The Whole World Is In Grave Danger Again From A Putin-Trump-Led Fascist Resurgence

As we saw in November, fascist Geert Wilders’ party came in first in the Dutch snap elections in November. His PVV wound up with 23.5% (and 37 seats in the 150-seat House). The Trump ally has been trying to put a coalition together that would make him prime minsterever since. Tuesday that looked further away than ever as Pieter Omtzigt, founder and leader of the center-right New Social Contract (NSC)— which won 20 seats out of the blue— walked away from negotiations, even after Wilders “pledged to drop anti-constitutional measures in his manifesto, such as bans on mosques and the Qur’an, as well as proposals rejected by his potential partners, such as a ‘Nexit’ referendum on leaving the EU. Without NSC, however, Wilders appears to have no chance of forming a majority government.”

Putin must be so sad. Oh, yes— Russia doesn’t just interfere in U.S. elections. They’ve become more and more adapt at it and they’re helping to bring fascists to power worldwide now. Yesterday, Nina Jankowicz reported that nearly eight years after Russian operatives interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, “U.S. democracy has become even less safe, the country’s information environment more polluted, and the freedom of speech of U.S. citizens more at risk. Disinformation— the deliberate spread of false or misleading information— was never the sole domain of foreign actors, but its use by domestic politicians and grifters has ballooned in recent years. And yet the country has been unable to rein it in because the very subject has become a partisan, politicized issue. Lawmakers have not been able to agree to common-sense reforms that would, for instance, require more transparency about the actions of social media companies or about the identity of online advertisers. In the process, they have enabled an environment of hearsay, in which many people, particularly conservatives, have used false or misleading information to raise the specter of a vast government censorship regime. That chimera of censorship chills legitimate academic inquiry into disinformation, undermines public-private cooperation in investigating and addressing the problem, and halts crucial government responses. The result is an information ecosystem that is riper for manipulation than ever.” 

Between 2012 and 2016, she watched Russia develop disinformation techniques to attack elections in Poland, Ukraine, the Baltic states and Georgia, part of “Russia’s attempts to influence their political systems and derail their efforts to integrate with the West; Russian agents would launch cyberattacks, stage paid-for protests, and deploy armies of trolls, all in an effort to create the illusion of grassroots support for pro-Russian causes abroad. Officials in Washington and Brussels almost uniformly ignored these operations.”

The United States has been slow to reckon with the threat of disinformation. In a speech in 2022, former President Barack Obama acknowledged his “failure to fully appreciate at the time [in 2016] just how susceptible we had become to lies and conspiracy theories, despite having spent years being a target of disinformation” himself. Unfortunately, greater awareness of the perils of disinformation has not produced the necessary corrective action. 

Political polarization, itself fed by disinformation, has made it hard for U.S. leaders and lawmakers to curtail the spread of untruths. For instance, sensible, bipartisan legislation, such as the Honest Ads Act— a bill proposed in 2017 by Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota, and Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, and initially cosponsored by Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, and then Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina— has languished in what congressional staffers have labeled the “disinformation graveyard.” The bill sought to close a glaring loophole in existing law: while political advertisers must admit to purchasing television, radio, and print political ads, they do not need to do so for online advertisements. As a result, foreign states such as Russia were able to quietly buy online ads in 2016 in a bid to influence U.S. voters. And yet the push to close this loophole after the 2016 election— an obvious, straightforward reform— failed to gain traction. The bill never made it out of committee in the Senate; the issue had become too politicized. 

After 2016, Congress attempted in other ways to become more proactive about fighting disinformation, hauling before committees tech executives whom legislators grilled about an array of online harms, including disinformation, often with ill-informed lines of questioning. These hearings revealed that tech companies were even more unprepared to handle foreign influence campaigns than previously understood. But political polarization stymied any bipartisan action. Democrats overplayed their hand in sensationalizing the extent to which Russian disinformation swung the 2016 election; Russia’s meddling served to exacerbate existing societal fissures in the United States, but it did not on its own hand the election to Donald Trump. For their part, Republicans dismissed the notion that Russia had attempted to support Trump, despite reams of open-source evidence showing that Russian operatives had in fact sought to do just that. Republicans stonewalled any attempts to regulate social media— to do so would have been seen as abetting a Democratic agenda— even as they privately sent their staffers to discuss the threat of online influence campaigns with disinformation researchers. By the 2020 election, Republican officials and lawmakers had even abandoned that private posture; they viewed action on disinformation as the province of their opponents and at best ignored the issue or, worse, decried its very existence as a fiction concocted to legitimize the censoring of political opponents. 

…In cooperation with the U.S. intelligence community, social media companies managed to expose several foreign operations, including the Peace Data scandal in 2020 when Russia created a fake news website and paid real journalists to write articles critical of the U.S. government in a bid to turn left-wing U.S. voters against Biden. But the platforms still missed the mark, and often; they failed to address harms that originated closer to home. Members of marginalized groups had to endure hate speech, threats, and harassment encouraged both by the toxic offline discourse in the country and social media algorithms that amplified divisive, vitriolic content. Similarly, domestic disinformation, spread to advance particular political causes or to win attention and favor, exploded as people spent more time online during the pandemic and the 2020 election drew near. Although there has always been lying in politics, the reach of social media meant that these lies traveled faster and further than ever before and were targeted at the individuals most vulnerable to them. 

