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Monster of 2024: Food Delivery Customers. Get Your Own Damn Food!

31 December 2024 at 11:00

The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. Importantly, this is a completely non-exhaustive and subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy or discontent. Enjoy.

Food delivery drivers can be a menace: On scooters or e-bikes, they weave in and out of traffic, run red lights, and terrorize pedestrians on the sidewalks. When they’re in cars, they can make illegal U-turns, block bike lanes, and double-park. Nearly everyone, even delivery drivers, hates delivery drivers. Major cities like New York and Boston have been trying to crack down on the chaos. The city council in Washington, DC, just passed legislation to try to regulate them, and city residents have called for better—let’s make that any—traffic regulation to restore order to the streets.

It’s an uphill battle. The delivery companies’ high-powered lobbyists have fought regulation, which is complicated by genuine concerns for the low-income immigrants exploited by the delivery app companies. Rarely discussed in all the furor, however, are the real monsters: the customers!

People who frequently use services like DoorDash and Uber Eats are like the single-occupancy commuter on the Beltway, the Amtrak passenger who piles his luggage on the adjacent seat on a crowded train, or the driver who blocks the intersection. They’re exemplars of American individualism, where one person’s immediate gratification comes at the expense of an entire city’s ability to use the crosswalks.

Delivery services can be legitimate lifelines for people with disabilities, new parents, the elderly, or people battling an illness. But the couriers clogging the roads and dominating sidewalks today aren’t delivering a week’s worth of groceries. They’re often delivering a single meal to a single person in already-congested urban areas where food offerings are abundant and close at hand. If that all sounds too theoretical, consider that DoorDash enjoys its highest market saturation in San Francisco, a walkable city with more than 13,000 restaurants—one for every 60 or so residents.

Food delivery is bad for city traffic and pedestrian safety, but it’s even worse for people doing the deliveries, whose occupation has become deadly. Yet customers seem largely oblivious to the wreckage they cause. In the first quarter of 2024, DoorDash fielded 650 million orders, up 21 percent from the previous year. And what sort of food is so important that it’s worth dispatching a low-paid delivery guy on a dangerous dash through traffic to retrieve it before it gets cold? According to DoorDash’s own data, the top food item it delivered in 2023 was: french fries, followed closely by chicken quesadillas.

“I would be taking a hit with the crackdown on them. I order a lot of Uber Eats, DoorDash.”

Food-delivery dependence can scramble the brain. In June, for instance, the Associated Press interviewed some people in Boston griping about the scourge of delivery drivers. Jaia Samuel, a 25-year-old hospital worker, agreed that delivery drivers on scooters can be dangerous. At the same time, she wasn’t in favor of getting rid of them. “I would be taking a hit with the crackdown on them,” she admitted. “I order a lot of Uber Eats, DoorDash.”

People have been ordering takeout Chinese and pizza for decades. But the app-based, on-demand delivery system has made it possible for people to order just about any food item, however small, anytime, anywhere. The use of these services skyrocketed during the pandemic, and over the past two years, the growth of e-bike and scooter delivery has contributed to the roadway pandemonium.

During the pandemic, many customers claimed they were helping struggling local restaurants by ordering takeout deliveries, while of course letting the drivers take all the risk of getting sick. Today, people order deliveries of $3 breakfast sandwiches from McDonald’s just because they are too lazy to fry an egg. Indeed, DoorDash, whose revenue has quadrupled since 2020, reports that this year, one customer ordered a 53 cent banana; another dialed up a 10-cent container of McDonald’s creamy ranch, plus a single straw. On-demand food delivery is a habit Americans acquired during the pandemic, and now it’s one they need to break.

DoorDash, which accounts for nearly 70 percent of the American food delivery market, unsurprisingly, does not agree. “This story is as wrong as it is offensive,” DoorDash spokesperson Julian Crowley told me in an email. “This out-of-touch and paternalistic critique, which stereotypes people as ignorant or lazy, doesn’t reflect the truth: millions of people—from big cities to small towns—choose DoorDash because it works. It helps them earn on their own terms, grow their business, and spend their time on what they value most.”

It’s worth considering that the CEO of DoorDash made $400 million in his 2021 pay package. It seems unlikely that he earned that much money solely from the nation’s sick and disabled who may rely on these services. (DoorDash told me that as many as 50 percent of people with disabilities had used their service to buy something they couldn’t buy themselves. But so did 44 percent of all the other customers.)

Data shows that the vast majority of food delivery customers skew young, like the twentysomething finance bro who used to live across the street from me. He got meals delivered almost every single day, and his neighbors grew weary of having to field all the food that got dropped at the wrong address.

But wait! If people didn’t Uber Eat, or DoorDash, or Caviar, or Grubhub, or whatever, they’d just congest the roads by driving to get their food, right? Perhaps some would. But it’s more likely that most people would scrounge something out of the fridge or—gasp!—pack a lunch or walk to Chipotle, the way they did before 2020. The most compelling evidence for this theory? High school students, better known as the DoorDash generation.

I first realized how bad this dynamic had become a few years ago when a delivery guy showed up at my house with a milkshake and a small bag of food. The delivery turned out to be for the 15-year-old next door. According to his parents, he was a star athlete, but apparently he was unable to manage the 350-yard walk to the Shake Shack he’d ordered from. Even worse, though, is how many kids are having meals delivered directly to school every day.

DC’s largest public high school doesn’t allow food deliveries. (“DoorDash is for lazy butts,” one student there told me.) But some of the private schools have no such rule. One day this month, I staked out a small, progressive private school in the Northwest section of DC, and one I know well because one of my children went there (and admittedly, occasionally ordered in).

The school is surrounded by many walkable food options, not to mention those offered inside the building. But during lunchtime, I clocked one food delivery every four minutes. Only one of those was picked up by a teacher. One thing I hadn’t expected to see: a traffic jam on the school’s quiet, tree-lined street from all the food delivery vehicles that weren’t even going to the school, but instead, to people’s houses. I watched with amazement as a Chick-fil-A car passed by and returned a minute or two later. A Chick-fil-A was a five-minute walk away. 

One former student, who sheepishly admits to having been a regular DoorDasher, said there were limits to how much money he’d waste on food deliveries—unlike one classmate. “It’s a new low when you’re delivering Starbucks to school,” he told me. (DoorDash recently established a partnership so customers can order delivery straight from the Starbucks app.)

The school’s delivery traffic seemed modest compared with that of a bigger private DC school that also allows students to leave campus at lunchtime. It too is surrounded by walkable lunch spots, but one recent grad told me that her fellow students ordered food deliveries from 7:30 a.m. until 7 at night. What were they ordering? Chick-fil-A and Dunkin’ Donuts mostly, she said, both less than a 10-minute stroll from the school. “I guess people didn’t want to walk,” she suggested.

The delivery traffic last year got so bad, she said, that the school had to set up a new security table to handle all the food dropoffs. She said so many students were getting food delivered during carpool that parents couldn’t get into the driveway to drop off or pick up their kids. The school eventually restricted the deliveries to a window between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. (The high school principal confirmed that the school did indeed limit the delivery hours.)   

That school has about 500 high school students. If even 10 percent of them are ordering a delivery every day, that could mean an additional 50 vehicles on the road gumming up traffic or terrorizing pedestrians and cyclists, all to bring a Frappuccino to a teenager with too much disposable income. This is not an immigration problem or a traffic enforcement issue or even really the result of corporate greed. It’s a demand problem, which means that the best solution is the most obvious one: Get your own damn food.

How a Fantasy Oil Train May Help the Supreme Court Gut a Major Environmental Law

18 December 2024 at 11:00

The state of Utah has come up with its share of boondoggles over the years, but one of the more enduring is the Uinta Basin Railway. The proposed 88-mile rail line would link the oil fields of the remote Uinta Basin region of eastern Utah to national rail lines so that up to 350,000 barrels of waxy crude oil could be transported to refineries on the Gulf Coast. The railway would allow oil companies to quadruple production in the basin and would be the biggest rail infrastructure project the US has seen since the 1970s.

