[Majorityrights News] Alex Navalny, born 4th June, 1976; died at Yamalo-Nenets penitentiary 16th February, 2024 Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, 16 February 2024 23:43.
[Majorityrights Central] A couple of exchanges on the nature and meaning of Christianity’s origin Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 25 July 2023 22:19.
[Majorityrights News] Is the Ukrainian counter-offensive for Bakhmut the counter-offensive for Ukraine? Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, 18 May 2023 18:55.
Posted by DanielS on Saturday, 21 January 2017 12:56.
Heavy, “Donald Trump Cabinet Picks List: All of the President-Elect’s Appointments” *18 Nov 2016:
The following is a list of everyone who has been appointed to work with Trump in the White House thus far, including members of the cabinet and advisers to the president.
The list of nominees is in accordance with Politico and The New York Times. Some candidates are awaiting confirmation. Triple parentheses ((())) indicate Jewish ancestry but not the only ones likely to be serving Jewish and complicit interests thereof.
Secretary of State: Rex Tillerson
Chief of Staff: Reince Priebus General John F. Kelly
Posted by DanielS on Wednesday, 04 January 2017 21:02.
TNO, “Germany: 3,000 Sex Attack Victims in 2016”, 4 Jan 2016:
Third World invaders pretending to be refugees in Germany preyed upon 2,000 adults and 1,000 children in 2015, a new study by monitoring group XZ Einzefall has shown - at least 1,964 of the sex attacks were serious,
The true number of attacks and victims is much higher, because police are under orders to withhold hundreds of reports and only respond if the media makes inquiries.
XY Einzefall is a German-based monitoring group which has carefully recorded every sex assault carried out in Germany since Angela Merkel opened that country’s gates to the mass Third World invasion in 2015.
Their final report for 2016, which can be found in spreadsheet format here, reveals that reported incidents only total 1,964, consisting of at least 201 rapes, 1,559 sex attacks, and 204 sex attacks in public swimming pools.
Only incidents which were actually reported by the police, or which were reported in the controlled media, were added to the XZ Einzefall list. Their spreadsheet contains the links to the police and media reports.
Of the 201 reported rapes, at least 35 were minors, the study showed. Of the 1,559 sex attacks, 653 victims were minors, and of the 204 swimming pool sex attacks, 286 were minors.
This works out at nearly six serious sex attacks every day during 2016.
However, as XY Einzelfall points out in its study, these figures are merely the tip of the iceberg. Quoting a separate study in Austria, the groups said that “only a tiny fraction of all crimes are published as a police or media-report.”
The Austrian study quoted compared complaints laid with the police to those reported by the police’s media officers and those reported in the media. The difference was vast, the study said, finding that in Vienna, of the more than 200,000 complaints made to police, less than 2,000 police reports were actually published.
With regard to rape cases, the study found, of the 647 rapes reported to the police, only 15 were ever mentioned by police reports and media.
“For this reason,” the study says, “the total number of crimes committed by migrants is much higher.”
Posted by DanielS on Monday, 26 December 2016 05:02.
TNO, “French Mayor on Trial for Truth”, 24 Dec 2016:
The French mayor of the town of Béziers has been charged with “hate crimes” after saying that it was a “problem” that a class in a local school was 91 percent Muslim.
The charges were brought by the Jewish “International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism” (Ligue Internationale Contre le Racisme et l’Antisémitisme, LICRA).
Mayor Robert Menard denied his comments were discriminatory, saying he had “just described the situation in my town.”
“The most striking proof of the great Replacement in progress. Just look at old class photos.” - Mayor Robert Menard.
The comments were made back in September 2016, when Menard told French news channel LCI that “In a class in the city Center in my town, 91 percent of the children are Muslims. Obviously, this is a problem. There are limits to tolerance.”
At the same time, Menard tweeted his regret at witnessing “the great replacement” of France’s white population by Third World invaders.
According to French media, his comments were “seized upon” by LICRA, and the Jewish group immediately pressed charges for “hate” and “incitement.”
