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It baffles me that Trump thinks it’s a good idea to mess with the school that most lawyers come from.

Not only that, the VOA literally has its own law requiring it to be impartial and protecting it from direct interference by the US government.

VOICE OF AMERICA BROADCASTS

Sec. 206. Title V of the United States Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948 is amended by adding the following new section:

Sec. 503. The long-range interests of the United States are served by communicating directly with the peoples of the world by radio. To be effective, the Voice of America must win the attention and respect of listeners. These principles will therefore govern Voice of America (VOA) broadcasts:

1. VOA will serve as a consistently reliable and authoritative source of news. VOA news will be accurate, objective, and comprehensive.

2. VOA will represent America, not any single segment of American society, and will therefore present a balanced and comprehensive projection of significant American thought and institutions.

3. VOA will present the policies of the United States clearly and effectively, and will also present responsible discussions and opinion on these policies. (Public Law 94-350)

• https://www.usagm.gov/who-we-are/mission/
• https://www.usagm.gov/who-we-are/oversight/legislation/voa-charter/
• https://uscode.house.gov/statutes/pl/94/350.pdf

The point is they’re supposed to at least keep up the pretext of not being propaganda, and this is done by being critical when permitted. Trump doesn’t want them to be critical of him at all, which goes against their mandate from Congress.

Elon Musk managed to more or less keep up the appearance of being smart for a long while, up to when he called that diver a pedo.

You shouldn’t be downvoted, but this isn’t true. While partially funded by Congress, the VOA’s mission is not propaganda.

Since its creation in 1942, Voice of America has been committed to providing comprehensive coverage of the news and telling audiences the truth. Through World War II, the Cold War, the fight against global terrorism, and the struggle for freedom around the globe today, VOA exemplifies the principles of a free press.

VOA is part of the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), the government agency that oversees all non-military, U.S. international broadcasting. It is funded by the U.S. Congress.

Now, we can debate how much this is true in practice, and I’m sure the governmental structure of the organisation means the government can put their thumb on the scale somewhat, but the mission means they’re at least meant to keep the pretext of being independent and free.

But Trump doesn’t understand that. In his eyes, he’s paying for it (not Congress nor the American voters/taxpayers) and if he’s paying for it he gets to boss them around.

I voted in Florida and it was really creepy that all the electronic voting machines were managed by a Republican, but not Dems.

Yes but there needs to be some appetite from politicians, Dems seemed completely unwilling to entertain the idea it may have been rigged, perhaps out of fear they would be compared to Trump in 2020. All the noise about election rigging has been about people voting when they couldn’t or dead people voting and the like, no one is really talking about simply not counting votes. Meanwhile, we’re told that turnout for 2024 was relatively low, and yet the lines out of the polls that I saw were always heaving.

I also strongly believe that the last election was rigged, and am worried that no one really seems to be looking into it. Between Trump’s own claims that he would win no matter what and Elon “It’s just one line of code” Musk there is enough to be concerned with. Most likely, I think they simply didn’t count a bunch of Dem votes.

The statement was

What is it about the lemm.ee domain that produces accounts with the most cringe, awful takes?

Now, I wouldn’t say that’s really appropriate here, Dagwood222’s comment above that wasn’t cringe nor awful. However, apparently UnderpantsWeevil already has this perception of lemm.ee users, and hexbear users making up a chunk of the userbase is my explanation for that.

No one ever really spoke bad of lemm.ee users before the hexbear defederations, and it was a clear echo of the complaints about lemmy.ml users that also started at the same time. It’s just a bandwagon/circlejerk, really; a cheap way of getting upvotes from other users not on those instances that only has a pinch of truth. But that pinch is what I was describing.

The two devs themselves are massive tankies. They also run lemmygrad.

lemm.ee has one of if not the best admin, and was always running more smoothly in earlier versions. More than that, when other bugs were taking out .world and many others, lemm.ee was already immune and the admin helped the other instances sort theirs out too. lemm.ee has a lot of good users.

However, when hexbear was banned, users on that instance started moonlighting on other instances. There were very few instances that were still federated with hexbear but also with the others, where all the conversation was - many wanted one account that could browse both. Several went to lemmy.ml, the instance run by the formal lemmy developers, and there was a noticeable shift in user behaviour from the instance. But lemm.ee never really was targeted by the hexbear brigading that led to their defederation with everyone else, perhaps because lemm.ee doesn’t really have any massive communities itself, not as big as the others.

So yeah, lemm.ee can still browse hexbear, and with that you get a sizeable chunk of their userbase spilling over. So some lemm.ee users do indeed suck. It’s not as bad as .ml, though, and I think that’s in no small part thanks to the lemm.ee admin team keeping the more extremist users in check.

