Tech layoffs ravage the teams that fight online misinformation and hate speech

CNBC

UPDATED SAT, MAY 27 2023

Hayden Field@HAYDENFIELD
Jonathan Vanian@JONATHANVANIAN

KEY POINTS
Meta, Amazon, Alphabet and Twitter have all drastically reduced the size of their teams focused on internet trust and safety as well as ethics as the companies focus on cost cuts.

As part of Meta’s mass layoffs, the company ended a fact-checking project that had taken half a year to build, according to people familiar with the matter.

“Abuse actors are usually ahead of the game; it’s cat and mouse,” said Arjun Narayan, who previously served as a trust and safety lead at Google and ByteDance.

Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., left, arrives at federal court in San Jose, California, US, on Tuesday, Dec. 20, 2022.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Toward the end of 2022, engineers on Meta’s team combating misinformation were ready to debut a key fact-checking tool that had taken half a year to build. The company needed all the reputational help it could get after a string of crises had badly damaged the credibility of Facebook and Instagram and given regulators additional ammunition to bear down on the platforms.

The new product would let third-party fact-checkers like The Associated Press and Reuters, as well as credible experts, add comments at the top of questionable articles on Facebook as a way to verify their trustworthiness.

But CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s commitment to make 2023 the “year of efficiency” spelled the end of the ambitious effort, according to three people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named due to confidentiality agreements.

Over multiple rounds of layoffs, Meta announced plans to eliminate roughly 21,000 jobs, a mass downsizing that had an outsized effect on the company’s trust and safety work. The fact-checking tool, which had initial buy-in from executives and was still in a testing phase early this year, was completely dissolved, the sources said.

A Meta spokesperson did not respond to questions related to job cuts in specific areas and said in an emailed statement that “we remain focused on advancing our industry-leading integrity efforts and continue to invest in teams and technologies to protect our community.”

Across the tech industry, as companies tighten their belts and impose hefty layoffs to address macroeconomic pressures and slowing revenue growth, wide swaths of people tasked with protecting the internet’s most-populous playgrounds are being shown the exits. The cuts come at a time of increased cyberbullying, which has been linked to higher rates of adolescent self-harm, and as the spread of misinformation and violent content collides with the exploding use of artificial intelligence.

In their most recent earnings calls, tech executives highlighted their commitment to “do more with less,” boosting productivity with fewer resources. Meta, Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft have all cut thousands of jobs after staffing up rapidly before and during the Covid pandemic. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently said his company would suspend salary increases for full-time employees.

The slashing of teams tasked with trust and safety and AI ethics is a sign of how far companies are willing to go to meet Wall Street demands for efficiency, even with the 2024 U.S. election season — and the online chaos that’s expected to ensue — just months away from kickoff. AI ethics and trust and safety are different departments within tech companies but are aligned on goals related to limiting real-life harm that can stem from use of their companies’ products and services.

“Abuse actors are usually ahead of the game; it’s cat and mouse,” said Arjun Narayan, who previously served as a trust and safety lead at Google and TikTok parent ByteDance, and is now head of trust and safety at news aggregator app Smart News. “You’re always playing catch-up.”

For now, tech companies seem to view both trust and safety and AI ethics as cost centers.

Twitter effectively disbanded its ethical AI team in November and laid off all but one of its members, along with 15% of its trust and safety department, according to reports. In February, Google cut about one-third of a unit that aims to protect society from misinformation, radicalization, toxicity and censorship. Meta reportedly ended the contracts of about 200 content moderators in early January. It also laid off at least 16 members of Instagram’s well-being group and more than 100 positions related to trust, integrity and responsibility, according to documents filed with the U.S. Department of Labor.

Andy Jassy, chief executive officer of Amazon.Com Inc., during the GeekWire Summit in Seattle, Washington, U.S., on Tuesday, Oct. 5, 2021.
David Ryder | Bloomberg | Getty Images

In March, Amazon downsized its responsible AI team and Microsoft laid off its entire ethics and society team – the second of two layoff rounds that reportedly took the team from 30 members to zero. Amazon didn’t respond to a request for comment, and Microsoft pointed to a blog post regarding its job cuts.

At Amazon’s game streaming unit Twitch, staffers learned of their fate in March from an ill-timed internal post from Amazon CEO Andy Jassy.

Jassy’s announcement that 9,000 jobs would be cut companywide included 400 employees at Twitch. Of those, about 50 were part of the team responsible for monitoring abusive, illegal or harmful behavior, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the details were private.

The trust and safety team, or T&S as it’s known internally, was losing about 15% of its staff just as content moderation was seemingly more important than ever.