After months of deliberation, Menard’s trial date has now been set for March 8, LICRA announced on their Twitter feed.
After months of deliberation, Menard’s trial date has now been set for March 8, LICRA announced on their Twitter feed.
Posted by DanielS on Saturday, 17 December 2016 16:31.
Mark Collett:
Nationalism should never be about being edgy and scaring people. We aren’t some 1% motorcycle club, with the motto, ‘no one likes us and we don’t care.’ ..we aren’t trying to scare people or offend them. In fact, we are trying to offer scared people hope…and our people have plenty to fear.
RUSSIA is engaged in a “campaign” of propaganda and cyber-warfare against Britain, Government officials have acknowledged for the first time. British officials are concerned about growing Russian influence on UK institutions. Theresa May will chair a National Security Council session within weeks to discuss the issue after senior Whitehall figures claimed the Kremlin is responsible for a plot to sabotage the UK with espionage and misinformation.
This comes after Barack Obama directly challenged Russia in an astonishing response to reports by US intelligence services claiming November’s general election was hacked under Vladimir Putin’s watch..
The outgoing President vowed the US would retaliate to the suspected espionage, and said the country would take action “at a time and place of our own choosing”.
He added: “Don’t do this stuff to us, because we can do this to you.”
US officials have expressed near-certainty Putin supervised the data breaches which brought Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign to ruin.
One official said: “If anything, given his background as a KGB officer, Putin has a much tighter grip on all Russian surveillance operations, civilian and military, foreign and domestic, than any democratic leader does.”
And in a cabinet meeting two months ago, top intelligence officers and civil servant voiced worries the same scale of threat from Moscow could extend to Britain.
A source told the Times: “There was an agreement on the need to do more across Whitehall to understand and assess and formulate options on how to reposed to Russian activities.”
Security services fear British institutions and companies have been infiltrated by Russian agents – some of whom could even be UK citizens.
And last night it was revealed several leading academics at Cambridge University left an intelligence forum following concerns over Russian interference.
The head of the armed forces earlier this week urged for counterintelligence efforts to be ramped up in an attempt to catch Russian cells.
Air Chief Marshal Sir Stuart Peach said: “We need to pay more attention to counterespionage and counterintelligence to protect our hard-won research, protect our industry and protect our competitive advantage.”
The extent of Russian infiltration in Britain is believed to be more severe than during the Cold War.
Shortly after Donald Trump was elected to be the next President of the United States, Matt Harrigan the CEO of a Cybersecurity firm, threatened to kill him! Harrigan posted his threats on his facebook page or some F/B group page. Some of his threats…
” I’m going to kill the president. Elect.” . ” Bring it Secret Service”.. ” Nope, getting a sniper rifle and perching myself where it counts. Find a bedroom in the whitehouse that suits you motherfucker I’ll find you.”
Screen shot of threats
Harrigan has since apologised. “My humble apologies that a flawed joke has become public/out of context.” Harrigan also resigned as the CEO of the company he worked for. He claimed to be surprised that his posts had become viral public consumption as they were only intended for his circle of friends, he was the CEO of a cybersecurity firm yet was surprised when his threats became viral?, he also played the drunk card. Harrigan was interviewed by the Secret Service and said he does not anticipate any charges.
Rev Matt Hale was convicted of soliciting an FBI informant (Tony Evola) to kill Federal Judge Joan Lefkow and was subsequently sentenced to 40 years in prison. Rev Hale was set up by the government. I will not go into the details of his abduction by the government here as most of our readers are quite aware them. For those unaware of the details…
Poor Matt Hale was set up by an FBI informant posing as his security guard. From what I understand, the informant asked Matt “if he wanted to do something about the judge handling his case” (of a patent violation - a Jewish man had copyrighted the logo of Matt’s church in order to file suit against him for copyright violation); Matt responded “yes, but don’t do anything illegal.” The Feds apparently wanted so badly to get Matt Hale incarcerated that that was “enough evidence” to sentence him for 40 years. Tragic. - DanielS
..
