We don’t actually NEED rigging for this election to have been stolen. The institutional cheating embodied in voter suppression, foreign interference, and a useless, sold out media are enough to throw an election. And all of those things are in play.
But I feel in my bones this was rigged, in exactly the way described in the duty to warn letter.
If for no other reason than that DT ALWAYS cheats, and always telegraphs how by projection. Notice exactly when all the yapping about “rigging” stopped?
You responded to this question perfectly. I couldn't figure out how to articulate that very simple fact.
Not to open up a can of worms but has anyone noticed how the yapping has stopped regarding the staged assassination attempts? What happened to all the bulletproof shields. Or the last suspect?
The media saw right through such a flimsy, staged assassination. They also saw that T's handlers were willing to kill one of their own supporters to get him elected.
"Let me just report whatever they say and move on to the next story as fast as possible."
Voter suppression 'is' the larger issue. I'm in the same camp as you Annabel - it was rigged. However, why is Kamala not challenging - and democrats ? Why ??
* My motto: Trust but verify. That would not make we the opposed, anything like or resembling the 'other side, the dark side.'
I wonder if K was ok with losing? Maybe she is tired. She doesn’t need money. She has been vilified enough for a lifetime. Maybe she just wanted to go home with Doug. DJT has made the whole political environment so toxic, anyone would want to stay away.
Biden was a placeholder. Kamela wasn’t supposed to win. Disappointing for her but had Biden any intention of changing the trajectory of the US he would have had Garland prosecute any myriad of cases handed to him by mueller let alone the J6 committee. Not a single architect was brought to justice. I knew by 2021 it was all stitched up.
I'm certain it's bothering her. From my own past experience, when you put so much of yourself into such an endeavor, and you know the real score and stories as she certainly knows and far more than we are allowed to know, she must be crushed.
My feeling is that's an unknown, and useful to those who 'need' to find blame TR. I'm sure you've run into those sorts of folks in your life. No matter what's to blame, the fact that voters were presented two real choices, yet chose tfg is most problematic thing that I'll not soon get over.
Well we could go around for weeks and argue about rigging cheating or what have you but I think there's plenty of signs that imply that yeah something went awry but nobody will ever be able to prove it just like they couldn't prove their lie that the Democrats cheated.
This is the authoritarian Playbook to a T confuse, blame. Flood
Just want to tell you that I feel exactly the same way. More than a few red flags exhibited by DT but yet with Super PACs Russian money, "could be" (reading between the lines it is) pouring into the Republican party in buying off members of Congress the first of which was Moscow Mitch. But he was too old to realize the long reaching implications of his greed
I would like to corroborate much of what Spoonamore says, along with the claims in the letter by Buell and others. As an election watcher, I have known for years that the security and validity of machine vote counts has been actively ignored. Audits that could test the accuracy and reveal hacking are largely not done, and when they are done the rules ae not followed, as if trying to hide something. Laws have been changed to make it easier to hide the results of audits, harder to understand them, and harder to gain access to that data. Until we have a good system of audits, I would not trust the count. There are too many ways to hack elections, and too many bad actors who are willing and able to hack elections, to hold trust in the results. On top of the vulnerabilities, the election outcomes are statitically very weird. I see a whole parade of red flags.
I found Trump's statement before the election that he already had all the votes he needed to be suspicious. I read somewhere that he was referring to the House in the anticipation that he could get the election thrown to the House over anomalies. I still think the simplest an best way to resolve the doubts is a hand count in all 7 swing states.
Well said and I agree but I do wonder if a handcount would accomplish much of anything if ballots were tossed, legit voters were purged, and/or if voting machines were compromised. But of course I'd rather there be handcounts of the swing state ballots than nothing being done at all.
State recounts are not needed: only for the particular counties showing the highest questionable statistical spreads that were defined. So maybe ten counties total for all of (not each, but the worst counties from the entire group of swing states).
With the margin of error so narrow, they could recount two swing states. I'd say we would just need them to look at one. Just pick one to prove a point.
I read your original article and, like a lot of people, I had wondered if it was a “hand of God” moment (The Maradona goal agsinst England) that we were witnessing but not. Sleight of hand is not easy to spot.
I found the rebuttal soon after as I was shocked big media outlets had nothing on it.