In an email to employees, Twitch CEO Dan Clancy didn’t call out the T&S department specifically, but he confirmed the broader cuts among his staffers, who had just learned about the layoffs from Jassy’s post on a message board.

“I’m disappointed to share the news this way before we’re able to communicate directly to those who will be impacted,” Clancy wrote in the email, which was viewed by CNBC.

‘Hard to win back consumer trust’

A current member of Twitch’s T&S team said the remaining employees in the unit are feeling “whiplash” and worry about a potential second round of layoffs. The person said the cuts caused a big hit to institutional knowledge, adding that there was a significant reduction in Twitch’s law enforcement response team, which deals with physical threats, violence, terrorism groups and self-harm.

A Twitch spokesperson did not provide a comment for this story, instead directing CNBC to a blog post from March announcing the layoffs. The post didn’t include any mention of trust and safety or content moderation.

Narayan of Smart News said that with a lack of investment in safety at the major platforms, companies lose their ability to scale in a way that keeps pace with malicious activity. As more problematic content spreads, there’s an “erosion of trust,” he said.

“In the long run, it’s really hard to win back consumer trust,” Narayan added.

While layoffs at Meta and Amazon followed demands from investors and a dramatic slump in ad revenue and share prices, Twitter’s cuts resulted from a change in ownership.

Almost immediately after Elon Musk closed his $44 billion purchase of Twitter in October, he began eliminating thousands of jobs. That included all but one member of the company’s 17-person AI ethics team, according to Rumman Chowdhury, who served as director of Twitter’s machine learning ethics, transparency and accountability team. The last remaining person ended up quitting.

The team members learned of their status when their laptops were turned off remotely, Chowdhury said. Hours later, they received email notifications.

“I had just recently gotten head count to build out my AI red team, so these would be the people who would adversarially hack our models from an ethical perspective and try to do that work,” Chowdhury told CNBC. She added, “It really just felt like the rug was pulled as my team was getting into our stride.”

Part of that stride involved working on “algorithmic amplification monitoring,” Chowdhury said, or tracking elections and political parties to see if “content was being amplified in a way that it shouldn’t.”

Chowdhury referenced an initiative in July 2021, when Twitter’s AI ethics team led what was billed as the industry’s first-ever algorithmic bias bounty competition. The company invited outsiders to audit the platform for bias, and made the results public.

Chowdhury said she worries that now Musk “is actively seeking to undo all the work we have done.”

“There is no internal accountability,” she said. “We served two of the product teams to make sure that what’s happening behind the scenes was serving the people on the platform equitably.”

Twitter did not provide a comment for this story.

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Advertisers are pulling back in places where they see increased reputational risk.

According to Sensor Tower, six of the top 10 categories of U.S. advertisers on Twitter spent much less in the first quarter of this year compared with a year earlier, with that group collectively slashing its spending by 53%. The site has recently come under fire for allowing the spread of violent images and videos.

The rapid rise in popularity of chatbots is only complicating matters. The types of AI models created by OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, and others make it easier to populate fake accounts with content. Researchers from the Allen Institute for AI, Princeton University and Georgia Tech ran tests in ChatGPT’s application programming interface (API), and found up to a sixfold increase in toxicity, depending on which type of functional identity, such as a customer service agent or virtual assistant, a company assigned to the chatbot.

Regulators are paying close attention to AI’s growing influence and the simultaneous downsizing of groups dedicated to AI ethics and trust and safety. Michael Atleson, an attorney at the Federal Trade Commission’s division of advertising practices, called out the paradox in a blog post earlier this month.

“Given these many concerns about the use of new AI tools, it’s perhaps not the best time for firms building or deploying them to remove or fire personnel devoted to ethics and responsibility for AI and engineering,” Atleson wrote. “If the FTC comes calling and you want to convince us that you adequately assessed risks and mitigated harms, these reductions might not be a good look.”

 
Meta as a bellwether

For years, as the tech industry was enjoying an extended bull market and the top internet platforms were flush with cash, Meta was viewed by many experts as a leader in prioritizing ethics and safety.

The company spent years hiring trust and safety workers, including many with academic backgrounds in the social sciences, to help avoid a repeat of the 2016 presidential election cycle, when disinformation campaigns, often operated by foreign actors, ran rampant on Facebook. The embarrassment culminated in the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal, which exposed how a third party was illicitly using personal data from Facebook.

But following a brutal 2022 for Meta’s ad business — and its stock price — Zuckerberg went into cutting mode, winning plaudits along the way from investors who had complained of the company’s bloat.

Beyond the fact-checking project, the layoffs hit researchers, engineers, user design experts and others who worked on issues pertaining to societal concerns. The company’s dedicated team focused on combating misinformation suffered numerous losses, four former Meta employees said.

Prior to Meta’s first round of layoffs in November, the company had already taken steps to consolidate members of its integrity team into a single unit. In September, Meta merged its central integrity team, which handles social matters, with its business integrity group tasked with addressing ads and business-related issues like spam and fake accounts, ex-employees said.

In the ensuing months, as broader cuts swept across the company, former trust and safety employees described working under the fear of looming layoffs and for managers who sometimes failed to see how their work affected Meta’s bottom line.

For example, things like improving spam filters that required fewer resources could get clearance over long-term safety projects that would entail policy changes, such as initiatives involving misinformation. Employees felt incentivized to take on more manageable tasks because they could show their results in their six-month performance reviews, ex-staffers said.

Ravi Iyer, a former Meta project manager who left the company before the layoffs, said that the cuts across content moderation are less bothersome than the fact that many of the people he knows who lost their jobs were performing critical roles on design and policy changes.

“I don’t think we should reflexively think that having fewer trust and safety workers means platforms will necessarily be worse,” said Iyer, who’s now the managing director of the Psychology of Technology Institute at University of Southern California’s Neely Center. “However, many of the people I’ve seen laid off are amongst the most thoughtful in rethinking the fundamental designs of these platforms, and if platforms are not going to invest in reconsidering design choices that have been proven to be harmful — then yes, we should all be worried.”

A Meta spokesperson previously downplayed the significance of the job cuts in the misinformation unit, tweeting that the “team has been integrated into the broader content integrity team, which is substantially larger and focused on integrity work across the company.”

Still, sources familiar with the matter said that following the layoffs, the company has fewer people working on misinformation issues.

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For those who’ve gained expertise in AI ethics, trust and safety and related content moderation, the employment picture looks grim.

Newly unemployed workers in those fields from across the social media landscape told CNBC that there aren’t many job openings in their area of specialization as companies continue to trim costs. One former Meta employee said that after interviewing for trust and safety roles at Microsoft and Google, those positions were suddenly axed.

An ex-Meta staffer said the company’s retreat from trust and safety is likely to filter down to smaller peers and startups that appear to be “following Meta in terms of their layoff strategy.”

Chowdhury, Twitter’s former AI ethics lead, said these types of jobs are a natural place for cuts because “they’re not seen as driving profit in product.”

“My perspective is that it’s completely the wrong framing,” she said. “But it’s hard to demonstrate value when your value is that you’re not being sued or someone is not being harmed. We don’t have a shiny widget or a fancy model at the end of what we do; what we have is a community that’s safe and protected. That is a long-term financial benefit, but in the quarter over quarter, it’s really hard to measure what that means.”

At Twitch, the T&S team included people who knew where to look to spot dangerous activity, according to a former employee in the group. That’s particularly important in gaming, which is “its own unique beast,” the person said.

Now, there are fewer people checking in on the “dark, scary places” where offenders hide and abusive activity gets groomed, the ex-employee added.

More importantly, nobody knows how bad it can get.

USE A SKULL AND CROSSBONES

Canada to require warning labels on individual cigarettes

Agence France-Presse
May 31, 2023

A woman smoking a cigarette [Shutterstock]

The messaging, to be phased in starting August 1, will include lines such as "Poison in every puff," "Tobacco smoke harms children" and "Cigarettes cause cancer."

Addictions Minister Carolyn Bennett said tobacco use continues to kill 48,000 Canadians each year. The new labelling rule is a world first, she said, although Britain has flirted with a similar regulation.

"This bold step will make health warning messages virtually unavoidable and, together with updated graphic images displayed on the package, will provide a real and startling reminder of the health consequences of smoking," Bennett said.

The Canadian government noted that some young people, who are particularly susceptible to the risk of tobacco dependence, start smoking after being given a single cigarette rather than a pack labeled with health warnings.

In 2000, Canada became the first country to order graphic warnings on packs of cigarettes -- including grisly pictorials of diseased hearts and lungs -- to raise awareness of the health hazards associated with tobacco use.

Smoking has been trending down over the past two decades.

Ottawa aims to further reduce the number of smokers in the country to five percent of the population, or about 2 million people, by 2035 -- from about 13 percent currently.

According to government data, almost half of the country's health care costs are linked to substance use.

© 2023 AFP

E-cigarettes won’t help you quit smoking regular cigarettes, study suggests

E-cigarettes won’t help you quit smoking regular cigarettes, study suggestsVuse e-cigarette packages are seen displayed at Cigar N Vape on Oct. 13, 2021 in the Park Slope neighborhood of the Brooklyn borough in New York City. - Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images North America/TNS

'Constantly watched': AI facial surveillance is measuring how much workers are concentrating
Brad Reed
May 31, 2023,

A stressed woman works at her laptop (Shutterstock).

