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lukeskywaker4ever · 5 years ago

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Christopher Columbus: Master Double Agent and Portugal’s 007

Henry IV of Spain – known as "The Impotent" for his weakness, both on the throne and (allegedly) in the marriage chamber – died in 1474. A long and inconclusive war of succession ensued, pitting supporters of Henry's 13-year-old heir, Juana de Trastámara, against a faction led by Princess Isabel of Castile and her husband, Ferdinand of Aragon. Portugal, Spain's much smaller antagonist for centuries already, sided with the loyalists.

(Wedding portrait of King Ferdinand II of Aragón and Queen Isabella of Castile.)

The civil war ended in 1480, with the Treaty of Alcáçovas/Toledo, whereby Portugal withdrew support for Juana; in exchange, Isabel and Fernando promised not to encroach on South Atlantic trade routes that Portugal had long been exploring and wished to monopolize.

Treaty Not Worth Much

Spain immediately began to violate the Treaty of Alcáçovas. Portugal's gold trade with Ghana was a powerful enticement, but the Spanish were also lured by the priceless knowledge that Portugal had painstakingly gathered about the currents, territories, winds and heavenly bodies relative to the Atlantic regions. The Portuguese were far advanced in the sciences of geography and navigation pertaining to the Atlantic Ocean, both south and west of Portugal itself.

Meanwhile, João II ascended to the throne of Portugal in 1481, reversing the policies of his father, another weak, late-Medieval ruler who'd surrendered excessive estates and privileges to the nobility. Large swaths of the noble class rebelled, but João II was an astute diplomat, with powerful alliances among the military and religious orders across Europe, along with an extensive network of spies. He sprang a trap on his adversaries, capturing and executing the ring leader.

(João II of Portugal)

Conspiracy!

Queen Isabel supported the traitors in Portugal, having obtained their promise to annul the Treaty of Alcáçovas. When the conspiracy was exposed, numerous traitors among the Portuguese nobility fled to Spain, where they found asylum, along with a base from which to continue their hostilities against João II. Prominent among the defectors were two nephews of the highly-born wife of Christopher Columbus – who would himself sacrifice the next twenty years of his life to join this exodus, faking desertion to his sovereign's most bitter foe. The internecine strife was so keen that after another occasion when his agents had tipped him off, which resulted in João II personally executing the Duke of Viseu, he threatened to charge his own wife with treason for weeping over her brother.

(Christopher Columbus was arrested at Santo Domingo in 1500 by Francisco de Bobadilla and returned to Spain, along with his two brothers, in chains)

The Mother of All Secrets

It's now been amply proven that evidence of hostility between Columbus and João II was fabricated. Columbus was, in fact, a member of João II's inner circle, in addition to being one of the most seasoned of all Portuguese mariners. After his false defection to Spain, Columbus attended three secret meetings with João II, the second of these, in 1488, being prompted by the mother of all maritime secrets: Dias having rounded the Cape of Good Hope, thereby establishing the shortest route to India by sea.

Now, the Holy Grail of all commercial bonanzas was a sea route to the riches of India – sought because Christendom was at war with Islam, and Muslim armies blocked the much shorter land routes across the Middle East. What the most knowledgeable Portuguese pilots knew was top secret, state of the art, a scientific prize for international espionage.

(The Portuguese discovered numerous territories and routes during the 15th and 16th centuries. Cantino planisphere, made by an anonymous cartographer in 1502.)

The Portuguese had been the first Europeans to launch expeditions in search of the Equator, which they reached around 1470, discovering while they were at it, the islands of São Tomé and Príncipe. By 1485, expert Portuguese technicians had invented charts and tables – based on the height of the sun at the Equator – which allowed navigators to determine their location in the daytime. While King João II was keeping Columbus up to date with all of the cutting-edge developments in maritime science, he was at the same time spreading so much disinformation elsewhere—among friends and foes alike— that we are still unraveling it.

(This secret letter, written by King João II was found in Columbus’ archives. Here is the exterior, addressed in the hand of King João II to, “Xpovam Collon, our special friend in Seville.”)

João II’s agents spent years pursuing the most important traitors across Spain, France and England. With that in view, the following comparison is revealing. Both Columbus and his nephew Don Lopo de Albuquerque (Count of Penamacor) fled Portugal at the same time, took refuge at Isabel's court under false identities, and fostered invasions of the Portuguese Atlantic monopoly from foreign shores. Lopo was tenaciously pursued, finally cornered in Seville and assassinated; in contrast, Columbus disposed of Portuguese secrets, exchanged letters covertly with King João II throughout his eight-year residence in Spain, stopped in Portugal on three of his four voyages, and lied to the Spanish Monarchs about these secret contacts.

A Secret Identity

Christopher Columbus is the garbled pseudonym of a very wellborn, learned, seafaring Portuguese nobleman. The antidote to all subsequent confusion about this man's true identity and character is simply to recognize that the news of his "discovery," which broke like a thunderbolt across the rest of Europe, was in fact nothing more than the release of information that the Portuguese had been hoarding for decades, laced with a linguistic insinuation that Spain had just pioneered the shortest route to India.

Everything Falls into Place

This new perspective on Columbus – as a Portuguese double agent – results in a major paradigm shift. All of the lies perpetrated by Columbus, his family, and the royal chroniclers suddenly begin to make sense as elements in a single, grand design, whose architect was King João II.

It is remarkable that the wave of treasons occurring in Portugal during the mid-1480s – engaging both Queen Isabel and Columbus so deeply – has never been linked by Portuguese historians to the biography of Columbus. Yet, no serious historian today accepts that Columbus was the first European to reach the Americas. There is no excuse any longer for maintaining that he was, or for sustaining the obsolete, pseudo-historical pretense that Columbus invented the idea of sailing west or that he ever really believed he'd landed in India.

(The secret Memorial Portugués, advising Queen Isabel that Portugal engineered the Treaty of Tordesillas specifically to safeguard the best territories for herself. Note how King João II is called (A) “an evil devil,” malvado diablo , and (B) how the “Indies,” Indias”, that Columbus visited are described as NOT the real India)

Having skirted the western lands from Canada to Argentina, the Portuguese understood there were no established commercial ports, no ready-made commercial goods, and was thus no trade potential there to compare with that of India. Columbus – and his many other co-conspirators in Spain, easily identified in retrospect – guarded these secrets faithfully, secrets they had to be privy to if they would guide the Spanish Monarchs to the counterfeit of India. The trade for gold and other goods along the west coast of Africa was immensely profitable, but still more jealously guarded was knowledge that the sea route to India lay also in this direction. The Portuguese were intent on keeping Spanish ships out of these waters. With both war and treaties having failed, João II and Columbus launched an audacious ruse to obtain their objective through less obvious means.

How History is Shaped

Colossal planning, nerve, and effort went into this accomplishment – seven years of convincing knowledgeable skeptics that the voyage was possible, outfitting a fleet and loading it with merchandise for trade (including cinnamon that would later be presented as evidence of contact with India). On a secret mission to Germany, Martim Behaim, another Templar knight member of the Portuguese Order of Christ, built a false globe based on Toscanelli's theory that East Asia lay just across the Atlantic. This globe still exists; it is the oldest one in the world. Genuine Portuguese traitors warned the Spanish Monarchs that they were being deceived.

(Martin Behaim’s globe intentionally placed the Azores islands, where Behaim lived and was married, on top of the Americas. This made Asia appear much closer to Europe than it really is, thus supporting the project that Columbus was advocating for: Map of Atlantic Ocean)

The Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), observed fairly well by both sides, achieved João II's strategic objective: to engage the Spanish in the west while keeping them out of those regions that Portugal wished to dominate. Its effect on the linguistic, racial and cultural substance of an immense portion of the globe has scarcely been rivaled by any other treaty between two nations. No single factor did more to realize this outcome than the erudite seamanship, cunning, ruthless persistence, loyalty and sangfroid of the man whom we still remember today as "Christopher Columbus," a real-life 007, on May 20th, 1506.

(Cover from the master spy and sailor's Book of Privileges , which clearly shows that the owner's pseudonym was "Colon." An international transmission of the stunning "discovery," in March of 1493, distorted the name in such a fashion as to leave us with "Columbus" in English today. Technically speaking, "Colón" as the Spanish still call him, is correct, and it will someday most likely replace "Columbus" in common usage)

Another particularly factor that King João II knew of existence of land on the west was that when the first Treaty of Tordesilhas came, the line that separate Spain and Portugal territory was just near the Cape Verde territory (already belonging to Portugal). King João II refuse that line and asked for more 370 nautical miles west from that line. The Spanish Monarchs, not knowing anything about the globe, accepted, thinking that it was just more water. When the new Treaty came, the line that King João II asked put Brasil over Portuguese domain. How King João II knew exactly the number of miles to put Brasil in Portugal territory? Because he already knew there was land on the west. The “discovery” of Brasil was NOT an accident.

#King João II of portugal #cristovao colombo #christopher columbus #portugal #treaty of tordesilhas

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mostlysignssomeportents · 6 years ago

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Study suggests that Flat Eartherism spread via Youtube

The rise in a belief that the Earth is flat is bizarre and somewhat frightening, a repudiation of one of the most basic elements of scientific consensus. Texas Tech University psych researcher Asheley R. Landrum attended a 2017 flat earth convention and interviewed 30 attendees to trace the origins of their belief in a flat earth, finding that Youtube videos were key to their journey into conspiracy theories; her findings were bolstered by a survey of more than 500 participants.

Landrum presented her research at an AAAS meeting a year ago, and it paints a compelling picture of the role Youtube plays in spreading conspiracy theories.

I think that a good model for understanding the spread of these theories needs to also take account of the breakdown of epistemological consensus about how we know things are true.

This breakdown has at least two contributing factors: the first is a decades-long, deliberate campaign to undermine the consensus about how we know things are true, from the denial of the link between cancer and smoking to climate denial. The denial playbook starts with undermining the idea that science produces reliable outcomes, or that a scientific consensus can be trusted.

But denialism is greatly augmented by a legitimate perception of corruption in both expert circles and regulators. The anti-vax movement, for example, relies on two true facts to suggest an untrue conclusion:

* the pharma industry is corrupt and willing to endanger people for profit; and

* regulators are captured by pharma and willing to let them get away with it; therefore

* vaccines can't be trusted.

In a democracy that values free expression, it's hard to imagine how we'll get people to stop saying untrue things (though of course we can tweak our suggestion algorithms to stop prioritizing "engagement," which ends up promoting untrue things).

But we can (and indeed, must) address the legitimate concerns of conspiracy theorists: the ability fo self-dealing, powerful companies to get away with bad acts, and the willingness of regulators to let them.

If you want to learn more about Flat Eartherism, I strongly recommend this interview with Mark Sargent, a notorious Flat Earther, who talked with the skeptical podcast Oh No Ross and Carrie in late 2017. Sargent's frank discussion of his conspiracy theory mindset provides really important insight into an extremely frightening breakdown in reason in our society.

https://boingboing.net/2019/02/18/engagement-maximization-pat.html

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sarcasm-and-studying · 6 years ago

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We Don’t Talk About the Stories

October 13

Before I start, let's get one thing straight. I'm not the type of person to fall for some run of the mill conspiracy. I don't believe in magic, and I take most things told to me with a truckload of salt. I mean, when you spent a good nine years of your life believing your house was taken over by a secret race of anthropomorphic gloves, you tend to start being a bit skeptical about the world around you.

Having said that, I truly believe my history teacher might be an immortal.

It started off as a joke, one of those blatantly untrue ‘rumors’ everyone spreads to feel like they’re a part of something bigger than themselves. It was somewhere around mid September when we all collectively realized that perhaps we weren’t completely lying to ourselves after all.

