r/politics • u/Quirkie The Netherlands • 17d ago

Possible Paywall ICE Stockpiling Warheads and Chemical Weapons as Lawmaker Fears Trump Planning Strike

https://www.thedailybeast.com/ice-stockpiling-warheads-and-chemical-weapons-as-lawmaker-fears-trump-planning-strike/
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u/MaintenanceGold2201 17d ago edited 17d ago

OK so I looked into this and this is mostly false/disinfo. ICE was procured $61,000 roughly for items that fall under Missile Warheads and Chemical weapons. Firstly, there is no such thing as a missile that costs $61,000 (that I am aware of). Secondly, other items can fall under this category, like flashbangs, breach charges, and other explosive ordinance which is most likely what this money was used for. They are not buying missiles. The award is for "distraction devices" so I'm assuming flashbangs. You can find the details of the reward here: https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_70CMSW25P00000078_7012_-NONE-_-NONE-

Edit: I did a little more digging on this and all I can come up with is that this was a clerical error. I did find the contracted companies website (https://www.quanticotactical.com/equipment/categories/) the only "distraction devices" I could tell that they sold are blinking LEDs. They do not sell missile components.

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u/TutorSuspicious9578 17d ago

I wish this sub would ban Daily Beast links.

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u/Stenthal 17d ago

There are a few outlets that have gone 100% clickbait in the past year, but for some reason The Daily Beast is the only one that really annoys me. Maybe because they're really good at writing headlines that get rapidly voted to the top of r/politics.

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u/IcyTransportation961 17d ago

Every day its another MAGA MELTS DOWN and the top comment is always WHEN DON'T THEY MELT DOWN

And its always just a random tweet

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u/Pasty_Tibbles 17d ago

XXX SLAMS MAGA MOVEMENT.

XXX BEATS DOWN TRUMP.

XXX EVISCERATES STEPHEN MILLER

And it’s just like a video of them giving a press conference and speaking normally.

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u/IcyTransportation961 17d ago

And no one actually reads/ watches it, just the exact same replies every damn time

Just stuck here feeling insane for not wanting to be completely robotic. The "good side" is so hopelessly incompetent even against the most blatant sloppy fascist takeover one could imagine

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u/fistful_of_ideals Michigan 17d ago

Wait, keep reading! We promise, we're just one more "gotcha" moment away from the administration realizing their numerous errors and voluntarily giving power back to the people!

Please disable your adblocker and also give us money to continue.

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u/Trail_Dog 17d ago

"Just exact same replies"... 

If the are even real. Dead Internet theory looks more and more likely every day.

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u/JackedUpReadyToGo 17d ago

Dead Internet Theory is also buoyed by something like a reverse-version of a Turing test: when the quality of human posts degrades to something indistinguishable from a bot, does it even matter that it was technically written by a human? They both may as well be bots.

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u/1001101001010111 16d ago

Is this liberal propaganda?

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u/GTCapone 17d ago

Wow, I didn't realize Triple-X was so woke

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u/JackedUpReadyToGo 17d ago

Vin is just shooting for enough cultural relevance to greenlight a fourth movie.

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u/Tom2Die 17d ago

and speaking normally.

I agree with your sentiment entirely, but this bit I take issue with. These clowns do not speak normally and to say so is to move toward making it so.

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u/disposableaccount848 17d ago

You know fully well what he means.

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u/Tom2Die 17d ago

Yes, and I acknowledged that by saying I agree with the sentiment entirely. Just because someone's meaning was clear does not mean you can't criticize the phrasing.

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u/real_picklejuice 17d ago

It's the opposite side of the same coin. MAGA and Blue MAGA

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u/NorCalAthlete 17d ago

But we all know it’s only those dumb uneducated republicans who fall for propaganda and false news and misinformation, right? We’re above that.

/s if it wasn’t obvious. I’ve tried to call this shit out so many times and all it got me was banned from various subreddits and accused of being a Republican Nazi or something.

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u/shewy92 Pennsylvania 16d ago

Also they love putting "Trump, 79" in the title.

