Friday Funbag #6 - Fright Night Edition

Billionaire media owners muzzle their editorial boards; poll aggregators reward bad faith data; and another Epstein accusation (with a twist!)

Further proof that the existence of billionaires are a policy failure.

Several years ago, during the dregs of the Trump presidency, it was considered a major victory for the news media when Jeff Bezos purchased The Washington Post and Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong purchased the Los Angeles Times. Both men had the funds to ensure they would not downsize or collapse. In an age where fascism was rising, these outlets were critical components of the patchwork news fabric of America.

Fast-forward to this week, when both billionaires stepped in at the last minute and prevented their editorial boards from running endorsements in the presidential election. Bezos, via his newest CEO for the Post, Will Lewis (a veteran of British right-wing media), said the Post was returning to its “historical practice” of non-endorsement. Keep in mind, it’s been fifty-two years since that practice was last the norm. In Los Angeles, Dr. Soon-Shiong claimed in a very long post on Twitter (X, if you’re so inclined) that the Times board declined to follow his guidelines of simply laying out the facts about both candidates and letting the people decide. The editor of the editorial page and two members of the board resigned in protest, claiming publicly that the doctor lied outright and they were never given a choice, but rather had come into the department as they were writing the endorsement and ordered them to not run it.

It’s been noted for decades that newspaper publishers and owners tend to be far more conservative than their reporters, which is why Republican presidential candidates have typically received more newspaper endorsements over the years. It is certainly within the boundaries of media ethics for owners to decline an endorsement or choose who gets endorsed. What is not very ethical is to both lie to the public about their decisions and to kill the endorsements as they were being prepared. Furthermore, both owners appear to have done so for business reasons—Bezos has very profitable government contracts that Trump could have severed, and the doctor has a friendship/partnership with Trump’s newest best friend, Elon Musk (better known around here as Apartheid Clyde).

This may be good business for them, but the unescapable fact is that Donald Trump is a fascist bent on ending democracy in America. That’s not even hyperbole. He says it. His former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs says it. His former national security adviser says it. His former chief of staff says it. His former vice president says it. Refusing to state that, refusing to endorse democracy over fascism—that is as craven as it gets.

When you throw in Elon Musk’s apparent impunity to consequences for blatantly breaking the law in his “lottery” for swing state voters that sign up to his PAC’s mailing list, for regularly talking with Russian president Vladimir Putin, for providing an embargoed Tesla to the Chechen leader, for shutting down Starlink connections to Ukraine when the government funded its use, for scamming hurricane victims with “free” Starlink service—it is abundantly clear that he believes his money insulates him from consequences. Bezos and Soon-Shiong feel the same. It’s long past time for an excessive wealth tax. No citizen should be above the law, and if your wealth puts you above it, then that wealth needs to be taxed until the impunity is gone.

LATE BREAKING UPDATE AS I WENT TO PUBLISH.

Once again, this is straight-up fascism. Donald Trump must lose.

What’s up with polling? How is it possible for the election to be this close?

This question has been on everyone’s minds for a few weeks now, and the answer is multipronged. I’m going to try and break it down, so bear with me.

1. A flood of push polls commissioned by right-wing pollsters and media outlets.
   
   Last week, there were fifteen new polls of Pennsylvania voters released. Twelve of the fifteen were done by pollsters for right-wing British outlets the Daily Mail and The Telegraph, GOP PAC pollsters, and GOP campaign pollsters. Despite the supposed shift in weighting that aggregators like FiveThirtyEight, Real Clear Politics, and The New York Times say that they perform on partisan polls, when you look at their work, they are failing on two fronts. The first is in not identifying the partisan slant of outfits like Tralfagar Pollsters, which reduces the negative weighting given to their polls and therefore increases the effect on the aggregatation; the second is ignoring the effect of the sheer volume of these polls. If twelve of the fifteen polls have partisan slanting, even with adjustments, the volume pushes the end result in the direction that those ordering the polls want: making Donald Trump’s position look better than it is.
   
   They did this in the 2022 midterms, leading the media to predict a red wave that was a mirage in the end. A key example was Michigan’s gubernatorial race. Governor Gretchen Whitmer, exactly thirty days before the election, held an eleven-point lead on challenger Tudor Dixon. After that point, the polls narrowed down steadily as right-wing polls flooded the zone, and the Election Day aggregation showed Dixon within 3.5 points. Whitmer won by eleven points. This repeated itself in numerous races around the country. It’s happening again now. Don’t believe the hype.
   