Mr. Robert T. Johnson is a quirky man with giant gold-rimmed glasses and a curly beard concealing most of his face. He dresses in vests and bow-ties that come in a variety of earthly tones, and he uses phrases like “that’s so Jake!” - phrases we’re pretty sure no one’s used in over a century.

I want to put a disclaimer here - a disclaimer that is brought on by my confidence in the second paragraph of this entry. Every ‘proof’ I have to offer of the supernatural is purely circumstantial, and can be, in theory, explained in a perfectly rational way.

At any rate, a huge reason why these rumors exist is because of Mr. Johnson’s stories. Every once in a while, he gets a droll look in his eye, and the class always exchanges excited glances. The stories range from the slightly peculiar to the straight up ludicrous, yet every student believes without a doubt that Mr. Johnson actually did punch a Nazi in a French aquarium, or that he actually did date an attractive acrobat who scammed a loan shark out of half a million dollars.

Yet these stories never have any time stamps, and whenever someone inquires Mr. Johnson as to when he actually had time to go on these adventures, he always gets flustered and quickly changes the subject. Pretty soon, we learned not to ask too many questions.

The most notable one of these incidents took place at the concert of some obscure musician with an unfamiliar name. By next period, someone googled the guy. Apparently his last concert was in 1903.

Yet we’d already learned not to ask too many questions, so we left the answers up to our own imaginations. And our imaginations did run wild, leading us to the perhaps slightly irrational conclusion I am sharing with you now.

December 27

My hands are almost shaking as I write this. I wish I didn’t believe the rumor, I wish I could listen to my rational mind. Yet the further I go into the school year, the more I seem to stop listening to logical reasoning of any sort.

The last few months have passed without any major incidents. Mr. Johnson remains as suspicious as ever, although new ‘proof’ has come up. My teacher seems to… imply he knows a lot of languages, as in his stories he regularly talks with residents of other countries. As always, he dodges questions, though. He doesn’t strike me as a language kind of guy, and however many he knows, it’s probably more than an average person learns in a lifetime.

The girl who sits in front of me in homeroom has never talked to me before, but today she leaned back in her chair and rested her elbow on my desk.

“You’re in Mr. Johnson’s class, aren’t you?” she inquired, her voice quivering with excitement. “Here, take a look at what I found while researching my forensics project!”

It was a scan of a news article with a giant picture of a policeman leading a man away in handcuffs. The policeman looked exactly like Mr. Johnson, except clean-shaven and without glasses.

The only problem was that the photo was taken in Ohio, and the policeman was identified as ‘Mr. Green’.

Oh, and it was taken in 1923.

“Mr. Johnson, do you have any ancestors who lived in Ohio?” I asked him at history that afternoon. “A grandfather, perhaps?”

Mr. Johnson stiffened up at the word ‘Ohio’. “Why do you ask?” he inquired, exaggerated nonchalance barely concealing a panicked note in his voice.

“I... was just wondering,” I replied, shifting awkwardly.

“My family did move here from Ohio!” he told me with a hearty laugh, switching to a laid back tone of voice. In a matter of seconds, all his tenseness had evaporated. “How did you find out?”

“A friend of mine was researching for a project,” I blurted without thinking. “She saw a picture of a man who looks just like you in some article about a murder case...”

A few days after that, Akane told me the scans had vanished from the internet. As soon as I came home from school that day, I messaged a few of the websites that previously provided the scans, asking them about the disappearance.

A few weeks have passed. Not one of them has replied.

February 16

The history teacher next door has left. It happened without any warning, and I am yet to meet a person who isn’t surprised by Mrs. Sheldon’s disappearance. She was an old, sweet lady, someone who has spent a good portion of her life teaching at our school. For her to leave like that, here on Friday and gone on Monday - it greatly disturbed the status quo.

According to the dean, Mrs. Sheldon has grown extremely sick and won’t be able to come to school for a while. She knew neither this mysterious illness nor how long this ‘while’ was going to last.

The new history teacher is a woman in her early to mid thirties, with a round, trustworthy face and strong arms. Her name is Mrs. Merri. She has started to decorate her classroom, the most notable of her posters being a ‘cheat sheet’ on some war we aren’t supposed to learn about until next year.

A girl in my math class was crying because she missed Mrs. Sheldon so much. I feel sorry for her. Fortunately, it doesn’t seem like Mr. Johnson will be leaving anytime soon.

March 24

I have asked around about what Mrs. Merri is like. People seem to have different opinions of her. Most people say she is nice, but some of the more ambitious students complain about how she doesn’t seem to be too experienced in teaching a history class.

People have mostly stopped talking about Mrs. Sheldon. Now, it’s just one of the many interesting things that have happened at my school.

April 2

I usually get a little early to school, and I often hang out in Mr. Johnson’s classroom for ‘tutoring’ until the first bell rings. Today, however, his door was locked and he was nowhere to be seen.

“It seems like Mr. Johnson is running late,” Mr. Merri said. She was leaning on her door frame, smiling openly. “Why don’t you come into my classroom instead?”

“Sure,” I shrugged, glancing behind her into the open room. Almost a dozen students sat at the desks, pouring over textbooks or conversing in hushed voices. I recognized Akane, as well as some other kids who I usually saw in Mr. Johnson’s class.

I took a seat next to Akane and pulled out my phone. For a while, we all worked in relative silence.

“I see a lot of unfamiliar faces today,” Mrs. Merri remarked at some point. She was perched, nonchalantly, on her desk, gazing over us in amusement. “Don’t tell me Mr. Johnson always gets this much more students in the mornings.”

Someone assured her this was an unusually busy day.

“He seems to be a good guy,” she continued. “I’d like to get to know him better. Does he tell you guys stories in his class? Because I’ve only spent a few days talking to him and I’ve already heard he’s been all over the world. Asia, Africa, Europe… And he’s been all over the US as well. Has he ever told you guys about Ohio?”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Akane freeze up mid-page turn.

“Not really,” I said nonchalantly. “He’s mentioned vacations in different countries, but you make it seem like he’s some sort of world traveler. I certainly don’t remember anything about Ohio.”

I remembered a rumor about how some girl saw Mrs. Sheldon in a grocery store recently looking very healthy and very much not like a person who has to leave school because of a mysterious illness.

“He doesn’t really tell stories,” Akane picked up. “He’s honestly a reserved kind of guy when he teaches our class.”

The rumors about Mr. Johnson’s mysterious past, Mrs. Sheldon’s sudden disappearance and quick replacement, the absolute confidence with which Akane and I delivered our lies - all of these things led a few of the other kids in the classroom to slowly nod their agreement.

Mrs. Merri regarded us with a cold, skeptical stare. Now she didn’t seem so friendly anymore. “So he’s told you… nothing? Nothing about his personal life at all?”

“Honestly, yeah,” said someone to my left. “I wish he’d tell more stories.”

“Mr. Johnson’s traveled across Europe?” piped up a boy in the front. “That’s amazing! Could you tell us more?”

Mrs. Merri let the topic evaporate, and in less than a minute the first bell rung. I’m going to tell Mr. Johnson about this, Akane told me under her breath as we filed out of the door.

Mr. Johnson did not tell our class any stories that day.

June 12

The next day, Mr. Johnson did not show up to class.

We later found out he had left a note of resignation on the principal’s desk the afternoon of the incident. He didn’t answer his email, and his phone went straight to voicemail no matter who called him or when they did it. Most of his belongings were left in the classroom, never to be picked up again, which would’ve been cause for alarm if it wasn’t for the disappearance of a whole row of books on his bookshelf, a whole row of books we knew Mr. Johnson cherished dearly.

So wherever he left, he left of his own accord.

A few days later, Mrs. Merri was replaced by Mrs. Sheldon again. Any questions about her alleged illness were avoided by both her and the school staff.

Now, more than ever, I suspect that both Mrs. Merri and Mr. Johnson have giant secrets. I don’t think I’ll ever find out, though.

I never saw either of them again.

#stories #short story #writeblr #writer #story #inspiration #plot #idea #immortal #teacher #mystery

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xtruss · 4 years ago

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Forced to Choose Between Trump’s “Big Lie” and Liz Cheney, the House G.O.P. Chooses the Lie

“Liz is a living reproach to all these cowards,” a friend of Cheney’s said, but the cowards have the votes.

— By Susan B. Glasser | May 6, 2021 | The New Yorker

Liz Cheney standing in front of the U.S. Capitol building.

It has become abundantly clear that House Republicans will soon throw Liz Cheney out of her leadership position for refusing to go along with Trump’s falsehoods.Photograph by Drew Angerer / Getty

On January 11, 2017, Donald Trump held his first Presidential press conference following his upset victory in the November, 2016, election. It was anything but Presidential. In perhaps the day’s most notable exchanges, he attacked BuzzFeed for publishing a former British spy’s unverified dossier on his extensive ties to Russia—the news organization, Trump said, was a “failing pile of garbage.” He also singled out CNN and its White House correspondent, Jim Acosta, for particular scorn. “You’re fake news!” Trump raged at Acosta, refusing to take a question from him. It was his first spoken utterance of a phrase that, arguably more than any other, would come to be associated with his Presidency.

It was also, and more to the point, an act of shameless linguistic larceny. In the two months since Trump’s upset win, the “fake news” conversation had been all about the weaponization of falsehoods by Trump and for his political benefit. On November 3rd, a few days before the 2016 election, Craig Silverman—a BuzzFeed reporter who had first regularly started using the term in 2014, in research papers and articles—broke a story about fake-news troll farms in Macedonia that had been spreading lies on Trump’s behalf to American voters on Facebook. When Trump actually won the election, the idea that fake news promoted by hidden forces had contributed to his unlikely victory went viral. In that January press conference, Trump appropriated the phrase for himself, this time as an attack on his critics, a move of political jiu-jitsu that proved to be stunningly effective. I spoke with Silverman the other day about the moment that “fake news” stopped being his label and became Donald Trump’s. “He decided to take it and turn it into his term, and to take ownership of it and use it as a cudgel to beat the media,” Silverman told me. “And I think it proved to be one of his favorite phrases, and probably one of his most effective phrases, too, over the course of his Presidency.”

All week long, I’ve been thinking about that moment four years ago. This Monday, Trump sent out a short statement, the kind that he would have tweeted out before his falsehoods about the recent election got him banned from Twitter. In it, he said, “The Fraudulent Presidential Election of 2020 will be, from this day forth, known as the big lie!” Soon after that, Liz Cheney, the No. 3 House Republican leader, sent out an actual tweet refusing to accept this Trumpian redefinition of truth. “The 2020 presidential election was not stolen,” she wrote. “Anyone who claims it was is spreading the big lie.” Anyone who has followed the past four years in the Republican Party, however, can tell you what happened next: the Party did not turn on Donald Trump for his outrageous inversion of truth but on Liz Cheney. Within a couple of days, it had become abundantly clear that House Republicans would soon throw Cheney out of her leadership position for refusing to go along with Trump’s big lie about the Big Lie.

Trump has learned the lesson of previous demagogues: the bigger and more flagrant the untruth, the better to prove the fealty of his Party. After all, it actually demands more loyalty to follow your leader into an absurd conspiracy theory than it does to toe the official line when it doesn’t require a mass suspension of disbelief. Back in January, the Big Lie had been rightly affixed to Trump’s preposterous falsehoods about the “rigged election” and his followers’ insurrection, on January 6th, to prevent Congress from certifying the results. His claims were so preposterous that a lawyer who advanced them on Trump’s behalf, Sidney Powell, is now defending herself in court with a filing that states “no reasonable person would conclude that the statements were truly statements of fact.” There was no fraud. Or, as Trump might put it, if he weren’t lying about it, “no fraud!” And yet Trump has successfully proved throughout the past few months that the repetition of these lies over and over again—even without accompanying evidence—is more than enough to get millions of Americans to believe him. He has run this play before. He knows that it works. Fake News indeed.

The striking difference is that, this time, Liz Cheney has chosen to fight him on it. If Trump does manage to reinvent “the Big Lie” in service of his own corrupt ends, Cheney will at least have forced members of her party into admitting, on the record, that they are making a choice between truth and Trump’s untruth—and choosing the latter. There is no hope among her supporters and advisers that she will win the fight, when the House Republican Conference votes, likely next week, to boot her. Instead, there is a recognition that Cheney has finally decided to do what most of the Trump skeptics within the Party were reluctant to for four years: publicly challenge not only Trump’s lies but the enablers within the G.O.P. who give his lies such power. “It’s all got to do with fealty to Trump and the Big Lie and the fact that Liz is a living reproach to all these cowards,” Eric Edelman, a friend of Cheney’s who served as a national-security adviser to her father, former Vice-President Dick Cheney, told me.

Cheney’s rupture with the House Republican Conference has become all but final in recent days, but it has been months in the making. Edelman revealed that Cheney herself secretly orchestrated an unprecedented op-ed in the Washington Post by all ten living former Defense Secretaries, including her father, warning against Trump’s efforts to politicize the military. The congresswoman not only recruited her father but personally asked others, including Trump’s first Defense Secretary, Jim Mattis, to participate. “She was the one who generated it, because she was so worried about what Trump might do,” Edelman said. “It speaks to the degree that she was concerned about the threat to our democracy that Trump represented.” The Post op-ed appeared on January 3rd, just three days before the insurrection at the Capitol.

Little noticed at the time was another Cheney effort to combat Trump’s post-election lies, a twenty-one-page memo written by Cheney and her husband, Phil Perry, an attorney, and circulated on January 3rd to the entire House Republican Conference. In it, Cheney debunked Trump’s false claims about election fraud and warned her colleagues that voting to overturn the election results, as Trump was insisting, would “set an exceptionally dangerous precedent.” But, of course, they did not listen. Even after the storming of the Capitol, a hundred and forty-seven Republican lawmakers voted against accepting the election results. When Trump was later impeached over his role in inciting the insurrection, Cheney was one of just ten House Republicans to vote in favor of it.

Revealingly, it is not Cheney’s impeachment vote that now looks like the move to get her bounced from the Party’s leadership. It is her refusal to shut up about it and embrace the official party line of forgetting about Trump’s attack on democracy and moving on—which is the approach of all but a handful of prominent Republicans. Even former Vice-President Mike Pence, who was forced by a pro-Trump mob to flee for his life on January 6th, after he refused Trump’s demand that he block congressional certification of the election results, is back to public deference. At an appearance last week, Pence called his service to Trump “the greatest honor” of his life.

So, too, is Kevin McCarthy, the House Minority Leader, who made a frantic phone call to Trump on January 6th seeking his help in stopping the mob. McCarthy was angry enough days later that he gave a speech on the House floor saying unequivocally that Trump “bears responsibility” for the Capitol attack. But McCarthy, like Pence, has returned to his safe space of Trump sycophancy. In recent days, McCarthy has made clear that the effort to dump Cheney has his support, as well as Trump’s. Various media accounts have suggested that he was personally angered that Cheney had not been more grateful when he intervened to help save her leadership job following her impeachment vote. The bad feelings are clearly mutual in Cheneyworld. “You have to surround the Big Lie with a bodyguard of lies,” Edelman told me, of McCarthy, paraphrasing Churchill.

Four years ago, back when Trump was turning “fake news” into his own hypocritical rallying cry, Cheney and other members of the conservative Republican establishment were in what appeared to be hold-their-noses-and-deal-with-him mode. Most of them went on to become vocal Trump cheerleaders. A few others, such as former House Speaker Paul Ryan, decided to leave the public stage altogether rather than take Trump on. The loudest anti-Trump voice in the G.O.P. in 2017, the Arizona senator John McCain, died of brain cancer the following year. Mitt Romney, who won election to the Senate from Utah a couple of months after McCain’s death, became essentially a lone Republican voice of public opposition to Trump on Capitol Hill. Cheney, from the rabidly pro-Trump state of Wyoming, stayed largely silent until the outrages of 2020 began to pile up.

It took a long time, but arguably Liz Cheney today is McCain’s heir. She is, at the last, willing to call a lie a lie. She applied “the Big Lie” to Trump’s crimes against American democracy long before Trump sought, this week, to steal the phrase for his own destructive purposes. But there is one matter about which I must disagree. In a scathing opinion article she published on the Post’s Web site Wednesday night, Cheney wrote that she will not back down from this fight because it is a “turning point” for her party, which will show whether Republicans “choose truth and fidelity to the Constitution” or the “dangerous and anti-democratic Trump cult of personality.” She is wrong about this one. The choice has already been made.

— Susan B. Glasser is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she writes a weekly column on life in Washington. She co-wrote, with Peter Baker, “The Man Who Ran Washington.”

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multipleservicelisting · 4 years ago

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Underselling the Vaccine

Want to get The Morning by email? Here’s the sign-up.

Good morning. We explain why the vaccine news is better than you may think.

Early in the pandemic, many health experts — in the U.S. and around the world — decided that the public could not be trusted to hear the truth about masks. Instead, the experts spread a misleading message, discouraging the use of masks.

Their motivation was mostly good. It sprung from a concern that people would rush to buy high-grade medical masks, leaving too few for doctors and nurses. The experts were also unsure how much ordinary masks would help.

But the message was still a mistake.

It confused people. (If masks weren’t effective, why did doctors and nurses need them?) It delayed the widespread use of masks (even though there was good reason to believe they could help). And it damaged the credibility of public health experts.

“When people feel as though they may not be getting the full truth from the authorities, snake-oil sellers and price gougers have an easier time,” the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci wrote early last year.

Now a version of the mask story is repeating itself — this time involving the vaccines. Once again, the experts don’t seem to trust the public to hear the full truth.

This issue is important and complex enough that I’m going to make today’s newsletter a bit longer than usual. If you still have questions, don’t hesitate to email me at [email protected].

‘Ridiculously encouraging’

Right now, public discussion of the vaccines is full of warnings about their limitations: They’re not 100 percent effective. Even vaccinated people may be able to spread the virus. And people shouldn’t change their behavior once they get their shots.

These warnings have a basis in truth, just as it’s true that masks are imperfect. But the sum total of the warnings is misleading, as I heard from multiple doctors and epidemiologists last week.

“It’s driving me a little bit crazy,” Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown School of Public Health, told me.

“We’re underselling the vaccine,” Dr. Aaron Richterman, an infectious-disease specialist at the University of Pennsylvania, said.

“It’s going to save your life — that’s where the emphasis has to be right now,” Dr. Peter Hotez of the Baylor College of Medicine said.

The Moderna and Pfizer vaccines are “essentially 100 percent effective against serious disease,” Dr. Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said. “It’s ridiculously encouraging.”

The details

Here’s my best attempt at summarizing what we know:

The Moderna and Pfizer vaccines — the only two approved in the U.S. — are among the best vaccines ever created, with effectiveness rates of about 95 percent after two doses. That’s on par with the vaccines for chickenpox and measles. And a vaccine doesn’t even need to be so effective to reduce cases sharply and crush a pandemic.

If anything, the 95 percent number understates the effectiveness, because it counts anyone who came down with a mild case of Covid-19 as a failure. But turning Covid into a typical flu — as the vaccines evidently did for most of the remaining 5 percent — is actually a success. Of the 32,000 people who received the Moderna or Pfizer vaccine in a research trial, do you want to guess how many contracted a severe Covid case? One.

Although no rigorous study has yet analyzed whether vaccinated people can spread the virus, it would be surprising if they did. “If there is an example of a vaccine in widespread clinical use that has this selective effect — prevents disease but not infection — I can’t think of one!” Dr. Paul Sax of Harvard has written in The New England Journal of Medicine. (And, no, exclamation points are not common in medical journals.) On Twitter, Dr. Monica Gandhi of the University of California, San Francisco, argued: “Please be assured that YOU ARE SAFE after vaccine from what matters — disease and spreading.”

The risks for vaccinated people are still not zero, because almost nothing in the real world is zero risk. A tiny percentage of people may have allergic reactions. And I’ll be eager to see what the studies on post-vaccination spread eventually show. But the evidence so far suggests that the vaccines are akin to a cure.

Offit told me we should be greeting them with the same enthusiasm that greeted the polio vaccine: “It should be this rallying cry.”

The costs of negativity

Why are many experts conveying a more negative message?

Again, their motivations are mostly good. As academic researchers, they are instinctively cautious, prone to emphasizing any uncertainty. Many may also be nervous that vaccinated people will stop wearing masks and social distancing, which in turn could cause unvaccinated people to stop as well. If that happens, deaths would soar even higher.

But the best way to persuade people to behave safely usually involves telling them the truth. “Not being completely open because you want to achieve some sort of behavioral public health goal — people will see through that eventually,” Richterman said. The current approach also feeds anti-vaccine skepticism and conspiracy theories.

After asking Richterman and others what a better public message might sound like, I was left thinking about something like this:

We should immediately be more aggressive about mask-wearing and social distancing because of the new virus variants. We should vaccinate people as rapidly as possible — which will require approving other Covid vaccines when the data justifies it.

People who have received both of their vaccine shots, and have waited until they take effect, will be able to do things that unvaccinated people cannot — like having meals together and hugging their grandchildren. But until the pandemic is defeated, all Americans should wear masks in public, help unvaccinated people stay safe and contribute to a shared national project of saving every possible life.

THE LATEST NEWS

The Transition

President-elect Joe Biden picked two Obama-era regulators to oversee key financial agencies: Gary Gensler to lead the Securities and Exchange Commission, and Rohit Chopra as the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Here’s Biden’s response to aides who use overly academic or elitist language: “Pick up your phone, call your mother, read her what you just told me,” he likes to say. “If she understands, we can keep talking.”

President Trump’s allies have collected tens of thousands of dollars from people seeking pardons.

Capitol Riot Fallout

From Opinion: Today is Martin Luther King’s Birthday. In a video Op-Ed, Martin Luther King III remembers his father’s economic message.

Media Equation: Fox settled a lawsuit over its lies about a murdered young man, but the network insisted that the settlement had to stay secret until after the 2020 election.

Lives Lived: Phil Spector was a pioneering producer who shaped the sound of pop music in the 1960s but who spent the end of his life in prison after murdering Lana Clarkson at his home in 2003. He has died, from complications from Covid-19, at 81.

Why sea shanties are suddenly viral

On TikTok in December, Nathan Evans, a 26-year-old Scottish postal worker and musician, shared a black-and-white video of himself singing a sea shanty — a traditional sailor’s work song — called “Soon May the Wellerman Come.” In the ensuing weeks, Sea Shanty TikTok was born.

Professional musicians, people driving in cars and even a Kermit the Frog puppet shared videos of themselves singing along. There were electro remixes. Some people began covering other songs, like “All Star” by Smash Mouth, in a sea-shanty style.

While the genre may seem like a strange one to go viral, the songs are relatively easy to learn. They also lend themselves well to collaboration, which TikTok’s functions encourage. An original goal of the sea shanty was to foster community, as sailors worked long hours aboard a ship.

“They are unifying, survivalist songs, designed to transform a huge group of people into one collective body, all working together to keep the ship afloat,” Kathryn VanArendonk writes in Vulture. And they’re especially fitting for a time when people are desperate for connection.

PLAY, WATCH, EAT

What to Cook

Spanakopita, the classic Greek spinach and feta pie, inspired this baked pasta.