But in all likelihood, the Uinta Basin Railway will never get built. The Uinta Basin is hemmed in by the soaring peaks of the Wasatch Mountains to the west and the Uinta Mountains to the north. Running an oil train through the mountains would be both dangerous and exorbitantly expensive, especially as the world is trying to scale back the use of fossil fuels. That’s why the railway’s indefatigable promoters, including the state’s congressional delegation, will probably fail to get the train on the tracks. However, they have succeeded in one thing: providing an activist Supreme Court the opportunity to take a whack at the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), one of the nation’s oldest environmental laws.

Enacted in 1970, NEPA requires federal agencies to consider the environmental and public health effects of such things as highway construction, oil drilling, and pipeline construction on public land. Big polluting industries, particularly oil and gas companies, hate NEPA for giving the public a vehicle to obstruct dirty development projects. They’ve been trying to undermine it for years, including during the last Trump administration.

Last week, when the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, former Solicitor General Paul Clement channeled those corporate complaints when he told the justices that NEPA “is designed to inform government decision-making, not paralyze it.” The statute, he argued, had become a “roadblock,” obstructing the railway and other worthy infrastructure projects through excessive environmental analysis. “NEPA is adding a juicy litigation target for project opponents,” Clement told the court.  

“The court is doing the dirty work for all of these industries that are interested in changing our environmental laws.”

But NEPA has almost nothing to do with why the Uinta Basin Railway won’t get built. “The court is doing the dirty work for all of these industries that are interested in changing our environmental laws,” Sam Sankar, a senior vice president at Earthjustice, said in a press briefing on the case, noting that Congress already had streamlined the NEPA process last year. Earthjustice is representing environmental groups that are parties in the case. “The fact that the court took this case means that it’s just issuing policy decisions from the bench, not deciding cases.”

The idea of building a railway from the Uinta Basin to refineries in Salt Lake City or elsewhere has been kicking around for more than 25 years. As I explained in 2022, the basin is home to Utah’s largest, though still modest, oil and gas fields:

Locked inside the basin’s sandstone layers are anywhere between 50 and 321 billion barrels of conventional oil, plus an estimated 14 to 15 billion barrels of tar sands, the largest such reserves in the US. The basin also lies atop a massive geological marvel known as the Green River Formation that stretches into Colorado and Wyoming and contains an estimated 3 trillion barrels of oil shale. In 2012, the US Government Accountability Office reported to Congress that if even half of the formation’s unconventional oil was recoverable, it would “be equal to the entire world’s proven oil reserves.”

Wildcat speculators, big oil companies, and state officials alike have been salivating over the Uinta Basin’s rich oil deposits for years, yet they’ve never been able to fully exploit them. The oil in the basin is a waxy crude that must be heated to 115 degrees to remain liquid, a problem that ruled out an earlier attempt to build a pipeline. The Seven County Infrastructure Coalition, a quasi-governmental organization consisting of the major oil-, gas-, and coal-producing counties in Utah, has received $28 million in public funding to plan and promote the railway as a way around this obstacle. The coalition is one of the petitioners in the Supreme Court case.

“We don’t have a freeway into the Uinta Basin,” Mike McKee, the coalition’s former executive director, told me back in 2022. “It’s just that we have high mountains around us, so it’s been challenging.”

Of course, there is no major highway from the basin for the same reason that the railway has never been built: The current two-lane road from Salt Lake City crests a peak that’s almost 10,000 feet above sea level, which is too high for a train to go over. So the current railway plan calls for tunneling through the mountain. But going through it may be just as treacherous as going over it. Inside the unstable mountain rock are pockets of explosive methane and other gases, not all of which have been mapped.

None of this deterred the Seven County coalition from notifying the federal Surface Transportation Board (STB) in 2019 that it intended to apply for a permit for the railway. The following year, the board started the environmental review process, including taking comments from the public.

In December 2021, the STB found that the railway’s transportation merits outweighed its significant environmental effects. It approved the railway, despite noting that the hazards from tunneling “could potentially cause injury or death,” both in the railway’s construction and operation. It recommended that the coalition conduct some geoengineering studies, which it had not done.

Among the many issues the board failed to consider when it approved the project was the impact of the additional 18 miles of oil train cars that the railway would add to the Union Pacific line going through Colorado, including Eagle County, home to the ski town of Vail. Along with creating significant risks of wildfires, the additional trains would run within feet of the Colorado River, where the possibility of regular oil spills could threaten the drinking water for 40 million people. The deficiencies in the STB’s environmental impact statement prompted environmentalists to ask the DC Circuit Court of Appeals to review the STB decision, as did Eagle County.

In August 2023, the appeals court invalidated the STB’s approval of the railway. Among the many problems it found was the STB’s failure to assess “serious concerns about financial viability in determining the transportation merits of a project.” A 2018 feasibility study commissioned by the coalition itself had estimated that the railway would cost at least $5 billion to construct, need 3,000 workers, take at least 10 years to complete, and require government bond funding because the private sector had little incentive to invest in the railway.  

As Justin Mikulka, a research fellow who studies the finances of energy transition at the New Consensus think tank, told me in 2022, “If there were money to be made, someone would have built this railroad 20 years ago.” The appeals court was also skeptical that the railroad had a future: “Given the record evidence identified by Petitioners—including the 2018 feasibility study—there is similar reason to doubt the financial viability of the Railway.”

“If there were money to be made, someone would have built this railroad 20 years ago.”

Indeed, the plan approved by the STB claims the railway construction would cost a mere $2 billion, to be paid for by a private investor. So far, however, only public money has gone into the project. The private investor, which is also one of the petitioners in the Supreme Court case, is a firm called DHIP Group. When I wrote about the railway in 2022, DHIP’s website showed involvement in only two projects: the Uinta Basin Railway and the Louisiana Plaquemines oil export terminal, which had been canceled in 2021. Today, the long-dead Louisiana project is still listed on its website, but the firm has added a New York state self-storage facility to its portfolio—a concrete box that’s a far cry from a complex, multibillion-dollar infrastructure project.

DHIP’s website also touts its sponsorship of the Integrated Rail and Resources Acquisition Corporation, a new company it took public in 2021 with a $230 million IPO. But in a March 2024 SEC filing, the company disclosed that the New York Stock Exchange had threatened to delist it because in the three years since the IPO, it has done…nothing. (The company has managed to hang on.) Environmental concerns notwithstanding, DHIP seems unlikely to come up with $2 billion to build the railway. A spokesperson for DHIP did not respond to a request for comment.

Even if environmentalists had never filed suit to block it, the railway probably would have died under the weight of its own unfeasibility. Instead, the Seven County coalition appealed the decision to the Supreme Court, arguing that the appeals court had erred when it required the STB to study the local effects of oil wells and refineries that it didn’t have the authority to regulate. In July, the Supreme Court agreed to take the case.

Now the court stands poised to issue a decision with much broader threats to environmental regulation by considering only one question raised by the lower court: Does Supreme Court precedent limit a NEPA analysis strictly to environmental issues that an agency regulates, or does the law allow agencies to weigh the wider impacts of a project, such as air pollution or water contamination, that may be regulated by other agencies?

During oral arguments in the case, liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor expressed frustration with Clement’s suggestion that the court prevent NEPA reviews from considering impacts that were “remote in time and geography.” She suggested that such an interpretation went against the heart of the law, noting, for instance, that if a federal agency allowed a car to go to market, “it could go a thousand miles and 40 states away and blow up. That’s a reasonably foreseeable consequence that is remote in geography and time.” A federal agency, she implied, should absolutely consider such dangers.

“You want absolute rules that make no sense,” Sotomayor told Clement.

Sotomayor seemed to be alone, however, in her defense of NEPA, and the majority of the other seven justices seemed inclined to require at least some limits to the statute. (Justice Neil Gorsuch recused himself from the case because his former patron, Denver-based billionaire Philip Anschutz, had a potential financial interest in the outcome of the case. His oil and gas company, Anschutz Exploration Corporation, has federal drilling leases in Utah and elsewhere and also filed an amicus brief in the case.)

While the justices seemed inclined to hamstring NEPA, such a ruling would be a hollow victory for the Utah railway promoters that brought the case. When the appeals court voided the STB decision approving the railway, it cited at least six other reasons it was unlawful beyond the NEPA issue. None of those will be affected by a Supreme Court decision in the Seven County coalition case. The STB permit will still be void, and the oil train will not get out of the station.

