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      ‘Everything is possible’: a worrying new book explores the danger of disinformation

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      You might not have heard of Rosanne Boyland. She made the 10-hour drive from Kennesaw, Georgia, to Washington on 5 January 2021. The next day, the 34-year-old died after losing consciousness in the crush of a mob of Donald Trump supporters as it surged against US Capitol police. She would never have been there, her sister said later, “if it weren’t for all the misinformation”.The tragedy opens Barbara McQuade’s new book, Attack from Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America. The NBC News and MSNBC legal analyst explores how the deliberate spreading of lies disguised as truth has been weaponised to consolidate power in the hands of the few, undermine legal structures and drive voters such as Boyland. It is both cause and symptom of the US’s corrosive polarisation.A former national security prosecutor, McQuade has seen the threat of disinformation evolve from al-Qaida to Islamic State to cyber-attacks from Russia. Teaching at the University of Michigan Law School, where she is a professor, she had her students study special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on 2016 election interference by Russia.“I was fascinated by the details of accounts that were created by Russian operatives with names like Blacktivist or Heart of Texas posing as grassroots activists on the right or the left or various groups, and then taking very divisive stands on various issues just in an effort to sow discord,” McQuade, 59, says in an interview in the lobby of a Washington hotel.It was then Trump’s bogus “stop the steal” movement in 2020, based on the big lie of widespread voter fraud rejected in more than 60 lawsuits and by his own attorney general, that inspired her to write the book. It considers lessons learned ahead of a potential repeat in 2024 as the US braces for a Joe Biden v Trump rematch.“We will definitely get interference from foreign adversaries, including Russia and probably China, North Korea, maybe Iran, but there is a domestic part of this now where we are already hearing Donald Trump talk about how voting by mail is unreliable and laying the groundwork so that, if and when he loses, and there are more Democrats who have voted by mail than Republicans, he will have credibility.View image in fullscreen“He will say: ‘See, I won the election and then it all flipped for me. It was fraud.’ The same strategy that he used in in 2020. I don’t know if he’ll have new strategies but ‘stop the steal’ was a classic disinformation influence campaign based on no evidence whatsoever.”Trump commentary falls into categories. Some stop short of drawing comparisons with Adolf Hitler, perhaps wary of Godwin’s law, which holds that as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches. Others dive in, arguing that some aspects of Trump’s authoritarianism, nativism and charisma do evoke the Nazi tyrant in enlightening ways.McQuade goes there with an “authoritarian playbook” charting a brief history of disinformation from Hitler and Benito Mussolini to Jair Bolsonaro and Trump and noting the tactics: demonising the other, seducing with nostalgia, silencing critics, muzzling the media, condemning the courts and stoking violence.She elaborates: “Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that there are two things that are essential to effective propaganda. One was a very simple repeatable message because when people hear a message repeated again and again – and start hearing it from different sources – they begin to believe it to be true.“The other is that the bigger the lie, the more likely it is to be believed. All of us are guilty of white lies from time to time that we might say out of kindness. My sister might say your hair looks fine when she means anything but, or my husband might say to me, no, dear, that dress doesn’t make you look fat.“They’re saying these things out of kindness, even though they might be technically lying. As Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, most people would not ever imagine that anyone could have the audacity to lie about something that is so significant – he was talking about the role of Jewish people in society, for example.“But here the big lie for Trump was that the election has been stolen because people say: ‘How could you possibly pull that off? It’s so ridiculous.’ That’s part of what gives it its credibility and he knows that so I worry we’re going to begin to hear that again, and there are a significant number of Americans who still believe that the 2020 election was stolen. There will always be people who are manipulated by those strategies.”Now the history of the January 6 insurrection itself is being rewritten, with the rioters recast as “patriots” and, if tried and imprisoned, as “hostages” whom Trump is promising to pardon if elected. Opinion polls show that more than a third of Americans believe that Biden’s election was illegitimate; Republicans are more sympathetic to the US Capitol rioters now than they were in 2021.McQuade says with some dismay: “They assaulted people, they brought weapons, they broke windows, they spread faeces on the walls of the temple of democracy, they carried Confederate flags in there. Now to refer to it as legitimate political discourse or ordinary tourist activity, and then to refer to people who have been arrested, charged and imprisoned for their crimes as hostages, is absolutely a brand of disinformation. I’m curious to see how many people will continue to fall for that in this election.”View image in fullscreenTrump svengali Steve Bannon, an arch election denier and vaccine conspiracy theorist, once memorably declared that the real opposition was the media and the way to deal with them was to “flood the zone with shit”. This brings to mind the Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin. McQuade cites the Russian author and journalist Peter Pomerantsev on “the fog of unknowability”.She explains: “Everything is possible and nothing matters, and so everything’s PR because people begin to doubt the very existence of truth. One day Putin might say the missiles were shot by Ukraine; the next day the missiles were shot by Russia; the next day the missiles were shot by Nato.