What to Watch

“MLK/FBI,” directed by Sam Pollard, draws on long-secret documents to chronicle the F.B.I.’s harassment of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

What to Listen to

Hear new tracks from Flo Milli, Lana Del Rey and more — including a song that holds the single-day streaming record on Spotify.

Multiple Service Listing for Business Owners | Tools to Grow Your Local Business

www.MultipleServiceListing.com

The post Underselling the Vaccine appeared first on Multiple Service Listing.

from Multiple Service Listing https://ift.tt/2LYyPrd

#multiple #service #listing #news #local #business #ads #near #me

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kathleenseiber · 4 years ago

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The types of electoral misinformation

By Kate Starbird and Jevin West, University of Washington, and Renee DiResta, Stanford University

When there’s no clear winner in a presidential election, there’s an opportunity for partisan activists, conspiracy theorists and others to exploit public uncertainty and anxiety to attempt to delegitimise the election results.

A growing number of narratives alleging electoral wrongdoing have been spreading on social media, shared through millions of tweets, Facebook posts and TikTok videos, often using hashtags like #riggedelection and #StopTheSteal. These types of narratives rely on “evidence” of ballots that are lost or found after the election, dubious statistics, misleading videos and allegations of foreign interference. People seeking to delegitimise election results are weaving real-world events, such as isolated confrontations with poll workers or broken voting machines, into claims of broader malfeasance by nefarious partisans on one side or the other.

As members of the Election Integrity Partnership and researchers who study online misinformation and disinformation, we have been monitoring social media. We are seeing five types of false and misleading narratives that people are spreading and are likely to spread online, wittingly or not. We urge people to be alert for – and to avoid spreading – the following types of misinformation, which erode trust in the electoral process and in one another.

1. Attempts to sow confusion and doubt

The wait for election results has been a stressful one. During times of uncertainty and anxiety, people are vulnerable to misinformation and manipulation.

Because of significant increases in the number of mail-in ballots in many states and unevenly timed processes for counting mail-in, early in-person and Election Day in-person ballots, even experts are struggling to make predictions and understand how remaining votes may line up. This lack of understanding and certainty can fuel doubt, fan misinformation and provide opportunities for those seeking to delegitimise the results.

As the vote counts come in and vote shares shift, some “influencers” – people with many followers in the media and on social media – have been questioning, with dubious evidence, the results and the voting process in battleground states. For example, images purporting to show people moving ballots in nefarious ways have gone viral – one turned out to be a poll worker moving ballots in an official capacity, and another turned out to be a photographer transporting equipment. There have also been several disputed claims that sudden increases in votes for one candidate indicate voter fraud.

2. “Evidence” of voter fraud

Many people have documented and shared their experiences at the polls on Election Day. Though the vast majority were uneventful, some showed isolated issues. Similarly, some stories in local news outlets and on social media showed isolated problems with mail-in ballots and voting at polling stations. Politically motivated individuals are likely to cherry-pick and assemble these pieces of digital “evidence” to fit narratives that seek to undermine trust in the results.

Much of this evidence is likely to be derived from real events, though taken out of context and exaggerated. As the race begins to focus in on a small number of states where the vote margin is slim, we expect to see cases of an incident in one place used to support false claims of fraud in another place.

A narrative that emerged on Election Day – and that continues to spread – falsely claims that poll workers provided some voters with pencils or Sharpie pens that would have rendered their ballots unreadable by the voting machines, thus nullifying some Trump supporters’ votes. There were more than 160,000 tweets and retweets that used the terms “Sharpies,” “felt tip” or “Sharpiegate” over the course of Nov. 4. The false claims quickly moved into the offline world. They were echoed by Trump supporters protesting in Maricopa County, Arizona, that evening, and Fox News reported that the state attorney general’s office was “investigating” the matter.

3. Ballots “found,” ballots “lost”

One of the most dominant narratives on the political right is likely to be Democratic activists or officials forging votes or faking vote totals to make up ground after the polls closed. This is a conspiracy theory that was alluded to by President Trump on election night, when he claimed to fear that ballots might be “found” at four o’clock in the morning and “added to the list.”

False claims of found ballots in Georgia emerged on Twitter on Nov. 4 and were amplified by Donald Trump Jr. On Nov. 5 Facebook banned a group called Stop The Steal for violating the platform’s policies. The group had been promoting conspiracy theories about ballots and organising protests.

Twitter has been flagging false and misleading tweets like this claim that ballots in Georgia were created after polls closed. Screen capture by Kate Starbird, University of Washington, CC BY-NC-ND

False claims that nefarious poll workers or activists destroyed, discarded or intentionally mislaid Republican ballots, or replaced them with fake Democratic ones, could also be woven into this narrative.

We expect people seeking to delegitimise election results to promote this theory using a number of interlinking elements. They are likely to frame statistical shifts and the fixing of reporting errors as post-election ballot stuffing – for example, the recent false claim that votes had “magically” appeared for Biden overnight in Michigan. The reality in this case was an error in a file the state sent to a media outlet. The theory is likely to also focus on chain-of-custody events, to create the impression that ballots could be added or swapped.

Together, purported anomalies in statistics, local news reports about misplaced ballots and occasional video of alleged ballot mistreatment could be used to form a greater narrative of a vast, multilevel institutional conspiracy. Since modern conspiracy theories are relatively omnivorous, even tangential elements such as the Sharpiegate claim could be folded into this broader story.

4. Bad projections

Even the best election models are often wrong. Inaccurate projections, which can be intentionally or accidentally wrong, can be picked up and used to contest results that conflict with the projection or cast doubt on the process as a whole. Early projections by Fox News and the AP of Biden winning Arizona appear to have been premature given the closeness of the race there, and if the final tally moves in Trump’s favor it could fuel criticism about an unfair process. Trump supporters protesting in Maricopa County on Nov. 4 expressed anger at Fox News for its Arizona call.

Two complicating factors in the 2020 election are that the polls are quite different from the actual vote share, and that the scale and demographics of mail-in voting, which skews Democratic, have complicated traditional models for projecting victory.

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Red shifts and blue shifts – when vote tallies shift from one candidate to the other as votes are counted – are common, but that hasn’t stopped purveyors of misinformation from citing them to falsely claim fraud.

These conditions, along with close margins in several states, have made it more difficult to project winners for several races. The longer periods of uncertainty create more opportunity for misinformation to spread.

5. Premature claims to victory

Early in the morning of Nov. 4, not long after polls closed at the end of Election Day, President Trump made a speech in which he falsely asserted that he had won the election. Later in the day he followed up with a tweet claiming victory in specific states, including Pennsylvania, where election officials were still counting votes and no reputable news organisation had called the race.

These premature and potentially inaccurate claims of victory again set the stage for arguing that conflicting results are somehow fraudulent or reflect a “rigged” election. This argument could advance the objectives of a political candidate and appeal to his supporters, but it can also undermine trust that the electoral process is fair.

Shoring up the foundations of democracy

Political misinformation destabilises the foundations of democracy, causing people to lose trust in democratic processes, information providers and, ultimately, one another.

We are working to better understand these dynamics and identify ways to counter them, with the aim of helping people become more resistant to manipulation. Our advice is to remain skeptical of claims about the election that haven’t been confirmed by reliable sources and to think before liking, retweeting or sharing.

Michael Caulfield, Director of Blended and Networked Learning at Washington State University Vancouver, contributed to this article.

Kate Starbird, Associate Professor of Human Centered Design & Engineering, University of Washington; Jevin West, Associate Professor and Director of the Center for an Informed Public, University of Washington, and Renee DiResta, Research Manager of the Stanford Internet Observatory, Stanford University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The types of electoral misinformation published first on https://triviaqaweb.weebly.com/

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krisiunicornio · 4 years ago

Link

Influential yoga teachers denounce the conspiracy theory, which has infiltrated spiritual communities, and offer advice on how to identify and stop the spread of misinformation

QAnon, the viral pro-Trump conspiracy theory alleging that a band of satan-worshipping pedophiles, is gaining steam in the yoga and wellness community.

On social media, some teachers and influencers are posting QAnon-related messaging—although it doesn't always explicitly mention QAnon by name. On pastel backgrounds and in pretty fonts they call COVID-19 a hoax, encourage gun ownership, warn about human trafficking, and celebrate Donald Trump as a “light worker” in his quest to “save the children.”

Yoga teachers including Hala Khouri and Seane Corn—cofounders of the yoga and social justice organization Off the Mat, Into the World—started seeing posts like these in their feeds near the beginning of the Coronavirus lockdown this spring. Khouri has said she believes the debunked viral documentary Plandemic, which spread misinformation about COVID-19, was an entry point to QAnon for many in the wellness community. (The documentary was removed by both Facebook and YouTube in May.)

In March, celebrity OB/GYN Christiane Northrup, MD, started sharing QAnon-related "save the children" messaging, along with videos and memes that disparage vaccines and mask-wearing and encourage distrust of mainstream media. Northrup also shared Plandemic with her more than 750,000 followers on social media.

In an interview with Jezebel, Khouri discussed how she was “slammed” by many members of her Facebook community when she questioned the veracity of the documentary. Soon after, an explosion of posts pushing back on mask-wearing and a proliferation of memes warning of a government-led holocaust via vaccine flooded her feeds.

see also Do Politics Belong in Yoga?

Yoga Teachers and Wellness Leaders Respond to QAnon

Khouri, Corn, and other high-profile members of the wellness community like Jeff Krasno, the creator of the yoga festival Wanderlust and now the director of Commune—a wellness video and podcasting platform—were so disturbed by QAnon’s allegations that they were moved to publicly denounce it.

On September 13, Corn posted this statement, created by a concerned group of yoga and wellness leaders, to her 108,000 followers on Instagram:

View the original article to see embedded media.

Corn told Yoga Journal that she believes QAnon messaging is manipulative and exploitative—designed to incite chaos and division in the lead-up to the upcoming presidential election. “I just wanted to alert people that QAnon is a cult and it’s dangerous and it’s got its roots in white supremacy culture,” says Corn. “People should be aware of misinformation that is being targeted directly at the wellness community.”

By the end of September, Corn’s post had around 10,000 likes. After accruing thousands of comments, many from QAnon supporters spreading disinformation, Corn decided to disable comments on September 24. “As much as I may have helped people to gain awareness, I may have also introduced people to QAnon theories and beliefs,” she said.

see also 8 Steps Yogis Can Take to Turn Political Anxiety Into Mindful Activism

The Roots of QAnon

According to believers of QAnon, the leaders of the cabal consist of top democrats and liberal entertainers; dark forces who threaten humanity. “Q” is the name of a supposed high-clearance intelligence officer who drops cryptic messages about the cabal on various websites.

According to The New York Times, Q has “dropped” almost 5,000 messages so far, many repeating warnings about satanic rituals that have previously made their way into mainstream culture: If you lived through the 80s, you might remember evening news stories claiming Satanists were infiltrating daycares and schools to abuse children. Another QAnon claim, that cabal members kill and eat children to gain special powers from their blood, is a recycled Blood Libel conspiracy theory rooted in anti-semitism from the turn of the Twentieth Century, which helped to fuel Nazism across the world.

Conspirituality

Why are some members of the spiritual community putting stock in this conspiracy theory?

Two of the issues QAnon distorts—child abuse and human trafficking—are legitimate concerns, and many in the wellness community, including Corn, feel passionately about stopping them. (Corn has been working to fight human trafficking for decades. She recommends a few organizations that she’s personally cooperated with in both the United States and India: Children of the Night and Apne App.)

