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How QAnon uses religion to lure unsuspecting Christians

Parker Neff was scrolling through conservative posts on Facebook when he saw an unfamiliar hashtag: #WWG1WGA.

Recently retired after serving as a Southern Baptist pastor for more than 20 years, his time was free and curiosity piqued.

“I started looking into it online,” Neff said. “Doing some research.”

And with that, the 66-year-old retiree, and soon his wife, Sharon, fell down one of the internet’s most dangerous rabbit holes.

It didn’t take long for Neff to find the hashtag’s meaning. “Where We Go One We Go All” is one of several mottoes of QAnon, a collective of online conspiracists.

The pastor and his wife, who live in Arcola, Mississippi, began watching the vast collection of QAnon videos posted online by “researchers” who decipher the cryptic messages of “Q,” an anonymous online persona who claims to have access to classified military and intelligence operations.

Since its inception in 2017 QAnon has quickly metastasized, infiltrating American politics, internet culture and now – religion.

According to QAnon, President Donald Trump is secretly working to stop a child sex cabal run by Hollywood and political elites who will one day be revealed during an apocalyptic event known as The Storm.

During the pandemic, QAnon-related content has exploded online, growing nearly 175% on Facebook and nearly 63% on Twitter, according a British think tank.

Although QAnon’s conspiracy theories are baseless – they allege that a famous actor is a secret sex trafficker and a leading Democrat participated in Satanic rituals – the dangers the movement poses are very real.

The FBI has called QAnon a domestic terror threat and an internal FBI memo warned that “fringe conspiracy theories very likely motivate some domestic extremists, wholly or in part, to commit criminal and sometimes violent activity.” Facebook finally pledged to ban QAnon content earlier this month.

Still, some Christian conservatives are falling for QAnon’s unhinged conspiracies.

“Right now QAnon is still on the fringes of evangelicalism,” said Ed Stetzer, an evangelical pastor and dean at Wheaton College in Illinois who wrote a recent column warning Christians about QAnon. "But we have a pretty big fringe.

“Pastors need to be more aware of the danger and they need tools to address it,” he told CNN. “People are being misled by social media.”

Pastors who preach QAnon-aligned ideas

Some Christian pastors are actually leading their followers to QAnon, or at least introducing them to its dubious conspiracy theories.

To cite a few examples:

“If you are just learning about QAnon and The Great Awakening, this is the right spot for you,” reads the ministry’s website. Representatives from the ministry did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Paul Anleitner, an evangelical pastor in Minneapolis, said he’s seen worrying examples of conservative Christians preaching from QAnon’s bible: Pastors warning about the “Deep State,” congregants trading conspiracy theories during Bible studies, and, most concerning to him, unsuspecting Christians lured to QAnon through respected church leaders.

“I see this circulating through conservative and Charismatic churches and it breaks my heart,” said Anleitner, who spent time in Pentecostal churches, where he says QAnon’s influence is distressingly pervasive.

“It’s pulling families apart, pulling people away from the gospel and creating distrust among people searching for the truth.”

Earlier this year a young Christian friend of his recirculated QAnon ideas posted online by a national Christian leader, Anleitner said. (He declined to name the pastor on the record).

“I reached out to my friend and told him the stuff he posted came directly from QAnon,” said Anleitner. “He had no idea.”

And that, Christian leaders say, is a big part of the problem.

Some followers see QAnon messages as sacred texts

QAnon is complex, said Brian Friedberg, a researcher at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government who has studied the movement.

It churns out an almost endless stream of content, from memes to anti-Semitic tropes to Christian Scripture. From its anonymous message board, the dubious ideas circulate through social media, sometimes finding their way into the Twitter feed of Trump and his allies, who have repeatedly boosted QAnon accounts.

Q himself (or herself, or themselves for that matter – no one quite knows who Q is) has posted nearly 5,000 messages since 2017.

In QAnon, some observers see a mass delusion, others see a political cult, and still others claim to see the sprouts of a new faith.

According to the religious view of QAnon, Q is a postmodern prophet, “Q drops” (aka his messages) are sacred texts and Trump is a messianic figure who will conjure “The Storm,” an apocalyptic revelation exposing evildoers.

If QAnon is a new religion, it bears the birthmarks of our truth-deprived time: Born on an obscure internet image board, it spreads through social media, preaches a perverted form of populism and is amplified by a president who has demonstrated little regard for facts.

But in Mississippi, the Neffs said they see QAnon as a source of “behind the scenes” information – not as a religion.

“It’s kinda like checking Fox News or CNN,” – that is, a place to find the latest news, said Park Neff, who has a masters in divinity and a doctorate from New Orleans Baptist Seminary. “It just seemed to be good, solid conservative thought.”

Like her husband, Sharon Neff said she saw no contradictions between QAnon and Christianity. Instead, she saw important connections, as did many of her friends and fellow church members.

“What resonated with me is the idea of moving toward a global government,” she said, “and that actually goes along with the Christian belief about the End Times.”

QAnon’s ‘red pill’

In some ways, QAnon echoes the concerns of politically engaged, ultra-conservative evangelicals.

It interprets world events through the lens of Scripture or Q posts. It’s obsessed with a grand, apocalyptic reckoning that will separate good from evil, deeply distrusts the media and finds an unlikely champion – and hero – in President Trump.

Neff also said she likes that Q quotes Christian scripture extensively and claims to be exposing child trafficking, a problem that she said she and other Southern Baptist women have been fighting for years.

That’s no accident, say experts who have studied QAnon. The group intentionally uses emotionally fraught topics, like suffering children, to draw Christians to their movement.

“That’s a recruiting tactic,” said Travis View, a host of “QAnon Anonymous,” a podcast that seeks to explain the movement. “It’s their red pill.” (Travis View is a pseudonym he uses for safety. )

View compared it to a religion that proselytizes by offering potential converts seemingly mundane services before laying the hard sell on them.

“The ‘Save the Children’ messaging is very effective, because everyone wants to protect children.”

It’s also tailor-made for evangelicals, View said.

Lately, he added, QAnon has been holding “Save the Children” rallies, while carefully concealing its involvement.

The tactic has been effective, said Anleitner.

“People who start with ‘saving the children’ don’t stay there – and that’s the problem,” he said. “It’s like Alice in Wonderland. They follow the rabbit and enter a totally different framework for reality.”

Ready for the Great Awakening

Friedberg said he sees elements of his experience as a young evangelical in the QAnon movement: Its seamless blend of Christianity and nationalism, its promise of spiritual knowledge and the primacy of scripture, and, finally, the desire to evangelize to friends and family.

But Friedberg said he doesn’t see QAnon itself as a religion.

“This is an information operation that has gotten out of the direct control of whoever started it,” he said. It’s an operation, he added, that likely would not exist in a less polarized, confusing and frightening time.

Under somewhat similar strains, a group of 1840s Baptists called the Millerites predicted the Second Coming of Jesus.

When Jesus didn’t arrive, the Millerites were greatly disappointed, but they adjusted their apocalyptic timetables and soldiered on, eventually becoming the Seventh Day Adventist Church.

Travis View said he sees echoes of the Millerites in QAnon. Numerous QAnon “prophecies” have proven false. Hillary Clinton was not arrested in 2017, Republicans didn’t rout Democrats during the 2018 midterm elections and Trump has not imprisoned his political enemies at Guantanamo Bay.

These days, Q shies away from giving specific dates, View noted, suggesting a shift in tactics. Even so, believers attempt to explain away any contradictions between QAnon and reality, just as the Millerites did centuries ago.

Park Neff, the Baptist pastor, said the failed prophecies are all part of QAnon’s master plan.

“Some of it seems like deliberate misinformation to throw off the other side,” Neff said, “as should be apparent to anyone who watches the news. Sometimes he (Q) does it to rattle their cages, sometimes to keep them guessing. It seems to work.”

Meanwhile, Neff, like many interested in QAnon, looks forward to the Great Awakening. The pastor said it won’t be like the other Great Awakenings, the religious revivals that torched through early America.

This one, he said, will concern the state, not the church.

It will start when the prevailing evil in our government is finally revealed, he said, and end with Trump validated and all the bad people jailed on an island far, far away.

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Democracy isn’t on the GOP’s side. Why should they pretend to care about it?

Yes, the U.S. political and judicial systems were designed to protect the minority from the majority — but not to entrench minority rule across the country.

Last week, I became a citizen of the United States. The process was long and tedious — forms, fees, photos, biometrics and, as the final step, a naturalization interview. That last hurdle in particular showed how much the rhetoric about the democracy the U.S. shares with immigrants differs from how it’s practiced.

One of the reasons I was keen to become a citizen is because the United States is supposed to be based not on a race or a culture but on an idea: of popular sovereignty; of government of, by and for the people; of democracy. That was reflected in my naturalization interview, as I discussed on my show the next day, which involved a test of my knowledge of “civics,” of U.S. history and government. Every prospective citizen is expected to answer a minimum of six questions correctly, from a list of 100 provided in a booklet from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). Democracy is something of a running theme throughout the test. The opening section of the question booklet is titled “Principles of American Democracy.” Many of the questions refer to elections and the electoral process; question 55 asks: “What are two ways that Americans can participate in their democracy?”

Now that I’m done with the test, maybe I should mail my well-thumbed USCIS booklet to the office of Republican Sen. Mike Lee. The senior senator from Utah declared on Twitter the night before my citizenship test:

He followed up a few hours later:

Sorry — what? Sure, right-wing trolls on Twitter often invoke the “we’re a republic, not a democracy” talking point to try to deflect from calls for greater representation and political equality. But it is deeply depressing to witness a sitting U.S. senator engage in the same “cheap rhetorical sleight of hand,” to quote the political scientist Ed Burmila.


Of course, Lee doesn’t really believe the U.S. isn’t a democracy. “It’s time to stop delaying democracy; it’s time to stop hiding from the American people,” he declaimed on the Senate floor in 2015. Lee, as writer Jonathan Katz noted, was accusing Democrats of undermining the democratic process in a debate over funding for the Department of Homeland Security.

