Summary
A vulnerability in the new OPM email server allowed anyone to send mass messages to federal employees, exposing poor cybersecurity.
Over 13,000 NOAA staff received spam and vulgar messages, including crude jokes about Trump and bizarre newsletters, causing widespread outrage.
The breach resulted from an overhaul led by Elon Musk that installed underqualified personnel and an insecure in-house system, sparking a class-action lawsuit for cybersecurity failures.
The unsecured system also inadvertently revealed ties to Project 2025 and a plan to gather government employee data as Trump’s loyalists reshape federal operations.
As much as I wish otherwise, Trump got a plurality of the vote, and pre-election day polling was clear that such a result was very possible.
The plurality of the people who bothered to vote put Trump in, who was quite clear about his alliance with Musk.
This is on us.
“us” being “a bunch of apathetic idiots and idiots deeply opposed to the rest of the country”
I mean it is worth noting the added legal schenanegins that are known.
https://hartmannreport.com/p/trump-lost-vote-suppression-won-c6f
Even if some form of manipulation or shenanigans pushed Trump over the edge, it couldn’t have done that if it hadn’t been close to begin with. It shouldn’t have been close.
That I cannot disagree with… Will 100% agree that flaws were made with… (in no particular order)
Voters not actually researching until it was too late. The amount of trump voters posting “what do you mean tarrifs will raise prices on stuff”. and amount that were searching “what is a tarrif”, stories of actual trump supporters that literally are getting deported etc… There’s absolutely a lot of trump voters, that wouldn’t have voted it if they took the time to understand what trump was literally openly saying he’d do… and did.
Non voters… IE via apathy or disagreements on the democratic party. Be it over just lazyness, or to try and get the democratic party to represent them better… the end result is now it’s going to take years of work whenever power is taken just to bring the country back to where it was a month ago… let alone improve it in the ways they wanted.
The democratic party. Honestly there’s 2 pretty blaring mistakes IMO in this campaign… starting with bypassing the primary, covering up Biden’s senility and letting him re-run. Rushing the flip to harris with now no primary or system in place of letting anyone chose our candidate… Then some major misteps on the harris campaign, which I felt was doing amazing early on… making solid steps solid grabs, minor misstep in refusing to criticize or draw a strong contrast between herself and biden., climbing in the polls… Before suddenly making a hard right turn on messaging. Courting the unobtainable red voters instead of focusing on motivating her own base to get out and vote.
I agree, trump is awful enough, that this should have been a slam dunk. the fact that this was ever anywhere close is an embarasment to the country as a whole constantly.
That being said… it still sucks that there’s a very good chance that even through those flaws, there’s still reason to question if we had won by a few percent… because honestly the potential of a small scale sabatoge (IE one to drop a few percent of votes rather than just outright change the machines and do it in bulk), would just be a 4th factor to add to that list.
The Democratic party is guilty of nothing less than total political malpractice from the moment they allowed Biden to run again.
We can put a significant amount of blame in the laps of Democrats (as in, DNC officials) and their sycophants and defenders in both media and online.
Lemmy itself worked to become an echo chamber reflecting an uncritical assessment of both Democrat performance from 2021-2024, and as well the legitimate electoral performance of both the Biden, and separately, the Harris campaign.
Reality: the denialism around how bad and unpopular both Biden and Harris were in their role as Executives in Cheif, did substantial damage to Harris and probably cost them the election.
That denialism was RAMPANT across lemmy, and still persists today.
You can not make a convincing argument that your team should be the ones elected when you are asking people to deny the evidence of their lives experience, and that’s exactly what both the Biden and Harris campaign did. Lemmy moderators also worked to suppress any media or users critical of Harris and Biden.
Harris needed to feel the pressure from the electorate that Americans sensed that the country wasn’t doing well and was going in the wrong direction. She needed to understand and respond to the fact that Americans, in general, wanted a change from how Democrats had been managing.
Building an echo chamber, in both mainstream media and social media, to shut that view point out, and ultimately leave it unaddressed, is why the Harris campaign failed.
That echo chamber shielded the campaign from critical information they needed to be aware of to make the right kinds of changes which might have led to success.
And every moderator here, who suppressed criticism, or who uses bans to create an echo chamber in forums like c/World, c/Politics, and c/PoliticalMemes is in part to blame.
Even now I routinely get hammered with downvotes when I say “Harris wasn’t a good candidate.”
I mean, elections are how you judge whether a candidate is a good candidate. We have an objective measure of how good a candidate she was. It wasn’t very.
I’m not sure what better candidate the Democrats could have fielded by the time Biden withdrew, but that just shows that Biden waited way too late to drop out.
The Democrats are masters at pulling defeat from the jaws of victory.
I think the key here is that Harris could have been a better candidate, and at certain points, especially before the convention, she was a better candidate.
She specifically and intentionally pivoted away from the politics that work for the Democratic party, Democratic Socialism, and towards neoliberalism and neoconservatism, a politics that doesn’t work for the Democratic party. It was cheerleaded by many here on Lemmy, and when told that this wouldn’t work, that it was harmful to her electoral chances, that they were pivoting to a non-existent center, we were called bots, schills, fascists, communists, armchair activists (although many of us making these criticisms, like myself have litterally put in thousands of hours into political campaigns). The briggading, the trolling, the abuse, the gaslighting: moderators and some very prevalent posters here on Lemmy were directly responsible, if not complicit. It was structural, and moderation abuse allowed it to happen and allows it to persist. And while it’s not unique to Lemmy (the same process was happening on Reddit), this is our house and we are collectively responsible for the outcomes that happen here.
Yep, she dropped out before Iowa because she was polling this badly when she ran for President in her own right. So yeah:
The people running her campaign committed malpractice, and because of the 2 party system, it’s but like voters can vote for another party without throwing away their vote (which they still should’ve done outside of the swing states, but the left again didn’t have their shit together and the whole thing was a shitshow with Cornell West wasting everyone’s time running for a Greens nomination he wasn’t going to get).