Some companies are now using tools that combine facial recognition software with artificial intelligence to constantly monitor and assess how much their workers are concentrating while on the job, The Guardian reports.

A woman in her 20s called Mae who spoke with the Guardian recounted how incredibly stressful it is to have your facial expressions monitored and cataloged in ways that will be used to evaluate your performance.

"Tracking doesn’t allow for thinking time or stepping away and coming back to work – it’s very intense," she explained.

What's more, she says that the technology has hurt her productivity and she has found she actually gets more work done when she's not being "constantly watched."

Of course, this actually requires her to do more work in secret after hours just to keep up with what she needs to get done.

Another worker who spoke with The Guardian, who goes by the name of Carlos, revealed that he's being surveilled minute by minute at his job and revealed to the publication that "I have found myself having to explain the reasons for a longer toilet break."

Henry Parkes, a senior economist at the Institute for Public Policy Research, tells The Guardian that "this technology can just be used to exert power over employees in a way that wasn’t possible before," while adding that " it’s dehumanizing and not how people are able to operate all day."

However, a worker who goes by the name of Adam tells The Guardian that he was able to get his boss to back off intensive tracking as soon as he reported it to his union.

"They are now aware that the watchers are being watched," he told the publication.

‘Man, the hunter’? Archaeologists’ assumptions about gender roles in past humans ignore an icky but potentially crucial part of original ‘paleo diet’

The Conversation
May 31, 2023, 

What if prehistoric men and women joined forces in hunting parties? 

gorodenkoff/iStock via Getty Images Plus


One of the most common stereotypes about the human past is that men did the hunting while women did the gathering. That gendered division of labor, the story goes, would have provided the meat and plant foods people needed to survive.

That characterization of our time as a species exclusively reliant on wild foods – before people started domesticating plants and animals more than 10,000 years ago – matches the pattern anthropologists observed among hunter-gatherers during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Virtually all of the large-game hunting they documented was performed by men.


Stone Folsom points, which date to between 11,000 and 10,000 years ago, are associated with the prehistoric hunting of bison. UMMAA 27673, 39802, 30442 and 37737, Courtesy of the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropological Archaeology

It’s an open question whether these ethnographic accounts of labor are truly representative of recent hunter-gatherers’ subsistence behaviors. Regardless, they definitely fueled assumptions that a gendered division of labor arose early in our species’ evolution. Current employment statistics do little to disrupt that thinking; in a recent analysis, just 13% of hunters, fishers and trappers in the U.S. were women.

Still, as an archaeologist, I’ve spent much of my career studying how people of the past got their food. I can’t always square my observations with the “man the hunter” stereotype.
A long-standing anthropological assumption

First, I want to note that this article uses “women” to describe people biologically equipped to experience pregnancy, while recognizing that not all people who identify as women are so equipped, and not all people so equipped identify as women.

I am using this definition here because reproduction is at the heart of many hypotheses about when and why subsistence labor became a gendered activity. As the thinking goes, women gathered because it was a low-risk way to provide dependent children with a reliable stream of nutrients. Men hunted either to round out the household diet or to use difficult-to-acquire meat as a way to attract potential mates.

One of the things that has come to trouble me about attempts to test related hypotheses using archaeological data – some of my own attempts included – is that they assume plants and animals are mutually exclusive food categories. Everything rests on the idea that plants and animals differ completely in how risky they are to obtain, their nutrient profiles and their abundance on a landscape.


It is true that highly mobile large-game species such as bison, caribou and guanaco (a deer-sized South American herbivore) were sometimes concentrated in places or seasons where plants edible to humans were scarce. But what if people could get the plant portion of their diets from the animals themselves?


Herbivores can consume and digest some plant material that humans usually can’t. 

pchoui/iStock via Getty Images Plus

Animal prey as a source of plant-based food

The plant material undergoing digestion in the stomachs and intestines of large ruminant herbivores is a not-so-appetizing substance called digesta. This partially digested matter is edible to humans and rich in carbohydrates, which are pretty much absent from animal tissues.

Conversely, animal tissues are rich in protein and, in some seasons, fats – nutrients unavailable in many plants or that occur in such small amounts that a person would need to eat impractically large quantities to meet daily nutritional requirements from plants alone.

If past peoples ate digesta, a big herbivore with a full belly would, in essence, be one-stop shopping for total nutrition.


Killing a bison could provide a source of both protein and carbs, if you consider the digesta. 

UMMAA 83209 a and b, Courtesy of the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropological Archaeology

To explore the potential and implications of digesta as a source of carbohydrates, I recently compared institutional dietary guidelines to person-days of nutrition per animal using a 1,000-pound (450-kilogram) bison as a model. First I compiled available estimates for protein in a bison’s own tissues and for carbohydrates in digesta. Using that data, I found that a group of 25 adults could meet the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s recommended daily averages for protein and carbohydrates for three full days eating only bison meat and digesta from one animal.