There will be winners in the case, however, most likely the big fossil fuel and other companies whose operations would benefit from less environmental scrutiny, should the court issue a decision reining in NEPA. For instance, the case could lead the court to strictly limit the extent of environmental harms that must be considered in future infrastructure projects, meaning that the public would have a much harder time forcing the government to consider the health and environmental effects of oil and gas wells and pipelines before approving them.

“This case is bigger than the Uinta Basin Railway,” Earthjustice’s Sankar said. “The fossil fuel industry and its allies are making radical arguments that would blind the public to obvious health consequences of government decisions.” The court will issue a decision by June next year.

Enjoy Your Air Travel This Thanksgiving. Next Year Will Likely Be Much, Much Worse.

22 November 2024 at 11:00

Flying during the Thanksgiving holiday is likely to be terrible—as usual. The lobbying group Airlines for America anticipates a record 31 million people will take to the air to visit family and friends for the holiday. But no matter how terrible the flying experience might be this season, it will probably be as good as it gets for a long time to come, as the second Trump administration plans to take a wrecking ball to commercial airline regulation.

Under Secretary Pete Buttigieg, the federal Department of Transportation has made a priority of tackling some of the biggest gripes Americans have had about air travel. To that end, the DOT has extracted nearly $4 billion in reimbursements and refunds owed to passengers since President Joe Biden took office, including forcing Southwest Airlines to refund more than $600 million to more than 2 million passengers who were stranded after it canceled 60 percent of its flights over two days during the December holidays in 2022. The DOT also fined the airline $140 million for a host of operational failures and consumer protection violations.

Under Biden, the DOT has forced most of the major airlines to guarantee free rebooking, meals, and even hotel accommodations when they cause a major delay. And it’s issued at least $225 million in penalties against airlines for violating consumer protection laws—a record. For example, in October, the DOT fined American Airlines $50 million for mistreating passengers with disabilities, including by breaking or losing thousands of wheelchairs.

Airlines destroying or breaking wheelchairs has been a chronic issue. In 2016, the Obama administration tried to remedy the problem with new regulations that would force airlines to track how often they broke or lost wheelchairs and mobility scooters. But as Mother Jones’ Russ Choma reported, the previous Trump administration, larded up with lobbyists from the industry, delayed the rule implementation almost immediately upon taking office. It finally took effect nearly two years later, and only after Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), a combat veteran and double amputee whose wheelchair had been lost by an airline, secured an amendment in Congress that forced the DOT’s hand.

The Biden DOT has also proposed rules to mandate disclosure of airline junk fees. This past spring, it issued a final rule requiring airlines to grant automatic cash refunds to people when the airlines cancel or cause significant delays to flights. The rule, which went into effect last month, spares travelers endless fights with airline bureaucracy to get their money back. And in August, the DOT proposed a rule to ban airlines from charging families extra fees to sit next to their children, a proposal that could save a family of four $200 on a round trip.

Unsurprisingly, the airlines hate all of this and long to return to the days when they could cancel your flight, keep your money, and force you to pay $50 so your toddler doesn’t have to sit next to a stranger on the plane. Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian said this month that President-elect Donald Trump promised “to take a fresh look at the regulatory environment, the bureaucracy that exists in government, the level of overreach that we have seen over the last four years within our industry. I think that will be a breath of fresh air.” Trump promises to usher in that fresh air, as the authors of Project 2025 made clear in their blueprint for the new administration, writing, “Another problematic area is aviation consumer protection.”

Trump has signaled his intention to prioritize airline profits over passengers with his selection of former Wisconsin Rep. Sean Duffy as his transportation secretary. A former reality TV star and Fox News host, Duffy previously was a lobbyist for the airline industry, which has ferociously fought Biden’s consumer measures with both lawsuits and gobs of lobbying money.

Duffy will be charged with following through on all the plans laid out in Project 2025, which include moving parts of the air traffic control system out of Washington in the hopes that much of the staff would quit—the 21st-century version of the Reagan administration firing striking air traffic controllers. Project 2025 envisions a world with far fewer controllers and even fewer control towers, and it advocates axing funding for research and development, as well as subsidies for essential air service to small, rural airports. People who live in Altoona, Pennsylvania, or Beckley, West Virginia, can probably kiss their airports goodbye—but air taxis for rich people will be a high priority in the Trump DOT.

So enjoy your miserable airport journey to see grandma for Thanksgiving this year. Next year’s trip promises to be much, much worse.

Enjoy Your Air Travel This Thanksgiving. Next Year Will Likely Be Much, Much Worse.

22 November 2024 at 11:00

Flying during the Thanksgiving holiday is likely to be terrible—as usual. The lobbying group Airlines for America anticipates a record 31 million people will take to the air to visit family and friends for the holiday. But no matter how terrible the flying experience might be this season, it will probably be as good as it gets for a long time to come, as the second Trump administration plans to take a wrecking ball to commercial airline regulation.

Under Secretary Pete Buttigieg, the federal Department of Transportation has made a priority of tackling some of the biggest gripes Americans have had about air travel. To that end, the DOT has extracted nearly $4 billion in reimbursements and refunds owed to passengers since President Joe Biden took office, including forcing Southwest Airlines to refund more than $600 million to more than 2 million passengers who were stranded after it canceled 60 percent of its flights over two days during the December holidays in 2022. The DOT also fined the airline $140 million for a host of operational failures and consumer protection violations.

Under Biden, the DOT has forced most of the major airlines to guarantee free rebooking, meals, and even hotel accommodations when they cause a major delay. And it’s issued at least $225 million in penalties against airlines for violating consumer protection laws—a record. For example, in October, the DOT fined American Airlines $50 million for mistreating passengers with disabilities, including by breaking or losing thousands of wheelchairs.

Airlines destroying or breaking wheelchairs has been a chronic issue. In 2016, the Obama administration tried to remedy the problem with new regulations that would force airlines to track how often they broke or lost wheelchairs and mobility scooters. But as Mother Jones’ Russ Choma reported, the previous Trump administration, larded up with lobbyists from the industry, delayed the rule implementation almost immediately upon taking office. It finally took effect nearly two years later, and only after Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), a combat veteran and double amputee whose wheelchair had been lost by an airline, secured an amendment in Congress that forced the DOT’s hand.

The Biden DOT has also proposed rules to mandate disclosure of airline junk fees. This past spring, it issued a final rule requiring airlines to grant automatic cash refunds to people when the airlines cancel or cause significant delays to flights. The rule, which went into effect last month, spares travelers endless fights with airline bureaucracy to get their money back. And in August, the DOT proposed a rule to ban airlines from charging families extra fees to sit next to their children, a proposal that could save a family of four $200 on a round trip.

Unsurprisingly, the airlines hate all of this and long to return to the days when they could cancel your flight, keep your money, and force you to pay $50 so your toddler doesn’t have to sit next to a stranger on the plane. Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian said this month that President-elect Donald Trump promised “to take a fresh look at the regulatory environment, the bureaucracy that exists in government, the level of overreach that we have seen over the last four years within our industry. I think that will be a breath of fresh air.” Trump promises to usher in that fresh air, as the authors of Project 2025 made clear in their blueprint for the new administration, writing, “Another problematic area is aviation consumer protection.”

Trump has signaled his intention to prioritize airline profits over passengers with his selection of former Wisconsin Rep. Sean Duffy as his transportation secretary. A former reality TV star and Fox News host, Duffy previously was a lobbyist for the airline industry, which has ferociously fought Biden’s consumer measures with both lawsuits and gobs of lobbying money.

Duffy will be charged with following through on all the plans laid out in Project 2025, which include moving parts of the air traffic control system out of Washington in the hopes that much of the staff would quit—the 21st-century version of the Reagan administration firing striking air traffic controllers. Project 2025 envisions a world with far fewer controllers and even fewer control towers, and it advocates axing funding for research and development, as well as subsidies for essential air service to small, rural airports. People who live in Altoona, Pennsylvania, or Beckley, West Virginia, can probably kiss their airports goodbye—but air taxis for rich people will be a high priority in the Trump DOT.

So enjoy your miserable airport journey to see grandma for Thanksgiving this year. Next year’s trip promises to be much, much worse.