We shouldn’t be surprised by Lee’s entreaties though. In all three branches of federal government, minority rule is the new normal — so why should Republicans pretend to care about democracy and the popular support it requires? Why would they want to promote it?

President Donald Trump lost the popular vote in 2016. The previous Republican president, George W. Bush, came to office in 2000 after also losing the popular vote. At the presidential level, the GOP has won the popular vote only once since 1988. Yet they have controlled the White House for the majority of the 21st century. According to Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman, “In 2020, it’s possible Trump could win 5 million fewer votes than his opponent — and still win a second term.”

In Congress, the House of Representatives is far from representative thanks to partisan gerrymandering. In the wake of 2018’s blue wave, which saw Democrats retake control of the House, the overall result still “wasn’t as bad as it could have been for Republicans,” according to analysis by The Associated Press, which states that the GOP “won about 16 more U.S. House seats than would have been expected based on their average share of the vote in congressional districts across the country.”

Across the Capitol, the Senate has always been an anti-majoritarian institution but never more so than today. Based as it is on states regardless of size, “the Republican Senate ‘majority,’” according to Vox’s Ian Millhiser, currently “represents 15 million fewer people than the Democratic ‘minority.’”

And on Oct. 12, the Senate Judiciary Committee launched hearings to confirm Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s third Supreme Court nominee. If confirmed, Barrett will join Chief Justice John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorusch, and Brett Kavanaugh in being nominated by a president who became president despite losing the popular vote. A minority of voters will have led to a majority on the highest court in the land in lifetime posts.

The problem remains the same at the state level. In five states in 2017 and 2018 — Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin — “Democratic candidates for state house received a majority of the statewide popular vote,” according to a study by the USC Schwarzenegger Institute, but “the Republican Party won more seats than Democrats,” thereby retaining their majorities. In Wisconsin, Republicans won 45 percent of the vote but gained a whopping 65 percent of the seats in the state Legislature.

How is this fair? How is it small-d democratic or, for that matter, small-r republican? To those who abuse history to defend such grossly inequitable outcomes with the tired trope of “We’re a republic, not a democracy,” it is worth considering the definition of a “republic” offered by Founding Father James Madison. In Federalist No. 10, Madison defined a republic as “the delegation of the government…to a small number of citizens elected by the rest.” The “rest,” however, have since become perpetually stymied even as their overall numbers have grown through universal suffrage. Yes, the U.S. political and judicial systems were designed to protect the minority from the majority — but not to entrench minority rule across the United States. None of the founders would have recognized a system that regularly denies a majority of voting citizens both political representation and the power to pass laws.

Those of us who are new U.S. citizens understand this, perhaps, better than most. I’m reminded of the third question in my test booklet: “The idea of self-government is in the first three words of the Constitution. What are these words?”

Answer: “We the People.”

“A Minority of People” would be marked incorrect.

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How far reaching is QAnon? It’s big and it has tormented people like this California State Senator with death threats because he is gay, and supports legislation they do not agree with.

What happened to me was a perfect QAnon storm: I’m a progressive, gay, Jewish Democrat working to end discrimination against L.G.B.T.Q. people. I’m just the right target for an internet cult obsessed with pinning pedophilia and child trafficking on progressives, gays, Jews and Democrats. As tens of thousands of slanderous and hate-filled comments about me proliferated on Facebook and Twitter, the companies did little to stop them.

How did I become a QAnon target? Last year, I introduced Senate Bill 145 in the California State Senate to end discrimination against L.G.B.T.Q. young people on California’s sex offender registry. California law treated “gay” sex — oral and anal — much more harshly than it treated vaginal sex, allowing straight young people to stay off the registry while forcing L.G.B.T.Q. young people onto it. This discriminatory distinction existed because when California created its sex offender registry in 1947, gay sex was illegal and anti-sodomy laws were still on the books. Even though these anti-sodomy laws were overturned in the 1970s, part of the sex offender registry law was never updated and was still destroying the lives of L.G.B.T.Q. young people.

If a 17-year-old and 19-year-old of the same gender had consensual oral or anal sex and the younger party’s parents made the decision to press charges for homophobic reasons, a judge would have no choice but to put the older teenager on the sex offender registry. But if a straight couple had vaginal intercourse, the judge would have discretion regarding whether or not the 19-year-old belonged on the registry.

This bill simply provided that all forms of sex should be treated the same way. It was supported by a broad coalition of law enforcement, civil rights and sexual assault survivor groups, and was signed into law last month.

But because SB 145 dealt with the sex offender registry, QAnon supporters latched on and began posting wildly inaccurate statements about it, including that it legalized sex with children. I woke up one morning in August to find that I had hundreds of messages from people I’d never met, with names like NoMaskMama29. They used hashtags I’d never encountered and anti-gay taunts I hadn’t heard in decades. We had to tell our interns to stop answering the phones because we were getting death threats by the minute.

QAnon is gaining followers because people are feeling hopeless, anxious and mistrustful of traditional institutions. The middle class has been shrinking for decades. Covid-19 has made Americans’ suffering even worse, and everyone’s stuck at home, clicking refresh on their devices. People are looking for something — or someone — to blame. Many want a good-versus-evil cause to which they can attach themselves. QAnon has smartly made child trafficking and pedophilia its “cause.” After all, who doesn’t want to #SaveTheChildren? Sharing this outrage on social media has become a release for so many.

The QAnon conspiracy theory is that a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles, mostly Democrats, are operating a global sex-trafficking ring, and that President Trump is secretly fighting to dismantle it. The baseless idea continues to gain steam, and President Trump has refused to disavow it. Political candidates who’ve embraced the theory may be elected to public office in two weeks.

QAnon followers are also targeting incumbent lawmakers with vicious online attacks and death threats. California State Senator Scott Wiener is one of those lawmakers. He’s a Democrat who represents San Francisco. He just wrote an op-ed in the New York Times headlined “What I Learned When QAnon Came for Me.”

In the op-ed, he says what happened to him was a “perfect QAnon storm.” He explains to Press Play that this year, he authored a bill that passed, ending significant discrimination against LGBTQ young people on the sex offender registry.

“All we were doing was saying, ‘Let’s treat everyone exactly the same way that straight kids are already treated.’ QAnon latched onto this legislation. And people started to spread misinformation that we were somehow ‘legalizing pedophilia.’ That was absolutely false.

He says on social media, he received about 1000 death threats from QAnon followers and tens of thousands of comments calling him a pedophile and other negative things. Wiener explains that the attacks were most intense between mid August to mid September, and he reported them to police.

He says, “People like Donald Trump Jr. and Ted Cruz and Rush Limbaugh and others amplified this slander. …. It really sends a loud signal to elected officials that if you dare to try to do the right thing, you might get attacked.”

Wiener’s staff were affected too. “At one point, we had to tell our interns to stop answering the phones because people were saying just horrific things.”

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This will be hard if not impossible…

Bloomberg Opinion) – Less than two weeks from Election Day, most talk of a political “bloodbath” remains metaphorical. A 59-year-old man was arrested in Wichita, Kansas, last week after threatening to slit the throat of the mayor, who led the city’s effort to pass a mask mandate. The week before in Michigan, 13 men were arrested on charges of conspiring to kidnap their state’s governor and “try”

Both plots, while ghastly, made headlines because they are atypical. The warped worldview that drives such plans, however, is growing alarmingly commonplace. According to a Yahoo News/YouGov poll, half of Trump supporters claim to believe in the mad ravings of the group that calls itself QAnon. Attacking the roots of propaganda that feed such paranoia should be one of most urgent tasks of a Joe Biden presidency.

The asymmetry of the two major parties is driven in part by information asymmetries that feed extremism. The decades-long project of Fox News and the conservative movement to destroy shared truth has paved the way. Regular imbibers of Fox News, according to a new survey from the Public Religion Research Institute, occupy a climate more extreme than other Republicans, who tend to have more varied and less dishonest information sources.

As insidious as Fox is, it appears almost benign compared with other feeders of fanaticism around Trump. The conspiracy theories of QAnon are not a departure from Trumpism; they are a subsidiary of it. Devotion to Trump requires not only defying the facts revealed by journalism, history, science and lived experience. It requires disbelieving the literally dozens of former Trump loyalists who openly dispute MAGA fantasies and see the president as childish, solipsistic, vindictive and uninterested in, or incapable of, doing his job. Meanwhile, Trump’s baseless accusations against others routinely turn to dust.

Some Trump supporters willfully ignore these realities. Others don’t care or perversely admire his corruption and incompetence. Both mindsets will persist even if Trump is removed from office in January.

Men like Donald Trump don’t prosper in a healthy political culture. The emergence of a reality-based conservative information sphere — the Bulwark is a new example — is a necessary but insufficient development. The alienation of the MAGA base from realistic national narratives will continue to play out in criminal plots, pizza obsessions and dangerously unhinged right-wing politics that enjoys the imprimatur of leading Republicans. The U.S. won’t return to anything like political health so long as tens of millions live in a dystopian triangle bounded by MAGA, Facebook and Fox.

Experts call for more aggressive actions by the news media and social media companies to combat disinformation. Both have improved upon their abysmal 2016 performance, but it’s not enough.

Even amid acute polarization, the most effective alternative to mass disinformation may be the White House. Trump has deployed it to spread countless lies. But his success proves that no media source can compete with the White House in establishing the flow and parameters of information. Even those who recognize the Trump administration’s falsehoods and the damage they have done to government credibility still bend to its gravity.

There are limits, of course. All sorts of calumny spread through right-wing media when Barack Obama was president. Moreover, there is little evidence that Republican politicians not named Mitt Romney will denounce propaganda — including Russian-sourced disinformation — if they think it provides a partisan advantage.

Yet Obama largely refrained from directly attacking disinformation aimed at undermining his presidency. That may or may not have been a partisan mistake. But beyond partisan self-interest, the cost of his administration’s reticence was high. With a more concerted effort, the presidency has the power to yoke the misinformed more closely to fact, if only by degrees.