Very few journalists, or people in general, would come forward like you have and openly discuss errors made. As to the vitriol, it’s shameful to see people resort to this rather than accept “we all make mistakes”. I’ve seen the pack mentality at work in social media and presume it’s partly because the perpetrators feel safe in their online anonymity.
Please keep doing what you do because the future of the world needs people like you!
“So, if you care - I have been a leader in hacking and counterhacking for 25 years. I'm well paid for it. The 2024 Election was hacked at the tabulation level.
Long thread on it: I continue to work professionally finding hackers, and fairly often DEVELOP AND INSTALL hacks designed to ferret out the misuse of systems. My customers have included numerous governments and F100 firms. I wrote risk assessments of smartgrid technologies for Obama, and IP e-protection for GE.
Here is what you are seeing. The Tabulation Systems at the County level were hacked far in advance of the election. The hack was probably written into the code even before the code was installed. It will have a WHEN function and IF/THEN functions to have the machine force balance to a given outcome within a specific window of time. You could test the machines 1000 times before election night, and the result will be correct. If you run it during the time window, the force balancing will be turned on and regardless of inputs you will get a programmed output.
It is very simple to prove this. Take the two most outlandish precinct results from any county and just hand-count the ballots. They won't match the tabulation outputs. From what I am seeing, you will find 8-11% avg. shifts from Dem to Rep. Be sure to check heavy Red areas, easier to cover up a run up of the score. That was how it was done in Ohio vs. Kerry - GOP flips in already highly red areas. Now, why the Bomb-Threats? They were NOT to allow for hacker access. The programming was already in place, they were to break Chain of Custody and produce legal grounds to not trust a recount. Every place that GOT a bomb-threat is a place the courts will now have to consider the factual argument of whether the ballots COULD have been tampered with while the evacuations were going on. They weren't. But that is the argument the GOP will make to prevent recounts.
I used to appear on Lou Dobbs TV Show, back when he was at CNN and discuss hacking, including of voting machines. I helped get machines into researchers hands - every single one of them were shocked/horrified how simple hacking the machines was. But somehow, the public has refused to engage.
Now that a full blown #fascist takeover is underway, and they did it by hacking the tabulation machines as described, please engage. I will lend any expertise if asked, but be aware these people are sociopaths who will kill you, they have done so to others, so act accordingly.
And it was relatively easy. Perhaps 300-500 tabulators of 3 types with 24+ months of prep. You just saw 3000+ comms devices of 4+ types hacked with software and installed explosives. These were set off in waves and specific times to destroy Hamas. Same thing here.
My personal record. A team of 4, 11 months total operation time, we hacked 500 Point of Sale CreditCard machines to install added tracking software allowing the units to work correctly while also creating traces to catch CC money laundering which the retailer was in on. Same thing as election 2024.
And finally, let me say again, this is a simple, stupid, easy to prove hack. Hand Count most suspected 2 Precincts in each county. They won't match. And FWIW, I am currently working on a much harder hack larger in scale and much better executed. This election hack is just about political will.”
Letter to Governor Shapiro:
Gov. of Pennsylvania J. Shapiro, et. al. Nov. 7th 2024
“This is a formal Duty to Warn Letter. Per DNI Dir. Clapper's 2015 directive to all agencies and contractors associated with intelligence and financial agency technologies. I have a Duty to Warn of suspicions of hacking, and have done so for my customers including Govt. Agencies, Dept. of Defense, F100 firms and numerous banks. I do so here as a directly affected voter.
Nearly all my investigations begin for one of two reasons. The hackers make a mistake triggering a system issue and/or the aggregate effects of the hacking creates results outside nominal expectations. There is a third and less common flag; an unrelated distraction to draw attention away from the hacking.
All three of these indicators are present in the election of Nov. 5th 2024. Element three, distraction via bomb-threats, is confirmed coming from Russian agencies. Element one is the inexplicable mismatch of reported votes vs. voter turnout. Here in Centre County initial tabulation was an absurdly low 67K votes when over 80K voters participated. Element two is also present. Our local scanner systems worked in testing, but were unable to communicate properly with tabulation systems after the bomb-scare. I note from experience - the failure of a scanning systems to properly load a database is an extremely common development when a system is changed without notice to the users. I have personally worked on similar issues where sudden scanner configuration failures were the first symptoms of system hacking.