Pete Hegseth Is Ready to Bring the Culture War to the Pentagon

13 November 2024 at 23:01

Some of the nation’s legendary “great men”—leaders like George Marshall and Clark Clifford—have served the country as defense secretary. President-elect Donald Trump has tapped a Fox News host for the job. Pete Hegseth is a veteran of wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan, but he stands out as being uniquely unqualified among his predecessors to oversee an agency with nearly 3 million employees. If you understand what Trump wants him to do, however, he’s probably the perfect man for the job.

Several former Trump administration officials, in conjunction with the conservative Heritage Foundation, created a blueprint for a second Trump term known as Project 2025. Much of the new defense secretary’s likely agenda is spelled out in it. And while it makes a few nods to transparency, calls for better contracting procedures, and, of course, big budget increases, much of the document is simply a roadmap for a culture war.

Christopher Miller, who served 72 days as acting defense secretary during the first Trump administration, is the author of the Project 2025 section on the Defense Department. He starts by suggesting that the Pentagon has emphasized “leftist politics” over military readiness. To combat this problem, Miller lays out a host of priorities for a new Trump administration. Among those are ridding the active military of transgender people and their health care, along with ending abortion access.

As Miller explains:

Exceptions for individuals who are already predisposed to require medical treatment (for example, HIV positive or suffering from gender dysphoria) should be removed, and those with gender dysphoria should be expelled from military service. Gender dysphoria is incompatible with the demands of military service, and the use of public monies for transgender surgeries or to facilitate abortion for servicemembers should be ended.

Miller seems to believe that the military is full of “Marxists” looking to carry out social justice experiments while indoctrinating the ranks. He urges the next defense secretary to make sure senior military officers “understand their primary duty to be ensuring the readiness of the armed forces, not pursuing a social engineering agenda.” To that end, he calls for axing diversity and equality programs and rooting out Marxist professors in the military academies—where tenure should be abolished. In addition, the new administration should audit the curriculum and health policies of schools on military bases so they can be cleansed of “inappropriate” content.

Everything on this conservative wish list dovetails nicely with Hegseth’s rhetoric on Fox News. He has railed against “woke” policies that he claims have hurt military recruitment and has decried the Pentagon’s “social justice” messages. “The Pentagon likes to say ‘our diversity is our strength.’ What a bunch of garbage,” he said on Fox. “In the military, our diversity is not our strength, our unity is our strength.” On a podcast hosted by conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt, Hegseth once said, “There are not enough lesbians in San Francisco, Hugh, to man the 82nd Airborne. You’re going to need to go to guys in Kentucky and Colorado and Ohio, who love the country.”

“There are not enough lesbians in San Francisco, Hugh, to man the 82nd Airborne. You’re going to need to go to guys in Kentucky and Colorado and Ohio, who love the country.”

Hegseth’s televised attacks on “wokeism” in the military helped kill a Pentagon initiative to crack down on extensive white supremacy and extremism within the armed forces. In 2021, Hegseth devoted a segment on Fox News’ Primetime to attacking a Black combat veteran named Bishop Garrison, whom Biden had tapped to oversee a new Countering Extremism Working Group. The working group was tasked with figuring out how to identify people like Jack Teixeira, the Massachusetts Air National Guard member with a history of violent, racist behavior who leaked a trove of classified documents on Discord in 2021. This week, Teixeira was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

But Hegseth reframed the anti-extremism effort as just another liberal attempt to impose woke policies on the federal government. He described Garrison’s assignment as “a purge, a purge of the Defense Department led by a new, and now powerful, radical leftist, a 1619 Project activist, a hardcore social justice Democrat, a man who believes all Trump supporters are racist and extremists.” Biden’s appointment of Garrison, he told viewers, was “the equivalent of Ibram X. Kendi, the author of How to Be an Antiracist, in charge of vetting the entire US military, past, present, and future.” His attack ultimately generated enough political pressure from Republicans that the working group disappeared in less than a year without having had much of an impact.

During the last Trump administration, there were no fewer than six defense secretaries—seven if you count Mark Esper’s two separate stints in the job. (By comparison, there has been just one during the Biden administration, Lloyd Austin.) Only two of Trump’s defense secretaries were ever confirmed by the Senate. Given that track record, the odds are high that Hegseth will be back at Fox News soon enough. But even a short tenure could give him enough time to check off some items on Project 2025’s to-do list.

Pete Hegseth Is Ready to Bring the Culture War to the Pentagon

13 November 2024 at 23:01

Some of the nation’s legendary “great men”—leaders like George Marshall and Clark Clifford—have served the country as defense secretary. President-elect Donald Trump has tapped a Fox News host for the job. Pete Hegseth is a veteran of wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan, but he stands out as being uniquely unqualified among his predecessors to oversee an agency with nearly 3 million employees. If you understand what Trump wants him to do, however, he’s probably the perfect man for the job.

Several former Trump administration officials, in conjunction with the conservative Heritage Foundation, created a blueprint for a second Trump term known as Project 2025. Much of the new defense secretary’s likely agenda is spelled out in it. And while it makes a few nods to transparency, calls for better contracting procedures, and, of course, big budget increases, much of the document is simply a roadmap for a culture war.

Christopher Miller, who served 72 days as acting defense secretary during the first Trump administration, is the author of the Project 2025 section on the Defense Department. He starts by suggesting that the Pentagon has emphasized “leftist politics” over military readiness. To combat this problem, Miller lays out a host of priorities for a new Trump administration. Among those are ridding the active military of transgender people and their health care, along with ending abortion access.

As Miller explains:

Exceptions for individuals who are already predisposed to require medical treatment (for example, HIV positive or suffering from gender dysphoria) should be removed, and those with gender dysphoria should be expelled from military service. Gender dysphoria is incompatible with the demands of military service, and the use of public monies for transgender surgeries or to facilitate abortion for servicemembers should be ended.

Miller seems to believe that the military is full of “Marxists” looking to carry out social justice experiments while indoctrinating the ranks. He urges the next defense secretary to make sure senior military officers “understand their primary duty to be ensuring the readiness of the armed forces, not pursuing a social engineering agenda.” To that end, he calls for axing diversity and equality programs and rooting out Marxist professors in the military academies—where tenure should be abolished. In addition, the new administration should audit the curriculum and health policies of schools on military bases so they can be cleansed of “inappropriate” content.

Everything on this conservative wish list dovetails nicely with Hegseth’s rhetoric on Fox News. He has railed against “woke” policies that he claims have hurt military recruitment and has decried the Pentagon’s “social justice” messages. “The Pentagon likes to say ‘our diversity is our strength.’ What a bunch of garbage,” he said on Fox. “In the military, our diversity is not our strength, our unity is our strength.” On a podcast hosted by conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt, Hegseth once said, “There are not enough lesbians in San Francisco, Hugh, to man the 82nd Airborne. You’re going to need to go to guys in Kentucky and Colorado and Ohio, who love the country.”

“There are not enough lesbians in San Francisco, Hugh, to man the 82nd Airborne. You’re going to need to go to guys in Kentucky and Colorado and Ohio, who love the country.”

Hegseth’s televised attacks on “wokeism” in the military helped kill a Pentagon initiative to crack down on extensive white supremacy and extremism within the armed forces. In 2021, Hegseth devoted a segment on Fox News’ Primetime to attacking a Black combat veteran named Bishop Garrison, whom Biden had tapped to oversee a new Countering Extremism Working Group. The working group was tasked with figuring out how to identify people like Jack Teixeira, the Massachusetts Air National Guard member with a history of violent, racist behavior who leaked a trove of classified documents on Discord in 2021. This week, Teixeira was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

But Hegseth reframed the anti-extremism effort as just another liberal attempt to impose woke policies on the federal government. He described Garrison’s assignment as “a purge, a purge of the Defense Department led by a new, and now powerful, radical leftist, a 1619 Project activist, a hardcore social justice Democrat, a man who believes all Trump supporters are racist and extremists.” Biden’s appointment of Garrison, he told viewers, was “the equivalent of Ibram X. Kendi, the author of How to Be an Antiracist, in charge of vetting the entire US military, past, present, and future.” His attack ultimately generated enough political pressure from Republicans that the working group disappeared in less than a year without having had much of an impact.

