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      Resistance to Misinformation Is Weakening on Twitter, a Report Found

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      Concerns about misinformation on Twitter have flared in the days since Elon Musk’s takeover on Oct. 27, pushing away advertisers, rattling researchers and increasing fears that conspiracy theories and false narratives could pollute the political discourse on the platform ahead of the midterm elections.Researchers at the Fletcher School at Tufts University said in a report that “early signs show the platform is heading in the wrong direction under his leadership — at a particularly inconvenient time for American democracy.”The researchers said they had tracked narratives about civil war, election fraud, citizen policing of voting, and allegations of pedophilia and grooming on Twitter from July through October. They said they had found that the discussion reflected a commitment to combating misinformation, hate speech and toxic ideas.“Post-Musk takeover, the quality of the conversation has decayed,” as more extremists and misinformation peddlers tested the platform’s boundaries, the researchers wrote.Before Mr. Musk took control of Twitter, posts pushing back against misinformation, hate and other toxic speech were usually many times greater than the original false or misleading posts, the Tufts researchers discovered.Conspiracy theories focused on unfounded allegations of pedophilia or “grooming,” which advance an anti-L.G.B.T.Q. message, have encountered less resistance from a Musk-led Twitter, the Tufts report found. Earlier spikes in the topic were accompanied by strong condemnation; after Oct. 28, researchers wrote, “the conversation deteriorated quickly” as users tested Twitter moderators by repeatedly writing “GROOMER,” in an echo of a coordinated campaign to spread antisemitic content as the platform adjusted to Mr. Musk.On Monday, with hours to go before the vote, Mr. Musk tweeted out a link to Twitter’s rules, which he said “will evolve over time.” Watchdog groups quickly noticed that the page did not explicitly address misinformation, although it did prohibit users from using the platform to manipulate or interfere in elections, employ misleading and deceptive identities or share harmful synthetic or manipulated media. A separate page about misinformation in Twitter’s “Help Center” section remained live.Fears about ads appearing in proximity to misinformation and other problematic posts have led General Mills, United Airlines and several other large companies to pause their spending on Twitter in recent days. Content moderation has sparked heated exchanges on Madison Avenue with and about Mr. Musk. More

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      Election Workers Have to Keep Volunteering to Do This

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      DURHAM, N.C. — One of the challenges of being alive right now is making sense of the threat to the American election system: It’s hard to determine, conclusively, how widespread that threat is, how much chaos and danger we’re living through and what to do next.How bad are things? In an October Reuters/Ipsos poll, 43 percent of voters said they worried about threats of violence or intimidation while voting. New York Times/Siena College polling has found that insofar as people worry about threats to democracy in the United States, they attribute the problem to the opposing party — an untenable situation that is tough to resolve. Recently, people have shown up, armed, to watch voter drop boxes. Many, many Republican candidates continue to advance false claims about the 2020 election. All over the country, election officials and workers have quit, citing threats and demands on them. One violent episode can alter individual lives forever, as well as reverberate through politics in deep and unexpected ways. You can picture a grim scenario in which voting and election work moves, like other facets of American life, into a permanent siege posture.Nobody really wants to live like that; nobody likes to think we could. But understanding the tangible, everyday scale of these problems — what’s changed and what hasn’t — genuinely isn’t easy.In endless tension with more abstract questions about the big picture is the practical reality that in a democratic republic, real people, with real lives, set up the voting equipment in a middle school gym somewhere, check you in, hand you a ballot, hand you a sticker, make sure the tabulator is empty before the count begins — the full battery of mundane procedures that start in your neighborhood and filter up through the county and the state and, in a presidential year, all the way up through the country.This fall, I spent two days in Durham, N.C., talking with four election workers with whom the county’s board of elections connected me. This ended up being as far from violence and conspiracy theories as you can get: drinking coffee outside in prime North Carolina fall weather, crystal clear mornings and warm afternoons, talking about how people got involved and how the process unfolds in the days leading up to Election Day.The four workers, who are paid, ranged in age from 30s to 70s. Two signed up in more recent election cycles, and two started working at the suggestion of a friend more than a decade ago. All worked early voting and Election Day before. We talked about things like provisional ballots, process checklists and local safeguards. The tenor here was brightness and practicality.One of them said that if someone has concerns about election fraud, one way to alleviate the feeling, to trust elections again, would be to undergo the formal training to be a poll worker or watcher and to see the whole thing unfold. The cut-and-dried nature of the process appeals to him. “Like, here