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The ex-president expects anti-abortion activists to line up behind his presidential campaign, but his bid for their support is off to a rocky start
According to two participants and another source close to Trump, the ex-president has warned leaders in off-the-record conversations that Republicans risk “losing big” — in Trump’s words — unless they follow his lead. He has warned the leaders to shift their own messaging, telling them to emphasize “exceptions” to abortion bans, including in cases of rape, incest, or a threat to the life of the mother. In these frank talks, Trump has stressed this is his 2024 plan, saying it’s necessary to prevent Democrats from painting him as an “extremist.”
Privately, Trump is conceding those big losses have already begun. Trump has for several weeks vented to confidants that the GOP is “getting killed on abortion” or on “the abortion issue,” according to three people who’ve heard him use this phrasing on different occasions.
During his meetings, when pressed on what specifically he’d support in a second term, Trump has instead focused on his record as the “most pro-life” president in U.S. history. Among the anti-abortion leaders, religious conservatives, and politically active pastors gathered, Trump’s retroactive focus has left some unsatisfied, including anti-abortion advocates who previously endorsed him. Indeed, during one of these conference calls held around early March, one of the participants gently told Trump that his 2024 policy commitments were vague, requesting clarity and specifics. Trump responded by boasting about his past accomplishments, according to two of the sources.
One recent participant wondered to Rolling Stone: Is Trump “going to try to make us swallow getting next to nothing in return for our support?”
Trump spokesman Steven Cheung dismissed criticism of the president. “President Trump’s unmatched record speaks for itself — nominating pro-life federal judges and Supreme Court justices that overturned Roe v. Wade, ending taxpayer-funded abortions, reinstating the Mexico City policy that protects the life of the unborn abroad, and many other actions that championed the life of the unborn. There has been no bigger advocate for the movement than President Trump,” he said in a statement.
Trump isn’t the only Republican candidate caught between hardcore supporters demanding new curbs on legal abortion and a majority of voters who continue to reject an anti-abortion agenda at every available opportunity. Rolling Stone also spoke to half a dozen longtime GOP strategists working on races for next year, almost all of whom say they are advising their candidates to talk as little as possible about GOP abortion proposals at this time. And party operatives are hoping anti-abortion voters won’t notice or won’t care. According to a Republican operative working on 2024 Senate races and another source who’s pored over the private data, recent GOP internal polling in multiple states has shown that abortion doesn’t even rank as a top-five issue right now among those Republican primary voters.
While the intra-party debate rages, the losses are piling up. In a heavily contested Wisconsin Supreme Court race last week, a Democrat staunchly supportive of reproductive rights beat an anti-abortion Republican by 11 points in a race that was expected to be close — and in a swing state Trump won in 2016 and barely lost in 2020. The Wisconsin wipeout followed a dismal showing for the GOP in the midterms, where they failed to capture the Senate and underperformed in the House. (During his private gatherings, Trump has, according to two of the sources, specifically cited the case of far-right, anti-abortion Republican candidate Doug Mastriano, who in the swing state of Pennsylvania lost the 2022 governor’s race by 14 percentage points.)
Amid the repeated losses, Trump has also pitched his tone-it-down-on-abortion messaging recommendations to some closely aligned GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill earlier this year, according to one source with direct knowledge of the situation and another person briefed on the topic.
In recent weeks, numerous emergency meetings — focused on abortion-related messaging and the potential for compromises — have been held by conservatives in nonprofit organizations, on Capitol Hill, and in elite Republican and evangelical circles, multiple sources familiar with the situation attest. “The ‘Dobbs effect’ is real and maybe devastating,” says one Republican member of Congress, referencing the Dobbs v. Jackson case the Supreme Court used to overturn Roe v. Wade, who requested anonymity to speak freely. “And there isn’t a solution that everyone can rally around yet.”
Silence is not an option for Trump. The former president is tied to the issue in a way no other candidate could be: It was his Supreme Court picks who were critical to overturning Roe and striking down federal protections for abortion access. His likely primary rival, Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, is putting the issue front and center, as he rallies Republicans in his state to ban abortion after just six weeks of pregnancy. Meanwhile, the party still has a vocal anti-abortion contingent who are promising to punish candidates who aren’t vocal supporters of their cause — with their criticism aimed at Trump, specifically.
“If you’re ignoring abortion [as a 2024 Republican candidate], you do so at your own peril,” says Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life of America. Lila Rose, the founder of the like-minded group Live Action, argues: “What the GOP needs to be doing is doubling down on what makes them even have any kind of competitive advantage over the opposing party: that they defend families, they defend the vulnerable. They’re going to fight for the most basic human rights — and ‘life’ is the first of them.… That needs to be the focus of the GOP, not fighting their own base — many of which are pro-lifers — and continuing to make space for Trumpian politics.”
From Rose’s perspective, the GOP’s national policy should be a total ban with no exceptions. As for the man most responsible for the historic overturning of Roe? “I do think the biggest drag in the GOP right now is Trump,” she says, adding that Trump blaming abortion rhetoric for the Republican Party’s recent string of losses is, in her opinion, “just cynical politicking. And it’s, quite frankly, disgusting.”
Of course, not all abortion foes are tiptoeing away from Team Trump just yet. Pastor Mark Burns, who previously counseled Trump as a campaign-trail faith adviser, says that he and “other faith-based leaders still support President Trump’s 2024 campaign due to the fact that President Trump has taken unprecedented action on behalf of unborn children,” adding that Trump “has done more than we could have anticipated,” and “it is abundantly evident why we need President Trump back in the White House.”
Amid the schism, some have suggested a compromise, but a consensus has proven elusive and even attempts at one prove controversial, as those offering suggestions have found out the hard way.
After the Wisconsin Supreme Court election loss, Jon Schweppe decided it was time for some blunt talk. Schweppe — the policy director at the American Principles Project, a PAC that bills itself as “The NRA for the Family” — suggested the GOP all get on the same page.
“Republicans need to figure out the abortion issue ASAP. We are getting killed by indie voters who think we support full bans with no exceptions,” he tweeted, calling for “everyone to suck it up and unify” behind the 15-week national ban on abortion Sen. Lindsey Graham floated last year.