FREE MATT HALE!
I will play devils advocate and say the “evidence” used to convict Rev Matt Hale was valid, all the prosecutor had was hearsay from a government informant that Hale wanted a judge killed. There was no written pronouncement of his supposed intentions. Even if he was guilty of what he was accused of the sentence was extreme. I’m sure a president elect Trumps a Judge? Harrigan posted clearly for all to see that he himself was going to kill the President elect! All he had to do was resign from his job and apologise for his inappropriate conduct. If Rev Hale were to apologise for his supposed misdeed and claim that it evolved from a drunken state, would he be afforded the same leniency given to Harrigan? The answer of course is no, the government entrapped Hale to get him to shut up, he was awakening far too many people, he needed to be silenced for the Zionist narrative(s) to remain intact. The Harrigan incident just further solidifies the fact that the unjust and harsh punishment that Rev Hale received was undeserved and contrived.
I do not want Matt Harrigan to be held to the same standard as Matt Hale, I want Matt Hale to be held to the same standard as Matt Harrigan.
Posted by DanielS on Wednesday, 16 November 2016 07:24.
NPR, “Could Trump ‘Undermine The Legacy Of The Obama Presidency’ With The Stroke Of A Pen?” 15 Nov 2016:
New Yorker writer Evan Osnos talks about the executive orders and other actions that Trump can use to undo existing agreements on climate change, immigration and foreign policy.
[...]
DAVE DAVIES, BYLINE: Well, Evan Osnos, welcome back to FRESH AIR. How reliable are campaign promises as a predictor of a president’s agenda in office, and will Trump be different?
EVAN OSNOS: I assumed that, like, I think like a lot of Americans, that campaign promises are not very valuable in terms of actually predicting the course of a presidency. We - you know, we tend to remember when campaigns say things that they don’t then fulfill. But actually, the political science on this is pretty clear, and it tells a very different story, which is that if you go back over the history of the presidency, you find that presidents tend to achieve the majority - the overwhelming majority of the things that they set out to accomplish when they were candidates.
[...]
DAVIES: Now, when people look at Donald Trump, some would say it’s not clear that he has any deeply held political beliefs. I mean, he used to be pro-choice. He used to be a Democrat. He’s kind of been all over the place over the course of his business career, and a lot of what he says seems kind of improvised, but we have some clues. I mean, there are two big appointments just announced. The Republican National Committee chairman, Reince Priebus, will be Trump’s chief of staff, and at the same time, his campaign CEO, Steve Bannon, who is from the right wing Breitbart News, will be a senior adviser with equal status to Reince Priebus. What does this tell us about Trump’s likely agenda?
OSNOS: Right. Well, I think a lot of us were very wary of the idea that Trump as president would actually do a lot of the things that he said as a candidate partly because he was, you know, obviously from way outside the mainstream and - of previous presidents. So perhaps the political science was useless. But there are a couple of things that I think are important to keep in mind. One is that the appointment of Steve Bannon as chief strategist and a counselor to the president is an extension of something that was very clear when this piece was written, which was that Donald Trump will move around on a lot of issues. He’s fluid, for instance, on what he would do on the technical basis of an H-1B visa, for instance, or whether or not he would allow school teachers to carry guns in the classroom.
But on three core ideas, he has stayed completely consistent. One of them is his belief that the United States is fundamentally being damaged by immigration. Number two is his belief that trade deals have done more damage to the United States than they have helped. And number three is his belief that the United States does too much for the world. As he said in 2015, I want to take back everything that the United States has given the world.
Steve Bannon, in his career at Breitbart, really transformed that organization into the principal exponent of those three ideas. So what you see today is Donald Trump is trying to balance the strategic objectives that his campaign road to victory in the form of Steve Bannon with the practical necessity of how do you actually operate within Washington. And for that, Reince Priebus, the new chief of staff, is the ultimate Washington professional. He has been here for his professional life. He has really risen to the top ranks of the Republican establishment, and he’s now in the position to be able to try to help Donald Trump achieve his objectives.