are the laws you must follow. Here are the rules and the process that you must go through,” he said.Asked what she wanted people to know about election workers in Durham, one woman, who’s been working elections since she moved there in the 1970s and whose two sisters are election workers where they live, too, said, “They’re everyday people. A lot of them are retired. A lot of them love the system. They’ve been working for years, so they enjoy doing the work. They know the work.” She said she likes the variety of the tasks, meeting workers and voters and seeing the process at the end, confirming the accuracy of the count. Another election worker mentioned that he liked the community nature of the endeavor, in which workers sometimes bring Bojangles and coffee to the precinct for the group.One mentioned the possibility of a violent episode and the bewildering question of what she would do if that happened at her site. But this was just one possible scenario she thinks about and plans for. “When we start a shift, I always like to start with: The voter walks in, what is that voter’s experience?” In precincts where she works, she said, she advises everyone to put down their book or magazine, even if the voter isn’t at their station, to ensure a sense of seriousness and value in the room. “That’s the only reason we’re there.”This is, probably, in the past two decades of American life, the more median experience with voting and election work: commonplace, uneventful, mechanical, populated by your neighbors. But we live in 2022. People like this in other cities or towns have become the subject of conspiracy theories and threats, frequently over a politician’s misrepresentation of a routine voting or counting procedure.This is a really big country. What’s happening in one place isn’t always happening in another, which is what makes it difficult to genuinely understand if the problems we have right now are temporary, existential or somewhere in between. In a democratic republic, we all are joined by both law and broader, harder-to-pin-down concepts like trust and fear. Preserving the uneventful and calm aspects of an election system while still recognizing its flaws and vulnerabilities is difficult in a moment of possibly deep peril.Ultimately, elections are administered by regular people who opt into the process. This prospect could make you nervous or, depending on your perspective, could deeply reassure you. The system requires people to continue to want to do this, and the fact that we’re talking about violence and intimidation at all highlights how fragile this arrangement could be. In North Carolina, for a couple of days, real life briefly felt normal: talking with four people about how the system works, about their lives, about doing that work and about voters who walk through the door.Katherine Miller is a staff writer and editor in Opinion.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      GOP Begins Ballot Watching Push Ahead of Election Day

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      Tedium and suspicion mix as skeptical observers monitor the largely monotonous work at a sprawling elections office near Las Vegas.NORTH LAS VEGAS, Nev. — The questions began soon after the doors opened to the public at a sprawling elections office inside a warehouse, and they kept coming until the sky was dark and a cold wind was blowing outside. Hundreds of thousands of ballots for Clark County, which encompasses Las Vegas, are processed, sorted and counted here, against a backdrop of mountains and desert.Because elections in America are more fraught than ever, the scrutiny of ballot counting now starts well before Election Day, and the legal challenges have already begun.The Republican Party and allied groups, many seized by Donald J. Trump’s falsehoods about fraud in elections, are training monitors around the country to spot what they see as irregularities at absentee ballot counting centers. The monitors are told to take copious notes, which could be useful for potential court challenges, raising the prospect of a replay in state and local elections of Mr. Trump’s attempt to use the courts to overturn his loss two years ago.The activity has not produced reports of major disruptions or problems. But on Thursday, local officials were taking no chances at the vote counting center in Clark County: For almost every observer, the elections office had an “ambassador” to escort and observe the observers. Suspicions ran high.“What are those boxes for?” an older woman in a red coat inquired, pointing to a couple of empty bins. She was sitting behind a glass barrier encircling a cavernous vote tabulation area that had been transformed into a large fishbowl. A county official assured her that he would check; he later said they were used to store damaged ballots. Then she asked why county workers were allowed to bring in bags, fretting that they could be used to smuggle ballots, and was told they were most likely used by the staff to carry in their lunches.Another observer wanted to know what was written on some blue sticky notes that were too far away to read. (They are used to alphabetize unopened ballots.) And a third, a 61-year-old dental hygienist named Caryl Tunison, asked, “Why do you not have cameras in every area here?” while she paused from writing in a notebook on her lap. She was sitting face to face with a young woman about three yards away, a county worker who sat on the other side of a glass partition and was placing envelopes in a bin.In a statement, the county elections department said that it “goes above and beyond what the law requires for observation.”