which is remotely recognizable as democratic. How could that possibly work? It's user error, and trying to fix it without changing the minds and wants of those users just makes them angrier that "the Elites are undermining the will of the People" or whatever.
    - QuantumGood 9mo ago
      Complex systems have more unintended behaviors and failure modes, and interventions create new problems you didn’t anticipate. This is literally the Law of unintended consequences, and the more detailed you make the law, the harder it is to update to correct, current or actual circumstances.
vdupras 9mo ago
Every accusation, an admission The process is so blunt, so blatant, it's surprising that it works. I'm guessing it's the result of years and years of lessening the american people so that they can roll over in the most undignified way.
jeffbee 9mo ago
Americans have been in a hot civil war since January 2021 and just refuse to realize it.
- CalRobert 9mo ago
  Like a slow motion Troubles
  - jeffbee 9mo ago
    It is exactly that.
- mullingitover 9mo ago
  Arguably the original civil war never ended. The most important battle lost by the Union forces: Reconstruction.
  - jeffbee 9mo ago
    The boys told me to stop bringing this up. But yes, correct take.
  - Integrape 9mo ago
    Just like The War of the Last Alliance. Reconstruction was Isildur keeping the ring for himself.
- AnimalMuppet 9mo ago
  No, not hot. But yes, we are in one.
A_D_E_P_T 9mo ago
Steve Bannon is all over the Epstein files. He'd probably say anything outlandish to deflect attention away from that. > https://www.jmail.world/messages/steve-bannon https://www.jmail.world/messages/steve-bannon
- crumpled 9mo ago
  It's not deflection. They're just doing multiple evil things at the same time.
  - ramuel 9mo ago
    "Flood the zone"
    - crumpled 9mo ago
      What's happening on the media landscape is an enormous problem, highly manipulated and coordinated on the right-wing side. Flooding the zone is happening, among other things that weaken trust in journalism, weaken/defund/discourage investigative reporting, burying the lede information etc. However, using the goon squad to illegally intimidate and disenfranchise voters is a problem large enough that calling it a would-be distraction from the Epstein files is doing everyone a disservice. We have to pay attention to more than one thing. Saying <blank> is just a distraction from <blank-2>, means that you're too distracted by <blank-2> and need to step back and look around at all the other horrors.
crumpled 9mo ago
The Project 2025 crew is so obvious about what they are doing, and the counter-measures seem to be along the lines of, "well, let's see how it goes."
- CamperBob2 9mo ago
  How it's going: https://www.project2025.observer/en https://www.project2025.observer/en Spoiler: ~50% of goals met in Trump's first year.
tptacek 9mo ago
This wouldn't be on-topic for HN even if it wasn't running in "Newsweek" --- even if a sitting senator had said it, mere proposals are explicitly off-topic --- but I always feel like it's useful to call out the fact that "Newsweek" is a grift publication. The Newsweek your parents read went out of business a decade and a half ago, and was purchased by a cult and run as an SEO farm. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=proposed%20bill%20by%3Adang&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- publicinterest 9mo ago
  [dead]
- crumpled 9mo ago
  I would change that classification from "mere proposal" to "credible threat". I'm honestly disappointed to see this flagged. What's the saying, "Even an SEO farm is right twice a day"?
  - bigyabai 9mo ago
    Agreed. Bannon has substantial political influence, and they definitely know that. The parent's comments have a history of unnecessarily concern-trolling posts they don't like, instead of flagging them or moving on.
- SilverElfin 9mo ago
  Why is a proposal off-topic? Who decides what is on-topic and off-topic? It seems quite relevant to me, since the administration regularly has people putting out statements that either test the waters or try to normalize some idea. And those statements have significant impact on many readers of HN.
- tim333 9mo ago
  The guidelines have: >Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. You could argue it's an interesting new phenomenon? The same story is in loads of publications.
_aleph2c_ 9mo ago
[flagged]
- mothballed 9mo ago
  A bazillion cases have determined you can be ID'd to exercise a right granted to 'people'. (Illinois FOID still hasn't been overthrown). The constitution protects rights of citizens to vote. It does seem bizarre you need an ID to show you are a 'person' to exercise the right of people, but not an ID to show you are a citizen to exercise the right of citizens. I'm not sure what the solution is, but it's blindingly inconsistent across rights. Surely it is at least as easy to show you are a person without ID, as it is to show you are a citizen without ID...
  - atmavatar 9mo ago
    It also seems bizarre that living US citizens were denied birth certificates because hospitals refused treatment of their pregnant moms due to race, forcing them to use midwives.
- mindslight 9mo ago
  Illegal immigrants are not voting, especially in significant numbers. Meanwhile this exact topic is discussing how our voting system may be directly attacked by effectively a foreign power, after the population was previously swayed by foreign influence in the form of revanchist propaganda highlighting all of America's problems while offering no solution beyond naked fascism red in tooth and claw. It's also utterly disingenuous to bring up "criminals" to drive focus onto individuals, skipping right past the fish rotting from the head with the corrupt federal executive.
  - eudamoniac 9mo ago
    > Illegal immigrants are not voting, especially in significant numbers. How can you know this though?
    - 9mo ago
secretballot 9mo ago
