Trump's Death Cult Explained

[Jon Miller]

But I cant start a church of the non-believers and get an exemption from taxes. I gotta subsidize the believers and their churches.

You can start a philanthropic institution dedicated to supporting humanism/etc (or a support group for leaving cults) and get it classified as a charity.

I don't understand how you are subsidizing believers, other than the way you are subsidizing all charities.

JM
(It comes across as if you don't understand how taxation works in the US.)

[Berzerker]

Believers still pay the same taxes as unbelievers. Churches just do not pay taxes that non-religious non-profit organizations do not have to pay.

JM

But I cant start a church of the non-believers and get an exemption from taxes. I gotta subsidize the believers and their churches.

[Berzerker]

the effect is the same... thats the point, if my local church doesn't pay any taxes, the people who do pay the taxes are subsidizing the church.

[Berzerker]

https://www.vox.com/2018/10/19/17990...tion-tampering

THat was a two second search from the description you gave. "twitter troll farms 100k". Just to see what came up. Shrug.

I've not read the details, but it looks like the data is available if you are so inclined to read them.

I never bothered looking, I got the description from Aaron Mate and Jimmy Dore (maybe Greenwald?). During congressional testimony the guy representing Google was asked how much $ they were paid and he said 3-4k as I remember. As for the Vox article:

The Twitter dump encompasses 10 million tweets since 2009 — 9 million of them from the IRA, the rest mainly from the suspected Iranian accounts.

We're interested in the summer/fall of 2016... But if they've been doing this for over a decade why weaponize it to red bait opponents? Oh, stupid question - we're talking about Hillary Clinton, John Podesta, John Brennan and assorted operatives masquerading as public servants.

The IRA is a known Russian troll factory, and it’s responsible for the vast majority of the flood of troll content that’s been unleashed across social media in recent years — as well as a significant amount of direct campaigning in the 2016 US election.

Okay, whats a significant amount and how bipartisan was it? I'm reading these qualifiers closely to figure out the extent of the effort and it keeps getting smaller and smaller.

many of the campaigns undertaken by the IRA involved anti-Clinton propaganda

How many? Were there any anti-Trump ads? What % of the ad buy was devoted to anti-Clinton propaganda?

Earlier this year, special counsel Robert Mueller indicted the IRA for its actions, including a charge for “conspiracy to defraud the United States.” However, there’s little evidence that the IRA’s agitation was directly responsible for shifting election results.

This is an older article but the charges have been dropped, the accused fought them and poof, they're gone. Kinda pulls the curtain back on the wizard. Btw, the owner of Crowdstrike testified back in Jan '17 that they actually had no proof the Russians stole the DNC emails. How many times did people like Schiff say they had the proof and never showed it? These Russia Gaters were telling us a different story than the ones they gave under oath.

Though most of the tweets about the US election involved stirring up anti-Clinton sentiment, the trolls deployed a wide range of political rhetoric, ranging from tweets supporting the Black Lives Matter movement to spreading conspiracy theories and hoaxes.

This often involved stoking both sides of a political controversy at the same time, as well as capitalizing on current news, events, and hashtags for maximum efficacy. The trolls also engaged with pop culture and internet memes to seem more authentic.

I followed the link within their story to analysis of the tweets:

4. Equal-Opportunity Troll Farms


The Russian trolls were non-partisan: they tried to inflame everybody, regardless of race, creed, politics, or sexual orientation. On many occasions, they pushed both sides of divisive issues.

“Mass shooting occurs even in #GunFreeZones so people is the problem not guns #Prayers4California” ( @micparrish, December 3, 2015)

“mass shooting wont stop until there are #GunFreeZones #Prayers4California” (@LazyKStafford, December 3, 2015)

It is vital to recognize this factor to end the partisan perception that Russian influence operations focused on one side of the political spectrum. Focus shifted over time or at specific moments based target audience.

Its called click bait...and most of the ads from Russia is in Russian for a domestic audience. They were especially active when the war with Ukraine broke out.

These opportunistic attacks had little to no discernible impact on the target populations’ political behavior, indicating the limitations of online troll operations.

Nobody voted differently based on these ads. I got to the end of that link to see the authors are from the Atlantic Council. Did you know they took millions from the owner of Burisma after they trashed the prosecutor Shokin who was investigating Hunter Biden's company?

So, how many ads targeted Clinton and how many targeted Trump?

and can we see them ourselves?

Meanwhile the Israeli lobby has Congress by the balls and the Democrats asked Russia and Ukraine to interfere in our elections. The Steele dossier was largely Russian disinformation and it was sold to the FBI who took it to a Fisa court to spy on Trump. These are the people complaining about foreign influence helping Trump.

[Jon Miller]

I think that whether a non-profit organization is a charity or not often depends on whether you think it is run by scammers. Determining that the leadership of a religious body are scammers is a pretty difficult.

An organization being a charity does not mean that the majority of people supports the organizations philanthropic goals. Only that the organization has them and is pursuing them.

https://www.score.org/resource/what-difference-between-nonprofit-organization-and-charity

"What most clearly distinguishes 501(c)(3) charities from other nonprofits, however, is that donations to 501(c)(3) organizations are tax-deductible to their donors."

"So, what is the actual trick to determining if a nonprofit is a charity? The answer is reliably found in the organization’s purpose. If the nonprofit’s purpose is educational or religious, if it provides funds or services to help support medical research, or if it promotes a cause that in some way could benefit the general public, 99% of the time that entity is known as a charity."

As far as religious scammers like many of the televangelists, I think it is the media's job to bring them to light. And if they are scammers, likely they are doing shady dealings in other areas, where the FBI can investigate them.