“We recognize the value of helping observers understand the process and responding to their questions, and work to provide answers to their wide variety of questions every day,” the statement read.Sealed ballot boxes stored in cages at the Clark County Election Department on Friday.Bridget Bennett for The New York TimesMonitoring elections has long been part of the voting process. But this year, the Republican National Committee has worked alongside outside groups like the Election Integrity Network to seek out activists who believe conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and elections in general being corrupted. The Election Integrity Network is a group led by Mark Meadows, who served as White House chief of staff during the Trump administration, and organized by Cleta Mitchell, one of Mr. Trump’s former lawyers.A number of Republican candidates around the country have stated that they may not accept election results if they lose, heightening concerns among many elections experts. But election officials say that they, too, are far better organized this time around. That high level of organization — and the scrutiny from election denial activists — was evident on a recent visit here.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsElection Day is Tuesday, Nov. 8.House Democrats: Several moderates elected in 2018 in conservative-leaning districts are at risk of being swept out. That could cost the Democrats their House majority.A Key Constituency: A caricature of the suburban female voter looms large in American politics. But in battleground regions, many voters don’t fit the stereotype.Crime: In the final stretch of the campaigns, politicians are vowing to crack down on crime. But the offices they are running for generally have little power to make a difference.Abortion: The fall of Roe v. Wade seemed to offer Democrats a way of energizing voters and holding ground. Now, many worry that focusing on abortion won’t be enough to carry them to victory.Many of the observers are people like Ms. Tunison, who believes the 2020 election was stolen and who said she was encouraged in her newfound activism by her pastor. She repeated a conspiracy theory, which circulated on social media after the 2020 election, that several swing states simultaneously halted counting to thwart Donald Trump. “Who was able to call all the counties and get them to stop counting all at once?” she asked.“I just think the whole system is kind of messed up,” she added in an interview as she was leaving. “We could do much better. I think the whole system should be scrapped and started over with something that’s actually secure.”And what would it be replaced with? “I’m not exactly sure, but I know that it should be mechanical,” she said, with “no internet access to any machine.” But she also said maybe tabulation could be done with “something like the blockchain,” referring to the same technology that is at the heart of Bitcoin.Baseless theories about foreign plots to hack voting machines have ricocheted around the right-wing media for two years and have been pushed by well-funded Trump allies, including Mike Lindell, the MyPillow chief executive.In fact, there is no evidence of widespread fraud or malfeasance in elections. And while there is a criminal investigation underway of election tampering in Georgia, it is examining the conduct of Mr. Trump and his circle of advisers.Still, a number of Republican lawyers have primed poll monitors to search for irregularities that could be used to bring legal challenges to the results later on.That would repeat a strategy used in some states in 2020, but many involved say they are better organized this election cycle. Even as the monitoring was taking place on Thursday in Clark County, a local judge rejected a bid by the R.N.C. to have more representation on panels that verify ballot signatures.At the Clark County office, ballots come in from polling places and drop boxes and are brought to a loading dock in the back of the warehouse. Then they are moved through a series of stations where observers from the public can view how they are handled.The number of observers fluctuated throughout the day and into the night. There was a woman in a leather hat complaining that she had been treated rudely by a county worker, a man watching while he twiddled a Rubik’s Cube.A young man from the R.N.C., who declined to comment, monitored late into the evening, while toting around a book by Ray Dalio, the hedge fund manager, called “The Changing World Order,” which ponders the rise of China and the twilight of America.Placards throughout the office inform the observers of state law and guidelines. They are prohibited, the placards say, from “talking to workers within the central counting” area or from “advocating for or against a candidate.”Much of the work is monotonous. In one area, stacks of ballots that had been through a sorting machine were hand counted for verification purposes. Watching the workers count the ballots was a tedious business. One observer, whose hair was pulled back in a pink scrunchie, paused from her own note taking to lean over and whisper to a reporter who was taking his own notes. She offered the friendly admonition of an armchair editor: “It’s going to be a boring article.”Unopened mail-in ballots being sorted at the Clark County Election Department on Friday.Bridget Bennett for The New York TimesIn another room, a group of seven observers watched as ballots were fed through the ballot sorting machine. Those that looked good were put into green bins set out on a long table in the middle of the room. Ballots with signatures that could not be verified using county records were sorted into red bins for further review. The sound of the thrumming machine was not unlike a train going over tracks.“I was being lulled to sleep,” said Matt Robison, a 60-year-old service technician for a propane company who came with his wife of 39 years, Sandra. They had not come on behalf of any particular group, but because of their own concerns about the last election.