Electoral Clickbait

So much for Harvard Professor Lawrence Lessig’s predictive abilities. Having gotten himself back in the media spotlight by forming a nonprofit legal effort called the Electors Trust, he told MSNBC a week ago that there might be enough members of the Electoral College prepared to break away from president-elect Donald Trump. “Some tell me that the number is higher than that. It should be more like 30, but I feel confident saying there’s at least 20.” In the end four Clinton electors voted for someone else, and two Trump electors defected.

On Twitter, Sarah Jeong of Motherboard joked about Lessig’s counting abilities, tweeting “well his name is larry lessig and not larry addig.”

With the Electoral College vote on the horizon for weeks, many of the big progressive online organizations fed their “members” false hopes and urged them to demonstrate at statehouses to demand that electors vote their consciences. An email from Moveon.org, which had polled its membership, claimed that “MoveOn members voted overwhelmingly to run a campaign to ask the electors to reject Trump.” So the group spent precious dollars making an online video featuring one rare Republican elector of conscience, and paid MSNBC and Fox to air it. In fact, as Anna Galland, Moveon’s executive director, told me they voted 231,130 in favor of the quixotic Electoral College campaign and 13,347 against. That is, barely 3 percent of Moveon’s members voted in the group’s survey. That’s hardly “overwhelming.”

Let’s hear it for the wisdom of crowds. (Nearly five million people signed this petition calling on the EC to make Clinton president, so at least we know the cause was great clickbait.) Personally, I still don’t understand how liberals who (correctly, in my view) are raising concerns about Trump violating the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause against taking foreign gifts or payments once he is president could, in the same breath, claim that the process by which Electors cast their vote guided by their state’s popular vote should be ignored.

Judd Legum and Kira Lerner report for ThinkProgress that the Embassy of Kuwait canceled a contract with a D.C. hotel days after the election and shifted it to the Trump International Hotel, acting under pressure from representatives of the Trump Organization.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich thinks he has a solution for Trump’s nepotism problem—he can pardon his kids for working with him in the White House. Recall that this is the same person who said the Clinton family foundation was an organized crime operation. And he gets a respectful hearing.

As we continue to struggle for moorings in these rapidly changing times, it’s worth looking at how other people have dealt with the rise of authoritarianism and the motivated reasoning that comes with it. Writing in the Huffington Post, writer and filmmaker Shawn Hamilton suggests that what we’re seeing now is a form of Gleichschaltung—German for “coordination” or “getting in line.” He quotes Hannah Arendt, who escaped Germany in 1933 and spent the rest of her life studying totalitarianism, writing:

“The problem, the personal problem, was not what our enemies did, but what our friends did. Friends ‘coordinated’ or got in line.” And this coordination was not necessarily due to the “pressure of terror,” said Arendt, who escaped Germany in 1933. Intellectuals were particularly vulnerable to this wave of coordination. “The essence of being an intellectual is that one fabricates ideas about everything,” and many intellectuals of her time were “trapped by their own ideas.” People rejected the uglier aspects of Nazism but gave ground in ways that ultimately made it successful. They conceded premises to faulty arguments. They rejected the “facts” of propaganda, but not the impressions of it. The new paradigm of authoritarianism was so disorienting that they simply could not see it for what it was, let alone confront it.

(h/t Laura Dawn)

Hamilton adds that the faulty premise that empowered Hitler was the claim that Germany had been winning World War I but was “stabbed in the back” by its own leaders, and he argues that the argument in America today that “illegal immigration” is the cause of white working class economic hardship works the same way, giving Trumpism a dangerous legitimacy.

Tech and politics: Republicans outspent Democrats on Google marketing products in 2016, Andrea Drusch reports for National Journal.

David Simas, a top White House adviser and former political director, has been picked by President Obama to be the CEO of his Chicago-based Obama Foundation, Lynn Sweet reports for the Chicago Sun-Times.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is running a full-page ad in Wired calling on the tech industry to “scrub your logs” so the data on users can’t be conscripted by a Trump Administration if it chooses to spy on its political opponents.

Apple CEO Tim Cook explains to his employees why he met with Trump, reports Matthew Panzarino in TechCrunch. “Personally, I’ve never found being on the sideline a successful place to be,” writes Cook. “The way that you influence these issues is to be in the arena. So whether it’s in this country, or the European Union, or in China or South America, we engage. And we engage when we agree and we engage when we disagree. I think it’s very important to do that because you don’t change things by just yelling. You change things by showing everyone why your way is the best. In many ways, it’s a debate of ideas.”

This is civic tech: Germany’s Prototype Fund has announced 17 projects that have won support in its first round of funding.

Our friends at Data & Society are looking to hire a research analyst focused on media and accountability.

Your moment of zen: Shtar Wars: The Kingdom Shtrikes Back.” Or, Brogue One.