Obviously the key point of a charity versus a non-profit would be removed if tax deductions were removed from the tax code.

JM

[Ted Striker]

Leadership doesn't always mean an engineering schematic or a project plan or fluffy policy guideline document.

It's also about setting the tone and communicating what we should be finding acceptable and what we find reprehensible.

Take Trump, for example, who has emboldened all the racists with his garbage rants.

[giblets]

I think some scrutiny of whether a religious organization is really the equivalent of a charity (Scientology?) is reasonable.

[giblets]

A bunch of nice sounding platitudes that offers no concrete proposals or analysis, exactly what I'd expect from Obama

[Jon Miller]

I actually would support all charitable deductions to be removed. They were a good idea, and I actually think the religious ones are on the whole good, but it is too heavily gamed by the rich and is distortionary.

This is probably the single biggest benefit that religious organizations (And non-religious charities) have.

JM

[giblets]

But for the most part they are not using the particularities of the religious exemption, rather they are using the standard properties of corporations and traditional aspects of being a grifter.

To focus on religious organizations and not non-profit (and for-profit, to be honest) institutions including ones like hospitals/etc is picking out religious organizations for a sin tax.

JM

I'm not saying only churches should be taxed more, I'm only talking about them because someone else brought it up.

[Jon Miller]

The Constitution is silent about exempting religion from taxation, I'm sure pastors/preachers had to pay sales taxes and/or tariffs imposed by the feds. Besides, the congressional power to tax supercedes our rights. It aint about punishing religion, its the religious who are demanding special treatment and by granting it Congress has violated the opening words of the Bill of Rights - "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion". Why are non-believers required to subsidize the believers? Doesn't sound like religious freedom to me.

Believers still pay the same taxes as unbelievers. Churches just do not pay taxes that non-religious non-profit organizations do not have to pay.

JM

[Jon Miller]

Lewis states there are varying opinions among scholars as to how much of a burden jizya was.^[107] According to Norman Stillman: "jizya and kharaj were a "crushing burden for the non-Muslim peasantry who eked out a bare living in a subsistence economy."^[108] Both agree that ultimately, the additional taxation on non-Muslims was a critical factor that drove many dhimmis to leave their religion and accept Islam.^[109]

In some places, for example Egypt, the jizya was a tax incentive for Christians to convert to Islam.[71]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhimmi#Jizya_tax

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxati...Jews_in_Europe

There is strong historical reasons to be deeply concerned about government using taxation to persecute or favor particular religions/etc. Or to favor (or disfavor) religious belief versus none at all.

JM

[Jon Miller]

The Constitution is silent about exempting religion from taxation, I'm sure pastors/preachers had to pay sales taxes and/or tariffs imposed by the feds. Besides, the congressional power to tax supercedes our rights. It aint about punishing religion, its the religious who are demanding special treatment and by granting it Congress has violated the opening words of the Bill of Rights - "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion". Why are non-believers required to subsidize the believers? Doesn't sound like religious freedom to me.

McCulloch v. Maryland (1819)


In the landmark Supreme Court case McCulloch v. Maryland, Chief Justice John Marshall handed down one of his most important decisions regarding the expansion of Federal power. This case involved the power of Congress to charter a bank, which sparked the even broader issue of the division of powers between state and the Federal Government.

In 1816 Congress established the Second National Bank to help control the amount of unregulated currency issued by state banks. Many states questioned the constitutionality of the national bank, and Maryland set a precedent by requiring taxes on all banks not chartered by the state. In 1818 the State of Maryland approved legislation to impose taxes on the Second National Bank chartered by Congress.

James W. McCulloch, a Federal cashier at the Baltimore branch of the U.S. bank, refused to pay the taxes imposed by the state. Maryland filed a suit against McCulloch in an effort to collect the taxes. The Supreme Court, however, decided that the chartering of a bank was an implied power of the Constitution, under the “elastic clause,” which granted Congress the authority to “make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution” the work of the Federal Government.

This case presented a major issue that challenged the Constitution: Does the Federal Government hold sovereign power over states? The proceedings posed two questions: Does the Constitution give Congress power to create a bank? And could individual states ban or tax the bank? The court decided that the Federal Government had the right and power to set up a Federal bank and that states did not have the power to tax the Federal Government. Marshall ruled in favor of the Federal Government and concluded, “the power to tax involves the power to destroy."

https://www.ourdocuments.gov/print_f...and+%281819%29

Many of the recent calls to tax churches rest on the premise that churches owe at least some of their resources to political authorities — to governments — who can decide whether or not to collect and use those resources for their own purposes. In this view, exempting churches from taxation is seen as somehow subsidizing religion. But it is a mistake to equate “not taxing” with “subsidizing,” even if in some sense the effect is the same. Governments do not refrain from taxing religious institutions merely because it is politically convenient or socially acceptable to support them. They do and should continue to refrain from taxing churches because their power over them is limited, because “church” and “state” are distinct and because religious freedom is fundamentally important.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...uld-keep-them/

JM

[Jon Miller]

Megachurches, televangelists... there's plenty of grifters using religion to make themselves rich. Claiming I'm biased and demanding a "sin tax" is just projection on your part.

But for the most part they are not using the particularities of the religious exemption, rather they are using the standard properties of corporations and traditional aspects of being a grifter.

To focus on religious organizations and not non-profit (and for-profit, to be honest) institutions including ones like hospitals/etc is picking out religious organizations for a sin tax.

JM

[Dauphin]

https://www.vox.com/2018/10/19/17990946/twitter-russian-trolls-bots-election-tampering

THat was a two second search from the description you gave. "twitter troll farms 100k". Just to see what came up. Shrug.

I've not read the details, but it looks like the data is available if you are so inclined to read them.