“These people have a job to do, and it looks like they’re doing their job,” said Mr. Robison. “If there’s ballots being shredded or anything like that, there’s no way that we’ll ever be able to see that. But I personally feel like there had been — I don’t know about necessarily in Nevada — but there had been election tampering in 2020. But the thing is I think that what we’re able to witness here shows people doing their jobs.”Election officials have long hoped that letting skeptics into the process would convince them to reject the conspiracy theories. That seemed a tall order in Clark County.Mr. Robison described himself as uncomfortable with “woke ideologies” and as a fan of “2000 Mules,” the film promoting conspiracy theories that have been discredited by experts, media outlets and government agencies.“You know, Dinesh D’Souza’s film?” he said, referring to the film’s director, who was pardoned by Mr. Trump after pleading guilty to campaign finance fraud. The film’s two star experts, Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips, were recently jailed for contempt of court.Still, he was cautious about what he thought about the 2020 election. “Unless I can see it, unless I actually witness something, then I can’t confirm,” he said, adding that if he “put my right hand in the air and swear solemnly to tell the truth and the whole truth,” the “truth would be I don’t know.”His wife, a gun training instructor, is more strident in her views and has come more often to observe. Her husband said, jokingly, that “she’s addicted.”Ms. Robison expressed dissatisfaction with the county and the observation process and wanted to see the ballots being unloaded in the back of the building — “the entire chain of custody,” as she put it.The county elections department said in its statement that its “observation plan was reviewed by the Nevada Secretary of State’s Office and upheld by the court before the primary election” and that “this included identifying the areas where observation would be provided.”For Trump supporters like Ms. Robison, the 2020 election was a catalyst.“There’s no question in my mind and a lot of other people’s minds that 46 should not be in the White House,” she said, referring to President Biden. “It was a stolen election.” More

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      Republican Secretaries of State Walk a Minefield of Election Lies

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      FAYETTEVILLE, W.Va. — Standing before a dozen volunteer poll workers gathered in an old wood-paneled community auditorium that would soon be transformed into a polling place, Mac Warner invited his audience to look at his socks.They were stitched with the hashtag #TRUSTEDINFO2020: a souvenir of a campaign that Mr. Warner, West Virginia’s secretary of state since 2017, had waged with his fellow secretaries across the country before the last presidential election, an effort to raise awareness of disinformation efforts targeting voters.“Don’t get your information from Facebook,” he told the poll workers. “Don’t get it from Google. Don’t get it from social media. Get it from trusted sources.”A former officer in the Army with the Judge Advocate General’s Corps who has assisted government ministries running elections in Afghanistan, Mr. Warner earned the respect of his fellow secretaries of state — most of whom, like Mr. Warner, serve as the top election official in their states — in 2020 for his particular commitment to fighting misinformation and security threats at the ballot box.But some of them have been more reluctant to praise him since December 2020, when he climbed onstage at a rally outside the State Capitol in Charleston the month after Donald J. Trump lost the presidential election, holding up a sign that said “STOP THE STEAL.”“It’s so important to keep him in office,” Mr. Warner, speaking of Mr. Trump, told an interviewer from Right Side Broadcasting Network at the rally.Today, Mr. Warner walks a delicate line. He acknowledges that Joseph R. Biden Jr. “was elected,” in 2020, but questions whether the election was run fairly in some states. He has worked to debunk conspiracy theories about voting machines and laments the rise of fringe views within his party. But he also compares the voting rights bills congressional Democrats tried to pass this year to the foreign influence campaigns he fought in 2020, and he blames the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol in part on the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear a long-shot challenge to the election from Texas’s attorney general, which he supported.“I believe that’s what spurred on the Jan. 6 people,” he said.In 40 states, secretaries serve as the chief elections officer, overseeing the voting process — a role that only rarely attracted attention until Mr. Trump and his allies, promoting a range of lies and conspiracy theories about his 2020 loss, thrust it into the center of partisan politics.Mr. Trump has continued to loudly blame his loss on secretaries of state in several states — most often Georgia, where Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, resisted Mr. Trump’s direct entreaties to overturn the election. A handful of secretary of state races have commanded national political attention and spending this year as Trump loyalists like Mark Finchem in Arizona and Kristina Karamo in Michigan have campaigned for the office on claims of the stolen election.