Thousands of Black people receive sinister texts threatening slavery – National & International News – FRI 8Nov2024
Thousands of Black people receive texts threatening slavery.
Pelosi blames Biden’s late dropout for Harris’s loss.
Thousands of Black people receive texts threatening slavery
The FBI, Federal Communications Commission, and attorneys general in several states are investigating after thousands of Black people received texts telling them they have been “selected” to become “a slave” or to pick cotton on a plantation. There were several versions of the texts, but many told recipients to “be ready” at certain dates and times, and said they would be picked up in a brown or white van. Some of the texts referred to the recipient by name, and in at least some instances, the text mentioned that their minor children (also named) would be taken as well.
Reporting does not indicate even a ballpark figure for how many people received the texts nationwide. However, thousands of Black college students received texts in Alabama alone. So far, these texts have been reported by recipients in at least 17 States. The recipients ranged from adults to children as young as middle school age. College students seem to have been a particular target. So far, all reported recipients were Black.
Whodunnit
It’s not clear who is behind the texts, but it appears to be more than one person. Some of the numbers were linked to TextNow, a company that allows customers to create phone numbers for free. TextNow says it shut down the accounts and is working with authorities.
CBS News managed to track down at least one person who sent a version of the text. The person’s area code was linked to Fort Wayne, Indiana. The person said that the message was “a prank” before hanging up.
Cori Faklaris, an expert in software and information services, believes that the miscreants targeted their victims by taking advantage of bulk-messaging industry databases used by mass marketers. Faklaris says it is surprisingly easy to make a guess about the race or ethnicity of individuals attached to phone numbers. A person can buy massive collections of personal information through the internet, and then use machine-learning algorithms to combine this data with other available data.
Election connection
The first of these texts went out on Wednesday, hours after Donald Trump was declared the winner of the presidential election. Some of these texts apparently even mentioned Trump by name. The Trump campaign has repudiated the texts and said they will take legal action “if we can find the origin of these messages which promote this kind of ugliness in our name”.
It is by no means certain that the responsible parties are even ideologically aligned with Trump. However, the timing and content of the messages make it clear that their purpose was to foster a climate of fear and intimidation following Trump’s election. In this, they succeeded. Recipients of the texts reported feeling fear and vulnerability. Many in marginalized communities are already wary, given the toxic and often hateful rhetoric that is frequently embraced by Trump and his surrogates.
Pelosi blames Biden’s late dropout for Harris’s loss
Days after Kamala Harris’s resounding defeat at the polls, many Democratic politicians are publicly engaging in postmortems. Speaking with the New York Times podcast “The Interview”, which will be released tomorrow, former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi blamed Harris’s loss Biden’s delay in dropping out after his disastrous debate with Donald Trump in June.
“Had [Biden] gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race” Pelosi said. “The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary”.
She went on to say, “Kamala may have, I think she would have done well in [the primary] and been stronger going forward. But we don’t know that. That didn’t happen. We live with what happened.”
Pelosi also made clear that she had wanted an open primary rather than having Harris be anointed Biden’s successor. After dragging his feet for almost a month, Biden finally did drop out. Minutes after announcing he was ending his candidacy, he endorsed Kamala Harris. Many noted at the time that despite Biden’s endorsement, it was several days before Pelosi, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, and former President Obama publicly got behind her.
“Because the president endorsed Kamala Harris immediately,” Pelosi said, “that really made it almost impossible to have a primary at that time. If it had been much earlier, it would have been different.”
Bad blue blood
It is widely acknowledged that former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was instrumental in convincing President Biden to drop out of the 2024 election. What is not widely known is that ever since, a massive rift has remained between Biden and Pelosi. The Biden team also apparently resents former President Obama, who also had a hand in forcing him out.
Following Harris’s loss, there is a lot of finger pointing between Biden and Harris’s respective teams. Some commentators have also pointed to embarrassing gaffes by Biden that may have further undermined Harris’s messaging.
What is not being widely acknowledged is that Harris’s prospects were also certainly hurt by Biden’s insistence on arming and funding Israel’s year-long military assault on Gaza. Biden’s policy on Gaza was deeply unpopular among Democratic and independent voters. Harris herself also bears responsibility for failing to distance herself from Biden’s Middle East policy. This very likely cost her Michigan, which is home to a sizable Arab and Muslim population, and probably also hurt her turnout among young voters nationwide.
Biden should never have run for re-election. Unfortunately, he did not have the cognitive ability to know he was unfit to serve four more years. And his wife, children and close advisers failed him and failed the nation by not intervening and telling him flat out not to run. So he ran and that resulted in the nominee being Kamala Harris, when a better candidate would have been nominated, had the primaries been truly open. Pelosi is right in her assessment.
