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Strong commitment to freedom? That would sure be news to the more than 5 million Palestinian people living under Israeli occupation in Gaza and the West Bank.
The pretense is that what’s happening now with Israel amounts to a surprising aberration from its natural state. At times, the denial even rests on the tacit and absurd assumption that Jews are less inclined to commit atrocities than any other people. But recent events in Israel are continuing a long Zionist process that has been propelled by mixtures of valid yearning for safety and extreme ethnocentrism, with terrible results.
Three widely esteemed human rights organizations -- Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and B’Tselem -- have rendered a clear and convincing judgment: Israel operates a system of apartheid against Palestinians.
When Israeli officials are confronted with such truth -- as shown in a recent video of a Q…A session with Israeli ambassador Tzipi Hotovely at the Oxford Union in Britain -- the responding demagoguery is pathetic and outrageous.
During the last few weeks, Israel’s government has grown even more dangerous in rhetoric and oppressive in deeds, with its soldiers protecting Jewish settlers rampaging as they terrorized Palestinians with horrible violence.
Israel has been the fruition of a Zionist dream, but at the same time a real-life nightmare for Palestinian people. The occupation of Gaza and the West Bank that began in 1967 has been nothing less than an ongoing, large-scale crime against humanity. Now, early 2023 has brought an unprecedented flood of concern from Israel’s supporters in the United States. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s new government has made clear its fascistic contempt for Palestinian lives, while even taking steps to curb some rights of Israeli Jews.
Since mid-February, the leading liberal American Jewish organization J Street -- “pro-Israel, pro-peace, pro-democracy” -- has been sounding frantic alarms. The group’s president, Jeremy Ben-Ami, warns that after taking power in early January, “the far-right . . . is now firmly in control of the government of Israel.” And “they are moving at lightning speed to enact their agenda, threatening to make Israel unrecognizable to millions of Jews and others in the United States who care deeply about the country and its people, and who believe in the democratic values on which it was founded.”
In a typical email alert, J Street declared that “Netanyahu is subverting Israel’s democracy” while advancing “a plan to completely strip the independence of Israel’s Supreme Court.” J Street went on to criticize the new government for policies not unlike those of Israeli governments going back decades; the new administration has “moved forward plans to build thousands of new settlement units in occupied territory” and “approved ‘legalization’ of at least nine West Bank settlement outposts that were previously unauthorized by the Israeli government -- acts of de facto annexation.”
And yet, after decrying these ominous developments, the J Street action alert just told recipients to merely “contact your representative in Washington and urge them to speak out and stand up for our shared interests and democratic values.”
Early this month, J Street lamented that “terrible violence and conflict on the ground continue to escalate -- as this year has seen deadly terror attacks on Israelis and the highest monthly death toll for Palestinians in over a decade.” But J Street refuses to call for a cutback -- let alone a cutoff -- of the massive subsidy of several billion dollars in military aid that automatically flows every year from the U.S. Treasury to the Israeli government.
Far from being a “Jewish democratic state,” Israel has evolved into a Jewish supremacist state. In the real world, “Israeli democracy” is an oxymoron. Denial does not make that any less true.
Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and the executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of a dozen books including War Made Easy. His next book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, will be published in June 2023 by The New Press.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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Months before the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, a report forecast the likelihood of violence during the presidential handover from Donald Trump to Joe Biden. (photo: Jose Luis Magana/AP)
In 2020, one hitherto unknown report accurately predicted what was to follow Biden’s election. It also laid out a plan to preserve democracy in an uncertain future.
Americans remember that dark winter well. But the impetus for structural change has faded, even among Democrats who still privately seethe about the country’s broken political system — and fear an uglier meltdown could come in 2024 or beyond.
The report carried a plain title: Plan D. Reading it, I wondered if the D stood for “doomsday.”
Actually, the letter was not a cipher. Plan D was the fourth of several studies organized by an opaque advocacy group, known as the Hub, to prepare for the depredations of the Trump era. The Hub is known in Washington for its sophisticated dark-money interventions in electoral politics. During the 2020 campaign, it also gathered up strategists, lawyers and activists to draft plans for a different kind of conflict.
The document is an artifact from a dangerous time: Warning that Trump would surely not concede defeat to Joe Biden, it advised Trump’s opponents to “assume the worst” would follow. It urged them to gird for a struggle not only with the president but with “institutions controlled or influenced by the GOP, including the courts.” The document forecast “militia and white supremacist activities through the inauguration — and, very likely, accelerated activity in the early months of a Biden administration.”
Plan D is sobering reading even today. It is a catalog of the defects in America’s electoral process and political culture that made it vulnerable to a rampaging demagogue— defects that some Democrats wanted to fix with drastic measures.
Should Biden lose narrowly, the report said, “layers of illegitimate structures and interventions will have contributed to it.” It closed with a warning against complacency even if Trump were to be defeated.
“A Biden win will not prove that our democracy is healthy,” the document argued, continuing: “Win, lose, or draw, we should perceive ourselves not in a singular moment of crisis but rather in what may be an era of existential challenge for American democracy.”