“People don’t know what to think and consistency doesn’t matter. In fact, inconsistency is part of the point, because first people become angry and then they become cynical and then finally they become numb and disengaged from politics altogether and so that’s a very dangerous place for democracy.“The other thing that people think in Russia is that truth is for suckers: you should just get what you can while you can and everybody is corrupt, which is one of the things that causes Donald Trump to constantly be suggesting that the Bidens are corrupt – if everybody is corrupt, then it gives you permission to overlook Donald Trump’s corruption, right?“‘Well, they’re all corrupt. Who knows what to believe? All these investigations are themselves weaponised and corrupt so I might as well look for someone who is strong, who will advance my values despite all of his corruption.’ This normalisation of corruption is something that is part of it all as well.”How has it come to this? McQuade, who was born in Detroit and lives Ann Arbor, Michigan, identifies three central causes. First, the delivery mechanism of disinformation has changed. For centuries, the deceiver had to rely on word of mouth or leaflets or planting a false story, perhaps in a foreign newspaper, in the hope that someone would pick it up and pass it on. Now someone can spread a lie at the push of a button.“Social media is a wonderful tool and can connect us to people all over the world in wonderful ways, but can also be used as a weapon when people want to and so it has been a really efficient vehicle for delivering disinformation,” says the author. “They’re completely unaccountable and we have ceded all of our power on social media to a handful of young bro billionaires, whose interest, of course, is in their own profits, not in the social good.”Second, we are living through the worst political divisions in America since the 1861-1865 civil war. McQuade reckons it began with the combative, attention-grabbing Republican Newt Gingrich in the 1990s, and has grown as parties concentrate on turning out their bases rather than finding common ground. With elections framed as an existential struggle between good and evil, voters demand political purity. “If my tribe says X then I say X too, even if I don’t believe X to be true.”Third, there is anxiety about a changing world: the climate crisis, refugees and border security, economic shifts with potential job losses. It is fertile soil for demagogues who promise that they alone can fix it. “We have leaders who want to use that to stoke fear because they perceive that that will be in their own political interest to attract those voters who are concerned about those changes and attract them into their own fold.“It’s a combination of those three things that Donald Trump has exploited in this country like no one we’ve ever seen. I don’t think that he’s necessarily a political genius, but I do think he’s a conman and a marketing genius who knows how to sell things. He’s a huckster and he has taken advantage of this moment for personal and political gain.”The huckster’s rise nearly a decade ago caught the media off guard. The old and laudable rules of balance, impartiality and not editorialising no longer seemed to work when one candidate was so blatantly mendacious. The New York Times newspaper broke the seal in 2016 with the headline: Trump Gives Up a Lie but Refuses to Repent. But as another election looms, McQuade worries that journalists have still not figured out how to cover him.“That which is novel is always newsworthy, that which is controversial is always newsworthy, and so they present those things. But in an effort to present both sides of a story and in a tradition of not calling people liars, they have allowed Donald Trump and his supporters to manipulate them and play them. They’ll just say he made a statement that is not backed up by evidence; say he’s lying! You gotta say it out loud.”View image in fullscreenBut Attack from Within is not a letter of surrender or obituary of America. McQuade offers solutions for countering disinformation and maintaining the rule of law, such as making domestic terrorism a federal crime, reviving local journalism, criminalising doxxing (the act of revealing identifying information about someone online) and considering a ban on online anonymous accounts.The former US attorney for the eastern district of Michigan urges politicians to get ahead of the curve of artificial intelligence. “I hope that our Congress can do something which we failed to do with social media, which is get ahead of it, because if it can put things in place before they create havoc, it’s much easier than trying to react after the fact.”Individual citizens, she says, can gain skills be critical consumers of social media. “We can educate ourselves and take responsibility by doing things like, when we read an article, don’t rely just on the headline; we should actually read the article before we forward it to someone else.“We should look for second sources of a story; if there’s an outrageous story, someone else will be reporting it. If there is data in a story, we should look at that data. How big was the sample set? Was it a sample of three or a sample of 3m? That makes a difference. Were the results of this study a causation or just coincidence with an outcome? We need to do that.”McQuade also calls for increasing media literacy in schools and a revival of teaching civics rather than focusing on test scores. “Civics education is important for all of us, because when someone explains to you how the separation of powers works and how the three branches of government work, it is impossible to believe that a president could be immune from prosecution. We all need that education.”
      Attack from Within is out now More