The alternative, Schweppe warned, would be suicide for the pro-life movement: “We are months away from that happening…. Ego checks need to happen now. It’s do or die time.”
The response, from all corners, was swift: Schweppe’s tweet became an equal-opportunity dunk-fest, ratioed and roasted by blue-check liberals and members of Students for Life alike.
But Schweppe stands by his assessment, and he predicts a reckoning for Republicans if they don’t find a consensus position stat. “There’s a big divide within the pro-life movement about what the right strategy going forward is,” he tells Rolling Stone, drawing a distinction between groups that “cannot compromise” and those that are “a little bit more practical, politically.” The more practical groups, he posits, are the ones actually spending money on elections (like American Principles, which Schweppe says spent $10 million last cycle and plans to up its spending in 2024) while anti-abortion advocacy groups that are less sensitive to electoral outcomes push an extreme agenda clearly unpopular with a majority of voters.
If Republicans don’t figure out a way forward quickly, Schweppe says, “it’s going to be hard for us to be effective with our other issues.… We want to make sure that we’re charting out a path that voters find palatable. I think we can do it, but people have got to have a come-to-Jesus moment.” He still believes that can happen — pointing to mainstream polling compiled by anti-abortion PAC Susan B. Anthony List indicating majorities of voters oppose, for example, tax-payer funding of abortion clinics.
“There are multiple ways to do this, but you have to do it in a way that is actually popular, where if you poll it, at least half the country is fine with it,” Schweppe says. “If you’re doing something where only 15 percent of the country is good with it, then you’re gonna lose some elections.”
The internal GOP politics of abortion are complicated enough that some Republican candidates are struggling to agree even with themselves. On Wednesday, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott — who’s almost certainly running for president — was asked on CBS News whether he would advocate for federal limits on abortion. He responded by saying he was “100 percent pro-life.”
Asked if that meant he would support a federal abortion limit, Scott argued: “That’s not what I said.”
On Thursday, Scott gave an interview with a New Hampshire radio station WMUR9 in which he initially said abortion should be left to the states. He added, however, that if as president Congress sent him a nationwide ban on abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, he would sign it: “20-week ban; definitely.”
Roger Severino, vice president at the Heritage Foundation, a leading conservative think tank says the hand wringing about election results is all for naught. “The last election, you could consider it the high-water mark for the side in favor of abortion because they were angry, and anger is a big motivator,” Severino says. “It doesn’t get better for them. They can’t keep up the anger forever.”
The Heritage Foundation is advocating for a national ban on abortions after roughly six weeks.
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An exam room is seen inside Planned Parenthood Friday, March 10, 2023, in Fairview Heights, Ill. (photo: Jeff Roberson/AP)
Now, the abortion navigation program manager and her co-workers joke that that's half the job — booking flight, train and bus tickets for out-of-state abortion seekers, arranging hotel stays and giving them money for food and gas.
"We're being as creative as possible to really just work with every individual patient to resolve all those barriers that might stand in the way between making their decision and getting to our door," she said.
What Pliskin and her colleagues face isn't unusual.
Even before Roe v. Wade was overturned last June, almost 10% of patients seeking abortions traveled out of state. But since the Supreme Court's decision, providers in some so-called "sanctuary" states where abortion access is protected are seeing record high out-of-state demand.
In Colorado, preliminary numbers show more than twice as many people from other states came for an abortion in 2022 compared to 2021.
While about a quarter of the states have restricted or banned abortions since the Supreme Court's decision, more than 25, including Colorado, have taken steps to do the opposite. Many of those states are clustered in the Northeast and on the West Coast.
Increased demand in "sanctuary states"
Illinois is surrounded on all sides by states categorized as "restrictive" or "most restrictive" by the The Guttmacher Institute. And after Roe v. Wade was overturned last June, the state has administered an average 1,140 more abortions each month, according to a #WeCount report released by the Society of Family Planning.
In some Illinois clinics, out-of-state abortions have risen six-fold, from roughly 5% to about 30%, since the Supreme Court's decision.
The majority are from neighboring states with restrictions, like Wisconsin, Pliskin said. But a number are coming from Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, and southern states as far as Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida.
Thirty-five states have been represented where she works.
"As a person with birthing capacity who would absolutely choose to get an abortion with my personal circumstances and where I am in my life, it's horrifying," Pliskin said. "Hearing those stories and challenges and people working desperately to overcome them on their own is even more devastating, and sometimes, frankly, traumatizing."
Sandwiched between Arizona and Texas — collectively home to more than 37 million people and some of the country's most restrictive abortion laws — New Mexico has administered 232 more abortions each month on average since the Dobbs decision, #WeCount reports.
And since last June, some Planned Parenthood clinics there have seen out-of-state patient loads double — now accounting for 40% of abortions.
Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains President Adrienne Mansanares said they had been anticipating the reversal of Roe v. Wade since former President Donald Trump took office, but "couldn't have predicted" the impact.
"It's really important to remember that each of those abortions represents someone's life and livelihood," said Ohio State University researcher Mikaela Smith, who is also a member of the #WeCount steering committee.
An emerging "migratory pattern": Getting to a clinic in the post-Roe era
When Mansanares pulls into the parking lot at work each morning in Denver, she's greeted by abortion seekers sleeping in their trucks.
Usually, the travelers have Texas license plates.
Dallas to Denver is at least a 12-hour drive. Cities like Austin, Houston and San Antonio are even further.
"It's like, 'Oh my gosh, hi, do you need blankets?' " Mansanares said. "They're [like] refugees. They're seeking care and having to drive through the night to do that."
One of the couples, she said, drove 17 hours to get there, leaving their cellphones behind for fear of being tracked and criminalized.
"I can't even drive to my kid's school without my phone," Mansanares said. "I can't imagine driving 17 hours to go to a [clinic you've] never been to. ... And when they arrive they have no phone. They are so fearful that they are going to be arrested, that they're doing something wrong."
About 32,260 fewer Americans received an abortion within six months of the Dobbs decision than before, reports #WeCount. And a study published six months after Dobbs found that the average commute to reach a provider had quadrupled, to about 100 minutes.
