<....The case in point at the moment is Georgia, where the board of elections has been completely hijacked by a MAGA majority. Members of the board of elections are attending Donald Trump rallies, and Trump personally calls them out as heroes. They're already putting in place Election Day machinery where they can allow local counties and to avoid or delay certification. As far as I can tell, the idea Trump and his acolytes can sow enough chaos and enough distrust in the political system, and then just completely lock up the process. The Hail Mary is to throw it to the House of Representatives, which could produce a Republican president.

Now, I don't think that's going to happen. If Trump continues on the self-destructive path he's gone down over the last few weeks, there's a pretty good chance that he will lose so comprehensively that even the MAGA acolytes can't sow chaos to delay that. But it's hugely worrying that four years after the January 6 insurrection, the same man who prompted that insurrection is willing to try the same trick again in 2025 if he loses. I hope that people read the book and they realize that this is a story of our moment. This isn't a story of distant history. It's very much an ongoing story of our moment.

These two communities you write about had very different trajectories. What did you learn from this? How can we use this lesson to heal our larger national dysfunction?

In Clallam County, they set up what they called the Sequim Good Government League. They made sure it included a lot of Democrats, Republicans and independents. They fielded candidates who took on local figures who had embraced QAnon, including the mayor. They explained to the public just how dangerous this kind of ideology was. Over the course of two election cycles, they basically recaptured all of those spots in city government, on the council, and on school boards. There were some pretty conservative Republicans, and there were pretty liberal Democrats. But they agreed about the necessity of restoring local democracy. That worked very effectively. There wasn't the equivalent in Shasta County. Over the last few months, it's gotten better, but for years the vacuum was filled by the hard-right. The right gained control over the border county supervisors, they gained control over local school boards and they pushed this increasingly fringe agenda. They fired the public health officer. They fired the people who were in charge of county health services. They reshaped government in the MAGA image, and it caused chaos. It caused budgeting dysfunction. It caused tremendous upheavals in the provision of services.

Whatever one thought of the MAGA identity, it didn't work as a way to govern locally. The lesson here is when a community starts lurching far to the right, the most important thing is to organize and push back against that. Educate people. Knock on doors. Explain to people at community meetings just why this is a bad idea to let a local community slide into far-right chaos.

In Shasta, it's taken a long time, but belatedly, there is now pushback. The epicenter of this hard right revolt was a man named Patrick Jones. And Patrick Jones was recently defeated in this spring's primary election. Even in a place as right-wing as Shasta County, a critical mass of people did ultimately realize that this just isn't a good road to go down. The ultimate lesson here is that when people pay attention, most Americans just do not want to go down this road. It's ugly and it's dysfunctional and it promises nothing but chaos and upheaval.>

<Bexar County officials moved forward Tuesday with a plan to mail county residents voter registration forms, defying Attorney General Ken Paxton’s threat to use “all available legal means” to quash the effort.

The 3-1 Commissioners Court vote escalates a brewing fight between Texas Republicans and some of the state’s largest counties over initiatives to proactively send registration applications to people who are eligible but unregistered to vote. Harris County leaders are weighing a similar plan, and Paxton warned the two counties against such efforts Monday evening, claiming they would run afoul of state law and risk adding noncitizens to the voter rolls.

Rebuffing those claims, Bexar County Commissioners Court approved a $393,000 outreach contract with Civic Government Solutions following three hours of fervent discussion at Tuesday’s court meeting. Local GOP activists spent more than an hour blasting the deal as an illegal waste of taxpayer money and insisting it would be used to disproportionately register Democrats, citing past comments from the firm’s leaders indicating support for Democratic candidates.

Democratic commissioners, backed by a county legal official, said Paxton’s legal threats were misleading and unfounded. And the firm’s chief executive said the outreach efforts would be strictly nonpartisan — a requirement of the contract, he said — and pose little risk of registering noncitizens.

“I have a personal view on who I would like to win the federal election. That is not to say that the contracts that we undertake with governments are in any way partisan,” said Jeremy Smith, CEO of Civic Government Solutions.

He noted the company uses a mix of public records and county data to identify people who could have recently moved and are unregistered, with a contractual obligation to contact “every eligible person who arises in any of those datasets.”

The court’s approval of the outreach contract came less than 24 hours after Paxton sent a letter to Bexar County commissioners warning the deal was illegal because the county “can take no action without a grant of legal authority,” and Texas law does not explicitly allow counties to mail out unsolicited registration forms.

Paxton cited his office’s successful effort in 2020 to block Harris County from sending unsolicited applications for mail-in ballots to every registered voter in that county.

“Because the same can be said for mass mailings of voter registration applications, I am confident the courts will agree with me that your proposal exceeds your authority,” Paxton wrote in his letters to Bexar and Harris counties.

Paxton’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Larry Roberson, chief of the civil division at the Bexar County District Attorney’s Office, said the 2020 and 2024 cases involved “two very different circumstances.” He noted that voter registration applications are widely available in post offices and other public locations, while state law more clearly restricts who can send out applications to vote by mail.

Paxton’s legal threat was the latest in a series of recent moves by Texas Republican leaders who say they are trying to protect the security of the state’s election systems and voter rolls ahead of the highly charged November election. A group of Democratic state lawmakers asked the Justice Department Friday to investigate the recent spate of election-related actions, saying they were “sowing fear and will suppress voting” among communities of color.

Gov. Greg Abbott announced last week that Texas officials had removed roughly 1 million people from its voter rolls since 2021 — though election experts noted such maintenance is a routine part of complying with state and federal law, and they warned Abbott’s framing could be used to undermine trust in elections.

Abbott’s office said the names scrapped from the voter rolls included more than 6,500 noncitizens who shouldn’t have been registered, and about 1,930 of those had a voting history. Voter watchdog and voting rights groups have questioned the figure, noting that Texas has wrongly flagged people as noncitizens before.

In his letters to Bexar and Harris counties, Paxton said the outreach proposals were “particularly troubling this election cycle” because of the sharp uptick in people illegally crossing the border during the presidency of Democrat Joe Biden, whose policies Paxton said have “saddled Texas” with “ballooning noncitizen populations.”

Paxton has routinely accused Democrats, without evidence, of adopting more permissive immigration policies in a bid to win elections by harnessing noncitizen votes — an argument he reprised last month, falsely telling conservative talk show host Glenn Beck that Democrats’ plan was to “tell the cartels, ‘Get people here as fast as possible, as many as possible.’”.....>

<....Paxton’s office has also recently conducted a series of raids as part of an investigation into alleged vote harvesting in Frio, Atascosa and Bexar counties, a move the League of United Latin American Citizens cast as an effort to “suppress the Latino vote through intimidation.” Paxton has also probed what appear to be unsubstantiated claims that migrants were registering to vote outside a state drivers [sic] license facility west of Fort Worth.

At Tuesday’s Bexar County court meeting, Smith pointed to the checks in place that prevent noncitizens from registering to vote.

When voter registrars receive applications, they send them to the Texas Secretary of State’s Office, where they are checked for eligibility against Department of Public Safety and Social Security Administration data. In addition, local voter registrars work with their county district attorney’s office to check citizenship status using responses from jury summons questionnaires.

When Harris County considered hiring Smith’s company for voter registration outreach last week, state Sen. Paul Bettencourt, R-Houston, argued the move would “result in very high probability of registering non-citizens to vote.” He told the Tribune that was based in part on his experience overseeing the voter rolls as Harris County’s tax assessor-collector, when he found 35 noncitizens who in 2004 had tried to register to vote or were already on the voter rolls.

Though some critics of the Bexar County contract Tuesday echoed Paxton’s argument that the contract would violate state law, much of the opposition centered on allegations that the outreach would end up benefiting Democrats. Biden beat Republican Donald Trump by more than 18 points in Bexar County in 2020. Still, Trump carried the state with 52.1% of the vote compared to Biden’s 46.5%.

“Even if the process was designed to be nonpartisan … when you are operating in the most Democrat[-leaning] counties, then you're going to have a partisan impact,” said Commissioner Grant Moody, the court’s lone Republican.

