I want to apologise at the start of this piece because it’s not short. I feel it is one of, if not the most important, piece I have ever written. I won’t lie, it will take some focus on your part, so if you’re not in the mood for it today, feel free to come back when you have a little more time to give it your full attention. If you are a regular reader of my work, I am confident that you will trust me enough to know that I would not be introducing this piece in this manner if I didn’t think it was important. To understand its full context and importance in relation to this moment, it’s essential to view the two videos included, as they are integral to this essay.
As we begin another week following what can only be described as a rollercoaster of a weekend, I am heartened by the sense of hope that swept the country as Americans found their voice through the #NoKings movement. It was a much-needed boost to many who were feeling isolated and targeted by an administration that, with the narrowest of election victories, has seen fit to completely reimagine American society under the false guise of a large electoral mandate.
Firstly, the mandate does not exist; secondly, changing society by daily proclamation was never the intent of the founding fathers. I want to keep the general tone of this piece apolitical because while the No Kings movement is a primarily Democrat activist-sponsored initiative. Democrat leadership sat around at the fringes, for fear of it all going wrong. Don’t get me started on the lack of conviction. I’m sure that now, everything went well, they’ll act as if they were always on board. And therein lies a big problem, my friends. I really see the movement as potentially appealing to everyone except MAGA die-hards, and so it should. This weekend presented a chance for traditional American values to rise up and say, ‘Not in our name.’ It was an opportunity for like-minded people to collectively voice their opposition to Trump’s march to absolute power.
It’s challenging to assess the attendance numbers, and we are hearing widely varying estimates, ranging from 12 million to as low as 5 million. However, based on my assessment, I think it's safe to assume the numbers are at least between 5 and 8 million. Whatever the number, it was a resounding success and rebuke of Trump’s actions.
He learned the hard way that military parades, designed to showcase a country’s military strength, do not work in a Western democratic society. They are the realm of authoritarian states and dictators. Trump claims his inspiration was the Bastille Day Parade, which he attended in 2017. What he failed to understand was that France is somewhat of an outlier; its parade is not based on projecting power, but rather on a longstanding celebration of liberation. The historical context is critical to understanding its place in French society. Fête Nationale, in French, is a national holiday celebrated annually on July 14th. It commemorates the storming of the Bastille prison on that date in 1789, a pivotal event marking the beginning of the French Revolution. It celebrates France’s liberation from the very autocratic rule he is trying to establish.
The UK also has military parades, as it did this weekend with the traditional Trooping of the Colour to celebrate the official birthday of our real King. Once again, they are not displays of power, but instead pageantry. Both are very different to the intent of Trump this weekend.
The bottom line is that Trump’s parade was an anticlimax, not because people don’t want to celebrate the bravery and commitment of the US military, but because an army which has to prove its power to the world via a military parade is crass and lacks class. Still, I suppose in that regard, we should not be surprised, given that Trump is the king of bad taste. You do not need a military parade to support military personnel; you can begin by not removing Medicaid and services to veterans. Improving military accommodation and respecting those who serve who step within range of your bigotry or homophobia. The event was an international joke, which will only add to an ever-growing legacy of lies, disinformation, corruption, economic incompetence and an acute inability to read the room. He will be remembered as the king who never was, destroyed by his hubris.
On the upside, America found her voice again, and that made my soul sing. I feel it’s imperative that this brand is adopted and built upon moving forward. To date, the people have been victims of an abuser who has, by his every action, sought to exert his control over them with his hand in their back pocket, while relentlessly burying them under a tsunami of lies and disinformation.
We have discussed the changing political landscape on many occasions. It is difficult to emphasise just how important it is for Republican opposition to come to terms with the challenges presented by Trump’s new dance with technology. At this moment, unless Democrats take time to assess the threat it poses, they may well live to regret it. I discussed in my last post how Republicans can’t compete in elections on a level playing field, hence their longstanding obsession with implementing voter suppression. Even in a political landscape traditionally right of centre, it represented a challenge for them. As their ideology has moved further and further to the right, they are forced to adopt more aggressive voter suppression tactics that see them needing to select their voters rather than the other way around.