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      Book bans in US schools and libraries surged to record highs in 2023

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      More books were banned in 2023 in US schools and libraries than any other year for which records have been kept, the American Library Association (ALA) reported on Thursday.Many of the books were targeted because they related to issues of LGBTQ+ communities or race, though the list was broad, including commonly taught novels such as Lord of the Flies and To Kill a Mockingbird.The group documented 4,240 unique book titles targeted for censorship in 2023, which was more than the previous two years combined: 2,571 in 2022 and 1,651 in 2021. There was a 65% spike in 2023 over 2022.It also recorded 1,247 documented demands to ban various library books, teaching materials, and other resources last year.Emily Drabinski, the ALA president, called book bans “an attack on our freedom to read”.“The books being targeted again focus on LGBTQ+ and people of color,” she said.“Our communities and our country are stronger because of diversity. Libraries that reflect their communities’ diversity promote learning and empathy that some people want to hide or eliminate.”The number of titles targeted for censorship also increased. The amount rose by 92% in public libraries and 11% at schools.ALA said it will release the list of most commonly targeted books in April but some of the most challenged book titles in 2022 were Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe, All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M Johnson, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, and The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky.The book ban movement has grown in recent years across the US, particularly in Republican-led states, as religious-political activism gains strength.Seventeen states saw attempts to ban more than 100 books: Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia and Wisconsin.“Libraries are vital institutions to each and every community in this country, and library professionals, who have dedicated their lives to protecting our right to read, are facing threats to their employment and well-being,” Drabinski said. More

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      Brett Kavanaugh knows truth of alleged sexual assault, Christine Blasey Ford says in book

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      The US supreme court justice Brett Kavanaugh is not a “consummately honest person” and “must know” what really happened on the night more than 40 years ago when he allegedly sexually assaulted Christine Blasey Ford, his accuser writes in an eagerly awaited memoir.A research psychologist from northern California, Ford was thrust into the spotlight in September 2018 as Kavanaugh, a Bush aide turned federal judge, became Donald Trump’s second conservative court nominee. Her allegations almost derailed Kavanaugh’s appointment and created headlines around the world.Ford’s memoir, One Way Back, will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.“The fact is, he was there in the room with me that night in 1982,” Ford writes. “And I believe he knows what happened. Even if it’s hazy from the alcohol, I believe he must know.“Once he categorically denied my allegations as well as any bad behavior from his past during a Fox News interview, I felt more certainty than ever that after my experience with him, he had not gone on to become the consummately honest person befitting a supreme court justice.”Kavanaugh’s nomination became mired in controversy after a Washington Post interview in which Ford said Kavanaugh, while drunk, sexually assaulted her at a party in Montgomery county, Maryland, when they were both in high school.“I thought he might inadvertently kill me,” Ford, then 51, told the Post. “He was trying to attack me and remove my clothing.”Kavanaugh vehemently denied the accusation, helping fuel hearing-room rancor not seen since the 1991 confirmation of Clarence Thomas, a rightwinger accused of sexually harassing a co-worker, Anita Hill.Supported by Republicans and Trump, Kavanaugh rode out the storm to join Thomas on the court. Trump would later add another conservative, Amy Coney Barrett, tipping the court 6-3 to the right. That court has since passed down major rightwing rulings, most prominently removing the federal right to abortion.In her book, Ford says she thought Kavanaugh might “step down to avoid putting his family through an investigation or further scrutiny”, adding that she wanted to tell him he should “save us both the trouble”, because “I don’t want this as much as you don’t want this”.She has been asked, she says, what she would have done if Kavanaugh had “reached out and apologised”.She writes: “Who would he be apologising to – me? The country? What would he be apologising for – that night? The harassment [of Ford by Trump supporters] around the testimony?“All I can guess is that if he’d come to me, really leveled with me, and said, ‘I don’t remember this happening, but it might have, and I’m so sorry,’ it might have been a significant, therapeutic moment for survivors in general … I might’ve wobbled a bit. I might have thought, ‘You know what, he was a jackass in high school but now he’s not.’“But when my story came out and he flat-out denied any possibility of every single thing I said, it did alleviate a little of my guilt. For me, the question of whether he had changed was answered. Any misgivings about him being a good person went away.”Ford says she decided to press through the difficulties of coming forward – meeting Democratic senators opposed to Kavanaugh, being grilled by Republicans supporting him, becoming famous herself – because of the importance of the court.She writes: “Honestly, if it hadn’t been the supreme court – if my attacker had been running for a local office, for example – I probably wouldn’t have said anything.Calling this “a sad, scary thing to admit”, Ford adds: “But this was a job at one of our most revered institutions, which we have historically held in the highest esteem. That’s what I learned at school.”Saying she was “thinking and behaving according to principle”, she adds: “I was under the impression (delusion?) that almost everyone else viewed it from the same perspective.“Wasn’t it inarguable that a supreme court justice should be held to the highest standard? A presidency you could win, but to be a supreme court justice, you needed to live your perfection. These nine people make decisions that affect every person in the country. I figured the application process should be as thorough as possible, and perhaps I could be a letter of (non)reference.”Ford also describes occasions on which she discussed the alleged attack as Kavanaugh rose to prominence. As well as conversations in therapy reported by the Post, she cites others triggered by high-profile events.Among such moments, Ford says, were the 1991 Thomas hearings in which Hill was brutally grilled by senators of both parties; a 2016 criminal case in which a Stanford swimmer was convicted of sexual assault but given a light sentence; and the #MeToo movement of 2017, in which women’s stories of sexual assault led to convictions of prominent men.After Kavanaugh was named as a potential supreme court nominee, Ford contacted Anna Eshoo, her Democratic California congresswoman, and the Post. She may have inadvertently leaked her identity, she writes, by contacting a tip line using her own phone. Either way, she was soon at the centre of a political hurricane.“I never, ever wanted [Kavanaugh’s] family to suffer,” Ford writes, adding: “When my allegations came out publicly, the media started reporting that he was getting threats. It troubled me a lot.“Then I remembered that I’d already had to move to a hotel because of the threats to me and my family. Again and again I thought, ‘Why is he putting us all through this? Why can’t he call those people off? Say something – anything – to condemn the harassment happening on both sides?”Kavanaugh, she writes, was at the mercy of rightwing interests pushing for his confirmation. Ultimately, she says, he should have expected “a thorough review of [his] entire history to be part of” becoming a justice.“If you can’t handle that,” Ford writes, “then maybe you’re not qualified for the job.” More

