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      Misinformation Swirls in Non-English Languages Ahead of Midterms

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      Unsubstantiated rumors and outright falsehoods spread widely in immigrant communities ahead of the presidential election in 2020. That is happening again in the run-up to this year’s midterm elections, researchers say, but with an insidious twist: The social media accounts pushing misinformation are now targeting audiences in more languages on more topics and across more digital platforms, with scant resistance from social media companies.In recent weeks, posts exaggerating the fallout from inflation have been aimed at Americans from Latin American countries that have been crippled by poor economic management. Conspiracy theories that spread in August about the Internal Revenue Service’s plans for a “shadow army” led mentions of “Ejército IRS” to surge alongside “IRS army,” its equivalent in English, according to the research group Zignal.Misinformation swirling in Chinese on Twitter, YouTube and WeChat about mail-in ballots, school curriculums and hate crimes “has dangerous implications” this year for Asian American voters, who are growing as a political force, according to the advocacy group Asian Americans Advancing Justice.“There’s definitely a hyper-targeting of messaging,” said Nick Nguyen, a co-founder of Viet Fact Check, a group that offers explanations about misinformation circulating among Vietnamese Americans. “This is where a lack of English-language fluency can make populations vulnerable.”Viet Fact Check is among a growing number of groups trying to contextualize and debunk false online narratives in languages other than English. Factchequeado, a six-month-old Spanish-language service, is examining inaccurate translations, manipulated images and misleadingly edited videos about the search of Mar-a-Lago and Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan. Desifacts, which focuses on South Asian American communities, began publishing explainers and clarifications about topics such as immigration and student debt relief in Hindi, Bengali and Tamil in February.Viet Fact Check is among a growing number of groups trying to battle false online narratives in non-English languages, but it can be hard to keep up with the flood of misinformation.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesBut the multilingual fact checkers say they cannot keep pace with the deluge of falsehoods online. They have called on the big social media platforms, like Facebook and YouTube, to do more for efforts in other languages as they would for misinformation in English.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.The Final Stretch: With less than one month until Election Day, Republicans remain favored to take over the House, but momentum in the pitched battle for the Senate has seesawed back and forth.A Surprising Battleground: New York has emerged from a haywire redistricting cycle as perhaps the most consequential congressional battleground in the country. For Democrats, the uncertainty is particularly jarring.Pennsylvania Governor’s Race: Attacks by Doug Mastriano, the G.O.P. nominee, on the Jewish school where Josh Shapiro, the Democratic candidate, sends his children have set off an outcry about antisemitic signaling.Herschel Walker: The Republican Senate nominee in Georgia reportedly paid for an ex-girlfriend’s abortion, but some conservative Christians have learned to tolerate the behavior of those who advance their cause.“With mis- and disinformation in Spanish, we feel like we are fighting a giant,” said Tamoa Calzadilla, Factchequeado’s managing editor and the former head of Univision’s fact-checking operation. “It’s frustrating because we are trying to do something, and we need support from the platforms — we are doing our work, but Big Tech can do more.”The social media companies said they moderated content or provided fact-checks in many languages: more than 70 languages for TikTok, and more than 60 for Meta, which owns Facebook. YouTube said it had more than 20,000 people reviewing and removing misinformation, including in languages such as Mandarin and Spanish; TikTok said it had thousands. The companies declined to say how many employees were doing work in languages other than English.TikTok has translated a midterms information hub on its app into more than 45 languages. Twitter has a similar elections center available in English and Spanish, along with prompts that debunk and “pre-bunk” misinformation in different languages. Meta said that it had invested in initiatives such as Spanish fact-checking services on WhatsApp in preparation for the elections and that it would show voting-related notifications in both English and a second language based on users’ activity.The companies also cited broader improvements. Meta said its Spanish misinformation prediction models in the United States were now working on a par with its English-language models and had significantly increased the amount of Spanish content sent to fact checkers for review. Twitter said its newly redesigned contextual labels, which are translated based on users’ language settings, had helped shrink engagement with misinformation. YouTube said information panels now appeared in different languages for certain search results and videos. It also highlights content from vetted non-English news sources based on users’ language settings and search queries, the company said.Tamoa Calzadilla is the managing editor of Factchequeado, an organization dedicated to examining inaccurate Spanish translations. Eva Marie Uzcategui for The New York TimesBut researchers worry about the effect of non-English misinformation on the coming vote, saying lies and rumors in other languages continue to seep through. A report released Monday from the watchdog group Media Matters found 40 Spanish-language videos on YouTube that advanced misinformation about U.S. elections, including the false notion that fraudulent ballots were coming into the United States from China and Mexico.Some disinformation experts, along with some elected officials, have pressed the social platforms for more action and transparency.This year, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus pushed Meta, TikTok, YouTube and Twitter for meetings with their top executives to discuss the spread of misinformation in Spanish. YouTube made its chief executive, Susan Wojcicki, available; TikTok and Twitter sent other executives. The caucus and Meta were unable to schedule a meeting, and Meta said it planned to instead