Mansanares has seen some patients from as far as Oklahoma and Florida. And the variation in care from state-to-state — coupled with increased wait times — has created a "migratory pattern" of its own where patients are forced to cross multiple state lines to get an abortion within a timely manner.
Texans, for example, often travel to New Mexico for an abortion. But even after a couple of new clinics opened near the state border in recent months, Mansanares said a two-week wait could send some further north to Colorado — where a decade ago, only 11 women from Texas sought an abortion. Last year, that number was 2,345.
"That's 20 million people who don't have abortion care in the state they live in," Mansanares said, noting that wait times used to be three days. "We're not going to be able to see 20 million people in New Mexico."
"There's the next patient, and the next": Life at the clinic
Because of increased demand for abortions, some clinics are having to put patients with less urgent needs — like those seeking contraceptives — temporarily on hold, sometimes leading to a 28-day wait, Mansanares said.
This, in turn, could lead to more unwanted pregnancies and an even greater number of people looking to get an abortion.
To meet increasing demand and make room for people who need in-person support, Mansanares said clinics have been amping up their telehealth options for family planning and birth control. They have also been expanding their hours and improving benefits for staff whose work takes an emotional toll.
"The trauma comes onto our providers and within our staff as well," Mansanares said. "And it's really hard to shake off because there's the next patient, and the next."
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Rupert Murdoch and Tucker Carlson (photo: Salon)
Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Rupert Murdoch likely to testify in epic trial that could reshape U.S. media
Offering a blizzard of damning evidence in the form of emails, texts and phone calls exchanged among high-profile Fox News figures, Dominion has accused the long-dominant conservative infotainment channel of knowingly perpetuating false claims that the 2020 election was stolen — and, more importantly, that Dominion somehow aided this effort through the nefarious use of its technology. Dominion said these false claims have cost the company major contracts with state legislatures who were persuaded not to purchase or use its voting machines.
What are the competing arguments?
Dominion's case is straightforward: Fox "manufactured a storyline about election fraud" in which Dominion was made the "villain."
Dominion laid out its claims in a 141-page complaint, which argues that Fox News hosts not only knowingly promoted and endorsed false claims that the election was stolen in 2020 but also selected high-profile guests who the network knew would parrot that claim, giving them near-boundless airtime for outrageous allegations that Dominion had rigged the election by manipulating vote counts.
Furthermore, Fox insiders knew or at least suspected that these claims were untrue, according to the lawsuit: "Fox witness after witness has admitted under oath that they have not seen evidence proving Dominion stole the 2020 Presidential Election or that they do not believe Dominion did."
"Not a single Fox witness has presented evidence that Dominion rigged the 2020 election because no evidence, documentary or otherwise, suggests it."
Fox News, on the other hand, has repeatedly claimed that it was doing journalism. The network's position is that even though some anchors and guests promoted false claims of election fraud, which many people at Fox News understood to be baseless, the company did its ethical due diligence by giving airtime to Dominion spokesman Michael Steel, who disputed the claims.
"Fox News Media is proud of our 2020 election coverage, which stands in the highest tradition of American journalism, and will vigorously defend against this baseless lawsuit in court," the company said in a statement.
When Dominion's filing dropped in February, Fox News hit back with a longer and broader statement, which it has persistently requested that journalists include in any and all coverage of the Dominion suit. Editors at Salon, for example, have received such requests on numerous occasions.
"There will be a lot of noise and confusion generated by Dominion and their opportunistic private equity owners, but the core of this case remains about freedom of the press and freedom of speech, which are fundamental rights afforded by the Constitution and protected by New York Times v. Sullivan," the company said.
Fox Corporation chair Rupert Murdoch — who is likely to appear as a witness, as is Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott — has admitted that some Fox News hosts pushed false claims, but has argued that outrageous allegations made by guest commenters were simply the free expression of opinion, and cannot be attributed to Fox News itself.
This suit has been in process since 2021, but most recently Judge Davis set Fox News' lawyers back on their heels by ruling that one of their primary defenses — that the allegations of election fraud were newsworthy because they came from then-President Donald Trump — was too weak a claim to be argued in court.
That move came after Dominion released a flurry of emails and text messages making clear that high-profile Fox News anchors and top executives knew the guests they hosted had no evidence of election fraud and that many people inside Fox News believed the network had gone too far.
Notably, when Davis greenlit the case to proceed to trial, he also ruled that Fox News' claims of election interference by Dominion were to be treated as totally false by jurors. This could protect the jury pool from having to give any weight to the validity of groundless conspiracy theories. He also allowed lawyers to ask potential jurors whether they were Fox News viewers, although not how they voted.
The most dramatic setback for Fox News leading into Monday was the penalty they received from Davis, who ruled that Fox lawyers had withheld evidence and slapped the company with a fine.
What about the texts and emails?
A flood of emails, texts and deposition statements regarding the Big Lie promoted by Trump and his allies — exchanged between Fox News hosts and high-ranking executives — were revealed in early March as part of Dominion's suit. Fox News hosts repeatedly admitted in those contexts that they knew the claims of 2020 election fraud were false, but said they would push them out to viewers anyway, even as they mocked their right wing sources in private.
Tucker Carlson, for instance, was revealed to be a prolific texter and a privately ferocious critic of Trump. Speaking to members of Fox staff about Trump in January 2021, he wrote, "We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can't wait. … I hate him passionately."
In the aftermath of the Jan. 6 attacks on the Capitol, he had even spicier words for Trump in a text conversation: "He's a demonic force, a destroyer. But he's not going to destroy us. I've been thinking about this every day for four years."
Carlson described right-wing attorney Sidney Powell as "insane" and a "nut" for her false and "dangerous as hell" claims against Dominion in a litany of angry insults. "Hope she's punished," he said.
As for Rupert Murdoch, he described the Jan. 6 Capitol attack as "a wake-up call for [Sean] Hannity, who has been privately disgusted by Trump for weeks, but was scared to lose viewers."
"Maybe Sean and Laura [Ingraham] went too far," Murdoch wrote in an email to Scott following Joe Biden's inauguration, referring to the network's post-election coverage. Murdoch then wondered whether it was "unarguable that high profile Fox voices fed the story that the election was stolen and that January 6th was an important chance to have the result overturned."