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      Aide tried to stop Trump praising Hitler – by telling him Mussolini was ‘great guy’

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      Donald Trump’s second White House chief of staff tried to stop him praising Adolf Hitler in part by trying to convince the then president Benito Mussolini, the Italian fascist dictator, was “a great guy in comparison”.“He said, ‘Well, but Hitler did some good things,’” the retired marines general John Kelly told Jim Sciutto of CNN in an interview for a new book.“I said, ‘Well, what?’ And he said, ‘Well, [Hitler] rebuilt the economy.’ But what did he do with that rebuilt economy? He turned it against his own people and against the world. And I said, ‘Sir, you can never say anything good about the guy. Nothing. I mean, Mussolini was a great guy in comparison.”Kelly, a retired US Marine Corps general, was homeland security secretary in the Trump administration before becoming Trump’s second chief of staff. Resigning at the end of 2018, he eventually became a public opponent of his former boss.Sciutto is a CNN anchor and national security analyst. His new book, The Return of Great Powers, will be published on Tuesday. CNN published a preview on Monday.Kelly told Sciutto it was “pretty hard to believe” Trump “missed the Holocaust” in his assessment of Hitler, “and pretty hard to understand how he missed the 400,000 American GIs that were killed in the European theatre” of the second world war.“But I think it’s more … the tough guy thing.”Trump’s liking for authoritarian leaders, in particular Vladimir Putin of Russia, is well known. His remarks to Kelly about Hitler – like his former practice of keeping a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bed – have been reported before.But Sciutto’s recounting of his conversation with Kelly comes amid resurgent fears over Trump’s authoritarian leanings, with Trump the presumptive Republican presidential nominee despite facing 91 criminal charges and multimillion-dollar civil defeats, and having seen off attempts to disqualify him for office.Kelly’s remarks to Sciutto were published shortly after Trump welcomed to his Florida home Viktor Orbán, the strongman leader of Hungary.Singing Trump’s praises, Orbán said that if Trump defeats Joe Biden for re-election, the US would not “give a penny” more in aid to Ukraine in its fight against Russian invaders.Kelly told Sciutto Trump “thought Putin was an OK guy and Kim [Jong-un] was an OK guy … to him, it was like we were goading these guys. ‘If we didn’t have Nato, then Putin wouldn’t be doing these things.’”Trump recently said that if re-elected, he will encourage Russia to attack Nato members Trump deems not to pay enough into the alliance.Condemning those remarks as “dumb, shameful and un-American”, Biden has sought to portray Trump as a threat to world security as well as US democracy.Kelly told Sciutto: “The point is, [Trump] saw absolutely no point in Nato. He was [also] just dead set against having troops in South Korea, again, a deterrent force, or having troops in Japan, a deterrent force” to North Korea.Kelly was not the only general to fill a civil role in Trump’s administration. James Mattis, also a marine, was Trump’s first secretary of defense while HR McMaster, from the army, was Trump’s second national security adviser.Kelly told Sciutto Trump thought US generals would prove as loyal to him as German generals did to Hitler.“He would ask about the loyalty issues,” Kelly said, but “when I pointed out to him the German generals as a group were not loyal to [Hitler], and in fact tried to assassinate him a few times, he didn’t know that.“He truly believed, when he brought us generals in, that we would be loyal – that we would do anything he wanted us to do.”A Trump spokesperson told CNN Kelly had “beclowned” himself and should “seek professional help”.Kelly said: “My theory on why [Trump] likes the dictators so much is that’s who he is.“Every incoming president is shocked that they actually have so little power without going to the Congress, which is a good thing. It’s civics 101, separation of powers, three equal branches of government.“But in his case, he was shocked that he didn’t have dictatorial-type powers to send US forces places or to move money around within the budget. And he looked at Putin and Xi [Jinping, of China] and that nutcase in North Korea as people who were like him in terms of being a tough guy.” More

