Analyzing the Digital Traces of Political Manipulation:The 2016 Russian Interference Twitter Campaign

“We collected a dataset with

over 43 million elections-related posts shared on Twitter between

September 16 and October 21, 2016 by about 5.7 million distinct

users. This dataset included accounts associated with the identified

Russian trolls. We use label propagation to infer the ideology of all

users based on the news sources they shared. This method enables

us to classify a large number of users as liberal or conservative

with precision and recall above 90%. Conservatives retweeted Rus-

sian trolls about 31 times more often than liberals and produced

36 times more tweets. Additionally, most retweets of troll content

originated from two Southern states: Tennessee and Texas. Using

state-of-the-art bot detection techniques, we estimated that about

4.9% and 6.2% of liberal and conservative users respectively were

bots. Text analysis on the content shared by trolls reveals that they

had a mostly conservative, pro-Trump agenda. Although an ide-

ologically broad swath of Twitter users were exposed to Russian

Trolls in the period leading up to the 2016 U.S. Presidential election,

it was mainly conservatives who helped amplify their message.”

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.04291

Inside the Secret SEAL Team 6 Mission to North Korea and What Went Wrong | Amanpour and Company

Inside the Secret SEAL Team 6 Mission to North Korea and What Went Wrong | Amanpour and Company

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79djGjRKsg4

ABC yanks Jimmy Kimmel’s show ‘indefinitely’ after remarks about Charlie Kirk

““The MAGA Gang (is) desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it,” Kimmel said. “In between the finger-pointing, there was grieving.””

If this is all he said, then this is a political cancellation that goes against everything many on the right used to say they stand for. Kimmel’s statement is not totally accurate, but is hardly beyond the pale.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/17/media/jimmy-kimmel-charlie-kirk-trump-fcc-brendan-carr

DOJ Quietly Deletes Study After Charlie Kirk’s Death That Says Right-Wing Extremists Engage in ‘Far More’ Political Violence

“An archived version of the study is still available online, and states that “far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides” than the left”

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/doj-quietly-deletes-study-charlie-005626328.html

How Trump’s purges weaken the CIA & Russian ship on fire after drone hit

Trump is purging the CIA of people who contributed to reports with evidence that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election. Trump is punishing people for doing an appropriate job while also weakening U.S. intelligence on Russia.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNveMlSeA7o

MAGA Economics Is Losing

“When you look at the sectors of the economy that were supposed to benefit from Trump’s economic policies, however, the news gets significantly worse. The manufacturing sector lost 12,000 jobs during the month of August and 78,000 over the past year, according to the data released Thursday by the Department of Labor.

Over the past three months, during which Trump’s tariffs have been in full swing, the manufacturing sector is down 31,000 jobs. Other blue-collar sectors like construction and mining are down over that same period.

All three sectors figure to have been negatively affected by Trump’s tariffs, which (contrary to the administration’s claims) have hit American businesses with huge new taxes on parts, raw materials, equipment, and more. Like with any big tax increase, one way businesses can offset those costs is by hiring fewer people or postponing new investments and expansion. That’s exactly what manufacturing firms say they have been doing.”

https://reason.com/2025/09/05/maga-economics-is-losing/

Navy SEALs Reportedly Killed North Korean Fishermen and Mutilated Their Bodies To Hide a Failed Mission

“By the sources’ telling, SEAL Team Six had sailed to the North Korean coast in two mini-submarines under a communications blackout, which meant that they lacked the livestreamed intelligence they were used to having. Based on aerial surveillance beforehand, the military planners had concluded that this part of North Korea was supposed to be free of boat traffic at that hour of the night in the winter.

Some of the SEALs swam to shore while others stayed in the submarines. When a leader of the shore team saw flashlights coming from a boat and a man jumping into the water, he opened fire without any discussion. Then the shore team swam to dispose of the bodies—trying to sink them so that they couldn’t be found—and then they sent a distress signal to evacuate. There were no weapons or uniforms on the boat.

The mission was carried out during the first Trump administration. The U.S. government wanted insight into North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during his high-stakes nuclear negotiations with President Donald Trump.”

https://reason.com/2025/09/05/navy-seals-reportedly-killed-north-korean-fishermen-and-mutilated-their-bodies-to-hide-a-failed-mission/

Trump’s 1 Percent Tax on Money Immigrants Send Home Is a Tax on the Global Poor

“President Donald Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) into law on July 4. One measure buried deep in the 870-page law imposes a 1 percent tax on remittances—the money that people send to friends and relatives in their home countries. The 1 percent tax applies to all remittance senders in the United States, though not to transfers sent from bank accounts and U.S.-issued debit or credit cards.

The Center for Global Development (CGD), an economic research think tank, suggests that remittances could drop by 1.6 percent “if the new tax raises costs by 1 percent.” Analyzing the potential impact on remittances sent by migrants in the U.S., the CGD finds that Central American countries will “suffer the greatest loss relative to their gross national income (GNI).” El Salvador is projected to lose 0.6 percent of its GNI, Honduras 0.55 percent, and Jamaica 0.42 percent.”

https://reason.com/2025/09/08/taxing-the-poor-globally/

National Conservatism Has a Bigotry Problem, Whether Yoram Hazony Wants To Admit It or Not

“The implication was that people like the Holocaust-denying Gen Z influencer Nick Fuentes and his army of online followers (“Groypers”) were not welcome in the natcon tent. “I think that the border is clear,” Hazony said. “Blood and soil is literally a Nazi term….We are not interested in a nationalism of blood.”
Yet on the first day of this year’s National Conservatism Conference (“NatCon 5”) in Washington, D.C., Hazony gave a speech that didn’t just fail to clarify which elements of the extreme right should not be counted as natcons in good standing; it seemed explicitly to carve out space within the movement for those with antisemitic views. “Nobody ever said that to be a good natcon you have to love Jews,” Hazony, who is Jewish, said. “Go take a look at our statement of principles. It’s not a requirement.”

The comment was in keeping with the larger theme of his speech, which was on the importance of holding MAGA together at all costs. “You can’t win elections without a coalition, and thank God Trump and Vance are great at coalition building,” he said. “But what I’ve discovered in these last few months is that there are some people who just—they’re not into this. They don’t want the coalition. What they want is to be pure.””

So this coalition includes a basket of deplorables?

https://reason.com/2025/09/08/national-conservatism-has-a-bigotry-problem-whether-yoram-hazony-wants-to-admit-it-or-not/