On whether he could have forced Fox News to stop hosting election deniers, Murdoch made an apparently damaging admission: "I could have. But I didn't."
But the texts and emails weren't the only evidence drops.
"Alex Wagner just broadcast audio of a Trump campaign official acknowledging during a phone call with a Fox News producer in December 2020 that there was no evidence of physical issues with Dominion voting machines," journalist Aaron Rupar tweeted.
What comes next?
Opening statements in the trial should come on Monday afternoon, once jury selection is complete. No, the trial won't be televised. But reporters for major networks will be allowed to relay events in old-school fashion.
Davis said if Dominion filed the appropriate subpoenas, he would compel Murdoch and other Fox officials to take the stand. Among the big names expected to appear are Carlson, Hannity, Jeanine Pirro, Bret Baier, Dana Perino, former Fox host Lou Dobbs (perhaps the most unrepentant super-spreader of false election claims) and Murdoch himself.
Despite rampant speculation from legal observers and self-appointed media experts, the outcome of this case is impossible to predict. Defamation cases are notoriously difficult, requiring proof that false statements were made with "actual malice," that is, either knowingly and willingly or with reckless incompetence. Fox has shelled out millions in settlements through the years, as recently noted by The Hill. It remains possible that the network may seek a last-minute settlement, if only to keep Murdoch and its celebrity hosts off the stand.
The filings and evidence already made public against Fox, along with the judge's pre-trial sanctioning of Fox attorneys, have convinced many legal experts that Dominion's case is unusually strong. As a not-insignificant side note, Fox News is also fighting a $2.7 billion suit by Smartmatic, a different voting technology company that was targeted with similar claims of 2020 election fraud.
In the courtroom, the bar Dominion must clear is high. But all those mocking remarks captured in the text and email evidence have led some observers to wonder whether Fox News can prove it didn't act with actual malice.
"Davis is not an intemperate judge, but he was really steamed at Fox today. The biggest points 1) he intends to appoint a special master to see if Fox intentionally failed to disclose evidence and 2) could instruct jury that Fox inappropriately blocked Dominion from getting (evidence)," writes Larry Hitman of the Los Angeles Times.
Is press freedom really the issue?
Although it's a case that could shape legal history, Dominion v. Fox News is ultimately a defamation case that's limited in scope. It's not about the limits of press freedom or the First Amendment. It's about one company claiming that another company's defamatory actions caused it to lose business, not about "fighting words" or incitement to violence.
This case may, however, offer the courts a chance to raise the threshold of what cable shows can get away with calling "news," by resurrecting via case law the ghost of the "fairness doctrine," once a core ethical tenet of news journalism, which Rupert Murdoch helped bury.
Dominion's damage claims are premised on Fox "knowingly" perpetuating false allegations about election fraud, which led not just to Dominion's lost government contracts but the Jan. 6 Capitol attack. In that sense, the core principles hint at the benefits of regulated public speech (e.g., it's illegal to shout "Fire!" in a crowded theater) and could open up news conglomerates like Fox to future legal scrutiny through that lens.
Loopholes in U.S. press law have also made legitimate defamation and libel suits exceptionally difficult to win, forcing prosecutors to prove the accused's "state of mind" rather than a breach of policy. Fox's own legal crusades have a history of widening the courts' definition of "truth" and "news," and one such loophole lies at the heart of the Dominion case.
There's no "right of reply" under U.S. law, at least not since the FCC under Ronald Reagan repealed the last shreds of the fairness doctrine in 1987. That effectively rolled out the welcome mat for the explosion of right-wing talk radio, and spurred Murdoch to bring around-the-clock GOP talking points to cable news in 1997.
There are right of reply laws in the U.K., for example, where the BBC's internal policy is seen as the industry. The EU inherited a right-of-reply standard first codified in 1974, the UN enacted its own version in 1962 and France has had such a law on the books since 1881. The core principle at work here — audi alteram partem ("listen to the other side") — is found in legal systems and philosophical traditions around the world, stretching back to the ancient Greeks.
Instead of any version of that right, the U.S. has a messy body of press law that leans heavily on an obligation to distinguish "news" from "opinion" content and to correct inaccurate statements. In short, "news" in the U.S. is understood to involve reported facts, including the factual reporting of blatantly untrue statements made by "newsworthy" figures (such as the president). There is no legal requirement that a journalist must push back or offer corrections to such false statements (even if, by most applicable ethical standards, they should).
In most journalistic ethical codes and some countries' laws, the right of reply includes the right to accusations made by an interviewee, such as a guest commenter on a Fox News program. No such clear standard exists in this country.
That's the legal shield Murdoch and Fox News have historically employed. The network has frequently presented controversial opinions or false claims as "news" by allowing prime-time guests to spout whatever egregious nonsense they wish, without Fox News hosts explicitly endorsing them, and then airing pro-forma rebuttals during undesirable late-night or weekend time slots.
Judge Davis specifically shot down that argument during pre-trial discussions. "It's a publication issue, not a who-said-it issue," he said. "You can't absolve yourself of defamation by merely putting somebody on at another time to say something different."
The only semblance of the right of reply found in American journalism typically looks like this: "The central person named in this story did not immediately reply to this reporter's request for comment."
If you see a version of that line in a reported news article, it ought to mean that either the outlet or author has done the minimal due diligence required by professional standards. It's probably true most of the time, but there are rarely serious consequences if it isn't.
If Fox News wins this case, it will no doubt be emboldened to repeat its borderline-reckless behavior. If Dominion wins, we need not expect some scary rollback of First Amendment rights. There's at least a chance that this case could begin a revival of the once-treasured fairness doctrine, on the principle that a "news" badge only protects those who wear it honestly.
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Red Square in Moscow last month. (photo: Evgenia Novozhenina/Reuters)
The estimate is contained in a document that is part of a trove of top-secret material leaked in a Discord chatroom
The Russian operators of those accounts boast that they are detected by social networks only about 1 percent of the time, one document says.
That claim, described here for the first time, drew alarm from former government officials and experts inside and outside social media companies contacted for this article.