I first read the report soon after it was composed, when a source shared it as an off-the-record analysis to inform my thinking about 2020. At the time, I thought it was a creative assessment of potential worst-case scenarios, some of which struck me as rather remote. The January 6 insurrection was still months away.
In any event, I found Plan D more compelling than contemporaneous Democratic planning exercises that seemed more like high-concept role play for political elites. My colleague Sam Stein, then at The Daily Beast, reported on one “simulation” that foresaw the Biden campaign urging the entire West Coast to secede in a unit known as “Cascadia.” Simulation indeed.
Plan D was no game. It was devised as a battle plan. Reviewing the report years later, it is impossible not to be struck by the sense of urgency in the text — and the speed with which the impatient demand for fundamental change to American politics has dissipated among most Democrats.
So, I returned to my source and obtained permission to write about it now at a safe distance from 2020.
Back then, the group behind Plan D saw deep reform to the political system as a survival imperative for Democrats. If the party controlled government after 2020, the report said, Democrats must treat it as a “fleeting-once-in-a-generation (or perhaps lifetime) opportunity” to revise the political system. Among the targets of that proposed overhaul: a Senate biased toward rural red states, a Supreme Court stacked with right-wing appointees and an Electoral College that overruled the popular vote twice in two decades.
“First and foremost, we must rewrite the rules of our democracy. That’s doing much more than just the voting, corruption, and money-in-politics reforms in HR1 or the VRA renewal,” the document stated, referring to the centerpiece legislative offerings of the Democrats’ pro-democracy agenda. “We must commit to structural reforms that, at a minimum, include DC and Puerto Rico statehood and expanding the federal courts.”
Liberals must also “embrace more aspirational goals of ending the Electoral College and establishing a constitutional right to vote,” it continued, plus more basic aims like the elimination of the Senate filibuster. Should Democrats fail to achieve those aims, the report proposed divisive and punitive measures, like denying certain federal assistance to sections of the country that consistently reject Democrats and yet hold a veto over legislation because the system is tilted in their favor. Perhaps, it suggested, brute fiscal coercion would extract concessions from Trump country.
Today, these calls for invasive constitutional surgery seem nearly fantastical. Democrats captured the White House and Congress, but with legislative majorities so small that they could not even restore the Voting Rights Act, let alone add new Supreme Court justices, new states and new stars to the American flag.
Democrats still have a thick sheaf of legislative proposals for reforming campaign finance, congressional redistricting, voter registration, early and mail-in voting, federal election oversight and more. In December, Congress passed a bipartisan measure to reform the Electoral Count Act, the rickety 19th Century law that Trump’s allies sought to exploit in 2020 to obstruct the transfer of power.
But these days Democrats are not really promoting ideas to address the most distorted features of the American system. Far from crusading for DC statehood, they are squabbling among themselves over whether to nullify changes to the city’s criminal code enacted by left-wing local lawmakers. A short-lived flirtation with court-packing withered in a blue-ribbon presidential commission that issued an equivocal report.
For now, America’s liberal party is more comfortable thundering against changes to the number of ballot-collection boxes in the Atlanta area than openly discussing the profound unfairness of a system that awards equal representation in the Senate to South Dakota and California. Indeed, there are times when talking to Democratic leaders about threats to democracy can feel a little like consulting with a physician who speaks with eager authority about all manner of unpleasant illnesses — except the terminal disease you have actually contracted.
One Democrat who is eager to talk about that fatal ailment is Arkadi Gerney, the founding leader of the Hub who recently stepped down as its executive director. A longtime gun-control advocate who previously worked for the Center for American Progress and Michael Bloomberg’s City Hall, he was one of the lead authors of the Plan D report.
In a reflective conversation this winter he told me Democrats should be far more attentive to the rightward bias of the country’s political institutions. Much of American history, he argued, is the story of one popular movement or another driving at changes to democratic political system far grander than the admission of several new states.
“In this country, we had a history of fixing flawed elements of our democracy, generation by generation, from slavery in the post-Civil War amendments to the Constitution, to women’s suffrage, to changing the age to vote to 18,” Gerney said. “And that process, in the last 50 years, has gotten stuck.”
Part of the problem, he said, is that America’s most unfair political institutions are self-perpetuating. You cannot do much to change the Senate and the Supreme Court without the assent of the Senate and the Supreme Court.
Still, Gerney insisted, awfully difficult is not the same thing as impossible. He pointed to voters’ volcanic indignation about the Dobbs decision as the kind of popular mobilization that could ultimately yield foundational change. We’ll see.
The good news in Plan D is contained in passages where its authors missed the mark: their warning, for instance, that the conservative judiciary might aid Trump’s election sabotage (it did not) or the suggestion that Democrats might need to give Trump amnesty from prosecution to ease the transfer of power (multiple ongoing investigations of Trump show otherwise).
Most encouraging may be what the report misjudged about how the business of legislating would unfold under Biden. Unless the filibuster were abolished, the document warned, Biden’s agenda could meet a miserable death in “Mitch McConnell’s legislative graveyard.” Plan D judged it largely futile to seek bipartisan compromise, since whatever Democrats do, “Republicans will accuse us of murder, socialism and worse.”