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      The Lede review: Calvin Trillin on the golden age of American reporting

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      For decades, Calvin Trillin has been one the most celebrated journalists in New York. This splendid collection of his pieces is filled with reminders of what makes him special: he is equally good at the serious stuff and “pieces meant to amuse”.The press is the subject that knits these stories together. It occurred to Trillin that these articles “amounted to a picture from multiple angles of what the press has been like” since he entered the game. Many are from the 1960s, 70s and 80s. They provide the flavor of the glory days of print journalism, when newsstands were stuffed with magazines and papers written by giants like Murray Kempton, Molly Ivins and Edna Buchanan – and giants in their own minds, like RW Apple Jr – each of whom gets their due here, in Trillin’s 32nd book.His title, The Lede, is the coin of the realm for every old-fashioned scribbler. Trillin sets the tone on page four:
      A veterinarian prescribed antibiotics Monday for a camel that lives behind an Iberville Parish truck stop after a Florida woman told law officers that she bit the 600-pound animal’s genitalia after it sat on her when she and her husband entered its enclosure to retrieve their deaf dog.
      Every good lede leaves the reader with a certain amount of mystery. Trillin points to this one: “While the veterinarian was caring for the camel, was anyone attending to that Florida woman?”The book is replete with the best lines of other journalists but Trillin’s phrases are the funniest, like the one he wrote after Time Warner announced that the magazine that gave the company half its name was to be “spun off – a phrase that to me has always conjured up a business enterprise caught in the final cycle of a giant washing machine, with desks and office machines flying through the air and middle-management types being blown away, head over heels, like so many tumbleweeds”.Or this one, describing Richard Nixon’s difficulties “with trying to buy an apartment in East Side co-ops that persist in treating him as if he were Jewish or a tap dancer”.Time is one of the places Trillin has labored. In the 60s, all its writers were men and all the researchers were women. For one of scores of beguiling details, Trillin quotes the biography of one Time founder, Briton Hadden, which asserted that he designed the system with the idea that “putting a male writer and a female researcher together in a quasi-adversarial situation would create a sexual dynamic that could lend energy to the process”.Trillin wrote a much-loved novel, Floater, about his Time experiences. It describes one of the researcher’s duties as finding “some reason why any sentence suspected of being even remotely graceful must be changed in a way that makes it boring or awkward”. (When I was a reporter at the New York Times its copy editors had exactly the same habit, which was a big reason I quit.)RW Apple Jr was a national political reporter, a Vietnam correspondent and London bureau chief for the Times, equally famous for his scoops and the size of his expense account. Trillin’s profile begins with the book that made Apple famous, Gay Talese’s portrait of the Times, The Kingdom and the Power. Talese reported that Apple boasted that he personally killed a few Vietcong, which “led an older reporter to say, ‘Women and children, I presume.’”Trillin was chairman of the Yale Daily News and Apple chairman of the Daily Princetonian when they met, in 1956. Apple was kicked out of Princeton a second time “after he began to spend every waking hour” at the paper. “By his standards, I have occasionally acknowledged to him, I failed to throw myself wholeheartedly into the job of running a college newspaper,” Trillin wrote. “I graduated.”The book celebrates Kempton and Ivins, two of my favorite journalists, more wholeheartedly.Kempton’s extraordinary erudition made colleagues “look forward to a courtroom recess” when he “might muse on some human characteristic that somehow linked, say, Montaigne and Bessie Smith and [New York crime boss] Frank Costello”. Kempton “was uncanny in his ability to find some way in which almost anyone who had been smitten was morally superior to those who had done the smiting”.Ivins was celebrated for skewering Texas politicians, but here Trillin remembers Paul Krugman’s description of her prescience after she died in 2007. Krugman recalled that when most reporters swallowed the Bush administration’s fantasy that American invaders of Iraq would be greeted as liberators, Ivins identified the real danger: “The problem is what happens after we win. The country is 20 percent Kurd, 20 percent Sunni and 60 percent Shiite. Can you say, ‘Horrible three-way civil war’?’”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrillin has plenty of serious things to say about reporting, including the dangers faced by journalists who mistake themselves for the people they’re covering. “You could argue that reporters, no matter how much money they make, forget at their peril that they are essentially cabin-class people traveling first class on an upgrade,” he writes. “When they acquire protective feelings toward the important people they enjoy seeing socially, they tend to get scooped.”Like many great reporters, Trillin’s principles were forged in the civil rights movement, which he covered for Time. This collection ends with a tremendous recollection of those years – and the limited relevance of objectivity in the coverage of that story.“I didn’t pretend that we were covering a struggle in which all sides – the side that thought, for instance, that all American citizens had the right to vote and the side that thought that people who acted on such a belief should have their homes burned down – had an equally compelling case to make,” Trillin writes.As America barrels towards a showdown between one party committed to democracy and another addled by racism and xenophobia, the usefulness of objectivity in an age like this is becoming more questionable every day.
      The Lede is published in the US by Random House More