DAVIES: You know, there’s a point of view that says, yeah, ideologues can have their say, but it’s the chief of staff who controls the president’s schedule that really moves the levers of power. Do you have an opinion about whether one will be more important than the other?
OSNOS: I think if you look at the way that those two roles have been used in recent history, you find that they are both important, and in many ways, that’s the design here. Steve Bannon has called Breitbart, which was his media organization, quote, “the platform of the alt right,” unquote. And that is the previously fringe movement on the conservative far-right edge, which was founded by Richard Spencer who lives in Montana and believes in the separation of the races. And that has now moved sort of further into the mainstream as a result of Steve Bannon’s rise within the Trump campaign and now his installation in the White House. But in order to get those ideas accomplished, you need somebody who really is just as skilled as anyone in sort of managing the levers of inside power in Washington, and that’s where Reince Priebus comes in.
DAVIES: OK, I want to talk about some of the areas of policy that will matter here. And we’ll try and figure out, you know, what Trump has said, what he believes, what he is really committed to and what he can actually accomplish by himself and what he needs congressional action for. One thing that people have talked about is that President Obama has done a lot with executive orders because of the gridlock in Congress and that President Trump, once he is inaugurated, can immediately undo a bunch of stuff simply by signing executive orders, repealing President Obama’s initiatives. Is that true?
OSNOS: Yeah, that’s true, and that’s an explicit part of the incoming Trump administration’s plan. Campaign advisers described it to me as a first-day project, by which they meant that on the first day or within a few days Donald Trump would seek to sign as many as 25 executive orders, or uses of executive power in other forms, that would, in the words of one adviser, erase the Obama presidency.
I should point out that every president when they come in uses executive powers in one form or another. Barack Obama, for instance, signed nine executive orders in the first 10 days. Doing 25 would be ambitious. People who have been through transitions before tell me that’s not realistic. But he could do several things that would significantly undermine the legacy of the Obama presidency. His team has talked about this since Election Day, that one of the things that’s important to them is to restart exploration of the Keystone Pipeline.
They will significantly expand the pace and intensity of deportations. They will seek to, if not formally remove the United States from the Paris climate agreement, then they will be able to take steps that basically undermine it so they can make sure the United States is not enforcing restrictions on carbon output. They can restrict funding and so on. So they can do things right away with the stroke of a pen that would pretty significantly undermine the legacy of the Obama presidency.
DAVIES: Is there some fine print here? I mean, I believe I’ve read that when some executive orders have gone past the rulemaking stage…
OSNOS: That’s right.
DAVIES: ...There’s a process. What does that mean?
OSNOS: Yeah, that’s right. The hyperbole in saying that they would undermine the Obama presidency is that once an executive order has gone beyond what’s known as the rulemaking stage, then that means that in order to undo it there has to be, for instance, a period of public comment. There has to be other bureaucratic steps. And that can take as much as a year or more depending on how efficiently the bureaucracy goes about it. And that’s meaningful because I think the question of how civil servants will interpret efforts to try to undermine previous initiatives matters. But the relevant point is that by issuing the executive order the clock on that process begins.
DAVIES: OK. Well, let’s look at some specific policy areas and figure out what might happen. Let’s start with climate change. You just mentioned that. Do we - what do we know about his views on climate change and the extent to which he is committed to them based on his appointments so far?
OSNOS: Well, as a candidate and before, Donald Trump has expressed a lot of skepticism about climate change. He’s called it a hoax. At one point, he described it as a hoax that was perpetrated by the Chinese in order to try to undermine American competitiveness. He later said that was a joke. Since Election Day, some of the appointments that he’s made have made clear that he’s going to make good on his belief that American energy policy and attempts to combat climate change are going in the wrong direction. So, for instance, Donald Trump’s transition team for the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency is run by somebody named Myron Ebell who has been really one of the most outspoken skeptics of climate change, runs a program here called the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and it opposes regulation. It’s not clear exactly who funds it, but in the past, it was funded by fossil fuel companies including Exxon Mobil and others.