“Google and Meta and others are trying to stop this, and Russia is trying to get better. The figure that you are citing suggests that Russia is winning,” said Thomas Rid, a disinformation scholar and professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. He added that the 1 percent claim was likely exaggerated or misleading.
The undated analysis of Russia’s effectiveness at boosting propaganda on Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Telegram and other social media platforms cites activity in late 2022 and was apparently presented to U.S. military leaders in recent months. It is part of a trove of documents circulated in a Discord chatroom and obtained by The Washington Post. Air National Guard technician Jack Teixeira was charged Friday with taking and transmitting the classified papers, charges for which he faces 15 years in prison.
The revelations about Russia’s improved misinformation abilities come as Twitter owner Elon Musk and some Republicans in Congress have accused the federal government of colluding with the tech companies to suppress right-wing and independent views by painting too many accounts as Russian attempts at foreign influence. A board set up to coordinate U.S. government policy on disinformation was disbanded last year after questions were raised about its purpose and a coordinated campaign aimed at the person who had been selected to lead it.
Twitter employees also say they worry that Musk’s cutbacks have hurt the platform’s ability to fight influence operations. Propaganda campaigns and hate speech have increased since Musk took over the site in October, according to employees and outside researchers. Russian misinformation promoters even bought Musk’s new blue-check verifications.
Many of the 10 current and former intelligence and tech safety specialists interviewed for this article cautioned that the Russian agency whose claims helped form the basis for the leaked document may have exaggerated its success rate.
But even if Russia’s fake accounts escaped detection only 90 percent of the time instead of 99 percent, that would indicate Russia has become far more proficient at disseminating its views to unknowing consumers than in 2016, when it combined bot accounts with human propagandists and hacking to try to influence the course of the U.S. presidential election, the experts said.
“If I were the U.S. government, I would be taking this seriously but calmly,” said Ciaran Martin, former head of the United Kingdom’s cyberdefense agency. “I would be talking to the major platforms and saying, ‘Let’s have a look at this together to see what credence to give these claims.’”
“Don’t automatically equate activity with impact,” Martin said.
The Defense Department declined to comment. TikTok, Twitter and Telegram, all named in the document as targets of Russian information operations, did not respond to a request for comment.
In a statement, YouTube owner Google said, “We have a strong track record detecting and taking action against botnets. We are constantly monitoring and updating our safeguards.”
With the average internet user spending more than two hours daily on social media, the internet has become perhaps the leading venue for conversations on current events, culture and politics, raising the importance of influencing what is seen and said online. But little is known about how a specific piece of content gets shown to users. The big tech companies are secretive about the algorithms that drive their sites, while marketing companies and governments use influencers and automated tools to push messages of all kinds.
The possible presence of disguised propaganda has evoked widespread concern in recent months about TikTok, whose Chinese ownership has prompted proposed bans in Congress, and Twitter, whose former trust and safety chief Yoel Roth told Congress in February that the site still harbored thousands or hundreds of thousands of Russian bots.
The document offers a rare candid assessment by U.S. intelligence of Russian disinformation operations. The document indicates it was prepared by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, U.S. Cyber Command and Europe Command, the organization that directs American military activities in Europe. It refers to signals intelligence, which includes eavesdropping, but does not cite sources for its conclusions.
It focuses on Russia’s Main Scientific Research Computing Center, also referred to as GlavNIVTs. The center performs work directly for the Russian presidential administration. It said the Russian network for running its disinformation campaign is known as Fabrika.
The center was working in late 2022 to improve the Fabrika network further, the analysis says, concluding that “The efforts will likely enhance Moscow’s ability to control its domestic information environment and promote pro-Russian narratives abroad.”
The analysis said Fabrika was succeeding even though Western sanctions against Russia and Russia’s own censorship of social media platforms inside the country had added difficulties.
“Bots view, ‘like,’ subscribe and repost content and manipulate view counts to move content up in search results and recommendation lists,” the summary says. It adds that in other cases, Fabrika sends content directly to ordinary and unsuspecting users after gleaning their details such as email addresses and phone numbers from databases.
The intelligence document says the Russian influence campaigns’ goals included demoralizing Ukrainians and exploiting divisions among Western allies.
After Russia’s 2016 efforts to interfere in the U.S. presidential election, social media companies stepped up their attempts to verify users, including through phone numbers. Russia responded, in at least one case, by buying SIM cards in bulk, which worked until companies spotted the pattern, employees said. The Russians have now turned to front companies that can acquire less detectable phone numbers, the document says.
A separate top-secret document from the same Discord trove summarized six specific influence campaigns that were operational or planned for later this year by a new Russian organization, the Center for Special Operations in Cyberspace. The new group is mainly targeting Ukraine’s regional allies, that document said.
Those campaigns included one designed to spread the idea that U.S. officials were hiding vaccine side effects, intended to stoke divisions in the West. Another campaign claimed that Ukraine’s Azov Brigade was acting punitively in the country’s eastern Donbas region.
Others, aimed at specific countries in the region, push the idea that Latvia, Lithuania and Poland want to send Ukrainian refugees back to fight; that Ukraine’s security service is recruiting U.N. employees to spy; and that Ukraine is using influence operations against Europe with help from NATO.
A final campaign is intended to reveal the identities of Ukraine’s information warriors — the people on the opposite side of a deepening propaganda war.
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Most children need systematic, sound-it-out instruction, known as phonics. (photo: Hannah Yoon/NYT)
Fed up parents, civil rights activists, newly awakened educators and lawmakers are crusading for “the science of reading.” Can they get results?
At an elementary school in Hutchinson, Minn., a veteran teacher is crusading for reform, haunted by the fear that, for 28 years, she failed children because she was not trained in the cognitive science behind reading.
And Ohio may become the latest state to overhaul reading instruction, under a plan by Gov. Mike DeWine.
“The evidence is clear,” Mr. DeWine said. “The verdict is in.”
A revolt over how children are taught to read, steadily building for years, is now sweeping school board meetings and statehouses around the country.
The movement, under the banner of “the science of reading,” is targeting the education establishment: school districts, literacy gurus, publishers and colleges of education, which critics say have failed to embrace the cognitive science of how children learn to read.