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      The Lie Detectives: Trump, US politics and the disinformation damage done

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      Most of Joe Biden’s past supporters see him as too old. An 81-year-old president with an unsteady step is a turn-off. But Donald Trump, Biden’s malignant, 77-year-old predecessor, vows to be a dictator for “a day”, calls for suspending the constitution and threatens Nato. “Russia, if you’re listening”, his infamous 2016 shout-out to Vladimir Putin, still haunts us eight years on. Democracy is on the ballot again.Against this bleak backdrop, Sasha Issenberg delivers The Lie Detectives, an examination of disinformation in politics. It is a fitting follow-up to The Victory Lab, his look at GOTV (“getting out the vote”) which was published weeks before the 2012 US election.Issenberg lectures at UCLA and writes for Monocle. He has covered presidential campaigns for the Boston Globe and he co-founded Votecastr, a private venture designed to track, project and publish real-time results. Voting science, though, is nothing if not tricky. A little after 4pm on election day 2016, hours before polls closed, Votecastr calculations led Slate to pronounce: Hillary Clinton Has to Like Where She Stands in Florida.The Victory Lab and The Lie Detectives are of a piece, focused on the secret sauce of winning campaigns. More than a decade ago, Issenberg gave props to Karl Rove, the architect of George W Bush’s successful election drives, and posited that micro-targeting voters had become key to finishing first. He also observed that ideological conflicts had become marbled through American politics. On that front, there has been an acceleration. These days, January 6 and its aftermath linger but much of the country has moved on, averting its gaze or embracing alternative facts.In 2016, Issenberg and Joshua Green of Businessweek spoke to Trump campaign digital gurus who bragged of using the internet to discourage prospective Clinton supporters.“We have three major voter suppression operations under way,” Issenberg and Green quote a senior official as saying. “They’re aimed at three groups Clinton needs to win overwhelmingly: idealistic white liberals, young women and African Americans.”It was micro-targeting on steroids.The exchange stuck with Issenberg. “I thought back often to that conversation with the Trump officials in the years that followed,” he writes now. “I observed so much else online that was manufactured and perpetuated with a similarly brazen impunity.”In The Lie Detectives, Issenberg pays particular attention and respect to Jiore Craig and her former colleagues at Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, a leading Democratic polling and strategy firm founded by Stan Greenberg, Bill Clinton’s pollster. Issenberg also examines the broader liberal ecosystem and its members, including the billionaire Reid Hoffman, a founder of LinkedIn and PayPal. The far-right former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro and his “office of hate” come under the microscope too.Craig’s experience included more than a dozen elections across six continents. But until Trump’s triumph, she had not worked on a domestic race. To her, to quote Issenberg, US politics was essentially “a foreign country”. Nonetheless, Craig emerged as the Democrats’ go-to for countering disinformation.“It was a unique moment in time where everybody who had looked for an answer up until that point had been abundantly wrong,” Craig says. “The fact that I had to start every race in a new country with the building blocks allowed me to see things that you couldn’t.”No party holds a monopoly on disinformation. In a 2017 special election for US Senate in Alabama, Democratic-aligned consultants launched Project Birmingham, a $100,000 disinformation campaign under which Republicans were urged to cast write-in ballots instead of voting for Roy Moore, the controversial GOP candidate.The project posed as a conservative operation. Eventually, Hoffman acknowledged funding it, but disavowed knowledge of disinformation and said sorry. Doug Jones, the Democrat, won by fewer than 22,000 votes. The write-in total was 22,819.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMore recently, Steve Kramer, a campaign veteran working for Dean Phillips, a long-shot candidate for the Democratic nomination against Biden, launched an AI-generated robocall that impersonated the president.Comparing himself to Paul Revere and Thomas Paine, patriots who challenged the mother country, Kramer, who also commissioned a deepfake impersonation of Senator Lindsey Graham, said Phillips was not in on the effort. If the sorry little episode showed anything, it showed disinformation is here to stay.Under the headline Disinformation on steroids: is the US prepared for AI’s influence on the election?, a recent Guardian story said: “Without clear safeguards, the impact of AI on the election might come down to what voters can discern as real and not real.”Free speech is on the line. Last fall, the US court of appeals for the fifth circuit – “the Trumpiest court in America”, as Vox put it – unanimously held that Biden, the surgeon general, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the FBI violated the first amendment by seeking to tamp down on Covid-related misinformation.In the court’s view, social media platforms were impermissibly “coerced” or “significantly encouraged” to suppress speech government officials viewed as dangerously inaccurate or misleading. The matter remains on appeal, oral argument before the supreme court set for later this month.Issenberg reminds us that Trump’s current presidential campaign has pledged that a second Trump administration will bar government agencies from assisting any effort to “label domestic speech as mis- or dis-information”. A commitment to free speech? Not exactly. More like Putinism, US-style.According to Kash Patel, a Trump administration veteran and true believer, a second Trump administration will target journalists for prosecution.“We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media,” Patel told Steve Bannon, Trump’s former campaign chair and White House strategist. “Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We’re going to come after you.”Welcome to the Trump Vengeance tour.
      The Lie Detectives is published in the US by Columbia University’s Columbia Global Reports More