“When I ran for this job in 2019, the first question I always got was, ‘What does your office do?’” said Michael Adams, the Republican secretary of state of Kentucky. “I don’t get that question anymore.”Testing voting machines in Fayette County in West Virginia. Voting machines are often a target of conspiracy theorists.Jeff Swensen for The New York TimesRegardless of how the most outspoken election deniers perform on Tuesday, the furious political climate has already transformed an office whose occupants have often prided themselves on their remove from partisan trench warfare. At a time when Republican and Democratic congressmen barely talk to each other, secretaries of state still speak with warmth about their colleagues from the other party. They socialize over cocktails at annual meetings and exchange text messages over election law cases they vigorously disagree about.But those relationships have been tested by the last two years, several secretaries of state said in interviews. Democrats have been offended by some Republicans’ sowing doubt without evidence about elections in other states. Republicans charge that Democrats have used Mr. Trump’s election lies as a pretext to paint legitimate conservative policy aims as threats to democracy.“It’s still a good working relationship,” said Steve Simon, Minnesota’s Democratic secretary of state. “But I would say it is fraught with the realities of what’s going on outside of us.”Secretaries of state, who are elected on party tickets in most of the country, have never been immune to partisan politics. Still, “as we were approaching Election Day” in 2020, said Maggie Toulouse Oliver, the Democratic secretary of state of New Mexico who at the time was the chairwoman of the national association, “we still felt very much on the same page.”But as Mr. Trump’s election claims persisted, fissures began to appear. Democrats were dismayed to see Mr. Warner and Jay Ashcroft, the Republican secretary of state of Missouri, speak at Stop the Steal rallies at their respective state capitols in late 2020.At a meeting of the National Association of Secretaries of State in August 2021, in response to a wave of highly partisan reviews billed as “audits” of the 2020 election results, a group of four Republican and four Democratic secretaries of state drew up a resolution setting clear standards for audits. The measure passed unanimously with the exceptions of Mr. Warner, who voted against it, and Mr. Ashcroft, who abstained, and shortly after that left the association entirely in protest of the measure, which he argues violated the group’s bylaws.Neither Mr. Warner nor Mr. Ashcroft directly claims that the election was stolen. Both have instead maintained that a significant number of ballots were cast “outside of the law” in key states on account of expansions in remote voting made in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, and that these issues have yet to be sufficiently settled in court.Although many legal challenges to the election were rejected by judges on the merits, others were dismissed on technical grounds. One postelection challenge, to the use of drop boxes for voting in Wisconsin, won in the state’s Supreme Court this year.Some Republican secretaries who stood by the outcome of the 2020 election have nevertheless given credence to lesser claims, directly or indirectly. Frank LaRose, the Republican secretary of state of Ohio, has publicly rebuked conspiracy theorists’ claims about the election in Ohio, but also raised questions about “things that happened in other states” in interviews. “Could it have changed the electoral count?” he said in an interview with The Columbus Dispatch in April. “Who knows.”In December, Louisiana’s Voting Systems Commission, a panel led by the Republican secretary of state Kyle Ardoin, invited Phil Waldron, a prominent election conspiracy theorist, to testify at a hearing. In January, Mr. Ardoin announced that Louisiana would no longer participate in the Electronic Registration Information Center, a cross-state information-sharing platform used to maintain voter rolls, which had lately become the subject of right-wing conspiracy theories.This has angered some Democratic secretaries of state, who note that election officials and often secretaries of state themselves have faced personal threats as a result of the conspiracy theories that their Republican counterparts have been reluctant to check.In October, a Nebraska man was sentenced to 18 months in prison for making threats against Jena Griswold, the Democratic secretary of state in Colorado, on social media.Colorado’s secretary of state, Jena Griswold, and her counterpart in Kentucky, Michael Adams, at a conference for secretaries of state this summer.Matthew Hinton/Associated PressBut some Democratic secretaries of state said they were sympathetic to the increasingly difficult position that colleagues like Mr. LaRose and Mr. Ardoin are in. Since last year, a grass-roots movement driven by right-wing conspiracy theories has put pressure on election officials, even those in deeply red states, to respond to convoluted claims of malfeasance.Mr. Adams of Kentucky and John Merrill, the Republican secretary of state of Alabama, have both been vilified by Mike Lindell, the MyPillow chief executive and influential election denier, over bogus claims of fraudulent votes in their states, both of which Mr. Trump won easily in 2020.In solidly Republican Montana, the state’s Republican secretary of state has had to fend off efforts to gain access to voting machines in several counties by activists and Republican state legislators who had attended an August 2021 conference hosted by Mr. Lindell.As recently as that August, “we didn’t really see election denialism happening in all 50 states,” Mr. Adams said, noting that it was limited to battlegrounds. Now, he said, “it’s gone everywhere.”Republican secretaries were also rattled this spring when Republican incumbents in South Dakota and Indiana lost primary elections to candidates who refuse to acknowledge Mr. Biden’s victory in the last election. Running to replace Barbara Cegavske, the term-limited Republican secretary of state of Nevada, is Jim Marchant, a member of the America First Secretary of State Coalition, a Trump-loyalist group funded by prominent election deniers. He is leading in the polls.Mr. Adams, who ran for office in 2019 on Republican priorities like strict voter I.D. laws and regular clearance of voter rolls, has found that his record on these issues counts for little with many in the crowds he now encounters at Republican events in his state, he said.