Trump wants to increase the debt ceiling, not so they can finance government projects, but so he can raid the taxpayer coffers to pay his backers.

Elon is marking Trump, meanwhile Peter Thiel has his hand up JD Vance’s ass. One way or another their agenda will get through.

The withdrawal that Trump set in motion with his inept foreign policies…

5.5 million out of over 300 million is hardly a majority.

Apparently it wasn’t so much that they don’t exist, but that people are generally stupid and if inflation spikes during your term you’re going to get the blame for it - even if your actions significantly limit inflation compared to the rest of the world.

Every government that was in power during the inflation rise and had an election this year lost voter share.

Yeah exactly. CNBC aren’t really twisting anything here, and they even mention the WaPo article in the 2nd bullet point at the top.

If there’s anyone worth looking at over the release of this story it’s WaPo. One could reasonably assume that Bezos wanted this story published, as Musk is a big rival. However at the same time they’ve just announced that they won’t endorse anyone for this election for the first time in decades, which at best could be seen as hedging their bets in case of a Trump presidency but at worst be seen as pandering to Trump.

I don’t think Trump is the next Hitler lol Hitler actually had some real carisma and intelligence. Your whataboutism turned into hyperbole is clearly flat and false.

Incidentally, do you know who it was who coined the term Mainstream Media, in the context of saying “you shouldn’t believe Mainstream Media”? That was Joseph Goebbels. You are literally spouting Nazi propaganda.

I’m not brainwashed, I try to take in as many sources I can and review them impartially, then come to an objective conclusion. Unfortunately for you, reality and truth skew away from your beliefs.

Russian collusion has not been debunked. The investigations were quashed.

Biden is on tape threatening to hold back a billion dollars in aid money if Ukraine didn’t fire a certain prosecutor.

Yes, Biden was under direction from the President to sort out corruption in Ukraine, where Russia had been funnelling money through Ukraine’s PrivatBank. Trump has been associated with this money laundering, and yet none of it has seen the light of day - the lawsuits in Delaware and the UK were both postponed until after Ukraine’s lawsuit, which was scheduled for summer 2022. This never happened due to the Russian invasion.

You’re still trying to bring up Biden being photographed at the cemetary while conducting his duties with Trump trying to take photographs explicitly for his election campaign. The two are not the same.

Most of the military does not support Trump. Hell, most of the US does not support Trump - he has never won a popular vote in his life. You’re pulling things out your ass now, and I can smell that shit well before I can see you.

All you have to do is look at the interviews they do with Kamala or Biden (the very few of them they’ve done) and then listen to the interviews they do with Trump or just about any Republican really. It’s more than obvious.

If it’s so obvious it should be easy for you to link to such an interview. Ideally, we should have two interviews from the same interviewer, one for either side, then we can determine the bias of that interviewer. Determining bias of the network would require much more evidence.

every now and then they’ll ask Kamala a tough question, but then she’ll give a completely false answer and they just move on to the next one.

Trump lies with almost every breath and gets away without fact checking against the vast majority of it. You claim Kamala does this also, but your only example so far has been one where the very network you claim is biased towards her in fact corrected her, at that very moment. They followed up on that. That’s what you said, now you’re trying to claim that they don’t follow up on her gaffes.

Perhaps it’s a flaw with interviewing in general, because interviewers for sure don’t fact check Trump very much. The fact checking comes after the fact, by other parties. However you can only be biased if you think Trump is fact checked more than Kamala, proportional to the amount of lies either of them make.

The fact is she makes fewer gaffes, that’s why it seems like they follow up less - there’s less to follow up on, and what is followed up on is usually less substantial. Meanwhile Trump lies all the time, and it becomes so tiresome trying to correct every word he says that most get overlooked, and can only be picked apart by in depth breakdowns that most people don’t have the time to watch.

If Trump claimed he retired from the military under a rank that he didn’t have, you’d never hear the end of it. Tampon Tim does it and they actively defend him.

Tampon Tim, lmao, your mask is slipping and you’re revealing how much kool-aid you’ve drank.

No one is comparing Tim to Trump. People are comparing Tim to Vance. Vice President nominee to Vice President nominee. JD Vance himself tried to dismiss Waltz’s 24 years’ service in the National Guard because he didn’t see combat, while ignoring the fact that Vance was in a PR department of the marines - for far less time - and also did not see combat. Vance’s military career was purely about getting a line on his resume, while you don’t serve for 24 years without some genuine patriotism. Walz suffered hearing damage from firing artillery, meanwhile Vance can’t even claim he developed carpal tunnel syndrome from his military service.