No doubt the most unhinged, such as the Michigan conspirators, would be undeterred by pronouncements from a Biden White House. To the MAGA cohort, a Biden presidency would represent an alternate reality that bears no resemblance to the magic kingdom in which they prefer to reside.

Still, the assault must be made. Breaking the hold of this collective delusion is a national imperative. If there is one thing America has learned in 2020, it is that defeating a virus — whether biological or informational — requires an honest and engaged president.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Francis Wilkinson writes editorials on politics and U.S. domestic policy for Bloomberg Opinion. He was executive editor of the Week. He was previously a writer for Rolling Stone, a communications consultant and a political media strategist.

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:eyes: Read this

The Trump presidency has brought American democracy to the breaking point. The president has encouraged violent extremists; deployed law enforcement and other public institutions as weapons against rivals; and undermined the integrity of elections through false claims of fraud, attacks on mail-in voting and an apparent unwillingness to accept defeat.

In this, he has been aided and abetted by a Republican Party that has fallen into the grips of white nationalism. The Republican base and its white Christian core, facing a loss of its dominant status in society, has radicalized, encouraging party leaders to engage in voter suppression, steal a Supreme Court seat in 2016 and tolerate the president’s lawless behavior. As a result, Americans today confront the prospect of a crisis-ridden election, in which they are unsure whether they will be able to cast a ballot fairly, whether their ballots will be counted, whether the candidate favored by voters will emerge victorious and whether the vote will throw the country into violence.

Yet if American democracy is nearing a breaking point, the crisis generated by the Trump presidency could also be a prelude to a democratic breakthrough. Opposition to Trumpism has engendered a growing multiracial majority that could lay a foundation for a more democratic future. Public opinion has shifted in important ways, especially among white Americans.

According to the political scientist Michael Tesler, the percentage of Americans who agree that “there’s a lot of discrimination against African-Americans” increased from 19 percent in 2013 to 50 percent in 2020, driven in the main by changes in the attitudes of white voters. Likewise, a Pew Research Center survey found that the percentage of Americans who believe that the country needs to “continue making changes to give Blacks equal rights with whites” rose from 46 percent in 2014 to 61 percent in 2017.

Polls also show that Americans overwhelmingly reject President Trump’s positions on race and that they increasingly embrace diversity. Last year, about two-thirds of Americans agreed with the statement that immigrants “strengthen the country,” up from 31 percent in 1994. And according to Pew, the percentage of voters who believe that “newcomers strengthen American society” rose from 46 percent in 2016 to 60 percent in 2020.

America’s emerging multiracial democratic majority was visible this summer in the aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The killing set off what may be the biggest wave of protest in United States history. An estimated 15 million to 26 million Americans took to the streets, and protests extended into small-town and rural America. Three-quarters of Americans supported the protests in June, and large majorities — including 60 percent of whites — supported the Black Lives Matter movement. These numbers declined over the course of the summer. As of September, however, 55 percent of Americans (and 45 percent of white Americans) continued to support Black Lives Matter, levels that were considerably higher than ever before in the movement’s history. This is why Mr. Trump’s efforts to resurrect Nixon’s “silent majority” appeals appear to have failed. The majority — seeking not a heavy-handed return to America’s racially exclusionary past but steps toward its multiracial democratic future — continue to sympathize with the protesters.

Not only do most Americans disapprove of the way Mr. Trump is handling his job, but an unprecedented majority now embraces ethnic diversity and racial equality, two essential pillars of multiracial democracy.

Yet translating this new multiethnic majority into a governing majority has been difficult. Democracy is supposed to be a game of numbers: The party with the most votes wins. In our political system, however, the majority does not govern. Constitutional design and recent political geographic trends — where Democrats and Republicans live — have unintentionally conspired to produce what is effectively becoming minority rule.

Our Constitution was designed to favor small (or low-population) states. Small states were given representation equal to that of big states in the Senate and an advantage in the Electoral College. What began as a minor small-state advantage evolved, over time, into a vast overrepresentation of rural states. For most of our history, this rural bias did not tilt the partisan playing field much because both major parties maintained huge urban and rural wings.

Today, however, American parties are starkly divided along urban-rural lines: Democrats are concentrated in big metropolitan centers, whereas Republicans are increasingly based in sparsely populated territories. This gives the Republicans an advantage in the Electoral College, the Senate and — because the president selects Supreme Court nominees and the Senate approves them — the Supreme Court.

Recent U.S. election results fly in the face of majority rule. Republicans have won the popular vote for president only once in the last 20 years and yet have controlled the presidency for 12 of those 20 years. Democrats easily won more overall votes for the U.S. Senate in 2016 and 2018, and yet the Republicans hold 53 of 100 seats. The 45 Democratic and two independent senators who caucus with them represent more people than the 53 Republicans.

This is minority rule. An electoral majority may not be enough for the Democrats to win the presidency this year either. According to the FiveThirtyEight presidential model, if Joe Biden wins the popular vote by one to two points, there is an 80 percent chance that Mr. Trump wins the presidency again. If Mr. Biden wins by two to three points, Mr. Trump is still likely to win. Mr. Biden must win by six points or more to have a near lock on the presidency. Senate elections are similarly skewed. For Democrats today, then, winning a majority of the vote is not enough. They must win by big margins.

The problem is exacerbated by Republican efforts to dampen turnout among younger, lower-income and minority voters. Republican state governments have purged voter rolls and closed polling places on college campuses and in predominantly African-American neighborhoods, and since 2010, a dozen Republican-led states have passed laws making it more difficult to register or vote.

Minority rule has, in turn, skewed the composition of the Supreme Court. Under Mr. Trump, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh became the first two Supreme Court justices in history to be appointed by a president who lost the popular vote and then be confirmed by senators who represented less than half the electorate. Amy Coney Barrett is likely to become the third.

In America today, then, the majority does not govern. This disjuncture cries out for reform. We must double down on democracy.

This means above all defending and expanding the right to vote. HR-1 and HR-4, a package of reforms approved by the House of Representatives in 2019 but blocked by the Senate, is a good start. HR-1 would establish nationwide automatic and same-day registration, expand early and absentee voting, prohibit flawed purges that remove eligible voters from the rolls, require independent redistricting commissions to draw congressional maps, and restore voting rights to convicted felons who have served their time. HR-4 would fully restore the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which was gutted by the Supreme Court’s Shelby County vs. Holder ruling in 2013.

Doubling down on democracy also means reforms that empower majorities, such as eliminating the Senate filibuster. The filibuster, which was rarely used during much of the 20th century, has turned into a routine instrument of legislative obstruction. There were more Senate filibusters over the last two decades than in the previous eight. All meaningful legislation now effectively requires 60 votes, which amounts to a permanent minority veto.

A democratic reform agenda should also include an offer of statehood to the District of Columbia and to Puerto Rico, which would provide full and equal representation to nearly four million Americans who are currently disenfranchised. And it should include elimination of the Electoral College. The House last voted in favor of a constitutional amendment in 1969, but the proposal died in the Senate, at the hands of old segregationist interests. (As Senator James Allen of Alabama put it: “The Electoral College is one of the South’s few remaining political safeguards. Let’s keep it.”)

Not only would ending minority rule be inherently democratic, but, importantly, it would also encourage the Republican Party to abandon its destructive course of radicalization. Normally, political parties change course when they lose elections. But in America today there is a hitch: Republicans can win and exercise power without building national electoral majorities . Excessively counter-majoritarian institutions blunt Republicans’ incentive to adapt to a changing American electorate. As long as the Republicans can hold onto power without broadening beyond their shrinking base, they will remain prone to the kind of extremism and demagogy that currently threatens our democracy.

There is ample precedent for democratic reform in America. A century ago, like today, the United States experienced disruptive economic change, an unprecedented influx of migrants and the growth of behemoth corporations. Citizens believed that their political system had become corrupt and dysfunctional. Progressive reform advocates like Herbert Croly argued that Americans were living in a democracy with antiquated institutions designed for an agrarian society, which left our political system ill-equipped to cope with the problems of an industrial age and vulnerable to corporate capture.

The response was a sweeping reform movement that remade our democracy. Key reforms — then regarded as radical but now taken for granted — included the introduction of party primaries; the expansion of the citizen referendum; and constitutional amendments allowing a national income tax, establishing the direct election of U.S. senators and extending suffrage to women. American democracy thrived in the 20th century in part because it was able to reform itself.

Critics of reform assert that counter-majoritarian institutions are essential to liberal democracy. We agree. That’s what the Bill of Rights and judicial review are for: to help ensure that individual liberties and minority rights are protected under majority rule. But disenfranchisement is not a feature of modern liberal democracy. No other established democracy has an Electoral College or makes regular use of the filibuster. And a political system that repeatedly allows a minority party to control the most powerful offices in the country cannot remain legitimate for long.

Democracy requires more than majority rule. But without majority rule, there is no democracy. Either we become a truly multiracial democracy or we cease to be a democracy at all.

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And then what happens. Some assessments as to who’s on alert for any kind of fallout with voting, or election results. Alot of sourcing of top level administration personnel points to the loyalty factors, and where T has his strongholds - AG Barr, the DNI head, Radcliffe, Senator Ron Johnson, and his dislike of FBI head Christopher Wray and CiA head Gina Haspel.

Ok…this is go time. Seems like everyone is ready.

There will of course be an Election Day — and it could be one of tumult, banners colliding, incidents at the polls and attempted hacks galore. More likely than not, it will end without a winner named or at least generally accepted.

America will probably awaken on Nov. 4 into uncertainty. Whatever else happens, there is no doubt that President Trump is ready for it.

I’ve spent the last month interviewing some two dozen officials and aides, several of whom are still serving in the Trump administration. The central sources in this story are or were senior officials, mainly in jobs that require Senate confirmation. They have had regular access to the president and to briefings at the highest level. As a rule, they asked for anonymity because they were taking a significant professional and, in some cases, personal risk in speaking out in a way that Mr. Trump will see as disloyal, an offense for which he has promised to make offenders pay.