I partly agree with her assessment (this is Liz btw). Biden should’ve stuck to his 2020 promise to be a one-term president. The Dems also shouldn’t have blunted – and even outright canceled – the *actual* primary in several states before the debate, especially when they were arguing that Trump was the threat to democracy.
However, I’m not sure another candidate would’ve made a difference. None of those in the running to replace Biden post-debate (Shapiro, Buttigieg, Newsome, Whitmer) would have run a campaign to Biden’s left. Certainly not on issues that polls showed really mattered to voters.
My perspective is that, just like 2016, the Dems gave voters a choice between Republican and Republican-lite, with extra warmongering. Not surprisingly, a lot of people chose the real thing (minus the extra warmongering) or stayed home. And like 2016, most of the Dems conducting postmortems, including Nancy, have concluded that they have to move further to the right. At this rate, I wouldn’t be surprised if they ran Liz Cheney in 2028. Anyway, consider this my “opinion editorial” on the matter, I don’t think I’ll be writing another one 😉
I’m not one who seeks to always have the last word, but I don’t agree with the “war mongering” and the “Republican light” references. Had Trump been president instead of Biden, would U.S.support of Israel’s invasion of Gaza have been any less? No. And to cast Harris and any other Democrat who could have been the Dem Nominee, had Biden not run, as being Republican light is not an accurate characterization. There are vast differences between the stances of Trump and any of those possible Dem candidates on many issues. I reject the assertion that the two parties are so similar that people should reject both and vote for third party candidates who have no chance of getting elected and who have thrown elections to the less popular candidate—Ross Perot in 1992 and Ralph Nader in 2000.
Always happy to engage in a thoughtful discussion of these topics 🙂 I don’t typically like to engage in hypotheticals but if we go by recent history (Obama, Clinton, and Biden), Democratic presidents don’t seem to garner nearly as much opposition from liberals when they either start or expand wars as Republicans do. I remember the massive protests of the Iraq war under George W. Bush, for example. Were there such protests when Obama re-entered Iraq or surged 50,000 troops to Afghanistan? Or when he engaged in the Syrian or Libyan wars? Not really.
When Biden finally ended the war in Afghanistan, he was raked over the coals in the press for months, even by friendly outlets like MSNBC. Yes the withdrawal was shambolic – ending wars is often just as messy a business as starting them. It was then that Biden’s approval ratings plummeted and never recovered. I do think that those criticisms helped to shape Biden’s involvement in Ukraine and the Middle East. Whether Trump would have done the same if he were still in office we will never know.
Harris did not help her case by doubling down on this warlike posture by repeatedly promising “the most lethal army in the world” and courting the likes of Liz Cheney and her father Dick, who had an 11% approval rating when he left office in 2009. In truth, yes the Republicans rarely meet wars that they don’t like. However, they have recognized that the public mood has soured on war, and they have adjusted their messaging (if not their policy) accordingly.
On domestic policy, yes there are some differences. However, starting with Bill Clinton, the shrinking of the welfare state and so forth, the Democrats have progressively moved away from kitchen table issues that affect millions of Americans. Since then, through both Republican and Democratic admins, wages have remained depressed, corporate consolidation has driven up prices, and corporate malfeasance has gone unpunished. Obama bailed out the banks when he came into office, leaving millions of homeowners in the lurch. Many have never forgotten that and have never fully recovered. Biden tried in many ways to do an about-face on that, for which I gave him credit. For instance, supporting unions, pursuing antitrust actions, investing in infrastructure (and jobs!). Those are all things that take time (maybe decades) to bear fruit. My biggest worry with Trump is that some of that could be reversed, though he’ll no doubt be eager to take credit for any gains resulting from them. Unfortunately, Harris did not campaign on those programs and priorities, when she could have been a much more effective messenger for them than Biden. I believe that cost her significantly.
Whether people vote for third parties is up to them. In this election, we can see that it made no difference one way or another. Trump would have won with or without them. I don’t think that prominent Democrats are helping their cause by blaming social and economic progressives for their loss, especially since they made little effort make a progressive case for themselves. By this left-shaming, and their torpedoing of Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020, the Democratic establishment has cultivated the perception that they’d rather lose to Republicans than win with progressive policies. That is a real shame, because of course, as you rightly say, there is currently no other viable vehicle for them. If Democrats want to remain viable, they need to re-orient their policies and messaging drastically. Unfortunately, I don’t see that they have any real appetite for that. I can only hope they prove me wrong.