That last part is true of many Republicans. On the whole, the GOP remains an angry, Trumpy party. Yet some — including McConnell — joined with Democrats to pass a hefty infrastructure law, an aggressive industrial policy for the high-tech sector and more. Even with the structure of the Senate and the courts still firmly in place, Democrats still managed to enact a landmark climate law that has unleashed a global clean-energy arms race.
Whether that was a sufficient use of a once-in-a-generation opportunity is a question Democrats must answer for themselves. The 2024 election will show if it was enough to avert the return of Trump himself.
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Fox News host Laura Ingraham said the head of the network's political Decision Desk 'always made my skin crawl,' in messages to stars Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity following the 2020 election. (photo: Shutterstock)
In private notes to one another, Fox's top stars spat fire at their reporting colleagues who debunked Trump's claims of election fraud, even as they gave those allegations no credence. "We are officially working for an organization that hates us," said prime-time host Laura Ingraham.
Reporters said they were being punished simply for doing their jobs. One producer told colleagues he was quitting because he could not justify working for Fox anymore.
And the network's chief executive, Suzanne Scott, said pressure from conservatives online meant that she couldn't defend "these reporters who don't understand our viewers and how to handle stories."
These exchanges, some of which have been quoted by previous legal filings, have been captured by Dominion Voting Systems' legal team. The election tech company is suing Fox for $1.6 billion over bogus claims it helped cheat Trump of victory in 2020. Fox maintains the false charges, spread by a sitting president and his advocates, were inherently newsworthy, and that any challenge to its ability to air such claims represents a strike against First Amendment principles.
Legal observers cite an avalanche of evidence in a powerhouse case
The level of discovery in this case — an avalanche of evidence — would trigger disclosures that would make any news organization quail. In a statement, Fox News accused Dominion of "using distortions and misinformation in their PR campaign to smear Fox News and trample on free speech." But legal observers say Dominion has put together a powerhouse case.
The internal strife at Fox stemmed from a single fateful decision blending journalism and broadcasting: Fox's dramatic election night 2020 projection of Joe Biden as the winner of Arizona. It was the first TV network to do so, and it made the prospect of a Trump victory remote.
The fury from the top was palpable. "I hate our Decision Desk people!" Fox Corp. boss Rupert Murdoch wrote on Nov. 7, the night the networks projected Biden would prevail nationally. He confided to Col Allan, the editor of his tabloid paper, The New York Post: "Just for the hell of it still praying for Az to prove them wrong!"
By mid-November, a small cadre of Fox reporters were debunking some of the lies and wild conspiracies of election projected by the Trump camp, often echoed on Fox's airwaves.
In a group chat of the network's three biggest prime-time stars on Nov. 15, Tucker Carlson noted that a segment by Fox reporter Eric Shawn was being used by the Daily Beast to assail Maria Bartiromo — one of the most pro-Trump hosts on the network.
"What are we all going to do [tomorrow] night," Ingraham responded. "I think 1-2-3 Punch."
Carlson wrote he didn't trust attorney Sidney Powell, who appeared on Fox repeatedly to allege Dominion committed fraud against Trump. Ingraham called her "a bit nuts." (Separately, Carlson wrote to an associate, "I hate [Trump] passionately.")
"My anger at the news channel is pronounced"
Yet they reserved their anger for their reporting colleagues, mocking, for example, Arnon Mishkin, the director of the Fox News Decision Desk. "Mishkin always made my skin crawl," she texted the other two prime-time hosts.
How much of the network's ratings "bleed is due to anger at the news channel?" Ingraham asked, adding "My anger at the news channel is pronounced."
"It should be," Carlson responded. "We devote our lives to building an audience and they let [Fox News Sunday host] Chris Wallace and [correspondent and anchor] Leland f------ Vittert wreck it."
"Let's be honest," Hannity joked. "Without Chris Wallace where would we be? We owe him everything."
Ingraham then prods her peers, saying "We have more power than we know or exercise."
The message was received at the network's top echelons.
Fox Corp. boss Lachlan Murdoch called Vittert "smug and obnoxious" for his coverage of pro-Trump rallies supporting ideas of electoral fraud.
And CEO Suzanne Scott and Fox News President Jay Wallace, the network's executive editor, exchanged irate notes a few days later after appearances by White House reporter Kristin Fisher.
"I can't keep defending these reporters who don't understand our viewers"
On Nov. 19, Fisher appeared on Fox host Dana Perino's afternoon program knocking down claims made by Trump campaign attorney Rudy Giuliani. "That was certainly a colorful news conference from Rudy Giuliani but it was light on facts," Fisher told viewers that night. "So much of what he said was simply not true or has already been thrown out in court." And she unraveled many of Giuliani's false claims.
Fox founder Rupert Murdoch was scathing about Giuliani in his own private remarks. So were other executives. But that night, Scott shot off an email to Jay Wallace calling Fisher's segment "editorializing."
"I can't keep defending these reporters who don't understand our viewers and how to handle stories," Scott wrote. "The audience feels like we crapped on [it] and we have damaged their trust and belief in us."
She concluded, "We can fix this but we cannot smirk at our viewers any longer."
Wallace replied, "She has been spoken to — internet definitely seized on it."