Research shows that most children need systematic, sound-it-out instruction — known as phonics — as well as other direct support, like building vocabulary and expanding students’ knowledge of the world.
The movement has drawn support across economic, racial and political lines. Its champions include parents of children with dyslexia; civil rights activists with the N.A.A.C.P.; lawmakers from both sides of the aisle; and everyday teachers and principals.
Together, they are getting results.
Ohio, California and Georgia are the latest states to push for reform, adding to almost 20 states that have made moves in the last two years. Under pressure, school districts are scrapping their old reading programs. Even holdouts like New York City, where hundreds of elementary schools were loyal to a popular but heavily criticized reading curriculum, are making changes.
About one in three children in the United States cannot read at a basic level of comprehension, according to a key national exam. The outcomes are particularly troubling for Black and Native American children, nearly half of whom score “below basic” by eighth grade.
“The kids can’t read — nobody wants to just say that,” said Kareem Weaver, an activist with the N.A.A.C.P. in Oakland, Calif., who has framed literacy as a civil rights issue and stars in a new documentary, “The Right to Read.”
Science of reading advocates say the reason is simple: Many children are not being correctly taught.
A popular method of teaching, known as “balanced literacy,” has focused less on phonics and more on developing a love of books and ensuring students understand the meaning of stories. At times, it has included dubious strategies, like guiding children to guess words from pictures.
The push for reform picked up in 2019, when national reading scores showed significant improvement in just two places: Mississippi and Washington, D.C. Both had required more phonics.
But what might have remained a niche education issue was supercharged by a storm of events: a pandemic that mobilized parents; Covid relief money that gave school districts flexibility to change; a fresh spotlight on racial disparities after the murder of George Floyd; and a hit education podcast with a passionate following.
“There is this urgency around the story, this unbelievable grief,” said Emily Hanford, a journalist at American Public Media. Her podcast, “Sold a Story,” detailed how stars of the literacy world and their publisher diverged from scientific research. It racked up nearly 5 million downloads.
The movement has not been universally popular. School districts in Connecticut and teachers’ unions in Ohio, for example, pushed back against what they see as heavy-handed interference in their classrooms.
Even within the movement, there are quiet rumblings of worry. There is no established curriculum for the science of reading — it refers to a large body of research that must be woven into the craft of teaching.
Can such a sprawling and enthusiastic movement stick to the science — across thousands of schools and classrooms? Can real change be executed and sustained?
“I saw this post where somebody said, ‘Reading wars are over, science of reading won,’” said Mark Seidenberg, a cognitive scientist at the University of Wisconsin.
“I’m sure it will be on a T-shirt soon,” he said. “But actually, nobody has won until we’ve actually seen we’ve improved literacy outcomes — especially with kids in groups where there is a long history of being left behind.”
A ‘Perfect Storm’
It all feels a bit familiar to Susan Neuman, an education official under former President George W. Bush.
In 2000, at the behest of Congress, a National Reading Panel recommended many strategies being argued for today. And the Bush administration prioritized phonics. Yet that effort faltered because of politics and bureaucratic snafus.
Dr. Neuman, now a professor at New York University, is among those who question whether this moment can be different. “I worry,” she said, “that it’s déjà vu all over again.”
Today’s movement, though, is less top down, and far more dynamic.
“You had this perfect storm happening,” said Jennie McGahee, a mother in Hudson, Ohio, who watched her son James muddle through reading and writing in elementary school.
A former teacher, Ms. McGahee tried to help at home. But she came to believe a central problem was the curriculum: a popular program by Lucy Calkins of Columbia University’s Teachers College. Until recently, the curriculum had put less emphasis on phonics and more emphasis on children reading and writing independently.
During pandemic Zoom lessons, Ms. McGahee said, other parents in her affluent, mostly white suburb known for its schools also began to question why their children were not getting more explicit instruction.
Then last fall, “Sold a Story” scrutinized the work of Professor Calkins and others, giving ammunition to parents like Ms. McGahee. She emailed the podcast to her school board, and at a recent meeting, marched up to the microphone.
“This will end with our curriculum changing — it’s just a matter of how long we need to fight to get this done,” said Ms. McGahee, whose son, now 12, still finds reading taxing. The district said it was piloting another program to boost phonics.
Professor Calkins rewrote her early literacy curriculum last year to include, for the first time, daily, structured phonics to be used with the whole class. In a statement, she said she had always treated phonics as critical. But she added: “To reduce the teaching of reading to phonics instruction and nothing more is to misunderstand what reading is, and what learning is.”
For many communities, the urgency of literacy is not new.
“These arguments have been made for a long time by a lot of people,” said Sujatha Hampton, the education chair for the N.A.A.C.P. in Fairfax County, Va.
But amid calls for racial justice after the murder of George Floyd, Dr. Hampton saw an opportunity to address gaps in reading outcomes for Black and Hispanic students, compared with white and Asian students in her district.
She pressed for structured literacy in 2021 — and saw swift change.
“I told them, ‘If you don’t switch this, I’m going to make sure that every time anybody Googles your name, what’s going to come up is your statistics and the racial discrepancy in how kids are learning to read here,” Dr. Hampton recalled.
Science of reading advocates say they are gaining momentum, in part because their battles have converged.
“We had no traction when we were dyslexia moms,” said Amy Traynor, who co-founded a parent group that recently won a curriculum change in Katy, Texas, a Houston suburb. “When we abandoned the use of dyslexia and started talking literacy for all children, that’s when progress started to be made.”
Avoiding Pitfalls
At Panther Valley Elementary, a rural, low-income school in eastern Pennsylvania, the science of reading has been transformative, said the principal, Robert Palazzo.
His school had been using a reading program by the influential educators, Irene C. Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell, whose work has been questioned by science of reading advocates. The district even took out a loan to afford the curriculum, which cost around $100,000, he said.
But teachers complained: It wasn’t working. Just a quarter of third graders were meeting benchmarks.
“I had to swallow my pride and realize that selecting that was a mistake,” Mr. Palazzo said.
