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    MyPillow founder defamed Smartmatic election tech company, judge rules

    MyPillow founder Mike Lindell defamed the election technology company Smartmatic with false statements that its voting machines helped rig the 2020 presidential election, a federal judge in Minnesota ruled recently.But US district judge Jeffrey Bryan deferred until future proceedings the question of whether Lindell – one of the country’s most prominent propagators of false claims that the 2020 election was a fraud – acted with the “actual malice” that Smartmatic still needs to prove to collect any damages.The judge said there are “genuine fact disputes” as to whether Lindell’s statements were made “with knowledge that they were false or made with reckless disregard to their falsity”. He noted that the defense says Lindell has an “unwavering belief” that his statements were truthful.The statements cited by the judge in his ruling on Friday arose from Lindell’s criticism of the results of the 2020 election in California’s Los Angeles county, which Democratic challenger Joe Biden carried with 71% of the vote over Republican incumbent Donald Trump. The results in LA county helped Biden secure the state’s 55 electoral votes as his electoral college victory sent him to the White House and ended Trump’s first presidency.The county used Smartmatic’s computerized touchscreen ballot-marking devices and was the company’s only customer for the 2020 election. Lindell alleged the machines were rigged to change Trump votes to Biden votes.The judge ruled there were 51 specific times when Lindell falsely claimed – in documentaries he produced and through various media and personal appearances – that Smartmatic interfered with the results.“The court concludes that, based on the record presented, no reasonable trier of fact could find that any of the statements at issue are true,” Bryan wrote.Smartmatic attorney Erik Connolly said they will be seeking “nine-figure damages” from Lindell and MyPillow for “spreading lies” about the company.“Smartmatic did not and could not have rigged the 2020 election,” Connolly said in a statement. “It was impossible, and everything that Mr Lindell said about Smartmatic was false.”Smartmatic has been on a winning streak, having reached settlements in 2024 with two conservative news outlets, including Newsmax and One America News Network. The Florida-based company also still has an active case against Fox News.Lindell also has made similar claims against Dominion Voting Systems. He lost a case involving the Denver-based company in June when a jury ruled that he defamed a former Dominion employee by accusing him of treason. The jury awarded $2.3m in damages.Lindell told the Associated Press shortly after the Smartmatic ruling was filed that he hadn’t seen it – but that it was “the most bizarre thing I’ve ever heard”.Lindell went on to call Smartmatic “one of the most corrupt companies in the world”, and he vowed to keep fighting until its voting machines are “melted down and turned into prison bars”. He said he will take his crusade to eliminate voting machines in favor of paper ballots all the way to the US supreme court if he has to.Lindell, known as the “MyPillow guy” for his bedding company, also said he recently re-established residence in Minnesota as a step toward a likely run for governor against the incumbent Democratic governor, Tim Walz. While MyPillow is based in the Minneapolis suburbs, Lindell had been living until recently in Texas.Lindell and MyPillow have faced a number of legal and financial setbacks in recent years, but he won a victory in July when a federal appeals court ruled he did not have to pay a $5m arbitration award to a software engineer who disputed data that Lindell claimed proved China interfered in the 2020 election. The court said the arbitration panel overstepped its authority. More

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    Rudy Giuliani and Dominion settle $1.3bn defamation suit over election lies

    Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor and personal lawyer to Donald Trump, has settled a long-running defamation lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems over lies he told about the result of the 2020 presidential election.Details of the settlement, revealed in federal court in Washington DC in a filing late on Friday, are confidential. The Colorado-based voting machine manufacturer sued Giuliani for $1.3bn in 2021, citing more than 50 instances in which he made false or defamatory statements insisting the election was rigged against Trump, with the integrity of Dominion’s machinery at the heart of the conspiracy theory.Representatives for Giuliani and Dominion confirmed the resolution on Saturday but declined further comment when approached by CBS News. “The parties have agreed to a confidential settlement to this matter,” a Dominion spokesperson said in a short statement.It is Dominion’s third payout in defamation lawsuits about the election resolved before reaching trial. The company reached a $787.5m settlement in 2023 with Fox, the network that amplified numerous voices pushing the election lies, including the star’s then-star host Tucker Carlson, the rightwing personality who was later fired.The conservative outlet Newsmax in August agreed to pay $67m after a superior court judge in Delaware ruled it had defamed Dominion. Newsmax admitted no wrongdoing and said it stood by its reporting in a terse statement – but chose to settle before a jury got to decide the amount of damages in the $1.6bn lawsuit.All three lawsuits related to evidence-free claims pushed by conservatives in the aftermath of the 2020 election that Joe Biden’s victory over Trump was rigged – and that Dominion’s machines were easily manipulated to provide false results.As Trump’s personal lawyer, Giuliani was a leading purveyor of the lies, appearing on television and radio shows as well as podcasts to amplify them.“Dominion brings this action to set the record straight, to vindicate the company’s rights under civil law, to recover compensatory and punitive damages, and to stand up for itself, its employees, and the electoral process,” the complaint against him stated.Giuliani remained defiant at the time, stating he would countersue and insisting he was “exercising my right of free speech and defending my client”. But his involvement ultimately proved costly, professionally and personally.In July 2024, he was permanently disbarred from practicing law in the state of New York after earlier having his license suspended for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Three months later, he was disbarred in Washington DC after failing to respond to a demand to explain his actions.This past November, he lost his temper in a New York court room and shouted: “I can’t pay my bills” at a judge in a hearing to explore why he had not complied with orders to surrender assets to pay a $148m settlement to two Georgia election workers he defamed.His outburst came weeks after he showed up to vote in Florida in the 2024 presidential election that resulted in a second presidency for Trump. Giuliani at the time was in a Mercedes-Benz the court had ordered him to hand over to the poll workers, Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss. More