It is fair to say that British values have heavily influenced the Democratic ideology. We Brits will form an orderly queue at the drop of a hat. That embedded sense of fair play, and it’s just not cricket to cheat, has been a central tenet of the Democratic attitude. No more was this better demonstrated than when Michelle Obama said, ‘When they go low, we go high. ’ In the world of unicorns and rainbows, she was so right. However, in the new era of political violence and hate-driven politics, everything has changed. Republicans need to cheat now like they have never cheated before, and it wasn’t until I started researching this piece that I began to understand to what lengths they are prepared to go.
Some will be aware of an organisation called Smart Elections, which has raised concerns about the validity of the 2024 general election results in light of the discovery of voting irregularities in the Senate election results in Rockland County, New York. The claim is as follows:
One machine (District 35) recorded 552 votes for Trump and 0 for Harris, yet showed 331 votes for Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand in the same batch.
In multiple districts, voters reportedly signed affidavits saying they voted for Harris, but those votes never appeared in local tallies.
To be clear, I DO NOT intend to go down a rabbit hole on this. However, a significant number of down-ballot votes were recorded for which no vote was cast at the top of the same ballot papers. Given that people are almost always focused on the top of the ticket, it is unusual that they leave it blank in such high numbers. The reason it piqued my interest is that a lawsuit was filed, and you can read the filing here. On 10th June, Newsweek reported:
SMART Legislation, the action arm of SMART Elections, a nonpartisan watchdog group, filed the lawsuit over voting discrepancies in Rockland County, New York.
Judge Rachel Tanguay of the New York Supreme Court ruled in open court in May that the allegations were serious enough for discovery to proceed.
The case is now proceeding to discovery after the judge refused a motion to dismiss by Rockland County Board of Elections. The suit calls for a full recount of the paper ballots. The next court date is scheduled for September 22, 2025, so we can’t expect to see any progress on this matter until later in the year. However, the claim is that there was some sort of software manipulation. Usually, I’d avoid commenting on this stuff given the farcical attempts by Republicans to prove voter machine manipulation in 2020.
What’s interesting about this, though, is that it represents a test of the Republicans’ own position on election integrity. They are constantly banging the drum that there should only be paper ballots, so they certainly could not legitimately object to a full and transparent public recount of the paper ballots to put this matter to bed. Suppose voting machines selectively recorded only down-ballot votes and failed to register votes cast for the top of the ticket. In that case, this raises serious concerns, and an investigation is essential to safeguard the future of free and fair elections.
Lulu Friesdat, Founder and Executive Director of SMART Legislation, stated:
“If the results are incorrect, it is a violation of the constitutional rights of each person who voted in the 2024 Rockland County general election. The best way to determine if the results are correct is to examine the paper ballots in a full public, transparent hand recount of all presidential and senate ballots in Rockland County. We believe it’s vitally important, especially in the current environment, to be absolutely confident about the results of the election.”
I must agree, and I see no reason why the court should deny the request. However, I’m pretty sure that any ruling to recount the ballots will be appealed and may even end up in the Supreme Court. This is likely to rumble on for some time, but it’s important because these same anomalies appear to exist across several swing states. The problem we now face is a complete breakdown of trust in the system, and that is precisely what Trump set out to achieve. It will also be a primary objective of the Republican midterm campaign to sow doubt in the voting process. It’s like watching a movie where we already know the ending.
It’s all very well if Smart Elections wins this case, but if it proves in court that voting machines were tampered with in 2024, then the entire current electoral system is not fit for purpose. How would you address this by 2026, without opening the door to Trump postponing the elections, while a never-to-be-found fix is sought? That’s before we consider the fact that no way Trump would allow himself to be forced from office. The implications are beyond terrifying.
Despite all of the above, my concerns extend far beyond whether the 2024 election result is in question; it’s about Trump's intent to use big data as a means of manipulating future elections. If you think about it, there are two stages to winning. First, to convince people to vote for you, and secondly, to ensure the votes are counted correctly. Simple enough, you might think, but the Rockland County case certainly casts doubt on the latter before we even start. As for the first objective, that’s where our journey together begins.