During the last Trump administration, there were no fewer than six defense secretaries—seven if you count Mark Esper’s two separate stints in the job. (By comparison, there has been just one during the Biden administration, Lloyd Austin.) Only two of Trump’s defense secretaries were ever confirmed by the Senate. Given that track record, the odds are high that Hegseth will be back at Fox News soon enough. But even a short tenure could give him enough time to check off some items on Project 2025’s to-do list.

Donald Trump, Candidate of Retribution, Is Restored to Power

6 November 2024 at 08:33

Former President Donald Trump will be returning to the White House for a second time after beating Vice President Kamala Harris in Tuesday’s election.

After running on a dark campaign of retribution, Trump tried to strike a conciliatory tone in his victory speech at the Palm Beach County convention, where thousands of his jubliant supporters had assembled for what Trump promised would be “the last rally.” In his speech, he declared his intention to “help the country heal,” and promised that his next administration would be “the golden age of America.” He thanked his campaign, and after Sen. JD Vance said a few words, Trump quipped, “Turned out to be a good choice!”

Among the others he thanks for his victory were podcasters Joe Rogan and Theo Von, in an acknowledgement of the underappreciated role that the medium played in his outreach to the young men who helped return him to office. Trump barely mentioned his opponent in the race and instead focused on his remarkable comeback, which Trump called “a triumph of democracy.”

“It’s time to put the divisions of the past four years behind us,” he said.

After President Joe Biden stepped down and Harris became the Democratic nominee in July, polls showed the race at a virtual dead heat, with both candidates within the margin of error in all the major swing states. But Trump succeeded in breaching the “blue wall” state of Pennsylvania that Harris could not afford to lose. He also won handily in North Carolina, Georgia, and appeared very likely to take Wisconsin, meaning he was certain to exceed the 270 electoral votes he needed to win a second term.

Harris did well with women voters of all ages and regions, but it wasn’t enough to make up the lost ground she lost among Black men and especially Latino voters, who appeared to break in surprisingly large numbers for Trump. Trump’s campaign had focused on peeling off support from those traditionally Democratic groups, and while they still voted in force for Harris, enough switched sides to make a difference.

As a 2024 candidate, Trump himself was no more disciplined than he was in 2016 or 2020. But his campaign was far more professional than it had been in his previous races. “Donald Trump is a movement,” former Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.) told me in the spring. “That’s how he won this thing originally. But it was kind of rag tag. This time he has everything going for him. He has a huge, disciplined ground operation, a coordinated message operation.”

A lot of that, Davis suspected, could be credited to campaign co-chair Chris LaCivita. “He’s the kind of guy that Trump listens to outside of the family and can take control.”

In October, though, Trump seemed to revert to form when he brought Robert F. Kennedy Jr. into the fold and promised to put him in charge of “making America healthy again.” Kennedy proceeded to make news with kooky promises that the second Trump administration would ban childhood vaccines and get rid of fluoride in drinking water.

Trump also briefly brought back Corey Lewandowski, his 2016 campaign manager who in 2021 fell out of Trump’s orbit after the wife of a big donor accused him of making unwanted sexual advances. Despite this series of self-inflicted wounds, campaign co-chairs LaCivita and Susie Wiles ultimately let “Trump be Trump” while keeping the rest of the campaign on track and focused.

During the closing days of the campaign, the Daily Beast published a story alleging that LaCivita was “double dipping” and making millions from Trump’s campaign and its ad buys (he denied the claim vociferously). The Atlantic later reported that the story had infuriated Trump, who considered firing LaCivita. In previous campaigns, Trump had hired and fired a handful of campaign managers, including Paul Manafort, who ended up going to prison for money laundering, tax fraud, and illegal foreign lobbying connected to his years working for Ukrainian politicians. (Trump later pardoned him.) But Wiles and LaCivita managed to stay on for the strong finish.

Trump also consolidated his support among the nation’s business leaders in a way he had not in his previous two campaigns. Most notably, billionaire Elon Musk took a starring role in Trump’s campaign, spending $150 million of his own money to fund a last minute get-out-the vote effort by paying an army of canvassers to knock on doors for the candidate. Whether Musk can really take credit for Trump’s victory is an open question. Especially because some of those workers seemed to be doing a good job of taking Musk’s money and not too much else.

News reports noted that as many as a quarter of the voter contacts made by Musk’s canvassers in Arizona and Nevada were bogus, as the workers figured out how to game the canvassing app to look as though they were out beating the bushes for every last vote when in fact they were hanging out at Starbucks. But Trump’s victory will undoubtedly be viewed as a victory for Musk as well, and perhaps serve as encouragement for other oligarchs to take a more direct role in running campaigns, leaving the national party even weaker.  

Trump has promised that among his first acts upon taking office will be to close the border, free some of the incarcerated January 6 rioters, fire Special Counsel Jack Smith (who has been investigating Trump for his mishandling of classified documents and his role in fomenting the January 6 riot), and launch his campaign of mass deportations.

Some time before the race was called, Cedric Richmond, co-chair of Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign informed her supporters that she would not be speaking tonight, and would address them in the morning.

Donald Trump, Candidate of Retribution, Is Restored to Power

6 November 2024 at 08:33

Former President Donald Trump will be returning to the White House for a second time after beating Vice President Kamala Harris in Tuesday’s election.

After running on a dark campaign of retribution, Trump tried to strike a conciliatory tone in his victory speech at the Palm Beach County convention, where thousands of his jubliant supporters had assembled for what Trump promised would be “the last rally.” In his speech, he declared his intention to “help the country heal,” and promised that his next administration would be “the golden age of America.” He thanked his campaign, and after Sen. JD Vance said a few words, Trump quipped, “Turned out to be a good choice!”

Among the others he thanks for his victory were podcasters Joe Rogan and Theo Von, in an acknowledgement of the underappreciated role that the medium played in his outreach to the young men who helped return him to office. Trump barely mentioned his opponent in the race and instead focused on his remarkable comeback, which Trump called “a triumph of democracy.”

“It’s time to put the divisions of the past four years behind us,” he said.

After President Joe Biden stepped down and Harris became the Democratic nominee in July, polls showed the race at a virtual dead heat, with both candidates within the margin of error in all the major swing states. But Trump succeeded in breaching the “blue wall” state of Pennsylvania that Harris could not afford to lose. He also won handily in North Carolina, Georgia, and appeared very likely to take Wisconsin, meaning he was certain to exceed the 270 electoral votes he needed to win a second term.

Harris did well with women voters of all ages and regions, but it wasn’t enough to make up the lost ground she lost among Black men and especially Latino voters, who appeared to break in surprisingly large numbers for Trump. Trump’s campaign had focused on peeling off support from those traditionally Democratic groups, and while they still voted in force for Harris, enough switched sides to make a difference.

As a 2024 candidate, Trump himself was no more disciplined than he was in 2016 or 2020. But his campaign was far more professional than it had been in his previous races. “Donald Trump is a movement,” former Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.) told me in the spring. “That’s how he won this thing originally. But it was kind of rag tag. This time he has everything going for him. He has a huge, disciplined ground operation, a coordinated message operation.”

A lot of that, Davis suspected, could be credited to campaign co-chair Chris LaCivita. “He’s the kind of guy that Trump listens to outside of the family and can take control.”

In October, though, Trump seemed to revert to form when he brought Robert F. Kennedy Jr. into the fold and promised to put him in charge of “making America healthy again.” Kennedy proceeded to make news with kooky promises that the second Trump administration would ban childhood vaccines and get rid of fluoride in drinking water.

Trump also briefly brought back Corey Lewandowski, his 2016 campaign manager who in 2021 fell out of Trump’s orbit after the wife of a big donor accused him of making unwanted sexual advances. Despite this series of self-inflicted wounds, campaign co-chairs LaCivita and Susie Wiles ultimately let “Trump be Trump” while keeping the rest of the campaign on track and focused.

During the closing days of the campaign, the Daily Beast published a story alleging that LaCivita was “double dipping” and making millions from Trump’s campaign and its ad buys (he denied the claim vociferously). The Atlantic later reported that the story had infuriated Trump, who considered firing LaCivita. In previous campaigns, Trump had hired and fired a handful of campaign managers, including Paul Manafort, who ended up going to prison for money laundering, tax fraud, and illegal foreign lobbying connected to his years working for Ukrainian politicians. (Trump later pardoned him.) But Wiles and LaCivita managed to stay on for the strong finish.