This is a predictable play. This had a highish likelihood of happening the moment they announced the massive, rapid funding and personnel expansion. Now that "abolish ICE" (ICE being their critically-important newly-empowered end-run around Posse Comitatus) is trending, they basically have to play every card they've got, or risk seeing their project set back by at least a few years, just as it's gaining steam. It'll take longer to capture enough of the courts and military that they don't need ICE and its bullshit "but immigration enforcement must have special otherwise-unconstitutional powers" smoke-screen of a justification any more. I also expect: 1) Lawsuits, subpoenas, and indictments against and of elections offices and key officials in Democratic areas of vulnerable Republican districts, timed to mess with their ability to even function. If it suppresses the vote that's a "nice to have" but mostly this is to sow uncertainty about the elections both by generating ginned-up headlines (it doesn't matter if the investigations actually find anything or go anywhere) and by delaying vote counting and causing chaos (e.g. very long lines) on Election Day, which opens up greater space for the GOP to act after the elections. 2) Challenges of the outcomes by the administration and their proxies, and outright calls for Republicans to pull certification tricks akin to the fake-elector crime they attempted in '20. This would be supported by #1, and by ICE-created chaos and vote suppression. Incidentally, the ICE intervention can take many forms, the most extreme of which (and most effective to the admin) is triggering violence (a lot of people are going to react poorly to being asked "papers, please" by a small squad of armed & armored federal thugs on the way to vote) that actually shuts down polling places in key locations. This both heavily suppresses the vote in areas they've targeted, and serves their "chaos! Democrats are trying to cheat by letting illegals vote! See how much they freak out when we don't let them?" narrative. The lighter version is some cautious shows-of-force and unrealized threats ahead of time, aimed at gentler levels of vote suppression (if you're a citizen but have an accent and aren't white, you might think twice about your odds of getting to the polls without getting locked up for a day or two and losing perhaps five figures you may not have attaining your release, and just stay home, even if ICE ends up not showing or just doing some show-of-force drive-bys that end up all over social media) I'd love to know what, if anything, state governments are planning to prevent any of this. I've personally not been able to think of a single effective thing they can do about it as far as actually keeping it from happening or recovering quickly from the material harm it does (winning much later in the court of public opinion, for whatever that's worth, is another matter, as is eventually winning in court) but maybe there's something. (I rate all the above fairly likely, in some form; my outside-but-not-impossible-odds guess is they'll seize some ballot drop boxes or enroute mail-in ballots with nebulous claims of wrongdoing that don't go anywhere but do fuck up specific districts' voting processes, with, as usual, no relief from the courts because by the time anything can be done about it it's a fait accompli and nobody's gonna trust those ballots after the feds have had them, anyway)
general1465 9mo ago
How many ICE agents is there? How many elections places are in USA? They would be spread so thinly that it would not even matter.
- secretballot 9mo ago
  A very high proportion of seats in any given election are, for "natural" or gerrymandering reasons, regarded as "safe seats" for their incumbent or (if the incumbent isn't running) party. These can all be ignored, unless you're just wanting to mess with a few polling places in safe Democratic districts to further a narrative of election chaos. For actually directly changing outcomes, they're irrelevant. A seat that is likely to flip is probably going to be a relatively close race. There are a bunch of public and private sources you can use, and databases both parties have already compiled, to find out which polling places are likely to be overwhelmingly visited by one party's voters over the other. A majority of one in the House, and a tie in the Senate, is all the White House needs to mostly prevent Congress from messing with them much (though larger margins are better). Combine all these facts and they have more than enough ICE agents to have a huge effect on the outcomes. They only need to show up in a handful of specific places to completely change the course of the next couple years.
- jeffbee 9mo ago
  I keep hearing this, but it doesn't make sense. This is electionist cope. The elections are decided in a handful of states with narrow margins. The ICE guys will be hanging around in urban neighborhoods with lots of minorities. Such as parts of Milwaukee and Detroit.
  - mcphage 9mo ago
    > The ICE guys will be hanging around in urban neighborhoods with lots of minorities. Such as parts of Milwaukee and Detroit. Which they have been. How did that go in the special election a few days ago?
    - jeffbee 9mo ago
      There was a recent first-past-the-post statewide special election somewhere?
tmaly 9mo ago
Bannon is being funded by a foreign agent. His job is to create controversy.
- SilverElfin 9mo ago
  One thing that surprised me in the Epstein files is just how much Epstein was intertwined in various foreign relations. Like Peter Thiel repeatedly meeting Russian officials and his Kremlin handler (literally) at Epstein’s properties. And various Israeli people conducting business there. Isn’t Thiel collaborating with Russians treasonous? What does it mean when you have this set of people who are all working together - Bannon, Thiel, Musk, Vance, etc - are they all treasonous?
  - tim333 9mo ago
    It all certainly looks iffy. Donald Tusk the Polish prime minister was saying Epstein was probably working for the Russians and getting kompromat for them. There seems to have been a deliberate effort to rope in as many people as possible. It's probably not legally treason but not good.
    - croon 9mo ago
      It's very convenient to be able to operate at a level that regular moral humans can't conceive as probable enough to warrant writing laws around.
      - tim333 9mo ago
        There's a lot of stuff that I'd think unlikely but it turns out the Russians have office buildings full of salaried employees organising it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_measures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_measures I'm not quite sure the answer. Maybe the west needs to get more serious about opposing that stuff?
  - aceazzameen 9mo ago
    I'm convinced all of these ghouls will do whatever they can to buy/cheat/steal these elections. Because if they don't, they all face potential prison time. And Bannon's not looking forward to going back.
exceptione 9mo ago
Flagged, because...?
- lawn 9mo ago
  Because fascists.
  - CalRobert 9mo ago
    What’s a better forum? Tired of “crushing democracy isn’t directly related to tech” flagging
    - exceptione 9mo ago
      Which means that this discussion should take place _right here_. That is also a role for moderation to play. It used to be worse though, the fascism is now too much in the face to push it aside, so some of the critical pieces of information are not immediately removed from front page. But HN has a problem with reality and responsibility, I had naively thought the public would be more intellectually honest. Reality will only get more uncomfortable, I think. Authoritarian dynamics will inevitable escalate, crushing dissent or competition, anything goes in this zero sum game. The business part has to think about its political part.
    - toxic72 9mo ago
      It'd be cool to fork HN and show only the flagged posts
      - cosmicgadget 9mo ago
        /active is close enough.