Democratic Commissioner Rebeca Clay-Flores cast the torrent of GOP criticism as a “dog and pony show” that she said was based on false rhetoric aimed at making people “intimidated to vote.” She also dismissed concerns about noncitizens registering to vote.

“I am continuously talking to migrants, and none of them are trying to figure out how to vote illegally,” she said. “They are concerned with getting food, and clothes on their backs.”

The contract passed on a 3-1 vote, with Moody casting the dissenting vote. Democratic Commissioner Tommy Calvert abstained, while the other three Democrats — County Judge Peter Sakai, Commissioner Justin Rodriguez and Clay-Flores — voted in favor.>

A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment....>

<....During the Biden administration, the department defended Trump in lawsuits over the firing of FBI officials who exchanged text messages critical of him and the violent clearing of protesters outside the White House in 2020.

The department initially said it would defend Trump in a defamation case brought by writer E. Jean Carroll, finding Trump acted in his official role when he disparaged Carroll while denying Carroll's allegation that he sexually assaulted her.

It later reversed course. Two juries went on to order Trump to pay Carroll more than $88 million.

Even as the department investigated Trump, it tread [sic] cautiously last year when it was asked to weigh in on Trump's claim of civil immunity from lawsuits over his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by his supporters.

It urged a federal appeals court to deny immunity, but noted in a filing that "in all contexts, questions of presidential immunity must be approached with the greatest sensitivity to the unremitting demands of the presidency."

The Supreme Court largely based its standard for criminal immunity off a longstanding prior decision that presidents cannot face civil lawsuits over conduct within the limits of their formal responsibilities.

In the election subversion case, the court left it to U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan to decide which of Trump's actions are covered by immunity and which can proceed to trial. Prosecutors must show either that Trump's conduct was not tied to his official responsibilities or that the prosecution does not infringe on presidential authority.

Whatever Chutkan decides is likely to be appealed back to the Supreme Court, leaving virtually no chance that a trial will take place before the Nov. 5 election, when Trump faces Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris.

The revised indictment emphasized the role of Trump's private attorneys and campaign officials, removing references to administration officials. It called Trump’s address to supporters ahead of the Capitol siege a campaign speech.

It highlighted the alternate roles of then-Vice President Mike Pence as Trump’s running mate in 2020 and president of the U.S. Senate when he oversaw the Jan. 6 congressional certification of the election. Trump unsuccessfully pressured Pence to prevent certification of the vote.

The department also declined in 2021 to shield Mo Brooks, a Republican U.S. representative who had spoken at the Jan. 6 rally, from a lawsuit over the riot. It concluded Brooks was engaging in campaign activity unrelated to his formal role.

Norm Eisen, a veteran Washington lawyer who served as special counsel in the first impeachment of Trump, said the Trump case presents a “unique set of circumstances,” making it less likely that future presidents will be hampered by the prosecution. No president other than Trump has attempted a similar effort to undermine election results, he said.

“The conduct here is so rare in American history,” Eisen said.>

<Former President Donald Trump has more than his share of outspoken critics within Christianity, from the Rev. Raphael Warnock (a Democratic U.S. senator via Georgia) to devout Catholics like President Joe Biden and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California). His Democratic opponent in the 2024 presidential race, Vice President Kamala Harris, is a Baptist with a fondness for Hinduism (her mother was from India).

Yet Trump continues to be extremely popular within a certain area of Christianity: far-right evangelical Christian nationalists, who see a second Trump term as God's will. One of them is Joshua Standifer, founder of the group Lion of Judah.

In an article published on September 4, The Guardian's Alice Herman details Standifer's efforts to recruit Christian nationalists as election workers.

"A Christian political operative has teamed up with charismatic preachers to enroll election skeptics as poll workers across the country, using a Donald Trump-aligned swing state tour to enlist support in the effort," Herman explains. "Joshua Standifer... describes the effort as a 'Trojan horse' strategy to get Christians in 'key positions of influence in government like election workers,' which will help them identify alleged voter fraud and serve as 'the first step on the path to victory this fall,' according to his website."

Standifer, Herman adds, "has been on the road with a traveling pro-Trump tent revival featuring self-styled prophets and Christian nationalist preachers that has made stops in key swing states, including Michigan, Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin."

"The Lion of Judah’s election worker training program, which The Guardian has reviewed, features a series of modules titled 'Fight The Fraud: How to Become an Election Worker in 4 Easy Steps,'" Herman reports. "Standifer's project has so far largely flown under the radar."

But Matthew D. Taylor of the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies has been sounding the alarm about Standifer's efforts.

In a thread posted on X, formerly Twitter, Taylor warned, "Standifer's organization Lion of Judah represents an urgent & unrecognized hazard to our democracy this fall. It's targeting election workers. I was at this event on Monday. I talked to Standifer himself…. Lion of Judah poses as a Christian ministry aimed at assisting Christians to register as election workers. That might sound mostly innocuous-albeit strange-but you have to look at the context in which they're doing it & how they go about it."

Taylor tweeted video of Standifer speaking in Wisconsin, where he said, "What if we had Christians across America, in swing states like Wisconsin, that were actually the ones counting the votes? ... They don't see it coming.">

<Hey. Did you see Elon Musk's latest crazy tweet?

Nope, not the one where he suggested that women and men who don't have enough testosterone aren't good at thinking. That was three days ago.

And no, not the one where Musk, who is backing Donald Trump in the fall election, announced that [sic] "Democrat Party is literally the party of criminals." That was two days ago.

I'm talking about the one from Tuesday, where he "promoted a Tucker Carlson interview with a Hitler apologist who downplayed the Holocaust and said Nazis were humane," as Techmeme succinctly described it.

That one you actually can't see, because Musk has now taken it down — a rare admission that something terrible he posted was actually terrible. Or, at least, that other people find it so terrible that he doesn't want to deal with the grief it creates.

I'm not going to get into the substance of the Carlson interview that Musk told his 196.5 million followers was "very interesting" and "worth watching."

I'm just going to point out, yet again, that this is exactly the kind of thing that explains why advertisers want nothing to do with Twitter, which Musk bought in 2022 and subsequently renamed "X": It's because of Musk, and the stuff he tweets.

Twitter's ad revenue has plummeted since he bought it. And sometimes people tend to overcomplicate the reason why, by throwing around terms like "brand safety." Twitter would like you to think it's because of a deep conspiracy among marketers, which is why it is suing some of its former customers.

But again, and almost certainly not for the last time: This is simple. Elon Musk's ad problem is Elon Musk.

The world's richest man loves to tweet, and he loves to tweet stupid stuff, and oftentimes that stupid stuff is offensive to lots of people. Like women. Or Democrats. Or people who don't like Hitler.

And there's no point in getting into the weeds about whether Musk meant to say that it's worth listening to someone who said millions of people "ended up dead" in Nazi concentration camps, or that maybe he hadn't listened to the full interview himself. Or that he says he's not an antisemite and has visited Auschwitz.

The point is that if you're an advertiser, you probably don't need to be on Twitter, because it's a small platform compared to many digital competitors. And you definitely don't want to deal with the headaches Musk causes when he tweets stupid stuff. So not advertising there is a super-simple decision.

That's it. That's the whole tweet.

I'd say I'll see you the next time he does the same thing. But we can't do that every time he does the same thing, because it would get exhausting. Still: See you again, soon.>

Supreme talent, don't you know.

<A federal judge on Thursday is holding her first hearing in Donald Trump’s criminal case for his Jan. 6, 2021, coup attempt, following a Supreme Court ruling that gave the former president immunity for “official acts” — and just days after he claimed he had “every right” to do what he did.

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan is expected to lay out a schedule for the revised indictment of Trump filed by special counsel Jack Smith last week.

The superseding indictment, as it is known, retains the four felony charges from the original 2023 case: conspiracy to defraud the United States; conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding; obstructing an official proceeding; and conspiracy to deprive millions of Americans of their right to have their votes counted.

It deletes references, though, to Trump’s attempts to coerce Department of Justice officials into falsely claiming that fraud had marred the 2020 election.

If convicted, Trump could receive decades in federal prison.