Several of them are in current posts in intelligence, law enforcement or national security and are focused on the concurrent activities of violent, far-right and white supremacy groups that have been encouraged by the president’s words and actions. They are worried that the president could use the power of the government — the one they all serve or served within — to keep himself in office or to create favorable terms for negotiating his exit from the White House. Like many other experts inside and outside the government, they are also concerned about foreign adversaries using the internet to sow chaos, exacerbate divisions and undermine our democratic process.

Many of those adversaries, they report, are already finding success in simply amplifying and directing the president’s words and tweets. And they’re thoroughly delighted, a former top intelligence official told me, “at how profoundly divided we’ve become. Donald Trump capitalized on that — he didn’t invent it — but someday soon we’re going to have figure out how to bring our country together, because right now we’re on a dangerous path, so very dangerous, and so vulnerable to bad actors.”

None of these officials know what will happen in the future any better than the rest of us do. It is their job to fret over worst-case scenarios, and they’re damn good at it. I can’t know all their motives for wanting to speak to me, but one thing many of them share is a desire to make clear that the alarm bells heard across the country are ringing loudly inside the administration too, where there are public servants looking to avert conflict, at all costs.

It is possible, of course, that this will be an Election Day much like all other Election Days. Even if it takes weeks or months before the result is known and fully certified, it could be a peaceful process, where all votes are reasonably counted, allowing those precious electors to be distributed based on a fair fight. The anxiety we’re feeling now could turn out to be a lot of fretting followed by nothing much, a political version of Y2K.

Or not.

Many of the officials I spoke to came back to one idea: You don’t know Donald Trump like we do. Even though they can’t predict exactly what will happen, their concerns range from the president welcoming, then leveraging, foreign interference in the election, to encouraging havoc that grows into conflagrations that would merit his calling upon U.S. forces. Because he is now surrounded by loyalists, they say, there is no one to try to tell an impulsive man what he should or shouldn’t do.

“That guy you saw in the debate,” a second former senior intelligence official told me, after the first debate, when the president offered one of the most astonishing performances of any leader in modern American history — bullying, ridiculing, manic, boasting, fabricating, relentlessly interrupting and talking over his opponent. “That’s really him. Not the myth that’s been created. That’s Trump.”

Still another senior government official, who spent years working in proximity to Mr. Trump, put it like this: “He has done nothing else that’s a constant, except for acting in his own interest.” And that’s how “he’s going to be thinking, every step of the way, come Nov. 3.”

One of the first things senior staff members learned about Mr. Trump was that he was all but un-briefable. He couldn’t seem to take in complex information about policy choices and consequences in the ways presidents usually do in Oval Office meetings.

What they saw instead was the guy from the first debate. He’d switch subjects, go on crazy tangents, abuse and humiliate people, cut them off midsentence. Officials I interviewed described this scenario again and again.

In the middle of a briefing, Mr. Trump would turn away and grab the phone. Sometimes the call would go to Fox television hosts like Sean Hannity or Lou Dobbs; sometimes the officials wouldn’t even know who was on the other end. But whoever it was would instantly become the key voice in the debate.

In one meeting about the border wall, Mr. Trump called a person “who built a flagpole at one of his golf courses,” said an official in attendance that day. Mr. Trump explained that because this person “got in a big fight about the size of the flagpole” and because it was “really big,” “the president thought, of course, they would understand how to build a wall.”

“Obviously,” this official said, “it is not the same.”

“We used to joke that it was like a phone-a-friend thing, a lifeline thing” from “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” this person said. Soon, senior officials — frustrated that they couldn’t seem to get a word in during briefings — adopted their own version of this technique. They’d ask an array of people — some Trump friends, some members of Congress, assorted notables — to call Mr. Trump and talk to him about key issues. The callers just couldn’t let on that a senior official had put them up to it. Two of these senior officials compared the technique to the manipulations of “The Truman Show,” in which the main character, played by Jim Carrey, does not know that his entire life is being orchestrated by a TV producer.

In March 2018, Mr. Trump took a trip on Air Force One to Charlotte, N.C., for the funeral of the Rev. Billy Graham.

History may note that the most important thing that happened that day had little to do with the religious leader and his large life, save a single thread of his legacy. That would be his grandson, Edward Graham, an Army Ranger “right out of central casting,” as Mr. Trump liked to say, who’d served eight tours in Afghanistan and Iraq over 16 years. In full uniform he met Mr. Trump to escort him, and the two talked about the country’s grueling conflicts overseas.

For Mr. Trump, the meeting was a face-to-face lifeline call. When he returned to Washington, he couldn’t stop talking about troop withdrawals, starting with Afghanistan. During his campaign, he had frequently mentioned his desire to bring home troops from these “endless wars.” As president, his generals — led by the polished, scholarly, even-keeled Defense Secretary Jim Mattis — explained the importance of U.S. troops in stabilizing whole regions of the world, and the value of that stability. Suddenly, after talking to Edward Graham, Mr. Trump didn’t want to hear it.

“In a normal, sane environment,” said a senior Pentagon official, “were it Obama or Bush, or whatever, they’d meet Billy Graham’s grandson and they’d be like ‘Oh that’s interesting,’ and take it to heart, but then they’d go and they’d at least try to validate it with the policymakers, or their military experts. But no, with him, it’s like improv. So, he gets this stray electron and he goes, ‘OK, this is the ground truth.’ ”

Mr. Graham, now working in his family’s ministry, said, “Any conversations that I have had with the president are private.” And, “additionally, when I had those conversations with the president, I was in the Army and I was speaking with our commander in chief.”

Several weeks later, at a speech in Ohio, Mr. Trump said, “we’re knocking the hell out of ISIS” in Syria and the U.S. troops there would be coming home “very soon.”

Once they heard this, shock started to run through Mr. Mattis and his old friend, John Kelly, who’d commanded Marine forces but was then the chief of staff to the president . Both men understood that the 2,000 U.S. troops in Syria were, soldier for soldier, probably the most valuable fighting force on the planet. They not only fought alongside the Kurds in routing ISIS, which was battered yet still a threat. These few troops helped hold the region intact, supporting the Syrian Democratic Forces, also filled with Kurds, which in turn checked the expansion of Syria’s murderous leader, Bashar al-Assad, and also kept Russia, Mr. Assad’s patron, in check. The Kurds had suffered tremendously in these conflicts, much more than the Americans had.

Word spread, and soon much of Congress, the Pentagon, the State Department and Mr. Kelly were doing various versions of “The Truman Show,” trying to get people on the phone that Mr. Trump trusted.

This went on for much of the year — as various voices, both inside and outside of government, worked to try to excise this idea of pulling troops out of Syria from the man.

On Dec. 19, 2018, top brass at the Pentagon received notification via Mr. Trump’s Twitter feed, along with more than 80 million of his followers: The United States would be pulling troops out of Syria. It wasn’t clear what, precisely, Mr. Trump was thinking, beyond the tweet: “We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump presidency.”

ISIS was shrunken, but not yet fully defeated. And the move meant a radical reduction in American influence in Syria, an increase in the power of Russia and Iran to determine events there and quite possibly a land grab by the Turkish government, sworn enemy of the Kurds. Senior leadership of the U.S. government went into a panic. Capitol Hill, too. John Bolton, who was still the national security adviser then, and Virginia Boney, then the legislative affairs director of the National Security Council, hit the phones, calling more than a dozen senators from both parties. Mr. Bolton started each call, saying, in an apologetic tone, “This is the mind of the president, he wants to bring home our troops,” and then switched to frank talk about what might be done. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina was beside himself. Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, who served during the Iraq War, was dumbstruck. So was Senator Dan Sullivan of Alaska, a colonel in the Marine Corps Reserves who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan. “Is there any way we can reverse this?” he pleaded. “What can we do?”

That’s what Mr. Mattis wondered. He’d worked nearly two years developing techniques to try to manage Mr. Trump, from colorful PowerPoint slides to several kinds of flattery. This was his moment. The next day, he suited up, put on his cherished, navy blue NATO tie, with the four-pointed symbol of the alliance from which Mr. Trump had threatened to withdraw, and entered the Oval Office. He tried every technique — his entire arsenal, every tack, every argument. The president was unmoved. Mr. Mattis paused, and then pulled from his breast pocket an envelope with his resignation letter.

Down the hall, the very next day, Mr. Kelly was almost done cleaning out his office. He, too, had had enough. He and Mr. Trump had been at each other every day for months. Later, he told The Washington Examiner, “I said, whatever you do — and we were still in the process of trying to find someone to take my place — I said whatever you do, don’t hire a ‘yes man,’ someone who won’t tell you the truth — don’t do that.” But, in fact, that’s exactly what Mr. Trump wanted. Seventeen months as chief of staff, stopping Mr. Trump from umpteen crazy moves, from calling in the Marines to shoot migrants crossing the Rio Grande — “It’s illegal, sir, and the kids, they’re good kids, they just won’t do it” — to invading Venezuela. The list was long. Were they just trial balloons? Sure, some were. And, if someone wasn’t there to challenge Mr. Trump, might they have risen to action? Surely.

“I think the biggest shock he had — ’cause his assumption was the generals, ‘my generals,’ as he used to say and it used to make us cringe — was this issue of, I think, he just assumed that generals would be completely loyal to the kaiser,” a former senior official told me. “And when we weren’t, that was a huge shock to him, because he thought if anyone was going to be loyal, it would be the generals. And the first people he realized were not loyal to him were the generals.”

This shock, and his first two-plus years of struggle with seasoned, expert advisers, led to an insight for Mr. Trump. It all came back to loyalty. He needed to get rid of any advisers or senior officials who vowed loyalty to the Constitution over personal loyalty to him. Which is pretty much what he proceeded to do.

In February 2019, William Barr arrived as attorney general , having auditioned for the job with a 19-page memo arguing in various and creative ways that the president’s powers should be exercised nearly without limits and his actions stand virtually beyond review. He stood ready to brilliantly manage the receipt of the Mueller Report in March. Mr. Barr’s moves constituted what amounted to a clean kill, decapitating the sprawling nearly two-year investigation led by his old friend with a single blow.