More generally, spiritual seekers are attracted to the idea of hidden and secret knowledge, and the existence of a grand cosmic plan, according to British writer and philosopher Jules Evans, who’s written extensively about the intersection of mysticism and conspiracy theories. “People prone to spiritual experiences may also be prone to unusual beliefs like conspiracy theories, which could be described as a paranoid version of a mystical experience,” Evans says.

“Conspirituality” is a term that was used by academic Charlotte Ward in 2011 in the Journal of Contemporary Religion. It is described as a “a rapidly growing web movement expressing an ideology fueled by political disillusionment and the popularity of alternative worldviews.”

Conspirituality is also a podcast, hosted by Derek Beres, Julian Walker, and Matthew Remski, that explores the cult-like behavior of QAnon and its theories.

see also 11 Yoga Practices for Working Through Stress and Anxiety

How to Spot QAnon, Protect Yourself from Disinformation, and Respond

In an interview with cult survivor and researcher Remski on the Conspirituality Podcast, Corn warned of the dangers of “Pastel QAnon” and their pleas to “protect children.” If you look closely, you might see QAnon hashtags attached to the posts, mixed in with other hashtags used by anti-trafficking campaigns: #savethechildren, #endsextrafficking, #eyeswideopen, #thegreatawakening, #dotheresearch, #followthewhiterabbit. (See a list of QAnon terminology here, compiled by the Conspirituality Podcast.)

According to Evans, “We need to learn how to balance our intuition with critical thinking, otherwise we can fall prey to ideas which are bad for us and our networks.”

If you see QAnon-related posts in your social feeds and want to start a conversation with the person who posted, Krasno recommends avoiding posting in their comments, as that can give the post more weight and help it spread further. He also recommends avoiding using words like ‘conspiracy’ or ‘conspirituality.’ “[These words] immediately cast any sort of skepticism in a negative light, and many conspiracies have been proven through hard-nosed journalism, including theories about Jeffrey Epstein, Watergate, and child sex trafficking,” he says. The word conspiracy can put people on the defensive and erode the common ground you are trying to create in an effort to bridge your worldview with others’, he explains. “You also have to be sensitive to the fact that some folks who support QAnon are survivors of sex trafficking and abuse,” says Krasno. “And now they feel heard, and have agency and community.”

see also A Sequence for Building Resilience in This Political Climate

When Krasno does engage with members of his community posting QAnon messages, he tries to frame his responses around discernment and media literacy, asking them if they know the source of the information they are sharing and whether it is reliable—whether it meets journalistic standards, has come from multiple expert sources, and was fact-checked.

“I remind myself that we are all susceptible to being imperceptibly influenced by misinformation, and then I ask others to be aware of that as well,” Krasno says. If your own opinions have changed over the last several months, he suggests asking yourself why. “One of the hardest things in the world now is to differentiate fact from fiction,” he says, especially when misinformation is prolific online.

“I also challenge people to get off of social media for a day, or even a week, to see how they feel,” Krasno adds. “The goal of QAnon and other similar movements is to propagate chaos by constantly agitating people, tapping into sympathetic nervous system responses that inspire you to fight. When people get off of social media for a while, they usually feel better, more relaxed, and happier.”

see also A Yoga Sequence to Train Your Brain to Relax

#sleep sounds #sleep music #white noise app #nature sounds #relaxing sounds #rain sounds for sleeping

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bountyofbeads · 5 years ago

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I am posting a series of articles on the misinformation campaign being waged by the Trump campaign and other nafarious actors including Russia, Iran and China..Its important we recognize, educate and share this information ahead of the 2020 election. The misinformation is 20 fold to the misinformation campaign waged in 2016. WE MUST DEFEAT DONALD TRUMP FOR THE SAKE OF OUR DEMOCRACY. PLEASE SHARE!!! TY🙏🏻🙏🙏🏼🙏🏽🙏🏾🙏🏿

THE BILLION-DOLLAR DISINFORMATION CAMPAIGN TO REELECT THE PRESIDENT..... How new technologies and techniques pioneered by dictators will shape the 2020 Election

By McKay Coppins | Published MARCH 2020 Issue | The Atlantic Magazine | Posted February 13, 2020 |

(**Updated at 2:30 p.m. ET on February 10, 2020.)

(PART 1 /2)

One day last fall, I sat down to create a new Facebook account. I picked a forgettable name, snapped a profile pic with my face obscured, and clicked “Like” on the official pages of Donald Trump and his reelection campaign. Facebook’s algorithm prodded me to follow Ann Coulter, Fox Business, and a variety of fan pages with names like “In Trump We Trust.” I complied. I also gave my cellphone number to the Trump campaign, and joined a handful of private Facebook groups for MAGA diehards, one of which required an application that seemed designed to screen out interlopers.

The president’s reelection campaign was then in the midst of a multimillion-dollar ad blitz aimed at shaping Americans’ understanding of the recently launched impeachment proceedings. Thousands of micro-targeted ads had flooded the internet, portraying Trump as a heroic reformer cracking down on foreign corruption while Democrats plotted a coup. That this narrative bore little resemblance to reality seemed only to accelerate its spread. Right-wing websites amplified every claim. Pro-Trump forums teemed with conspiracy theories. An alternate information ecosystem was taking shape around the biggest news story in the country, and I wanted to see it from the inside.

The story that unfurled in my Facebook feed over the next several weeks was, at times, disorienting. There were days when I would watch, live on TV, an impeachment hearing filled with damning testimony about the president’s conduct, only to look at my phone later and find a slickly edited video—served up by the Trump campaign—that used out-of-context clips to recast the same testimony as an exoneration. Wait, I caught myself wondering more than once, is that what happened today?

As I swiped at my phone, a stream of pro-Trump propaganda filled the screen: “That’s right, the whistleblower’s own lawyer said, ‘The coup has started …’ ” Swipe. “Democrats are doing Putin’s bidding …” Swipe. “The only message these radical socialists and extremists will understand is a crushing …” Swipe. “Only one man can stop this chaos …” Swipe, swipe, swipe.

I was surprised by the effect it had on me. I’d assumed that my skepticism and media literacy would inoculate me against such distortions. But I soon found myself reflexively questioning every headline. It wasn’t that I believed Trump and his boosters were telling the truth. It was that, in this state of heightened suspicion, truth itself—about Ukraine, impeachment, or anything else—felt more and more difficult to locate. With each swipe, the notion of observable reality drifted further out of reach.

What I was seeing was a strategy that has been deployed by illiberal political leaders around the world. Rather than shutting down dissenting voices, these leaders have learned to harness the democratizing power of social media for their own purposes—jamming the signals, sowing confusion. They no longer need to silence the dissident shouting in the streets; they can use a megaphone to drown him out. Scholars have a name for this: censorship through noise.

After the 2016 election, much was made of the threats posed to American democracy by foreign disinformation. Stories of Russian troll farms and Macedonian fake-news mills loomed in the national imagination. But while these shadowy outside forces preoccupied politicians and journalists, Trump and his domestic allies were beginning to adopt the same tactics of information warfare that have kept the world’s demagogues and strongmen in power.

Every presidential campaign sees its share of spin and misdirection, but this year’s contest promises to be different. In conversations with political strategists and other experts, a dystopian picture of the general election comes into view—one shaped by coordinated bot attacks, Potemkin local-news sites, micro-targeted fearmongering, and anonymous mass texting. Both parties will have these tools at their disposal. But in the hands of a president who lies constantly, who traffics in conspiracy theories, and who readily manipulates the levers of government for his own gain, their potential to wreak havoc is enormous.

The Trump campaign is planning to spend more than $1 billion, and it will be aided by a vast coalition of partisan media, outside political groups, and enterprising freelance operatives. These pro-Trump forces are poised to wage what could be the most extensive disinformation campaign in U.S. history. Whether or not it succeeds in reelecting the president, the wreckage it leaves behind could be irreparable.

'THE DEATH STAR'

The campaign is run from the 14th floor of a gleaming, modern office tower in Rosslyn, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C. Glass-walled conference rooms look out on the Potomac River. Rows of sleek monitors line the main office space. Unlike the bootstrap operation that first got Trump elected—with its motley band of B-teamers toiling in an unfinished space in Trump Tower—his 2020 enterprise is heavily funded, technologically sophisticated, and staffed with dozens of experienced operatives. One Republican strategist referred to it, admiringly, as “the Death Star.”

Presiding over this effort is Brad Parscale, a 6-foot-8 Viking of a man with a shaved head and a triangular beard. As the digital director of Trump’s 2016 campaign, Parscale didn’t become a household name like Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway. But he played a crucial role in delivering Trump to the Oval Office—and his efforts will shape this year’s election.

In speeches and interviews, Parscale likes to tell his life story as a tidy rags-to-riches tale, embroidered with Trumpian embellishments. He grew up a simple “farm boy from Kansas” (read: son of an affluent lawyer from suburban Topeka) who managed to graduate from an “Ivy League” school (Trinity University, in San Antonio). After college, he went to work for a software company in California, only to watch the business collapse in the economic aftermath of 9/11 (not to mention allegations in a lawsuit that he and his parents, who owned the business, had illegally transferred company funds—claims that they disputed). Broke and desperate, Parscale took his “last $500” (not counting the value of three rental properties he owned) and used it to start a one-man web-design business in Texas.

Parscale Media was, by most accounts, a scrappy endeavor at the outset. Hustling to drum up clients, Parscale cold-pitched shoppers in the tech aisle of a Borders bookstore. Over time, he built enough websites for plumbers and gun shops that bigger clients took notice—including the Trump Organization. In 2011, Parscale was invited to bid on designing a website for Trump International Realty. An ardent fan of The Apprentice, he offered to do the job for $10,000, a fraction of the actual cost. “I just made up a price,” he later told The Washington Post. “I recognized that I was a nobody in San Antonio, but working for the Trumps would be everything.” The contract was his, and a lucrative relationship was born.

Over the next four years, he was hired to design websites for a range of Trump ventures—a winery, a skin-care line, and then a presidential campaign. By late 2015, Parscale—a man with no discernible politics, let alone campaign experience—was running the Republican front-runner’s digital operation from his personal laptop.

Parscale slid comfortably into Trump’s orbit. Not only was he cheap and unpretentious—with no hint of the savvier-than-thou smugness that characterized other political operatives—but he seemed to carry a chip on his shoulder that matched the candidate’s. “Brad was one of those people who wanted to prove the establishment wrong and show the world what he was made of,” says a former colleague from the campaign.

Perhaps most important, he seemed to have no reservations about the kind of campaign Trump wanted to run. The race-baiting, the immigrant-bashing, the truth-bending—none of it seemed to bother Parscale. While some Republicans wrung their hands over Trump’s inflammatory messages, Parscale came up with ideas to more effectively disseminate them.

The campaign had little interest at first in cutting-edge ad technology, and for a while, Parscale’s most valued contribution was the merchandise page he built to sell MAGA hats. But that changed in the general election. Outgunned on the airwaves and lagging badly in fundraising, campaign officials turned to Google and Facebook, where ads were inexpensive and shock value was rewarded. As the campaign poured tens of millions into online advertising—amplifying themes such as Hillary Clinton’s criminality and the threat of radical Islamic terrorism—Parscale’s team, which was christened Project Alamo, grew to 100.

Parscale was generally well liked by his colleagues, who recall him as competent and intensely focused. “He was a get-shit-done type of person,” says A. J. Delgado, who worked with him. Perhaps just as important, he had a talent for ingratiating himself with the Trump family. “He was probably better at managing up,” Kurt Luidhardt, a consultant for the campaign, told me. He made sure to share credit for his work with the candidate’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and he excelled at using Trump’s digital ignorance to flatter him. “Parscale would come in and tell Trump he didn’t need to listen to the polls, because he’d crunched his data and they were going to win by six points,” one former campaign staffer told me. “I was like, ‘Come on, man, don’t bullshit a bullshitter.’ ” But Trump seemed to buy it. (Parscale declined to be interviewed for this story.)