The Supreme Court ruled in July that a president has complete immunity from prosecution for “official” actions, including hiring and firing employees within the executive branch and demanding that they carry out certain instructions.

In a court filing accompanying the revised indictment, Smith wrote that he sought the new one to comply with the high court’s precedent-setting new guidance.

The morning hearing, which Trump is not expected to attend, comes just four days after Trump told Fox News’ Mark Levin: “Whoever heard — you get indicted for interfering with a presidential election, where you have every right to do it, and your poll numbers go up?”

After regaining control of the case last month, Chutkan immediately scheduled a status conference to hear how prosecutors and Trump’s lawyer envision going forward, in light of the Supreme Court immunity decision. The original Aug. 16 court date was postponed at Smith’s request.

The reason for the delay was unclear at the time, but now appears to have been because Smith was in the process of presenting the charges to a new federal grand jury ― presumably so that Trump cannot argue that the original, 2023 grand jury’s decision to indict him had been tainted by evidence that the Supreme Court subsequently said could not be used....>

<....Trump will be officially arraigned on the revised indictment at Thursday’s hearing, although Chutkan granted his request to not attend it in person and to instead allow his lawyers to plead not guilty on his behalf.

In a filing last week, Smith said he is prepared to move forward quickly to reveal to Trump and to the court “additional unpled categories of evidence.” Smith intends to use this evidence to back up his argument that the new indictment does not intrude on any of Trump’s “official” actions as president, for which the Supreme Court ruled he can’t be prosecuted.

“The government is prepared to file its opening immunity brief promptly at any time the court deems appropriate,” Smith wrote in his section of the joint filing.

Trump’s lawyers, in contrast, wrote in their portion of the filing that they want to be able to put off their motion asking Chutkan to dismiss the case, based on the high court’s presidential immunity decision, until December.

That plan suggests they will argue that everything Trump is accused of doing in the revised indictment is “official” conduct protected by the Supreme Court’s ruling. Their proposed schedule foresees additional motions and hearings straight through the autumn of 2025, with no trial date in sight.

What’s more, Trump’s lawyers said that the GOP presidential nominee should be spared the “opprobrium” that comes with criminal court proceedings, and that decisions regarding immunity and their other planned motions to dismiss should be rendered “as a matter of law,” without consideration of any evidence.

A number of Trump’s former aides had testified last year, before the original grand jury, including former Vice President Mike Pence. If Chutkan holds an evidentiary hearing, they’d likely be called to testify again.

Trump’s lawyers made it clear they would oppose that. “The court should take every reasonable step possible to resolve the case on legal grounds, before permitting an invasive public inquiry regarding President Trump’s official conduct while in office,” John Lauro and Todd Blanche wrote.

Trump faces a second indictment based on his coup attempt in Georgia, as well. If convicted on the most serious felonies, he would face decades in state prison there.

A second, unrelated federal prosecution for his refusal to turn over secret documents he took with him to his South Florida country club upon leaving the White House was dismissed by the trial judge, but that ruling is currently under appeal with an appellate court in Atlanta.

Finally, Trump is scheduled to be sentenced in New York City on Sept. 18, after he was convicted on 34 felony counts in May for falsifying business records to hide a $130,000 hush money payment to a porn actor in the days ahead of the 2016 election. He could receive as much as four years in prison on those charges.

If Trump wins the presidency in November, he would almost certainly order his attorney general to dismiss the federal cases against him and would likely seek to postpone the state-level cases until he is no longer in office.>

<While celebrating the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court on Oct 26, 2020, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) said, “A lot of what we have done over the past four years will be undone sooner or later by the next election.” But, he added, “They won’t be able to do much about this for a long time to come.”

So it was inevitable that McConnell would instantly offer a rebuke of President Biden’s Supreme Court reform proposals.

“Dead on arrival,” said McConnell.

He is, by any fair measure, the architect of the extreme Supreme Court whose supermajority has run roughshod over long-standing precedents that protected constitutional rights and the prerogatives of other branches of the federal government, as well as state and local governments.

The court has also become an ethical nightmare of millions of dollars in previously undisclosed gifts from right-wing donors, possible tax evasion and potentially insurrectionist flag-waving.

Far from the “independent judiciary” he proclaims it to be, this extreme and corrupt court is McConnell’s greatest triumph and personal pull toy. He can’t resist the chance to return to the scene of his victory.

McConnell starts his argument by falsely claiming that “for decades, the courts were a reliable ally of the left and its policy aims.”

America had a conservative Supreme Court beginning in 1969 when President Richard Nixon, who had pledged to move the court to the right in reaction to the rulings of the liberal Warren Court, nominated and had four justices confirmed in less than three years.

From 1969 to 1993, a full quarter century, Republican presidents nominated, and the Senate confirmed, 10 consecutive justices.

Democrats undoubtedly disagreed with some of the court’s decisions during that long period of Republican-appointed justices. Nevertheless, the Supreme Court maintained public support.

Several of these justices, Harry Blackmun, John Paul Stevens and David Souter, proved to be surprisingly liberal. Others, such as Lewis Powell, Sandra Day O’Connor, and Anthony Kennedy, proved to be moderate. William Rehnquist, much more conservative than the others, turned out to be a collegial chief justice who by and large respected precedent.

These justices also had legitimacy because they were confirmed through a thorough, searching confirmation process, which continued to be the case for nominees made by Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. While Rehnquist in particular was opposed to the civil and individual rights established from the 1950s through Roe v. Wade in 1973, they were not uprooted.

But a judicious Supreme Court, especially one that contained justices who demonstrated independence once appointed, was anathema to many powerful groups.>

<....The Christian Right committed to restricting abortion, much of the Republican corporate donor base that despises government regulation and The Federalist Society, which spearheaded the long battle to capture the court to move it decisively to the right, were all factors in influencing the court’s ideological change.

And McConnell delivered for them, big time when he prevented the Senate’s consideration of President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland for 10 months on the specious grounds that it was an election year in 2016. This contrasted sharply with his zeal to ram through the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett in 2020, eight days before an election that Trump seemed likely to lose. It is before the backdrop of this ignominious history that McConnell criticizes Biden’s proposal for Supreme Court term limits on the grounds of the “dangerous blow it would deal to the Senate’s power of advice and consent.”

No one has done more damage to the Senate’s power of advice and consent than McConnell, who personally poisoned the last five Supreme Court confirmation fights while projecting his own behavior onto Democrats, accusing them of being responsible for every escalation of the judicial wars.

McConnell writes that Biden “proposes to hamstring the only independent branch of the federal government empowered to shield individual Americans from the whims of the executive and the tyranny of legislative majorities.”

McConnell, who has been a Senate leader longer than anyone in history, surely does not truly view the political branches of the government with such self-critical contempt. It’s just part of McConnell’s scheme to shield the Supreme Court from the torrent of well-deserved criticism of its radical decisions on abortion, guns, affirmative action, church and state and government regulation.

McConnell correctly points out that Alexander Hamilton expressed support for lifetime appointments for judges as a guarantee of their independence in The Federalist No. 78. Of course, life spans were much shorter in 1787, and since that time, every other constitutional democracy in the world has chosen to place age limits or term-limits on the judges of their highest court.

McConnell fails to mention that Hamilton famously conceived of the judiciary as “the least dangerous” branch with “no influence over either the sword or the purse.”

Since the days of Marbury v. Madison, when the court gave itself the power to strike down democratically passed laws, “the least dangerous branch” has become the most dangerous and least democratic, with the justices imposing their own ideological views in a way that is difficult to counteract.

“We the people” are not obligated to ignore the real-world evidence of the damage that the court is doing to the rights protected by the Constitution, or the proper functioning of our government.

Waxing philosophical this past February, McConnell mused: “History will settle every account.” For McConnell, the accounting may begin quite soon.

If Kamala Harris wins the election, it will be in large part a consequence of McConnell’s legacy — his creation of the extreme court, whose decisions will spur millions of outraged Americans to vote for a president who will have the power to appoint justices to end the reign of reaction.>

<Elon Musk is a self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist.” He’s declared himself so committed to the unfettered, open exchange of ideas that he’s said the only way X would let a government suppress speech on its platform is “at gunpoint.” All of this explains why Musk recently allowed X to be banned in Brazil rather than comply with the country’s mandate that the social media platform block certain accounts.

It does far less to explain Musk’s history of doing that very thing in other countries — often at the behest of right-wing or authoritarian regimes.

Musk has been open to following government orders from nearly the beginning. In January 2023 — a little over two months after Musk’s takeover — the platform then known as Twitter blocked a BBC documentary critical of India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi. India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting confirmed that Twitter was among the platforms that suppressed The Modi Question at the behest of the Modi government, which called the film “hostile propaganda and anti-India garbage.”

Musk later claimed he had no knowledge of this. But in March, after the Indian government imposed an internet blackout on the northern state of Punjab, Twitter caved again. It suppressed Indian users’ access to more than 100 accounts belonging to prominent activists, journalists, and politicians, The Intercept reported at the time.

Later that year, Twitter’s Global Government Affairs account announced it had “taken actions to restrict some content in Turkey” to ensure the website “remains available to the people of Turkey.” As Slate noted at the time, Twitter imposed restrictions on certain accounts on the eve of Turkey’s national elections — and it did so amid rampant social media criticism of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

Twitter representatives later said the company had filed objections to court orders requiring the website to ban access to some posts and accounts. Still, Twitter suppressed the accounts and posts. “We received what we believed to be a final threat to throttle the service — after several such warnings,” Twitter said in a statement, adding it “took action” on four accounts and 409 tweets “in order to keep Twitter available over the election weekend.”

Musk has previously said that despite his personal beliefs about free speech, his “preference is to hew close to the laws of countries in which Twitter operates.” In a 2023 interview with the BBC, Musk said Twitter “can’t go beyond the laws” of the countries in which it operates. He reiterated the claim in an interview with CNN, in which he said the platform has “no actual choice” but to comply with government censorship requests.

Under Musk, the website now known as X has complied with such requests readily. Between October 2022 and April 2023, Twitter received 971 requests from governments and courts to suppress specific content and identify private information about anonymous accounts, according to Lumen data analyzed by Rest of World. It complied, to some degree, with 99 percent of those. The majority of these requests came from countries with restrictive speech laws, including India, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates....>

<....But X isn’t always amenable to government moderation requests, nor is it particularly vigilant about removing illegal content. In January 2023, a European anti-hate speech group filed a lawsuit in Germany, alleging the platform had failed to properly moderate antisemitic content and Holocaust denial on its platform, violating both its own policies and German law. There has been a marked rise in hate speech on X since Musk’s takeover, due in no small part to Musk’s decision to fire the content moderation team and X’s Trust and Safety Council.

Musk has also been at odds with European Union regulators over disinformation on X. In 2022, Musk said he was “very much on the same page” as the EU regarding the Digital Services Act (DSA), a far-reaching law that requires major online platforms to remove posts containing illegal content and holds them legally accountable if they don’t. But the following year, X pulled out of the EU’s voluntary Code of Practice against disinformation, a voluntary agreement that in effect functioned as a precursor to the DSA.

EU regulators have since criticized X for allowing disinformation and illegal content to remain on the platform, and EU Commissioner Thierry Breton has warned Musk that regulators are keeping tabs on the platform. Musk has, for his part, occasionally antagonized Breton and the EU regulators over their stance on X.

This April, after an Australian judge ruled that X was required to block a video showing a bishop being stabbed in a Sydney church, Musk accused the country of censorship. X’s Global Government Affairs account said the company believed the order “was not within the scope of Australian law” and said the country “does not have the authority to dictate what content X’s users can see globally.”

Some of the inconsistencies in X’s compliance with government censorship requests could be attributed to technicalities. (X did not immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment on its decisions.) Turkey and India requested that it suppress content only in their countries, while Australia tried to censor a video globally. But it’s worth noting that the video played into one of Musk’s pet causes: combating the so-called “great replacement” of white people by immigrants and people of color. Australian authorities said they believed the stabbing was a religiously motivated terrorist attack. More broadly, Musk has a history of antagonizing governments and politicians he considers too “woke.”

Musk’s other business interests may also be relevant. Erdoğan asked Musk to build a Tesla factory in Turkey last fall, just a few months after X suppressed critics’ posts. And this April, the Financial Times reported that Tesla is exploring locations for a $3 billion factory in India. The man who once said he’d only allow one of his companies to suppress speech “at gunpoint” is far less firm in his beliefs than he claims.>

<Donald Trump's rap sheet is a work in progress these days.

Under the former president's current court schedule, he will greet Election Day as a sentenced felon.

But legal scholars predict Trump is about to use his new presidential immunity powers to execute an unprecedented legal maneuver, one that will delay his hush-money sentencing, now set for September 18, until well after voters cast their ballots.

Two days before his sentencing, Trump, they predict, will seek something never before allowed in the appellate courts in New York or in most states for that matter: an interlocutory appeal.

Interlocutory is just a fancy, legal term for the kind of appeal that is filed before a case wraps up on the trial-court level.

Former Manhattan prosecutors and judges have told Business Insider that New York's criminal procedure law simply does not allow the kind of pre-sentence, interlocutory appeal Trump is already signaling he plans to seek, one that challenges the admissibility of the evidence used against him.

Defendants only get to appeal their convictions after, not before, sentencing, according to experts in New York trial and appellate law.

"That's black letter law," meaning well-established and beyond dispute, former Manhattan financial crimes prosecutor John Moscow told BI.

But Trump's lawyers have something up their sleeves they say trumps black letter, state-level law: a shiny new, big ol' legal monkey wrench called presidential immunity.

The US Supreme Court last month found that a president's official acts cannot be used against him in a criminal prosecution. Trump now says that's just what happened, improperly, when he was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to hide a 2016 election-eve hush-money payment to porn actress Stormy Daniels.

Trump has asked his trial judge, state Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan, to toss the entire case on that basis. He's arguing that some of the evidence used against him involved official acts from his first and second years in office, including an incriminating conversation he had about the hush-money payment with former White House advisor Hope Hicks.

Manhattan prosecutors have countered that any official-act evidence was inconsequential — "a sliver of the mountains of testimony and documentary proof" as they put it court papers — and so the conviction should stand.

Merchan has promised a written decision on September 16, just two days before the scheduled sentencing.

Trump attempted a last-minute end run around Merchan on August 29, asking a federal judge in Manhattan to take over the hush-money case. The effort — Trump's second federal removal bid — was quickly rejected. On September 3, the judge, US District Judge Alvin Hellerstein, tersely declined to take over, noting that federal judges do not have jurisdiction to reverse or modify a state-level verdict. Trump has immediately appealed that decision.

Legal scholars believe that come September 16, Merchan, who retains control of the case, will side with prosecutors.

And they expect that Trump will then immediately start swinging his immunity monkey wrench up through the layers of the state's appellate courts — and the federal appeals courts, too, if necessary....>

<....Trump won't stop swinging, they predict, until he finds a judge who will "stay," or delay, a proceeding where he faces a sentence of probation, community service, fines, and anywhere from zero to four years in prison.

The sentencing will likely remain on ice, said experts in constitutional and appellate law, as this interlocutory appeal drags on in an effort to overturn Merchan and kill the case in its entirety on official-act-evidence grounds.

"He does have some not-crazy arguments," said Michel Paradis, an attorney who teaches national security and constitutional law at Columbia Law School.

Trump attorneys Todd Blanche and Emil Bove first hinted that this was their strategy in an August 14 letter to Merchan asking to delay the sentencing until after the election.

Even Trump's Manhattan prosecutors are conceding that this is a legal monkey wrench to be reckoned with. On August 16, they declined to take a stand on whether the sentencing should be delayed. Instead, they deferred to Merchan on scheduling, "given the defense's newly-stated position" that an interlocutory appeal is planned.

By early September, the scheduling remained unchanged. Trump remains due in court on September 18.

"Bragg's willingness to punt the question to the judge shows that even the DA recognizes the strength of Trump's argument," said Paradis, referring to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.

A spokesperson for the DA's office declined to comment. A lawyer for Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Moscow, the former Manhattan financial crimes prosecutor who now works at Lewis Baach Kaufmann Middlemiss PLLC, believes Trump will be quickly laughed out of court as he begins appealing on the state level.

Claiming that his state appeal bears any resemblance to his SCOTUS case is "arrogant and wrong," he said.

But Trump won't take "no" for an answer should his first-level state appeal fail, experts said.

"If New York's courts deny him a right to appeal, he can challenge the decision in federal court," said Paradis. If the federal district court in Manhattan says no, "he can appeal that to the second circuit federal court of appeals."

If he is denied a stay at any point, Trump can also quickly ask SCOTUS for one, the professor added, adding that the Supreme Court has been "pretty sympathetic" to him.

"But if you look to analogous precedents in the national security, diplomatic, and even attorney-client context, Trump has a real argument to make" in favor of an interlocutory appeal, Paradis said.

Trump's hush money case, meanwhile, would remain in limbo — unsentenced and unfinalized — as whatever appellate safe haven he's landed in weighs if the case should be thrown out in its entirety because Manhattan prosecutors improperly relied on the kind of "official act" evidence now forbidden for use against a former president.

Frank Bowman, a University of Missouri emeritus law professor, predicts that New York's appellate judges "will say Merchan has made his decision — that it's essentially a limited, evidentiary decision — and the best time to address that is on appeal following sentencing."

"It will take weeks at best, and months more likely," he predicted.

Still, "We're in bizarro world here," he joked. "Anything can happen.">

<Since Starlink first beamed down to Brazil two years ago, hundreds of communities in the Amazon that were previously off the grid found themselves connected to the rest of the world. Here was the purest promise of SpaceX’s satellite internet—to provide connectivity in even the most remote places on Earth—fulfilled. Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, received a medal from the Brazilian government. But now Starlink’s Brazilian service is tangled in a mess of political tensions, court orders, personal insults, and threats to revoke the company’s license to operate in the country. And this drama all started because of another Musk business that links strangers around the globe: X, née Twitter.

For months, X and Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes have been publicly feuding over Moraes’s order that X suspend dozens of user accounts, including many belonging to right-wing politicians and pundits, as part of what the judge has called a campaign against online disinformation. Musk has largely ignored the demands, accusing de Moraes of censoring conservative voices. He kept ignoring it even as the court levied fines against X and froze Starlink’s Brazilian financial assets in an attempt to pressure any Musk-owned company to pay the penalties. The fight reached a boil in recent days, when de Moraes instructed internet providers in Brazil to cut off access to X altogether and Musk refused to block the site on Starlink until the latter business got its accounts back.

In some ways, this is classic Musk, scuffling with government agencies when he believes they’re infringing on his enterprises. “What a scumbag!” Musk posted about de Moraes yesterday, after Starlink reversed course and agreed to block X (and pursue legal action over the locked assets). But in other ways, the debacle is a microcosm of fraught, ongoing debates over free speech and internet regulation around the world. Musk isn’t the clear villain here: His actions could be seen as a necessary corrective to government overreach. But they seem less magnanimous when you consider that the alternative to government overreach is, apparently, a World Wide Web governed by the whims of the world’s richest man.

This particular feud has crystallized an unsettling truth that is growing more apparent each day: Musk is becoming an internet god. Space-based internet and social media are a potent combination, and their control by a single person is quite unprecedented—and alarming in the same manner as a federal government restricting online speech via sweeping decree. Not only can Musk now determine who gains traction on a small but influential corner of the web; in certain corners of the globe, he can also determine who has access to the internet at all, and regulate what people encounter when they use it.

For a service that took off only about five years ago, Starlink has become impressively ubiquitous, available for use on all seven continents. Musk dispatched terminals to places reeling from natural disasters, and then to the front lines of war. When Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022, it hacked the satellite provider that the Ukrainian military relied on for communications. Ukrainian officials appealed to Musk for help, and SpaceX dispatched truckloads of Starlink terminals to the besieged country, for free. Soon, Musk found himself with immense decision-making power, as Ukrainian authorities pleaded with him to activate Starlink over a port city in Crimea, apparently so that they could conduct a surprise drone attack on the Russian fleet anchored there. By the end of the war’s first year, when SpaceX no longer wanted to foot the bill for Starlink operations, the Pentagon jumped to take over the job before SpaceX could cut off access. As one undersecretary told The New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow, “Even though Musk is not technically a diplomat or statesman, I felt it was important to treat him as such, given the influence he had on this issue.”

Last year, when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hosted Musk for a visit, the billionaire looked—and played—the part of a world leader traveling to a war zone. He toured a kibbutz that Hamas had attacked, dressed in a suit instead of his trademark Occupy Mars T-shirt, and offered Starlink’s services to the Israeli government. Israel has imposed internet blackouts and destroyed telecommunications infrastructure in Gaza, a common tactic in modern warfare. This summer, after lengthy negotiations, Israeli authorities allowed SpaceX to activate Starlink in one hospital in Gaza, with more service on the way. The deal resembled agreements between Israel and other world powers for humanitarian aid, but as far as we know, the United States, where SpaceX is registered, did not send Musk to the Middle East to broker it. He flew over on his private jet....>

<....Starlink is what’s known in the satellite business as a megaconstellation. At the time of this writing—and that’s important to note, because SpaceX launches a fresh batch nearly every week—more than 6,000 operational Starlink satellites are circling Earth, accounting for more than half of all functioning satellites in orbit. (As I’ve written before, if any aliens stopped by low-Earth orbit, they would think this planet belonged to SpaceX.) Starlink has grown so large in part because SpaceX is simply the most prolific space company in the world. Other companies are working on their own internet constellations, including Amazon, but they’re lagging far behind—and none of their leaders owns prominent social-media companies, where they can govern the flow of information.

Compared with SpaceX, the world’s town square, as Musk calls X, is a cauldron of chaos, especially for users. Since Musk took over Twitter, he has made it a cozy home for far-right provocateurs, reinstated the accounts of previously banned bad actors, promoted conspiracy theories, and made the website worse at separating fact from fiction. And yet, Musk believes that X is the “number 1 source of news in the world.” For a part of the world that relies on Starlink, Musk could, if he wanted, make it the only news source.

The Brazil fiasco may have led to Musk backing down, but it has also revealed just how easily he can serve Starlink users whatever content he may want. Musk’s fame, the omnipresence of his many businesses, and his growing attention to politics does not automatically translate to foreign-policy expertise. But what could Brazil—or any nation—really do to curb his control? Pummel Starlink out of the sky? Impossible; as David Burbach, a professor of national-security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College, once told me, “Nobody has enough anti-satellite weapons to come anywhere near shooting that down.”

And Starlink, which currently operates in 75 countries, is only getting bigger. A new batch of satellites went up today. SpaceX has already received approval from U.S. regulators to launch thousands more, and soon SpaceX may start launching Starlinks in even greater quantities on its giant new rocket, Starship. Musk envisions as many as 42,000 satellites orbiting Earth someday. In the next few years, more people than ever may find themselves subject to Musk’s decisions when they’re doing something as simple as sending an email. The exoskeleton of Starlink satellites surrounding Earth, invisible from the ground, will feel almost palpable, shifting with the whims of the richest person in the world, who controls it all.>

<"Oh Georgia, no peace I find" sang Ray Charles in Georgia on My Mind. Today, that should go double for the rest of us.

And that's because the fate of the 2024 presidential election may rest with Georgia and a newly filed lawsuit by Georgia and national Democrats. It challenges an initiative from the Georgia State Election Board adopted by a 3-2 vote that requires election officials to make an undefined "reasonable inquiry" prior to certifying election votes. It also permits, without specifying any form of supervision, individual county board members to handle original balloting documents. Former President Donald Trump has praised the prevailing board members by name as "pit bulls"—not just for "honesty" and "transparency" but more important, "for victory."

If pro-Trump officials can use this new rule to hold up Georgia election results without good cause for an unlimited period of time, it might devastate democracy. And Trump, of course, may not care. He's not too keen on democracy. He has repeatedly praised dictators and dictatorship, and still refuses to concede that he lost the 2020 election despite losing 60 of 60 lawsuits challenging the results.