So this would be, I think, safe to say a radical change in the way the United States has talked and thought about climate change. One of the people that he has also indicated could be powerful in terms of shaping energy policy is Harold Hamm who was a billionaire who founded the shale oil company Continental Resources. He’s been a big contributor to the Koch brothers fundraising network, and there is so far no indication that Donald Trump did not mean what he said when he talked about climate change being a hoax that has damaged American competitiveness.
DAVIES: Are there some specific things President Trump could do immediately to change the direction of climate policy?
OSNOS: Yeah, he could. The Paris climate deal is a formal matter, requires four years to unwind. So in the interim, he could immediately suspend American payments to the deal in effect. These are the payments that the United States would make to U.N.-affiliated agencies that would be in charge of both implementing the deal and then also helping developing countries pay for making some of the concessions and transitions that are required in order to implement it.
[...]
DAVIES: You talk to some experienced people in immigration for your piece in The New Yorker about what it would take to affirmatively go out and find millions of undocumented workers and get them out of the country. You want to share a bit of that with us?
OSNOS: Yeah. I spoke to Julie Myers Wood, for instance, who was the head of Immigration Customs and Enforcement under George W. Bush, and she is opposed to Donald Trump-stated policies on immigration in many ways. But she also said that it’s a big mistake to assume that his ideas are so radical as to therefore be impossible, and that was her major point to me was that there are tools that are at the disposal of a president that would allow them to do this dramatic escalation of deportation. For instance, a president could give the IRS files to ICE, to Immigrations Customs Enforcement. So IRS files are considered to be the most reliable source of home addresses because a lot of undocumented immigrants who pay taxes, for instance, put in a reliable home address so that they can receive their refund.
If the president allowed it, that would then make it much easier for enforcement agents to be able to go out and find people. Another thing that would be at the disposal of a President is what’s known as 287-G of the Immigration Act which would allow the local and state agents, basically cops of one kind or another, to be enlisted in service of the deportation project. So that’s how you begin to see, for instance, local police being brought in for the purposes of raiding farms or factories and beginning to achieve the deportation numbers that he’s talked about.
But in order to do so, it would take a significant escalation of manpower and also of resources. But what came clear from my reporting on the subject was that it’s a big mistake to assume that it’s - this is binary that you either will have the system as it exists today or you would have some completely unimaginable system that Donald Trump has talked about. There is in fact a spectrum in between that Trump could move fairly substantially down the road to achieving his objectives on immigration.
[...]
DAVIES: Let’s talk about trade and the economy. You know, one of his core principles you said is the belief that trade deals have harmed America’s economy and killed jobs. What authority would he have immediately to remake or undo American trade policy?
OSNOS: The president has broad authority on trade. So, for instance, right away, the president could end American participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership. I think it’s fair to assume that the TPP as it’s known is now dead. But beyond that, he could also force Canada and Mexico to renegotiate NAFTA or withdraw from it eventually.
There is a process in the case of NAFTA. He couldn’t just do it immediately. But when it comes to slapping tariffs, for instance, on other countries, there’s two ways to do it. One requires Congress and one doesn’t. If he goes after specific categories of goods - so if he says, for instance, that, you know, Chinese exports of one specific type, let’s call it, you know, chicken or tires or something like that, then he can use his own presidential power to do that sort of on an emergency basis. But if he’s going to try to impose a broad-based tariff against a country, that would actually require the consent of Congress.
But I think the important point is that he has the ability to change the tenor of the trade relationship with a country by talking about it in other ways. And as we all know, you know, he talked about China in very harsh terms during this campaign. My own sense based on talking to his trade advisers and his China specialists was that that was a kind of theater. I don’t believe that Donald Trump is prepared actually in any way to go to a trade war with China, I think, meaning that, you know, one of the things that his advisers said to me was that Donald Trump’s persona that he - you know, he’s confrontational, he says outrageous things, that that would have a chilling effect on the other side and that China would then fall in line. That’s their theory. They’re not actually prepared for the full economic consequences, which would be severe and profound, of a trade war with the world’s second-largest economy.