submit a written update.An example of the kind of post Factchequeado seeks to debunk, shown on Ms. Calzadilla’s laptop. The organization placed a stamp that reads “Falso” over this misleading image.Eva Marie Uzcategui for The New York TimesThe International Fact-Checking Network at Poynter sent an open letter to YouTube in January, describing the ease with which misinformation on the platform was flowing across borders. Researchers have said the same narrative often emerges on different sites in different countries, and then cross-pollinates in a feedback loop that makes it seem more believable. As one fact checker argued, an immigrant is more likely to trust a conspiracy theory voiced by both the person’s mother in El Salvador and a friend in San Francisco.Misinformation can also do what researchers call platform-jump — originate in English on fringe services like Truth Social or Gab and then emerge later on more mainstream sites, presented in a different language or sometimes with a misleading translation attached.Alethea Group, which helps corporations guard against disinformation, recently looked at seven YouTube channels that were based in Colombia but appeared to target conservative Spanish speakers living in or tied to the United States. Researchers found that the channels often took false or misleading narratives from conservative or foreign state media, repeated it on YouTube in Spanish, and then sometimes pointed viewers to platforms like Twitter and Telegram, where the translated content continued to spread. Sometimes, the channel operators tried to monetize the videos through ads or requests for donations or subscriptions.Alethea found that one account with more than 300,000 subscribers repurposed and translated existing unsubstantiated narratives that the F.B.I. had deliberately planted documents at Mar-a-Lago to entrap former President Donald J. Trump, according to the report. The title of one video was “S4LE LA V3RDAD” instead of “sale la verdad” (the truth comes out), which Alethea researchers believe may have been a potential attempt to evade YouTube moderators. Other researchers have discovered accounts, previously terminated by platforms for violating misinformation guidelines, that reincarnated under different aliases.A post translated into Spanish on Telegram repeated former President Donald J. Trump’s false claim that documents were thrown haphazardly on the floor.Dominik A. Stecula, an assistant professor of political science at Colorado State University and an immigrant from Poland, attributed the spread of multilingual misinformation online in part to the slow decline of local ethnic media outlets covering community issues.“People don’t want to pay for content, and as a result, a lot of these institutions are falling apart,” Mr. Stecula said. “What replaces them is just some dude in Arizona with a high-definition camera and a microphone.”Mr. Stecula noted how moderation was complicated by cultural nuances and diverse communication preferences, explaining that while immigrants from Asia tend to prefer WhatsApp, people from Poland often gravitate toward Facebook.Some experts, skeptical that all multilingual misinformation can be removed, push instead for other ways to limit amplification. Last year, Twitter tested a feature that allowed some users in the United States, South Korea and Australia to flag tweets as misleading.Evelyn Pérez-Verdía, the head of strategy at the consulting firm We Are Más, in South Florida, estimated that tens of thousands of people followed Spanish-language channels on Telegram that promote the QAnon conspiracy theory. She said she had learned about one group, with nearly 8,000 subscribers, from her Colombian American hairstylist.She said such groups have been “very smart to make sure the message is tailored based on culture and subculture,” sometimes exploiting symbols like the raised fist, which can represent hope and solidarity to younger people born in the United States while reminding older immigrants of leftist Latin American dictatorships. Posts have blended anti-communist sentiment with conspiratorial QAnon language, calling President Biden “el Lagartija” (the Lizard) while describing his party as “Demoniocratas” (Demon-Democrats).“It’s not only about misinformation or disinformation — there also needs to be a responsibility to understand that words and symbols mean different things to other communities,” Ms. Pérez-Verdía said. “It doesn’t matter if you’re from Vietnam or from Colombia — most people see the prism of the politics of our nation through the prism of the politics of theirs.” More

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      Walter Dean Burnham, Who Traced Political Parties’ Shifts, Dies at 92

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      A noted political scientist, he saw parties periodically realigning themselves in stark fashion, presaging the rise of Donald Trump.Walter Dean Burnham, a political scientist who theorized that political parties realign periodically in tectonic shifts that he called “America’s surrogate for revolution,” died on Oct. 4 in San Antonio. He was 92. The death was confirmed by his daughter, Anne Burnham.Professor Burnham, who taught most recently at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Texas, Austin, suggested that realignments of political parties had occurred roughly every three to four decades since 1896.With this in mind, he said, Donald J. Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election, while “shockingly unexpected” by the news media and professional pollsters, should not have been so surprising, coming as it did 36 years after the sharp turn to the right known as the Reagan revolution.“This was a ‘change’ election,” Professor Burnham wrote in the wake of it on the London School of Economics website. “Say what one wishes about Donald Trump’s unfitness for the presidency which he has now won, he was obviously the ‘change candidate,’ promising reactionary revitalization in response to a present deemed by himself to be intolerable.”Enough voters agreed with Mr. Trump to give him a majority in the Electoral College, though not in the popular vote. But turnout still sagged below 60 percent of voting age Americans, a benchmark that it last topped in 1968 after falling from highs of 80 percent in the 19th century.Professor Burnham long lamented declining turnout rates, acknowledging that while some people were undoubtedly discouraged by legal and bureaucratic hurdles to registration and voting, removing those hurdles did not necessarily improve turnout dramatically.Instead, he attributed the historic decline in participation rates to an expanding gulf between Americans and their government, to the withering of party loyalty, and to the absence of a European-type social democratic party representing the poor and blue-collar workers.