A Fox Corp. staffer warned of "a backlash from the pro-Trump orbit," citing social media posts from a trio of right-wing commentators who have spread baseless conspiracy theories.
"I'm being punished for doing my job. Literally."
Fisher vented to a colleague over the pressure she felt. The two women said they each had lost assignments to serve as guest anchor on news shows and their appearances on other programs had dried up. "I have had zero live shots from the [White House] except for [Special Report]," Fisher texted to reporter Gillian Turner. (Special Report, anchored by Fox's Bret Baier, is the network's prime political newscast.)
"F---. Really?" Turner replied. "You think they pulled you from anchoring over that sh--?"
"100%," Fisher wrote. "I'm being punished for doing my job. Literally. That's it."
In late November, Hannity chatted by text with Fox … Friends host Steve Doocy. It was Thanksgiving weekend, and Hannity sent a picture of his turkey. "This year is gonna suck my friend," Hannity texted Doocy. "'News' destroyed us'."
"Every day," replied Doocy. Nine seconds later, Hannity texted, "You don't piss off the base."
"They don't care," Doocy wrote, mockingly. "They are JOURNALISTS."
Doocy's son Peter had covered the Biden 2020 campaign for Fox News as a reporter and became its White House correspondent the following January.
"I couldn't defend my employer to my daughter"
On Dec. 9, reporter Gillian Turner picked up the theme once more, writing to Kristin Fisher that she was no longer being asked to fill in as a host on the popular morning show Fox … Friends. "That makes two of us!" Fisher texted. "It's a sh-- network. I'm 100% being muzzled."
A producer on Special Report later wrote to Fisher of his decision to leave the network, saying Fox "removed every panelist on SR who spoke out against Trump[']s false election sh--."
Phil Vogel wrote he was taking a pay cut and forgoing six weeks paid leave to get out. "The post election coverage of 'voter fraud' was the complete end," Vogel wrote, citing the birth of his daughter. "I realized I couldn't defend my employer to my daughter while trying to teach her to do what is right."
A rash of departures followed internal clashes
The network took two hours of political news programs and gave them to opinion hosts; it laid off a significant number of writers and reporters; and it forced out political director Chris Stirewalt and Washington Managing Editor Bill Sammon, both of whom were part of the decision desk team that made the Arizona projection for Biden.
While Turner remains with the network, Vogel left for a software technology company in early 2021. So did Leland Vittert, now with News Nation. Fisher departed Fox for CNN that spring.
Carlson moved on to new conspiracy theories, seeking to discredit the import of the bloody siege of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, by Trump supporters intent on blocking the formal congressional certification of Biden's victory. Carlson has variously suggested it was organized by antifa and the FBI. This week, he relied on snippets of official video released to him by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a Trump ally, to contend falsely that the insurrection represented the harmless ambling of peaceful protesters.
Carlson's show feeding such baseless beliefs led Fox commentators Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes to leave Fox in fall 2021. Fox News Sunday's Chris Wallace followed suit a few weeks later, taking a job at CNN.
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Supporters of former president Donald Trump cheer as he speaks at a Save America Rally, Jan. 15, 2022. (photo: Ross D. Franklin/AP)
In 2022, many Republicans who embraced election denialism were re-elected and, in some cases, elevated to higher office
Those efforts didn’t succeed. But Trump nonetheless created a new poison that seeped deep in the Republican party – a belief that the results of US elections cannot be trusted. The belief quickly became Republican orthodoxy: it was embraced by Republican officeholders across the country as well as local activists who began to bombard and harass local election officials, forcing many of them to retire. The January 6 attack on the US Capitol – in which thousands stormed the building, and five people died – was the starkest reminder of the potential violent consequences of this rhetoric.
In 2022, several Republicans who embraced election denialism lost their races to be the top election official in their state. But at the same time, many Republicans who unabashedly embraced the idea and aided Trump’s efforts to overturn the election were re-elected and, in some cases, elevated to higher office.
Here’s a look at how some of those who tried to overturn the 2020 election have since been promoted into positions of power:
Members of Congress
Kevin McCarthy
McCarthy was one of 147 House Republicans who voted to reject Biden’s election victory in January 2021. Then the House minority leader, McCarthy privately criticized Trump in the wake of the January 6 insurrection, but quickly backed off from calling for his resignation because of fears of retribution from the Republican party.
When Republicans took control of the House in the 2022 midterms, McCarthy became the presumed next speaker of the House. The only thing standing in his way was a group of 18 other election deniers who repeatedly cast their ballots against him, forcing a total of 15 votes before McCarthy was able to secure the total he needed to become speaker.
Steve Scalise
Scalise was the highest-ranking Republican to sign onto a US supreme court amicus brief trying to get electoral votes from key swing states rejected. He was also one of the 147 Republicans to vote against certifying the 2020 election results.
In November, he was easily re-elected to a ninth term to represent his Louisiana district in Congress. He was unanimously elected House majority leader last year, making him the No 2 ranking Republican in the US House.