James Barnes, a Facebook employee who was dispatched to work closely with the campaign, told me Parscale’s political inexperience made him open to experimenting with the platform’s new tools. “Whereas some grizzled campaign strategist who’d been around the block a few times might say, ‘Oh, that will never work,’ Brad’s predisposition was to say, ‘Yeah, let’s try it.’ ” From June to November, Trump’s campaign ran 5.9 million ads on Facebook, while Clinton’s ran just 66,000. A Facebook executive would later write in a leaked memo that Trump “got elected because he ran the single best digital ad campaign I’ve ever seen from any advertiser.”

Though some strategists questioned how much these ads actually mattered, Parscale was hailed for Trump’s surprise victory. Stories appeared in the press calling him a “genius” and the campaign’s “secret weapon,” and in 2018 he was tapped to lead the entire reelection effort. The promotion was widely viewed as a sign that the president’s 2020 strategy would hinge on the digital tactics that Parscale had mastered.

Through it all, the strategist has continued to show a preference for narrative over truth. Last May, Parscale regaled a crowd of donors and activists in Miami with the story of his ascent. When a ProPublica reporter confronted him about the many misleading details in his account, he shrugged off the fact-check. “When I give a speech, I tell it like a story,” he said. “My story is my story.”

'DISINFORMATION ARCHITECTURE'

In his book This Is Not Propaganda, Peter Pomerantsev, a researcher at the London School of Economics, writes about a young Filipino political consultant he calls “P.” In college, P had studied the “Little Albert experiment,” in which scientists conditioned a young child to fear furry animals by exposing him to loud noises every time he encountered a white lab rat. The experiment gave P an idea. He created a series of Facebook groups for Filipinos to discuss what was going on in their communities. Once the groups got big enough—about 100,000 members—he began posting local crime stories, and instructed his employees to leave comments falsely tying the grisly headlines to drug cartels. The pages lit up with frightened chatter. Rumors swirled; conspiracy theories metastasized. To many, all crimes became drug crimes.

Unbeknownst to their members, the Facebook groups were designed to boost Rodrigo Duterte, then a long-shot presidential candidate running on a pledge to brutally crack down on drug criminals. (Duterte once boasted that, as mayor of Davao City, he rode through the streets on his motorcycle and personally executed drug dealers.) P’s experiment was one plank in a larger “disinformation architecture”—which also included social-media influencers paid to mock opposing candidates, and mercenary trolls working out of former call centers—that experts say aided Duterte’s rise to power. Since assuming office in 2016, Duterte has reportedly ramped up these efforts while presiding over thousands of extrajudicial killings.

The campaign in the Philippines was emblematic of an emerging propaganda playbook, one that uses new tools for the age-old ends of autocracy. The Kremlin has long been an innovator in this area. (A 2011 manual for Russian civil servants favorably compared their methods of disinformation to “an invisible radiation” that takes effect while “the population doesn’t even feel it is being acted upon.”) But with the technological advances of the past decade, and the global proliferation of smartphones, governments around the world have found success deploying Kremlin-honed techniques against their own people.

In the United States, we tend to view such tools of oppression as the faraway problems of more fragile democracies. But the people working to reelect Trump understand the power of these tactics. They may use gentler terminology—muddy the waters; alternative facts—but they’re building a machine designed to exploit their own sprawling disinformation architecture.

Central to that effort is the campaign’s use of micro-targeting—the process of slicing up the electorate into distinct niches and then appealing to them with precisely tailored digital messages. The advantages of this approach are obvious: An ad that calls for defunding Planned Parenthood might get a mixed response from a large national audience, but serve it directly via Facebook to 800 Roman Catholic women in Dubuque, Iowa, and its reception will be much more positive. If candidates once had to shout their campaign promises from a soapbox, micro-targeting allows them to sidle up to millions of voters and whisper personalized messages in their ear.

Parscale didn’t invent this practice—Barack Obama’s campaign famously used it in 2012, and Clinton’s followed suit. But Trump’s effort in 2016 was unprecedented, in both its scale and its brazenness. In the final days of the 2016 race, for example, Trump’s team tried to suppress turnout among black voters in Florida by slipping ads into their News Feeds that read, “Hillary Thinks African-Americans Are Super Predators.” An unnamed campaign official boasted to Bloomberg Businessweek that it was one of “three major voter suppression operations underway.” (The other two targeted young women and white liberals.)

The weaponization of micro-targeting was pioneered in large part by the data scientists at Cambridge Analytica. The firm began as part of a nonpartisan military contractor that used digital psyops to target terrorist groups and drug cartels. In Pakistan, it worked to thwart jihadist recruitment efforts; in South America, it circulated disinformation to turn drug dealers against their bosses.

The emphasis shifted once the conservative billionaire Robert Mercer became a major investor and installed Steve Bannon as his point man. Using a massive trove of data it had gathered from Facebook and other sources—without users’ consent—Cambridge Analytica worked to develop detailed “psychographic profiles” for every voter in the U.S., and began experimenting with ways to stoke paranoia and bigotry by exploiting certain personality traits. In one exercise, the firm asked white men whether they would approve of their daughter marrying a Mexican immigrant; those who said yes were asked a follow-up question designed to provoke irritation at the constraints of political correctness: “Did you feel like you had to say that?”

Christopher Wylie, who was the director of research at Cambridge Analytica and later testified about the company to Congress, told me that “with the right kind of nudges,” people who exhibited certain psychological characteristics could be pushed into ever more extreme beliefs and conspiratorial thinking. “Rather than using data to interfere with the process of radicalization, Steve Bannon was able to invert that,” Wylie said. “We were essentially seeding an insurgency in the United States.”

Cambridge Analytica was dissolved in 2018, shortly after its CEO was caught on tape bragging about using bribery and sexual “honey traps” on behalf of clients. (The firm denied that it actually used such tactics.) Since then, some political scientists have questioned how much effect its “psychographic” targeting really had. But Wylie—who spoke with me from London, where he now works for H&M, as a fashion-trend forecaster—said the firm’s work in 2016 was a modest test run compared with what could come.

“What happens if North Korea or Iran picks up where Cambridge Analytica left off?” he said, noting that plenty of foreign actors will be looking for ways to interfere in this year’s election. “There are countless hostile states that have more than enough capacity to quickly replicate what we were able to do … and make it much more sophisticated.” These efforts may not come only from abroad: A group of former Cambridge Analytica employees have formed a new firm that, according to the Associated Press, is working with the Trump campaign. (The firm has denied this, and a campaign spokesperson declined to comment.)

After the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, Facebook was excoriated for its mishandling of user data and complicity in the viral spread of fake news. Mark Zuckerberg promised to do better, and rolled out a flurry of reforms. But then, last fall, he handed a major victory to lying politicians: Candidates, he said, would be allowed to continue running false ads on Facebook. (Commercial advertisers, by contrast, are subject to fact-checking.) In a speech at Georgetown University, the CEO argued that his company shouldn’t be responsible for arbitrating political speech, and that because political ads already receive so much scrutiny, candidates who choose to lie will be held accountable by journalists and watchdogs.

"Shady political actors are discovering how easy it is to wage an untraceable whisper campaign by text message."

To bolster his case, Zuckerberg pointed to the recently launched—and publicly accessible—“library” where Facebook archives every political ad it publishes. The project has a certain democratic appeal: Why censor false or toxic content when a little sunlight can have the same effect? But spend some time scrolling through the archive of Trump reelection ads, and you quickly see the limits of this transparency.

The campaign doesn’t run just one ad at a time on a given theme. It runs hundreds of iterations—adjusting the language, the music, even the colors of the “Donate” buttons. In the 10 weeks after the House of Representatives began its impeachment inquiry, the Trump campaign ran roughly 14,000 different ads containing the word impeachment. Sifting through all of them is virtually impossible.

Both parties will rely on micro-targeted ads this year, but the president is likely to have a distinct advantage. The Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign have reportedly compiled an average of 3,000 data points on every voter in America. They have spent years experimenting with ways to tweak their messages based not just on gender and geography, but on whether the recipient owns a gun or watches the Golf Channel.

While these ads can be used to try to win over undecided voters, they’re most often deployed for fundraising and for firing up the faithful—and Trump’s advisers believe this election will be decided by mobilization, not persuasion. To turn out the base, the campaign has signaled that it will return to familiar themes: the threat of “illegal aliens”—a term Parscale has reportedly encouraged Trump to use—and the corruption of the “swamp.”

Beyond Facebook, the campaign is also investing in a texting platform that could allow it to send anonymous messages directly to millions of voters’ phones without their permission. Until recently, people had to opt in before a campaign could include them in a mass text. But with new “peer to peer” texting apps—including one developed by Gary Coby, a senior Trump adviser—a single volunteer can send hundreds of messages an hour, skirting federal regulations by clicking “Send” one message at a time. Notably, these messages aren’t required to disclose who’s behind them, thanks to a 2002 ruling by the Federal Election Commission that cited the limited number of characters available in a text.

Most experts assume that these regulations will be overhauled sometime after the 2020 election. For now, campaigns from both parties are hoovering up as many cellphone numbers as possible, and Parscale has said texting will be at the center of Trump’s reelection strategy. The medium’s ability to reach voters is unparalleled: While robocalls get sent to voicemail and email blasts get trapped in spam folders, peer-to-peer texting companies say that at least 90 percent of their messages are opened.

The Trump campaign’s texts so far this cycle have focused on shouty fundraising pleas (“They have NOTHING! IMPEACHMENT IS OVER! Now let’s CRUSH our End of Month Goal”). But the potential for misuse by outside groups is clear—and shady political actors are already discovering how easy it is to wage an untraceable whisper campaign by text.

In 2018, as early voting got under way in Tennessee’s Republican gubernatorial primary, voters began receiving text messages attacking two of the candidates’ conservative credentials. The texts—written in a conversational style, as if they’d been sent from a friend—were unsigned, and people who tried calling the numbers received a busy signal. The local press covered the smear campaign. Law enforcement was notified. But the source of the texts was never discovered.

'WAR ON THE PRESS'

One afternoon last March, I was on the phone with a Republican operative close to the Trump family when he casually mentioned that a reporter at Business Insider was about to have a very bad day. The journalist, John Haltiwanger, had tweeted something that annoyed Donald Trump Jr., prompting the coterie of friends and allies surrounding the president’s son to drum up a hit piece. The story they had coming, the operative suggested to me, would demolish the reporter’s credibility.

I wasn’t sure what to make of this gloating—people in Trump’s circle have a tendency toward bluster. But a few hours later, the operative sent me a link to a Breitbart News article documenting Haltiwanger’s “history of intense Trump hatred.” The story was based on a series of Instagram posts—all of them from before Haltiwanger started working at Business Insider—in which he made fun of the president and expressed solidarity with liberal protesters.

The next morning, Don Jr. tweeted the story to his 3 million followers, denouncing Haltiwanger as a “raging lib.” Other conservatives piled on, and the reporter was bombarded with abusive messages and calls for him to be fired. His employer issued a statement conceding that the Instagram posts were “not appropriate.” Haltiwanger kept his job, but the experience, he told me later, “was bizarre and unsettling.”

The Breitbart story was part of a coordinated effort by a coalition of Trump allies to air embarrassing information about reporters who produce critical coverage of the president. (The New York Times first reported on this project last summer; since then, it’s been described to me in greater detail.) According to people with knowledge of the effort, pro-Trump operatives have scraped social-media accounts belonging to hundreds of political journalists and compiled years’ worth of posts into a dossier.