“The growing political problem is found where the degeneration of political parties intersects with the rise of television advertising, continuous polling, media consultants and consent-massaging election operatives,” he wrote in 1988 in a letter to The New York Times.In the presidential race that year, he added, “non-Southern turnout levels fell to their lowest point in 164 years — since before the democratization of the presidency in the Andrew Jackson era. This, I think, is the fruit of the corruption, pollution and trivialization of the electoral process in our time.”He later found that by 2014, regional differences in turnout between the South and the rest of country had virtually vanished, for the first time since 1872.Professor Burnham explored his ideas on political realignment and declining voter turnout in his influential article “The Changing Shape of the American Political Universe,” published in 1965 in The American Political Science Review.He expanded those themes into a book, “Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics” (1970), which held that party realignments are typically prompted by critical elections, wars and depressions.In this 1970 book, Professor Burnham argued that party realignments are typically prompted by critical elections, wars and depressions.After the 2014 midterm elections, when Republicans won their largest majority in nearly a century, Professor Burnham forecast the dynamics of the presidential campaign two years later.“Many are convinced that a few big interests control policy,” he and Thomas Ferguson of the University of Massachusetts, Boston, wrote of voters on AlterNet, a progressive website, weeks after the 2014 elections. “They crave effective action to reverse long term economic decline and runaway economic inequality, but nothing on the scale required will be offered to them by either of America’s money-driven major parties.”Richard H. Pildes, a professor at New York University School of Law, called Professor Burnham “one of the most influential political scientists of his generation on the role and nature of political parties in American democracy.”“Americans,” he added, “have gone through frequent eras of disdain for parties, including now, yet Burnham’s work still provides some of the most compelling rejoinders to that disdain and a powerful argument that insists on the centrality of strong parties to a healthy democratic politics. In particular, he asserted that weak parties creates weak, vulnerable legislators, which enables even greater domination of government by private interests.”Walter Dean Burnham was born on June 15, 1930, in Columbus, Ohio, to Alfred H. Burnham Jr., an engineer for General Electric, and Gertrude (Hamburger) Burnham, a homemaker.He received a bachelor’s degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1951 and then served in the Army as a translator of intercepted communications in Russian. He went on to earn a master’s degree and a doctorate from Harvard, where his mentor was the historian V.O. Key Jr.He taught at Boston, Kenyon and Haverford Colleges and Washington University in St. Louis before joining the M.I.T. faculty in 1971 and the government department of the University of Texas in 1988. He became professor emeritus in 2004.In addition to his daughter Anne, he is also survived by a son, John, and four grandchildren. His wife, Patricia (Mullan) Burnham, died in 2018.Professor Burnham noted that political parties, for all their shortcomings, “are the only devices thus far invented which generate power on behalf of the many.”“I guess I would like to go back not to the smoke-filled room, but to the smoke-free room,” Professor Burnham told The Times in 1988. “After all, the first president of the United States was chosen by a search process. I don’t believe the open primary system is a democratic process. A few thousand activists push the Republican Party to the right and the Democratic Party to the left.”Alex Traub More

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      Deadly Shooting at Israeli Checkpoint Sets Jerusalem on Edge

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      Surging violence claimed the lives of four Palestinians and an Israeli soldier over the weekend, raising tensions on the eve of a Jewish holiday.JERUSALEM — Israeli security forces on Sunday said that they were still searching for the gunman who carried out a deadly attack late Saturday at a checkpoint in East Jerusalem and that three Palestinians had been arrested in connection with the shooting.The attack, which left an Israeli soldier dead and a security guard severely wounded, came as tensions surged before the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, when worshipers and pilgrims pour into the city. Israeli forces were put on high alert across the city ahead of the holiday, which begins at sundown on Sunday evening and lasts a week.The attack on Saturday night at the checkpoint near the Shuafat refugee camp, on the northeastern outskirts of Jerusalem, occurred hours after a deadly Israeli arrest raid and armed clashes in the city of Jenin, in the occupied West Bank, during which two Palestinians were killed.The recent spasm of violence gripping Israel and the West Bank is the worst those areas have seen in years. The Israeli military has been carrying out an intensified campaign of arrest raids, particularly in and around the northern West Bank cities of Jenin and Nablus, after a spate of terrorist attacks in Israeli cities that killed 19 people in the spring.The military raids, which take place almost nightly, are often deadly. At least 100 Palestinians have been killed so far this year. The Israeli authorities say that many of those were militants killed during clashes or while trying to perpetrate attacks, but some Palestinian protesters and uninvolved civilians have also been killed.The high death toll in the West Bank has spurred more disaffected Palestinian men to take up arms and try to carry out revenge attacks, according to analysts. The resurgence of loosely formed, armed Palestinian militias in the northern West Bank is increasingly reminiscent of the chaos there during the second intifada, or Palestinian uprising, which broke out in 2000 and lasted more than four years.The new militancy comes after years without any political progress toward a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and