140 points by SilverElfin 9mo ago

A lot of people have been concerned that ICE is turning into a personal army for Trump. This year they will expand ICE to over 40,000 agents allegedly. This is enough to overwhelm police departments in every jurisdiction. There is a real possibility that these agents will continue detainment of people, even if they are US citizens, as they are trying to vote. Perhaps they will use their facial recognition app, Mobile Fortify (built by NEC), to identify people and decide if they’re a likely GOP voter or not. Who knows. Whatever they do, this feels like a serious threat to American democracy.

convolvatron 9mo ago
the swing is small enough that one doesn't even have to target individuals. delaying some mail from particular zip codes might be enough. suppressing urban voting a little might be enough. a few of these and you're done.
rawgabbit 9mo ago
On Election Day, they will deploy ICE to traditionally Democratic voting precincts. This is how they will "solve" electoral fraud.
- OutOfHere 9mo ago
  It is the swing precincts and states that they will deploy it to.
  - dragonwriter 9mo ago
    No, if it was maximizing suppression bang for the buck it would be the Democratic precincts in swing states, not “swing precincts and states”, because electoral votes (except for 5—out of the 9 in Nebraska and Maine—that are determined by Congressional district) are decided by statewide (not precinct level) outcomes, so you get the maximum effect on the outcome by suppressing the vote in Democratic-leaning areas of swing states, not by targeting precincts that are near parity in the same states.
    - SilverElfin 9mo ago
      That’s for the presidential elections right? For midterms wouldn’t they target swing districts that determine House seats?
      - dragonwriter 9mo ago
        Sure, I was thinking in terms of the presidential; but its pretty similar for midterms, you'd still mostly want to target Democratic and not swing precincts, but those in swing congressional districts rather than swing states; precincts are typically on the several hundred to a few thousand people; congressional districts are several hundred thousand to just over a million people.
- breakpointalpha 9mo ago
  1. Deploy ICE agents wearing milsim gear to key Dem voting locations. 2. Allow the crowd to yell at them. 3. Use the crowd agitation as an opportunity to escalate and go "hands on". 4. Cause a ruckus. 5. Use the ruckus as justification for closing the polling location for the rest of the day. 6. Count the Republican votes, discard the Dem votes. 7. Declare landslide victory. 8. Ignore calls for extended voting or recounts.