So, with democracy hanging in the balance, will the American legal system rise to the occasion? The case isn't a difficult one. A court doing its duty can't fail to rule that any "inquiries" can't block the need to report election results. The board doesn't have the right to change laws passed by the Georgia legislature, and those laws require the results to be certified no later than 5 p.m. six days after election day.

A court should also readily recognize that the two provisions are impossibly vague and therefore impossible to enforce without judicially imposed limits. What's a "reasonable inquiry?" Who decides whether it's reasonable? How long can it go on? Can a single concern block the whole counting process?

And what's the rule for anyway? Georgia already has laws governing challenges to election honesty. Recounts can be demanded. An election contest can be filed alleging "misconduct, fraud or [election] irregularity." Those laws set up a system that the pro-Trump board can't simply smother.

So, the case should be a legal no-brainer. But it likely won't be. After all, the Georgia courts have already stumbled in one Trump-related election case. This past spring, Judge Scott McAfee allowed Trump and his co-defendants to turn his Georgia election fraud case into a circus by letting the defendants put prosecutor Fani Willis on trial—preposterously for having an affair with a fellow prosecutor. While the judge rightly rejected the move to knock Willis out of the case, Trump was not only allowed an early appeal, but a Georgia appeals court suspended proceedings in front of McAfee while it considers Trump's claims. The case will thus be in limbo until after the election.

That case joins similar embarrassments to the judiciary this year. Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed Trump's secret document case in Florida, not on its merits, but because of the mechanism used to appoint the prosecutor. The Supreme Court crushed a Colorado ruling striking Trump from the ballot as an insurrectionist, not because he wasn't an insurrectionist, but because the court felt the constitutional provision at issue needed implementing language. It also stalled Trump's Washington, DC, federal election fraud case for months, again not because he committed no fraud, but because it decided to create some consequence-free zones within which presidents can commit crimes with impunity. Unfortunately, the courts have amassed a mostly dismal record in Trump's cases.

So, yes, Georgia should be on our minds. Watch while Trump and his allies try to tie the new case up in knots with the same old diversionary tactics. Will the Georgia courts let him kick them in the head again or will they up their game and call him out?

It would be simple to do it. The court has the power to set a strict schedule. The judge should order that any preliminary motions must be filed in one combined motion to be heard within two weeks—remember it's urgent. The judge should hear and decide the main issue within three weeks. The judge should require any post-ruling motions to be resolved within three days of the initial decision. Appellate courts must expedite their review to resolve the whole matter well before the election.

If our democracy is to survive, judges must judge. Their failure to do so during most of the Trump trials has been a bitter blow to the rule of law. Now, it's Georgia's turn again with this new case. As Ray Charles might have put it, "Georgia, the road to righteousness is thine. Will you walk it, or is justice no more than moonlight through the pines?">

<Judge Tanya Chutkan acknowledged Thursday that appeals are certain no matter how she rules on pending immunity issues in former President Donald Trump’s Jan. 6 case.

During the first hearing since the federal case was paused in December, attorneys argued about the timeline for handling a range of issues that must be resolved before moving forward, including applying the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity, assessing the constitutionality of special counsel Jack Smith’s appointment and determining the legitimacy of two charges tied to an obstruction statute narrowed by the Supreme Court. Trump’s attorney John Lauro emphasized there is no need to rush to judgement, but Chutkan responded that everybody knows her ruling will be appealed.

“We’re hardly sprinting to a finish line here,” Chutkan said, noting it’s difficult to even contemplate a trial date with “looming appellate issues.”

Trump’s attorneys asked to deal with legal issues first — such as whether Trump’s conversations with then-Vice President Mike Pence are subject to immunity and whether special counsel Jack Smith was illegitimately appointed — in a pre-trial schedule that would stretch into 2025. Special counsel Jack Smith’s team argued the government should file the first brief explaining why presidential immunity does not apply to the superseding indictment within a couple of weeks, allowing the defense to respond afterwards.

“I’m risking reversal no matter what I do,” Chutkan acknowledged.

Special counsel Jack Smith filed a superseding indictment last week designed to address the Supreme Court’s ruling. It included the same four charges, but updated the language to emphasize Trump was acting outside his official duties and omit allegations related to Trump’s “attempt to leverage the Justice Department,” which the Supreme Court explicitly found was covered by immunity.

Trump, who did not attend the Thursday hearing, pleaded not guilty to all four revised charges.

Lauro said he cannot imagine a “more unfair” approach than allowing the government to file its brief first. Chutkan repeatedly emphasized that she would not allow the impending election to influence her decision on how to proceed.

“We have had a year of a stay,” Chutkan told Lauro. “There needs to be some forward motion in this case, regardless of when an election is scheduled.”

Since December, the case has been on hold to allow time for Trump to appeal Chutkan’s denial of his motion to dismiss the case based on presidential immunity. After the Supreme Court issued its ruling in July, finding that presidents are immune from prosecution for official acts taken in office, the case returned to Chutkan in August.

Chutkan seemed inclined to handle multiple issues concurrently, rather than spreading issues out. She said she intends to issue her schedule as soon as possible, potentially by the end of the day.

“We can all walk and chew gum at the same time,” Chutkan said.>

<YouTube took down several right-wing politics channels that had been linked with allegations from the Justice Department that Russian government employees were paying right-wing influencers in the United States to produce content.

The Google-owned video site “terminated” Tenet Media and four other channels run by right-wing media entrepreneur Lauren Chen as part of the company’s “ongoing efforts to combat coordinated influence operations,” a YouTube spokesperson said in an emailed statement Thursday.

On Wednesday, the Justice Department indicted two employees of the Russian government-backed media organization RT, formerly known as Russia Today, accusing them of illegally funding a Tennessee-based media organization. The government has not specifically mentioned Tenet, but a quote from the media organization’s YouTube channel listed in the indictment suggest it is the media organization targeted. Some right-wing influencers have subsequently identified Tenet as the company in the indictment.

Tennessee business records list Lauren Chen and her husband, Liam Donovan, as the owners of Tenet Media. On Thursday, Chen’s contributor contract with conservative media organization Blaze TV was terminated, Semafor reported. Prosecutors allege that the founders of the media company in the indictment knew their funding was coming from Moscow and privately acknowledged in messages to each other that their backers were Russian.

Tenet Media did not immediately return a request for comment sent through a contact form on its website.

YouTube was the main platform for videos produced by Tenet Media and is popular with conservative media personalities, including those who had worked with Tenet, such as Tim Pool, Benny Johnson and Dave Rubin. In the weeks after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, YouTube took down RT’s channels, which had been globally popular on the platform.

YouTube is the only major western social media site still available inside Russia, where it remains popular. But in recent months, the Russian government has stepped up its throttling of the site, degrading quality for many users in the country.>

Y'know, <fredfradiavolo>, despite your portrayal of me here as a wild-eyed, bomb-throwing anarchist, I have no more truck with those Commies who would destroy us than you purportedly do.

Capisce?

<The corruption of democracy begins with the corruption of thought—and with the deliberate undermining of reality. Stephen Richer, an election official in Arizona, and Adam Kinzinger, a former Republican congressman, learned firsthand how easily false stories and conspiracy theories could disorient their colleagues. They talk with hosts Anne Applebaum and Peter Pomerantsev about how conformism and fear made it impossible to do their jobs.

This is the first episode of Autocracy in America, a new five-part series about authoritarian tactics already at work in the United States and where to look for them.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Anne Applebaum: Peter, picture this: A harsh winter has finally come to an end. Exhausted and ragged, America’s Revolutionary Army soldiers are huddled in tents. It’s Valley Forge. It’s 1778. And on a makeshift stage, a group of George Washington’s officers are putting on a play. It’s called Cato, A Tragedy.

Peter Pomerantsev: So they put on togas in the middle of a war?

Applebaum: History does not record what costumes they wore nor why, exactly, they were putting on a play at that particular moment. We do know it was one of Washington’s favorite plays. It was very popular in colonial America. It tells the story of the end of the Roman Republic, a democracy in its time, which was destroyed by a dictator, Julius Caesar.