With these three elements present, I suggest immediately doing a relatively simple set of preliminary checks. First, randomly selected precincts require manual comparisons of the number of voters who took ballots vs the scanned output of vote totals. Those did not match here in Centre County by apx 13K votes. Once added, those votes substantially changed outcomes and led to the outright reversals in multiple Centre County races. Centre County BOE now shows vote totals over 80K votes. Apx. 6% above 2020 turnout. In my professional opinion every county in PA as well as many in WI, MI and GA currently reporting lower vote totals vs. 2020 and/or also experienced a distraction bomb threat should undertake the same process. My professional opinion is: many thousands of voters are being disenfranchised, likely by a malicious actor via errors in tabulation software. My concern has been proven correct and warranted here in Centre County PA.
ESignature = Stephen R. Spoonamore
Stephen Spoonamore (Resident Centre County PA)”
End of letter.
Please let Vice President Harris know about this revelation. It is crucial a hand recount is accomplished in the swing states.
Remember, Trump said he had enough votes BEFORE the election.
And Musk completed his purchase of twitter in November 2022 (24 months prior to the election) and in spite of drops in value, he just kept "working" in there doing nothing to save it! And we really had no idea he and trumpy boy had become such good chums!
Rachel, your reporting is first rate, so thanks for all you do. Unfortunately, the technology used can be easily compromised. This is just a simple truth. And with the generally sad state of human psychology — propaganda, poor public educational systems, and active measures inherent in the capitalist system — I’m sure you have seen Adam Curtis’s work, The Century of the Self, our heads can be hacked just as easily, which is the real issue. Not to mention, the Active Measures — Russia, China, Tech Bros, etc, have been widely acknowledged to have been taking place since at least 2014.
The Russians have a hundred years of active measures background to draw upon re how to hack our minds for their own purposes even through control of the international media. Ask the NYT about that factor. As to cyber matters, they are aces at cybercriminality of all kinds. No problem, tovarishche.
Bless you, dear lady (I lived in the Deep South for 7yrs.!). Great post(s) and most of the comments too. I'm still waiting for somebody, anybody, to explain to me why 6.6M fewer Dem voters voted for Harris than voted for Biden in 2020: 81M vs 74.4M, but Trump only received 2.9M more than his losing effort in 2020: 74M vs 76.9M. Our elections are, and have been since Citizens United (thnx to the corrupt SCOTUS) utterly corrupted by dark money, since the first Trump victory in 2016.
As you know, I'm a retired psychiatrist (psychologically trained in the old days), so I look beneath the hood on the horror that has taken over so much of the anti-social media. I hold the anti-government GQP and certainly Our Mad King (wannabe) Donald responsible for much of the validation of angry attacking comments on the net. Hell, he has and continues to model it! No mystery here.
You are doing a stand-up and highly professional job. Don't let the SOBs get you down. As others have said here: WE NEED YOUR VOICE AND INTELLIGENT INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING. Thanks for all you do! Gregg
Thanks for this clarification and partial rebuttal - that's responsible journalism.
Selfishly I'd rather you didn't turn off comments by free subscribers, but if it's the only way to manage the vitriol those of us who don't pay can hardly complain!
Much as I'm turned off by vitiolic comments (a nasty overspill from social media, I think) as a low-income subscriber, I would be unhappy to be denied commenting. And is the vitriol really only/modtly from free subscribers?
I was surprised when, after composing a response to a vitriolic comment recently, I returned to post it only to find the comment had been scrubbed. Fairly naive about cyber (and Substack) protocol, I didn't realize such things happened, and without notice that they had. I sympathize with dislike of trolling etc, but wonder if it isn't useful for readers to see that kind of ugliness as part of present reality. Unsullied polite conversation is a myth and we all lnow it; but is (unlabeled) cancelling the way to deal with it? I don't know, and not being the one who has to see it in its quantity, I'm not the one to decide how to handle it.
And, fwiw, I'm grateful for the little-guy journalism you offer, and was glad to see (and forward to my own maillist) your piece on hacking. That is one of the services yoj provide that is much needed in our world where big money mega corporations control journalism.
I wholeheartedly agree with your thoughts about the comments under recent posts Rachel. I've been dismayed by the frequent ugly nature of many comments, which seem so out of kilter alongside your enlightening, professional and honest posts.