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    Georgia governor’s race heats up with entrance of two skeptics of Trump’s 2020 election claims

    The entrance into the Georgia governor’s race of two prominent figures on the right who stood up to Donald Trump’s effort to steal the 2020 election shows how the election interference crisis continues to reverberate in the state’s politics.On Wednesday, Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, announced his candidacy. Raffensperger was the recipient of the “perfect phone call” by Trump in 2020 in the wake of his electoral loss in Georgia, pressuring Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes” and overturn the results.The recording of that phone call led to investigations in Georgia and Washington. Raffensperger’s rejection of stolen election claims and his unwillingness to subvert Georgia election law for partisan purposes landed him near the top of Trump’s enemies list.At a rally in Atlanta during the campaign, Trump called Raffensperger and the outgoing Republican governor, Brian Kemp, “disloyal” and said “they’re doing everything possible to make 2024 difficult for Republicans to win”. Kemp is term-limited and cannot run again in 2026.In his announcement address, Raffensperger said: “I’m a conservative Republican, and I’m prepared to make the tough decisions. I follow the law and the constitution, and I’ll always do the right thing for Georgia no matter what.”Raffensperger pledged to work toward capping seniors’ property taxes, banning puberty-blocking drugs from minors and eliminating the state income tax.And last Tuesday, former lieutenant governor and erstwhile Republican Geoff Duncan announced his candidacy for governor. Duncan was elected lieutenant governor in 2018 as a Republican, forgoing re-election in 2022 after drawing heated reaction from Trump supporters after repudiating stolen election claims. Duncan testified before the special purpose grand jury in Fulton county examining election-interference claims.Duncan published a book about reforming the Republican party in 2021, and briefly considered running for president under the No Labels brand as an independent in 2024. Presenting himself as a political iconoclast, Duncan announced last month that he had formally switched parties.In the absence of the election-interference case that followed Trump’s efforts in 2020, both Duncan and Raffensperger would have been considered orthodox conservative Republicans by Georgia political standards.But Georgia’s Republican party can no longer be described as orthodox, except in its loyalty to Trump. Delegates to the Georgia GOP convention in January overwhelmingly voted to bar Raffensperger from qualifying as a Republican candidate while they expelled Duncan entirely, citing his appearance at the Democratic National Convention endorsing Kamala Harris in the presidential election.The move was largely symbolic; state law provides for no mechanism for a political party to bar a candidate. Nonetheless, the animus from the 2020 election persists.In dueling open letters last year, the Georgia GOP chair, Josh McKoon, described Duncan as “prostituting” himself to CNN as a Trump critic.“[Y]our desperate and ridiculous endorsements of Joe Biden and now Kamala Harris for president, coupled with your inexplicable opposition in 2022 to [Republican Senate candidates] Burt Jones and Herschel Walker, not to mention your comical attempt to run for president as an independent candidate, are violations of the oaths of loyalty you repeatedly swore when you qualified as a Republican candidate for office,” McKoon wrote.Duncan legislated as a “100% pro-life” lawmaker, and supported a 2019 state law banning most abortions – a position he is now repudiating as a Democratic candidate, along with prior positions on gun control and Medicaid expansion. His argument to voters is that cross-party appeal is necessary to beat a Republican in the general election.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I’ve never wavered on taking on Trump,” Duncan said in his announcement video. “I’m running for governor to put Georgians in the best position to once again love their neighbors and to make Georgia the frontline of democracy and a backstop against extremism.”Duncan enters a Democratic race that grows increasingly crowded. He faces the state senator Jason Esteves, an Atlanta-area legislator and former Atlanta school board chairperson, as well as former labor commissioner and DeKalb county CEO Michael Thurmond and former Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms. Other candidates are expected to announce their bids in coming weeks.Among Republicans, Georgia’s attorney general, Chris Carr, and lieutenant governor, Burt Jones, have already declared their candidacies for governor. Carr stepped down from chairing the Republican Attorneys General Association after learning it had paid for a robocall urging supporters to come to Washington DC and “stop the steal” on 6 January 2021. Carr and Kemp are political allies.Jones is favored by Trump and was a mainstay on the 2024 campaign trail.“Chris Carr and Brad Raffensperger have one thing in common: They are both Never Trumpers,” Jones wrote on Instagram following Raffensperger’s announcement. “There is only one candidate in this race that’s always supported and has the full and complete endorsement of [Trump].”Jones, a Republican state senator in 2020, served as one of the 16 fake electors for Trump – all of whom signed a document, submitted to the National Archives, claiming Trump won Georgia.Fulton county’s district attorney, Fani Willis, had considered charging Jones in the election-interference case, but a Fulton county judge barred her in 2022 from investigating the lieutenant governor after she appeared at a fundraiser for Jones’s opponent. An outside prosecutor determined Jones’s actions as a state senator did not merit “further investigation or further actions” and considered the case closed. More