Trump also consolidated his support among the nation’s business leaders in a way he had not in his previous two campaigns. Most notably, billionaire Elon Musk took a starring role in Trump’s campaign, spending $150 million of his own money to fund a last minute get-out-the vote effort by paying an army of canvassers to knock on doors for the candidate. Whether Musk can really take credit for Trump’s victory is an open question. Especially because some of those workers seemed to be doing a good job of taking Musk’s money and not too much else.

News reports noted that as many as a quarter of the voter contacts made by Musk’s canvassers in Arizona and Nevada were bogus, as the workers figured out how to game the canvassing app to look as though they were out beating the bushes for every last vote when in fact they were hanging out at Starbucks. But Trump’s victory will undoubtedly be viewed as a victory for Musk as well, and perhaps serve as encouragement for other oligarchs to take a more direct role in running campaigns, leaving the national party even weaker.  

Trump has promised that among his first acts upon taking office will be to close the border, free some of the incarcerated January 6 rioters, fire Special Counsel Jack Smith (who has been investigating Trump for his mishandling of classified documents and his role in fomenting the January 6 riot), and launch his campaign of mass deportations.

Some time before the race was called, Cedric Richmond, co-chair of Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign informed her supporters that she would not be speaking tonight, and would address them in the morning.

The Front Row Joes Ponder What May Be Their Last Trump Rally

6 November 2024 at 02:06

No matter the outcome, Election Night this year is bittersweet for one particular group of former President Donald Trump’s supporters: The most dedicated of Trump superfans known as the Front Row Joes. There are about 1,500 of them from all across the country, and they got their start with Trump back in 2015 when no one in the establishment was taking him seriously. The Joes travel the country attending his political rallies in much the same way that groupies follow rock bands. In their matching baseball jerseys, they deploy military-level logistics and marathon endurance to stake their spots at the front of the line to see the man they adore.

But the events that have animated their lives for nine years may be coming to an end, regardless of the election’s outcome. If Trump wins, he won’t need rallies, and if he loses, there won’t be many reasons to have one.

A group of the Joes assembled at the Palm Beach County Convention Center Tuesday night for the Trump election watch party in the hopes that if this is the end of the road, at least they will be celebrating a victory. I spoke to some of them about how they felt about the prospects of the end of an era.

One Front Row Joe, Greg Reed, from New Port Richie, Florida, told me that he will be sorry to see this glorious road show make its last stop. “I’ve been preparing myself,” he told me. “It will sadden me for sure. But I’m hoping for tears of joy.” He had been standing in line outside the convention center since 11 a.m. until the doors opened at 4 p.m. But Reed was used to it. A veteran of 40 Trump rallies since 2015, he usually gets there about three days in advance and camps out in front of the venue—if it’s ok with the authorities. Otherwise, he said, “We sleep in our cars.”

Sharon Anderson and her friend Pam Lathrop were sitting at a table in the back with a group of Joes waiting for the night’s festivities to kick off. Anderson is from east Tennessee, and this was her 63rd rally. For Lathrop, from North Port, Florida, this one is number 39.

The "Front Row Joes"—Trump's band of diehard rally-goers, who have attended many dozens of his events for nearly a decade—are at Palm Beach County Convention Center for Trump's election night party. @smencimer chatted to two members about what's next. pic.twitter.com/8Pe1QSpIVO

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) November 6, 2024

Being a Front Row Joe confers a certain kind of MAGA royalty, even though the sacrifices the Joes have made to show up for Trump have earned no special perks or insider status with the campaigns. As Reed’s experience shows, they still have to wait in line like everyone else. Anderson said she has shown up for rallies at least a week early sleeping on the sidewalk and showering at Planet Fitness. But that’s part of the appeal. It shows their commitment.

“My special perk is listening to his vision for this country.”

“My special perk is listening to his vision for this country,” Anderson told me.

“We’re happy to earn that front-row status,” Lathrop said. “We don’t do it for the notoriety.”

That said, they do enjoy getting a shout-out from the former president.“He will recognize us from the podium during the rally,” Anderson said. “That’s thrilling for us. Of course, anybody would want to be recognized by Donald J. Trump, so we’re very appreciative.”

What they will do if this is the last rally?” I asked. Lathrop was not discouraged. Even if Trump loses, she said, it won’t be the end. “He’ll have thank-you rallies!”

“But he’s not going to lose,” Anderson said. And if he does? Or he just decides that he’s too busy being president to hold rallies? “We’re gonna help make his dream for America come true,” Anderson replied. Lathrop said they were going to support the MAGA movement and other candidates.

I wondered whether they thought people would accept the results of the election should Trump lose. Would there be a replay of 2020? Neither woman was sure, and of course, they both thought the Democrats would behave worse if Harris were defeated. But they were feeling pretty good about Trump’s prospects, which they’d worked hard to boost.

“I’m gonna leave it in God’s hands,” Lothrop said

“But he’s not gonna lose.” Anderson said. “We spent too much time working for the win. Right now is no time to walk away from the field.”

Musk Gave $1 Million to the PAC of QAnon Promoter Who Allegedly Photographed Sex in GOP Office

1 November 2024 at 16:08

In August, former President Donald Trump called the billionaire Elon Musk “a super genius guy.” That “super genius” and his new America PAC have now taken over much of the Trump campaign’s swing-state ground game in the final weeks before the election. Since creating the PAC in April, Musk has infused it with nearly $120 million to try to get out the vote for Trump. But, as it turns out, winning a presidential election may not be as simple as colonizing Mars or wrecking Twitter—especially for a political neophyte.

Musk offered people money to register to vote and then subsequently got sued by the Philadelphia district attorney and warned by the Justice Department that the scheme is likely illegal. He hired an army of canvassers only to see many of them game a GOTV app to make it seem as if they had knocked on hundreds of doors, when, in fact, they may have been just sitting at Starbucks. And in late August, he made a $1 million donation to a political action committee founded by Scott Presler, a man who even the Republican National Committee has declined to employ because in 2016 he was allegedly caught having sex in an office the RNC shared with the Virginia GOP and posting photos of the encounter on Craigslist.

Over the past two years, Presler has been a fixture at local Republican party events across the country, where he often conducts voter outreach training. He was among the MAGA activists who helped depose Ronna McDaniel as chair of the Republican National Committee earlier this year for not doing more to hire people like…Scott Presler. When the former president’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump took over as RNC co-chair in March, one of her first moves was to announce her intention to bring on Presler to help with the party’s GOTV efforts.

Presler “is an amazing vote registerer,” Trump told Benny Johnson, host of the Tenet Media show In The Arena. (Tenet turned out to be a vehicle for Russian disinformation and has since disbanded.) “I think he’s fantastic. I want him on our legal ballot harvesting division.” Five days later, after old stories about Presler’s tenure with the Virginia GOP resurfaced, the RNC issued a statement saying that he would not be joining the party payroll and would remain “focused on his nonprofit.”

The founder of Early Vote Action, Presler moved to Pennsylvania earlier this year to flip the crucial swing state for Trump. He has been registering Republican voters among groups he believes are untapped reservoirs of Trump supporters like the Amish, truck drivers, and gun owners who just need a push. In early October, when Trump returned to the same Pennsylvania venue where he’d been nearly assassinated in July, Presler was awarded a speaking slot at the rally. The 6 foot 5 inch former head of “Gays for Trump” and QAnon conspiracy promoter told the assembled crowd, “To our beautiful Amish in Lancaster and across the state: we will protect your raw milk, your dairy, your farming, your school choice, your religious freedom … your ability to afford to have 10 beautiful children per family.”

Presler has promoted Qanon conspiracies and proved too controversial for the RNC. Musk just gave him $1 million.

Musk appears to be a committed Presler fan. He has amplified Presler’s social media posts, including some that featured conspiracy theories about the election. At an October town hall event in Pennsylvania, an audience member asked Musk if, as an adviser to Trump, he’d hire Presler in the next administration. “Absolutely, yes,” Musk said.