Scott Perry
Perry has served as a Republican congressman from Pennsylvania since 2013. He is the chair of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, and is a staunch supporter of Trump. He played an instrumental role in Trump’s attempt to overturn the election and to send a slate of fake electors to Washington, a plot that’s factored into federal investigations after the January 6 insurrection. Perry introduced Trump to Jeffrey Clark, who wrote a draft of a letter to officials in six states suggesting they select alternative electors. The FBI seized Perry’s cellphone last year as part of a criminal investigation into the fake elector scheme.
Despite the active investigation, Perry was re-elected to Congress in November with 54% of the vote and was appointed to the US House oversight committee, the chamber’s primary investigative committee.
State legislators
Jake Hoffman
Hoffman signed onto a fake slate of electors that falsely claimed Donald Trump won Arizona in 2020 and sent a letter to Mike Pence on 5 January 2021, asking the then vice-president to delay certifying the state’s election results. He previously worked for Turning Point USA, a group with strong ties to the state GOP, and was permanently suspended from Twitter over his firm’s work for Turning Point.
He first won office in the Arizona house of representatives in 2020, moving to the upper chamber in 2022. He now serves as the chairman of Arizona’s Freedom Caucus, a far-right group of lawmakers that has emerged as a counterweight to the Democratic governor, Katie Hobbs.
As a senator, Hoffman chairs two prominent committees: the government committee, where bills typically relate to how the government itself is run, and a newly created committee on director nominations, which assesses Hobbs’ selections for agency leaders. Already, the committee voted down one of Hobbs’ nominees after intense, pointed questioning from Hoffman, though the full senate still must vote on the appointment.
Among the bills Hoffman has proposed is one that would break up Arizona’s largest county, Maricopa, into four smaller counties, three of which would be Republican-leaning. The plan, which has been shot down multiple times before, found renewed interest from the GOP after the county swung toward Democrats in 2020.
Anthony Kern
Kern lost his election in 2020, but returned to the Arizona legislature in 2022, winning a seat as a state senator. His win came after he attended the Stop the Steal rally on January 6, 2021, at the US Capitol, after he signed on to a slate of fake electors and volunteered at the so-called audit, a review of ballots after the 2020 election.
He continually insists Trump won in 2020. And Kern’s appearance at the audit raised eyebrows because Kern himself was on the ballot, though the election review only looked at the presidential and US Senate races. He was also one of the state lawmakers who joined a lawsuit against Pence in the lead-up to the electoral college vote.
During Hobbs’ first State of the State address in January, Kern turned his back, a show of disagreement and disrespect to the incoming executive. He has said the 2022 election results should not have been certified and indicated he supports a “revote” of the election.
Liz Harris
A first-time representative, Liz Harris gained prominence in Arizona Republican political circles by questioning election results and leading an unsanctioned canvass of voters after the 2020 election.
Harris’s canvass came after a warning from the US Department of Justice regarding the official Arizona “audit”. The department said a canvass could intimidate voters. Harris’s canvass was subsequently dismantled by elections experts, who found a lack of evidence and some outright false assertions.
She sits on the house’s election committee. Since her election, which was confirmed via a state-mandated recount, Harris has said she wouldn’t vote for anything unless there was a revote of the 2022 election, and she has made good on her promise.
She has continued to call for a redo of the 2022 election. She recently invited a woman to an elections hearing who shared wild, unproven allegations of widespread fraud by various elected officials, resulting in condemnation from her own party and an ethics complaint from a Democratic lawmaker.
State officials
Ken Paxton
Paxton was one of Trump’s key allies after the 2020 race. He led a lawsuit at the US supreme court to try and get the electoral college votes of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia and Michigan thrown out as part of an effort to keep Trump in power. He was easily re-elected to a third term in November.
During his time in office, Paxton has made prosecuting election fraud a priority, but his office has turned up few cases (voter fraud is exceedingly rare in the United States). After a rebuke from Texas’s highest court, he is seeking expanded authority from the legislature to prosecute people for election crimes.
Burt Jones
Georgia state senator turned lieutenant governor Burt Jones aided in amplifying false claims of mass election fraud in Georgia following Biden’s win in the state. Jones denied the validity of election results in 2020 and served as one of 16 fake electors from the state. Jones’s actions as a false elector led to his inclusion in ongoing investigations by both the Department of Justice and local Fulton county prosecutor Fani Willis.
In 2023 Jones assumed office as the newly elected lieutenant governor of Georgia following a campaign filled with attempts to downplay his role in the 2020 elector scheme and distance himself from Trump. As lieutenant governor, Jones holds power over the state’s senate. Jones maintains a prominent platform that he uses to steer clear of election debates, instead focusing on legislation ranging from public safety to economic development.
Robert Spindell
Spindell served as one of 10 fake electors in Wisconsin, a key battleground state. He has suggested there was something amiss in the state’s 2020 election, even though there is no evidence of that.
In 2021, Republicans reappointed Spindell to a second term on the Wisconsin elections commission, the six-member body that oversees elections in the state. He has since bragged about lower turnout among Black voters in Milwaukee, prompting Democrats to call for his removal from the body.
Chuck Gray
Chuck Gray has called the 2020 election fraudulent and campaigned on his concerns about the integrity of the state’s elections. He said he wants to ban ballot drop boxes, transition to all-paper ballots and clear the office of employees who do not agree with his vision.