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    Georgia supreme court ends Fani Willis bid to reverse removal from Trump case

    The Georgia supreme court on Tuesday declined to hear Fani Willis’s appeal of a lower court’s ruling disqualifying the Fulton county prosecutor from prosecuting Donald Trump’s election interference case.In a 4-3 decision, the state’s highest court let stand the lower court order disqualifying Willis from the racketeering and election interference case that initially snagged 19 defendants, including Donald Trump, in 2023.Georgia’s appeals court removed Willis from the case in December 2024, citing the “appearance of impropriety” created by her relationship with former special prosecutor Nathan Wade.The appellate decision in effect established a new standard in Georgia law for removing a prosecutor from a case, which the Georgia supreme court’s decision allows to stand without review.Trump, while president, is protected from state-level prosecutions, but the other remaining defendants are still subject to prosecution. The case will be reassigned by the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia, but it is unclear whether Pete Skandalakis, executive director of the council, will be able to find a prosecutor willing to take up the politically fraught, legally complicated case.He said he expected the formal process to begin within a month or so. Skandalakis, a district attorney elected by conservative voters outside of metro Atlanta may simply choose to drop the charges against the remaining 14 defendants, rather than risk the backlash of their constituents and the increasingly vocal and retributive ire of the president. But the primary consideration was a matter of capacity, Skandalakis said.“I have to start looking, today, for a prosecutor to take this case,” Skandalakis said. “You kind of narrow it down to resources – who has the staff – and then you kind of branch out. There are some offices that are too small, that are overrun with cases.”Willis and attorneys for Trump and other defendants did not immediately respond to a request for comment.A grand jury in Atlanta indicted Trump and 18 others in August 2023, using the state’s anti-racketeering law to accuse them of participating in a wide-ranging scheme to illegally overturn Trump’s narrow 2020 loss to Joe Biden in Georgia. The alleged scheme included Trump’s call to the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, urging him to help find enough votes to beat Biden. Four people have pleaded guilty. Trump and the others have pleaded not guilty. More

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    Election deniers now hold posts on local US election boards, raising concerns for midterms

    A number of people who deny the legitimacy of the 2020 election, and often of other elections in which Republicans have not been victorious, have been elevated to positions of power since Donald Trump’s re-election, raising concerns about the potential for partisan meddling in critical parts of the country such as Arizona and Georgia.State by state, activists aligned with the “election integrity” movement have found their way on to local elections boards and elections offices, raising red flags for Democrats who have already started efforts to have them removed.“I think Republicans want to put us in jail,” Fulton county commissioner Dana Barrett said, moments after a contempt hearing in an Atlanta, Georgia, courtroom in August, where she and five other county commissioners were fighting a battle to reject the appointment of two Republican election denialists to the Fulton county board of registrations and elections.The commission’s charter says the board must appoint two nominees made by each political party. A finding of criminal contempt could have resulted in commissioners being jailed until they agreed to make the appointment, but Fulton county superior court judge David Emerson found the board in civil contempt last month for refusing to vote for the appointment as ordered by the court. A $10,000 daily fine for failing to make the appointment is on hold, pending appeal.“At the end of the day, we have no choice but to resist,” Barrett said. “This is not a particularly strategic move on my part, but rather a move to defend the integrity of our elections and to do what I can in my corner of the world to try to help hold this democracy together. If that means I’m resisting, then by all means, I’m resisting.”One of the two appointees in question, Julie Adams, works for the Election Integrity Network, an election denial activist organization founded by Cleta Mitchell, a Trump ally who aided his efforts to overturn the election in Georgia and elsewhere. The other, Jason Frazier, is a consultant for EagleAI, software that collects open-source data of dubious validity to aid activists making thousands of voter challenges at a time. Frazier was a plaintiff in a 2023 lawsuit demanding voter registration purges by the county and the state.“I believe that Jason Frazier and Julie Adams are election deniers,” Barrett said.“We all find ourselves in positions where we have to make tough decisions considering the climate in our country,” said Fulton county commissioner Mo Ivory. “I’m glad to be standing up for the people that put me in office, and continue to fight for our democracy, not for partisan politics, but for what it means to live in a democracy.”In Georgia, board appointments to county election offices are idiosyncratic. Fulton county’s charter gives power to the board of commissioners and to the political parties’ county committees. In neighboring DeKalb county, the appointments are made by the chief judge of its superior court, who is free to reject a nominee by one of the party’s committees if that person doesn’t meet the judge’s legal standards.Such was the case earlier this year, when Shondeana Morris, chief judge of the DeKalb county superior court, rejected William Henderson after a letter campaign by the county’s Democratic committee and voting rights activists. But the judge did allow the appointment of Gail Lee, another Republican activist linked to the Election Integrity Network.During a DeKalb county election board meeting last week, local political activists challenged the qualification of Jason Lary, a former mayor of Stonecrest, Georgia, to run for the city council. Lary recently returned from federal prison, where he was serving a sentence for fraud after being convicted of stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal Covid-19 relief funds allocated to the city.Lary is a Democrat and the board has a Democratic majority, but after a brief discussion, the board voted unanimously to kick him off the ballot and strip him of his voter registration, given that he was still under supervision for his sentence and thus ineligible to vote.