Deafening Silence from the Cybersecurity Industry
forbes.com
forbes.com
https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/04/fact-sheet-pr...
>Krebs ... falsely and baselessly denied that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen
This quote coming from "whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets" is pretty wild. This seems to be retribution, plain and simple.
It's hardly surprising as it's almost the defining feature of Trump - pettiness and revenge minded.
(though strangely, he hasn't publicly insulted his Pennsylvania would-be-assassin, but luckily his ear has healed remarkably well and so maybe he feels no need to do so)
...
There was indeed a campaign to fight "misinformation", with active cooperation between the previous administration and social media companies. There was an official effort to establish a disinformation fighting team within the government. Some of the stories like Hunter biden's laptop and COVID origin stuff blew up as what looks like potential partisan censorship cases. And frankly while I'd attribute the latter, and most of these efforts, to stupidity, the former looks like malice even to me. So now one sides idiotic authoritarian self own can be used by the other side to justify even more idiotic even more authoritarian "corrective" action.
At best they care about the financial parts of the news.
The "problem" with principles is that living by them sometimes means going against something we want right now. People don't want to concede anything, even for their own ideals.
People cannot concede anything anymore. We are all trapped in survival mode at this point.
Try to imagine living on $60k, then think about the fact that that’s a good salary to a majority of US workers.
The safety net in America is tattered and torn, with the current administration working to remove it.
A tech worker who graduated and entered the market in 2012 could easily retire in their 40s with millions. One who graduated in 2022 is going to struggle to stay afloat and employed, and you are surprised people care about that?
"Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me"
There is still time to react, in a year from now it will be like something like McCarthy, only worse.
Congress-critters are concerned about losing reelection. (And of being primaried even in safe districts)
Yet the minification of attention spans has confused the average American voter that they're impotent, when really they're just lazy, ignorant, and unwilling to muster real-world action.
When's the last time you saw someone pepper a House district with self-made signs?
There are things every single person can do, but just doesn't. And because of this, media has been able to turn political engagement into profitable passive consumption.
Never, because it would be totally ineffective. Incumbents in Congress have about a 95% win rate[1]. For almost everywhere in the country, districts are what they are and no amount of hand drawn signs are going to change it.
1: https://ballotpedia.org/Election_results,_2024:_Incumbent_wi...
Primaries are the place to beat candidates in most districts.
[0] https://ballotpedia.org/Primary_election_competitiveness_in_...
So the Constitution does not forbid it. All executive orders, it could be argued, are authoritarian, not just the ones that you happen to dislike. The moral? Be damned careful to whom you give this authority.
Requiring Congress to get involved every time a regulatory agency needs to adapt to new circumstances or new technology would leave us at the mercy of unscrupulous corporations who can and will "move fast and break things."
No; Congress relinquished their power when Congressional Republicans chose to become "the party of No" and just prevent anything from happening under Obama. That's when executive orders started to become much more common.
Executive orders are the latest extension of the trend of do-nothing congresses. They have been growing exponentially over time.
Yes, this (to an extent), but more importantly, they're also experts. The people hired at these agencies aren't politicians, they're professionals.
Seems to me most congress people can barely tell their ass from a hole in the ground these days. Do we really need them chiming in on what medicine is okay and what isn't?
Delegating power to regulatory agencies also has nearly nothing to do with Congress's recent gridlock and ineffectiveness, or the spate of executive orders that has prompted.
Between about 1985 (Chevron) and 2010 (the populist movements in both parties), this idea was at its nadir of popularity. For the entire rest of US history from 1776-1980 and 2010-2025, a distrust of a large executive branch was very popular, and pretty much bipartisan most of the time. Just because you do not remember a time when this idea was popular, it does not mean that it was a fringe one only until very recently.
Congress is designed to be gridlocked. That's its natural state. We are now learning why it's a good idea to have a relatively ineffective government.
Congress is broken - intentionally.
This is not news, it is well known, and public facts (60 years) https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/03/10/the-polar...
The core plank of the Repub strategy has been to eschew bi-partisanship. It is the home of the Tea party movement, because it kept feeding its base red meat, and then never actually delivering. Trump is lauded by his base, because he treats the political theater as reality.
Please remember, during Trump 1, liberals and centrists reached out constantly to the Republican rank and file, and never made progress. You cannot overcome a media and political machine built to prevent such progress and dialogue.