The Republican lawmaker who co-chairs the panel that deals with state election law put forward a motion to remove election functions from the secretary of state’s office and instead give them to a separate operating agency. But the effort didn’t gain widespread support.
Wes Allen
In the wake of the 2020 presidential election, Allen, then an Alabama state representative, supported a lawsuit brought by Texas that tried to sue four other states for alleged election “irregularities” responsible for Trump’s defeat. The suit presented no evidence, and was thrown out by the US supreme court.
Campaigning to become Alabama’s secretary of state, Allen promised that he would restrict access to the ballot box by banning mail-in voting, reining back early voting and imposing strict voter ID requirements. As one of his first acts since taking office in January, he removed Alabama from a data-sharing scheme known as the Electronic Registration Information Center (Eric). Eric has become the target of rightwing conspiracy theories that claim it is a leftwing plot to rig elections. In fact, more than two dozen states participate in the network, many of them Republican-controlled, as a way of ensuring the accuracy of voter rolls.
State party officials
Kristina Karamo
A former college professor, Kristina Karamo gained national prominence in 2020 after claiming she had witnessed fraud while observing Michigan’s recount of absentee ballots.
Karamo drew the support of Trump in her unsuccessful bid for Michigan secretary of state. She subsequently sued the state over its election processes, which would have targeted thousands of voters. A judge quickly rejected the suit, writing that Karamo and other plaintiffs had “raised a false flag of election law violations and corruption”.
In February, the Michigan Republican party chose Karamo as party chair over Matthew DePerno – a conservative lawyer who also promoted false claims of election fraud during the 2020 presidential election. In light of her win, Karamo wrote on Facebook that she would “stop the Democratic party’s totalitarian agenda in Michigan”.
Karamo has yet to concede her 2022 run for secretary of state.
Dorothy Moon
A former state lawmaker, Moon openly questioned Biden’s victory in the 2020 race, with no evidence of wrongdoing. “No, I think there was a big problem when we noticed at 11 o’clock at night all of the battleground states decided to go to bed and then they were going to start back up at 8, 9 or 10 in the morning,” she said in 2022, according to the Idaho Capital Sun. “In my lifetime, I had never seen that happen nor had most Americans who stay up that late to watch for the results.”
Moon also falsely claimed Canadians were coming over the border to vote in Idaho’s elections and supported a bill that would have imposed new voting restrictions in the state. She lost a bid to be Idaho’s top election official last year, but was then elected chair of the state Republican party.
Mike Brown
Brown, a construction contractor who has served as a county commissioner, ran unsuccessfully for Kansas secretary of state in the GOP primary. His campaign was centered on Trump’s baseless claim that voter fraud swung the 2020 election and unfounded doubts about election security. He vowed to ban ballot drop boxes and to use his office to prosecute voting crimes. He attempted to blame then secretary of state Scott Schwab for failures in his role as election administrator. In response to Schwab’s claims that elections run smoothly in Kansas, Brown asked: “Because he said so, or because he can prove it?”
In February, Brown was elected Kansas Republican party chair at the party’s convention. Brown defeated longtime state GOP leader Helen Van Etten, who was backed by most of the top Republican elected officials in the state.
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U.S. president Joe Biden has called on Congress to 'reward work, not just wealth.' (photo: Evan Vucci/AP)
US president’s reported budget plan would also nearly double capital gains tax on investments.
Biden’s proposed spending plan would also nearly double the capital gains tax for investment from 20 percent to 39.6 percent, and lift income levies on corporations and wealthy Americans, Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday.
Biden will unveil his budget plan on Thursday amid sharp divisions between Republicans and Democrats on taxes, spending and debt reduction, kicking off what are likely to be fraught negotiations between the White House and a divided Congress.
The spending plan comes as Republicans and the White House are locked in a standoff over raising the debt ceiling, the total amount of money the federal government is allowed to borrow, amid a $31 trillion national debt.
Republicans, led by US House of Representatives Speaker Kevin McCarthy, have argued the ceiling should not be raised without significant spending cuts and have dismissed calls for higher taxes.
Biden has said his plan will cut the deficit by nearly $3 trillion over 10 years, mostly through tax increases. Republicans hold a majority in the House, with the Democrats controlling the Senate.
During his State of the Union address in February, Biden called on Congress to support higher taxes on the wealthy and “reward work, not just wealth”.
The US president has insisted that his proposed tax hikes will only affect a small percentage of Americans, telling an audience in Virginia last week that those with an annual salary of less than $400,000 “will not pay an additional single penny in any tax”.
Biden last year proposed a billionaire minimum income tax to ensure households worth more than $100m pay at least 20 percent in taxes on both income and unrealised gains from unsold investments.
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Para Jumpers display the abbreviation for the United States Special Operations Command, 2021. (photo: SOCOM Para-Commandos/Twitter)
The U.S. government spent years warning deepfakes could destabilize democratic societies.
The plans, which also describe hacking internet-connected devices to eavesdrop in order to assess foreign populations’ susceptibility to propaganda, come at a time of intense global debate over technologically sophisticated “disinformation” campaigns, their effectiveness, and the ethics of their use.