cf100clunk 9mo ago

Voter intimidation is against the law.

dyauspitr 9mo ago
This administration is lawless.
- an0malous 9mo ago
  Can anyone downvoting this comment explain why? It seems like an objective fact at this point that this administration is lawless. Trump himself has stated that anything he does as president is by definition legal and that the only bounds on what he can do are "[his] own morality"
- deepfriedchokes 9mo ago
  This is a systems problem, not a human problem. It was inevitable that any weaknesses in the system would eventually be exploited. We should focus on fixing the system so this cannot happen again.
  - Analemma_ 9mo ago
    I disagree completely. There are a lot of tweaks which need to be made to the various mechanisms of American government, but ultimately there's no system you can design which can fix the problem of "approximately half the country is in a personality cult to one guy who demands absolute power, and his supporters in government refuse to enforce the law against him". Or at least no system which is remotely recognizable as democratic. How could that possibly work? It's user error, and trying to fix it without changing the minds and wants of those users just makes them angrier that "the Elites are undermining the will of the People" or whatever.
  - QuantumGood 9mo ago
    Complex systems have more unintended behaviors and failure modes, and interventions create new problems you didn’t anticipate. This is literally the Law of unintended consequences, and the more detailed you make the law, the harder it is to update to correct, current or actual circumstances.

vdupras 9mo ago

Every accusation, an admission The process is so blunt, so blatant, it's surprising that it works. I'm guessing it's the result of years and years of lessening the american people so that they can roll over in the most undignified way.

jeffbee 9mo ago

Americans have been in a hot civil war since January 2021 and just refuse to realize it.

CalRobert 9mo ago
Like a slow motion Troubles
- jeffbee 9mo ago
  It is exactly that.
mullingitover 9mo ago
Arguably the original civil war never ended. The most important battle lost by the Union forces: Reconstruction.
- jeffbee 9mo ago
  The boys told me to stop bringing this up. But yes, correct take.
- Integrape 9mo ago
  Just like The War of the Last Alliance. Reconstruction was Isildur keeping the ring for himself.
AnimalMuppet 9mo ago
No, not hot. But yes, we are in one.

A_D_E_P_T 9mo ago

Steve Bannon is all over the Epstein files. He'd probably say anything outlandish to deflect attention away from that. > https://www.jmail.world/messages/steve-bannon https://www.jmail.world/messages/steve-bannon

crumpled 9mo ago
It's not deflection. They're just doing multiple evil things at the same time.
- ramuel 9mo ago
  "Flood the zone"
  - crumpled 9mo ago
    What's happening on the media landscape is an enormous problem, highly manipulated and coordinated on the right-wing side. Flooding the zone is happening, among other things that weaken trust in journalism, weaken/defund/discourage investigative reporting, burying the lede information etc. However, using the goon squad to illegally intimidate and disenfranchise voters is a problem large enough that calling it a would-be distraction from the Epstein files is doing everyone a disservice. We have to pay attention to more than one thing. Saying <blank> is just a distraction from <blank-2>, means that you're too distracted by <blank-2> and need to step back and look around at all the other horrors.

crumpled 9mo ago

The Project 2025 crew is so obvious about what they are doing, and the counter-measures seem to be along the lines of, "well, let's see how it goes."