The reverse applies to Democrats, who are sufficiently unafraid of their leadership that they occasionally engage openly in collaboration with the enemy.
The only time Congress gets anything done is with a blue majority.
They don't even pass a budget anymore.. which they're explicitly required to do. They learned there are political consequences to their action so they handed their job to agencies in the Executive Branch to write their own rules which acted like laws.
When SCOTUS struck down Chevron Doctrine last year, it boiled down to "No, Congress writes the laws."
The fix is Congress doing their job.
https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/obama-administration-cla...
It could be writen on single-ply toilet paper, and the paper hold more value.
Of course a lot of this is up in the air and could be resolved before the end of this term, as there are numerous legal challenges on-going, but perhaps not and with people openly taking about a 3rd term by various tricks (not blatantly declaring that it is happening, but I'd not put it past them!) such as him running as vice to someone else's election campaign then the president elect stepping down, this sort of ignorance of current law could continue for two terms or more.
I've also been imploring my friends to go vote, make sure their ID is in order because the current regime is going to do everything in their power to make sure than anyone under 65 has a tough time voting
I thought the same.
If the threat of financial loss stops people from criticizing actions, imagine what it would be like if you would be investigated and jailed on sham charges like in some other countries.
Some other countries? The US is renditioning people without due (any!) process ostensibly based on their tattoos. I'm not saying this to be pithy but to sound (or at least amplify) the alarm.
I suppose it makes sense: for most of the Americans who voted, this is what they voted for.
Because I am generous, I always assume it's the first. And, I can't fault them. They are under constant bombardment of propaganda and lies around what DOGE is doing. I mean, DOGE can't be honest to save their lives. So, of course constituents are misled.
[1] https://cybershow.uk/blog/
[2]https://www.dataandpolitics.net/trump-is-a-critical-vulnerab...
When those who own and control the means of discourse are donors to, and so in collusion with the problem, don't expect to hear opposition.
Is CVE-47 taken?
> Yet in recent years, elitist leaders in Government have unlawfully censored speech and weaponized their undeserved influence to silence perceived political opponents and advance their preferred, and often erroneous, narrative about significant matters of public debate
Isn't the executive a branch of government? Physician, heal thyself.
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/4/15/agencies-demand...
Another shining example in the first few months of this administration of how we should not defer leadership to private industry, because they will always be motivated by preserving their bottom line.
Anyone surprised that the greedy executives at the top don't care if anything were to happen to Chris Krebs, Brian Krebs, Bruce Schneier, etc. under this admin is naive to this new dynamic. Nonetheless, it's disgusting to see.
The fact that people with such a cynical and amoral worldview wield so much power not only in US but globally and are willing to wield that power in capricious and petty ways is deeply upsetting.
But what is more horrifying for me is that apparently this administration remains representative of a large section of the US population - with seemingly unshakeable approval by between 40% and 50% of the US adult population according to polls.
I love the US, have friends and family there, have a first cousin in the marines, grandfather born there, etc., and have visited many many times and just find it difficult to reconcile my positive experiences with the place and people with the idea that more than 4 out of 10 US adults could approve of the cruel and vindictive actions of this administration. I'm not being over dramatic by stating that it has genuinely shaken my world-view and belief in the innate goodness of humanity.
Fwiw media manipulation of American opinion isn’t new, its been a huge part of how America works since at least the Spanish American war of 1896.
Telling your audience obviously false / anti-factual lies, without any regard for fact checking, is not just "biased reporting". And it is inherently wrong, malevolent, evil.
Anyway, I'm amazed each time I hear right wingers who did not get the joke seemingly complaining about how Reality has a left leaning political bias...
The big issue with the current news ecosystem and social media is their complete disregard for this methodology. By discarding the journalistic methodology, they make themselves propagandists, not journalists.
Monopoly and capture is what happened to the right. Theres a reason republicans march and Dems debate.
The republican strategists build this advantage over decades, it’s not the work of a single term. It’s a captured market of ideas, tariffs if you will. No competition from actual debates.
That’s why you can sell contradictory ideas within hours of each other, and never be called out for it. It’s why you can sell debates on Tan suits or prop up bogeymen, and never deal with debate.
