News and commentary for understanding and coping with the years ahead...
Turning universities into right-wing propaganda factories
The authoritarian parallels
A compendium of the best reporting and commentary surrounding the pivotal 2024 elections in the United States. You won't find horse race coverage here, or the standard "both sides" BS that passes so often for political journalism. What you will find are links, with brief commentary, to work that I believe advances the conversation we should be having about America's – and the world's – future. Remember: Everything is at stake this year. (Unfortunately, some of the work I point to is behind paywalls.)
Beyond cynical
City Manager Bryan Heck fielded an unusual question at City Hall on the morning of Sept. 9, from a staff member of Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance. The staffer called to ask if there was any truth to bizarre rumors about Haitian immigrants and pets in Springfield. “He asked point-blank, ‘Are the rumors true of pets being taken and eaten?’” recalled Heck. “I told him no. There was no verifiable evidence or reports to show this was true. I told them these claims were baseless.” By then, Vance had already posted about the rumors to his 1.9 million followers on X. Yet he kept the post up, and repeated an even more insistent version of the claim the next morning.
Another fine piece of reporting from the Wall Street Journal conclusively demonstrates the evil cynicism of Trump, Vance, and their cult followers in converting bogus pet-eating rumors into the most vicious kind of lies. The Republican ticket didn't just ignore the warnings – from officials in their own party – that the rumors were outright lies. After being told that, and after being asked to stop spreading the lies, Trump and Vance escalated their campaign to scare the hell out of white Americans and – there is no other way to understand this – goad their right-wing extremist allies into threats of violence, if not worse. The KKK in its heyday didn't act any less brazenly. Now imagine what it will be like if Trump and Vance pull this kind of vile stunt from the White House, as president and vice president.
A second Trump presidency could see more far-reaching interference with the agency’s scientific work. Project 2025, the radical conservative policy plan to overhaul the government, would make it much easier to fire scientists who raised concerns about industry influence.
Trump's hostility to environmental regulation and action to mitigate climate change is well understood. This case is an example of what would be not just common, but routine, in a new Trump administration. Now consider that phenomenon replicated all across the federal government, with the Trump apparatchiks deliberately and systematically wiping out decades of social, environmental, and consumer protections (and much more).
The question that has begun to bedevil these disinformation researchers—used to recognizing patterns and ferreting out the source of influence operations—is, who is trying to kill their industry and why are their attacks working so well? Some see strong similarities to corporate-backed assaults on climate scientists in the 1990s, where oil and gas groups teamed up with conservative politicians to push back against the scientific consensus that human beings were causing climate change. Others see echoes of Cold War paranoia.
We may not know who is behind all, or perhaps a majority, of the attacks on researchers who try to help us sort out the lies from reality. But as this article notes, we do know – for sure – of at least one group, because they're doing it in plain sight: Republican office holders, notably Rep. Jim Jordan and his clique on the House Judiciary Committee. The bad faith of Jordan and his team is epic, and it has had what is surely the intended effect: to harass and discourage some of the top researchers in the field – and to "persuade" the scholars' institutional backers to pull back on their efforts. Read "Invisible Rulers" by Renee DiResta, one of those researchers, for chapter and verse on the Jordan method. The bad actors want their allies to be free to spread lies with impunity. At the moment, as the article makes clear, they're winning.
Again, all of this is preliminary, as we've got more questions than answers. But from now on, whenever U.S. national-security functionaries talk about the necessities of securing supply chains, this is what I'm going to be thinking about. Not the need to preserve commercial patterns and stabilize prices of consumer goods, but exclusive or limited access to the points of manufacture and distribution for the Rules-Based International Order to weaponize that economic activity for the moment of detonation. This will not be the last time this sort of thing happens, and Israel will not be the only state culprit.
Ackerman is one of the best journalists anywhere on these topics, and his informed speculation about what Israel is doing with the booby-trapped pagers is worth reading. We're entering a new era of state-sponsored violence, for sure. But weapons controlled by governments – especially if they are "portable" – have a way of ending up in the hands of (or being replicated by) non-state actors and terrorists. (Nuclear is, thank god, an exception so far.) What does it have to do with the U.S. elections? Two things, I think. First, Netanyahu's government has been rapidly escalating the violence in the region. If this remote-control foray into neighboring countries is designed, even in part, to make even more trouble for the Biden administration, that's designed to help Trump. Second, ask yourself which candidate and his/her national-security team are likely to absorb the broader implications of these new tactics and figure out how, or if, we can and should respond. The world just got a bit more dangerous.
In my humble opinion, the message to bring to third-party curious voters on the left is simple: Your idealism is admirable. We need you to keep pushing for real change. But until we change our two-party system, either to a proportional representation system or one that (like New York and Connecticut) allows smaller parties to “fuse” by cross-nominating candidates, voting for third-party candidates in close elections won’t advance your cause. Kamala Harris and Tim Walz aren’t perfect, but if elected you’ll be able to keep pushing them. The opposite will be true under Trump-Vance.
Micah (a friend) is one of the wisest and most credible observers of our politics. In his latest newsletter post, he warns (not for the first time) about the third-party presidential candidates who could well – and may intend to – tip the election to Trump. The cynicism at work in these candidacies is breathtaking. I believe but can't prove that throwing the election to Trump is the point of those candidacies. Surely Jill Stein – whose votes in key states provided the margin Trump needed in 2016 – is well aware that her candidacy this year could have the same result; when top Democrats call her party "not serious" and Stein's campaign "predatory" they are being polite. Look at the political-operatives working to help the "liberal" third party candidates: They're largely Republicans. (Democrats may be doing a bit of this, but on nowhere near the scale the Trump people are doing.)
Voting is just part of democracy, but it's the essential place to start. Make sure you're registered. Doublecheck in the fall, well before Election Day, because in some states Republican officials are removing people, mostly those who tend to vote for Democrats, from voting rolls.
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Sharon Lerner
Anna Merlan
Spencer Ackerman
Micah L. Sifry