“The one thing that became clear is the importance of the public to remain vigilant on little things like people who qualified for office,” Lee said at the end of the meeting. “Because if a person hadn’t come for and challenged the candidates then they would have gone forward and possibly had a felon in office.”There’s only so much a Republican activist can accomplish on a five-person board with a Democratic majority, as is the case in metro Atlanta’s core counties. When Adams refused to certify a primary election in Fulton county in 2024, state superior court judges ruled that she was required to do so by state law, a decision affirmed by the Georgia supreme court this week. The duty to certify is “ministerial”, a pronouncement that is obligatory, not discretionary.And many if not most decisions by an elections board involve mundane procedural questions about where to site a voting drop box or how to schedule poll worker training. Even contentious issues often result in unanimous votes.But elections offices are staffed by human beings maintaining sensitive equipment and critical records, all of which are vulnerable to someone with authority and an agenda.Protect Democracy, an advocacy organization, describes a strategy of election subversion in three parts: deceive, disrupt and deny.Disinformation from influencers suggests that voter fraud or noncitizen voting occurs often enough to swing an election. Then these influencers call on their supporters to disrupt election administration and voting process and introduce chaos into the system. Finally, they attempt to interfere or halt the certification process and “declare the true result untrue, unknown, or unknowable”, Protect Democracy’s advocates wrote.The object is to allow the loser to claim victory regardless of the results, forcing a court to either choose a winner or order a new election, delegitimizing a fair vote.Changes wrought by a new law specific to Spalding county, Georgia, populated its board with Republican election activists. The board members and the county’s new elections director called for a hand-count of ballots following elections in 2022 and 2023. The process, observers noted, was painfully slow and riven by inaccuracies that took days to rectify, with an end result that showed Dominion machines had counted votes correctly.They did not hand count ballots in 2024.Spalding county’s Republican elections board members – Ben Johnson, Roy McClain and James Newland – are among the many defendants in a federal lawsuit seeking to overturn a law permitting mass voter challenges passed in the wake of the 2020 election that voting rights advocates argue violates the Voting Rights Act.Meanwhile, Maricopa county’s board of supervisors has been in a political war with the county’s elected recorder Justin Heap to prevent this outcome. Maricopa county contains Phoenix and almost two-thirds of Arizona’s population.Heap, a former state representative, defeated the incumbent Republican in 2024 while refusing to say if he believed the 2020 and 2022 elections were fair and calling Maricopa county elections a “laughingstock”.After Heap’s victory, the board stripped the recorder’s office of its duties to manage in-person early voting and some IT management of voter rolls. Negotiations broke down in May, leading to lawsuits and acrimony. Heap retained America First Legal, a Trump-aligned firm, to represent him in the lawsuit.“Justin Heap is lying about me, and going forward, he better keep my name out of his lying mouth,” Maricopa county supervisor Steve Gallardo said in a July release, refuting claims by Heap that Gallardo had agreed to restore power to the recorder’s office. “Since his election, Justin Heap has taken actions that have confused voters and damaged relationships. This must end. Justin Heap should stop the performative theater and just do his job.”Some states appear to be more fertile ground than others for election denialist’s influence on boards.North Carolina’s Republicans controlled the state legislature with a veto-proof majority last year, even though its former governor Roy Cooper was a Democrat. After Josh Stein, another Democrat, won the governor’s race, legislators stripped the governor of the power to appoint members to state and county elections boards, handing it to newly elected state auditor Dave Boliek, a Republican.The state’s Republican-majority supreme court ratified the law in May after court challenges. Boliek almost immediately replaced 3-2 Democratic majorities with 3-2 Republican majorities across all 100 county election boards.Those appointments have drawn pushback from election denialists as well as from Democratic activists.Places such as Durham county, where less than 10% of voters are registered Republicans, now has a Republican majority on its elections board. But most new board members appear to have been rewarded for their loyalty to the party and not their fidelity to election denialism.“There are concerns that there are people that are getting rewarded as a political favor, as opposed to their working knowledge and their experience in elections,” said Jim Womack, Lee county GOP chair and the president of the non-profit North Carolina Election Integrity Team, speaking to North Carolina news site The Assembly. More

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    Newsmax agrees to pay $40m to settle defamation suit over false election claims

    The conservative news outlet Newsmax agreed to pay the voting equipment company Smartmatic $40m last year as part of a settlement in a defamation suit over Newsmax’s decision to broadcast false claims about the 2020 election, a new filing revealed.The parties did not reveal details of the settlement when it was reached in September, but Newsmax disclosed the settlement amount in a public 7 March financial filing. The news outlet said it had also offered Smartmatic the option to buy stock in the company and that it had paid $20m of the settlement amount so far.A Newsmax spokesperson declined to comment beyond the statement the company issued after the settlement last year.Smartmatic voting equipment was only used in one jurisdiction in the United States during the 2020 election. Nonetheless, allies of Donald Trump and other conservative outlets repeated false claims that the company hacked votes and sent them overseas.Smartmatic sued Newsmax, the far-right network One America News and Fox for defamation, claiming they broadcast false claims about the company after the 2020 election. It previously settled with One America News and the case against Fox is ongoing. In January, A New York appellate judge said the company’s $2.7bn suit against Fox could proceed.Fox agreed to pay Dominion voting systems, another voting equipment company, $787.5m to settle a defamation suit over election claims in 2023.All of the cases are being closely watched by first amendment scholars as tests of whether libel law could be an effective tool for curbing misinformation. In the case between Dominion and Fox, for example, the legal process made public internal Fox messages showing prominent hosts and key personnel were aware the information about the company was false. More