This is news media. Eventually Fox wasn’t the sole juggernaut, and the techniques got adopted for online debates.
It’s been so wildly successful in building a reliable political voting bloc, that every political party in the world took notes.
So this 'approval' is sort of phantom approval. It's approval of a fantasy man who doesn't track too closely with the reality of what's actually happening.
The point where people pay heavily for their erroneous beliefs, for instance by losing their retirements and savings, is a point where people re-evaluate.
Now, someone has to act to deal with reality. This is pretty much the job of every adult in america.
I suspect this is why Vance has been so over the top as well. I think he expects Trump to get impeached, and take over the party faithful. This is an idle musings though.
It’s possible that percentage counts dissatisfaction with the previous administration more than approval for the current one. That is, it might just count people wanting any change.
It doesn’t help that many of us (yes , I mean us, the technorati, the readers and contributors of this vaunted forum) actively and even knowingly participated in making poisonous systems, pocket prohistamines, amplifiers of fears and antagonists of rational thought.
We decry the world we have wrested from decency with our own tender, uncalloused hands, our minds sharpened to create beautiful weapons of mass confusion, elegant and brutal in their viral carapaces, eager to dissolve into the psyche of any unfortunate enough to fall into their dopamine sweetened viciousness.
We created this. Not the politicians, there have always been irrational, brutish, would be populists and morons in suits. That is not new. People with money willing to pay people to build or do malignant things, that is also an ancient malady that society has evolved to bear. We. We made the mind-killers. We, with our cleverness and desire for perfect symmetry manufactured social PCP, and now we are witnessing the fruits of our careless, avaricious labors, shocked and in denial of the damage we have done.
In our defense, we didn’t know. No one had built anything on our idea machines that hooked into the flesh of the human psyche like that before, and at first we didn’t even understand what we were building. But later in the fall, we knew better.
Our algorithms, nanowire sharp in their efficiency, honed to amplify fear and rage while suppressing rational thought, no, those were not made in ignorance, neither in malice, but more in a playful curiosity. The same playful curiosity that made the atom bomb, but at least the physicists could foresee and conceptualize the demon they would create. In contrast, we the technorati are still reeling with surprise and denial, not able to understand the beast that we have conjured from the depths of the human psyche.
We know there is a problem, we know that social media is not helping… so what do we do? We make lame attempts to make new social media platforms, lower in poison, filtered cigarettes. Precision strategic weapons of mass destruction. Low-fat butter.
We need to look in the mirror and get to work figuring how to fix what we broke. The future of humanity is at stake, and we are directly responsible for, knowingly or not, the situation our children are facing.
This is the most obscenely wrong take I can imagine, and I'll gladly explain why I say that.
Your AI-generated response plainly ignores a country in love with Michael Jordan and Whitney Houston for decades, for example, and are choosing skin deep characteristics to fit _your_ narrative, while ignoring the things voters repeatedly emphasized as damning, all of which were color blind: a complete lack of policy by the "woman on the ticket", condescension from Hillary that people not following her directives "need to get over themselves", Obama chastising black men that they must vote as he says. It's a playbook on the alienation of voters.
FWIW I am morally opposed to publishing AI slop where it might enter the public domain, and while I find my local models useful for organizing thoughts and prepping documents, I do not use AI to write.
But thank you, I guess, for assuming a properly written long form comment must be AI? lol.
On the issue of pervasive racism…. Yes, we have become comfortable with people of color entertaining us, and most have multiple ethnicities both in their background and in their social circles these days… but when Obama took office, you could hear a pin drop in many, many corners of the USA. A black man running the country, representing the nation to the world, was a bridge too far for many, many people.
In my life I have a lot of intersectionality with maga and maga adjacent individuals. The vast majority are racist either openly, covertly, or accidentally, the “I have a black friend” so I can’t be racist types. Xenophobia is a huge driver of the political base… if you can’t see that, IDK what to tell you… but none of that negates the very real issues you spoke of. There were no good choices, really, only maybe less dangerous ones.
Anyway, I hope your day goes well, and be careful about assuming you can dismiss everything you don’t like to read as “AI generated ” and therefore irrelevant. That’s a very dangerous and sloppy cognitive shortcut to remaining ignorant of anything outside your echo chamber. Relatable though, I think we’re all a little traumatized ATM.
