[Official] Re-Elect Joe Biden in 2024 thread

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-bi...platform-meta-facebook-twitter-files-99101669

The Biden Administration’s Assault on Free Speech
Emails paint a picture of a White House running roughshod over First Amendment protections.
By Philip Hamburger and Jenin Younes
July 28, 2023 at 5:52 pm ET

Among the revelations in the so-called Twitter files was that government officials pressured social-media companies to censor posts unfavorable to the Biden administration. The White House has denied this, insisting that companies like Meta and Twitter adopted content-moderation policies on their own. But internal documents newly released by the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on Weaponization of the Federal Government prove thatgovernment pressure led Meta to go beyond what it otherwise would have in censoring user speech.

Court-ordered discovery in Missouri v. Biden has already revealed that the White House strong-armed platforms into more censorship than they considered justified—prompting the judge to declare that the administration had made “arguably the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.” The new documents go further, showing that the administration drove much of Meta’s censorship.

In April 2021, Facebook (now Meta) executive Nick Clegg wrote to the company’s leaders, Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg: “We are facing continued pressure from external stakeholders, including the White House and the press, to remove more COVID-19 vaccine discouraging content” (emphasis in original). Mr. Clegg recounted a conversation he had with Andy Slavitt, then White House senior adviser for the Covid response. Mr. Clegg wrote that Mr. Slavitt was “outraged” that Facebook hadn’t taken down a meme, which joked that 10 years from now trial-lawyer commercials would be soliciting the vaccinated to seek damages. When Mr. Clegg protested that the administration was making “a significant incursion into traditional boundaries of free expression,” Mr. Slavitt (according to Mr. Clegg) dismissed such First Amendment concerns on the ground that the objectionable meme “inhibits confidence in Covid vaccines.” This prompted Mr. Clegg to comment to his colleagues that “given what is at stake here,” the company should “regroup to take stock of where we are in our relations with the WH, and our internal methods too.”

Meta acquiesced to the administration’s pressure. An internal Aug. 2, 2021, email from a Facebook employee on the Trust and Safety Team noted: “Leadership asked Misinfo Policy and a couple of teams on Product Policy to brainstorm some additional policy levers we can pull to be more aggressive against Covid and vaccine misinformation. This is stemming from the continued criticism of our approach from the US administration and a desire to kick the tires further internally on creative options.”

An internal Meta email from a few weeks later confirms that the company increased its censorship under administration pressure. After discussing “our response to the Surgeon General on COVID-19 misinformation,” another employee on the Trust and Safety team wrote, “we agreed to further explore four discreet policy options for reducing the prevalence of COVID-19 misinformation on our platforms.” Those policies targeted 12 individuals known as the “Disinformation Dozen” and were implemented on the platform shortly after the Aug. 2 email, resulting in removal of these accounts and many others.

At the government’s behest, Facebook also adopted a policy of removing posts discussing the lab-leak theory. In July 2021, Mr. Clegg emailed his colleagues to find out “why we were removing—rather than demoting/labeling—claims that Covid is man made.” The company’s vice president in charge of content policy responded that “we were under pressure from the administration and others to do more” and continued with regret: “we shouldn’t have done that.”

The First Amendment prohibits the government from “abridging the freedom of speech.” Supreme Court doctrine makes clear that government can’t constitutionally evade the amendment by working through private companies. The newly released documents paint a clear picture of an administration running roughshod over these protections.

The Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is poised to reconsider the injunctionagainst the government in Missouri v. Biden early next month. The government’s case relies to a significant degree on the claim that it isn’t clear the government caused the platforms’ censorship. And the Sixth Circuit will soon be re-evaluating the denial of discovery in a similar case, Changizi v. HHS.

The latest revelations underscore the need for the injunction in Missouri and for discovery, not dismissal, in Changizi. If the appellate courts fail to recognize the spurious nature of the government’s position, the First Amendment might as well be a dead letter.

More generally, the nation needs to come to terms with the reality and scale of the assault on free speech. Our government has established a vast system of censorship. By keeping it largely secret, it has been able to exert unconstitutional control over medical, scientific and political speech, suppressing debate over questions of great public importance. This is a shocking constitutional violation. All of us, not only the courts, need to recognize what is at stake.