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    The loudest megaphone: how Trump mastered our new attention age

    The first step in winning a public debate, indeed in any effective communication, is to get attention for your message. But that in and of itself is not enough. Attention is the means, not the end, because the end is persuasion. Once you have people’s attention, then you can try to persuade them with your evidence and arguments.This, at least, is the traditional model of communication. The trouble is, this basic model has fallen apart. It is crumbling to dust before our eyes, though we have a hard time accepting how far gone it is. The reality is that everywhere you look, there is no longer any formal set of institutions to force public attention on a topic, no basic rules for who will speak when and who will listen.Under these conditions, the need for attention becomes exclusive; it swallows debate, it swallows persuasion, it swallows discourse whole. Attention ascends from a means to an end to the end itself. If you can’t be heard, it doesn’t matter what you say. And right now it’s both easier than ever to shout and harder than ever to be heard. The incentives of the attention age create a new model for public debate in which attention is its own end, to be grabbed by any means necessary.This transformation has been a long time in the making. Before the digital age there was the TV age. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, published in 1985, the author Neil Postman argued that for its first 150 years the US was a culture of readers and writers, and that the print medium – pamphlets, broadsheets, newspapers, and written speeches and sermons – structured not only public discourse but the institutions of democracy itself. TV destroyed all that, Postman argued, replacing our written culture with a culture of images that was literally meaningless. “Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other,” he wrote. “They do not exchange ideas; they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.”Postman first settled on his argument while working on an essay about two different dystopian visions of the future that had been offered in the mid-20th century: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Postman’s insight was that these two books, though often grouped together, portray very different dystopias. In Orwell’s vision, all information is tightly controlled by the state, and people have access only to the narrow, bludgeoning propaganda that is force-fed to them. Huxley’s vision was the opposite. In Brave New World, the problem isn’t too little information but too much, or at least too much entertainment and distraction. “What Orwell feared,” Postman writes, “were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.” The key insight that propels Postman’s now-classic work is that Huxley described the future much better than Orwell.View image in fullscreenPostman didn’t quite frame his argument in terms of attention, but what I take from it is that in competitive attention markets, amusement will outcompete information, and spectacle will outcompete arguments. The more easily something attracts our attention, the lower its cognitive load, the less friction there is for us to be drawn to it. By the 1980s, the dominant mode of political communication was the minute-long ad, and Postman’s central point, that it’s a long way down from the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, where the two challengers for the Illinois state senate squared off in 90-minute speeches, to Reagan’s “Morning in America” commercial, seems irrefutable.A little more than two decades after Postman published his book, the US writer George Saunders developed some of its themes in an essay about the bleating idiocy of American mass media in the era after 9/11 and the run-up to the Iraq war. In it, he offers a thought experiment.Imagine, Saunders says, being at a cocktail party, with the normal give-and-take of conversation between generally genial, informed people. And then “a guy walks in with a megaphone. He’s not the smartest person at the party, or the most experienced, or the most articulate. But he’s got that megaphone.” The man begins to offer his opinions and soon creates his own conversational gravity: everyone is reacting to whatever he’s saying. This, Saunders contends, quickly ruins the party. And if you have a particularly empty-minded Megaphone Guy, you get a discourse that’s not just stupid but that makes everyone in the room stupider as well:“Let’s say he hasn’t carefully considered the things he’s saying. He’s basically just blurting things out. And even with the megaphone, he has to shout a little to be heard, which limits the complexity of what he can say. Because he feels he has to be entertaining, he jumps from topic to topic, favouring the conceptual-general (‘We’re eating more cheese cubes – and loving it!’), the anxiety- or controversy-provoking (‘Wine running out due to shadowy conspiracy?’), the gossipy (‘Quickie rumoured in south bathroom!’), and the trivial (‘Which quadrant of the party room do YOU prefer?’).”Yes, Saunders wrote that in 2007, and yes, it sounds uncannily like the spoken patter of a certain US president, doesn’t it? But Saunders’ critique runs deeper than the insidious triviality and loudness of major TV news. He’s making the case that the sophistication of our thinking is determined to a large degree by the sophistication of the language we hear used to describe our world.This is not a new contention: the idea that dumb media make us all dumber was part of the very earliest critiques of newspapers, pamphlets and the tabloid press in the late 18th century, and has continued right up to the present day. I once thought, along with many others, that the internet was going to solve this problem. No more gatekeepers, no more relying on the crass commercial calculations of megacorporations about what audiences want. We, the public at large, were going to seize