Thursday, July 6, 2023

July 5, 2023 HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

July 5, 2023

JUL 6

Yesterday the official account of the Republican National Committee tweeted Independence Day greetings with a graphic of the Liberian flag, which has one star, rather than that of the United States, which has fifty.

Even more troubling was the tweet from Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) attributing to founder Patrick Henry a false quotation saying that “this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ.” Historian Seth Cotlar noted that the quotation actually came from the April 1956 issue of a virulently antisemitic white nationalist magazine, The Virginian.

Also yesterday, Trump-appointed judge Terry A. Doughty of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana issued a preliminary injunction saying the First Amendment prevents the government from trying to stop the spread of disinformation.

Doughty has become the judge Republican attorneys general seek out in their challenges to the Biden administration, and in this case, that judge shopping appears to have paid off. In a lawsuit brought by the attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri, Doughty temporarily prevented employees of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Health and Human Services from talking to social media companies for “the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech.”

At stake is the belief among right-wing figures that government officials and social media companies have teamed up to silence them, although in fact, studies show that social media algorithms actually amplify right-wing political content and that social media companies are reluctant to remove it out of fear of backlash from extremists. Right-wing complaints stem from the removal of disinformation during the pandemic, and of accounts linked to the violence of January 6, 2021.

For years, the government has worked with social media companies to try to address terrorism, images of child sexual abuse, and disinformation about the pandemic and elections. But disinformation has become a key political tool for the Republicans, and going into the 2024 election season, they have doubled down on the disinformation that the 2020 presidential election was fraudulent and flooded the media with that lie.

Fittingly, as Philip Bump pointed out in the Washington Post today, Doughty’s injunction accepts right-wing allegations at face value, meaning he cites as a mark against the administration something that, in fact, didn’t happen.

Foreign accounts have amplified right-wing lies, and the injunction specifically targets the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, which leads the push to identify and stop malign foreign influence in our social media.

But there is a new twist there: Russia’s Yevgeny Prigozhin—the man who recently led his Wagner Group soldiers toward Moscow to demand changes in Russian military leadership—was key to the 2016 Russian disinformation campaign, and Reuters reported on Sunday that he announced on Saturday that his media company, including a troll factory that sought to influence public opinion in the U.S., is shutting down.

That the injunction claims to protect free speech by forcing people to stop communication was not lost on observers. Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe called the injunction “blatantly unconstitutional” and noted: “Censoring a broad swath of vital communications between government and social media platforms in the name of combating censorship makes a mockery of the first amendment.” Tribe joined law professor Leah Litman to eviscerate the “breathtaking scope” of the order.

The Department of Justice appealed the order today. It will go to the right-wing Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Disinformation is also behind the attempt of far-right House members to undermine the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, both of which maintain the rule of law in the United States. The FBI was key to investigating Russia’s attempt to help former president Trump win the 2016 presidential election and the efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, while the DOJ has been central to making sure that those who have broken the law are held accountable.

Right-wing Republicans, many of whom are implicated in the events surrounding the 2020 election, insist that the FBI—overseen by Trump appointee Christopher Wray—and the DOJ are improperly targeting them. They are calling for Wray to be fired and Attorney General Merrick Garland, who heads the DOJ, to be impeached. Barring that, they want to starve the department and the bureau by slashing their budgets.

Trump attacked the FBI and the DOJ from the beginning of his presidency, and today the House investigation into the FBI and DOJ includes the Oversight, Judiciary, and Ways and Means Committees. It is currently centered on right-wing insistence that President Biden’s 53-year-old son, Hunter, received a lenient deal from the DOJ and that the DOJ retaliated against an IRS whistleblower about the case. Legal analysts say that, in fact, the younger Biden got a harsher deal than others and point out that David Weiss, the U.S. attorney overseeing the case, was appointed by Trump.

On June 7, Weiss told Jordan in a letter that Garland had given Weiss full authority over the case; on June 30, Weiss wrote to deny that the DOJ had retaliated against a whistleblower, reiterating that he had “been granted ultimate authority over this matter.” Wray is scheduled to testify before the House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), on July 12. Jordan is a key critic of what he claims is FBI focus on Republicans.

Disinformation was a key factor in the rise of Russian president Vladimir Putin to the authoritarian power he now holds. The importance of insisting on the rule of law was the point of a BBC report today on a brutal attack on Russian investigative journalist Elena Milashina and lawyer Alexander Nemov in Chechnya, while they were on their way to court for the sentencing of the wife of a federal judge who was kidnapped by security forces in retaliation for the activism of her son. The two were abducted, beaten, stabbed, and tortured.

“This story,” the BBC said, translating from the Russian newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets, “is a test of whether society and the state can protect the law, in other words, itself. The law is the foundation of any state. Take it away and everything falls apart. And instead of civilization you get chaos and destruction. The law must always function and apply to everyone. In recent times, we have seen how certain people have been above the law. In place of the judge with his gavel—thugs with sledgehammers. And this is the result.”

Also yesterday, Guardian journalist Luke Harding reported that Kyiv says Russians have placed explosives on top of two nuclear reactors at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station. This station is in an area occupied by Russian forces. Nonetheless, Russian social media accounts are spreading the accusation that Ukraine is about to attack and damage the station.

U.S. nuclear expert Cheryl Rofer notes that the situation in Zaporizhzhia is different from the conditions that led to other nuclear crises. The Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union, that melted down in 1986 had a different kind of reactor, and the Fukushima reactor in Japan was fully operational right up until the moment the 2011 earthquake hit, making it much hotter than the Zaporizhzhia reactor is currently.

Regardless of the relative danger, though, Rofer reinforces the dangers of authoritarian government when she concludes: “The danger to the plant is wholly Russia’s responsibility for starting the war and occupying the plant.”

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Notes:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jul/05/republican-party-tweet-independence-day-liberian-flag

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/04/business/federal-judge-biden-social-media.html

https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2021/rml-politicalcontent

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/09/business/free-speech-social-media-lawsuit.html

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/prigozhin-controlled-russian-media-group-shuts-amid-mutiny-fallout-2023-07-02/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/07/04/biden-social-lawsuit-missouri-louisiana/

https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000189-2209-d8dd-a1ed-7a2de8d80000

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/07/05/social-media-biden-ruling/

https://nucleardiner.wordpress.com/2023/07/04/the-danger-at-zaporizhzhia-nuclear-power-plant/

https://www.justsecurity.org/87155/restricting-the-government-from-speaking-to-tech-companies-will-spread-disinformation-and-harm-democracy/