Mr. Hamburger teaches at Columbia and is CEO of the New Civil Liberties Alliance, which represents plaintiffs in Missouri v. Biden and Changizi v. HHS. Ms. Younes led the litigation in those cases for NCLA and more recently served as senior special counsel on the Weaponization Subcommittee.
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Can the Race Really Be That Close? Yes, Biden and Trump Are Tied.
A Times/Siena poll suggests a slight Biden edge among voters who don’t like either candidate.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/01/upshot/biden-trump-poll-2024.html

 

Obama warns of Trump’s political strengths in private talk with Biden
Former president Barack Obama promises in a White House lunch to do all he can for President Biden’s reelection

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/08/02/obama-biden-campaign-reelection/

excerpt:

Former president Barack Obama, at a private lunch with President Biden earlier this summer, voiced concern about Donald Trump’s political strengths — including an intensely loyal following, a Trump-friendly conservative media ecosystem and a polarized country — underlining his worry that Trump could be a more formidable candidate than many Democrats realize.
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more at the link

 

Democrats worry their most loyal voters won’t turn out for Biden in 2024

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/07/31/democrats-black-voters-2024-election-biden/

excerpt:

Democrats are worried about a potential drop next year in turnout among Black voters, the party’s most loyal constituency, who played a consequential role in delivering the White House to President Biden in 2020 and will be crucial in his bid for reelection.

Their concern stems from a 10 percentage-point decline in Black voter turnout in last year’s midterms compared with 2018, a bigger drop than among any other racial or ethnic group, according to a Washington Post analysis of the Census Bureau’s turnout survey. Such warning signals were initially papered over by other Democratic successes in 2022: The party picked up a U.S. Senate seat in Pennsylvania, Sen. Raphael G. Warnock won reelection in Georgia and anticipated losses in the House were minimal.

But in key states like Georgia, the center of Democrats’ plans to mobilize Black voters in large margins for Biden in 2024, turnout in last year’s midterms was much lower among younger and male Black voters, according to internal party analysis.

The drop in Black turnout has become a focus for Democratic leaders as the party reorients to next year’s presidential contest. Biden’s election in 2020 hinged on narrow victories in states like Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania that former president Donald Trump had won in 2016. Democratic activists are cautioning that the party can’t afford to let support from Black voters slip.
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more at the link

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https://www.wsj.com/articles/voters-never-expected-much-of-biden-26782dc3?mod=hp_opin_pos_5#cxrecs_s

Voters Never Expected Much of Biden
Should anyone be surprised that he’s unpopular?
By James Freeman
Updated Dec. 21, 2023 at 5:13 pm ET

Conservatives note the President’s inflation-inducing spending binge and chaotic border policies and wonder why his lousy poll numbers aren’t even worse. Liberals note a growing economy with low unemployment and figure that eventually the public’s low opinion of him will have to improve. But maybe the pace of inflation and economic growth in 2024 won’t be the deciding factors in his re-election attempt.

Jack Shafer writes in Politico:

Could it be that it’s not policy or circumstances that voters are rejecting, but that it’s Biden? The tough truth for Biden, one that the press seems to have avoided, is that he has always been unpopular... His 1988 campaign for president ended abruptly, as he dropped out of the race after three months amid a plagiarism scandal. Then in the 2008 presidential campaign, he found such low favor among voters that he placed fifth in the Iowa caucuses and then exited.
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That was the year Joe Biden finished just ahead of “uncommitted” in the Hawkeye State. It must have been especially disappointing. Just two weeks before the caucuses, Beth Fouhy reported from Des Moines for the Associated Press on Dec. 21, 2007:

Joe Biden’s aides call it “Mo-Joe” -- a last-minute surge of momentum and good luck they hope could power the Delaware senator into a better-than-expected showing in Iowa’s leadoff caucuses.

“There’s a fingertip instinct that tells me something is going on. I feel like I’m still in the game,” Biden said in a telephone interview as he traveled to a campaign event in Cedar Rapids.
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Iowa voters opted for no Joe.

When Mr. Biden ran again in 2020, Iowans remained unimpressed and he finished fourth on caucus night. Of course things got much better after that for the candidate but it wasn’t easy persuading voters. Mr. Shafer writes:

In the 2020 contest, running in a crowded primary field, Biden rarely broke the 30 percent mark. Biden won the nomination not because he was popular but because he was running as a centrist in a field clogged with progressives. He also had the good political fortune to emerge as the last moderate candidate standing against socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders. Establishment Democrats didn’t love Joe as much as they disliked Sanders and wanted a candidate around whom they could coalesce.

Meanwhile, Biden’s victory over Trump in the general election wasn’t a mandate on his popularity. It was a flight to safety for a nation fed up with a meshuga president. Biden was merely the vegetable voters convinced themselves they had to eat in order to rid themselves of Trump.
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Mr. Shafer is perhaps not the first person to accuse Mr. Biden of being a vegetable. But if voters thought they were getting healthy if bland centrist governance, how wrong they were. After defeating Mr. Sanders Mr. Biden has labored to enact much of the socialist’s spending agenda.

What has also been much more socialist than centrist is Mr. Biden’s prosecution of his political rival. Current polls suggest voters are now considering which vegetables they have to consume to rid themselves of Mr. Biden. Perhaps Democrats will want to consider another option before caucus season begins once again.

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