2. Oversampling/overadjusting for Donald Trump voters.
   
   The media has apparently never gotten over their mistakes in polling for Trump in 2016, and to a lesser degree in 2020. This has resulted in the 2022 midterms being oversampled towards GOP voters even by neutral pollsters, and this year, it’s even worse. Likely voter models are slanted five points in favor of the GOP, despite a massive gender gap opening up between women and men, and despite women making up the majority of voters. That gap is fueled by the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the subsequent situation where women are unable to get emergency maternity care in half of the states in America. In a desire to not look wrong, the media is doubling down on inaccurate modeling. Groupthink then prevents them from admitting it and adjusting accordingly.
   
   An excellent rundown by Vantage Data House of these issues can be found here.
   

3. The media believes Trump winning will boost their bottom line like it did in the first term.

   
   Internet personality/veteran Hollywood film editor Michael Tae Sweeney has been relentlessly pushing this view for weeks now, and I firmly believe he’s right. The big news orgs like CNN, The New York Times, et cetera, saw marked increases in profitability during Trump’s first term. The publishers/top editorial staff do not believe that he will follow through on his much more violent, unhinged threats in a second term, and thereby (to use Parker Molloy’s brilliant phrase) sanewashes Trump’s behavior. This was never more evident than how CBS News before the vice-presidential debate put this graphic up.

   

   Treating the mass deportation of over twelve million people, a forced movement of people not seen since the Nazis in World War II, as an equally normal policy proposal with down payment assistance and tax incentives is stunningly amoral. It is literally a racist fever dream, and Trump waxes about it during his rallies with violent rhetoric about it being bloody, and about cleaning up our cities. His campaign posts blatantly racist memes about a Harris victory turning your neighborhood into a black and brown gang warzone. These are not equivalent positions. What the media is doing is gross malpractice, and the fact that they keep doing it means that it’s deliberate.
   
   It’s not a big leap, therefore, to believe that they are sanitizing the polls by weighting them to boost Trump. Remember how we discussed weighting above? They don’t tell us what the weighting is, just that they do it. Keep that in mind.

Jeffrey Epstein allegedly let Donald Trump molest his Sports Illustrated swimsuit model girlfriend in the 1990s. How serious is this?

The story broke yesterday that Stacey Williams, who was Epstein’s girlfriend before he met Ghislaine Maxwell, went with Epstein to visit Trump Tower in the early 1990s where Trump molested her openly. Here’s the key passage:

Ms. Williams said Mr. Epstein appeared to consider Mr. Trump a close friend. “Jeffrey talked about Trump all the time,” she said.

Ms. Williams and Mr. Epstein would often go for walks. On one occasion in 1993, they were strolling down Fifth Avenue, and he suggested that they stop at Trump Tower to visit Mr. Trump. She said that they rode the elevator to the floor of Mr. Trump’s office and that he greeted them in a waiting area.

As Mr. Trump and Mr. Epstein conversed, Mr. Trump pulled Ms. Williams toward him and touched her breasts, waist and buttocks, she said. “It was like an octopus,” she said. “I was utterly confused and frozen.”

After they left Trump Tower, Mr. Epstein “just berated me for allowing that to happen,” Ms. Williams said. She added that she often wondered whether she had been part of a bet or a challenge between the two men. “I definitely felt like I was a piece of meat delivered to that office as some sort of game.”

Ms. Williams said that she was not sure exactly when the incident occurred but that she remembered that the sun was shining and that she wasn’t wearing a coat.

Ms. Williams tried to push the memory out of her mind. Eventually, she said, she stopped seeing Mr. Epstein and avoided events where she might encounter Mr. Trump. But she said Mr. Trump continued to pursue her.

Not long after the incident, she said, her agent gave her a postcard with a photo of Mar-a-Largo, Mr. Trump’s club in Palm Beach, Fla. There was a handwritten message on the back: “Your home away from home. Love, Donald.”

Allison Gutwillinger, a friend of Ms. Williams for nearly two decades, said Ms. Williams told her about the groping incident around the time that Mr. Trump announced his first run for president in 2015. Ms. Gutwillinger had noticed the postcard sitting on Ms. Williams’s kitchen counter.

“Why do you have a love note from Donald Trump?” Ms. Gutwillinger said she asked Ms. Williams. Ms. Williams then told her the story, Ms. Gutwillinger said.

In this insane year, this probably doesn’t register much of a blip. It should. It should reinforce that Donald Trump is a predator who has no business being president, being around women alone, and being a free man. He is an amoral monster with enough sins to damn his soul ten times over. Every woman who has come forward about him is a warning to the rest of us: he will rape this country and its freedoms the same way he has done to women throughout his adult life.