As someone without an income and therefore unable to subscribe, I would be gutted to not have access to comment. I've been frustrated by this limitation on other accounts. However, even with that in mind, my opinion - based on a concern for your personal wellbeing - would be to close the comments to non-paid subscribers. You'll save yourself and your most committed followers a heap of upset that you really don't need, and which draws energy away from the important work you're doing.
Thank you for what you do. I was wondering if you are aware of Greg Palast"s work uncovering vote suppression/ ballot removals (challenges, etc.) in Georgia, N.cC., etc? These factors tip the scales way in advance-- and votes just "disappear, like a miracle...."
THank you Rachel, I am currently listening to “How to stand up to a dictator’ by Maria Ressa. Your work is vital and needed. Your energy is everything. Regarding the energy stealing comments, if your energy is depleted by them, please take care of you. We need you🌼
I very much appreciate your podcasts Rachel. I must admit that was not happy about your latest post about possible election fraud. Or this one. I didn't find them very convincing. I am also sure there are enough forces in the USA that will deal with their frauds so that we on this side of the Atlantic need not to bother so much.
On comments: It is a pity that some people are so rude when commenting, BUT I don't think that you should feel responsible for that. Make a disclaimer that you don't have time or desire to moderate comments, but that you still reserve the right to delete rude comments.
Seems that the bullet points don't add up. But Jackie Singh, who was the key cybersecurity lead on Biden's 2020 campaign, is now calling for a forensic audit and I'm inclined to suggest this is taken seriously. It's an audit. It's forensic. What harm can there be?
Seems like THIS is both possible and urgent and that if it turns out Trump won fair and square, then there's no problem, right? And if they cheated (as various actors from Putin down seem to be claiming) then surely we all need to know...?
We don’t actually NEED rigging for this election to have been stolen. The institutional cheating embodied in voter suppression, foreign interference, and a useless, sold out media are enough to throw an election. And all of those things are in play.
But I feel in my bones this was rigged, in exactly the way described in the duty to warn letter.
If for no other reason than that DT ALWAYS cheats, and always telegraphs how by projection. Notice exactly when all the yapping about “rigging” stopped?
You responded to this question perfectly. I couldn't figure out how to articulate that very simple fact.
Not to open up a can of worms but has anyone noticed how the yapping has stopped regarding the staged assassination attempts? What happened to all the bulletproof shields. Or the last suspect?
The media saw right through such a flimsy, staged assassination. They also saw that T's handlers were willing to kill one of their own supporters to get him elected.
"Let me just report whatever they say and move on to the next story as fast as possible."
I definitely agree.
Voter suppression 'is' the larger issue. I'm in the same camp as you Annabel - it was rigged. However, why is Kamala not challenging - and democrats ? Why ??
* My motto: Trust but verify. That would not make we the opposed, anything like or resembling the 'other side, the dark side.'
I wonder if K was ok with losing? Maybe she is tired. She doesn’t need money. She has been vilified enough for a lifetime. Maybe she just wanted to go home with Doug. DJT has made the whole political environment so toxic, anyone would want to stay away.
Biden was a placeholder. Kamela wasn’t supposed to win. Disappointing for her but had Biden any intention of changing the trajectory of the US he would have had Garland prosecute any myriad of cases handed to him by mueller let alone the J6 committee. Not a single architect was brought to justice. I knew by 2021 it was all stitched up.
I'm certain it's bothering her. From my own past experience, when you put so much of yourself into such an endeavor, and you know the real score and stories as she certainly knows and far more than we are allowed to know, she must be crushed.
Yeah and Joe's late choice to pass the torch condemned her to lose if he had done it four to six months earlier I think she would have won
My feeling is that's an unknown, and useful to those who 'need' to find blame TR. I'm sure you've run into those sorts of folks in your life. No matter what's to blame, the fact that voters were presented two real choices, yet chose tfg is most problematic thing that I'll not soon get over.
Well we could go around for weeks and argue about rigging cheating or what have you but I think there's plenty of signs that imply that yeah something went awry but nobody will ever be able to prove it just like they couldn't prove their lie that the Democrats cheated.
This is the authoritarian Playbook to a T confuse, blame. Flood
Just want to tell you that I feel exactly the same way. More than a few red flags exhibited by DT but yet with Super PACs Russian money, "could be" (reading between the lines it is) pouring into the Republican party in buying off members of Congress the first of which was Moscow Mitch. But he was too old to realize the long reaching implications of his greed
I feel the same; For very logical reasons.
