Hacker News Reader

I wonder if they'll add an addendum to discuss Clinesmith's guilty plea (not yet entered, there's only a Criminal Information from last Friday), the info Steele sourced from Igor Danchenko, or Warner's contact with Oleg Deripaksa via Adam Waldman?

Update: The guilty plea got entered -

https://www.justice.gov/usao-ct/pr/fbi-attorney-admits-alter...

> We don't have to imagine very hard. Did you read the Senate report (bipartisan) that shows the level of effort Russia put into helping install a President who's policies show an inclination of wanting to be a dictator? That's supported by a party that takes as many steps as possible to deny citizens the right to vote?

What level of effort? $100,000 in Facebook ad spend, a paid troll farm[1], and airing some of the DNC's dirty laundry? That was all that it took for half the country to go ahead and elect a monster?

You're severely downplaying the scope, abilities, and observable impact of our domestic propaganda organs, that range from mainstream publications (Like Fox) to insane-bonkers fringe crap (Like Alex Jones).

> I arrived there, and I immediately felt like a character in the book '1984' by George Orwell-a place where you have to write that white is black and black is white. Your first feeling, when you ended up there, was that you were in some kind of factory that turned lying, telling untruths, into an industrial assembly line.

We have plenty of domestic organizations who engage in this exact same bloody thing, for similarly cynical political ends. The difference is, they are funded by folks like Rupert Murdoch, who, of course, always has the best interests of America in his heart.

[1] Never mind that useful idiots on reddit and 4chan are more then happy to troll the, uh, libs, for free.

> and airing some of the DNC's dirty laundry?

Fun fact, the GOP was also hacked, but their blackmail material was held in reserve and not published.

It's too bad that didn't get released, but I'm just not sure what would have been in the RNC's emails which would have damaged Trump. Have to imagine it was mostly old hands panicking over how well he was doing in the primaries and trying to find ways to sabotage him.

I would bet my right arm that the RNC's emails were rife with breathtaking racism and misogyny. This is a group of people who are well known for having wildly offensive beliefs that are only expressed in private.

So not just damaging to Trump, but damaging for the entire party.

Damaging the RNC and Republican establishment would have been helpful to Trump: his candidacy was (or at least was perceived as) an upstart insurgency against them. Assuming the RNC emails were actually packed with bigotry (I'm not so sure), the most anti-Trump read which would have emerged out of it might have been something like, "see, all these people like to pretend they're better than Trump but they say the same stuff behind closed doors!"

What there would not have been in the RNC emails was a bunch of discussion between party insiders and Trump surrogates/loyalists as to how to tilt the primary race in his favor. This is what made the DNC leaks damaging to Clinton's campaign.

If the RNC thought it would benefit them to have their private communications leak, they could've done that without foreign help.

You keep making the mistake of conflating the 2016 RNC's political fortunes and Trump's. Many Republican insiders probably didn't even want Trump to win the general election as it would mean they'd be frozen out of influence in the party. Remember that guy Paul Ryan?

After Trump was elected and showed himself to be an establishment wolf in populist sheep's clothing they've largely mended relations, and the few holdout never-Trumpers have left for other pastures (including the Democratic Party), but it was a very different picture in 2016.

> You keep making the mistake of conflating the 2016 RNC's political fortunes and Trump's.

You do realize they were on the same ticket, and Trump's fortunes on that ticket had direct, downticket nationwide consequences for the rest of the party?

You only need to look to the UK's Labour Party for an example where a certain faction of a party's insiders considered it better for themselves for their candidate to lose a general election. Winning is never the only consideration.

Hmm. Have you thought about the possibility that what you consider "breathtaking racism and misogyny" might not be seen as such my a sizable portion, maybe a majority of Americans?

Because every time you point out that something is unacceptable, and someone else doesn't agree with you, you've lost their vote- and they will now do anything to prevent people like you from deciding what's acceptable and what isn't.

> Have you thought about the possibility that what you consider "breathtaking racism and misogyny" might not be seen as such my[sic] a sizable portion, maybe a majority of Americans?

I did, and immediately discarded it as ridiculous. 63% of Americans support Black Lives Matter[1], for example. Furthermore, women have been a bigger proportion of the vote than men in every election in the past four decades[2].

[1] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/63-support-black-lives-matte...

[2] https://cawp.rutgers.edu/sites/default/files/resources/gende...

It seems America doesn't like a tastr of it's own medicine it prescribed as recently as mid-90s (Russia) or 2013-2014 (Ukraine)