is being fueled by splits from and divisions within Fatah, the secular party that controls the Palestinian Authority, the body that administers parts of the West Bank.Israel captured the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan in the 1967 war and then annexed East Jerusalem in a move that was never internationally recognized. The Palestinians claim the West Bank and East Jerusalem as part of a future Palestinian state.Adding to the frictions is Palestinian frustration with the authority’s leaders, who are widely viewed as inept and corrupt, and whose security coordination with the Israeli military is decried by many Palestinians as collaboration with the enemy. Power struggles are also at play, as Palestinian factions jockey for a position to succeed Mahmoud Abbas, the authority’s 87-year-old president.Israeli armored vehicles during a raid on Saturday by the Israeli military at a refugee camp near the West Bank city of Jenin.Alaa Badarneh/EPA, via ShutterstockHamas, the Islamist militant group that dominates the Palestinian coastal enclave of Gaza, and Fatah’s main rival, has been encouraging the armed groups in the West Bank in an effort to destabilize the area. It is expected to continue to do so in the run-up to the Israeli election, which is set to take place on Nov. 1 — the country’s fifth in under four years.The United Nations special coordinator for the Middle East peace process, Tor Wennesland, said in a statement late Saturday that he was “alarmed by the deteriorating security situation,” citing the rise in armed clashes in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.“The mounting violence in the occupied West Bank is fueling a climate of fear, hatred and anger,” he said, adding, “It is crucial to reduce tensions immediately to open the space for crucial initiatives aimed at establishing a viable political horizon.”The attack on the checkpoint occurred shortly after 9 p.m. on Saturday, when a man emerged from a vehicle, shot at the security personnel then fled on foot in the direction of the Shuafat refugee camp.The military identified the soldier who was killed, a female member of a combat battalion of the military police, as Sgt. Noa Lazar, 18. She was promoted in rank to sergeant from corporal after her death.The Israeli military raid on the Jenin refugee camp earlier Saturday took place, unusually, in broad daylight. The target, who was eventually arrested, was a member of the Islamic Jihad militant group, according to the military, which also said he had been released from prison in 2020 and had since been involved in shooting attacks against Israeli soldiers.The military said that dozens of Palestinians hurled explosives and fired shots at soldiers during the raid, and that the soldiers responded with live fire.The Palestinian Health Ministry identified the two Palestinians who were killed as Mahmoud al-Sous, 18, and Ahmad Daraghmeh, 16. Two more Palestinian teenagers were killed by Israeli troops in separate incidents in the West Bank the day before.Human rights groups have accused Israel of using excessive force in quelling unrest in the West Bank. Nabil Abu Rudeineh, the spokesman for Mr. Abbas, the Palestinian president, blamed Israel for the escalation and warned that it would push the situation toward “an explosion and a point of no return, which will have devastating consequences for all.”The prime minister of Israel, Yair Lapid, who is running for election against former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said on Sunday that Israel would “not rest” until the “heinous murderers” of Sergeant Lazar were brought to justice. Mr. Netanyahu said he was “holding the hands of the security forces operating in the field.” More

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      Nicolás Maduro Is President of Venezuela Whether the U.S. Likes It or Not

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      When the United States arranged an exchange of prisoners with President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela last week — sending home two nephews of Mr. Maduro’s wife who had been convicted of drug trafficking in a swap for seven Americans held in Venezuelan jails — it exposed the incoherence of U.S. policy toward Venezuela.Even as it negotiates with Mr. Maduro, the White House continues to insist that Juan Guaidó, an opposition politician, is the real president of Venezuela. The United States has no formal diplomatic relations with the Maduro government, and the embassy in Caracas has been closed since early 2019, shortly after President Donald Trump recognized Mr. Guaidó as president in an unsuccessful, long-shot bid to force Mr. Maduro from power.It is time for the Biden administration to accept that the Guaidó gambit has failed and that most Venezuelans, and most of the international community, have moved on. The White House needs a Venezuela policy based on fact, not fiction. And the fact is that Mr. Maduro is president of Venezuela and Mr. Guaidó is not.Accepting reality will have many potential benefits — not least to the Venezuelan opposition, which is in the midst of a turbulent effort to remake itself.After Mr. Trump announced his support for Mr. Guaidó in January 2019, dozens of other countries followed Washington’s lead. But today, only a dwindling handful continue to recognize Mr. Guaidó as Venezuela’s president, and, like the United States, eschew direct diplomatic ties with Mr. Maduro’s government.And that list is getting shorter.Gustavo Petro, the newly elected leftist president of Colombia, moved quickly after taking office in August to abandon his country’s recognition of Mr. Guaidó and reopen its embassy in Caracas. That change is crucial because Colombia has long been Washington’s most important ally in South America and a key supporter of Mr. Guaidó.Brazil, another powerful backer of Mr. Guaidó, could be next, if Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva retakes the presidency in a runoff election later this month.Mr. Guaidó was always president in name only — he had no government and no power to act inside Venezuela. He showed courage when he defied Mr. Maduro’s repressive regime, but he never had a viable plan, beyond vague hopes for a military coup or for U.S. intervention. And he was wedded to Mr. Trump’s sanctions-heavy approach, which exacerbated Venezuela’s economic crisis.Mr. Guaidó’s claim to an alternate presidency rested on his role as head of the National Assembly, but his legislative term ended last year, and at that point many of his supporters inside and outside of Venezuela gave up on the notion.Today, Mr. Maduro is stronger than he was three years ago, and the opposition is in disarray.Dropping the pretense that Mr. Guaidó is president would set U.S. policy on a rational foundation but would not be an endorsement of Mr. Maduro. It could facilitate talks with Mr. Maduro over key areas, including the wave of Venezuelan refugees entering the United States and possible changes to economic sanctions related to oil exports. A resumption of consular activities would make it possible for citizens to obtain or renew visas and passports.One of the greatest beneficiaries could be the Venezuelan opposition, which is in a turbulent, and necessary, state of flux. The opposition has been harshly repressed by a Maduro government committed at all costs to staying in power; while the opposition has made many missteps, it is the primary political force in the country committed to democracy and the defense of human rights, and it is therefore critical to finding a solution to the country’s crisis.Over the last two years, most mainstream Venezuelan opposition parties have been thrown into crisis, hemorrhaging activists, splitting apart in leadership squabbles or watching once-loyal voters defect.The government has frequently stepped in to stir the pot, using the courts or electoral authorities to order the takeover of parties by substitute leadership that is considered suspect by the rest of the opposition. But in most cases, the divisions were there to be exploited.Venezuelans are fed up with opposition parties that often seem more interested in fighting with each other than in improving the country’s fortunes.At the same time, new parties have emerged, organizing around new leaders.The political changes were evident in elections held last November. The opposition won a third of the mayorships around the country, after previously holding fewer than one in ten. And although the opposition won just four governorships out of 23, it received a majority of votes in all but a few states. The reason it didn’t win more governorships was that multiple opposition candidates split the vote, essentially handing victory to candidates allied with Mr. Maduro.The lessons of November were powerful. The election showed that Venezuelans still see the ballot box as a way out of the nation’s troubles. It unmasked the weakness of the government party among voters. It demonstrated, once again, that lack of unity is the opposition’s Achilles’ heel.And it revealed gains for the nontraditional opposition, with about half of total opposition votes going to candidates outside the coalition led by the four mainstream parties, according to Eugenio Martínez, a journalist who specializes in election analysis.Venezuelan politics are now aimed at a presidential election that will take place in 2024.Will the opposition come together to choose a single candidate, or will it remain divided? The United States has urged Mr. Maduro and the opposition to resume negotiations that could lead to improved electoral conditions. But who will sit across the table from Mr. Maduro’s negotiators?So far, Washington has thrown its weight behind the Unitary Platform, a rebranded coalition led by Mr. Guaidó and the traditional parties, which is seeking to steer the choice of a 2024 candidate and which controls the team that would negotiate conditions with Mr. Maduro.But by continuing to uphold the fiction that Mr. Guaidó is president of Venezuela, the administration makes it harder for the opposition to go through the necessary process of reforming itself. The United States must acknowledge reality — as it relates to who actually governs in Venezuela and the need for Venezuelans to fashion the opposition that they choose. That is the only way that Washington can play a constructive role in solving Venezuela’s crisis.William Neuman is a former New York Times reporter and Andes region bureau chief, and the author of “Things Are Never So Bad That They Can’t Get Worse: Inside the Collapse of Venezuela.”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 Trump Case, Texas Creates a Headache for Georgia Prosecutors

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      A Texas court is thwarting Georgia prosecutors’ attempts to compel testimony from Texas witnesses as part of a criminal investigation into former President Donald J. Trump.ATLANTA — Witnesses called to testify in a Georgia criminal investigation into former President Donald J. Trump and his allies have not always come willingly.A number of them have fought their subpoenas in their home-state courts, only to have local judges order them to cooperate. That was the case with Trump-aligned lawyers John Eastman in New Mexico, Jenna Ellis in Colorado and Rudolph W. Giuliani in New York; Mr. Giuliani was also told by an Atlanta judge that he could come “on a train, on a bus or Uber” after his lawyers said a health condition prevented him from flying.But the state of Texas is proving to be an outlier, creating serious headaches for Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, who is leading the investigation into efforts by Mr. Trump and others to overturn his 2020 election loss in Georgia.Last month, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the state’s highest criminal court, thwarted Ms. Willis’s effort to force Jacki L. Pick, a Republican lawyer and pundit, to testify in Atlanta, saying that her subpoena had essentially expired. But in a pair of opinions, a majority of the judges on the all-Republican court went further, indicating that they believed the Georgia special grand jury conducting the inquiry may not have the legal standing to compel testimony from Texas witnesses.After the court’s ruling, two other pro-Trump Texans, Sidney Powell and Phil Waldron, did not show up for their scheduled court dates in Atlanta. And while there may be workarounds for Ms. Willis — experts say the Atlanta prosecutors could go to Texas to depose the witnesses — it looks to some Georgia observers like a pattern of Texas Republicans meddling with Georgia when it comes to the fate of Mr. Trump.Fani Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, has subpoenaed prominent lawyers of Mr. Trump, including Rudolph Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, John Eastman and Sidney Powell.Audra Melton for The New York Times“It does seem like there’s a substantial resistance from Texas and Texans to forcing people to cooperate in ways that we haven’t seen from any other jurisdiction,” said Anthony Michael Kreis, a constitutional law professor at Georgia State University in Atlanta.Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, has also weighed in, filing an amicus brief late last month along with other Republican attorneys general that supported efforts by Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina to avoid testifying in the Atlanta investigation. Mr. Paxton, in a statement accompanying his brief, assailed the investigation for what he said were its “repeated attempts to ignore” the Constitution.Mr. Paxton, who is running for re-election this year despite having been indicted and arrested on criminal securities-fraud charges, has sought to intervene in Georgia before. After the 2020 election, he sued Georgia and three other swing states that Mr. Trump lost, in a far-fetched attempt to get the Supreme Court to delay the certification of their presidential electors.By refusing to compel the three Texas residents to testify in Georgia, the court is breaking with a long tradition of cooperation between states in producing subpoenaed witnesses. All 50 states have versions of what is known as the Uniform Act, which was created in the 1930s to establish a framework for one state to compel testimony from a witness residing in another.Ms. Willis, in a statement, said, “We expect every state to abide by the Constitutional requirement to ensure that full faith and credit is given by them to the laws and proceedings of other states. That requirement includes abiding by the interstate compact to produce witnesses for other states’ judicial proceedings.”Ms. Willis is weighing potential conspiracy and racketeering charges, among others, and is examining the phone call that Mr. Trump made on Jan. 2, 2021, to Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, imploring him to “find” nearly 12,000 votes, or enough to reverse the outcome of the Georgia vote.On Friday, her office filed paperwork seeking to compel testimony from three more witnesses, The Associated Press reported: former House Speaker Newt Gingrich as well as Michael T. Flynn, a former national security adviser, and Eric Herschmann, a lawyer who worked in the Trump White House.Nearly 20 people, including Mr. Giuliani, have already been informed that they are targets of Ms. Willis’s investigation and could face criminal charges. Ms. Pick, a radio host and former lawyer for House Republicans whose husband, Doug Deason, is a prominent Republican donor and Dallas power broker, has also been told she is among the targets of the investigation, according to one of her lawyers, Geoffrey Harper.She played a central role in one of two December 2020 hearings before Georgia lawmakers that were organized by Mr. Giuliani, who advanced a number of falsehoods about the election. During a hearing before the Georgia Senate, Ms. Pick narrated a video feed that showed ballot counting taking place at a downtown Atlanta arena where voting was held.Jacki L. Pick played a central role in one of two December 2020 hearings before Georgia lawmakers that were organized by Mr. Giuliani.Rebecca Wright/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via APAt the hearing, Ms. Pick said the video “goes to” what she called “fraud or misrepresentation,” and the implication of her presentation was that something improper was taking place. She was immediately challenged by Democrats at the hearing. The office of Mr. Raffensperger, a Republican, has also long refuted the idea that anything nefarious took place in the counting of votes at the arena.Mr. Harper said his client had done nothing wrong.“She didn’t suggest there was fraud, she didn’t suggest something untoward had happened,” he said. “She simply said here is a video, here’s what it shows, we’d like to investigate further. Her testimony is the most innocuous thing you’ve ever seen.”Fulton County prosecutors are also seeking the testimony of Ms. Powell, who like Ms. Pick lives in the Dallas area. She is a lawyer and conspiracy theorist who played a high-profile role in efforts to keep Mr. Trump in power. In Georgia, she helped put together a team of Trump allies and consultants who gained access to a wide range of voter data and voting equipment in rural Coffee County; they are currently being investigated by Mr. Raffensperger’s office, as well as the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and Ms. Willis’s office.In an email, Ms. Powell said, “GA has no need to subpoena me. My involvement in GA issues has been significantly misrepresented by the press including your outlet.”She did not answer questions about her legal strategy with respect to Fulton County’s attempt to make her testify, or say whether she had been informed that she is a target of the investigation or merely a witness.Mr. Waldron, a former Army colonel with a background in information warfare, also advanced a number of conspiracy theories after the 2020 election, and he made a virtual appearance at one of the legislative hearings in Georgia. He could not be reached for comment. He lives outside of Austin, Texas, and the district attorney in the county where he lives said he was not aware of any legal challenge to Ms. Willis’s effort to compel Mr. Waldron’s testimony.Phil Waldron, a former Army colonel, made a virtual appearance at a legislative hearing in Georgia after the 2020 election.Aram Roston/ReutersThe body overseeing the Fulton County investigation is known under Georgia law as a special purpose grand jury. It can sit for longer periods than a regular grand jury and has the ability to subpoena targets of the investigation to provide testimony, though it lacks the power to indict. Once a special grand jury issues a report and recommendations, indictments can be sought from a regular grand jury.A majority of judges on the Texas court expressed the view that the Georgia grand jury was not a proper criminal grand jury because it lacks indictment authority, and thus likely lacks standing to compel the appearance of witnesses from Texas.“I am inclined to find such a body is not the kind of grand jury envisioned by the Uniform Act,” wrote Judge Kevin Yeary. “And if I may be wrong about that, I would place the burden to show otherwise on the requesting state.”His view was essentially backed by four other judges on the nine-member court.The question of whether the Fulton County special grand jury is civil or criminal in nature came up in late August, when lawyers for Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, unsuccessfully sought to quash a subpoena demanding that he testify. The governor’s lawyers argued that the special grand jury was civil, and that Mr. Kemp would not have to testify in a civil action under the doctrine of sovereign immunity.But in a written order on Aug. 29, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert C.I. McBurney rejected the idea that the special grand jury was civil, noting that none of the paperwork establishing the grand jury mentioned that it would be considering civil actions.