back the means of communication. We were going to remake the world through democratic global conversations. Now, the wisdom of crowds would rule.That’s not what happened. The internet really did bring new voices into a national discourse that for too long had been controlled by far too narrow (too white, too male, too affluent) a group. But it did not return our democratic culture and modes of thinking to a more serious, thoughtful era. The writing got shorter and the images and video more plentiful until the internet birthed a new form of discourse that was a combination of word and image: meme culture. A meme can be clever, even revelatory, but it is not discourse in the mode that Postman pined for.As for the guy with the megaphone prattling on about the cheese cubes? Well, rather than take that one guy’s megaphone away, we just gave everyone at the party their own megaphone. And guess what: that didn’t much improve things! Everyone had to shout to be heard, and the conversation morphed into a game of telephone, of everyone shouting variations of the same snippets of language, phrases, slogans. The effect is so disorienting that after a long period of scrolling through social media you’re likely to feel a profound sense of vertigo.Not only that: the people screaming the loudest still get the most attention. And it was in this setting that the guy with the loudest megaphone, the most desperate, keening need for attention in perhaps the entire history of the United States, rose to power.It is, sadly, at this point that I am forced to talk at some length about Donald Trump. You simply cannot write about how the rise of attention as the most valuable resource has changed our politics without writing about Trump. He is the political figure who most fully exploited the new rules of the attention age. He seemed to sense intuitively – born of a combination of his experience with the New York City tabloids and his own psychological needs – that attention is all that matters.This is not typically true for politicians. Yes, they need to attract attention to have sufficient name recognition, but that is just a first step. A politician needs attention as a means of getting people to like him and vote for him. Of course, if you are only concerned with maximising the amount of attention you receive, there are all kinds of things you can do to get that attention. The problem is that, in the traditional model, not all attention is good. There are ways to get attention – running through your district naked – that are foolproof for the limited goal of getting attention, but would probably hurt you in your attempt to persuade your neighbours to vote for you.Trump’s approach to politics ever since the summer of 2015, when he entered the presidential race, is the equivalent of running naked through the neighbourhood: repellent but transfixing. In that race to become the Republican nominee, his competitors found the entire spectacle infuriating. No matter what they did – unveil a new plan for tax policy, give a speech on America’s role in the world – the questions they faced were about Donald Trump. Tim Miller, who worked on Jeb Bush’s campaign, recounts that he had a staff member track in a spreadsheet all of the media mentions of Bush. By far the biggest category was mentions of Bush reacting to Trump. Trump was the attentional sun around which all the other candidates orbited, and they knew it. There was no way to escape the gravitational pull, no matter what they did. And of course whatever you said about Trump – criticism, sarcasm, praise – it was all just further directing attention to Trump.Unlike love or recognition, attention can be positive or negative. Trump cares deeply about being admired, sure, but he’ll take attention in whatever form he can get. He’ll take condemnation, rebuke, disgust, as long as you’re thinking about him. Being willing to court negative attention at the cost of persuasion is really Donald Trump’s one simple trick for hacking attention-age public discourse.View image in fullscreenThere was a deep logic to this approach. Trump intuited that if he drew attention to certain topics, even if he did it in an alienating way, the benefits of highlighting issues where he and the Republican party held a polling advantage would outweigh the costs. Here’s a concrete example: in 2016, polling tended to show that Republicans were more trusted on the issue of immigration than Democrats. Trump wanted to raise the amount of attention paid to the issue, and to that end he was constantly saying wild and hateful things on the topic. In the first few minutes of his very first speech, he accused the Mexican government of “sending” rapists and other criminals to the US, an accusation both ludicrous and offensive enough that it immediately led several businesses and organisations (including NBC, which aired The Apprentice) to cut ties with him. But that was just the beginning. As a standard part of his stump speech, he infamously promised to build a wall across the entire 2,000-mile expanse of the US-Mexico border and, even more absurdly, claimed he would make Mexico pay for it. In June of that year, a  Gallup poll found 66% of Americans were opposed to building a wall along the whole southern border.You would think, given those polling numbers, that Trump would not keep hammering the issue. But his continued insistence on the policy reliably attracted attention to the issue of immigration, in which, as a general matter, Republicans had an advantage over Democrats. When he attacked the Mexican-American heritage of a federal judge who was ruling on a lawsuit, it was despicable and bigoted, but also another opportunity to attract attention to immigration.Public attention, particularly in a campaign, is zero sum: voters are going to have only a few things in mind when considering candidates, and which issues they are focused on will be one of them. At the end of the 2016 campaign, when Gallup asked voters to volunteer words they associated with each candidate and then rendered the responses as word clouds – with the size of the word corresponding to the frequency of response – Hillary Clinton’s word cloud was entirely dominated by “emails”, while Trump’s featured “Mexico” and “immigration” among the top responses. This is how Trump won his narrow electoral college victory – by (among many other factors) pulling off the improbable trade of persuasion for attention, likability for salience.In 2024, Trump more or less reprised this model. While polling showed his popularity and approval edging up a bit from what it was during his presidency, his negatives – as pollsters call them – remained high for a successful candidate. Certainly higher than, say, Mitt Romney in 2012. But once again his domination of public attention was near total. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, enthusiastically threw himself into Trump’s campaign using both $250m dollars in direct campaign expenditures and the manipulation and domination of the attention platform X. Recent polling shows that Musk’s favourability has plummeted as his antics draw more attention, but in the end the attention is the point. It worked.As the old models for how to win attention and how to use it erode, we are left with a struggle for attention itself, a war of all against all, in every moment. Despite being embedded in the attention age, despite our lamentations of its effects, and our phone addictions, and our addled, distracted mental states, I think we all still retain an outdated model of how public conversation happens. We are still thinking in terms of “debate” – a back-and-forth, or a conversation, or discussion.But that is not at all what’s happening. Trump is a terrible debater in any classical understanding of the term. He doesn’t engage, he doesn’t construct logical refutations and rebuttals. In fact, it’s striking when you transcribe anything he says how syntactically odd it is, full of ellipses and self-interruptions. Often at the sentence level, what he is saying is nearly devoid of propositional content. What he does is shtick, salesman patter, Borscht Belt insult comedy and ad slogans. What he wants more than anything is for you to pay attention to him.Attentional imperatives feel as though they have fully swallowed informational ones. In ways large and small, we are seeing the erosion of the last vestiges of a functional attentional regime – one that would guide the basic mechanics of, say, selecting who should be the lone political figure elected by all citizens to represent the country.Here’s an example. During the early months of 2024, Joe Biden’s policy of full US support for Israel’s military response to Hamas’s 7 October atrocity began to fracture the Democratic coalition, as the sheer monstrous reality of its effect on Gazan civilians became clear. This was all happening in a presidential election year in which the Republican party already had a de facto nominee in Donald Trump. Under those conditions, you expect a robust debate to emerge between the two likely nominees over this signature foreign policy issue. So what was Donald Trump’s position on US support for Israel’s Gaza offensive?He largely avoided articulating one. Usually, when asked about it, he would say: “If I were president this never would have happened,” and move on. And while it was clear he would be supportive of the Netanyahu government’s war efforts (saying he wanted to allow them to “finish the job”), the Trump campaign never presented any kind of position paper or comprehensive vision of its policy. Mostly, it was a bunch of often contradictory rhetorical gestures and evasions. Under those conditions, how exactly are voters supposed to even begin to evaluate what they would be voting for?Trump was able to get away with this at least in part because of the sharp decline in the ability of the political press to effectively focus national attention. In the past, it would use that power to ends I found maddening – focusing on trivial scandals or ephemeral horse-race questions – but as an institution, what used to be called the campaign press or the national political press did have the ability to commandeer the public’s attention.This shaped how campaigns campaigned and how candidates acted. In the summer of 2008, Vladimir Putin invaded Georgia. Both John McCain and Barack Obama, their respective party’s nominees, staked out positions on how to respond. The Republican McCain took a maximalist position of confrontation, while the Democrats’ Obama stressed diplomacy and working with allies to isolate Russia. The campaigns put out position papers, and the candidates gave speeches and organised background phone calls with reporters to flesh out their views.That kind of approach – here’s a pressing issue of the day, here’s where I stand on it – is almost entirely gone now. We have a country full of megaphones, a crushing wall of sound, the swirling lights of a 24/7 casino blinking at us, all part of a system minutely engineered to take our attention away from us for profit. Under these conditions anything resembling democratic deliberation seems not only impossible but increasingly absurd, like trying to meditate in a strip club. The promise of the information age was unparalleled access to every single last bit of human knowledge at every moment, and the reality is a collective civic mental life that permanently teeters on the edge of madness.Because focus is harder and harder to sustain in the attention age, it is thus more and more important. Which stories and issues obtain disproportionate public attention will have enormous consequences for how government functions and what choices our elected representatives will make.This simple truth has profound implications for our civic health. Because, to put it reductively, what gets attention is very different from what’s important for sustaining a flourishing society. This tension is the central challenge of working in the attention industry, as I do. We in the news business have, to borrow the phrase used to describe the work of the Federal Reserve, a dual mandate: we must keep people’s attention and tell them things that are important for self-governance in a democratic society. And like the Fed trying to keep both inflation and unemployment low, we must try to do both even when there’s a direct trade-off between the two.Here’s just one example of the challenge, repeated in some form or another nearly every single day of the 13 years I’ve been hosting a cable news show.On 18 June 2023, a small deep-ocean submersible called the Titan lost communications contact after it departed for a tour of the Titanic wreckage off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada, in the North Atlantic. The five passengers inside the minivan-size pod had about 96 hours of oxygen, and quickly a massive multinational rescue mission set out to find them before their air ran out.View image in fullscreenIt was immediately clear that this was going to be a huge story, particularly on TV news. It had a set of features that reliably grab and hold attention. First, there was the suspense inherent in the plight of the five passengers: what would happen to them? Situations in which people are trapped alive and rescuers race to save them always draw big audiences. Then there’s the general fascination