Dr. Fountas and Dr. Pinnell pointed to research supporting their program and said “countless schools” had achieved positive results. Their approach, they said, includes phonics.
Panther Valley, though, used grants, donations and Covid relief money to buy a new phonics curriculum. The school also recently added 40 minutes of targeted, small-group phonics at the end of every day.
Nearly 60 percent of third graders are now proficient in decoding words, up from about 30 percent at the beginning of the school year, progress Mr. Palazzo hopes will translate to state tests this spring.
Still, experts foresee a number of pitfalls to meaningful reform on a national scale.
For starters, bringing reading science to commercial curriculums is still a work in progress. Schools may scrap their old textbooks but find there is no perfect replacement.
“What’s coming along is in the right ballpark at least,” said Dr. Seidenberg, of the University of Wisconsin. But he warned against treating anything as “gospel.”
There is also the danger of overemphasizing phonics. To establish true literacy, students need to be able to not only sound out words, but also read quickly and build enough vocabulary and background knowledge for comprehension.
Another risk: impatience.
When Mississippi improved reading scores in 2019, it was touted as a “miracle.” In fact, progress came over many years, with systemic reform that included sending literacy coaches to the state’s lowest-performing schools.
“I don’t want the science of reading to be the shiny object — ‘look here, look here,’” said Jack Silva, the chief academic officer in Bethlehem, Pa., an early adopter of the science of reading. “You forget the hard work that it takes to implement.”
In his district, principals were trained first, then teachers, grade by grade. Eight years later, training is now underway for middle and high school principals, an area that Timothy Shanahan, a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois Chicago, says deserves more attention.
Literacy for early readers is not an “inoculation,” Dr. Shanahan said.
Students must keep building skills — moving from “The Snowy Day” to Steinbeck and Shakespeare.
In Columbus, Ohio, Joy Palmer is still fighting for her daughter Dey’Leana, 18.
Dey’Leana struggled with reading from an early age. Her mother blames, in part, an ineffective reading intervention Dey’Leana received during elementary school. Even after Dey’Leana was diagnosed with dyslexia at age 9, her mother said, she did not get all the support she needed.
The Columbus district, as it moves toward the science of reading, is no longer using that early intervention program, and said it was working closely with Ms. Palmer and her daughter.
School has not been easy for Dey’Leana. By middle and high school, she stopped raising her hand, pushed back at teachers and at times skipped class.
“I would be stressed,” Dey’Leana said.
Now a junior, she is nowhere close to reading on grade level, her mother said.
“What are they going to do now that we are in the repercussion and damage stage?” said Ms. Palmer, who is pushing for the district to provide Orton Gillingham tutoring, a highly structured approach for struggling readers.
Even if executed flawlessly, the science of reading movement cannot solve everything. Poverty plays its own damaging role in students’ lives. And some children may always need specialized instruction.
Cathy Kucera is determined to try.
Fueled by regret for what she did not know in her first 28 years as an elementary schoolteacher, she and a colleague, Heather Vaillancourt, are on a two-woman crusade at their school in Hutchinson, Minn. They begged for a phonics-based curriculum and even wrote their own kindergarten lessons, incorporating research they say they were never taught.
“If it means we aren’t making friends or we aren’t the most popular people on campus, we don’t care,” Ms. Kucera said. “It’s about kids learning to read, and I’m not wasting another day.”
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President Erdoğan visits a disaster zone in the city of Kahramanmaraş in south-east Turkey, two days after the earthquake, on 8 February 2023. (photo: Adem Altan/AFP)
Toppling the president and his AKP party in May is no longer unthinkable. But voters in Ankara seem finely balanced
The two friends are split in their allegiances. Oluklu described himself as a nationalist, and said he intended to support Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in a tightly contested presidential election on 14 May. “Erdoğan is like a father figure for us in Turkey. He’s been running the country for 20 years. I don’t think it’s impossible to remove him as leader, but especially among this opposition, there’s no one who can replace him,” he said.
His friend Kaan, a longtime supporter of the main opposition Republican People’s party (CHP), who declined to give his surname, quietly disagreed. “I just don’t think this country is governed well, and I want people’s voices to be heard by those in power,” he said. “I really think this might be the end for Erdoğan,” he added cautiously. “Or, at least, I hope so.”
After two decades in power, Erdoğan is facing a concerted challenge. Polls show his main rival, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, a former accountant and longtime bureaucrat, has a slight edge. The vote presents a stark choice for the Turkish public, between Erdoğan and the possibility that re-electing him will entrench one-man rule, or his opponents who have promised to overhaul the presidential system and return Turkey to parliamentary democracy.
Turkey’s opposition, a six-party coalition headed by Kılıçdaroğlu and united by the sole aim of removing Erdoğan from power, believes that the problems facing the country should make this choice easy. A deep economic crisis and a lacklustre government response to two powerful earthquakes that struck the country in February have capped 20 years under Erdoğan and his Justice and Development party (AKP), which appears poised to suffer losses in parliamentary elections held in tandem with the vote for president.
Kaan’s father, Hasan, smoothed the fine mesh of net curtains hanging in his fabric shop next to Oluklu’s dessert shop as he explained why he won’t be voting for either the AKP or Erdoğan for the first time in his life. “It’s simple: he took all the money out of my pocket,” he said. “The fabric we sell here, for us to buy it wholesale costs five times more than before. But my rent has more than doubled.”
Hasan’s views on the economy are matched by the pro-business Democracy and Progress party (Deva), led by a former senior AKP official who is now a member of the opposition coalition. “The situation regarding this economy is clear, as well as the experience of this presidency. Look at the economic indicators – inflation, income distribution, poverty. All of this has deteriorated significantly under this presidential system,” said İbrahim Çanakcı, a Deva cofounder and former Turkish treasury official.
“Erdoğan used to blame ministers, institutions or foreign forces. But now people see clearly that when it comes to this system of one-man rule, that means there’s only one person responsible for this outcome,” he said.
But putting an abrupt end to two decades of rule by both Erdoğan and the AKP is no simple task. While many polls indicate the opposition coalition could gain a majority in the parliament, the race for the presidency remains tight. Without winning both the presidency and the parliament, the opposition will be unable to enact the sweeping constitutional reforms they have promised. The risk that Erdoğan could hang on as president even if his party suffers a defeat in parliament could further concentrate power around the presidency, cancelling out any opposition gains.