Pomerantsev: So basically, Washington and the founders, you know—their vision of the end of democracy was to be a dictator taking the capital by storm and grabbing power.

Applebaum: Every generation has a vision of how democracy dies, and this was theirs.

Pomerantsev: I mean, today when I’m in America, I hear a lot of, like, references to: The Nazis are coming. The fascists are coming.

Applebaum: You and I have both lived in countries that became more autocratic over time, meaning that the leader or the ruling party usurped more and more power, eliminating checks and balances. And we both know that this doesn’t necessarily look like stormtroopers marching in the streets.

Pomerantsev: And it happens sort of slowly, almost imperceptibly, like mold eating away a building. And it’s like these little things that actually show you that you’re going in the wrong direction.

Applebaum: Things become even more dangerous when people are sick of the political conversation and just want it to end, and they want someone to come along and end it.

Applebaum: I’m Anne Applebaum, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Pomerantsev: I’m Peter Pomerantsev, a senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University.

Applebaum: This is Autocracy in America.

Pomerantsev: In this podcast, we are not talking about some distant, dystopian, totalitarian state.

Applebaum: This is not a show about America’s future. It’s about the present.

Pomerantsev: There are authoritarian tactics already at work in America, eating away at the guardrails that prevent a leader from usurping power, and we are going to show you where.

Applebaum: Look at what we have already: widening apathy, politicized investigations, the embrace of the strongman cult.

Pomerantsev: And in this episode: psychological corruption.

Applebaum: Peter, when did you start to see things in the United States shift—shift away from a democratic culture?

Pomerantsev: Look, it’s a slightly personal issue for me. My parents were Soviet dissidents in Soviet Ukraine, where I was born. They were arrested by the KGB. We were exiled in the late 1970s (I was still a baby at the time), and after the fall of the U.S.S.R., I went and lived in Russia and Moscow from 2001 to 2010. That was the first 10 years of the Putin era and, in that time, I saw Russia degrade from a really rotten democracy to a really aggressive dictatorship.

And I actually remember one moment quite clearly: This must have been still during the Obama era. I was visiting the U.S. on holiday or for a work trip or something, and I suddenly found myself among groups of people who subscribed to this idea of birtherism, that Obama had not been born in America.>

<....Applebaum: Exactly. And if he wasn’t born in America, then he’s not qualified to be president.

Pomerantsev: But it was the way they were talking about it. I mean, the evidence was not important to them. I mean, you could provide loads of evidence that Obama had been born in America—that wasn’t the point. The way they were using this conspiracy was kind of a real warning sign.

This wasn’t like, I don’t know, the Kennedy assassination, where people try to find the truth out. Here, people I met who signed up to the birther conspiracy didn’t care about evidence. They said things I heard in Russia when it was fading into dictatorship. They would say, I don’t know. The truth is unknowable. There are no such things as real facts or even evidence. But what did matter was how you signaled your political affiliation by making a conspiratorial statement.

Applebaum: Yep, and this is exactly how a conspiracy theory—a big lie—functions in an autocratic political system. It helps the leader, the autocrat, establish who’s loyal, who’s on our side, and who’s not. You know, if you promise to believe in the made-up story, then you can work for the government or the party or whatever, and if you don’t, you’re out. And so this then, not merit or hard work, determines who gets promoted and who runs things.

Pomerantsev: To show that you belonged to the Putin system, you had to repeat absurd lies that people Putin was arresting were guilty of totally absurd charges. You had to agree that Nazis were taking over Ukraine. You know, that could be socially very awkward at first, and people could get quite aggressive, especially when they were drunk. And after a while, it just became dangerous because if you disagreed with these absurd statements, with these conspiracy theories, then you were essentially an enemy of the state. And that would become incredibly dangerous.

Applebaum: When I first saw birtherism unfolding in the U.S., my first reaction was, No way is this happening here. Americans can’t fall for this kind of garbage.

Pomerantsev: Sorry—why did you think Americans were immune, just out of interest?

Applebaum: Wrongly, I imagined our political system is too big, and our democracy is too well anchored, and people don’t believe in conspiracy theories. And obviously I was wrong.

Pomerantsev: You know, once you get into this world where truth is a subset of power, it basically means that you can’t have democratic debate anymore.

Applebaum: Eastern Europeans are familiar with the idea of ruling by conspiracy. But in contemporary America, this is new. And it’s so new, in fact, that I’m not sure Americans realize the significance of it.

Stephen Richer: In May of 2021, Donald Trump accused me of deleting files from the 2020 election. And that was—it’s just hard to describe, but it’s a little bit like the Eye of Sauron. With that, when it’s turned on you, you feel it, and people start contacting you, and you get a lot of ugliness directed your way.

Applebaum: Stephen Richer is an election official in Maricopa County, Arizona. And this disorienting accusation began, at first, as something completely impossible for him to imagine: that the president knew his name and was releasing statements directed at his office.

CNN newscaster Erin Burnett: Tonight, a bitter feud erupting among Arizona Republicans over an election audit of the state’s most populous county.

Fox 10 Phoenix newscaster Ty Brennan: Trump released a statement yesterday saying, quote, “The entire database of Maricopa County in Arizona has been deleted. This is illegal, and the Arizona state Senate, who is leading the forensic audit, is up in arms.”

Applebaum: At first, it felt somewhat impossible for Richer to take this kind of accusation seriously. He knew it wasn’t true. He could see all the files on the county computers every day he went to work. They hadn’t disappeared at all.

Brennan: In response, Republican recorder Stephen Richer sent out a tweet saying, quote, “Wow. This is unhinged. I’m literally looking at our voter registration database on my other screen. Right now. We can’t indulge these insane lies any longer.”

Applebaum: And then these claims started to take hold with other big players in the Trump circle.

Richer: Christina Bobb from One America News Network was here. The “Stop the Steal” candidates throughout the country would come into Arizona and almost pay pilgrimage, pay homage to that production....>

<....Applebaum: And were the attacks on you—what were they accusing you of doing?

Richer: Everything from rigging tabulation equipment to falsifying evidence to deleting electronic files to, you know, turning my back on my people to not maintaining proper chain of custody. I just—the breadth is really breathtaking. Some of it is quite imaginative, and never in a million years would I have thought that somebody would have accused me of shredding ballots from the 2020 election, feeding them to chickens, and then burning the chickens to cover the evidence.

Pomerantsev: It’s something right out of the sort of absurdist stories that you hear about politics in Eastern Europe, where the regime is using absolutely nonsensical charges against you, and their very absurdity shows that you’re kind of powerless to fight back. Because how do you fight back against somebody accusing you of feeding chickens with election ballots?

Applebaum: Right. This was the kind of archetypic, absurdist thing that happened in communist Poland or communist Czechoslovakia. You know, you would be accused of something ludicrous or ridiculous, and there would be no way to defend yourself. But the whole system would somehow take it incredibly seriously.

Pomerantsev: You can’t actually fight back against absurdity. It’s actually very—well, let me put it differently: It starts off funny, and then it becomes really creepy.

I kind of always thought, just like you did with birtherism and with conspiracy theories, that in the U.S., false accusations would be quickly knocked down by the press—just by the system that is, at the end of the day, grounded in some sort of rationality. Or at the very least, I kind of thought that somebody like Stephen Richer—who, well, let’s put it very basically, is a white election official, not a particularly vulnerable member of society—that they would be able to defend themselves pretty easily against blatant lies. But that is not what was happening at all.

Applebaum: No, in Maricopa County, which is a completely ordinary part of America, we see not just accusations of fraud but ridiculous accusations of fraud, and they were being taken seriously.

Richer: I remember vividly one of the meetings I went to in front of a group of about 50 grassroots activists in the Republican Party, and the first question they asked was, Were the tabulation machines in 2020 connected to the internet?

And we had just had three professional elections-technologies companies come in and test that very thing, among other things. So I knew, categorically, as sure as I possibly could, that the answer to that was no. But you could look into their faces and see that that was not going to go down well.

And I said it, and then it turned into just a lot of shouting, a lot of obscenities, and then ultimately following me out to my car.