While the U.S. government routinely warns against the risk of deepfakes and is openly working to build tools to counter them, the document from Special Operations Command, or SOCOM, represents a nearly unprecedented instance of the American government — or any government — openly signaling its desire to use the highly controversial technology offensively.
SOCOM’s next generation propaganda aspirations are outlined in a procurement document that lists capabilities it’s seeking for the near future and soliciting pitches from outside parties that believe they’re able to build them.
“When it comes to disinformation, the Pentagon should not be fighting fire with fire,” Chris Meserole, head of the Brookings Institution’s Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology Initiative, told The Intercept. “At a time when digital propaganda is on the rise globally, the U.S. should be doing everything it can to strengthen democracy by building support for shared notions of truth and reality. Deepfakes do the opposite. By casting doubt on the credibility of all content and information, whether real or synthetic, they ultimately erode the foundation of democracy itself.”
Meserole added, “If deepfakes are going to be leveraged for targeted military and intelligence operations, then their use needs to be subject to review and oversight.”
The pitch document, first published by SOCOM’s Directorate of Science and Technology in 2020, established a wish list of next-generation toys for the 21st century special forces commando, a litany of gadgets and futuristic tools that will help the country’s most elite soldiers more effectively hunt and kill their targets using lasers, robots, holographs, and other sophisticated hardware.
Last October, SOCOM quietly released an updated version of its wish list with a new section: “Advanced technologies for use in Military Information Support Operations (MISO),” a Pentagon euphemism for its global propaganda and deception efforts.
The added paragraph spells out SOCOM’s desire to obtain new and improved means of carrying out “influence operations, digital deception, communication disruption, and disinformation campaigns at the tactical edge and operational levels.” SOCOM is seeking “a next generation capability to collect disparate data through public and open source information streams such as social media, local media, etc. to enable MISO to craft and direct influence operations.”
SOCOM typically fights in the shadows, but its public reputation and global footprint loom large. Comprised of the elite units from the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, and Air Force, SOCOM leads the most sensitive military operations of the world’s most lethal nation.
While American special forces are widely known for splashy exploits like the Navy SEALs’ killing of Osama bin Laden, their history is one of secret missions, subterfuge, sabotage, and disruption campaigns. SOCOM’s “next generation” disinformation ambitions are only part of a long, vast history of deception efforts on the part of the U.S. military and intelligence apparatuses.
Special Operations Command, which is accepting proposals on these capabilities through 2025, did not respond to a request for comment.
Though Special Operations Command has for years coordinated foreign “influence operations,” these deception campaigns have come under renewed scrutiny. In December, The Intercept reported that SOCOM had convinced Twitter, in violation of its internal policies, to permit a network of sham accounts that spread phony news items of dubious accuracy, including a claim that the Iranian government was stealing the organs of Afghan civilians. Though the Twitter-based propaganda offensive didn’t use deepfakes, researchers found that Pentagon contractors employed machine learning-generated avatars to lend the fake accounts a degree of realism.
Provocatively, the updated capability document reveals that SOCOM wants to boost these internet deception efforts with the use of “next generation” deepfake videos, an increasingly effective method of generating lifelike digital video forgeries using machine learning. Special forces would use this faked footage to “generate messages and influence operations via non-traditional channels,” the document adds.
While deepfakes have largely remained fodder for entertainment and pornography, the potential for more dire applications is real. At the onset of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a shoddy deepfake of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy ordering troops to surrender began circulating on social media channels. Ethical considerations aside, the legality of militarized deepfakes in a conflict, which remains an open question, is not addressed in the SOCOM document.
As with foreign governmental “disinformation” campaigns, the U.S. has spent the past several years warning against the potent national security threat represented by deepfakes. The use of deepfakes to deliberately deceive, government authorities warn regularly, could have a deeply destabilizing effect on civilian populations exposed to them.
At the federal level, however, the conversation has revolved exclusively around the menace foreign-made deepfakes might pose to the U.S., not the other way around. Previously reported contracting documents show SOCOM has sought technologies to detect deepfake-augmented internet campaigns, a tactic it now wants to unleash on its own.
Perhaps as provocative as the mention of deepfakes is the section that follows, which notes SOCOM wishes to finely tune its offensive propaganda seemingly by spying on the intended audience through their internet-connected devices.
Described as a “next generation capability to ‘takeover’ Internet of Things (loT) devices for collect [sic] data and information from local populaces to enable breakdown of what messaging might be popular and accepted through sifting of data once received,” the document says that the ability to eavesdrop on propaganda targets “would enable MISO to craft and promote messages that may be more readily received by local populace.” In 2017, WikiLeaks published pilfered CIA files that revealed a roughly similar capability to hijack into household devices.
The technology behind deepfake videos first arrived in 2017, spurred by a combination of cheap, powerful computer hardware and research breakthroughs in machine learning. Deepfake videos are typically made by feeding images of an individual to a computer and using the resultant computerized analysis to essentially paste a highly lifelike simulacrum of that face onto another.
