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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   2619 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 6, 2022

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A common trope is that spies gets tapes of some politician doing something immoral or illegal, which is then used for blackmail. Allegations of this is rife, e.g. Trump in Moscow, Epstein, etc. Do we have any clear example of this actually working? E.g. some politician pushes policy X. Years later it is revealed that this was because of blackmail from Y. An example of failed blackmail would also be interesting, e.g. some politician saying "Y has an embarrassing video of me which they are using for blackmail, but I won't give in!" followed by Y releasing the video.

(I guess most of the time the blackmail is more a way to generally pressure someone and keep them in line. I also know that most cases probably wouldn't become known to the public)

Madison Cawthorn?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madison_Cawthorn#Circulation_of_nude_video

Someone spread an embarrassing video of him, but it's not clear if any blackmail was involved.

And that, in conjunction with some other things, got him him unseated from government.

Do you really think whomever had the video in their possession didn't attempt to extract something from him first?

It seems entirely plausible that whomever had the video released it just to ruin Crawthorn without attempting to do any blackmail. Or that they did a "traditional" blackmail for money, not the kind of political favors blackmail I'm discussing here. And if they did a blackmail, why wouldn't Crawthorn tell the details, or go to the police?

And if they did a blackmail, why wouldn't Crawthorn tell the details, or go to the police?

Because there is more, even worse and possibly criminally actionable material in the offing?

Is that not how blackmail tends to work? This feels like a gimme question.

Is it? Blackmail works when the difference "what I'll release if you don't cave" minus "what I'll release if you do cave" hurts the target more than the cost of caving, so you want to maximize that difference. Releasing kompromat but not all-the-kompromat makes the difference smaller. It would be a good response to "I know you have material on me but I don't think you'll release any of it", but who wouldn't think that? Even bluffing blackmailers just pretend to have material they don't really have, they don't pretend to be willing to publish material they really wouldn't.

Or because there was no blackmail. I know that most cases of political blackmail is in shades of grey and veiled from the public, that's why I'm looking for clear-cut cases.

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