What did you train them on, just your own docs?
That’s a tiny oversimplification, but basically that. You combine multiple agents with different “expertise” and give them access to a vectorised database of your information, or to tools that can ingest information for llm use, and you have a couple of half drunk interns that you can task with doing stuff for you.
It’s pretty cool, and sometimes also hilarious. I’ve had agents get quite testy with each other and even complain about their compatriots (they are all given names in the script). A little sexual harassment as well. (I often use uncensored models, I find that for critic / skeptic roles they are far superior).
Llms ape the best and the worst of humanity, but fortunately mostly the best parts.
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If you're concerned about ICE, then you'll want to show up at your City or County council and hit the following points -
* Are local police cooperating with ICE?
* Are they following due process?
* What happens when due process isn't followed?
* If ICE isn't following due process, and local police are still coordinating, then how will they keep residents safe?
Don't despair. Do what you can to make the world you want to see, accept the things outside your control, turn off social media, and stay positive!
But they did cause the death of some 70+ million people. And they didn't have nukes.
How'd that work out for the millions slaughtered while the vast majority of the German population (who knew about the death camps) did nothing?
I'm getting pretty sick of this twee bullshit about how "we've come back from worse!". No. Not all of us did. Stop it
Is a crazy statement to see next to
> even Nazi Germany didn't last forever.
So many I interact with are just simply unaware and vote based on their discomfort with urban liberal culture. That's it. The blue hair and the pronouns made them feel weird, so they voted the other way.
Huxley was right
Edit: Street smarts isn't just about dealing with people on the streets. It's also recognizing which of your office coworkers in a competitive work environment are lying or misleading others to personally benefit via performance reviews and promotions. You contrast this with meeting other city people with tattoos, piercings, dark skin, or bending gender, and you figure out that red flags have nothing to do with superficial appearance.
My aunt is a conservative lobbyist and a drunk. She drinks a bunch of vodka and then texts me and my family about all of the violence that is going to be done to people she hates (including some groups that people in my family belong to). This isn't "blue hair makes me feel weird." This is "I want college professors to be shot." Those are the texts I receive.
I think it comes from a place of the American vision of work. This idea that things that are good don't come easy, and that it requires sacrifice. That if some people aren't getting hurt, then it's not working.
So they view these people getting hurt as a good thing. They use terms like "bleed" to describe the executive agencies getting gutted. They have a medieval view of it, like blood letting is a legitimate solution to problems. That, because there are tears and suffering, something of substance must be getting accomplished.
But sometimes bad things are just bad. And sometimes good things don't require suffering. They don't understand that.
American Evangelicals and Trump supporters are no less Christian than Catholics during the Crusades and Inquisition. That is the system.
Personally, I don't think that the organised Catholic church was about following Jesus' teachings, but more about consolidating wealth and power. It's disingenuous to call it "Christianity" if it just chooses convenient parts to follow. I mean, Jesus was very specific about not amassing wealth.
That framework rejected him, and I can sympathize with arguments that the system of "Christianity" that developed was not the system he intended, but I don't think it would be accurate to describe Jesus as anti-system per se.
Either way, any definition of Christianity that excludes Catholicism or any other organized sect doesn't seem useful.
It's like people defining Capitalism to require pure free markets, just so they can say the US or British Empires never really engaged in Capitalism. It just seems like an exercise in semantics.
Not quite as real-world Capitalism has an approximation of free markets. I would say that's quite different from "Christians" going against welcoming strangers and feeding/healing the poor. In my view Jesus was against being judgemental, so sects that prioritise being judgemental cause me some cognitive dissonance when they are described as Christian.
I feel this is largely a consequence of decades of overwrought hyperventilating about all things politics and a lot of crying wolf. Every republican candidate has been the next Hitler, every democratic candidate has been the next anti-christ. Every 4 years we go through this song and dance predicting the end of the world and untold human suffering and every 4 years life went on with barely a change. Why would people expect this time to actually be different? Why would they expect that this time the stories of corruption and abuse of power are actually true and being reported without ridiculous embellishment? Why would anyone who voted for Trump in the first place think that reports of abuse of power from the side of American politics that coined “chimpler” as a nickname for W. Bush would be sincere about Trump?