Rachel--
I would like to corroborate much of what Spoonamore says, along with the claims in the letter by Buell and others. As an election watcher, I have known for years that the security and validity of machine vote counts has been actively ignored. Audits that could test the accuracy and reveal hacking are largely not done, and when they are done the rules ae not followed, as if trying to hide something. Laws have been changed to make it easier to hide the results of audits, harder to understand them, and harder to gain access to that data. Until we have a good system of audits, I would not trust the count. There are too many ways to hack elections, and too many bad actors who are willing and able to hack elections, to hold trust in the results. On top of the vulnerabilities, the election outcomes are statitically very weird. I see a whole parade of red flags.
Yes - this is the latest: https://substack.com/@spoonamore/note/p-152290802?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=2mk2q
I found Trump's statement before the election that he already had all the votes he needed to be suspicious. I read somewhere that he was referring to the House in the anticipation that he could get the election thrown to the House over anomalies. I still think the simplest an best way to resolve the doubts is a hand count in all 7 swing states.
Well said and I agree but I do wonder if a handcount would accomplish much of anything if ballots were tossed, legit voters were purged, and/or if voting machines were compromised. But of course I'd rather there be handcounts of the swing state ballots than nothing being done at all.
State recounts are not needed: only for the particular counties showing the highest questionable statistical spreads that were defined. So maybe ten counties total for all of (not each, but the worst counties from the entire group of swing states).
With the margin of error so narrow, they could recount two swing states. I'd say we would just need them to look at one. Just pick one to prove a point.
Kamala legally could have demanded recounts before January 6. Nobody did that. Rules say if u don't contest it..the other guy wins
Everyone in kamala's camp knew the rules n would have demanded recounts if they thought it was a winning deal
I appreciate your dedication to uncovering the truth. We can’t continue to learn the truth without working through the bluffs.
Great work Rachel.
I read your original article and, like a lot of people, I had wondered if it was a “hand of God” moment (The Maradona goal agsinst England) that we were witnessing but not. Sleight of hand is not easy to spot.
I found the rebuttal soon after as I was shocked big media outlets had nothing on it.
Very few journalists, or people in general, would come forward like you have and openly discuss errors made. As to the vitriol, it’s shameful to see people resort to this rather than accept “we all make mistakes”. I’ve seen the pack mentality at work in social media and presume it’s partly because the perpetrators feel safe in their online anonymity.
Please keep doing what you do because the future of the world needs people like you!
Stephen Spoonamore:
“So, if you care - I have been a leader in hacking and counterhacking for 25 years. I'm well paid for it. The 2024 Election was hacked at the tabulation level.
Long thread on it: I continue to work professionally finding hackers, and fairly often DEVELOP AND INSTALL hacks designed to ferret out the misuse of systems. My customers have included numerous governments and F100 firms. I wrote risk assessments of smartgrid technologies for Obama, and IP e-protection for GE.
Here is what you are seeing. The Tabulation Systems at the County level were hacked far in advance of the election. The hack was probably written into the code even before the code was installed. It will have a WHEN function and IF/THEN functions to have the machine force balance to a given outcome within a specific window of time. You could test the machines 1000 times before election night, and the result will be correct. If you run it during the time window, the force balancing will be turned on and regardless of inputs you will get a programmed output.
It is very simple to prove this. Take the two most outlandish precinct results from any county and just hand-count the ballots. They won't match the tabulation outputs. From what I am seeing, you will find 8-11% avg. shifts from Dem to Rep. Be sure to check heavy Red areas, easier to cover up a run up of the score. That was how it was done in Ohio vs. Kerry - GOP flips in already highly red areas. Now, why the Bomb-Threats? They were NOT to allow for hacker access. The programming was already in place, they were to break Chain of Custody and produce legal grounds to not trust a recount. Every place that GOT a bomb-threat is a place the courts will now have to consider the factual argument of whether the ballots COULD have been tampered with while the evacuations were going on. They weren't. But that is the argument the GOP will make to prevent recounts.
I used to appear on Lou Dobbs TV Show, back when he was at CNN and discuss hacking, including of voting machines. I helped get machines into researchers hands - every single one of them were shocked/horrified how simple hacking the machines was. But somehow, the public has refused to engage.