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      Find Me the Votes review: Fani Willis of Georgia, the woman who could still take down Trump

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      If this week’s hearing about Fani Willis’s affair with her assistant Nathan Wade has piqued America’s interest in the character of the Fulton county district attorney, Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman have written the perfect book for this moment.Isikoff has been a dogged investigator for the Washington Post, NBC and Yahoo, while his longtime friend and collaborator Klaidman is a former managing editor of Newsweek now a newly minted investigative reporter for CBS. Together they have produced the most readable and authoritative account to date of all of Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.At its center is a nuanced portrait of Willis, who at least until a couple of days ago appeared to be Trump’s most effective nemesis, having indicted him, his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and the former White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, as well as 16 other co-conspirators.Whether Willis’s affair with one of her principal assistants is a valid reason to force the presiding judge to dismiss her from the case remains to be seen. But the revelation seems to have been as much of a bombshell for her biographers as it was for everyone else.Contacted by the Guardian, both authors declined to predict the outcome of the current proceeding. But Isikoff sounded optimistic that Willis would survive this latest assault.“How did the relationship between Willis and Wade prejudice any of the other defendants?” Isikoff asked. “There is simply no evidence that it did.”Willis is a daughter of the civil rights movement. In the 1960s, her father, John C Floyd III, migrated from the politics of John F Kennedy and the non-violence of Martin Luther King Jr to the much tougher ideology of the Black Panther Party of Los Angeles, which he co-founded in 1967. After that he became a criminal defense and civil rights lawyer.Isikoff and Klaidman say Floyd’s odyssey gives us “a glimpse into his daughter’s pugnacious personality and her deep-seated loathing of bullies” – both of which were on prominent display when she defended herself in the hearing room.While it was her personal passion that brought Willis into an unwelcome spotlight, it was her own focus on allegations of sexual harassment against her previous boss and mentor that made her election as the first woman district attorney of Fulton county possible. Paul Howard became the first Black person to hold the job of Fulton county DA in 1996, and made Willis a star by giving her some of his Atlanta office’s most famous cases. She became famous as the lead prosecutor in an indictment of 35 public school officials for alleged violations of Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (Rico) Act. The Atlanta schools superintendent, six principals, two assistant principals and 14 teachers were accused of faking students’ test scores, in response to the requirements of No Child Left Behind.That law, championed by George W Bush, put schools at risk of losing federal aid if students didn’t meet minimum standards for success on standardized tests. All but one of the defendants was Black, which made the prosecution even more controversial. By the time Howard gave Willis the case she was chief of the office’s trial division. Isikoff and Klaidman say she proved a “hands-on micromanager” who “plunged into every detail of the case”. Its complexity turned out to be the perfect training for Willis to use the same Rico statute to go after Donald Trump and his co-conspirators.One of this book’s most important contributions is to remind us of the breadth and viciousness of the president’s efforts to undermine democracy – and the horrendous effects they had on the lives of decent, honest election officials in every swing state Trump lost.After multiple lawsuits alleging voter fraud were thrown out by nearly every judge who heard them, Trump famously turned his attention to the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, one of several Republicans whose resistance proved heroic. When Trump got Raffensperger and his assistants on the phone, they were shocked by how many QAnon conspiracy theories Trump seemed to have accepted as fact – just because so many of his supporters had retweeted them. A particular favorite of the president’s was the notion there had been 200,000 forged signatures on absentee ballots in Fulton county – even though the total number of absentee votes had been 148,319.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn the same call, Trump repeated the big lie that the Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Wandrea “Shaye” Moss had run between 18,000 and 56,000 bogus ballots through election scanners. Trump said Freeman was “known all over the internet”. This was the same lie promoted by Giuliani, which ultimately cost him a richly deserved verdict of $148m for libeling the two innocent women.In one of the many telling details of Isikoff and Klaidman’s book, the authors remind us that the other hero from that phone call was the Georgia deputy secretary of state, Jordan Fuchs.“Fuchs did what was arguably the single gutsiest and most consequential act of the entire post-election battle,” the authors believe. To protect her boss, she decided to tape the phone call – without telling Raffensperger. After the tape leaked to the Washington Post, it quickly became the single most powerful piece of evidence against the ex-president in any of the four prosecutions he is still facing.When you see all of Trump’s alleged crimes piled together in a single narrative, it is beyond belief that he remains the favorite of a majority of Republican primary voters. But these same facts should surely be enough to guarantee his defeat if he actually gets the chance to face the larger electorate in November.
      Find Me the Votes is published in the US by Twelve More