with transport disasters – sunk ships, plane crashes – not to mention the fact that this was all taking place around the wreckage of the Titanic itself, probably the single most iconic disaster in history.And of course, the story did produce enormous audience demand and wall-to-wall coverage. But as the search dragged on, people began to rebel against the disproportionality of the coverage. During that very same week there had been another awful maritime disaster: a fishing boat filled with hundreds of migrants from Pakistan, Egypt and Syria capsized in the Mediterranean while trying to reach Italy. Hundreds of men, women and children died, all as a Greek coastguard ship watched nearby and did not rescue them. It was by no means the first such incident; this had become a gruesome regular occurrence in the Mediterranean.And yet the boat full of hundreds of migrants had received a tiny sliver of the coverage of the five people inside the Titan who, it would turn out, had died when it imploded early in its journey. As the coverage of the submersible took over the news cycle, there emerged another subgenre of pieces making this very point – that there was something profoundly dehumanising and wrong about so much attention being paid to the plight of five affluent tourists while hundreds of desperate migrants drowned in silence.Viewed coldly – and with as many years in the attention business as I have, I can’t help myself – the pieces about the double standard of the coverage were themselves pieces about the submersible, an attempt to capture the wind of attention gusting toward that story and then use it to power interest in another direction. When the New Republic ran one of the dozens of these pieces – “The media cares more about the Titanic sub than drowned migrants” – people noted that the New Republic itself hadn’t to date published any stories on the Greek migrant boat other than that one.Without concerted effort, habit and training, what we are drawn to focus on and what we believe to be worthy bear no relation to one another. They may sometimes overlap by happy accident, but they are more often than not as estranged as id and superego. We have a robust vocabulary to describe the category of things we find gripping but morally dubious: “titillating”, “lurid”, “prurient” and so on. This is the category that occupies an enormous amount of the attention economy. The lurid and titillating are what tend to drive the evening news; they are the stories that we now describe as clickbait and once called “tabloid”.There are consequences to where public attention flows. To go back to the two disasters at sea, once the story of the Titan’s loss of communication went public, an enormous search and rescue effort was undertaken by the US, Canadian and French governments. It’s hard to get a solid estimate on how much money the governments spent, but it was certainly millions of dollars. These are real material commitments that come as a direct result of the attentional imperatives. No such concerted rescue effort attended the capsized migrant boat.This is just one example, but it serves as a kind of allegory. In nearly all areas of policy, from the smallest local township to the federal government, money follows attention, and the literal cost of a life depends in no small part on how attention-grabbing the death was.Nowhere is the problem of attention more obvious and urgent than when it comes to climate change. According to our best estimates, it’s probably the hottest it’s been on the planet in 150,000 years. The effects of climate change are visible, sometimes spectacularly so, but climate change itself – the slow, steady, invisible accretion of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere – is literally imperceptible to human faculties. It is almost the opposite of a siren. It evades our attention rather than compelling it. None of our five senses can detect it.It’s striking that when film-maker Adam McKay wanted to make a Hollywood blockbuster film about climate change, one that had to hold viewers’ attention for two-plus hours, he chose to tell the story via an allegory about a comet speeding toward Earth that would destroy the planet and extinguish all human life. One of the most dramatic moments in Don’t Look Up is when the comet appears in the sky. People notice it, traffic stops, and drivers and passengers emerge from their cars to gaze up in awe and terror. I loved this movie, but the thing about climate change is precisely that it never gives us that specific moment. We have charts to look at and pictures of droughts, and wildfire smoke, and glaciers calving. Heatwaves shut down airports and kill people in their homes. But we can’t see or hear the actual thing itself. There is no single moment, like the moment the comet appears in the sky, or the moment the second plane flew into the twin towers, that will be the moment when we realise the scale of the disaster.Climate activists around the world have taken increasingly desperate measures to produce the kind of spectacle that will focus public attention. Some have taken to parking themselves in the middle of a road, binding themselves to each other with their arms handcuffed together inside tubes, refusing to move. Traffic builds up, people get angry and eventually news cameras arrive. Then there are the museum protests in which a few climate activists enter a museum and throw soup or paint on a famous work of art, which seem designed to create a sense of shock and revulsion. Other protests have disrupted concerts or sports contests.View image in fullscreenThe reaction to these efforts is almost uniformly negative: this doesn’t help the cause! This only alienates people who view you as weirdos and freaks, negatively polarising precisely the people you want to persuade! Which: fine. Sure. But the sheer, desperate, cri de coeur, FOR-THE-LOVE-OF-GOD-PAY-ATTENTION thrust of these demonstrations captures something objectively true: we’re hurtling toward disaster and no one seems to be giving it anywhere near the level of attention we should be.These disruptions are designed to make the same kind of trade that Trump pulled off so successfully. What good is persuasion if no one’s paying attention? Who cares if people have a negative reaction so long as they have some reaction? You can be polite and civil and ignored, or you can fuck shit up and make people pay attention. Those are the choices in the Hobbesian war of all against all in the attention age, and it’s very hard for me to blame these people for choosing the latter. Adapted from The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource by Chris Hayes, published by Scribe More