CamperBob2 9mo ago
How it's going: https://www.project2025.observer/en https://www.project2025.observer/en Spoiler: ~50% of goals met in Trump's first year.

tptacek 9mo ago

This wouldn't be on-topic for HN even if it wasn't running in "Newsweek" --- even if a sitting senator had said it, mere proposals are explicitly off-topic --- but I always feel like it's useful to call out the fact that "Newsweek" is a grift publication. The Newsweek your parents read went out of business a decade and a half ago, and was purchased by a cult and run as an SEO farm. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=proposed%20bill%20by%3Adang&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

publicinterest 9mo ago
[dead]
crumpled 9mo ago
I would change that classification from "mere proposal" to "credible threat". I'm honestly disappointed to see this flagged. What's the saying, "Even an SEO farm is right twice a day"?
- bigyabai 9mo ago
  Agreed. Bannon has substantial political influence, and they definitely know that. The parent's comments have a history of unnecessarily concern-trolling posts they don't like, instead of flagging them or moving on.
SilverElfin 9mo ago
Why is a proposal off-topic? Who decides what is on-topic and off-topic? It seems quite relevant to me, since the administration regularly has people putting out statements that either test the waters or try to normalize some idea. And those statements have significant impact on many readers of HN.
tim333 9mo ago
The guidelines have: >Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. You could argue it's an interesting new phenomenon? The same story is in loads of publications.

_aleph2c_ 9mo ago

[flagged]

mothballed 9mo ago
A bazillion cases have determined you can be ID'd to exercise a right granted to 'people'. (Illinois FOID still hasn't been overthrown). The constitution protects rights of citizens to vote. It does seem bizarre you need an ID to show you are a 'person' to exercise the right of people, but not an ID to show you are a citizen to exercise the right of citizens. I'm not sure what the solution is, but it's blindingly inconsistent across rights. Surely it is at least as easy to show you are a person without ID, as it is to show you are a citizen without ID...
- atmavatar 9mo ago
  It also seems bizarre that living US citizens were denied birth certificates because hospitals refused treatment of their pregnant moms due to race, forcing them to use midwives.
mindslight 9mo ago
Illegal immigrants are not voting, especially in significant numbers. Meanwhile this exact topic is discussing how our voting system may be directly attacked by effectively a foreign power, after the population was previously swayed by foreign influence in the form of revanchist propaganda highlighting all of America's problems while offering no solution beyond naked fascism red in tooth and claw. It's also utterly disingenuous to bring up "criminals" to drive focus onto individuals, skipping right past the fish rotting from the head with the corrupt federal executive.
- eudamoniac 9mo ago
  > Illegal immigrants are not voting, especially in significant numbers. How can you know this though?
  - 9mo ago

secretballot 9mo ago

This is a predictable play. This had a highish likelihood of happening the moment they announced the massive, rapid funding and personnel expansion. Now that "abolish ICE" (ICE being their critically-important newly-empowered end-run around Posse Comitatus) is trending, they basically have to play every card they've got, or risk seeing their project set back by at least a few years, just as it's gaining steam. It'll take longer to capture enough of the courts and military that they don't need ICE and its bullshit "but immigration enforcement must have special otherwise-unconstitutional powers" smoke-screen of a justification any more. I also expect: 1) Lawsuits, subpoenas, and indictments against and of elections offices and key officials in Democratic areas of vulnerable Republican districts, timed to mess with their ability to even function. If it suppresses the vote that's a "nice to have" but mostly this is to sow uncertainty about the elections both by generating ginned-up headlines (it doesn't matter if the investigations actually find anything or go anywhere) and by delaying vote counting and causing chaos (e.g. very long lines) on Election Day, which opens up greater space for the GOP to act after the elections. 2) Challenges of the outcomes by the administration and their proxies, and outright calls for Republicans to pull certification tricks akin to the fake-elector crime they attempted in '20. This would be supported by #1, and by ICE-created chaos and vote suppression. Incidentally, the ICE intervention can take many forms, the most extreme of which (and most effective to the admin) is triggering violence (a lot of people are going to react poorly to being asked "papers, please" by a small squad of armed & armored federal thugs on the way to vote) that actually shuts down polling places in key locations. This both heavily suppresses the vote in areas they've targeted, and serves their "chaos! Democrats are trying to cheat by letting illegals vote! See how much they freak out when we don't let them?" narrative. The lighter version is some cautious shows-of-force and unrealized threats ahead of time, aimed at gentler levels of vote suppression (if you're a citizen but have an accent and aren't white, you might think twice about your odds of getting to the polls without getting locked up for a day or two and losing perhaps five figures you may not have attaining your release, and just stay home, even if ICE ends up not showing or just doing some show-of-force drive-bys that end up all over social media) I'd love to know what, if anything, state governments are planning to prevent any of this. I've personally not been able to think of a single effective thing they can do about it as far as actually keeping it from happening or recovering quickly from the material harm it does (winning much later in the court of public opinion, for whatever that's worth, is another matter, as is eventually winning in court) but maybe there's something. (I rate all the above fairly likely, in some form; my outside-but-not-impossible-odds guess is they'll seize some ballot drop boxes or enroute mail-in ballots with nebulous claims of wrongdoing that don't go anywhere but do fuck up specific districts' voting processes, with, as usual, no relief from the courts because by the time anything can be done about it it's a fait accompli and nobody's gonna trust those ballots after the feds have had them, anyway)