That summer, two more heavyweight senior officials, Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, and his deputy, Sue Gordon, a beloved 32-year veteran of the C.I.A., both resigned. To replace Mr. Coats, Trump selected Representative John Ratcliffe of Texas, a small-town mayor-turned-congressman with no meaningful experience in intelligence — who quickly withdrew from consideration after news reports questioned his qualifications; he lacked support among key Republican senators as well. Mr. Trump then picked a communications official in the administration of George W. Bush and ambassador to Germany under Mr. Trump, Richard Grenell. Mr. Grenell’s stint was temporary and in May Mr. Trump brought back his first choice, Mr. Ratcliffe, who is now director of national intelligence for Mr. Trump’s homestretch and postelection period.

In other words, by the summer of 2020, Mr. Trump was well along in completing the transition to a loyalty-tested senior team. When I asked the White House to respond to this idea, I heard back from Sarah Matthews, a deputy press secretary.

“President Trump serves the American people by keeping his promises and taking action where the typical politician would provide hollow words,” she said. “The president wants capable public servants in his administration who will enact his America First agenda and are faithful to the Constitution — these principles are not mutually exclusive. President Trump is delivering on his promise to make Washington accountable again to the citizens it’s meant to serve and will always fight for what is best for the American people.”

The reason having loyalists at both the Department of Justice and D.N.I. is so very important for the president is that it allows him, potentially, to coordinate two key agencies of the government — secret intelligence and prosecution — toward his own political ends. This is exactly what he was criticized for doing in the summer and fall of 2020, with Mr. Barr being accused of announcing politically motivated action and investigations — including to support the fiction of widespread voter fraud — and Mr. Ratcliffe, with collecting and releasing information that is targeted at Mr. Trump’s opponents.

The third leg of what would be an ideal triad for this sort of activity is the F.B.I. director, Christopher Wray, who drew Mr. Trump’s ire in September, when, in congressional hearings, he echoed the consensus of the intelligence community that the Russians intervened in the 2016 election on Mr. Trump’s behalf, that they were doing it again in this election cycle, that “racially motivated violent extremism” — coming mostly from right-wing white supremacists — was a persistent threat, and that widespread voter fraud was a nonissue.

The F.B.I. has been under siege since this past summer, according to a senior official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “The White House is using friendly members of Congress to try to get at certain information under the guise of quote-unquote, oversight, but really to get politically helpful information before the election,” the official said. “They want some sort of confirmation that we’ve opened an investigation,” for example, into Hunter Biden, “which, again, the F.B.I. doesn’t confirm or deny whether it’s opened investigations.”

This official said that Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee, “sends letters constantly now, berating, asking for the sun, moon, stars, the entire Russia investigation, and then either going on the morning talk shows or calling the attorney general whenever he doesn’t get precisely what he wants.” The urgency, two F.B.I. officials said, ratcheted up after Mr. Trump was told three weeks ago that he wouldn’t get the “deliverables” he wanted before the election of incriminating evidence about those who investigated and prosecuted his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn.

Ben Voelkel, a spokesman for Senator Johnson, specifically disputed the idea that Mr. Johnson had made requests to receive material quickly for TV appearances.

Furthermore, he said, “Senator Johnson has been frustrated by the failure of the F.B.I. and many other federal agencies to timely produce documents since taking over as chairman of the Senate’s chief oversight body in 2015. In that time, the F.B.I. habitually rebuffed oversight requests, which prompted Senator Johnson to issue F.B.I. a subpoena in August 2020. Senator Johnson has been putting pressure on the F.B.I. — and other federal agencies — because that’s the only way to get the records the committee is entitled to receive.”

Rumors swirled a week before the election that Mr. Trump was preparing to fire Mr. Wray, as well as, perhaps, the director of the C.I.A., Gina Haspel — who had also drawn Mr. Trump’s ire, according to both former and current senior intelligence officials. The speculation is that they could both be fired immediately after the election, when Mr. Trump will want to show the cost paid for insufficient loyalty and to demonstrate that he remains in charge .

The senior official at the F.B.I., however, said that “firing the director won’t accomplish the goal.” There are “37,000 other people he would have to fire. It won’t work.”

That doesn’t mean that the president won’t try. Nov. 4 will be a day, said one of the former senior intelligence officials, “when he’ll want to match word with deed.” Key officials in several parts of the government told me how they thought the progression from the 3rd to the 4th might go down.

They are loath to give up too many precise details, but it’s not hard to speculate from what we already know. **Disruption would most likely begin on Election Day morning somewhere on the East Coast, where polls open first. Miami and Philadelphia (**already convulsed this week after another police shooting), in big swing states, would be likely locations. It could be anything, maybe violent, maybe not, started by anyone, or something planned and executed by any number of organizations, almost all of them on the right fringe, many adoring of Mr. Trump. The options are vast and test the imagination. Activists could stage protests at a few of the more crowded polling places and draw those in long lines into conflict.

A group could just directly attack a polling place, injuring poll workers of both parties, and creating a powerful visual — an American polling place in flames, like the ballot box in Massachusetts that was burned earlier this week — that would immediately circle the globe. Some enthusiasts may simply enter the area around a polling location to root out voter fraud — as the president has directed his supporters to do — taking advantage of a 2018 court ruling that allows the Republican National Committee to pursue “ballot security” operations without court approval.

Would that mean that Mr. Trump caused any such planned activities or improvisations? No, not directly. He’s in an ongoing conversation — one to many, in a twisted e pluribus unum — with a vast population, which is in turn in conversations — many to many — among themselves. People are receiving messages, interpreting them and deciding to act, or not. If, say, the Proud Boys attack a polling location, is it because they were spurred on by Mr. Trump’s “stand back and stand by” instructions? Is Mr. Trump telling his most fervent supporters specifically what to do? No. But security officials are terrified by the dynamics of this volatile conversation. It can move in so many directions and very quickly become dangerous, as we have already seen several times this year.

The local police are already on-guard in those cities and others around the country for all sorts of possible incidents at polling places, including the possibility of gunfire. If something goes wrong, the media will pick this up in early morning reports and it will spread quickly, increasing tension at polling places across the country, where the setup is ripe for conflict.

Conservative media could then say the election was being stolen, summoning others to activate, maybe violently. This is the place where cybersecurity experts are on the lookout for foreign actors to amplify polling location incidents many times over, with bots and algorithms and stories written overseas that slip into the U.S. digital diet. News of even a few incidents could summon a violent segment of Mr. Trump’s supporters into action, giving foreign actors even more to amplify and distribute, spreading what is, after all, news of mayhem to the wider concentric circles of Mr. Trump’s loyalists. Groups from the left may engage as well, most likely as a counterpoint to those on the right. Those groups are less structured, more like an “ideology or movement,” as Mr. Wray described them in his September testimony. But, as a senior official told me, the numbers on the left are vast.

Violence and conflict throughout that day at the polls would surely affect turnout, allowing Mr. Trump to claim that the in-person vote had been corrupted, if that suits his purposes. There’s no do-over for Election Day.

Under the 12th Amendment, which Mr. Trump has alluded to on several occasions, the inability to determine a clear winner in the presidential election brings the final decision to the House of Representatives. The current composition of the House, in which Republicans control more state delegations even though Democrats are in the majority, favors Trump. But the state count could flip to the Democrats with this election.

There are many scenarios that might unfold from here, nearly all of them entailing weeks or even months of conflict, and giving an advantage to the person who already runs the U.S. government.

There will likely be some reckoning of the in-person vote drawn from vote tallies and exit polls. If Joe Biden is way ahead in these projections, and they are accepted as sound, Mr. Trump may find himself having to claim fraud or suppression that amounts to too large a share of votes to seem reasonable. Inside the Biden campaign they are calling this “too big to rig.”

Races tend to tighten at the end, but the question is not so much the difference between the candidates’ vote totals, or projections of them, as it is what Mr. Trump can get his supporters to believe. Mr. Trump might fairly state, at this point, that he can get a significant slice of his base to believe anything.

But he could use all the help that he can summon to invalidate the in-person vote.

Senior intelligence officials are worried that a foreign power could finally manage a breach of the American voting architecture — or leave enough of a digital trail to be perceived to have breached it. There were enormous efforts to do so, largely but not exclusively by the Russians, in 2016, when election systems in every state were targeted. There is also concern that malware attacks could cripple state governments and their electronic voter registration data, something that could make swaths of voters unable to vote. A senior official told me that provisional ballots can then be passed out and “we keep all the receipts,” meaning that these votes would have a paper ballot trail that can be laboriously counted and rechecked. But a breach or an appearance of a breach, in any state’s machinery, would, in a chaotic flow of events, be a well-timed gift to Mr. Trump.

The lie easily outruns truth — and the best “disinformation,” goes a longtime C.I.A. rule, “is actually truthful.” It all blends together. “Then the president then substantiates it, gives it credence, gives it authority from the highest office,” says the senior government official. “Then his acolytes mass-blast it out. Then it becomes the narrative, and fact, and no rational, reasonable explanation to the contrary will move” his supporters “an inch.”

No matter how the votes split, there’s an expectation among officials that Mr. Trump will claim some kind of victory on Nov. 4, even if it’s a victory he claims was hijacked by fraud — just as he falsely claimed that Hillary Clinton’s three million-vote lead in the popular vote was the result of millions of votes from unauthorized immigrants. This could come in conjunction with statements, supported by carefully chosen “facts,” that the election was indeed “rigged,” as he’s long been warning.

If the streets then fill with outraged people, he can easily summon, or prompt, or encourage troublemakers among his loyalists to turn a peaceful crowd into a sea of mayhem. They might improvise on their own in sparking violence, presuming it pleases their leader.

If the crowds are sufficiently large and volatile, he can claim to be justified in responding with federal powers to bring order. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, have both said they are opposed to deploying armed forces on American soil.

A senior Pentagon official, though, laid out a back-door plan that he was worried about. It won’t start, he thinks, with a sweeping move to federalize the National Guard, which is within the President’s Article 2 powers; it’d be more of a state by state process. The head of the National Guard of some state “starts feeling uncomfortable with something and then calls up the Pentagon.”