Onursal Adıgüzel, a deputy and fierce supporter of Kılıçdaroğlu, was unconcerned. Speaking from a makeshift opposition campaign office decorated with beatific posters of Kılıçdaroğlu meeting farmworkers and young people, he said CHP would triumph by targeting pensioners and elusive undecided voters.
“Personally, I believe it will be easier for us to win the presidential election than the parliamentary vote,” he said. “Two years ago, Kılıçdaroğlu wasn’t considered a strong rival for Erdoğan and now he’s leading in the polls. But, most of all, he’s a person who can deliver peace to Turkey, and he’s not using polarising language like Erdoğan.”
Asked to define the appeal of Kılıçdaroğlu’s candidacy, most voters and members of his coalition said he provided an alternative to Erdoğan and represented change. Few managed to articulate what might encourage undecided voters or lifelong Erdoğan supporters to choose him. The 74-year-old bespectacled politician has also faced public criticism from his main coalition partner, the nationalist IYI Parti (Good party), that he muscled his way to the candidacy, forcing others out of the running despite polls showing that every other potential option stood a better chance of beating Erdoğan.
“Erdoğan will lose and Kılıçdaroğlu will win this election – we’re confident in that,” said Çanakcı. “The decision about the candidate is already made. There’s no use questioning how fitting Kılıçdaroğlu is. In our view, he fits the position perfectly.”
Uğur Poyraz, general secretary of the IYI party, said their hesitancy about Kılıçdaroğlu’s candidacy was because of the high stakes of this election, where Turkish democracy was on the line. “Our position on the candidate is about our position on victory, and ultimately this is about the good of our country,” he said.
As for how they plan to topple a president who had built up a cult of personality over two decades, Poyraz said he believed that reality would work in their favour, and that the Turkish public no longer trusted Erdoğan or his party. His IYI party will contest every seat in the hope of winning over what they see as a silent majority of AKP voters who are ready to defect.
“Our problem is not with any one individual, it’s about a system that is tainting every aspect of Turkish society. It’s that system we’re setting out to change, not a person we’re fighting … The public is by and large convinced that it’s time for this government to change, that it’s irredeemable, incurable and that there is no redemption for them,” he said.
Not all voters are convinced. For those like Oluklu’s cousin Kamuran Özcip, who has voted Erdoğan in every single election in his adult life, the prospect of ending the president’s rule is impractical. “I like Erdoğan, maybe it’s his politics, maybe it’s his personality. He’s a really experienced statesman,” he said, pointing up at a television showing news of the president’s latest speech in their family’s dessert shop.
Özcip was baffled by the opposition’s offer of radical change. He’d prefer, he said, to hope that Erdoğan could improve things. “There are some minor problems, with the economy, with people being unable to speak, or people being sent to jail. If Erdoğan changed these things, life wouldn’t be perfect, but it would improve,” he said. “Everyone wants change, and honestly I don’t know what they’re thinking. If Kılıçdaroğlu wins the election, it’s completely unpredictable,” he added.
His nephew Oluklu leaned across the table with a gentle smile. The opposition, he said, misunderstands voters like him who support Erdoğan and his coalition. “People talk about us, those who vote for Erdoğan and the AKP like we’re sheep, as if we vote for them blindly. But that’s not the case at all, we have free choice and we vote accordingly,” he said.
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Wind power. (photo: Dai Kurokawa/EPA/Picture Alliance)
But they stopped short of endorsing a 2030 deadline for phasing out coal that Canada and other members had pushed for, and left the door open for continued investment in gas, saying that sector could help address potential energy shortfalls.
"In the midst of an unprecedented energy crisis, it's important to come up with measures to tackle climate change and promote energy security at the same time," Japanese industry minister Yasutoshi Nishimura told a news conference.
"While acknowledging that there are diverse pathways to achieve carbon neutral, we agreed on the importance of aiming for a common goal toward 2050," he said.
G7 ministers finish two days of meetings on climate, energy and environmental policy in the northern Japanese city of Sapporo on Sunday. Renewable fuel sources and energy security have taken on a new urgency following Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
"Initially people thought that climate action and action on energy security potentially were in conflict. But discussions which we had and which are reflected in the communique are that they actually work together," said Jonathan Wilkinson, Canada's minister of natural resources.
In their communique, the members pledged to collectively increase offshore wind capacity by 150 gigawatts by 2030 and solar capacity to more than 1 terawatt.
They agreed to accelerate "the phase-out of unabated fossil fuels" - the burning of fossil fuels without using technology to capture the resulting C02 emissions - to achieve net zero in energy systems by 2050 at the latest.
On coal, the countries agreed to prioritise "concrete and timely steps" towards accelerating the phase-out of "domestic, unabated coal power generation", as a part of a commitment last year to achieve at least a "predominantly" decarbonised power sector by 2035.
Canada was clear that unabated coal-fired power should be phased out by 2030, and Ottawa, Britain and some other G7 members committed to that date, Canada's Wilkinson told Reuters.
"Others are still trying to figure out how they could get there within their relevant timeframe," Wilkinson said.
"We are trying to find ways (for) some who are more coal-dependent than others to find technical pathways how to do that," he said.
'HUGE STATEMENTS'
"The solar and wind commitments are huge statements to the importance that they will rely on the energy superpowers of solar and wind in order to phase out fossil fuels," said Dave Jones, who is head of data insights at energy think tank Ember.
"Hopefully this will provide a challenge to Japan, for which offshore wind is the missing part of the jigsaw that could see its power sector decarbonise much quicker than it thought possible."
Host country Japan, which depends on imports for nearly all its energy needs, wants to keep liquefied natural gas (LNG) as a transition fuel for at least 10 to 15 years.
The G7 members said investment in the gas sector "can be appropriate" to address potential market shortfalls provoked by the crisis in Ukraine, if implemented in a manner consistent with climate objectives.
They targeted 2040 for reducing additional plastic pollution to zero, bringing the target forward by a decade.
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