Among past peoples, consuming digesta would have relaxed the demand for fresh plant foods, perhaps changing the dynamics of subsistence labor.

Recalibrating the risk if everyone hunts

One of the risks typically associated with large-game hunting is that of failure. According to the evolutionary hypotheses around gendered division of labor, when risk of hunting failure is high – that is, the likelihood of bagging an animal on any given hunting trip is low – women should choose more reliable resources to provision children, even if it means long hours of gathering. The cost of failure is simply too high to do otherwise.


What 19th-century ethnographers recorded might not be a good representation of prehistoric conditions. MPI/Archive Photos via Getty Images

However, there is evidence to suggest that large game was much more abundant in North America, for example, before the 19th- and 20th-century ethnographers observed foraging behaviors. If high-yield resources like bison could have been acquired with low risk, and the animals’ digesta was also consumed, women may have been more likely to participate in hunting. Under those circumstances, hunting could have provided total nutrition, eliminating the need to obtain protein and carbohydrates from separate sources that might have been widely spread across a landscape.

And, statistically speaking, women’s participation in hunting would also have helped reduce the risk of failure. My models show that, if all 25 of the people in a hypothetical group participated in the hunt, rather than just the men, and all agreed to share when successful, each hunter would have had to be successful only about five times a year for the group to subsist entirely on bison and digesta. Of course, real life is more complicated than the model suggests, but the exercise illustrates potential benefits of both digesta and female hunting.


Winter in the Arctic offers Indigenous hunters more chances to kill herbivores than to find edible plants. Topical Press Agency/Hulton Archive via Getty Images

Ethnographically documented foragers did routinely eat digesta, especially where herbivores were plentiful but plants edible to humans were scarce, as in the Arctic, where prey’s stomach contents was an important source of carbohydrates.

I believe eating digesta may have been a more common practice in the past, but direct evidence is frustratingly hard to come by. In at least one instance, plant species present in the mineralized plaque of a Neanderthal individual’s teeth point to digesta as a source of nutrients. To systematically study past digesta consumption and its knock-on effects, including female hunting, researchers will need to draw on multiple lines of archaeological evidence and insights gained from models like the ones I developed.

Raven Garvey, Associate Professor of Anthropology; Curator of High Latitude and Western North American Archaeology, Museum of Anthropological Archaeology; Faculty Affiliate, Research Center for Group Dynamics, University of Michigan

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

WHAT ABOUT OTHER  NON CHRISTIAN RELIGIONS

Editorial: If Missouri public schools teach Bible classes, whose version of religion rules?

2023/05/25

The Missouri State Capitol in Jefferson City, Missouri. - Wayne Mckown/Dreamstime/TNS

Missouri legislators have adopted yet another solution in search of a problem. They’ve passed a bill — and sent it to Gov. Mike Parson to sign (he shouldn’t) — that would allow public schools to offer elective courses on the Bible.

This isn’t the first time lawmakers have attempted this, even though there seems to be no prohibition against teaching about scripture in public schools. In fact, there can be value in that. What is — and should be — prohibited is teaching that promotes a particular religion. People are right to be suspicious that backers of this Missouri legislation are simply trying to slide the Christian camel’s nose under the public school tent as an initial way of advancing that faith tradition.

Sponsors of the bill may not realize it, but for almost two decades, educators have had available quality, constitutionally appropriate material to use when teaching students about the Bible and its influence. Those resources have come from the 501(c)(3) nonprofit Bible Literacy Project and have been used in hundreds of public schools in dozens of states. Why not just suggest parents and schools investigate this respected resource — recognizing, however, that even it doesn’t deal with other sacred texts that helped shape America, such as the Book of Mormon?

The Missouri bill at least pays lip service to the idea of not proselytizing in public classrooms. As the online summary of the bill notes: “This act requires that any course offered shall follow applicable laws maintaining religious neutrality, and shall not endorse, favor, promote, or show hostility to any particular religion, nonreligious faith, or religious perspective.”

That summary also says that any elective social studies course need not be limited to using the Bible — either the Jewish or Christian versions. But that’s far from encouraging students to explore the influence on society of Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist or other sacred writings.

There are many good reasons for students to be familiar with the Bible, given that it’s been so influential in U.S. history. Beyond that, of course, our language and literature are full of biblical references (“go the second mile,” “Good Samaritan laws,” “the patience of Job” and more) that will mean nothing to students without at least an introductory look at the book’s influence.