“How do you reason with someone that really thinks that Venezuelan socialists are hacking into paper ballot counters that don’t have a modem?” said Mr. Adams, who is seeking re-election next year. “All I can do is just say all day, every day, that it’s not true. And just hope that I’ll survive.”Several secretaries of state said that, as the prospect of an election denier bloc emerging among their ranks drew closer to reality, it had drawn Democrats and Republicans closer together as they openly wondered what would become of their once-convivial interactions.“It may be very challenging to have some of these same conversations or bipartisan happy hours with people who are spewing nonsense about us or demonizing those of us who are not in their party,” said Shenna Bellows, Maine’s Democratic secretary of state.A preview of sorts was offered this July in Baton Rouge at the annual conference for the National Association of Secretaries of State. During a meeting there with federal cybersecurity officials, Cord Byrd, Florida’s newly appointed Republican secretary of state, launched into a speech condemning electronic voting, according to several people in attendance. (A spokesman for Mr. Byrd said this account was “unequivocally false.”)But the secretaries also took heart when Mr. Merrill, a generally Trump-friendly Republican, offered his own experience as an election observer in Russia as testimony that paper ballots were just as manipulable as electronic voting.Mr. Merrill is term-limited, and will be leaving his post this year. A spokeswoman for Wes Allen, the Republican running to replace him, said that Mr. Allen believed the 2020 election was “conducted in a safe and secure manner” in Alabama. Asked who Mr. Allen believed had won the 2020 election nationwide, she declined to answer. More

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      How the Right Became the Left and the Left Became the Right

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      One of the master keys to understanding our era is seeing all the ways in which conservatives and progressives have traded attitudes and impulses. The populist right’s attitude toward American institutions has the flavor of the 1970s — skeptical, pessimistic, paranoid — while the mainstream, MSNBC-watching left has a strange new respect for the F.B.I. and C.I.A. The online right likes transgression for its own sake, while cultural progressivism dabbles in censorship and worries that the First Amendment goes too far. Trumpian conservatism flirts with postmodernism and channels Michel Foucault; its progressive rivals are institutionalist, moralistic, confident in official narratives and establishment credentials.These reversals are especially evident in a pair of prominent headlines from the last week. If you had been told at any point from, say, 1970 to 2005 that a disturbed-seeming man living in the Bay Area with a history of involvement with nudist activists and the hemp jewelry trade had allegedly followed his paranoid political delusions into a plan to assault an important national politician, the reasonable assumption would have been that his delusions belonged to the farthest reaches of the left and therefore his target was probably some notable Republican.By the same token, if you had been told in George W. Bush’s presidency that a trove of government documents would reveal the Department of Homeland Security essentially trying to collude with major corporations to regulate speech it considers dangerous or subversive, an effort extending from foreign threats to domestic ones, you would have assumed that this was all Republican overreach, a new McCarthyism — and that progressives would be up in arms against it.In our world, though, things are otherwise. The man who allegedly attacked Paul Pelosi while hunting the speaker of the House did, seemingly, belong to left-wing, Left Coast culture in the not-so-distant past. But at some point in his unhappy trajectory, he passed over to the paranoias of the extreme right — probably not in some semi-rational radicalization process in which he watched too many attack ads against Nancy Pelosi but more likely in a dreamlike way, the nightmares of QAnon matching his mental state better‌ than the paranoias of the left.His journey’s violent endpoint was singular and extreme, but this kind of left-to-right migration has more normal correlatives: the New Age-QAnon overlap, the Covid-era migration of formerly left-wing skeptics of Big Pharma onto right-wing shows and platforms, the way that all doubts about the medical establishment are now coded as right-wing, Trumpy, populist.And the political right’s response to the Pelosi attack reflects these shifts as well. The ethos of Fox Mulder in “The X-Files,” “Trust no one,” is a now dominant value on the right, which in this case encouraged a swift leap from reasonable questions about the details of the assault, based on inaccurate initial reports, to a very specific narrative about a gay assignation that the cops and the Pelosis were presumably covering up.As of this writing, several public references to this theory from prominent conservatives have been deleted. But the cover-up narrative will probably survive indefinitely as a reference point, an underground “truth,” like the left-wing conspiracies of old.One of those deleted tweets belonged to Elon Musk, the new impresario of Twitter, and it inevitably became an exhibit in the case for