Musk’s donation to Early Vote Action was a pittance for someone who wasted more than $40 billion buying a chronically unprofitable social media site. But the million dollars was more than three times what Presler had previously raised for the PAC since its inception in December 2022. Federal elections records show that by the end of June this year, Early Vote Action had raised less than $350,000. Its largest donor at that point was the $50,000 contributed by Fight Like a Flynn PAC, started by Trump’s disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

The second-largest contribution of $20,000 came from Margaret Topper, a Florida woman who has been a regular donor to candidates who denied the results of the 2020 election, like Colorado’s former secretary of state Tina Peters, who was recently sentenced to nine years in prison for election interference. Presler was a prominent figure in the “Stop the Steal” movement in 2020. On January 6, he was outside the US Capitol, where he tweeted a video of the mob, calling it “the largest civil rights protest in US history.”

With an active online presence, Presler extensively documents his efforts to register voters on Trump’s behalf. Posts show him in the field, working booths at gun shows and county fairs, tossing his long, Fabio locks back as he announces his latest haul of voter registrations. Every week, he has posted new numbers showing that voter registrations in various Pennsylvania swing counties were trending red. But it’s unclear whether his curated social media narrative reflects real influence on the election in Pennsylvania.

When I told one local involved in politics in Pennsylvania that Musk had given Presler $1 million, he was shocked. “I don’t know what he’s done with it,” he told me.

Before receiving money from Musk, Early Vote Action’s biggest expenditures weren’t for campaigns or candidates but for fundraising and media consultants. The PAC paid about $50,000 to a Vermont-based fundraising company called Information Cataloging Strategies, and $30,000 to a media consultant named Roma Daravi who worked in the first Trump White House as the deputy director of strategic communications. Those same two vendors account for the biggest chunk of the new spending from Early Vote Action since receiving Musk’s donation.

The consultants seem to be doing their job in one regard: Presler has become a regular presence on right-wing media, which has been happy to endorse his work. And his fundraising has picked up as a result. His PAC has now raised nearly $3 million, including the donation from Musk. But whether all that media and money is moving any votes is still an open question. For instance, in late September, Presler declared that Republican voter registrations had overtaken those of Democrats in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. “IT IS DONE!” he declared on all his social media channels. “We flipped Luzerne County, Pennsylvania…This is monumental, earth-shattering, ground shaking news.”

But Presler’s efforts in Luzerne County may have no meaningful impact on the election. That’s because lots of registered Democrats in Luzerne County have long been pulling the lever for Republicans, especially for Trump. The former president crushed President Joe Biden in Luzerne County in 2020, 56 percent to 42 percent. The spread was even bigger in 2016 when Luzerne County voters went for Trump over Hillary Clinton by more than 20 points. Luzerne County “was voting that way for a while,” says Thomas Shubilla, chair of the Luzerne County Democrats. “There were people that were Democrats a long time ago that switched to Republican. It’s quite a purple county.”

When I told Shubilla that Musk had given Presler $1 million, he was shocked. “I don’t know what he’s done with it,” he told me. Shubilla says that he is out knocking on doors almost constantly in the county and he has seen very little evidence of any sort of Trump ground game there. “Very very very rarely do I see Trump literature anywhere” at the houses he visits that might indicate that a canvasser had stopped by and left some materials, he told me.

In Luzerne County, Presler can point to at least one specific success: gumming up the works at the local election board. For weeks, he’s complained online that the board had a huge backlog of unprocessed voter registration forms. He has urged his supporters to contact the board to complain about the log jam and also to pester staffers with unfounded claims that massive numbers of undocumented immigrants are registered to vote in the county. Presler has appeared at least twice at county election board meetings to demand answers to these questions, and then he posted the videos of his grandstanding before the board to his more than 2 million followers on social media.

Yet County Election Director Emily Cook told the local paper the Times Leader in late September that many of the new voter registration applications her office is receiving are either duplicates from people already registered or others who simply wanted to change their address or party affiliation. Cook also said that the understaffed board’s work had been slowed by an onslaught of people calling the office, many from outside the county, asking “scripted” questions about the registration backlog, immigrants, and whether the board had enough paper for the election. (In 2022, Luzerne County ran out of paper for ballots on Election Day.)

“These script questions are designed to take bureau employees away from processing applications to sow those seeds of doubt and create those problems they want to find,” Cook told the Times Leader.

Presler did not respond to a request for comment for this story, but Shubilla says Presler’s laser focus on voter registration, while a fine civic exercise, isn’t likely to have much of an impact. “What I’m doing is making sure our voters are voting on Election Day, returning their mail-in ballots by Election Day,” he said. “And that’s what’s going to win the election.”

That’s not just the view of the local Democrats. A longtime GOP political consultant who wished to remain anonymous told me that voter registration drives are notorious for collecting forms from people who are already registered. That’s because 30 years ago Congress passed the National Voter Registration Act, better known as the “Motor Voter” law that allows people to register at the same time they apply for a drivers’ license or public assistance. Even the Post Office now asks people who are submitting a change of address form if they want to register to vote.

“Everybody’s registered now because you can’t go anywhere without them sticking a voter registration form in your face,” the consultant said. And that includes the Amish, he noted. “A lot of them, they’re all registered,” he told me. “The question is turning them out. And what turns voters out is being motivated and excited about your candidate.”

Voters in the past two presidential elections have been pretty motivated, on both sides. The 2020 election had the highest turnout—66 percent—of any national election since 1900, and that figure was even higher in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, where almost 70 percent of the registered voters cast a ballot. Moving the needle, as the polls show, will require a lot more than a few voter registration changes.

Meanwhile, Musk’s Early Vote Action donation suggests that he’s failed to understand the most basic feature of Republican politics, namely its well-developed pool of sharks just waiting to take advantage of unsophisticated rubes with a lot of money. Musk wouldn’t be the first rich guy to get “taken to the cleaners” by opportunistic politicos, says the GOP consultant. “He’s a rookie. He’s gotta make rookie mistakes.”

Anyone Can Access GOP Voter Data on Turning Point’s Canvassing App

29 October 2024 at 16:00

Before I could knock on the door of the house in rural, upstate New York, a big, burly man dressed in a plaid lumberjack jacket came outside to greet me. “I’m looking for Yvette Ovitt,” I told him, when he asked me what I wanted. “Oh, she’s dead,” he replied calmly. “She died back in June. Heart attack.”

After expressing my condolences, I explained my mission: I was testing a get-out-the-vote app that the Turning Point Action political action committee is using this election season. On its website, Turning Point says this app “is vital” to what it claims “will be the largest and most sophisticated ballot chasing operation the movement has ever seen.” The conservative youth organization is specifically deploying the technology to try to turn out “low-propensity” voters in Republican areas—people they believe are Trump supporters but who have rarely voted in recent elections. People like Yvette, apparently, may she rest in peace.

Rather than rely on the traditional campaign or Republican Party apparatus for the 2024 election, the Trump campaign has outsourced much of its ground game to Turning Point and other conservative PACs. The strategy is largely untested, as are the groups running the operation. Turning Point has promised to spend more than $100 million on its “chase the vote” effort this cycle to get Trump elected. The youth group was involved in such efforts in 2022, and many of the most high-profile candidates it backed lost. Others, like America PAC, a super PAC funded almost entirely by billionaire Elon Musk, got into the game just this summer.

Bad addresses, dead voters and people who refuse to answer the door are a regular feature of political canvassing for both the parties, so I wasn’t especially surprised to find that one of Turning Point’s targets was no longer with us. Fortunately, I wasn’t using the app to persuade people to vote. I was at the Ovitt house because I was interested in how well this app worked. I also wanted to know how Republicans it identified might feel about the ease with which I was able to access their personal information with it.

Phone apps are now a canvassing staple for elections. When they’re used by the major political parties, their use is closely supervised by the campaigns. The primary app used by Democrats is called MiniVan. When I downloaded MiniVan, I needed a code from a campaign official to access any of the data, which I did not have. No such privacy protections exist for the Turning Point app, where its extensive data is accessible to anyone with a phone.

Turning Point’s app was developed by a company called Superfeed that has close ties with its founder Charlie Kirk, whose mother-in-law is on the Superfeed board. Superfeed’s former CEO, Jeff DeWitt, was previously the Arizona GOP chairman, until he resigned from the party post in January after news broke that he’d allegedly tried to bribe Kari Lake to keep her from running for his state’s Senate seat.