The F.B.I., meanwhile, is bracing for huge challenges. “We are all-hands-on-deck for the foreseeable future,” the F.B.I. official I mentioned earlier told me. “We’ve been talking to our state and local counterparts and gearing up for the expectation that it’s going to be a significant law-enforcement challenge for probably weeks or months,” this official said. “It feels pretty terrifying.”

In the final few weeks of the campaign, and during Mr. Trump’s illness, he’s done two things that seem contradictory: seeking votes from anyone who might still be swayed and consolidating and activating his army of most ardent followers. They are loyal to him as a person, several officials pointed out, not as president. That army Trump can direct in the difficult days ahead and take with him, wherever he goes. He may activate it. He may bargain with it, depending on how the electoral chips fall. It’s his insurance policy.

The senior government official who discussed Mr. Trump’s amplifying of messages spoke with great clarity about these codes of loyalty. The official was raised in, and regularly visits, what is now a Trump stronghold.

They’re the reason he took off the damned mask when he got to the White House” from Walter Reed, the official said. “Those people eat that up, where any reasonable, rational person would be horrified. You are still actively shedding a deadly virus. You are lucky enough to have the best and brightest doctors, trial drugs, whatever. You get flown back to the White House, and you do a photo-op with a military salute to no one. You ask it to be refilmed, and you take off your mask, which, in my mind, has become a signal to his core base of supporters that are willing to put themselves at risk and danger to show loyalty to him.”

But across the government, another official — a senior intelligence official in a different department — argues that citizens may yet manage to rise to the challenge of this difficult election, in a time of division.

The last line of defense in elections is the American voter,” he told me. “This is the most vulnerable phase,” now and the days immediately after Election Day, “where we’re so eager to have an outcome, that actors both foreign and domestic are going to exploit that interest, that thirst, that need for resolution to the drama.”

I asked him what he would say to American voters. “Look,” he said, softly, “just understand that you’re being manipulated. That’s politics, that’s foreign influence, they’re trying to manipulate you and drive you to a certain outcome.”

“Americans are, I think, hopefully, made of sterner stuff."

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The Washington Post: It’s up to the people to foil Trump’s plot against democracy

As American democracy hurtles toward what could be its final crisis, we continue to hope that someone will ultimately rise up to save us, that somehow our institutions will protect us, that people in positions of authority will finally do the right thing. This faith in the resilience of democracy is endearing, but unfortunately all it has done these past four years is blind and paralyze us. Believing that the only problem was President Trump and his authoritarian inclinations, we have looked to those around him — in the White House, in the Justice Department, in Congress and in the courts — to control and contain him, presumably out of some innate love of democracy.

It did not occur to us that men and women with respectable résumés might be just as willing to subvert the democratic system as Trump himself, as if U.S. officials alone were immune from the temptations of power. The consequence of this self-delusion is that we have now almost run out of chances to stop them.

Let’s be clear about what that America will look like. An administration that steals an election by abusing power must continue abusing that power to keep it. And Trump will have no shortage of excuses to wield power. A stolen election will bring tens of millions into the streets, possibly for weeks and months. The nation will have descended into an extra-constitutional civil conflict, with each side using the tools available to try to prevail.

For Trump, those tools are those of the executive, which the founders entrusted with immense power, from the administration of justice to the defense of the nation by the armed forces. The administration’s opponents, lacking institutional power, will be able to count only on its millions in the streets, and on the democratic consciences of individual judges and justices and federal employees, armed and unarmed, across the country. But consider what they will be asking. They will be counting on federal employees to do the “right thing” by turning against the man whom even the Supreme Court has declared their legitimate president.

Meanwhile, Trump and his minions will purge the federal government of all those deemed disloyal. Barr will open and expand investigations into anyone suspected of conspiring against the president, in 2016, in 2020 and for as long as Trump remains in power. Owners of mainstream media outlets will become targets of investigations by government agencies. Smears against Democratic lawmakers will mount. Trump’s supporters at massive rallies will shout “Lock them up!” And who will come to the rescue of the persecuted? Who in a position of power will have an incentive to reverse the events that kept them in power?

Congressional Republicans will be fighting for their own survival, while Tucker Carlson, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Donald Trump Jr. and others compete to be Trump’s successor in the affections of the masses. Maybe Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), the master of glorious but meaningless gestures, will give some more moving speeches.

This may sound like the Sinclair Lewis novel “It Can’t Happen Here.” Perhaps it won’t happen. Maybe Trump and his gang don’t have the skill or steely courage required to pull it off. Perhaps they will just fade away. If so, we will be fortunate, but undeserving. We kept counting on others to save us — our institutions, our political leaders, our courts — but help never arrived. And as we waited for someone, anyone, to do the right thing, we moved closer to the end.

Now all we have left is the people. The voters, for all their failings, may prove more trustworthy than their supposed guardians. They may deliver us by delivering an irrefutable landslide to Biden. Or, failing that, by going out into the streets in an American version of “people power” to foil the plot against their democracy. A republic, if we can save it.

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Various essays from NYT Opinion section on what we’ve lost.

Persuasion Trump has exploited and betrayed my friends. By Nicholas Kristof

Innocence I can’t look at America the same way. By Frank Bruni

Imagination Four years of cultural impoverishment. By Michelle Goldberg

Pax Americana Trump’s long international legacy. By Paul Krugman

Faith Smashing the ‘decency floor.’ By David Brooks

Generosity Trump has normalized selfishness. By Jennifer Senior

Naïveté How could we have been so blind? By Charles M. Blow

Our Word No democracy takes Trump’s America seriously. By Roger Cohen

Conservatism Republicans trashed their reputation. By Bret Stephens

A Female President Trump is the patriarchy’s worst representative. By Gail Collins

Our Illusions There is nothing unprecedented about Trump. By Jamelle Bouie

Allies The whole world has gotten darker. By Thomas L. Friedman

Pride It’s exhausting to be this outraged all the time. By Maureen Dowd

A Reckoning Have we learned nothing? By Ross Douthat

Apathy This is the end of American complacency. By Farhad Manjoo

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Washington Post: My party is destroying itself on the altar of Trump

Benjamin L. Ginsberg practiced election law for 38 years. He co-chaired the bipartisan 2013 Presidential Commission on Election Administration.

President Trump has failed the test of leadership. His bid for reelection is foundering. And his only solution has been to launch an all-out, multimillion-dollar effort to disenfranchise voters — first by seeking to block state laws to ease voting during the pandemic, and now, in the final stages of the campaign, by challenging the ballots of individual voters unlikely to support him.

Follow the latest on Election 2020

This is as un-American as it gets. It returns the Republican Party to the bad old days of “voter suppression” that landed it under a court order to stop such tactics — an order lifted before this election. It puts the party on the wrong side of demographic changes in this country that threaten to make the GOP a permanent minority.

These are painful words for me to write. I spent four decades in the Republican trenches, representing GOP presidential and congressional campaigns, working on Election Day operations, recounts, redistricting and other issues, including trying to lift the consent decree.

Nearly every Election Day since 1984 I’ve worked with Republican poll watchers, observers and lawyers to record and litigate any fraud or election irregularities discovered.

The truth is that over all those years Republicans found only isolated incidents of fraud. Proof of systematic fraud has become the Loch Ness Monster of the Republican Party. People have spent a lot of time looking for it, but it doesn’t exist.

As he confronts losing, Trump has devoted his campaign and the Republican Party to this myth of voter fraud. Absent being able to articulate a cogent plan for a second term or find an attack against Joe Biden that will stick, disenfranchising enough voters has become key to his reelection strategy.

Perhaps this was the plan all along. The president’s unsubstantiated talk about “rigged” elections caused by absentee ballot “fraud” and “cheating” has been around since 2016; it’s just increased in recent weeks.

Trump has enlisted a compliant Republican Party in this shameful effort. The Trump campaign and Republican entities engaged in more than 40 voting and ballot court cases around the country this year. In exactly none — zero — are they trying to make it easier for citizens to vote. In many, they are seeking to erect barriers.

All of the suits include the mythical fraud claim. Many are efforts to disqualify absentee ballots, which have surged in the pandemic. The grounds range from supposedly inadequate signature matches to burdensome witness requirements. Others concern excluding absentee ballots postmarked on Election Day but received later, as permitted under state deadlines. Voter-convenience devices such as drop boxes and curbside voting have been attacked.

Texas Republicans even thought it was a good idea to challenge 100,000 ballots already cast at a Harris County drive-through voting center that they want retroactively declared illegal. Perhaps they forgot the Republican expressions of outrage in Florida in 2000 when Democrats sought unsuccessfully to exclude 25,000 absentee ballots in GOP counties because of administrative error, not voter fault.

I was there, and I haven’t.

The GOP lawyers managing these lawsuits may have tactical reasons for bringing each. But taken as a whole, they shout the unmistakable message that an expanded electorate means Trump loses.

This attempted disenfranchisement of voters cannot be justified by the unproven Republican dogma about widespread fraud. Challenging voters at the polls or disputing the legitimacy of mail-in ballots isn’t about fraud. Rather than producing conservative policies that appeal to suburban women, young voters or racial minorities, Republicans are trying to exclude their votes.

“We have volunteers, attorneys and staff in place to ensure that election officials are following the law and counting every lawful ballot,” Justin Riemer, chief counsel for the Republican National Committee, said Friday.

That’s not precisely true. The Republican challenging effort is focused almost exclusively in heavily Democratic areas. Signature mismatches will go unheeded by Trump forces in friendly precincts. This is not about finding fraud and irregularities. It’s about suppressing the number of votes not cast for Trump.

Maybe the president foreshadowed his real purpose at a Pennsylvania rally Saturday night, predicting “bedlam” if the results aren’t known Nov. 3. In fact, challenged ballots aren’t reviewed until days later. So in a tight race, Trump’s demands for a quick result could cause the very bedlam he rails against. Or allow him to claim a false election night victory based on bad-faith challenges.

How sad it is to recall that just seven years ago the Grand Old Party conducted an “autopsy” that emphasized the urgency of building a big tent to reach communities of color, women and young voters. Now it is erecting voting barriers for those very groups. Instead of enlarging the tent, the party has taken a chain saw to its center pole.

My party is destroying itself on the Altar of Trump. Republican elected officials, party leaders and voters must recognize how harmful this is to the party’s long-term prospects.

My fellow Republicans, look what we’ve become. It is we who must fix this. Trump should not be reelected. Vote, but not for him.

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Karl Rove is a Republican operative, and someone who’s been behind a lot of R power moves and got GW Bush elected. He feels the results are in, and that no fraud, or voter interference happened at all or at least to change the outcome of this election. …FWIW to the R’s.

Rove analyzes the numbers in various battleground states, and hisses at the lack of larger wins by Biden which the polls seemed to predict, stating that Biden really only lead by a 3.3 point margin instead of what various polls projected 8 point margin in front of Trump. Rove also mentions the dates various states will be certifying their results before the Electoral Votes will be finalized Dec. 14. (fingers crossed)

And leave it to a Republican to want to slam Rep Maxine Waters for her remarks about black men. Boy do they dislike her.

Well, am glad this WSJ Op-Ed piece is in print, and states that we need to move on. It should get some notice from Trumpworld.

Once his days in court are over, the president should do his part to unite the country by leading a peaceful transition and letting grievances go.

It has been an eventful, unsettling year: A deadly virus struck without warning and claimed almost a quarter-million American lives; a lockdown demolished personal routines and left us gasping for normality; a sudden, deep recession snatched newfound prosperity from many families; and now a rocketlike recovery lifts up some but leaves many on the launchpad. So why not finish out 2020 with a misforecast election as the finale?

Pundits predicted a blue tsunami of historic proportions that would carry Democrats into the White House, flip the U.S. Senate, increase Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s caucus by as many as 20 seats, and transform a basketful of red-state legislatures into blue ones just in time for redistricting in 2021. Well, the White House changed hands. But none of the rest happened.

The final RealClearPolitics average of polls predicted Joe Biden would win the popular vote by 7.2 percentage points. Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com put Mr. Biden’s likely margin at 8 points. The Cook Political Report had it at “more like 9 or 10 points.” As of Wednesday, with some ballots yet to be counted in California and New York, President Trump trailed Mr. Biden by 3.3 points.

Voter turnout was up. Once everything is counted, the turnout rate will likely reach 66.5%, the highest since 1908’s barnburner between William Howard Taft and William Jennings Bryan. But the nature of this enthusiasm differed by party. The Fox News Voter Analysis found 51% of Biden supporters voted more against Mr. Trump than for the Democratic candidate, while 79% of Mr. Trump’s backers voted more for him than against Mr. Biden.

Mr. Trump also won 26% of nonwhite voters, according to NBC’s exit poll, driving commentators on the left crazy. One described these voters as “distracted.” A New York Times columnist found it “personally devastating” that many blacks and gays voted for the president. Rep. Maxine Waters (D., Calif.) warned that black male Trump voters “have a price to pay for years to come.” This is what passes for liberal tolerance.

Still, enough voters wanted change. Mr. Biden maneuvered successfully to make the election a referendum on the president’s personality and his handling of Covid. For months Mr. Trump was content to fight on that turf, trying only fitfully to contrast his agenda with his challenger’s.

Presidents win re-election only in part by heralding their achievements and outlining second-term agendas; much more depends on contrasting their opponent’s values and views with their own. That Mr. Biden’s margin of victory was much slimmer than projected can be credited partly to Mr. Trump’s emphasis in the closing days on their substantive differences—discussing fracking in Pennsylvania and toleration of socialism in Miami. But it wasn’t enough.

Mr. Trump is now pursuing legal challenges in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona and Nevada, and there will be an automatic recount in Georgia, given Mr. Biden’s 0.29-point lead there. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is correct that Mr. Trump is “100% within his rights” to go to court over concerns about fraud and transparency. But the president’s efforts are unlikely to move a single state from Mr. Biden’s column, and certainly they’re not enough to change the final outcome.

There are only three statewide contests in the past half-century in which recounts changed the outcome: the 1974 New Hampshire Senate race, the 2004 Washington governor’s contest, and the 2008 Minnesota Senate election. The candidates in these races were separated, respectively, by 355, 261 and 215 votes after Election Day.

These margins aren’t much like today’s. Mr. Biden led Wednesday in Wisconsin by 20,540 votes, Pennsylvania by 49,064, Michigan by 146,123, Arizona by 12,614, Nevada by 36,870 and Georgia by 14,108.

To win, Mr. Trump must prove systemic fraud, with illegal votes in the tens of thousands. There is no evidence of that so far. Unless some emerges quickly, the president’s chances in court will decline precipitously when states start certifying results, as Georgia will on Nov. 20, followed by Pennsylvania and Michigan on Nov. 23, Arizona on Nov. 30, and Wisconsin and Nevada on Dec. 1. By seating one candidate’s electors, these certifications will raise the legal bar to overturn state results and make it even more difficult for Mr. Trump to prevail before the Electoral College meets Dec. 14.

TV networks showed jubilant crowds in major cities celebrating Mr. Biden’s victory; they didn’t show the nearly equal number of people who mourned Mr. Trump’s defeat. U.S. politics remains polarized and venomous. Closing out this election will be a hard but necessary step toward restoring some unity and political equilibrium. Once his days in court are over, the president should do his part to unite the country by leading a peaceful transition and letting grievances go.

Mr. Rove helped organize the political-action committee American Crossroads and is author of “The Triumph of William McKinley” (Simon & Schuster, 2015).

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No words for T’s dismal positioning as he’s lost the election and lying about how he won. The complicity within the Republican party is horrendous.

No president in American history has ever before spent the end of his time in office trying to discredit our democracy, degrade the federal government and set Americans against each other. And what of the Republican Party? They, too, are finishing the Trump presidency the way they started it, with a show of complicity and cowardice.

There are some Republicans, the most repugnant, who are enthusiastically whipping up anger and spreading lies about voter fraud, trying to convince their base that Biden will be an illegitimate usurper. At the other end, there are a few who have grudgingly acknowledged reality, admitting that yes, Biden won the election and will become president in January. But there are so few of the latter group that when one says, “I expect Joe Biden to be the next president of the United States,” it makes the news.

The rest of them are hiding, too craven to even answer that simple question. “We invited every single Republican senator to appear on Meet the Press this morning,” said NBC’s Chuck Todd on Sunday. “They all declined.” The reason was clear: They can’t defend Trump and don’t have the guts to tell the truth about what he’s doing.

So please, let’s not hear anyone praise those few Republicans willing to say that Biden is going to be president and the transition should proceed with some measure of professionalism. That’s nothing to be proud of. What we deserve is to hear Republicans say to Trump, “Stop this right now. You are hurting the country.”

But there are none who will do so. So to them we should say: The leader of your party is pouring poison into our national bloodstream, and if you can’t find the courage to say it’s wrong, don’t ever try to tell us again how patriotic you are.

Over the past four years, I’ve thought often about how just a few days after the 2016 election, President Barack Obama welcomed Trump into the Oval Office. Trump had turned himself from a reality show buffoon into a political figure by becoming the country’s foremost advocate of the racist “birther” lie, accusing Obama of not being a real American, then ran a campaign of fear and hatred to win the presidency.

Yet Obama was polite and gracious. Like every American president who came before him, he knew that what mattered at that moment was not the disgust he surely felt for his successor nor his fear of what the future might bring. What mattered was showing Americans that democracy is about all of us, a shared enterprise we have to work to sustain.

Later, Obama would leave Trump a letter welcoming him to the Oval Office, just as George W. Bush did for him and other presidents had done in the past. Here’s part of what it said:

We are just temporary occupants of this office. That makes us guardians of those democratic institutions and traditions — like rule of law, separation of powers, equal protection and civil liberties — that our forebears fought and bled for. Regardless of the push and pull of daily politics, it’s up to us to leave those instruments of our democracy at least as strong as we found them.

No president amasses a perfect record of protecting those democratic institutions and traditions. But at the moment their presidencies ended, every one — even those who left in disgrace — remembered that there are principles and commitments more important than their own petty grievances and wounded egos.

Until now.

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The Washington Post: Abolish the electoral college

From the Editorial Board

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This topic was automatically closed 15 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.

Posting this here as the thread on must read oped’s is now closed, but I think this is a very good summary of the highly questionable behaviour of T and his enablers in the GOP with respect to the election.

Historians could mark 2020 as the moment when Republicans applied the same zeal they have used to attack democracy in advance of elections, through voter suppression and gerrymandering, to attacking democracy on the back end, by trying to deny and overturn the results.

Whatever damage US democracy has sustained in 2020, much of it traces back to the source, to a president who did not see anything wrong in 2019 with coercing a foreign leader to try to take out a political opponent, who made the fealty of state governors a condition of pandemic aid, and who now has twisted the arms of elected officials across the United States in an effort to subvert the will of American voters.

The role that Trump has played in attacking the integrity of the American system is the most outrageous and unprecedented of all the unholy perversions of democracy that 2020 has seen. Whether that role will be replicated or reprised in future White Houses, and in future elections, could make all the difference.

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Why the Russian hack is so significant, and why it’s close to a worst-case scenario

Experts say it’s potentially the largest spying operation against the U.S. in history — and it ran without being noticed for nine months.

It’s not often that the Treasury Department and Iowa State University are dealing with the same security problem.

Such is the breadth of what’s known as the SolarWinds hack, named for a Texas-based company that was used as a staging ground for an espionage campaign so widespread that experts say we’re only beginning to understand who was affected and what was stolen. Treasury is trying to figure out how many senior officials’ email accounts were monitored. Iowa State has decommissioned servers to check whether hackers got in.