Often when a particular news story is deemed especially unfair—or politically damaging—to the president, Don Jr. will flag it in a text thread that he uses for this purpose. (Among those who text regularly with the president’s eldest son, someone close to him told me, are the conservative activist Charlie Kirk; two GOP strategists, Sergio Gor and Arthur Schwartz; Matthew Boyle, a Breitbart editor; and U.S. Ambassador Richard Grenell.) Once a story has been marked for attack, someone searches the dossier for material on the journalists involved. If something useful turns up—a problematic old joke; evidence of liberal political views—Boyle turns it into a Breitbart headline, which White House officials and campaign surrogates can then share on social media. (The White House has denied any involvement in this effort.)

Descriptions of the dossier vary. One source I spoke with said that a programmer in India had been paid to organize it into a searchable database, making posts that contain offensive keywords easier to find. Another told me the dossier had expanded to at least 2,000 people, including not just journalists but high-profile academics, politicians, celebrities, and other potential Trump foes. Some of this, of course, may be hyperbolic boasting—but the effort has yielded fruit.

"PASCALE HAS SAID THE CAMPAIGN INTENDS TO TRAIN “SWARMS OF SURROGATES” TO UNDERMINE COVERAGE FROM LOCAL TV STATIONS AND NEWSPAPERS."

In the past year, the operatives involved have gone after journalists at CNN, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. They exposed one reporter for using the word fag in college, and another for posting anti-Semitic and racist jokes a decade ago. These may not have been career-ending revelations, but people close to the project said they’re planning to unleash much more opposition research as the campaign intensifies. “This is innovative shit,” said Mike Cernovich, a right-wing activist with a history of trolling. “They’re appropriating call-out culture.”

What’s notable about this effort is not that it aims to expose media bias. Conservatives have been complaining—with some merit—about a liberal slant in the press for decades. But in the Trump era, an important shift has taken place. Instead of trying to reform the press, or critique its coverage, today’s most influential conservatives want to destroy the mainstream media altogether. “Journalistic integrity is dead,” Boyle declared in a 2017 speech at the Heritage Foundation. “There is no such thing anymore. So everything is about weaponization of information.”

It’s a lesson drawn from demagogues around the world: When the press as an institution is weakened, fact-based journalism becomes just one more drop in the daily deluge of content—no more or less credible than partisan propaganda. Relativism is the real goal of Trump’s assault on the press, and the more “enemies of the people” his allies can take out along the way, the better. “A culture war is a war,” Steve Bannon told the Times last year. “There are casualties in war.”

This attitude has permeated the president’s base. At rallies, people wear T-shirts that read rope. tree. journalist. some assembly required. A CBS News/YouGov poll has found that just 11 percent of strong Trump supporters trust the mainstream media—while 91 percent turn to the president for “accurate information.” This dynamic makes it all but impossible for the press to hold the president accountable, something Trump himself seems to understand. “Remember,” he told a crowd in 2018, “what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”

Bryan Lanza, who worked for the Trump campaign in 2016 and remains a White House surrogate, told me flatly that he sees no possibility of Americans establishing a common set of facts from which to conduct the big debates of this year’s election. Nor is that his goal. “It’s our job to sell our narrative louder than the media,” Lanza said. “They’re clearly advocating for a liberal-socialist position, and we’re never going to be in concert. So the war continues.”

Parscale has indicated that he plans to open up a new front in this war: local news. Last year, he said the campaign intends to train “swarms of surrogates” to undermine negative coverage from local TV stations and newspapers. Polls have long found that Americans across the political spectrum trust local news more than national media. If the campaign has its way, that trust will be eroded by November. “We can actually build up and fight with the local newspapers,” Parscale told donors, according to a recording provided by The Palm Beach Post. “So we’re not just fighting on Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC with the same 700,000 people watching every day.”

Running parallel to this effort, some conservatives have been experimenting with a scheme to exploit the credibility of local journalism. Over the past few years, hundreds of websites with innocuous-sounding names like the Arizona Monitor and The Kalamazoo Times have begun popping up. At first glance, they look like regular publications, complete with community notices and coverage of schools. But look closer and you’ll find that there are often no mastheads, few if any bylines, and no addresses for local offices. Many of them are organs of Republican lobbying groups; others belong to a mysterious company called Locality Labs, which is run by a conservative activist in Illinois. Readers are given no indication that these sites have political agendas—which is precisely what makes them valuable.

According to one longtime strategist, candidates looking to plant a negative story about an opponent can pay to have their desired headlines posted on some of these Potemkin news sites. By working through a third-party consulting firm—instead of paying the sites directly—candidates are able to obscure their involvement in the scheme when they file expenditures to the Federal Election Commission. Even if the stories don’t fool savvy readers, the headlines are convincing enough to be flashed across the screen in a campaign commercial or slipped into fundraising emails.

'DIGITAL DIRTY TRICKS'

Shortly after polls closed in Kentucky’s gubernatorial election last November, an anonymous Twitter user named @Overlordkraken1 announced to his 19 followers that he had “just shredded a box of Republican mail in ballots” in Louisville.

There was little reason to take this claim at face value, and plenty of reason to doubt it (beginning with the fact that he’d misspelled Louisville). But the race was tight, and as incumbent Governor Matt Bevin began to fall behind in the vote total, an army of Twitter bots began spreading the election-rigging claim.

The original post was removed by Twitter, but by then thousands of automated accounts were circulating screenshots of it with the hashtag #StoptheSteal. Popular right-wing internet personalities jumped on the narrative, and soon the Bevin campaign was making noise about unspecified voting “irregularities.” When the race was called for his opponent, the governor refused to concede, and asked for a statewide review of the vote. (No evidence of ballot-shredding was found, and he finally admitted defeat nine days later.)

The Election Night disinformation blitz had all the markings of a foreign influence operation. In 2016, Russian trolls had worked in similar ways to contaminate U.S. political discourse—posing as Black Lives Matter activists in an attempt to inflame racial divisions, and fanning pro-Trump conspiracy theories. (They even used Facebook to organize rallies, including one for Muslim supporters of Clinton in Washington, D.C., where they got someone to hold up a sign attributing a fictional quote to the candidate: “I think Sharia law will be a powerful new direction of freedom.”)

But when Twitter employees later reviewed the activity surrounding Kentucky’s election, they concluded that the bots were largely based in America—a sign that political operatives here were learning to mimic Russian trolling tactics.

Of course, dirty tricks aren’t new to American politics. From Lee Atwater and Roger Stone to the crooked machine Democrats of Chicago, the country has a long history of underhanded operatives smearing opponents and meddling in elections. And, in fact, Samuel Woolley, a scholar who studies digital propaganda, told me that the first documented deployment of politicized Twitter bots was in the U.S. In 2010, an Iowa-based conservative group set up a small network of automated accounts with names like @BrianD82 to promote the idea that Martha Coakley, a Democrat running for Senate in Massachusetts, was anti-Catholic.

Since then, the tactics of Twitter warfare have grown more sophisticated, as regimes around the world experiment with new ways to deploy their cybermilitias. In Mexico, supporters of then-President Enrique Peña Nieto created “sock puppet” accounts to pose as protesters and sabotage the opposition movement. In Azerbaijan, a pro-government youth group waged coordinated harassment campaigns against journalists, flooding their Twitter feeds with graphic threats and insults. When these techniques prove successful, Woolley told me, Americans improve upon them. “It’s almost as if there’s a Columbian exchange between developing-world authoritarian regimes and the West,” he said.

Parscale has denied that the campaign uses bots, saying in a 60 Minutes interview, “I don’t think [they] work.” He may be right—it’s unlikely that these nebulous networks of trolls and bots could swing a national election. But they do have their uses. They can simulate false consensus, derail sincere debate, and hound people out of the public square.

According to one study, bots accounted for roughly 20 percent of all the tweets posted about the 2016 election during one five-week period that year. And Twitter is already infested with bots that seem designed to boost Trump’s reelection prospects. Regardless of where they’re coming from, they have tremendous potential to divide, radicalize, and stoke hatred that lasts long after the votes are cast.

Rob Flaherty, who served as the digital director for Beto O’Rourke’s presidential campaign, told me that Twitter in 2020 is a “hall of mirrors.” He said one mysterious account started a viral rumor that the gunman who killed seven people in Odessa, Texas, last summer had a beto bumper sticker on his car. Another masqueraded as an O’Rourke supporter and hurled racist invective at a journalist. Some of these tactics echoed 2016, when Russian agitators posed as Bernie Sanders supporters and stirred up anger toward Hillary Clinton.

Flaherty said he didn’t know who was behind the efforts targeting O’Rourke, and the candidate dropped out before they could make a real difference. “But you can’t watch this landscape and not get the feeling that someone’s fucking with something,” he told me. Flaherty has since joined Joe Biden’s campaign, which has had to contend with similar distortions: Last year, a website resembling an official Biden campaign page appeared on the internet. It emphasized elements of the candidate’s legislative record likely to hurt him in the Democratic primary—opposition to same-sex marriage, support for the Iraq War—and featured video clips of his awkward encounters with women. The site quickly became one of the most-visited Biden-related sites on the web. It was designed by a Trump consultant.

'FIGHTING FIRE WITH FIRE'

As the president’s reelection machine ramps up, Democratic strategists have found themselves debating an urgent question: Can they defeat the Trump coalition without adopting its tactics?

On one side of this argument is Dmitri Mehlhorn, a consultant notorious for his willingness to experiment with digital subterfuge. During Alabama’s special election in 2017, Mehlhorn helped fund at least two “false flag” operations against the Republican Senate candidate, Roy Moore. For one scheme, faux Russian Twitter bots followed the candidate’s account to make it look like the Kremlin was backing Moore. For another, a fake social-media campaign, dubbed “Dry Alabama,” was designed to link Moore to fictional Baptist teetotalers trying to ban alcohol. (Mehlhorn has claimed that he unaware of the Russian bot effort and does not support the use of misinformation.)

When The New York Times uncovered the second plot, one of the activists involved, Matt Osborne, contended that Democrats had no choice but to employ such unscrupulous techniques. “If you don’t do it, you’re fighting with one hand tied behind your back,” Osborne said. “You have a moral imperative to do this—to do whatever it takes.”

Others have argued that this is precisely the wrong moment for Democrats to start abandoning ideals of honesty and fairness. “It’s just not in my values to go out there making shit up and tricking voters,” Flaherty told me. “I know there’s this whole fight-fire-with-fire contingent, but generally when you ask them what they mean, they’re like, ‘Lie!’ ” Some also note that the president has already handed them plenty of ammunition. “I don’t think the Democratic campaign is going to need to make stuff up about Trump,” Judd Legum, the author of a progressive newsletter about digital politics, told me. “They can stick to things that are true.”

"EVENTUALLY, THE FEAR OF COVERT PROPAGANDA INFLICTS AS MUCH DAMAGE AS THE PROPAGANDA ITSELF."

One Democrat straddling these two camps is a young, tech-savvy strategist named Tara McGowan. Last fall, she and the former Obama adviser David Plouffe launched a political-action committee with a pledge to spend $75 million attacking Trump online. At the time, the president’s campaign was running more ads on Facebook and Google than the top four Democratic candidates combined. McGowan’s plans to return fire included such ads, but she also had more creative—and controversial—measures in mind.

For example, she established a media organization with a staff of writers to produce left-leaning “hometown news” stories that can be micro-targeted to persuadable voters on Facebook without any indication that they’re paid for by a political group. Though she insists that the reporting is strictly factual, some see the enterprise as a too-close-for-comfort co-opting of right-wing tactics.