DAVIES: Well, this is an interesting and important question. And you can’t predict the future, but if, in fact, one of his core beliefs is that this is a big problem, we have to fix this to rebuild the American economy, what do the economists you talk to expect to happen? Are we going to have a trade war? What would it do?
OSNOS: A trade war could be a really dramatic turn in American economic history. If you talk to independent analysts, people who are not involved in either campaign, somebody - there’s a guy, for instance, named Mark Zandi, who’s an economist at Moody’s Analytics. And he’s worked for Republicans and he’s worked for Democrats in the past. And what he says is that Trump’s plan, if he actually did the things that he said he would and triggered a trade war with China that that would put probably somewhere around 4 million Americans out of work. And then over the ensuing recession that it would also cost the economy another 3 million jobs that would have been created otherwise.
Most economists broadly agree that a trade war would be hugely damaging to the United States.
[...]
DAVIES: One of the things he also says he wants to do is immediately cut the regulatory burdens on businesses on Wall Street. Can he do that himself?
OSNOS: He can. The president has authority, ultimate authority over 15 executive agencies. And he would be able to direct them to change the pace and spirit in which they are issuing regulations. He has said - I’m not clear on whether this is legally possible - that he wants to do a version of what Vice President-elect Mike Pence did in Indiana.
Pence created an agency that was dedicated to suspending the creation of all new regulations except for public health and safety.
[...]
DAVIES: He’s promised big tax cuts. Will they really happen?
OSNOS: That, I think, is one of his better bets. He’s got a Republican Congress on his side. And at this point, it’s hard to see them not doing it.
DAVIES: And what kind of tax cuts are we talking about? I mean, for those of us who haven’t carefully followed his campaign positions, are they upper income, middle income, everybody?
OSNOS: They provide the greatest relief to the upper stratum of the tax base, so the highest earners will do best. There is also tax relief for the sort of upper-middle-class. Then corporate tax rates will be substantially relieved.
[...]
DAVIES: Let’s talk about foreign and military policy. He’s criticized the deal with Iran. Can he scuttle that deal by himself?
OSNOS: Yes, he can. What he has said he wants to do is renegotiate the deal with Iran, and renegotiate is a sort of a flexible word. It’s not clear what he means entirely. But were he to try to reopen that deal, that could actually - that could really change the course of things more broadly beyond just the Iran deal because at that point what happens is that Iran - and Iran specialists told me as much months ago - would regard the United States seeking to renegotiate the deal as an abrogation of the deal.
At that point, they would say that the United States has basically not held up its end of the bargain, and they would have the right - the legal authority and the right - to restart the development of nuclear energy. So I think he’s going to find once he begins to get into the details of this that by simply announcing that he’s going to renegotiate that might not achieve the effect he has in mind. It might actually hasten the restart of the Iranian nuclear program.
[...]
DAVIES: When you wrote about Donald Trump and his policies towards the military and towards foreign affairs, the issue of temperament comes up. This is a loaded word. He hated being criticized for his temperament. But you have - you found a quote from his book “Think Like A Billionaire.” It can be smart to be shallow, that he has a penchant for making big decisions quickly, that he trusts his gut. Share what - some of what you learned about what that might mean from your conversations with military and intelligence officials.
OSNOS: Yeah. When you talk to a broad range of people who have been involved in the most sensitive national security questions, you know - these are the people who’ve been in the Situation Room at crucial moments particularly from Republican administrations what they’ll tell you is that the crucial ingredient is whether or not a president is impetuous, whether or not the president makes decisions before they have as much information and as many competing points of view as possible. And often as one - James Woolsey who is a former director of the CIA is now an adviser to the Trump administration - before he became an adviser to Trump, he said to me in an interview that very often the first information that a president receives is wrong. And we’ve seen that beginning all the way from Vietnam up to the present day. And part of the sort of crucial patience that’s required is the ability to both wait until you have a fuller picture and then also be prepared to act. But if you act on the basis of limited information, history suggests to us that we would have made a lot of catastrophic choices.
