Apropos my thread from earlier on the “Absolute 9-0” video. Lindell is the ideal mark: He’s rich, wants desperately to believe, doesn’t understand the subject matter at all, AND has an elaborate ideological defense mechanism in place against being alerted to the con.
All cons thrive to some extent on the resistance to the humiliating admission you’ve been duped, but with Lindell you’ve got it on steroids (with a side of cocaine).
He’s built a whole public persona around pushing the con. He’s relying on it in multiple lawsuits! And anyone trying to explain how he’s been gulled gets dismissed as Part of the Liberal Cover-Up looong before they manage to walk him through the basics.
On reflection, there’s a decent chance that eventually Lindell’s lawyers will press him to throw his “cyber experts” under the bus if it looks like he’s at risk of losing all his money to Dominion.
Obviously he’s going to cling to “it’s not defamation because the claims are true” for as long as he can. But when that fails & he’s at risk of losing his shirt: “It’s not actual malice because I’m computer illiterate & these cyber people duped me.”
Probably it’ll take the form of a slippery argument-in-the-alternative. As in: “IF this was all ludicrous garbage, at any rate it wasn’t reckless disregard because people who use Linux were validating my delusions for money.”
And given the appropriately high bar for defamation suits by public figures, that defense could very well save him. Though it implies a weird legal escape hatch for people wealthy enough that their slanderous fantasies inspire knock-on grifts.

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More from @normative

5 Jun
Starting to feel almost bad for Mike Lindell. Mr. Lindell, I’d like to offer you my services. In exchange fo a fee to be negotiated, I will help you construct a body of slightly-less-obviously-bogus body of evidence for imaginary election fraud. My package includes...
* One (1) superficially plausible backstory for how I have visibility on traffic to hundreds of municipal government networks. At your discretion, I will pepper this backstory with references to actual monitoring tools like “nmap” and “Wireshark” for extra verisimilitude.
* One (1) properly-formatted fabricated pcap screenshot, suitable for use in online videos, guaranteed to provoke less mockery than just converting publicly available voter data to hex. At your request, I can create a version in green Matrix font that dribbles down the screen.
Read 8 tweets
4 Jun
Out of sheer masochism just looked at the latest PillowGuy video “proving” election rigging, and it’s even cringier and more incoherent than I’d expected. Among other things, it seems almost certain Lindell himself is getting conned.
I don’t have much pity—never was there a more willing victim—but it’s comically apparent from the video that a bunch of dudes decided they could bill a rich moron for months of “cyber forensics” work & feed him nonsense, because he wouldn’t know enough to be able to tell.
Assuming Lindell isn’t in on it partly because if he were, he would have come up with something a LITTLE more superficially plausible looking. This is the kind of half-assed thing you throw together when you’re certain the mark doesn’t know anything.
Read 9 tweets
2 Jun
This isn’t how I’d have framed it, but I think it’s right we’re in danger of overcorrecting away from lazy both-sides neutrality in a way that would accelerate epistemic fragmentation & make journalism worse.
Human beings all have biases & opinions & blind spots. The inference from this used to be “so we need strong professional norms to compensate.” My sense is there’s a growing camp for whom the inference is “so objectivity is a fraud & we should stop pretending.”
I think it needs to be stressed that this is as much about the economics of journalism as about norms. Both-sidesing is easy. Objectivity is hard. It requires time, work, subject matter expertise, and hard judgment calls about when reporter umpiring serves the reader.
Read 4 tweets
1 Jun
Apparently Michael Flynn’s derangment is tempered by cowardice: He’s now attempting to retcon his endorsement of a military coup at a QAnon event & pretend he said the opposite of what he is caught on video saying. texasnewstoday.com/michael-flynn-…
He’s now claiming he said “there’s no reason [a coup like in Myanmar] should happen here. Horseshit. Watch the video. Even if hadn’t already previously called for martial law to overturn the election, it’s not ambiguous. At all.
Question: “I wanna know why what happened in Minnamar [sic] can’t happen here?” [HUGE cheers from crowd]

Flynn: “No reason. I mean, it should happen here.” [more cheers from crowd] “No reason. That’s right. One more!”
Read 10 tweets
25 May
If you could actually do this, it would entail wiping out ~$250 billion in assets, much of that held by people who engaged in lawful transactions. It’s not really clear how you could in fact do it, though.
All the major ransomware groups & most bitcoin exchanges are outside U.S. jurisdiction. So in practice you’re just making it illegal for U.S. victims to pay ransoms. Which… we could just do directly, if we wanted to do that.
There are also thorny definitional issues. Is any digital asset tracked via blockchain a “cryptocurrency”? If so, you’re banning NFTs too. If not, ransomware groups ask for payment in the form of some digital asset that falls outside the definition of “cryptocurrency.”
Read 4 tweets
21 May
As an undergrad, I’d started expecting to major in journalism. The profs I became really friendly with advised me not to: “Take a few classes, maybe do a minor, but you’re better off learning a subject relevant to what you report on. Journalism itself you learn by doing it.”
What IS vital, and related to our “info problems,” is the transmission of journalistic norms & practice & culture, which traditionally happened via working with more experienced veteran reporters & editors, whether or not you’d gone through a college journalism curriculum.
The Internet has enabled a lot of people to bypass the traditional process of slogging your way up the journalistic totem poll, as it were. As a 20-something blogger in the early aughts, this was fantastic: You could build a sizable national audience out of nowhere.
Read 11 tweets

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