Once the software has been sufficiently trained, its user can crank out realistic fabricated footage of a target saying or doing virtually anything. The technology’s ease of use and increasing accuracy has prompted fears of an era in which the global public can no longer believe what it sees with its own eyes.
Though major social platforms like Facebook have rules against deepfakes, given the inherently fluid and interconnected nature of the internet, Pentagon-disseminated deepfakes might also risk flowing back to the American homeland.
“If it’s a nontraditional media environment, I could imagine the form of manipulation getting pretty far before getting stopped or rebuked by some sort of local authority,” Max Rizzuto, a deepfakes researcher with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, told The Intercept. “The capacity for societal harm is certainly there.”
SOCOM’s interest in deploying deepfake disinformation campaigns follows recent years of international anxiety about forged videos and digital deception from international adversaries. Though there’s scant evidence Russia’s efforts to digitally sway the 2016 election had any meaningful effect, the Pentagon has expressed an interest in redoubling its digital propaganda capabilities, lest it fall behind, with SOCOM taking on a crucial role.
At an April 2018 hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Gen. Kenneth Tovo of the Army Special Operations Command assured the assembled senators that American special forces were working to close the propaganda gap.
“We have invested fairly heavily in our psy-op operators,” he said, “developing new capabilities, particularly to deal in the digital space, social media analysis and a variety of different tools that have been fielded by SOCOM that allow us to evaluate the social media space, evaluate the cyber domain, see trend analysis, where opinion is moving, and then how to potentially influence that environment with our own products.”
While military propaganda is as old as war itself, deepfakes have frequently been discussed as a sui generis technological danger, the existence of which poses a civilizational threat.
At a 2018 Senate Intelligence Committee hearing discussing the nomination of William Evanina to run the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said of deepfakes, “I believe this is the next wave of attacks against America and Western democracies.” Evanina, in response, reassured Rubio that the U.S. intelligence community was working to counter the threat of deepfakes.
The Pentagon is also reportedly hard at work countering the foreign deepfake threat. According to a 2018 news report, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the military’s tech research division, has spent tens of millions of dollars developing methods to detect deepfaked imagery. Similar efforts are underway throughout the Department of Defense.
In 2019, Rubio and Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., wrote 11 American internet companies urging them to draft policies to detect and remove deepfake videos. “If the public can no longer trust recorded events or images,” read the letter, “it will have a corrosive impact on our democracy.”
Nestled within the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021 was a directive instructing the Pentagon to complete an “intelligence assessment of the threat posed by foreign government and non-state actors creating or using machine-manipulated media (commonly referred to as ‘deep fakes’),” including “how such media has been used or might be used to conduct information warfare.”
Just a couple years later, American special forces seem to be gearing up to conduct the very same.
“It’s a dangerous technology,” said Rizzuto, the Atlantic Council researcher.
“You can’t moderate this tech the way we approach other sorts of content on the internet,” he said. “Deepfakes as a technology have more in common with conversations around nuclear nonproliferation.”
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The state of Alabama is accused of making access to federal dollars so hard that the people who needed it most got nothing. (photo: USDA)
The state is accused of making access to federal dollars so hard that the people who needed it most got nothing.
The Center of Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice, Natural Resources Defense Council, and Southern Poverty Law Center, accuse the Alabama government of withholding federal funds distributed though a state program intended to address clean water issues for Black residents.
The complaint alleges the Alabama Department of Environmental Management purposefully set up rules that stopped any applicant trying to get funds from Alabama’s Clean Water State Revolving Fund. Historically, Black Alabamans have comprised the majority of people who are forced to live with raw sewage and without proper plumbing.
The rules that blocked access included: a cumbersome points system, a refusal to consider financial need, a limited amount of loan forgiveness, and a lack of alternative financing options. In contrast, neighboring states like Florida and Georgia offer low interest loan options and Virginia has a fund which offers grants to residents to replace their septic systems.
One of the factors in the lack of viable sewage systems is the soil, which is composed of clay and drains water very slowly, which makes it difficult to build and maintain sewage systems. In poorer communities, septic systems are expensive to obtain and many homeowners have “straight pipes,” pipes that flush waste directly from the home through a PVC pipe to an area nearby, sometimes just a few yards from the home. In an area of the country where conditions are already difficult to achieve basic sanitary conditions, climate change will almost certainly make it worse.
Catherine Coleman Flowers knows this issue deeply after 20 years of advocating for her community. She founded the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice and wrote a book called Waste: One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret. (She was also named to the 2020 Grist 50 list of emerging climate leaders.)
Septic systems in this part of the country must contend with many factors, including the soil and the high water table, which makes them prone to damage. “[Septic systems] are failing as well and people just can’t afford to fix them,” said Flowers.
Residents are also dealing with the threats to their health due to sewage exposure, like hookworm, which one 2017 study found was present in one-third of residents in Lowndes County in Alabama’s Black Belt. Fixing the issue would address issues of disparities in health and sanitation, as well as eliminate a problem that has plagued Alabamans for decades.
“People that are on the lower end of the economic spectrum tend to be people of color and if we could get this resolved I think that it will not only solve the problem for communities of color but it will also solve the problems for all homeowners that are living with onsite septic systems,” said Flowers.
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