[...]
DAVIES: You know, last year, you wrote about white nationalist groups that have embraced Trump, and they feel he’s expanded their reach, given them some legitimacy and, of course, since the election there have been some very troubling cases of swastikas, racist graffiti, some assaults racist hate speech. You know, some would see this as just a fringe that is an embarrassment to most Republicans and conservatives I’m wondering what you make of this and what the impact will be of Trump being in the White House?
OSNOS: Well, in some ways, this was a storyline that I think people who generally covered politics didn’t initially embrace, you know, the idea that somehow the alt-right or the white nationalist world would be even talked about in a discussion of an incoming presidential. It was so ludicrous that we didn’t even really do it. And then it just became very clear early on in the Trump campaign that they were a part of this phenomenon. The neo-Nazi website endorsed him for president 12 days after he announced. And later you follow it all the way through 20 months later. He was endorsed by the newspaper the KKK. Steve Bannon has been - who is now chief strategist in the White House - has been really the sort of principal thinker in terms of how do you take ideas that exist way out on the far right and get them in front of people’s eyes that are more conventional readers?
And at Breitbart, that’s really what he did. He sort of - it became the platform for the alt-right. When I spoke on Election Day to a white nationalist leader named Matthew Heimbach as the sort of results became clear, I said, you know, how are you feeling? And he said vindicated. And what he said was that this campaign and that the victory of Donald Trump has shown that there is an appetite out there for his ideas, even if people can’t quite bring themselves to say so.
You know, I just have to say, I mean, this was so preposterous that we’d be talking about this a couple of years ago, that it’s a reminder of how much politics have changed and been changed by the candidacy of Donald Trump. Now, look, how that actually translates into a White House, we don’t yet know. But Steve Bannon is now a couple of steps from the Oval Office, and that’s - we’re in uncharted territory there.
DAVIES: Evan Osnos, thanks so much for speaking with us.
The US president is not directly chosen by voters, but by ‘electors’ that people in a state vote for.
The more people in a state, the more electors an area has. For example, Texas has a population of 25 million and is afforded 38 Electoral College votes, while Delaware has a population of 936,000 and has only three votes.
There are 538 electors in total, corresponding to 435 members of Congress, 100 Senators and three additional electors for the District of Columbia. They will meet in their respective states on 19 December to ultimately elect the President.
Why is the Electoral College in place?
The system was established to ensure regional balance — it makes it mathematically impossible for a candidate with large amounts of support in just one region to overwhelm the vote.
What are the criticisms of the Electoral College?
It renders safe states almost irrelevant to the result of the election: for example it does not matter if Ms Clinton wins a state by five or 40 per cent, she will still get the same number of Electoral College votes.
Five states can vote to legalize marijuana on Election Day
Instead, the result hinges on a handful of states that are politically divided, which some say is undemocratic.
The swing states have a lot of power because most of them choose to elect whoever is the state-wide winner, regardless of the margin they won by.
If Mr Trump wins or loses by a tiny fraction in Florida, for example, all 29 votes flip depending on it.
Analysts also say the system favours smaller and more rural states, since the minimum number of electors a state can have is three — so states with very small populations are over-represented.
And the system technically allows the electors to hijack the result, since it is not certain the electors will vote the way their state does.
Although around 30 of the 50 states have passed laws – meaning their electors must vote according to the popular vote in their state – the punishment for not doing so can merely be a fine. This means they could potentially defy the electorate’s choice.
Almost every state chooses to allocate all its Electoral College votes to whoever comes in first place statewide, regardless of their margin of victory.
Whoever gets to 270 electoral votes first – the majority of the 578 total votes – will win the election.
Theresa May will chair a meeting to discuss the issue.
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