This Ain’t No Party, This Ain’t No Disco

Remember when prominent political figures deleted their embarrassing tweets? Ah, good times. Here’s retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, the man Donald Trump has chosen to be his national security adviser, tweeting that “Fear of Muslims is RATIONAL.” That was from February. Here he is retweeting a fake news site from 16 days ago, purporting that new Hillary emails would expose “Money Laundering, Sex Crimes w Children, etc.”

Flynn has “criticized the [Islamic] religion as being nothing more than a ‘political ideology,’ has made a point of using the phrase ‘radical Islamist terrorism’ as often as possible, and once posted a video on his Twitter account that included the phrase ‘Fear of Muslims is rational,'” Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Maggie Haberman report for the New York Times. They add, “He has also claimed that Islamic law, known as Shariah, is spreading in the United States, without providing evidence.” (There is none.)

And here’s the President-elect, tweeting his false claim that Ford Motors has decided not to move a Kentucky auto plan to Mexico as a result of his election, which as Jesse Singal of New York magazine points out, has already been converted into a fake news story and spread (even by Reuters) into headlines claiming that Trump’s election has already saved jobs.

“Nobody fact-checks anything anymore—I mean, that’s how Trump got elected. He just said whatever he wanted, and people believed everything, and when the things he said turned out not to be true, people didn’t care because they’d already accepted it. It’s real scary. I’ve never seen anything like it.” That’s Paul Horner, a fake news impresario who says he makes $10,000 from AdSense revenue alone, talking to the Washington Post’s Caitlin Horner about the impact of his work. Horner admits having made up stories about people being paid to protest at Trump events, even to the point of posting fraudulent Craigslist ads to back up his claims, and hoping that they’d backfire on Trump supporters who shared them. “Looking back, instead of hurting the campaign, I think I helped it. And that feels [bad].”

President Obama is worrying a lot about the impact of fake news, too. “If everything seems to be the same and no distinctions are made, then we won’t know what to protect,” he said while on a visit to German chancellor Angela Merkel.

Trump’s new Attorney General choice, Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, has expressed some choice opinions in the past. When he was nominated for a federal judgeship in 1986, the Republican-controlled Senate Judiciary committee rejected him. As Eric Lichtblau, Maggie Haberman and Ashley Parker report for the New York Times, “In testimony before the committee, former colleagues said that Mr. Sessions had referred to the N.A.A.C.P., the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and other civil rights groups as ‘un-American’ and ‘Communist-inspired.’ An African-American federal prosecutor then, Thomas H. Figures, said Mr. Sessions had referred to him as ‘boy’ and testified that Mr. Sessions said the Ku Klux Klan was fine ‘until I found out they smoked pot.’ Mr. Sessions dismissed that remark as a joke.”

With “post-truth” now officially added to the Oxford dictionary, Margaret Sullivan, media columnist for the Washington Post, says journalism must “scrutinize, not normalize.” Amen.

The Internet Association, which represents companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google, has written to President-elect Trump urging him to support strong encryption in order to make America more secure, Amar Toor reports for The Verge. We have a different suggestion for those companies: delete all the data you currently have on your users, promise not to hold any for more than 30 days, and declare that you will refuse unconstitutional demands for user data in the future.

As Human Rights Watch’s Sarah St. Vincent warns, “Your data may be at the disposal of the United States president – regardless of whether you did anything wrong. President Barack Obama’s administration, and soon President-elect Donald Trump’s, has sweeping powers to spy on both US citizens and others without a warrant and, in some cases, with little or no oversight from Congress. If you get caught in the government’s dragnet, the authorities can keep your data and search it for years to come.”

Kids, if you haven’t downloaded and started using Signal, from OpenWhisperSystems, for your more sensitive communications, stop fooling around. It’s here.

Food for thought: While Trump’s presidency-in-formation continues to live up exactly to the campaign he ran, as a white economic-nationalist misogynist Christian, we must remember that many people voted for him out of desperation and not necessarily as an endorsement of everything he is now doing. In that respect, these two interviews by Washington Post reporter Jeff Guo with University of Madison Professor Kathy Cramer, the author of The Politics of Resentment, are worth reading closely. She has been studying the politics and culture of of her poor rural Wisconsin neighbors for more than a decade, and her insights into why they went for Donald Trump deserve close attention.

If you are interested in efforts to bridge the red-blue divide, keep an eye on this post from the National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation.

This is civic tech: Here’s some really good advice for foundations on how they should relate to nonprofits right now, from Vu Le, the executive director of the Rainier Valley Corps (which works to bring leaders of color into the nonprofit sector). He also writes the blog Nonprofit With Balls. Need I say more? Read and share this widely, please.

Fission Strategy co-founder Cheryl Contee digests the election’s result, promising to do more to reach voters who just wanted to “shake up Washington” as well as people who weren’t motivated to vote.

Shaun Abrahamson of Urban.us reflects on what the Trump victory means for urban tech. One takeaway: since climate change efforts will continue at the city and state level, there’s plenty of opportunities still there.

Here’s a great write-up of last week’s Platform Cooperative conference, by Darren Sharp for Shareable.

Tech and the campaign that wasn’t: Matt Bai, who has been chronicling the internal politics of the Democratic party for more than a decade (writing a very good book called The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers and the Battle to Remark Democratic Politics along the way) says in his election post-mortem that the Clinton campaign was a “cult of demography” and “all about the database.”:

[Hillary Clinton’s] campaign was effectively nothing but a giant turnout operation, crunching data on reliable Democratic voters while simultaneously keeping the candidate herself from saying anything remotely interesting. She ran on a database, rather than on an argument; the more Trump alienated and motivated her base, the less she felt the need to make any discernible case.”

Related: The vaunted Clinton campaign somehow ignored calls from staff in battleground states like Michigan and Wisconsin to send more paid staff, leaving organizers in those places to scramble to raise their own money for additional GOTV workers in the final weeks of the campaign, Sam Stein reports for the Huffington Post.