Trump has just named Brad Parscale to run his 2020 campaign. LOL on the campaign, but you might want to know who Parscale is.
The House Intel committee showed interest in him in mid 2017. Parscale had been Trump’s “digital director,” which would have put him right in the middle of any on-line activity related Trump-Russian collusion.
Just the fact that this looks bad makes us wonder why Trump would put him in charge of Trump Steals POTUS 2.0. On possible explanation is that Trump is simply following marching orders, from Putin or some Oligarchich handler. I say this as pure speculation, of course, but why the hell else would such a controversial pick be made?
Anyway, some basic information on who this dude is:
Parscale is from Kansas, and worked for various Trump enterprises, building their web sites. He created a firm that Trump paid $91 million to run the digital phase of the Trump campaign. Other than building some campaign web sites, the company had no experience related to running or helping with a campaign.
The work Parscale did was the Trump side (as opposed to the Putin side, or other interests) of the on line (mainly Facebook) trump blitz to win the election. Parscale had denied that he or anyone else colluded with Russia.
Newsweek has a little on that.
In June 2017:
The ranking Democrat on the committee, Rep. Adam Schiff, would not confirm whether Parscale had been invited to testify as part of the congressional investigation.
But Schiff told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow this week that he is “very interested in finding out” whether there was “Russian funding or support” for the Trump campaign’s data analytics operation, “or Russian assistance in any way with gathering data” that was then used by the campaign.
Pre Trump, from Wikipedia:
After graduating from Trinity, Parscale moved to California and worked as a sales and marketing director, selling CGI software for five years. After the dot.com bust, he returned to San Antonio, investing $500 to establish Parscale Media in 2004,[6] where he gained clients by soliciting customers at Barnes and Noble looking at web development books, through the Yellow Pages and online for businesses in San Antonio that he thought needed a web presence. In 2011, he partnered with Jill Giles of Giles Design and together, founded Giles-Parscale, a San Antonio branding, design, digital media, website and marketing firm. Parscale also co-founded TechBloc, a San Antonio-based organization focused on building and expanding technology, as well as attracting and retaining professionals in the technology field.
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He played that FB bit well. It certainly seems (in retrospect) he, or someone he hired, had a good understanding of using FB’s tools for ad targeting and getting racist messages promoted.
Way beyond that. He gave an interview that described what he did, with AB testing of hundreds of versions of the same ad. When asked why he’s giving away secrets, he said its easy to describe, hard to do.
Meanwhile a polisci paper came out recently that found approximately zero value in online ad spending and TV ad spending.
Ugh. It’s always distressing to hear of the “magic” of A/B testing as though it’s a new concept: the basic idea of comparing results with designed experiments is over 100 years old — there is nothing new here.
Also, as stated, that information provides zero information. This is a powerful idea, and the temptation to overuse it is high. Simply saying “hundreds” of tests were run is meaningless without information about the form of the individual tests, whether they were done based on predetermined questions that were decided upon for the data was collected or whether they were simply run after the data was collected to see what showed up. It should have been the first approach (although even then the chance of detecting “significant” results just by chance is huge): if it were the second approach the results are totally worthless.
This also ignores the fact that classical hypothesis testing, based on p-values, really provides no evidence for or against either of your hypotheses.
I think it had to do with analyzing which versions of the same ad were more popular, analyzing click thru.
It doesn’t matter what the goal of the testing was.
What I meant when I said we need more information is this: how were the tests done, was there any corrections for repeated tests with the same data, and so on.
The p-value and testing comment applies regardless: they give you zero information for or against either of your hypotheses.
The only reason he is a ‘controversial pick’ is because of accusations made by others about Russia.
if there is no collusion with Russia, there is no controversy.
If there is collusion with Russia, the controversy lies with Trump, not Parscale.
Either case, there is nothing controversial about picking Parscale.
That cognitive scotoma of yours can be illustrated by the right hand panel here:
https://healthsaline.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/image-result-for-scotoma-768×406.jpeg
I’ll bet he knows the full story behind the server in Trump tower talking constantly to a server for a Russian bank. Perhaps Mueller should question him under oath.
That’s already been explained. Has to do with a marketing company. Steele in all his competence couldn’t even spell the name of the bank right.
He was interviewed on 60 Minutes not long ago. Afterward I looked him up on Facebook. There was a long chain of approvals for his work. I asked whether (as he had claimed in the interview) he really believed there had been no Russian interference in our election process. AFAIK there has been no reply.
Everything is very open with a clear explanation of the issues.
It was definitely informative. Your website is useful.
Many thanks for sharing!
Side comment: he looks an uncanny amount like a landscape photographer I know.