liberal panic over his takeover: What could be more indicative of the platform’s imminent descent into a democracy-destroying hellscape than conspiracy theories spread by the Chief Twit himself?But the alternative to Musk’s reign was clarified by the second recent illustration of our left-right reversal: a story from The Intercept, by Lee Fang and Ken Klippenstein, detailing the Department of Homeland Security’s migration into the social-media surveillance and the pressure the department has tried to exert on internet companies to flag and censor content along lines favored by the national security bureaucracy.On the surface, this is not a partisan story: The Intercept is a left-wing publication, and the current version of the D.H.S. anti-disinformation effort got started in the Trump administration.But everyone understands those efforts’ current ideological valence. The war on disinformation is a crucial Democratic cause, the key lawsuit filed against the Biden administration on these issues comes from Republican attorneys general (joined by doctors critical of the public-health establishment), and the most famous flashpoint remains the social-media censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story, which Fang and Klippenstein suggest followed from what one could reasonably call a deep-state pressure campaign.Meanwhile, according to a draft report from the D.H.S. obtained by The Intercept, the list of online subject areas that the department is particularly concerned about includes “the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic and the efficacy of Covid-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine” — mostly areas where, whether in wisdom or in folly, the populist right is more likely to dissent from the establishment position.And for the future of Twitter, in particular, it’s notable that the Intercept story first points out that a committee advising DHS on disinformation policy included Twitter’s then-head of legal policy, trust and safety, Vijaya Gadde, and then notes that Gadde was one of the first people fired by Musk. It’s a tacit nod to the left-right switch: Under Musk the social-media giant is widely seen as moving “rightward,” but that could mean becoming less entangled with an arm of what was once George W. Bush’s national security state.The point of emphasizing this reversal isn’t to suggest that either side is likely to flip back. The evolving attitudes of right and left reflect their evolving positions in American society, with cultural liberalism much more dominant in elite institutions than it was a generation ago and conservatism increasingly disreputable, representing downscale constituencies and outsider ideas.But a stronger awareness of the flip might be helpful in tempering the temptations that afflict both sides. For progressives, that could mean acknowledging that the Department of Homeland Security’s disinformation wars, its attempted hand-in-glove with the great powers of Silicon Valley, would have been regarded as a dystopian scenario on their side not so long ago. So is it really any less dystopian if the targets are Trumpistas and Anthony Fauci critics instead of Iraq War protesters? And if it is a little creepy and censorious and un-American, doesn’t that make some of the paranoia evident on the right these days a little less unfathomable and fascist seeming, even a little more relatable?Then the Fox Mulder right might benefit from recalling the thing that conservatives — or this conservative, at least — used to find most insufferable about the anti-establishment left, which was not its skepticism but its credulity, not the eagerness to question official narratives but the speed with which implausible alternatives took root. (If parts of Oliver Stone’s “J.F.K.” make you understand where conspiracy theories come from, the part where the conspiracy gets “explained” should make you a Nixon Republican.)This is the key problem with the right today, whether the issue is the 2020 election or the Covid-vaccine debate or the attack on Paul Pelosi. Not the baseline of skepticism, not being attuned to weaknesses and inconsistencies in official narratives, not being open to scenarios of elite self-dealing and conspiracy and cover-up, all of which emphatically exist. It’s the swift replacement of skepticism with certainty, the shopping around for any narrative — even if it comes from Sidney Powell and Mike Lindell — to vindicate your initial theory, the refusal to accept that even institutions you reasonably mistrust sometimes get things right.Or to put this in terms of Musk and his hopes for Twitter: The ideal virtual town square would be a place where conservatives could discuss speculative, even conspiratorial theories of the day’s events — but also a place where they could be persuaded to abandon bad theories when the evidence dissolves them.Social-media and tribal incentives being what they are, that seems exceedingly unlikely. But if I had just paid billions to own a social media platform — and become both its main character and arguably the most important right-leaning figure in American life, pending the Donald Trump-Ron De‌ ‌Santis slugfest — I would be thinking about what it would take for a spirit of contrarianism and rebellion to aim, not simply at transgression, but at truth itself.In addition to my two weekly columns, I’m starting a newsletter, which will go out most Fridays and cover some of my usual obsessions — political ideas, religion, pop culture, decadence — in even more detail. You can subscribe here.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram. More

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      in Elections

      With Falsehoods About Pelosi Attack, Republicans Mimic Trump

      by