In a nation in which the religious landscape has been changing rather dramatically over the last 50-plus years, basic religious literacy is important. It’s exactly what such groups as the Greater Kansas City Interfaith Council promote as a way of living in peace in a society that’s becoming more religiously diverse, including a fast-growing number of religiously unaffiliated people.

But focusing on just one sacred text — even if a rapidly-shrinking majority of Americans still identify as Christian — is an incomplete answer. In fact, public school teaching that uses only the Bible can be problematic in various ways.

Which translation should be used? (There are dozens, and sometimes they offer conflicting English versions of the original Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic.) Whose interpretation of those texts should be given priority? Will the Bible be seen through the eyes of people who say it’s “inerrant” in all ways, including the idea that the world was created in six literal 24-hour days? Or should more metaphorical and allegorical interpretations be offered? Should students get a Mainline Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, Pentecostal or evangelical approach, or one from a branch of Judaism?

Rabbi Doug Alpert of Congregation Kol Ami of Kansas City is on target when he suggests that it’s not the legislature’s place to say it’s legal to teach about the Bible: “It sounds like they’re doing the courts’ job.” Exactly.

Public school families who want their children taught about the many ways the Bible has influenced our nation and its citizens should be careful how they go about making that happen. Letting Missouri lawmakers set the boundaries is far from the best idea.

___

© The Kansas City Star

CANADIAN FASCIST SAYS;

'We want dictator Trump': America First activist publicly calls for 'Trumpian Reich'

David Edwards
May 31, 2023,

Twitter/screen grab

Tyler Russell, a Canadian nationalist leader of the America First movement, has called for Donald Trump to be installed as "dictator" in a "Trumpian Reich."

In a clip obtained by Right Wing Watch, Russell told the audience of his daily broadcast about his vision for a Trump government.

"All of these DeSantis, you know, libertarian populist people that are like, we need to actually have political substance," he complained. "No, I don't give a f--k about that, okay? I don't care about your political substance."

"I want a Trump Reich," he continued. "And I want Trump's face to be, you know, projected onto every single tallest skyscraper in every city around America, okay?"

Russell insisted that his followers did not want "freedom."

"We want a total Trumpian Reich, okay?" he said. "That's what we want. We want a total Trumpian Reich. We want dictator Trump."

"We want Trump to rule forever and ever and make America great again," Russell added. "And we want all these people who are acting in bad faith, who are traitors to this nation, to go to jail. That's what we want."

Watch the video clip at this link.

'Tallahassee Mussolini': Steve Schmidt says 'unfit' Ron DeSantis has even worse morals than Trump

Matthew Chapman
May 31, 2023, 

Ron Desantis (Photo via Shutterstock)

Former GOP strategist turned Lincoln Project co-founder Steve Schmidt ripped into Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) in a new episode of his political podcast, "The Warning."

"There he is," said Schmidt, showing an image of DeSantis during his interview with Fox News in which he claimed he would "smash" leftism in the United States as president. "Governor Ron DeSantis. The Mussolini of Tallahassee, using a U.S. Navy war vessel as a visual prop just days after his disastrous launch, which spawned the fantastic hashtag, "#DeSaster."

"Who is it that he wants to smash?" said Schmidt. "Is he going to arrest Bernie Sanders? Is he going to send AOC to a rehabilitation and re-education camp?"

This moment, for Schmidt, encapsulated how DeSantis is unfit for office — and how his presidential campaign, hyped by numerous GOP donors looking for an alternative to Trump, will crash and burn.

"Ron DeSantis' campaign is going to be epic," said Schmidt. "As in, an epic debacle for the ages. He will raise more money against lower vote results than any presidential candidate in American history. He's going to make Texas Senator Phil Gramm look like Bill Clinton, when it comes to politics, by the time this is done."

"Let me just say this about Ron DeSantis, and his wanting to smash and break and hurt," he continued. "The job of the American president is to temporarily lead the American people, and to make the Union more perfect. Ron DeSantis doesn't understand that. He's as unfit at a moral level, at a character level, as any person has ever been, including Donald Trump, running for this office."

"He will fail," said Schmidt.

NOTHING QUITE LIKE A STEVE SCHMIDT RANT  

EIGHT MINUTES LONG!!!

EXCLUSIVE: Trump captured on tape talking about classified document he kept after leaving the White House

By Katelyn Polantz, Paula Reid and Kaitlan Collins, 

CNN  Wed May 31, 2023

CNN —

Federal prosecutors have obtained an audio recording of a summer 2021 meeting in which former President Donald Trump acknowledges he held onto a classified Pentagon document about a potential attack on Iran, multiple sources told CNN, undercutting his argument that he declassified everything.

The recording indicates Trump understood he retained classified material after leaving the White House, according to multiple sources familiar with the investigation. On the recording, Trump’s comments suggest he would like to share the information but he’s aware of limitations on his ability post-presidency to declassify records, two of the sources said.