general1465 9mo ago

How many ICE agents is there? How many elections places are in USA? They would be spread so thinly that it would not even matter.

secretballot 9mo ago
A very high proportion of seats in any given election are, for "natural" or gerrymandering reasons, regarded as "safe seats" for their incumbent or (if the incumbent isn't running) party. These can all be ignored, unless you're just wanting to mess with a few polling places in safe Democratic districts to further a narrative of election chaos. For actually directly changing outcomes, they're irrelevant. A seat that is likely to flip is probably going to be a relatively close race. There are a bunch of public and private sources you can use, and databases both parties have already compiled, to find out which polling places are likely to be overwhelmingly visited by one party's voters over the other. A majority of one in the House, and a tie in the Senate, is all the White House needs to mostly prevent Congress from messing with them much (though larger margins are better). Combine all these facts and they have more than enough ICE agents to have a huge effect on the outcomes. They only need to show up in a handful of specific places to completely change the course of the next couple years.
jeffbee 9mo ago
I keep hearing this, but it doesn't make sense. This is electionist cope. The elections are decided in a handful of states with narrow margins. The ICE guys will be hanging around in urban neighborhoods with lots of minorities. Such as parts of Milwaukee and Detroit.
- mcphage 9mo ago
  > The ICE guys will be hanging around in urban neighborhoods with lots of minorities. Such as parts of Milwaukee and Detroit. Which they have been. How did that go in the special election a few days ago?
  - jeffbee 9mo ago
    There was a recent first-past-the-post statewide special election somewhere?

tmaly 9mo ago

Bannon is being funded by a foreign agent. His job is to create controversy.

SilverElfin 9mo ago
One thing that surprised me in the Epstein files is just how much Epstein was intertwined in various foreign relations. Like Peter Thiel repeatedly meeting Russian officials and his Kremlin handler (literally) at Epstein’s properties. And various Israeli people conducting business there. Isn’t Thiel collaborating with Russians treasonous? What does it mean when you have this set of people who are all working together - Bannon, Thiel, Musk, Vance, etc - are they all treasonous?
- tim333 9mo ago
  It all certainly looks iffy. Donald Tusk the Polish prime minister was saying Epstein was probably working for the Russians and getting kompromat for them. There seems to have been a deliberate effort to rope in as many people as possible. It's probably not legally treason but not good.
  - croon 9mo ago
    It's very convenient to be able to operate at a level that regular moral humans can't conceive as probable enough to warrant writing laws around.
    - tim333 9mo ago
      There's a lot of stuff that I'd think unlikely but it turns out the Russians have office buildings full of salaried employees organising it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_measures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_measures I'm not quite sure the answer. Maybe the west needs to get more serious about opposing that stuff?
- aceazzameen 9mo ago
  I'm convinced all of these ghouls will do whatever they can to buy/cheat/steal these elections. Because if they don't, they all face potential prison time. And Bannon's not looking forward to going back.

exceptione 9mo ago

Flagged, because...?

lawn 9mo ago
Because fascists.
- CalRobert 9mo ago
  What’s a better forum? Tired of “crushing democracy isn’t directly related to tech” flagging
  - exceptione 9mo ago
    Which means that this discussion should take place _right here_. That is also a role for moderation to play. It used to be worse though, the fascism is now too much in the face to push it aside, so some of the critical pieces of information are not immediately removed from front page. But HN has a problem with reality and responsibility, I had naively thought the public would be more intellectually honest. Reality will only get more uncomfortable, I think. Authoritarian dynamics will inevitable escalate, crushing dissent or competition, anything goes in this zero sum game. The business part has to think about its political part.
  - toxic72 9mo ago
    It'd be cool to fork HN and show only the flagged posts
    - cosmicgadget 9mo ago
      /active is close enough.