Now that a full blown #fascist takeover is underway, and they did it by hacking the tabulation machines as described, please engage. I will lend any expertise if asked, but be aware these people are sociopaths who will kill you, they have done so to others, so act accordingly.
And it was relatively easy. Perhaps 300-500 tabulators of 3 types with 24+ months of prep. You just saw 3000+ comms devices of 4+ types hacked with software and installed explosives. These were set off in waves and specific times to destroy Hamas. Same thing here.
My personal record. A team of 4, 11 months total operation time, we hacked 500 Point of Sale CreditCard machines to install added tracking software allowing the units to work correctly while also creating traces to catch CC money laundering which the retailer was in on. Same thing as election 2024.
And finally, let me say again, this is a simple, stupid, easy to prove hack. Hand Count most suspected 2 Precincts in each county. They won't match. And FWIW, I am currently working on a much harder hack larger in scale and much better executed. This election hack is just about political will.”
Letter to Governor Shapiro:
Gov. of Pennsylvania J. Shapiro, et. al. Nov. 7th 2024
“This is a formal Duty to Warn Letter. Per DNI Dir. Clapper's 2015 directive to all agencies and contractors associated with intelligence and financial agency technologies. I have a Duty to Warn of suspicions of hacking, and have done so for my customers including Govt. Agencies, Dept. of Defense, F100 firms and numerous banks. I do so here as a directly affected voter.
Nearly all my investigations begin for one of two reasons. The hackers make a mistake triggering a system issue and/or the aggregate effects of the hacking creates results outside nominal expectations. There is a third and less common flag; an unrelated distraction to draw attention away from the hacking.
All three of these indicators are present in the election of Nov. 5th 2024. Element three, distraction via bomb-threats, is confirmed coming from Russian agencies. Element one is the inexplicable mismatch of reported votes vs. voter turnout. Here in Centre County initial tabulation was an absurdly low 67K votes when over 80K voters participated. Element two is also present. Our local scanner systems worked in testing, but were unable to communicate properly with tabulation systems after the bomb-scare. I note from experience - the failure of a scanning systems to properly load a database is an extremely common development when a system is changed without notice to the users. I have personally worked on similar issues where sudden scanner configuration failures were the first symptoms of system hacking.
With these three elements present, I suggest immediately doing a relatively simple set of preliminary checks. First, randomly selected precincts require manual comparisons of the number of voters who took ballots vs the scanned output of vote totals. Those did not match here in Centre County by apx 13K votes. Once added, those votes substantially changed outcomes and led to the outright reversals in multiple Centre County races. Centre County BOE now shows vote totals over 80K votes. Apx. 6% above 2020 turnout. In my professional opinion every county in PA as well as many in WI, MI and GA currently reporting lower vote totals vs. 2020 and/or also experienced a distraction bomb threat should undertake the same process. My professional opinion is: many thousands of voters are being disenfranchised, likely by a malicious actor via errors in tabulation software. My concern has been proven correct and warranted here in Centre County PA.
ESignature = Stephen R. Spoonamore
Stephen Spoonamore (Resident Centre County PA)”
End of letter.
Please let Vice President Harris know about this revelation. It is crucial a hand recount is accomplished in the swing states.
Remember, Trump said he had enough votes BEFORE the election.
Trump also said he had a “secret”.
And Musk completed his purchase of twitter in November 2022 (24 months prior to the election) and in spite of drops in value, he just kept "working" in there doing nothing to save it! And we really had no idea he and trumpy boy had become such good chums!
Yeh he also said people were stealing n eating cats n dogs
.
.he is the most notorious liar ever at this point
And why did no one do this?
Rachel, your reporting is first rate, so thanks for all you do. Unfortunately, the technology used can be easily compromised. This is just a simple truth. And with the generally sad state of human psychology — propaganda, poor public educational systems, and active measures inherent in the capitalist system — I’m sure you have seen Adam Curtis’s work, The Century of the Self, our heads can be hacked just as easily, which is the real issue. Not to mention, the Active Measures — Russia, China, Tech Bros, etc, have been widely acknowledged to have been taking place since at least 2014.
The Russians have a hundred years of active measures background to draw upon re how to hack our minds for their own purposes even through control of the international media. Ask the NYT about that factor. As to cyber matters, they are aces at cybercriminality of all kinds. No problem, tovarishche.