You also cannot genuinely claim that Walz’s military career is glossed over. No one has challenged Vance’s career up until now, while Walz has faced these accusations and won in spite of them time and time again since 2006. The reason he wins in spite of the accusations is because the accusations are vexatious.

The argument over Walz’s rank is semantic. He was promoted, it’s just that the promotion was conditional on him completing certain training after the promotion, which he never completed. Similarly, Donald Trump was indicted twice while President, it’s just that his party’s Senate elected not to actually remove him from the office of President. Walz was still promoted to that rank, and Donald Trump was still indicted twice. Walz was essentially offered a job that he eventually did not take up, meanwhile Trump committed crimes but went unpunished.

Biden was the first to actually use photos he had taken in section 60 in a campaign ad

Biden had his photo taken while performing his duties as then-Vice President. He later re-used that photo in an election campaign. The photo was taken in 2010, then he used it in 2020.

Trump brought media with him to take photos during his election campaign for the purpose of using those photos in his election campaign.

The rules are clear, you’re not allowed to do take photos for the purpose of election campaigning. Biden did not break that rule, he didn’t even arrange the photo. You’re free to take photos so long as it isn’t for the purpose of election campaigning.

In spite of not breaking the letter of rule, I would agree that Biden violated the spirit of the rule. However, Biden is not running for President now, Trump is, and Trump’s gaffe happened well after he had dropped out. Trump’s getting desperate, and he’s making bigger and bigger mistakes.

You also cannot say that Biden was at fault and disrespected the military without admitting that Trump disrespected the military.

Ultimately, it feels like talking to you is pretty pointless. You stubbornly refuse to concede anything, no matter how minor, chasing some proverbial “win”. You’ve chosen to follow your favourite fiction, rather than embrace a search for objective truth. Frankly, I believe that clinging to ignorance, in spite of evidence to the contrary, is the greatest sin a human being can commit. It brings shame to your ancestors, to the good men and women who sacrificed their lives for you to live in relative comfort.

Trump secured three pay raises for our troops and their families including the largest pay raise in over a decade.

Not quite correct:

Basic pay for the military did increase by 2.4 percent on Jan. 1, 2018 — the largest in eight years. But pay increases are determined by a statutory formula, and Trump in fact requested an amount below the automatic adjustment for 2018. Congress overrode the president’s proposal, and Trump ultimately agreed to fully fund the increase as determined by federal law.

Trump didn’t secure the pay raise, he wanted to pay them less but was overruled. The other pay raises were also mandatory.

The increase under Trump was also only 2.4%, and the most in 8 years (not “over a decade”). Meanwhile the increase under Biden was 5.2%, the most in decades, plural, more than 20 years.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/senate-passes-defense-policy-bill-52-pay-raise-troops-biggest-boost-de-rcna129668

He rebuilt the military after 8 years of neglect under the previous administration with over $2.2 trillion in defense spending, including $738 billion for 2020.

Spending in defense =/= good for servicemen and veterans. The vast majority of military spending does not go to personnel.

He created the space force as well which was the first new branch of the United States Armed Forces since 1947.

Splintering the USAF off and creating the Space Force arguably does not help the country. For one, the organisations’ mandates and domains are so similar that the difference does not provide benefit (NASA covers both aeronautics and space, for good reason). Second, this makes it easier for enemies of the US to determine how much is being inveseted in space activities through separate public disclosures, making it harder for the US to maintain its military lead.

He vetoed the FY21 National Defense Authorization Act, which failed to protect our national security, disrespected the history of our veterans and military, and contradicted our efforts to put America first.

Trump vetoed a bill that had an overwhelming bipartisan majority behind it, knowing full well that his veto would be overruled. That’s not a real veto, that’s just for show, just to give him something to complain about on social media. The veto was also an attempt to halt funding to federal agencies, a common tactic of the Republican party, and one that hurts actual service members requiring them to continue working without pay.

He protected America’s defense-industrial base, directing the first whole-of-government assessment of our manufacturing and defense supply chains since the 1950s.

Trump also stole classified documents and leaked them to Russia. Him running an “assessment” of US defense supply chains is more about him providing intel to foreign adversaries.

He also helped our Veterans out by giving them the ability to go to whatever doctor they want to go to so they would no longer have to wait so long that some of them were dying to be seen at the VA.

He helped the US healthcare industry by giving them more customers and overruled the VA’s pricing system, such that the taxpayer pays more to exploitative corporations.

And I believe that he would have done much more for our military if he wasn’t being held down by all of phony Russia collusion nonsense.

HAH. Trump has always been in bed with Russia, this has been public knowledge since the 80s. His young girl talent agencies were involved with Russian human trafficking.

You’ve got your head buried in the sand. Trump would rather gut and gimp the military so the US can roll over for Russia.