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      Biden ‘privately defiant’ over chaotic 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal, book says

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      Joe Biden is “privately defiant” that he made the right calls on the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in summer 2021, a new book reportedly says, even as the chaos and carnage that unfolded continues to be investigated in Congress.“No one offered to resign” over the withdrawal, writes Alexander Ward, a Politico reporter, “in large part because the president didn’t believe anyone had made a mistake. Ending the war was always going to be messy.”Ward’s book, The Internationalists: The Fight to Restore Foreign Policy After Trump, will be published next week. Axios reported extracts on Friday.Ward adds: “Biden told his top aides, [national security adviser Jake] Sullivan included, that he stood by them and they had done their best during a tough situation.”Ward quotes an unnamed White House official as saying: “There wasn’t even a real possibility of a shake-up.”The US invaded Afghanistan in October 2001, a month after the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington. The Taliban, which had sheltered the leader of al-Qaida, Osama bin Laden, was soon ousted but fighting never ceased.Figures for the total US death toll in the country since 2001 vary. The United States Institute of Peace, an independent body established by Congress, says that 2,324 US military personnel, 3,917 US contractors and 1,144 allied troops were killed during the conflict. More than 20,000 Americans were wounded.“For Afghans,” the institute goes on, “the statistics are nearly unimaginable: 70,000 Afghan military and police deaths, 46,319 Afghan civilians (although that is likely a significant underestimation) and some 53,000 opposition fighters killed. Almost 67,000 other people were killed in Pakistan in relation to the Afghan war.”Hundreds of thousands were displaced. Furthermore, according to the Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs at Brown University, “four times as many [US] service members have died by suicide than in combat in the post-9/11 wars [including Iraq and other campaigns], signaling a widespread mental health crisis”.Biden entered office determined to withdraw, and in late summer 2021 US forces pulled out, leaving the defense of the country to US-trained Afghan national forces.The Taliban swiftly overran that opposition, and soon scenes of chaos at Kabul airport dominated world news. Tens of thousands of Afghans who sought to leave, fearing Taliban reprisals after a 20-year US occupation, were unable to get out. More than 800 US citizens were left behind, notwithstanding Biden’s promise on 18 August that troops would stay until every US citizen who wanted to leave had done so.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWard, Axios said, quotes a senior White House official as saying: “There’s no one here who thinks we can meet that promise.”On 26 August, 13 US service members were killed in a suicide attack. Three days later, a US drone strike killed 10 Afghan civilians, seven of them children. No Americans faced disciplinary action over the strike, which a US air force inspector general called “an honest mistake”.According to Axios, Ward also details extensive infighting over the withdrawal between the Departments of State and Defense.Biden, Ward says, tended to favour the state department, having been chair of the Senate foreign affairs committee, and to be wary of the Pentagon, having been vice-president to Barack Obama through eight years of inconclusive war. More