Applebaum: It got personal, and it got much worse from there.

Richer: A man from Missouri made a phone call telling me, in no uncertain terms, what he thought of me and what he was going to do because I had said that President Trump’s comments were unhinged regarding his allegations that I had deleted the files.

Applebaum: And do you think that the people who criticized you or attacked you—do you think they believed Trump, or had they departed already from any idea of reality, or was it something they said for political reasons?

Richer: The politicians say it for political reasons. I think the people online and a lot of the people from the Republican grass roots of Arizona who email me really believe it. And it conforms to what they want to believe about the world, which is, I think, a real victimization right now and an explanation of how they lost in 2020 that isn’t simply that more Arizonans voted for Joe Biden, because I don’t think they want to embrace that possibility. And it’s incompatible with the world that they see around them when they go to Trump events and see Trump flags, and their neighbors voted for Trump.

NBC 12News newscaster Tram Mai: It appears to be official. Arizona’s attorney general has opened an investigation into the 2020 presidential election. Former Maricopa—

Richer: Mark Brnovich was somebody that I was on friendly terms with, and he had told me that he knew it was all nonsense, but we moved more and more apart as he continued to indulge it. And then, in the late months of 2021, he launched a criminal investigation into the 2020 election over six months.

Pomerantsev: So, Anne, how did we actually get here? There’s a statement from then-President Trump. Then there’s pilgrimages from national figures to Maricopa County.....>

<....Applebaum: Exactly. This is where rumors and talk transformed yet again, not just into dramatic pilgrimages and pressure campaigns but now into an actual criminal investigation by the Arizona attorney general.

Richer: He committed 10,000 man-hours to investigating it. It is especially scary to think that somebody who is willing to indulge these delusional beliefs could have been the chief prosecutor for the state of Arizona.

Pomerantsev: Anne, I just can’t help feeling there’s a bigger story here. It’s not about just what happened in Arizona. It’s about: How did something so unhinged, something so absurd become so normalized in the Republican Party?

Applebaum: There are a lot of people, including a lot of Republicans, who are trying to understand that. That’s after the break.

Applebaum: Peter, Adam Kinzinger is a former Republican congressman in Washington, where a lot of examples are set that then trickle down to state and local politics. Kinzinger was in office from 2011 to 2023, and he saw the changes in the party as they were happening, and he played along with them a little bit himself, at least for a while, before changing his mind completely.

Adam Kinzinger: Yeah. So, you know, I was raised during the time of Reagan, when I started to pay attention to politics and, you know, always just really believed in the role of America. I grew up hearing that America is this force for good. You know, I was alive during the Soviet Union. I saw, at a young age, the Berlin Wall fall. I saw the iron curtain torn down. And I gave credit for that to the Republican Party, you know, the party that was unabashedly pro-America.

Applebaum: Peter, Kinzinger was very idealistic, like many people who join Congress. But then he discovered that the reality of politics wasn’t always so noble and that, to be part of the party, sometimes you go on TV to say things that rally the base.

Kinzinger on TV recordings, overlapping: Yeah, well, look: This is obviously a reason why I think we need real border security—

—but that ISIS has grown to where it even eclipses Al Qaeda—

Congress may be unpopular. Look, we all get that. We understand it. But that doesn’t mean Congress doesn’t exist. That doesn’t mean you conveniently get to throw out the Constitution.

Applebaum: Kinzinger’s ability to speak for the party on TV and elsewhere got more complicated because right after Donald Trump’s inauguration—immediately—Trump started saying absurd things about how he’d had the largest crowds in history. No one had ever seen so many people on the National Mall.

Kinzinger: Yeah, just shortly after that, you know, dismissing what we see in pictures.

Pomerantsev: The pictures showed that it wasn’t a very big crowd out there. So, you know, he was sort of saying that to be part of his group, part of this new political in-group that rules the country, you’ve got to repeat these absurd statements, and that will show that you’re one of us.

Applebaum: Exactly. In this case, it was ridiculous. I mean, who cares how many people were at the inauguration? But he insisted that his press spokesman get the National Park Service to lie about how many people there were, because only through forcing people to lie, forcing institutions to lie, could he prove their loyalty. And this is another classic piece of authoritarian behavior.

Pomerantsev: Authoritarianism doesn’t start with something huge. It’s like taking or giving a tiny, little bribe—five bucks or something. It doesn’t sound like a big thing. But that’s it. You’re hooked. And then it’s just like cotton candy. It reels you in. It just gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger.

Applebaum: Right. So all the while, Adam Kinzinger was increasingly forced into a kind of mental gymnastics. He did, for a while, continue to go on TV, speaking for the GOP on issues that he cared about but without fully aligning himself with the commander in chief.

Kinzinger on TV recordings, overlapping: I agree with what the president’s saying about Iran. I think him pulling out of the nuclear deal was huge. Iran has, by the way, about 40,000 troops in Syria.

Obviously, I think there’s some things I wish he wouldn’t put on Twitter. But when it comes to some of these issues, like with North Korea, I think there’s benefit in that unpredictability—

I wish what the president wouldn’t do is show any kind of division with his intelligence chiefs. I think it’s not beneficial for us. It’s not beneficial for our presence on the world stage.

Pomerantsev: You can really hear Kinzinger trying to find a way to be loyal to his party and yet keep his integrity and criticize the leader.....>

<....Applebaum: And he continued to try and find that balance, but he found less and less camaraderie among members of his party, especially as the investigation into President Trump’s ties with Russia began.

Kinzinger: This was during the Russia investigation. This person—all I remember is they were a sane, rational person—just said, Yeah, but I think the Democrats are making this up to go after him.

And I remember specifically thinking, You know that that’s not true. But then I started to understand, like, you can convince yourself of anything. If you have to rationalize your behavior, you can convince yourself of anything. So if you know that you have to defend Donald Trump, despite his ties to Russia or his sympathy to Russia—if you know that and, you know, that’s hard for you to do—you can convince yourself that the Democrats are making this up.

You can start out doublespeaking and saying one thing to one group and another thing to another. But, eventually, even the leaders, even those pushing out the false narratives, eventually they get corrupted too, and they believe their own garbage. And that’s a very dangerous moment.

Pomerantsev: It’s a dangerous moment and also sort of the infection of mental corruption spreading. I saw the same thing happen in Russia as it tipped into being a full-blown autocracy.

It was around 2014. I remember the moment very clearly: Russia had just invaded Ukraine, and people that I knew who worked in state media and the bureaucracy—who’d always been so cynical, sort of smirking when they repeated the government’s lines, signaling that they knew that all the propaganda was a stupid game, that they were just playing along—suddenly, when the war started, they had this completely blank look and this total seriousness as they repeated the government lies, that the revolution in Ukraine, which was this incredible act of heroism by the Ukrainian people, was, I don’t know, all a CIA plot. I kept on looking for their old smirk—the little glint in the eye—but suddenly they were just delivering it like zombies. Something had changed. They knew now that they had to inhabit these lies fully if they were going to survive in a new paradigm.

Applebaum: And this vulnerability to mental corruption is very human. It’s just like what happened in 2015 when the plane-crash conspiracy theory in Poland started to take hold.

Pomerantsev: This is the plane-crash conspiracy that the former government had actually been—what? Brought down by—

Applebaum: The president’s plane crashed carrying a lot of military and political leaders as well. And the plane crash was an accident. It was extensively investigated. The black boxes were found. There had been a pilot error.

But then, the late president’s brother, who was also the leader of what was then the political opposition in the parliament, began claiming that the crash was deliberate—maybe it was caused by his political rivals, maybe by the Russians. A lot of people dismissed this. There was no evidence for it.

But once there had been a change of power—once the president’s brother’s party was in charge of the government, the conspiratorial party—then all kinds of people suddenly thought, Well, you know, they won. They must be right. The conspiracy must be true. And even if it’s not true, it’s in my interest to repeat it. And then they began to repeat the same lies as the people in charge.

Pomerantsev: “Truth,” and I’m saying that in inverted commas, becomes whatever the powerful say it is. I’m often asked, like, Do Russians believe in all the lies that Putin’s propaganda says?>