      WASHINGTON — Speaking on a conservative radio talk show on Tuesday, former President Donald J. Trump amplified a conspiracy theory about the grisly attack on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, that falsely suggested that Mr. Pelosi may not have been the victim of a genuine attack.“Weird things going on in that household in the last couple of weeks,” Mr. Trump said on the Chris Stigall show, winking at a lie that has flourished in right-wing media and is increasingly being given credence by Republicans. “The glass, it seems, was broken from the inside to the out — so it wasn’t a break-in, it was a break out.”There is no evidence to suggest that. Mr. Pelosi, 82, was attacked on Friday with a hammer by a suspect who federal prosecutors say invaded the Pelosis’ San Francisco home, bent on kidnapping the speaker and shattering her kneecaps.But Mr. Trump, a longtime trafficker in conspiracy theories who propelled his political rise with the lie that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States, has never let such facts get in his way.The reaction to the assault on Mr. Pelosi among Republicans — who have circulated conspiracy theories about it, dismissed it as an act of random violence and made the Pelosis the punchline of a dark joke — underscores how thoroughly the G.O.P. has internalized his example. It suggested that Republicans have come to conclude that, like Mr. Trump, they will pay no political price for attacks on their opponents, however meanspirited, inflammatory or false.If anything, some Republicans seem to believe they will be rewarded by their right-wing base for such coarseness — or even suffer political consequences if they do not join in and show that they are in on the joke.“LOL,” Representative Claudia Tenney, Republican of New York, who is up for re-election in a competitive district, tweeted on Friday night, circulating a photograph that showed a group of young, white men holding oversized hammers beside a gay Pride flag.On Sunday, Representative Clay Higgins, Republican of Louisiana, who is in line to helm a Homeland Security subcommittee if his party wins control of the House next week, also amplified a groundless and homophobic conspiracy theory hatched on the right about the attack. He tweeted, but later removed, a picture of Ms. Pelosi with her hands covering her eyes, with the caption: “That moment you realize the nudist hippie male prostitute LSD guy was the reason your husband didn’t make it to your fundraiser.”On Tuesday, Mr. Trump said he thought the federal complaint detailing the break-in and the attack was not telling the entire story.“I don’t know,” Mr. Trump said suggestively. “You hear the same things I do.”Mr. Pelosi, 82, remained in intensive care with a fractured skull, according to a person familiar with the situation who spoke on condition of anonymity.In Arizona, the Republican candidate for governor, Kari Lake, made the attack a punchline at a campaign event on Monday, noting that while Ms. Pelosi has security around her, “apparently her house doesn’t have a lot of protection.” She smiled as her supporters howled with laughter.Republican leaders have condemned the violence against Mr. Pelosi and have not shared the conspiracy theories or sinister memes, but they have not publicly condemned those who have done so or done anything to try to tamp down on the stream of lies. And over the past few years, they have consistently demonstrated to their colleagues in Congress that there are no consequences for making vitriolic or even violent statements.If anything, such behavior has turned those more extreme members into influencers on the right, who carry more clout in Congress.The intruder who attacked Mr. Pelosi had wanted to take Ms. Pelosi, whom he saw as “the ‘leader of the pack’ of lies told by the Democratic Party,” hostage and break her kneecaps. He entered her San Francisco home with rope, zip ties and a hammer, according to the federal complaint against him.There was a time when such an event would have led to unequivocal denunciation by the leaders of both parties, sometimes followed by a pause in the day-to-day mudslinging of a campaign — if only to ensure that no candidate would make a remark that could be construed as in any way offensive to the victim.This time, few Republicans made such moves.Former Vice President Mike Pence followed the old model, saying that the attack was an “outrage” and noting that “there can be no tolerance for violence against public officials or their families.” But what would have once been a run-of-the-mill statement stood out for being one of the few that was unqualified in its condemnation of the attacker, who Mr. Pence said should be prosecuted.“They don’t have any fear of reprisal,” said Douglas Heye, a former Republican leadership aide on Capitol Hill. “That’s because our politics have become so tribal that anything that is about owning the other side is somehow seen as a political message, even though it’s not.”It is a page out of Mr. Trump’s playbook. For years, he elevated online rumors by speculating about them, bursting onto the national political scene in 2011 with the unfounded “birther” theory about Mr. Obama. When Mr. Trump insulted Senator John McCain of Arizona for being taken captive in Vietnam, his popularity among Republicans suffered no discernible hit.The current crop of candidates and lawmakers who have grown in power through their allegiance to Mr. Trump have replicated his methods. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, tweeted that Mr. Pelosi was attacked by a “friend” and that the media was the source of disinformation. Her post has since been removed.Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, recirculated a Twitter thread stating that “none of us will ever know for sure” what happened at Ms. Pelosi’s house and complaining that the attack was being cited as an “indictment of Republicans.” More