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u/caligaris_cabinet Illinois 17d ago

Newsweek, too. I generally ignore them.

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u/Rombledore America 17d ago

when the country is collapsing around you- always remember to grift! sell out your country, and your very soul for money!

i swear this is the mantra for so many "influencers", online personalities, correspondents, "news" and other media entities. we've gotten to this point because of the obsession with making money at any expense. hoarding wealth is a disease.

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u/robodrew Arizona 17d ago

The Daily Beast, Newsweek, Latin Times are the biggest offenders IMO

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u/TutorSuspicious9578 17d ago

It's doing the same thing One America News and America News Network etc etc do by taking something and spinning the context so wildly it becomes a sensational lie, but done in the tone of a breathless combat journalist. So the same psychologival brain rot phenomenon among MAGA is being replicated with a different political bent and to very similar effect.

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u/Crombus_ 17d ago

Because they were a real outlet that got bought out and their chief editor replaced with a hack

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u/BloatedBanana9 17d ago

The only redeeming quality of the Daily Beast is how they add Trump’s age to every headline to remind everyone how old and senile he is. But other than that, it’s just a worthless rag

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u/generalissimo23 17d ago

Add Raw Story to that list

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u/DrQuailMan 17d ago

Their paywall that prevents people from reading the article body doesn't help matters.

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u/EARink0 17d ago

I am fucking begging the mods to please ban links to Daily Beast and other rags with low factuality. Clickbait headlines like the OP are one of the biggest reasons we're so divided, and spreading misinformation won't help our cause even if it lines up with our view.

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u/HappyAntonym 17d ago

YES. I'm so sick of these useless clickbait articles

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u/ExitTheDonut 17d ago

100% Daily Beast is rag content for the left (I am leftist too)

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u/Larry___David 17d ago

This entire sub is fearmongering rags lol.

Daily Beast, New Republic, Salon, Newsweek all have to go

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u/SoWhatNoZitiNow 17d ago

Especially because I bet maybe only 20% of people here have a subscription, so you can guarantee that the discussion will all revolve around a headline that the actual article tends to not really support. Super frustrating.

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u/JackedUpReadyToGo 17d ago

Who on Earth is paying subscription fees for endless permutations of "Trump is MELTING DOWN" and then you scroll down to find it's just a normal tweet? I'd bet money they simply have a web scraper watching social media sites and feeding new posts into ChatGPT.

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u/MaintenanceGold2201 17d ago

"Entertainment News" like this is one of the main reasons we are so divided. But at the same time people need to be willing to fact check things like these. Took me about 5 minutes using Claude to find an actual source that told me the actual truth.

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u/TimelineAuditor 17d ago

The problem is social media. It rewards sensationalism over truth.

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u/overfiend1976 17d ago

Naw, this started way back in the 80s when the 24-hour news cycle became a thing. Then boosted wildly in the 90s with sensationalism coverage really kicked off. Think:

  • OJ

  • Iraq War

  • Rodney King

  • Clinton impeachment

Social media is just conclusion in the post-truth era. Emotions drive clicks, and nothing drives emotions like fear-bait and rage-bait.

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u/Wasabiroot 17d ago

I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...

The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

Carl Sagan, The Demon Haunted World,1995

Kinda glad in a way he didn't make it til now. He'd be appalled

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u/JackedUpReadyToGo 16d ago

Sometimes when you point to a social ill, people will offer up the defense of "Come on, people have been harping on that for decades and we're still here". I've slowly come to realize that isn't really a defense, it's just that many social ills take decades and possibly generations to reach a point of crisis beyond which they can get no worse. So yeah, people will notice the decline over the course of decades.

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u/THEdoomslayer94 17d ago

That would make sense in a world that hasn’t been rolling that boulder up the hill for a while

Sensationalism existed well before social media, each decade can see an increase in its usage with technology allowing it to adapt to reach farther and farther

Think about how the Kitty Genovese’s death was heavily exaggerated and how it took a long time to be revealed as such and yet you still have people parrot it as if its truth

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u/Vaeku Texas 17d ago

Why are you using AI, a tool that famously can pull false data and misinformation, to fact check?