Bless you, dear lady (I lived in the Deep South for 7yrs.!). Great post(s) and most of the comments too. I'm still waiting for somebody, anybody, to explain to me why 6.6M fewer Dem voters voted for Harris than voted for Biden in 2020: 81M vs 74.4M, but Trump only received 2.9M more than his losing effort in 2020: 74M vs 76.9M. Our elections are, and have been since Citizens United (thnx to the corrupt SCOTUS) utterly corrupted by dark money, since the first Trump victory in 2016.
As you know, I'm a retired psychiatrist (psychologically trained in the old days), so I look beneath the hood on the horror that has taken over so much of the anti-social media. I hold the anti-government GQP and certainly Our Mad King (wannabe) Donald responsible for much of the validation of angry attacking comments on the net. Hell, he has and continues to model it! No mystery here.
You are doing a stand-up and highly professional job. Don't let the SOBs get you down. As others have said here: WE NEED YOUR VOICE AND INTELLIGENT INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING. Thanks for all you do! Gregg
Thanks for this clarification and partial rebuttal - that's responsible journalism.
Selfishly I'd rather you didn't turn off comments by free subscribers, but if it's the only way to manage the vitriol those of us who don't pay can hardly complain!
Much as I'm turned off by vitiolic comments (a nasty overspill from social media, I think) as a low-income subscriber, I would be unhappy to be denied commenting. And is the vitriol really only/modtly from free subscribers?
I was surprised when, after composing a response to a vitriolic comment recently, I returned to post it only to find the comment had been scrubbed. Fairly naive about cyber (and Substack) protocol, I didn't realize such things happened, and without notice that they had. I sympathize with dislike of trolling etc, but wonder if it isn't useful for readers to see that kind of ugliness as part of present reality. Unsullied polite conversation is a myth and we all lnow it; but is (unlabeled) cancelling the way to deal with it? I don't know, and not being the one who has to see it in its quantity, I'm not the one to decide how to handle it.
And, fwiw, I'm grateful for the little-guy journalism you offer, and was glad to see (and forward to my own maillist) your piece on hacking. That is one of the services yoj provide that is much needed in our world where big money mega corporations control journalism.
I wholeheartedly agree with your thoughts about the comments under recent posts Rachel. I've been dismayed by the frequent ugly nature of many comments, which seem so out of kilter alongside your enlightening, professional and honest posts.
As someone without an income and therefore unable to subscribe, I would be gutted to not have access to comment. I've been frustrated by this limitation on other accounts. However, even with that in mind, my opinion - based on a concern for your personal wellbeing - would be to close the comments to non-paid subscribers. You'll save yourself and your most committed followers a heap of upset that you really don't need, and which draws energy away from the important work you're doing.
Thank you for what you do. I was wondering if you are aware of Greg Palast"s work uncovering vote suppression/ ballot removals (challenges, etc.) in Georgia, N.cC., etc? These factors tip the scales way in advance-- and votes just "disappear, like a miracle...."
Or MK. He has dug in pretty deep and unconcovered a bit more, especially in OH.
THank you Rachel, I am currently listening to “How to stand up to a dictator’ by Maria Ressa. Your work is vital and needed. Your energy is everything. Regarding the energy stealing comments, if your energy is depleted by them, please take care of you. We need you🌼
Thank you for your hard work. Appreciated.
I very much appreciate your podcasts Rachel. I must admit that was not happy about your latest post about possible election fraud. Or this one. I didn't find them very convincing. I am also sure there are enough forces in the USA that will deal with their frauds so that we on this side of the Atlantic need not to bother so much.
On comments: It is a pity that some people are so rude when commenting, BUT I don't think that you should feel responsible for that. Make a disclaimer that you don't have time or desire to moderate comments, but that you still reserve the right to delete rude comments.
Seems that the bullet points don't add up. But Jackie Singh, who was the key cybersecurity lead on Biden's 2020 campaign, is now calling for a forensic audit and I'm inclined to suggest this is taken seriously. It's an audit. It's forensic. What harm can there be?
Seems like THIS is both possible and urgent and that if it turns out Trump won fair and square, then there's no problem, right? And if they cheated (as various actors from Putin down seem to be claiming) then surely we all need to know...?