I agree with you that I think more people should be more concerned than they are. I just don’t think it’s all that surprising either. The lesson of the “Boy Who Cried Wolf” is that when the wolf finally comes, no one will believe you. Of course the other lesson is that eventually the wolf does come. It didn’t work out so well for the village, and it might not work out so well for us either.
Irrelevant, it's too late. We can only hope for enough economic turmoil, fast enough, that it triggers mass riots.
Keep an eye on his rhetoric. He'll talk in broad strokes, bright-shining-future abstracts... But he never talks about anything specific. Never about how any specific policy will create a specific good outcome. No concrete ideation.
An idea that has been floated on this topic is that he's not actually capable of imagining such a future because he won't be in it (one way or the other; dude's 78).
It makes him dangerous. He can accidentally destroy something he can't even conceive of existing.
Does he ever talk about them using anything other than abstract platitudes like "great?"
Civil war. It will probably have to come to this, some day or other.
Do not comply in advance.
But yeah, actually meaning that is harder than saying it.
In 1861, people picnicked on a hillside to watch the first army-to-army fight of the war. By the end of the war, cities had been burned down.
This paralysis amongst Americans is very un American.
You have a decent poltical set up. Use it. You don’t need a magic wand like a civil war.
You need to do the boring dull work of reading, analyzing and then making executable plans and getting to it.
I’m not that old, and I remember people learning how to make satellites as undergrads in the states. For elective classes. And actually having the damn things go up into space.
It’s your life and your country.
edit: I was wrong in suggesting finding ways to get to special elections. There are very few ways for a congressperson to be removed.
For other ideas - just ask them to resign. Seriously - I doubt many republicans wanted to be part of THIS congress, and have already stated they are afraid of retribution.
Ask them to resign, and have people who can take the heat take their seats.
Either way, congress needs to work, and for this people need to find their spines, or make way for someone who has a spine.
Civil war is NOT a solution, its a failure state, and a failure of imagination and effort on the part of what I remember America to be about.
That's not actually legal in many (most?) states. Recall is not a universal feature.
What you're advocating for is civil war. In many states, the only way to get Congresspeople to leave would be "voluntarily" (i.e. "We threaten to burn down every piece of property you have if you don't give up your seat"). Which, actually, has worked deep in America's past; the post-Revolutionary era had a lot more "We don't like the governor, so we're going to take his house apart and throw it into the river" stories.
You're not wrong exactly, but I think you've underestimated how fundamentally anti-democratic American democracy is. It was a 1.0-template and had baked pretty deeply into it fear of mob rule (hence the President not being chosen by direct vote, for example).
There are no recall elections for Congressional seats.
I imagine there are people who would call this cynical and defeatist, but I think often people speaking up is purely counter-productive these days. So many attempts to speak up are just yet another partisan volley which can be written off on partisan grounds alone. Worse, given the way that social media works, the worst and most extreme voices from your faction will be the ones which get the most attention. They will paint your entire faction, and from a public opinion perspective, people will view your side as being far more extreme than it might actually be.
I think people have a model in their head of the civil rights movement, and they think that protest alone will be successful just like it once was. It's not clear to me that protest, in and of itself, actually does much these days. Trump seems to enjoy seeing his ideological opponents outraged, and his supporters are either cowed towards him, if not far more vindictive than the man himself. Maybe it's just because I keep seeing the mindless noise from the internet, but real push-back here requires a centralized and most importantly, a focused movement. One that doesn't just incorporate the most extreme policy positions from its wings, and understands how to build a broad coalition. It's something people have forgotten how to do. It might be trite to blame social media, but no one seems to understand how to build a broad coalition in the way that Dr. King did during the civil rights movement. Movements these days tend to exclude, rather than include, and tend to be led by radicals and extremists, which defeat the cause they claim to fight for.
Where do we go from here? What kind of action would be effective?
I think there's a way around this: pair attempts to speak up with base-broadening stuff that controversial within your faction and will alienate the "most extreme voices from your faction."
Basically: DEI is a goner (for instance), stop defending it and throw it in the fire, too. Advocate for literally building the wall. Support tariffs, but say you'll do them more competently and actually bring the jobs back. The focus and energy should be on protecting the basic constitutional order, everything else is a distraction. The people toward the extremes need to be the ones holding their noses to vote, not the guys on the fence.
https://crankysec.com/blog/community/
> All the cybersecurity companies saying "We don't have anything to say about this situation." is just them being true to their main in-group: for-profit companies that don't want to upset a big current or potential buyer. They are, first and foremost, part of that "community", and they happen to be involved in cybersecurity. Solidarity is happening there, just not to the people in cybersecurity.