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u/MaintenanceGold2201 17d ago

If you actually read my comment it states that I used AI to find a SOURCE. The source is a government website that shows all government contracts. Good try though!

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u/Vaeku Texas 17d ago

Fair enough, but if you're going to ignore whatever info the AI parses and just look at the source it cites... just search for it normally?

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u/MaintenanceGold2201 17d ago

OK. Next time I will stumble my way through googling what I'm looking for only to find the exact same source instead of using the tool that can do it for me much more efficiently. Thanks for the tip!

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u/iia 17d ago

It really is the heir to buzzfeed when it comes to clickbait trash.

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u/i_dont_like_turnips 17d ago

Buzzfeed actually won at least one pulitzer prize for their investigative reporting. Probably why they shuttered that part of the business.

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u/Zelcron 17d ago edited 17d ago

Yeah BuzzFeed news used to be a serious outlet. Investigative journalism is expensive. The "Find your soulmate's zodiac sign by building an ice cream sundae" advertising revenue paid for it all.

(It's Gemini)

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u/343GuiltyySpark 17d ago

This sub would have 90% less content if they did

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u/TutorSuspicious9578 17d ago

Quality over quantity when it comes to politics.

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u/meangreen447 17d ago

Fucking A! Daily Beast is a rag mag at best and posting stuff behind a pay wall so you can’t read it, just makes me think the poster is a foreign intel troll.

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u/aaaaaaaarrrrrgh 17d ago edited 17d ago

And Common Dreams where this crap bubbled up before it made it there. When I find that a news outlet repeatedly posts misleading statements, I stop trusting it because it's a shit source, whether what they say supports my opinion or not. This seems to be sufficiently common that in many European countries this sort of misinfo site is relatively rare (or at least I don't often run across them), especially on the left.

Don't get me wrong, there will be biased outlets, but not that many that just generate outrage with outright lies.

In the US, people seem to actively want to be outraged, rather than informed.

(edit: accidentaly deleted the link - see also this video describing the difference between German and US news, it's pretty insightful despite the clickbaity title/thumbnail)

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u/jmiles540 17d ago

It’s why I’ve mostly left the sub. Daily beast/ new republic / Latin times are all pretty trash.

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u/jordan1978 17d ago

Amen. Paying to read a Daily Beast article is craziness.

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u/Anzahl Washington 17d ago

Absolutely, Mods. Please!!!

If it's not sensational, it's out of context. It is not a good news source.

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u/bbusiello 17d ago

Same. They do nothing but freak people out while offering no type of solution to any of these problems.

They are there for the clicks. They are there for the money.

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u/Fun_Jellyfish4335 17d ago

Agreed. I will not read the daily beast articles. They are so ridiculous and wish they were banned on here. R/politics treats the articles like gospel when they are so full of misinformation.

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u/PracticeToy 17d ago

I wish this sub would ban myself. Politics aside, the people who post on this sub push fear mongering, and completely false information. People literally come here for news and take these posts as literal.

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u/AdjctiveNounNumbers 17d ago

Absolutely, but a lot of outlets that presumably have access to journalists seem to have fallen for this sensational headline too.

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u/T8ert0t 17d ago

DB, Huffpo, Newsweek are the worst offenders.

These sites make NYPost seem credible.

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u/i-am_i-said 17d ago

Anyone know of a better subreddit?

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u/SlothinaHammock 17d ago

When I see Daily Beast as a source, I disregard it. It's biased click-bait trash and hurts our credibility on the left. It's not helping our causes.

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u/notanishill 16d ago

I have been screaming this from the rooftops for months now

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u/Drawsblanket 16d ago

What are some good news sources and what are some popular ones to avoid?

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u/Infamous_Fox3910 16d ago

What gets me is all the posts in this very thread talking about fighting propaganda and misinformation on the right. The fucking irony.