Supercharged disinformation threatened both public health during the pandemic and the health of American democracy before and after the 2020 presidential election. For instance, powerful politicians, government officials, and media personalities amplified anti-vaccine conspiracies while secretly getting vaccinated themselves. Trump, many of his advisers, and pro-Trump media personalities repeated that behavior when they amplified bogus conspiracy theories related to the presidential election that they knew to be false, in the process producing the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol. In the last year of Trump’s term, Republicans had a choice; they could prepare to return to rhetoric based in reality, or they could enshrine disinformation as part of U.S. politics. They chose the latter. 

…Disinformation nearly upended the peaceful transfer of power from Trump to Biden. And yet the Biden administration has not sufficiently reckoned with the problem. Rather than immediately setting out a whole-of-government strategy to address disinformation as the threat that it is and issuing, as I urged in Foreign Affairs in 2020, “a unifying policy directive to guide agencies in working together to combat disinformation,” Biden and his advisers left the creation of such a policy to languish in the endless debates of the National Security Council. Predictably, in a sprawling government that lacks an overarching strategic vision on how to handle the disinformation threat, efforts to address disinformation have made little progress during Biden’s years in office. Agencies have duplicated efforts, fought turf wars, and desperately wanted for better internal coordination. 

…Americans have every right to— and should— ask questions about the ways their government is protecting both the First Amendment and their national security, but those questions must be rooted in reality; the campaign against disinformation researchers is not. If Republicans are truly frightened of social media firms censoring conservative speech, they should pass bills to provide needed oversight over the social media platforms themselves. After all, if social media companies were more transparent, the American public would get a better and less politicized picture of the decision-making inside these firms.

Over two billion people will cast ballots in elections this year, including in the United States. Elections abroad are vulnerable to the kinds of disinformation rife in this country. In allowing politics to undermine efforts to establish social media transparency and oversight, the United States has failed in leading the world in the protection of the truth. And as long as the United States continues to fail, disinformation will only grow more pervasive and harder to contain.

Could this be at least part of an explanation for why 74% of Republicans approve of Trump’s dictatorship plan? Yesterday, Tim Dickinson reported that “a new poll suggests that defending America’s constitutional system of checks and balances is no longer an electoral slam dunk… The UMass Amherst poll posed the following questions to 1,064 respondents: ‘Donald Trump recently said that if elected, he would be a dictator only on the first day of his second term.’ It then asked, ‘Do you think that this is a good or bad idea for the country?’ Only 44 percent of adults completely rebelled at the notion of giving the former president— who is currently facing 91 felony charges— dictatorial authority, calling it ‘definitely bad’ for America. Another 16 percent judged that it was ‘probably bad.’ Those most opposed were women (67 percent), African Americans (82 percent), and 2020 Biden supporters (91 percent). A full 15 percent of those surveyed responded that making Trump dictator for a day was ‘definitely good’ for the country, while another 24 percent said it was ‘probably good.’ Underscoring the authoritarian leanings of the far right, the MAGA crowd, in particular, appears to love Trump’s dictator talk. The poll found that 76 percent of the former president’s 2020 voters give a thumbs-up to entrusting Trump with 24 hours of tin-pot powers.”

Trump’s total immunity ranting and raving fits right in with this newly public penchant for authoritarianism. You see this after the unanimous Appeals Court ruling slapping him down?

As Dan Pfeiffer noted yesterday, “This reads like a bomb threat from a particularly illiterate person at the end of a coke binge. As a general rule, we should amend the Constitution to bar people who communicate in all caps from the presidency. It’s truly disqualifying. In terms of politics, Trump’s insistence on immunity is not only politically self-sabotaging but also contradicts public opinion. The vast majority of Americans believe Trump has committed a crime. According to a recent Navigator Research poll, 63 percent of Americans— including 30 percent of Republicans— believe Trump has committed a crime. When you step back for a minute, this is a truly stunning stat. That poll paints a stark picture: a considerable portion of voters actually believe Trump has broken the law, yet they're still considering casting their vote for him come November. It's a puzzling contradiction. But here's the kicker: when the majority already see you as a wrongdoer, trying to pitch the idea of immunity becomes a tough sell. Also, and I find this very reassuring as an American, most voters oppose the concept that a president should be immune from prosecution. A PBS Newshour poll found that only 35% of voters support Trump having immunity from criminal prosecution from actions he took while in office. 

“We’re living in an era of extreme polarization where most issues tend to split the population right down the middle, with each side digging into their partisan trenches. It’s not often we come across an issue where the scales tip so heavily, with only 35% in favor and a significant 64% opposed. Trump’s staunch advocacy for the minority viewpoint presents us with a unique opportunity, and frankly, it's one we shouldn't pass up.”

Show the slightest degree of independence from the cult's grouop think of from the cult leader and this is what happens: