In This Edition:
- Watch the Digital Rapid Reponse Training
- Lots of Links to Chew On Overnight
Follow Epolitics on Substack, Bluesky, Threads, or Twitter/X
Watch Digital Rapid Response: How to Be Ready When the Moment Strikes
The video of last week’s digital rapid response training is live on YouTube! Check it out below. Note the irritating troll invasion I wrote about last week (who’s the guy with the British accent??), and thank you again to participants for helping me out via the Zoom chat. And, my recent digital advocacy strategy training is also online.
I’ll be revisiting digital rapid response for this week’s Digital Strategy Summit, which you should not miss. It features 30-odd excellent sessions covering a huge range of digital communications essentials, and you can use the code epolitics20 for a 20% discount on the (already reduced) registration fee.
Also coming soon: Online Fundraising 101 on March 6th. Register for this free training today! As usual, I’ll record it and send around the link afterwards.
Links to Chew On Overnight
- Chris Murphy Emerges as a Clear Voice for Democrats Countering Trump [NYT]. More on this soon
- “They’re Scared Shitless”: The Threat of Political Violence Informing Trump’s Grip on Congress [Vanity Fair]. C.f. Republicans fear ‘death threats and Gestapo-like stuff’ from Trump fans: report [Raw Story]
- AfD Influencers: The Unabashedly Provocative Youth Driving Germany’s Far Right [NYT]
- How Elon Musk used X to amplify Germany’s far right ahead of election [WaPo]. “Musk won AfD a massive new audience on the social media site he owns. That brought the party outsize attention, but the impact in Germany was limited, data shows.”
- Justice Department deletes database tracking federal police misconduct [WaPo]
- DOGE Sparks Surveillance Fear Across the US Government [Wired]
- Elon Musk Threatens FBI Agents and Air Traffic Controllers With Forced Resignation If They Don’t Respond to an Email [Wired]. Just about everyone else, too
- Pentagon prepares to fire thousands of civilian employees in dramatic culling [Politico]
- With incalculable long-term harm to the nation, Cuts drain federal government of technical expertise [Axios]
- ‘Terrified’ Federal Workers Are Clamming Up [The Atlantic]. “Transitions of power always lead to changes in priorities, but that is not what the workers say they are witnessing. Instead, the new Trump administration is engineering what some feel could be described only as ideological obedience.”
- The Governor Who Stood Up to Trump [The Atlantic]. “But the larger dynamic is that Trump isn’t merely pushing to redefine the boundaries of the law or even the Constitution. He is rejecting the principle that the law constrains him at all.”
- Trump Issued Perhaps His Most Terrifying Executive Order on Tuesday [Slate]. The man who would be king…
- The Trump team ups the trolling to 11 [WaPo]
- Elon Musk Can’t Stop Talking About P….. [The Atlantic]. “The point is to laugh in their faces as he dismantles the things that they care about, in an attempt to break them. It is not enough to beat your adversaries. They must be humiliated.”
- How Meta’s concessions to the right may have backfired [Platformer]. “A new inquiry from the Federal Trade Commission suggests that apologizing for “censorship” may have only emboldened the company’s conservative critics.”
- Why Paul Krugman left the NYT, and what it says about contemporary media
- Layoffs Push Pressure Higher At NPOs In Washington, D.C. [Nonprofit Times]
- Censoring Games: What China’s influence over Marvel Rivals reveals about censorship [NYT]
- America is being sold out by its leaders [Noahpinion]. “If Trump and Elon think they can forge a grand right-wing alliance with China and Russia, they’re heading for trouble.”
- And finally, Leopards Eating Faces: The Song
– cpd