Notable legal clouds that continue to hang over Donald Trump in 2023

CNN has not listened to the recording, but multiple sources described it. One source said the relevant portion on the Iran document is about two minutes long, and another source said the discussion is a small part of a much longer meeting.


Special counsel Jack Smith, who is leading the Justice Department investigation into Trump, has focused on the meeting as part of the criminal investigation into Trump’s handling of national security secrets. Sources describe the recording as an “important” piece of evidence in a possible case against Trump, who has repeatedly asserted he could retain presidential records and “automatically” declassify documents.

Prosecutors have asked witnesses about the recording and the document before a federal grand jury. The episode has generated enough interest for investigators to have questioned Gen. Mark Milley, one of the highest-ranking Trump-era national security officials, about the incident.

The July 2021 meeting was held at Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, with two people working on the autobiography of Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows as well as aides employed by the former president, including communications specialist Margo Martin. The attendees, sources said, did not have security clearances that would allow them access to classified information. Meadows didn’t attend the meeting, sources said.

Meadows’ autobiography includes an account of what appears to be the same meeting, during which Trump “recalls a four-page report typed up by (Trump’s former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) Mark Milley himself. It contained the general’s own plan to attack Iran, deploying massive numbers of troops, something he urged President Trump to do more than once during his presidency.”

The document Trump references was not produced by Milley, CNN was told.

Investigators have questioned Milley about the episode in recent months, making him one of the highest-ranking national security officials from Trump’s administration to meet with the special counsel’s team. Milley’s spokesman Dave Butler declined to comment to CNN.

Out of the spotlight, Mark Meadows wields quiet political power amid Trump legal woes

The revelation that the former president and commander-in-chief has been captured on tape discussing a classified document could raise his legal exposure as he continues his third bid for the White House. Trump has denied any wrongdoing.

A Trump campaign spokesman said “leaks” are meant to “inflame tensions” around Trump.

“The DOJ’s continued interference in the presidential election is shameful and this meritless investigation should cease wasting the American taxpayer’s money on Democrat political objectives,” the spokesman added.

When asked at a CNN town hall this month if he showed classified documents he kept after the presidency to anyone, Trump answered: “Not really. I would have the right to. By the way, they were declassified after.”

A lawyer for Meadows declined to comment. A lawyer for Martin declined to comment.

Smith’s investigation has shown signs of nearing its end, though it hasn’t yet resulted in any criminal charges. A spokesman for the special counsel’s office declined to comment for this story.

In this February 2020 photo, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley chats with President Donald Trump after he delivered the State of the Union address at the Capitol in Washington, DC.Olivier Douliery/AFP/Getty Images/File

Trump was outraged at New Yorker story on Milley and Iran

The recording that’s now in the hands of prosecutors shows they are not only looking at Trump’s actions regarding classified documents recovered from his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, but also at what happened at Bedminster a year earlier.

The meeting in which Trump discussed the Iran document with others happened shortly after The New Yorker published a story by Susan Glasser detailing how, in the final days of Trump’s presidency, Milley instructed the Joint Chiefs to ensure Trump issued no illegal orders and that he be informed if there was any concern. The story infuriated Trump.

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Glasser reported that in the months following the election, Milley repeatedly argued against striking Iran and was concerned Trump “might set in motion a full-scale conflict that was not justified.” Milley and others talked Trump out of taking such a drastic action, according to the New Yorker story.

On the recording and in response to the story, Trump brings up the document, which he says came from Milley. Trump told those in the room that if he could show it to people, it would undermine what Milley was saying, the sources said. One source says Trump refers to the document as if it is in front of him.

Several sources say the recording captures the sound of paper rustling, as if Trump was waving the document around, though is not clear if it was the actual Iran document. There’s also laughter in the room that’s captured on the recording.

The US military has contingency plans and courses of action that apply to countries and situations around the globe.

The meeting took place well before Trump’s team shipped 15 boxes of presidential records and classified documents back to the National Archives and Records Administration in January 2022 after months of back-and-forth between his team and the records agency.

The Justice Department later obtained additional documents with classified markings from Trump, seizing more than 100 during a search of Mar-a-Lago last August. Trump’s legal team hired people to search other Trump properties, including Bedminster, late last year.

Investigators from the special counsel’s office also have asked in their document handling and obstruction investigation about other scenarios in which Trump may have shown national security documents, such as maps, to others, sources say. They’ve also asked several witnesses to share details about Trump’s anger toward Milley.

During the summer of 2021, sources say multiple people were making recordings of Trump as he held conversations with journalists and biographers.
Trump’s different explanations on the declassified documents

Trump and his attorneys have given several different, often conflicting, explanations for why Trump didn’t intentionally retain classified materials in violation of federal law. 

