covid diary: day 103

Haha, ok, sure.

It felt like a very long weekend. The Trump administration did some real sketchy shit, like trying to fire the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York (again) because he's investigating the president's personal lawyer and other cronies (again) because they're all a bunch of criminals. Also he had a big rally in Tulsa, and the campaign touted it as the kickoff to this election season, bragging that fully ONE MILLION tickets had been reserved. Not only that, but bragging that the data collected from those fully ONE MILLION reservations was going to catapult the data-collection arm of the campaign into the stratosphere.

Hahahahaha, too bad that's not how it worked out. In reality (or as Rachel Maddow puts it, "here on Earth 1") only about 6,200 people attended the rally. None of them social distanced, most of them declined to wear masks, and all of them are people with very bad judgment.

But what happened to the rest of the reservations? Sure, there were some supporters who maybe decided not to risk their health by going, but it turns out the bulk of the tickets were reserved by teenagers and K-pop stans, in a campaign coordinated over social media. These kids posted online to teach each other to create dummy email accounts and temporary phone numbers, register for tickets, get confirmation of their reservation, and then delete the accounts. And THEN they deleted the social media posts they used to coordinate the effort.

These kids need to GET ON MY LAWN. Seriously. So smart. So creative!

And what a blow to Trump. We all know that he's a dark malevolence who feeds on the attention of others, so having to give a triumphant speech to a not-even-half-full venue was a real ego blow for him. Not to mention that all that fake data has now infiltrated the campaign infrastructure, so any subsequent email/direct mail/phone campaigns will have a very high failure rate (or they'll just have to delete all the data from the whole event, including from actual supporters, and lose all the time/effort/money they spent promoting the thing).

In short, I believe the children are our future. And the K-pop stans, even though I don't really understand them as a whole because I am old and missed that whole movement.

Nationwide cases: 2,312,302. Deaths: 120,402.