Turning Point officials have marketed the Superfeed app to other conservative groups. Also using the app this cycle is Early Vote Action, a PAC founded by MAGA activist Scott Presler, whose GOTV work for Trump was recently boosted with a $1 million donation from Elon Musk. Presler has spent the past year trying to register Republican voters in overlooked groups, like hunters and the Amish. He claims to have flipped the voter registration figures in several Pennsylvania counties from blue to red. The Nevada, Delaware, Georgia and Arizona state Republican parties have also adopted the app.

The Superfeed corporate website is nonfunctional, but the Apple store says the Turning Point app allows users to “read original content and feeds from TPUSA top creators.” The app originally started as a vehicle for right-wing news distribution, not for election work. Giving how much is riding on the app in this election, I decided to give it a test run this month when I was in upstate New York leaf peeping in the reddest part of a reliably blue state.

After downloading the app, I discovered a mess of X social media posts on the home screen, from Kirk and other Turning Point surrogates including: pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec; Benny Johnson, a right-wing influencer and former Turning Point employee who was allegedly duped into taking hundreds of thousands of dollars from a front group to create pro-Russia content; and Tyler Bowyer, the Turning Point COO who’s been indicted in Arizona for his alleged participation in Trump’s “fake elector” scheme to overturn the 2020 election results. (Bowyer has also served on the Superfeed board.)

Among the social media posts is a button that says, “Register To Vote: Tap Here.” Users are then led to the Turning Point Action website, where they’re instructed to fill out a form as if they were registering to vote. But there are clues that this is not an authentic voter registration form—“referred by,” and “referral email,” queries that have nothing to do with voting and a lot to do with data harvesting. Once the form is filled out, a new window opens announcing, “Wait! One more step! Confirm your state to register to vote online.” That’s when users click a state and are redirected to a government website where they can legitimately register to vote.

The arrow for the election “activist suite” is buried like an afterthought among the other junk on the app home screen, and accessing these tools requires users to again provide all their personal information and enable location tracking. Turning Point Action did not respond to questions about its privacy protocols and what it does with the data collected through the app.

The activist tools include, among other things, a text-spamming and calling feature, both of which employ the users’ actual phone number. In contrast, Democratic phone banks always anonymize phone calls to protect the privacy of volunteers. There’s also a feature that invites users to upload all their phone’s contacts into the app. Users’ friends will no doubt appreciate this giveaway of their lucrative personal information once they start getting spammed with texts and calls.

I declined to give Turning Point my phone book, skipped the spam texts, and instead hit “knock on doors.” Then I hopped in my car to try to find the “voters near me” listed in the app, all of which eventually led me to Yvette Ovitt’s home.

As a journalist, I have never canvassed for any political party or candidate, so I am unfamiliar with these types of operations. Yet even my unsophisticated use of the app felt like a massive privacy violation. As I drove, a list of target contacts appeared, with the names, addresses, ages, and phone numbers of people up and down the road. Several entries were tagged with a red flag indicating that the address was home to multiple voters over the age of 75—a potential goldmine because older voters tend to vote more than younger ones.

This feature alone should be cause for concern by app users and potential contacts alike. A Democratic National Committee spokesperson told me that the party’s canvassing app doesn’t allow this sort of universal, geolocated address lookup; the party provides canvassers only a predefined walking list created by campaign administrators. The DNC spokesperson also says the systems are protected with encryption, two-factor authentication and other modern security measures—none of which was present on the Turning Point app.

Once I settled on an address to visit, I had trouble locating the scripts the app provided for talking to any potential voters. A so-called training video that I found on the Turning Point Action website was an hour-long gabfest on Rumble, frequently interrupted with ads for Ivermectin, so I didn’t finish it. By comparison, the Democrat’s MiniVan training video is a quick, ad-free five minutes.

No one was home at the first couple of addresses I tried, but I finally hit pay dirt at a large house with a beat-up old truck covered with graffiti parked on the road out front. A man outside asked me suspiciously if I had come up his driveway to buy his pickup. I explained that I was looking for a 22-year-old woman named Sophie, and showed him the app. He grudgingly informed me that Sophie was away at college.

He declined an interview and warned me not to knock at the house next door. A woman there, also listed in the app, was his 80-something year old mother. “She won’t want to talk to you,” he told me in a tone suggesting he was just about to yell at me to get off his lawn.

I moved on to a few more empty houses, and one address I simply couldn’t find. Finally, the app directed me to Yvette Ovitt’s home, a modest wood structure fully decked out with yards of artificial spider webs that looked professionally wrapped around the fence and adorned with smiling pumpkins and spooky signs wishing people a Happy Halloween.

The man who came out to meet me turned out to be Yvette’s older brother, Randy Ovitt. He lived there, too, so I showed him her name and asked what he thought about how easy it was for anyone to find this much information about his sister and their neighbors. “That’s fucked up—I mean messed up,” he corrected, laughing as he lit up a cigarette.

Looking at Yvette’s listing, I asked Randy whether his sister was a 51-year-old Republican. While he could confirm that his sister had died just shy of her 51st birthday, which happened to be the day I showed up, Randy had no idea about her party affiliation. They didn’t talk about politics, he said, except about the “towelheads they keep dropping in here, getting their $1,000 debt cards.”

Randy was referring not to a Fox News myth, but a story that has gained prominence on the network and morphed into a MAGA talking point. In March, New York City mayor Eric Adams started giving pre-paid debt cards—valued at about $1,440 a month for a family of four—to migrants who had been bused to the city from Texas, so they could buy food and baby supplies. The cards were a cheaper way for the city to provide meals to the new arrivals than the city’s food-service contracts but they’d quickly become an anti-immigration talking point.

Randy was not listed in the app, possibly because he may have been a registered Democrat. At first, he told me he thought he wouldn’t vote in November. “It’s terrible, ain’t it?” he said of this year’s election. But after his second cigarette, he confessed that he “might of” voted for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, and hinted that he might vote for Harris, too. When I showed him the list of voters I was looking for, he pointed to one name and said the man had been dead for a while. Randy explained that someone else listed at the same address was the partner of the dead man’s daughter Dawn, who also lived there. “Ernie will talk to you,” he said.

Encouraged, I headed down the road to a large compound in the woods, full of trailers, a mobile home, a small house, plus several vehicles. There I found Ernie Gray, cutting plywood to build an enclosed deck on the mobile home for Dawn. He told me he’d swapped a 4 x 4 for the work on the roof because at 60, he thought he was too old to be getting up on the ladder. He was doing the rest of the work himself.

I showed him the Turning Point app with his listing in it. “How the hell did you get that?” he asked with a good-natured growl. “All my information is supposed to be private!” The app had his phone number wrong—it had belonged to Dawn’s deceased father and had been disconnected ages ago—but the rest was spot on.

Dawn and Ernie were die-hard Trump fans, not low-propensity voters. He said they’d both already voted for Trump in the primary and planned to do it again in November.  Ernie elaborated extensively on the many ways he hated Joe Biden, as Dawn nodded along from behind the screen door, where she stood with a tiny dog at her feet. Ernie, too, complained about immigrants getting debit cards, an issue that seems to rank high on the list of concerns of voters in these parts.

It was getting late in the day, so I bid Ernie farewell and packed it in. After two hours of driving around, I’d used the Turning Point app to identify two dead people, one missing college student, an elderly woman with a protectively hostile son, a closet Democrat, and one Trump supporter who needed no persuasion.

Later, I spent some more time noodling around on the app. I finally found the door-knocking script, which instructed me to ask potential voters questions such as “Do you usually get an early ballot?” or “Can we help get your ballot in on time?” Just to see what happened, I clicked “no” or “I need more help” on these questions for a voter in Virginia and then hit “submit.” The app then helpfully made a pie chart report on all my efforts. Apparently, once I tagged these people as contacted, they dropped off the list so other canvassers would not bother them. The potential for mischief with this app seemed very high and I wondered: Is this the way to win an election?

“These people are amateurs,” a longtime Republican consultant who wanted to remain anonymous told me after I described my app test results. In a close presidential election, he said, “People are voting not because someone came to their door, certainly not because somebody they never met came to the door. They’re going to vote because of something they’ve read or seen, or because someone they know dragged them to the polls.” Still, he predicted, “I think Republicans are going to have a good night in 11 days, and then all these grifters are going to take credit for it.”

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