When I spoke with McGowan, she was open about her willingness to push boundaries that might make some Democrats queasy. As far as she was concerned, the “super-predator” ads Trump ran to depress black turnout in 2016 were “fair game” because they had some basis in fact. (Clinton did use the term in 1996, to refer to gang members.) McGowan suggested that a similar approach could be taken with conservatives. She ruled out attempts to misinform Republicans about when and where to vote—a tactic Mehlhorn reportedly considered, though he later said he was joking—but said she would pursue any strategy that was “in the bounds of the law.”

“We are in a radically disruptive moment right now,” McGowan told me. “We have a president that lies every day, unabashedly … I think Trump is so desperate to win this election that he will do anything. There will be no bar too low for him.”

This intraparty split was highlighted last year when state officials urged the Democratic National Committee to formally disavow the use of bots, troll farms, and “deepfakes” (digitally manipulated videos that can, with alarming precision, make a person appear to do or say anything). Supporters saw the proposed pledge as a way of contrasting their party’s values with those of the GOP. But after months of lobbying, the committee refused to adopt the pledge.

Meanwhile, experts worried about domestic disinformation are looking to other countries for lessons. The most successful recent example may be Indonesia, which cracked down on the problem after a wave of viral lies and conspiracy theories pushed by hard-line Islamists led to the defeat of a popular Christian Chinese candidate for governor in 2016. To prevent a similar disruption in last year’s presidential election, a coalition of journalists from more than two dozen top Indonesian news outlets worked together to identify and debunk hoaxes before they gained traction online. But while that may sound like a promising model, it was paired with aggressive efforts by the state to monitor and arrest purveyors of fake news—an approach that would run afoul of the First Amendment if attempted in the U.S.

Richard Stengel, who served as the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy under President Obama, spent almost three years trying to counter digital propaganda from the Islamic State and Russia. By the time he left office, he told me, he was convinced that disinformation would continue to thrive until big tech companies were forced to take responsibility for it. Stengel has proposed amending the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which shields online platforms from liability for messages posted by third parties. Companies such as Facebook and Twitter, he believes, should be required by law to police their platforms for disinformation and abusive trolling. “It’s not going to solve the whole problem,” he told me, “but it’s going to help with volume.”

There is one other case study to consider. During the Ukrainian revolution in 2014, pro-democracy activists found that they could defang much of the false information about their movement by repeatedly exposing its Russian origins. But this kind of transparency comes with a cost, Stengel observed. Over time, alertness to the prevalence of propaganda can curdle into paranoia. Russian operatives have been known to encourage such anxiety by spreading rumors that exaggerate their own influence. Eventually, the fear of covert propaganda inflicts as much damage as the propaganda itself.

Once you internalize the possibility that you’re being manipulated by some hidden hand, nothing can be trusted. Every dissenting voice on Twitter becomes a Russian bot, every uncomfortable headline a false flag, every political development part of an ever-deepening conspiracy. By the time the information ecosystem collapses under the weight of all this cynicism, you’re too vigilant to notice that the disinformationists have won.

'POWERS OF INCUMBENCY'

If there’s one thing that can be said for Brad Parscale, it’s that he runs a tight ship. Unauthorized leaks from inside the campaign are rare; press stories on palace intrigue are virtually nonexistent. When the staff first moved into its new offices last year, journalists were periodically invited to tour the facility—but Parscale put an end to the practice: He didn’t want them glimpsing a scrap of paper or a whiteboard scribble that they weren’t supposed to see.

Notably, while the Trump White House has endured a seemingly endless procession of shake-ups, the Trump reelection campaign has seen very little turnover since Parscale took charge. His staying power is one reason many Republicans—inside the organization or out—hesitate to talk about him on the record. But among allies of the president, there appears to be a growing skepticism.

Former colleagues began noticing a change in Parscale after his promotion. Suddenly, the quiet guy with his face buried in a laptop was wearing designer suits, tossing out MAGA hats at campaign rallies, and traveling to Europe to speak at a political-marketing conference. In the past few years, Parscale has bought a BMW, a Range Rover, a condo, and a $2.4 million waterfront house in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. “He knows he has the confidence of the family,” one former colleague told me, “which gives him more swagger.” When the U.K.’s Daily Mail ran a story spotlighting Parscale’s spending spree, he attempted deflection through flattery. “The president is an excellent businessman,” he told the tabloid, “and being associated with him for years has been extremely beneficial to my family.”

But according to a former White House official with knowledge of the incident, Trump was irritated by the coverage, and the impression it created that his campaign manager was getting rich off him. For a moment, Parscale’s standing appeared to be in peril, but then Trump’s attention was diverted by the G7 summit in France, and he never returned to the issue. (A spokesperson for the campaign disputed this account.)

Some Republicans worry that for all Parscale’s digital expertise, he doesn’t have the vision to guide Trump to reelection. The president is historically unpopular, and even in red states, he has struggled to mobilize his base for special elections. If Trump’s message is growing stale with voters, is Parscale the man to help overhaul it? “People start to ask the question—you’re building this apparatus, and that’s great, but what’s the overarching narrative?” said a former campaign staffer.

But whether Trump finds a new narrative or not, he has something this time around that he didn’t have in 2016—the powers of the presidency. While every commander in chief looks for ways to leverage his incumbency for reelection, Trump has shown that he’s willing to go much further than most. In the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections, he seized on reports of a migrant caravan traveling to the U.S. from Central America to claim that the southern border was facing a national-security crisis. Trump warned of a coming “invasion” and claimed, without evidence, that the caravan had been infiltrated by gang members.

Parscale aided this effort by creating a 30-second commercial that interspersed footage of Hispanic migrants with clips of a convicted cop-killer. The ad ended with an urgent call to action: stop the caravan. vote republican. In a final maneuver before the election, Trump dispatched U.S. troops to the border. The president insisted that the operation was necessary to keep America safe—but within weeks the troops were quietly called back, the “crisis” having apparently ended once votes were cast. Skeptics were left to wonder: If Trump is willing to militarize the border to pick up a few extra seats in the midterms, what will he and his supporters do when his reelection is on the line?

It doesn’t require an overactive imagination to envision a worst-case scenario: On Election Day, anonymous text messages direct voters to the wrong polling locations, or maybe even circulate rumors of security threats. Deepfakes of the Democratic nominee using racial slurs crop up faster than social-media platforms can remove them. As news outlets scramble to correct the inaccuracies, hordes of Twitter bots respond by smearing and threatening reporters. Meanwhile, the Trump campaign has spent the final days of the race pumping out Facebook ads at such a high rate that no one can keep track of what they’re injecting into the bloodstream.

After the first round of exit polls is released, a mysteriously sourced video surfaces purporting to show undocumented immigrants at the ballot box. Trump begins retweeting rumors of voter fraud and suggests that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers should be dispatched to polling stations. are illegals stealing the election? reads the Fox News chyron. are russians behind false videos? demands MSNBC.

The votes haven’t even been counted yet, and much of the country is ready to throw out the result.

'NOTHING IS TRUE '

There is perhaps no better place to witness what the culture of disinformation has already wrought in America than a Trump campaign rally. One night in November, I navigated through a parking-lot maze of folding tables covered in MAGA merch and entered the BancorpSouth Arena in Tupelo, Mississippi. The election was still a year away, but thousands of sign-waving supporters had crowded into the venue to cheer on the president in person.

Once Trump took the stage, he let loose a familiar flurry of lies, half-lies, hyperbole, and nonsense. He spun his revisionist history of the Ukraine scandal—the one in which Joe Biden is the villain—and claimed, falsely, that the Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams wanted to “give illegal aliens the right to vote.” At one point, during a riff on abortion, Trump casually asserted that “the governor of Virginia executed a baby”—prompting a woman in the crowd to scream, “Murderer!”

This incendiary fabrication didn’t seem to register with my companions in the press pen, who were busy writing stories and shooting B-roll. I opened Twitter, expecting to see a torrent of fact-checks laying out the truth of the case—that the governor had been answering a hypothetical question about late-term abortion; that a national firestorm had ensued; that there were certainly different ways to interpret his comments but that not even the most ardent anti-abortion activist thought the governor of Virginia had personally “executed a baby.”

But Twitter was uncharacteristically quiet (apparently the president had said this before), and the most widely shared tweet I found on the subject was from his own campaign, which had blasted out a context-free clip of the governor’s abortion comments to back up Trump’s smear.

After the rally, I loitered near one of the exits, chatting with people as they filed out of the arena. Among liberals, there is a comforting caricature of Trump supporters as gullible personality cultists who have been hypnotized into believing whatever their leader says. The appeal of this theory is the implication that the spell can be broken, that truth can still triumph over lies, that someday everything could go back to normal—if only these voters were exposed to the facts. But the people I spoke with in Tupelo seemed to treat matters of fact as beside the point.

One woman told me that, given the president’s accomplishments, she didn’t care if he “fabricates a little bit.” A man responded to my questions about Trump’s dishonest attacks on the press with a shrug and a suggestion that the media “ought to try telling the truth once in a while.” Tony Willnow, a 34-year-old maintenance worker who had an American flag wrapped around his head, observed that Trump had won because he said things no other politician would say. When I asked him if it mattered whether those things were true, he thought for a moment before answering. “He tells you what you want to hear,” Willnow said. “And I don’t know if it’s true or not—but it sounds good, so fuck it.”

The political theorist Hannah Arendt once wrote that the most successful totalitarian leaders of the 20th century instilled in their followers “a mixture of gullibility and cynicism.” When they were lied to, they chose to believe it. When a lie was debunked, they claimed they’d known all along—and would then “admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.” Over time, Arendt wrote, the onslaught of propaganda conditioned people to “believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.”

Leaving the rally, I thought about Arendt, and the swaths of the country that are already gripped by the ethos she described. Should it prevail in 2020, the election’s legacy will be clear—not a choice between parties or candidates or policy platforms, but a referendum on reality itself.

______

This article appears in the March 2020 print edition with the headline “The 2020 Disinformation War.”

______

MCKAY COPPINS is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of The Wilderness, a book about the battle over the future of the Republican Party.

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gezinus · 5 years ago

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The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President

Illustration: Mishko; Hanna Alandi / Getty

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THE DEATH STAR

As Trump’s 2016 digital director, Brad Parscale flooded the internet with the campaign’s messages. (Illustration: Mishko; Jabin Botsford / The Washington Post / Getty)

DISINFORMATION ARCHITECTURE

Read: Peter Pomerantsev on Russia and the menace of unreality

Shady political actors are discovering how easy it is to wage an untraceable whisper campaign by text message.

Read: The age of reverse censorship

WAR ON THE PRESS

Parscale has said the campaign intends to train “swarms of surrogates” to undermine coverage from local TV stations and newspapers.

From December 2019: The dark psychology of social networks

DIGITAL DIRTY TRICKS

Mishko

FIGHTING FIRE WITH FIRE

As the president’s reelection machine ramps up, Democratic strategists have found themselves debating an urgent question: Can they defeat the Trump coalition without adopting its tactics?

On one side of this argument is Dmitri Mehlhorn, a consultant notorious for his willingness to experiment with digital subterfuge. During Alabama’s special election in 2017, Mehlhorn helped fund at least two “false flag” operations against the Republican Senate candidate, Roy Moore. For one scheme, faux Russian Twitter bots followed the candidate’s account to make it look like the Kremlin was backing Moore. For another, a fake social-media campaign, dubbed “Dry Alabama,” was designed to link Moore to fictional Baptist teetotalers trying to ban alcohol. (Mehlhorn has claimed that he was unaware of these efforts and does not support the use of misinformation.)

Eventually, the fear of covert propaganda inflicts as much damage as the propaganda itself.

From May 2018: The era of fake video begins

POWERS OF INCUMBENCY

Read: McKay Coppins on the conservatives trying to ditch fake news

The votes haven’t even been counted yet, and much of the country is ready to throw out the result.

NOTHING IS TRUE