Before we begin this section, let me say that I’m not writing this to frighten you. What you should be terrified of is being oblivious to the possibility of what might be around the next corner.
You may recall that in 2016, a major scandal erupted regarding Facebook data being harvested by a British company called Cambridge Analytica. The company was founded as a result of a conversation and subsequent meeting between Steve Bannon and Alexander Nix, the CEO of what was to become Cambridge Analytica, at Bannon's direction. The project was funded primarily by the ‘family’ of hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, a supporter of Donald Trump, under the stewardship of Bannon, to whom everyone answered. Its objectives were to harvest data from Facebook for the purpose of microtargeting voters for the 2016 US election.
In this article from The Guardian, dated March 17, 2018, years after the collapse of the company, they noted:
The data was collected through an app called thisisyourdigitallife, built by academic Aleksandr Kogan, separately from his work at Cambridge University. Through his company Global Science Research (GSR), in collaboration with Cambridge Analytica, hundreds of thousands of users were paid to take a personality test and agreed to have their data collected for academic use.
All seemed innocent enough, but the app used the opportunity to scrape all the user’s data from Facebook, which could include everything down to direct messages. Not only did it scrape their data, but it also scraped the data of their Facebook friends, without their knowledge. The survey was misrepresenting the purpose for which the data was to be used.
Christopher Wylie, who became a whistleblower, worked with Aleksandr Kogan to obtain the data, and told the Observer:
“We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis the entire company was built on.”
It was said at the time, ‘Give me 10 likes and I’ll know more about you than your co-workers do. Give me 300 likes and I’ll know more about you than your wife does. It was data mining on an epic scale. It combined microtargeting with psychological profiling to create a mechanism that a political campaign could use to feed you a diet of lies and outrage to manipulate the way you voted. It was subliminal coercion. The jury is out on how effective it was, but it’s clear it was very new and brought added value.
Christopher Wylie and his team quite literally built a culture war machine. However, when the scandal broke, that data had been stolen from 50 million Facebook users, the project was dead in the water, and Cambridge Analytica collapsed, but the damage had already been done. They had the data.
The Guardian report goes on to state:
Documents seen by the Observer, and confirmed by a Facebook statement, show that by late 2015 the company had found out that information had been harvested on an unprecedented scale. However, at the time it failed to alert users and took only limited steps to recover and secure the private information of more than 50 million individuals.
The Trump campaign paid over $5 million for the use of the data, which Alexander Nix claimed was one of the key drivers of Trump’s 2016 win. I’m not sure I share fully his assessment, but it was certainly a new tool that played to Trump’s culture war objectives. As with all things Trump, there was a firewall between the campaign and Cambridge Analytica. Needless to say, nobody went to prison. The reason I’m sharing this is that it’s particularly important in the context of Trump’s Executive Order to clear the way for Palantir to analyse and aggregate data across the US government.
During the Cambridge Analytica project, Palantir allegedly assisted the company in obtaining insights into scraping Facebook data. Initially, Alex Karp, Palentir's CEO, vigorously denied the allegation. However, they later offered up a scapegoat, claiming it was an employee who, unbeknownst to the company, had assisted without the company's knowledge or consent.
The key point here is that a company with numerous contracts with the US government, working with the CIA and Homeland Security, to mention but two, is now well-positioned to, among other things, politicise big data. As an aside, they were also one of the companies that sponsored Trump’s military parade fiasco. Palantir is well-versed in aggregating social media data with personal information to facilitate profiling, and that’s just the beginning.
One thing you may not be aware of, if you aren’t familiar with the UK, is Brexit. I was a right-wing campaign run by the right with Trump’s British buddy Nigel Farage, who is currently the advance team for UK MAGA, poisoning our politics for the oligarchs. The system used for Trump's campaign was also used for the Brexit campaign. If you are interested in the big picture, you might want to watch this clip from Carole Cadwalladr, who wrote the Guardian piece featured in this article. The reason I would like you to watch it is that this is from 6 years ago, and Carole recently gave a reprise of her TED Talk, which is featured at the end of this piece.