“That a special purpose grand jury cannot issue an indictment does not diminish the criminal nature of its work or somehow transmogrify that criminal investigation into a civil one,” Judge McBurney wrote. “Police officers, too, lack the authority to indict anyone, but their investigations are plainly criminal.”Ronald Wright, a law professor at Wake Forest University who studies the work of criminal prosecutors, said that the Texas court’s decision, based on its interpretation of the special grand jury’s purpose, appeared unusual. “I haven’t heard anything about one state saying categorically, ‘No we read your statute, that doesn’t apply here, you can’t get this witness,’” he said.The nine members of Texas’ Court of Criminal Appeals are elected and are all Republicans. But they have not always been in sync with Gov. Greg Abbott and Mr. Paxton, both vociferous Trump supporters. Mr. Harper said his reading of Georgia law is that the special grand jury is a civil proceeding. He believes that witnesses living in other states can challenge efforts to compel their testimony, at least if it is in person.“Civil cases can get testimony from out-of-state witnesses, but they have to do it by deposition,” he said. “I believe that if pressed on the issue, it would be a unanimous ruling by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals that a special grand jury in Georgia cannot subpoena live testimony from witnesses outside of Georgia.” More

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      El bolsonarismo no se irá de Brasil

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      El rechazo tajante al gobierno reaccionario de Jair Bolsonaro que predecían las encuestas y deseaban millones de personas no llegó. Brasil está al borde del precipicio.No todo fue negativo. En las elecciones presidenciales del domingo, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, el antiguo líder sindical de centroizquierda que gobernó con destreza a Brasil de 2003 a 2011, se llevó aproximadamente el 48 por ciento de los votos; fue un resultado satisfactorio, dentro del margen de error de las encuestas finales. Lo malo es que Bolsonaro superó las predicciones y se llevó el 43 por ciento de los votos (cifra mucho más alta que las proyecciones previas), por lo que es probable que la segunda vuelta del 30 de octubre sea más cerrada de lo que se esperaba. Por si fuera poco, varios aliados y antiguos ministros del gabinete de Bolsonaro por todo el país lograron el mismo éxito en las elecciones locales.Los resultados mostraron, sin lugar a dudas, que Bolsonaro no es ningún accidente de la historia. Podría haber sido posible restarle importancia a su sorpresiva victoria hace cuatro años, cuando llegó al poder gracias a un sentimiento antiizquierdista generalizado, y explicarla como mera suerte. Pero ya no. Detrás de sus vagas referencias a “Dios, patria y familia” hay un respaldo muy firme por todo el país y de una parte amplia y diversa de la sociedad. Independientemente del resultado que obtenga a finales de este mes, los espíritus que alborotó Bolsonaro y la política que cultivó no desaparecerán.Las primeras incursiones de Bolsonaro en la política brasileña estuvieron marcadas por la ignominia. Este capitán retirado del ejército capturó por primera vez la atención nacional a mediados de los años ochenta, cuando las fuerzas armadas comenzaron una retirada táctica de la vida política tras dos décadas de gobierno militar. Un conocido semanario reveló que Bolsonaro, insatisfecho por el salario tan bajo que recibían los militares, planeó provocar algunas explosiones en un cuartel de Río de Janeiro. Su intención, según le dijo al periodista con una tremenda franqueza, era crear problemas para el nada popular ministro del ejército.Tras una ráfaga publicitaria y una investigación interna en la que Bolsonaro pareció amenazar al periodista por testificar en su contra, el incidente quedó prácticamente en el olvido. Sin embargo, ese desplante ilustró la conducta habitual de Bolsonaro, un soldado deslucido cuyas enormes ambiciones políticas por lo regular molestaban a los militares distinguidos de mayor rango. Con todo, su pasado militar fue un arma electoral útil. En 1988, después de restaurada la democracia brasileña, decidió arrancar su carrera política posicionándose como representante de los intereses y perspectivas del militar típico.Con el paso del tiempo, su discurso adquirió un tono más general de derecha y adoptó el tono conservador, si no es que la teología, el cristianismo evangélico. La política de Bolsonaro —una mezcla de intolerancia, autoritarismo, moralismo religioso, neoliberalismo y teorías conspirativas espontáneas— casi no tuvo prominencia después del gobierno militar. No obstante, 13 años de gobierno del progresista Partido de los Trabajadores causaron descontento en la derecha. En opinión de las figuras de esa ideología, las repetidas victorias electorales de la izquierda parecían indicar que había juego sucio y atentaban contra la propia noción de democracia. Al frente de esta embestida, con una grandilocuencia ideológica inimitable, estaba Bolsonaro. En la mayor democracia de América Latina, ahora habla en nombre de decenas de millones de personas.Los sucesos del domingo subrayaron esta lamentable situación. Los candidatos respaldados por Bolsonaro tuvieron los mejores resultados en todo el país y obtuvieron victorias importantes contra candidatos respaldados por Da Silva en São Paulo y Río de Janeiro. De hecho, la primera vuelta de las votaciones parece indicar que el proyecto político que se impuso en 2018 (en una palabra, el “Bolsonarismo”) no solo sigue vigente, sino que puede crecer. Si pensamos en el desastroso manejo de la COVID-19 por parte de Bolsonaro, sus constantes amenazas a la democracia brasileña y la serie de escándalos de corrupción en torno a él y su familia, el futuro luce sombrío.Pero esto no es inexplicable. Aunque hay mucho que no sabemos (el censo, postergado debido a la pandemia y a un sabotaje institucional, tiene más de una década de retraso), algunas cosas son claras. A pesar de que Bolsonaro conservó su abrumadora ventaja en las áreas del oeste y el noroeste del país, el aspecto más sorprendente de las elecciones fue con cuánta claridad mantuvo las líneas establecidas de apoyo regional. En el sureste, un bastión tradicional de política conservadora, Bolsonaro