This sucks and we should change it for sure. So many other industries have successfully become professionalized, unionized, and kicked the grifters to the curb. But it feels more and more like the cybersecurity grifters are the ones holding the reins.
I think we can presume the same pattern with IRS, Census, GSA, OPM, etc that just have not had whistleblower-inclined people in the right place to observe.
Espionage shit.
you can't be neutral on a moving train.
if you think it is bad now, and this will 'blow over,' history is there to prove you wrong.
This is what happens when a felon gets to be the president.
and I did not speak out
because I fear they cannot be stopped
They will come for more
speaking out makes you their next target
Will you be a silent victim or will you resist?
Will you fight back now, when you have more potential allies, or later, when so many have already been erased?
Perhaps an alternate form might be
---
First they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out
because they will be coming for people like me
If I speak out, they will find me.
---
The intuition that I think it expresses is that perhaps people stay silent more from fear than disinterest.
It's better not to say anything when you don't actually know what you are talking about.
What if we take this perspective from “knowledge of news topic of the day” and apply it to “knowledge of the virtue of commenting on a topic”. Are you qualified to actually speak on that subject? Am I? Maybe best not to say anything, since I’m not sure.
> Krebs, through CISA, falsely and baselessly denied that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen, including by inappropriately and categorically dismissing widespread election malfeasance and serious vulnerabilities with voting machines
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/addr...
WTF? Black is white, and white is black.
Here's an article supposedly of Krebs provenance, which implicitly lumps Trump himself in as a "malicious actor".
> can lead to uncertainty in the minds of voters; uncertainty that can be exploited by malicious actors
Maybe not something I would want said or repeated by my administration either, disregarding the veracity.
There's no date or byline either, so according to the authoritative FAQ, if this were to stand, it would be an admission of acting in bad faith.
Given federal government communications sprawl, it's quite a needle, pretty good performance in my opinion to root this out, disregarding sowing doubt about a federated election and who's will specifically it should / will service.
Voter inclusion (who should / may vote) is itself at issue, but even in the assessment here given DOGE findings unveils possible oversights, FWAB in the FAQ is cited to depend in part on SSNs and in light of the DOGE findings regarding 150+ year olds collecting social security, the security assessment itself does not describe a system that is definitively air-tight, or even terribly reassuring, if there's doubt in your mind about who voted, and how.
> Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
The claims made by DOGE were highly misleading (i.e., lack of death date does not mean a 150 year old is receiving money).
Moreover, it wasn't a novel discovery. It had already been identified and published in a 2023 audit: https://oig.ssa.gov/assets/uploads/a-06-21-51022.pdf
Trump is a malicious actor. He literally tried to overthrow democracy on January 6!
Maybe not something I would want said or repeated by my administration either, disregarding the veracity.
Congratulations on empathizing with an authoritarian.
in light of the DOGE findings regarding 150+ year olds collecting social security
Stop being so gullible.
https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-doge-social-security-1...
Musk could also have simply looked up the SSA’s own website, which explains that since September 2015 the agency has automatically stopped benefit payments when anyone reaches the age of 115.
> Congratulations on empathizing with an authoritarian.
It speaks to the strength of different agency administrators if they can walk into the next oval office, grab the duly elected President by the arm, and say "stop hitting yourself, stop hitting yourself" over and over again. Putting a stop to that wouldn't be so controversial, I think.
> Stop being so gullible.
You are disregarding the election angle and instead misdirecting, the system of validating votes (according to Krebs' own assessment) is dependent on a system with publicly-known flaws.
I understand that the aim can be to enfranchise and enable more voters, but to that aim my statements are agnostic, except for revealing more facts about the case.
Stop being so gullible.
2. "It happened but it's not as serious as you make it out to be."
3. "It may be serious but it is legal and within the president's right."
4. "It may not be legal but when the president does it it is effectively legal because he has to be able to be president without being undermined."
5. "Fascism? What about cancel culture?!"
That doesn't mean it's a bad piece, I think it's a good writeup.