The Cambridge Analytica scandal dates back to 2014/15 when AI was but a seed of thought for what was to come. In this moment, it is the preeminent data crunching tool, which, given the right data source, can instantly profile you based solely on your social media activity. Indeed, prospective employers already use AI to aggregate job applications with social media to score candidates.
Trump’s Executive Order on 20th March was explicitly designed to allow departments across the government to cross-reference data on individuals across all datasets. If this data were to be aggregated with social media data, you instantly have the foundations for a surveillance state. As a former data analyst myself, I can tell you that this is all about using a unique identifier to bring data together across various datasets. Anyone who has ever created a database is familiar with primary keys and foreign keys.
It’s all about linking data. Let’s take your Social Security record, which is a unique ID that identifies you. Your record will also include your address, as well as a contact number and/or an email address. These two pieces of data can then be linked to external data, such as social media, which may contain an email address or telephone number. If they don’t have either of these, they can even process images from posts to try to identify a common geospatial address, which allows them to run that against your phone location to narrow things down. AI can process vast amounts of data very quickly to build a profile, and I can assure you, this is no longer science fiction.
Be in no doubt, Palantir are the global gold standard when it comes to data analytics; it’s alleged they even helped the CIA locate Osama Bin Laden, so finding Bobby Smith in New York or Karen Nuisance in Ohio is a walk in the park. If you think the poster child for transactionalism would not leverage political profiling in the 2026 midterms, you should seek some help. My friends, this is a very real threat to civil liberties on a scale never experienced in Western society, and Trump, given the opportunity, will grab it with both hands, because the stakes are so high.
Imagine what you could do with a political profile on every eligible voter, aggregating voter registration, political donations, voter records, and polling data. It could do everything from recommending purges from voter rolls to serving up targeted political Ads. This is the road to absolute control that could never be restored. You can still hold ‘free elections’, as is currently the case in a competitive autocracy. They would be just minus the fairness, and that will certainly not be a problem for Trump. For anyone who thinks I am over-egging the cake, I respectfully suggest you are wrong. AI brings all this within reach NOW. The only thing missing is the relationship keys for some of the data.
Imagine you are a pregnant woman seeking reproductive care out of state. The link between a driver's license or a credit card transaction for a flight or train would connect you back to your address, then to your social security number, and ultimately to your medical records. You could then be prevented from leaving your state if pregnant. Please don’t doubt me when I say big data is the whole ball game for an authoritarian state. It’s natural to think this assessment is fanciful because, as part of a Western democratic society, we have no overt experience with this level of surveillance, even though most of it has been in place for years, particularly in areas such as face recognition and number plate readers.
Surveillance is now an integral part of Western society; it’s just not in your face. Existing systems often operate in a walled-off space. The danger arises when they are combined into a single state-controlled dataset; that’s when the trouble really begins. The next natural step is social credit, but that’s a story for another day. This is not fear-mongering; it is merely an exercise in making you aware of the possibilities of aggregated data in the wrong hands, and Trump and his acolytes are the wrong hands.
This is Carole’s recent TED Talk which revisits the previous event six years ago that almost destroyed her life. This is how serious this threat is. I don’t claim to be a journalist, but Carole is a world class investigative journalist that uncovered the Facebook scandal and Lord has it cost her.
I have a short film on this topic that I've created, but I’m waiting for copyright clearance on a couple of items before I can publish it. I will post it separately and link back to this article once it is released. I didn’t want to hold off on publishing this piece in the meantime.
THANK YOU! Your writing is captivating & honest! please keep speaking out & sharing your knowledge! I watched those Ted talks last year . This is not talked about enough! EVERYONE needs to know this! Our elected officials on both sides have not protected us from this data crime surveillance! Of course legacy media has also failed in My opinion.
I am not a "Democrat" and I marched on Saturday. I cannot abide by Trump and his ways. I saw how he was the last time. I am basically conservative, yet refuse to vote for Republican idiots. I have never voted a straight party.