Around the world, at least hundreds, but more likely thousands or tens of thousands of organizations — including companies, schools, think tanks and, notably, every major government agency — have been working frantically to see whether they’ve been affected by the suspected Russian hacking campaign and, if so, how much access the hackers had.

It’s not rare for companies or government agencies to suffer security breaches. The campaign has drawn some comparisons to China’s 2014 hack of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, which stored the private information of nearly all government employees, including undercover agents. But experts say the SolarWinds hack is unique in its scope, potentially the largest spying operation against the U.S. in history — and it ran without being noticed for nine months.

“The issue is we don’t know how big this is, and at the same time it could be the biggest ever,” said Sergio Caltagirone, the vice president of threat intelligence at the cybersecurity company Dragos, which is helping industrial and manufacturing companies deal with the hacking campaign and its fallout.

Only a handful of organizations, including the cybersecurity company FireEye and three federal agencies — the departments of Commerce, Energy and Treasury — have admitted having been seriously affected. But the cybersecurity industry is aware of “a little over 200” compromises, Caltagirone said, with the number all but guaranteed to grow.

“Most organizations still lack the basic visibility to even assess whether they were compromised or not,” Caltagirone said. “We know we are undercounting the victims here. We know that for a fact.”

The campaign is so broad because the hackers pulled off a textbook “supply-chain attack.” Instead of breaking into individual organizations, many of which have robust cybersecurity measures, the hackers — widely believed to be Russia’s SVR intelligence agency, although most Trump officials have publicly pointed the finger only at Russia — breached SolarWinds, based in Austin, Texas, a company that has an enormous customer base.

Unlike some of Russia’s nosier agencies, like the FSB, which is accused of poisoning Russian dissidents, or the GRU, which hacks and leaks material to disparage Russia’s opponents, the SVR is known for its methodical, long-term intelligence-gathering operations.

SolarWinds provides software that helps large organizations manage their computer networks, and it is thus given automatic permission to be in those networks without raising alarms. In March, the hackers implanted malicious code into the company’s regular software updates, the company and a government investigation found, creating a potential back door into any of the company’s tens of thousands of customers.

While the question of who was affected is still open, SolarWinds said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that it had informed 33,000 customer organizations that they had been infected and that it could narrow the suspected number of actual victims only to under 18,000.

While SolarWinds has released an update of its software, the hackers’ nine-month head start means they are likely to have built additional entry points into the networks they deemed important, said Neil Jenkins, the chief analytic officer at the Cyber Threat Alliance, a cybersecurity industry group, and a former senior cybersecurity official at the Department of Homeland Security.

“As soon as you get into a network, you’re going to set up other potential back doors and ways to get in, in case the original way you got in closed,” Jenkins said. “So just because you closed the SolarWinds intrusion doesn’t mean you’ve solved the problem.”

The range of victims extends beyond SolarWinds’ extensive customer base. The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, which is leading the government’s technical response to the hacking campaign, has warned that the same hackers may have infected victims by other means.

The hackers’ lead time and extraordinary access mean victim organizations will have to choose between two unpleasant options: spending significant resources hunting through their computers in the hope that they can eradicate the hackers’ footholds or rebuilding their networks from scratch, said Suzanne Spaulding, the former head of what is now CISA and currently the director of the Defending Democratic Institutions project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank.

“I think we’ll be at least months trying to figure out the full scope and scale of this,” Spaulding said. "And at least months trying to recover, trying to get the adversary out or abandon ship and rebuild securely.

“This is not an adversary that goes away when detected,” she said. “They fight to maintain their persistent presence, and we’ll be doing battle, I suspect, for a while.”

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Recommended reading from a black journalist who covers the points of view media takes on whites and blacks, and various cultural differences and where the dividing lines are.

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Even If It’s ‘Bonkers,’ Poll Finds Many Believe QAnon And Other Conspiracy Theories

A significant number of Americans believe misinformation about the origins of the coronavirus and the recent presidential election, as well as conspiracy theories like QAnon, according to a new NPR/Ipsos poll.

Forty percent of respondents said they believe the coronavirus was made in a lab in China even though there is no evidence for this. Scientists say the virus was transmitted to humans from another species.

And one-third of Americans believe that voter fraud helped Joe Biden win the 2020 election, despite the fact that courts, election officials and the Justice Department have found no evidence of widespread fraud that could have changed the outcome.

The poll results add to mounting evidence that misinformation is gaining a foothold in American society and that conspiracy theories are going mainstream, especially during the coronavirus pandemic. This has raised concerns about how to get people to believe in a “baseline reality,” said Chris Jackson, a pollster with Ipsos.

“Increasingly, people are willing to say and believe stuff that fits in with their view of how the world should be, even if it doesn’t have any basis in reality or fact,” Jackson said.

“What this poll really illustrates to me is how willing people are to believe things that are ludicrous because it fits in with a worldview that they want to believe.”

"That’s terrifying"

The NPR/Ipsos poll of 1,115 U.S. adults was conducted Dec. 21 to 22. The credibility interval for the overall sample is 3.3 percentage points.

One of the most striking poll findings has to do with QAnon, the baseless conspiracy theory that gained widespread attention this year as two of its backers were elected to Congress.

The poll asked respondents whether they believe that “a group of Satan-worshipping elites who run a child sex ring are trying to control our politics and media” — the false allegation at the heart of QAnon. While only 17% said it was true, another 37% said they didn’t know.

“It’s total bonkers,” said Jackson, “and yet … essentially half of Americans believe it’s true or think that maybe it’s true. They don’t really know. And I think that’s terrifying that half of Americans believe that could be the case.”

According to the poll, 39% of Americans believe another key tenet of the QAnon theory: that there is a deep state working to undermine President Trump.

The president is himself a major source of misinformation, as he continues to make baseless claims about election fraud on Twitter and elsewhere. Conservative media also have devoted hours of coverage to exaggerated or debunked claims.

The NPR/Ipsos poll suggests those claims are having an impact. Two-thirds of Republicans surveyed said they believe that voter fraud helped Biden win the election, and fewer than half of Republicans said they accept the outcome of the election.

“There’s just too much information out there,” said Brooke Williams, a Republican voter and self-described QAnon follower from Oro Valley, Ariz., during a follow-up interview with NPR. “I can’t see how anybody is not thoroughly convinced that Biden was illegally elected.”

In contrast, only 11% of Democrats think voter fraud helped Biden win the election, and 93% accept the outcome.

Whom Americans trust

Overall, most respondents said they do want to see a peaceful transition to a Biden administration in January, though many are worried about political violence over the next four years.

The vast majority of Americans said they’re also worried about the spread of false information, with 4 out of 5 poll respondents saying they’re concerned about misinformation related to the coronavirus and vaccines in particular.

But Republicans were more likely than Democrats to believe misinformation about the virus, including that it was created in a lab in China and that COVID-19 is no more of a “serious threat” than the seasonal flu.

“I think it was deliberately released by China,” said Jon Costello, a Republican from Huntsville, Ala., who responded to the poll. “I think this big thing of shutting down businesses, shutting down education systems … is all part of a plan to break the spirit and the will of Americans.”

Poll respondents of both parties expressed skepticism about the vaccines that are now being distributed in the U.S., though Republicans were less likely than Democrats to say that they would “take the COVID-19 vaccine as soon as it is made available to me.”

“I shouldn’t have to take a vaccine for something that was man-made,” said Shaena Castro, a Democrat who lives in New York City. “I guess you can call me a conspiracy theorist or whatever, but yeah, I am convinced that it’s man-made.”

When asked whom they trust, respondents mostly pointed to the people they encounter in their daily lives. Personal physicians scored highly, as did faith or spiritual leaders.

Politicians and media figures did not fare as well. Tucker Carlson of Fox News, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC and Wolf Blitzer of CNN were at the bottom of the list.

More Americans trust Biden than Trump, but both lagged behind Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who scored the highest of any specific person the poll asked about.

New misinformation vs. old conspiracy

Pollsters say that multiple factors make people more or less susceptible to misinformation — including educational attainment, media consumption and political affiliation — and that people are more likely to believe conspiracy theories that fit into their worldview.

For example, almost half of respondents said that the majority of racial justice protests over the summer were violent, when in fact the vast majority were peaceful. Poll respondents from all demographics answered this question incorrectly — but they were even more likely to do so if they were Republicans and if they got their news from Fox News or conservative online outlets like Breitbart or the Daily Caller.

Recent misinformation held more sway than some older conspiracy theories.

About 60% of Americans correctly answered that former President Barack Obama was born in the United States and that several mass shootings in recent years were not staged hoaxes. And about 70% correctly answered that humans do play a significant role in climate change — roughly the same percentage who believe astronauts landed on the moon in the 1960s and '70s.

It’s also clear from the poll results that Americans are worried about misinformation, even if there’s no clear prescription for what to do about it.

Nearly 70% of respondents said they are concerned that information they receive on social media is inaccurate; a similar percentage is concerned about foreign interference in U.S. social media.

“I’m concerned to see so many people living in a false reality, seeing relatives honestly believe that this was some kind of rigged election,” said William Street, who lives in northeast Mississippi.

“It terrifies me that people can be that misled and believe conspiracy theories like that,” Street tells NPR. “I’m concerned that with even just a little prodding from this man in office, they could be led to do very desperate things.”

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Wow. Just wow. I wonder if reinstating the Fairness Doctrine & have it include cable & social media would help counter this fantasyland belief.

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Very interesting thought. Just how does a country legislate to protect itself from misleading and false propaganda? Not being familiar with the Fairness Doctrine I had a brief look and it seems that it would have served a similar purpose to what you envisage, but was cast aside in 2011 as it seemingly had served its usefulness. Sometimes we throw the baby out with the bath water. :frowning:

The Chairman touts this regulatory clean-up effort as “clearing the path for greater competition, investment and job creation”. But it’s impossible to imagine that anybody’s path to greater competition, investment and/or job creation was hindered in any way by the ghost of the Fairness Doctrine flickering faintly in some obscure and unread passages of the rules. If we have allowed the Doctrine to hinder anything in the past 20 years, that says a lot more about us than about the Doctrine.

my bold

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