Initially, Trump allies argued he had a “standing declassification order” so that documents removed from the Oval Office were immediately declassified.  A few weeks later, Trump told Fox News that he could declassify things “just by thinking about it.”

Earlier this year, Trump’s legal team told Congress that classified material was inadvertently packed up at the end of the administration. Most recently, Trump told CNN at a town hall that materials were “automatically declassified” when he took them.

However, there’s no indication Trump followed the legally mandated declassification process, and his attorneys have avoided saying so far in court whether Trump declassified records he kept.

This story has been updated with a response from former President Trump’s campaign.

CNN’s Kristen Holmes and Sara Murray contributed to this report.

Alaska governor's 'pro-family' adviser resigns after pro-Hitler and pro-rape comments resurface

Matthew Chapman
May 31, 2023

APM Reports, YouTube screen grab

A key policy adviser for Gov. Mike Dunleavy (R-AK) has resigned after the release of a series of inflammatory statements he made on a podcast praising Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler and defending the right of husbands to rape their wives, among a number of other things, reported Alaska Public Media this week.

Jeremy Cubas had been serving as Dunleavy's counsel on "pro-family" policies after previously serving as the governor's staff photographer, and, according to the report, his main job in his new role had been setting up a "pro-family" website for the state.

"Cubas aired those and other extreme views on the podcast he co-hosts, Contra Gentiles, whose Latin title translates to 'against the non-believers,'" reported Nathaniel Herz and Curtis Gilbert. "The program, which has been published for the past three years, was available for anyone to hear on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and YouTube when Dunleavy, in April, promoted Cubas to a $110,000-a-year job as his policy adviser on 'pro-family' issues."

Among many other things, Cubas claimed that anti-Semitism is fictional, that Hitler only targeted Jews because they were "homeless people just taking over the country," and he really just "wanted the races in their respective areas to remain pure, so Europe remains Europe." He also called civil rights activist Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. a "loser," and said people should just "get violent on" transgender activists to stop them.

Cubas also had a lot to say in defense of rape, particularly spousal rape, which he claims is not possible because "When you signed the contract, you have already consented. You’re consenting until the end of time, until you’re dead." He added that rape in general is "pretty low on the totem pole of grave immoral actions," especially if the victim is impregnated, and that "divorce is worse than rape."

Speaking to APM, Dunleavy's spokesman Jeff Turner reportedly condemned Cubas' controversial statements.

“Gov. Dunleavy sincerely believes that the differences between people are what makes all of us stronger,” said Turner. “The governor represents all Alaskans, regardless of their faith, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation or gender. Derogatory statements about individuals and groups within our society do not in any way reflect the values of Gov. Dunleavy or his administration and will not be tolerated.”

McCarthy suggests new commission could look at Social Security and Medicare cuts

Sarah K. Burris

May 31, 2023,

Kevin McCarthy (Photo by Stefani Reynolds for AFP)

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) announced Wednesday he was launching a commission tasked with looking at budget cuts – and he suggested Social Security and Medicare could come under his scalpel.

His pledge came just months after vowing such cuts to mandatory spending programs were off the table.

In February, President Joe Biden spoke before a joint session of Congress, telling Americans the GOP wanted to cut the programs they had paid into their whole lives. "Instead of making the wealthy pay their fair share, some Republicans want Medicare and Social Security to sunset every five years," he said.

"That means those programs will go away if Congress doesn’t vote to keep them. Other Republicans say if we don’t cut Social Security and Medicare, they’ll let America default on its debt for the first time in our history."

His comments got a chorus of boos from the audience of Republicans. Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) shook his head.

As he repeated the claim at his State of the Union address, Biden incensed Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) so much she leaped her feet yelling “liar!", while Republicans committed on television to never making such cuts.

McCarthy even told CBS's Face the Nation he was taking Social Security and Medicare “off the table” in debt ceiling negotiations.

And then, on Wednesday, the speaker announced he's starting a commission to look at how to make cuts.

Appearing on the Fox network, McCarthy explained, "And now we're cutting, and you know what? It's gonna make some people uncomfortable by doing that, but I'm not going to give up on the American people."

"I'm going to announce a commission coming forward from the speaker — from bipartisan, both sides of the aisle," he added. "...The majority driver of the budget is mandatory spending; it's Medicare; it's Social Security, interest on the debt."

McCarthy told Fox host Harris Faulkner that only 11 percent of the budget could be negotiated during the debt ceiling talks because Biden had "walled off" parts of it – including the part that included discretionary spending programs.

Now, he said, "We have to look at the entire budget."

See a clip of the interview below