prosperó. En el noreste, refugio del Partido de los Trabajadores, Da Silva sobresalió. El éxito de Bolsonaro ha consistido en mantener y ampliar la base de apoyo conservadora tradicional, convocándola en torno a sus amargas denuncias de los progresistas, el sistema de justicia, la prensa y las instituciones internacionales.Sin embargo, con todo y esta gran demostración de dominio de Bolsonaro, el resultado más probable todavía es la victoria de Da Silva. Después de todo, el segundo lugar en la primera vuelta de las elecciones nunca en la historia ha ganado la segunda vuelta. Además, lo más probable es que los candidatos que terminaron en tercer y cuarto lugar, Simone Tebet, de centroderecha, y Ciro Gomes, de centroizquierda, apoyen a Da Silva. El gusto del expresidente por las actividades de campaña, evidente en un animado mensaje que escribió en Twitter en cuanto los resultados fueron claros, es otra ventaja. Cuatro semanas dedicadas a hacer campaña deberían sentarle bien.El problema es que prolongar la campaña también podría ser peligroso. Los partidarios de Bolsonaro ya han estado envueltos en varios actos de violencia en contra de los seguidores de Da Silva. No sería inesperado que el “Bolsonarismo”, movimiento arraigado en una retórica violenta, se cobre más vidas antes del 30 de octubre. Mientras tanto, gracias a su sorpresivo éxito, el presidente Bolsonaro tiene más tiempo y credibilidad para seguir adelante con sus planes en contra de la democracia brasileña.Bolsonaro todavía debe librar varios obstáculos para hacerse con el poder. Pero acaba de superar uno muy importante.Andre Pagliarini (@apagliar) es profesor asistente de Historia en Hampden-Sydney College, investigador en la institución independiente Washington Brazil Office y columnista de The Brazilian Report. More

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      A Plan B for Democrats Living in Red States

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      BOZEMAN, Mont. — Before we get to the point, keep in mind that during Montana’s recent primary election, in the Second Congressional District race in Garfield County — a stretch of eastern badlands and prairie nearly the size of Connecticut — 14 Democrats voted. Then again, maybe that is the point.After the 2020 census, Montana regained the second House seat it lost 30 years ago. Here in the western mountains where I live, the First District could be competitive for Democrats if the college towns and Indian reservations can outflank clumps of Trumpists and armed Christian separatists. But when I asked Dorothy Bradley — a Democratic icon since she got elected to the state legislature as a 23-year-old in 1970 — about the Second District, she replied point blank, “A Democrat can’t win in eastern Montana.”She is, however, floating a Plan B. In April, Ms. Bradley invited to the Capitol in Helena her opponent in the 1992 gubernatorial race, Marc Racicot, the two-term governor and former chair of the Republican National Committee. In the contest for the House seat in the eastern district, they endorsed an independent, Gary Buchanan, who is running against Montana’s current at-large representative, Republican Matt Rosendale. The Bradley-Racicot endorsement was a singular milestone in Montana politics, as if the C.E.O.s of Pepsi and Coke called a truce to sell some Dr. Pepper.President Biden’s plea to rational Republicans and independents to vote for Democrats in the midterms, as a ploy to root out authoritarian Republican extremists, could persuade the already persuadable. But winning the popular and electoral votes in 2020 does not change the fact that he lost in about 2,500 of the nation’s 3,000 or so counties. While the Republican Party spurns observable reality, the Democratic Party has alienated most of the continent (which is also unrealistic in a republic if governing is the goal). In landscapes where, as former Senator Conrad Burns described eastern Montana, there is “a lot of dirt between light bulbs,” defending pluralist democracy might require a pluralist task force. Realistic Democrats allying with Republican defectors and the unaffiliated to elect civic-minded independents could look like the bipartisan coalition backing Mr. Buchanan and an experiment south of here in Utah.The Utah Democratic Party decided not to field a U.S. Senate candidate and instead endorsed the independent Evan McMullin, a former C.I.A. officer who ran for president in 2016, to oppose Mike Lee, who initially supported Donald Trump’s claims of a stolen election. That was a stirring, patriotic feat. Still, what did they have to lose? The last Democrat to win the Senate in Utah was born in 1911 and lost to Orrin Hatch in 1976.These independents overlap in ways that could be instructive in future races — levelheaded centrists with establishment support and a sense of place running against mortifying Republican oddballs in regions where Democrats are pariahs. And while Mr. Buchanan has raised about twice as much money as his Democratic opponent, the fact that Mr. McMullin doesn’t have a Democrat to contend with has helped propel him to a statistical tie with Senator Lee, according to a Deseret News/Hinckley Institute of Politics poll.No responsible American can vote for congressional Republicans — with few exceptions, like Senator Lisa Murkowski — for the foreseeable future because of the threat that party poses to orderly elections. Montana’s Representative Rosendale, who voted against certifying the 2020 election results, personifies that threat.Mr. Buchanan, who owns an investment advisory firm in Billings, made a last-minute decision to run for the House after Mr. Rosendale voted against a bipartisan resolution titled “Supporting the People of Ukraine.”How do you know if your representative is not the least bit representative? When the House votes 426-3, and yours is among the three.Mr. Buchanan described that vote as the moment “when embarrassment became shame.” It’s worth noting that our right-wing governor, Greg Gianforte, was so offended by the invasion, he started immediately divesting the state’s Russian assets, proclaiming, “Montana stands with Ukraine.” It’s such a near-unanimous position that even I will stand with my journalist-clobbering governor, though I will be 10 yards away wearing my dad’s welding helmet.Pondering Representative Rosendale’s peculiar record (he was also in the minority when the House voted 394-18 to support Sweden and Finland joining NATO), Mr. Racicot summarized his disapproval: “These aren’t necessarily moral judgments. These are almost mathematical judgments.”Though I voted for Dorothy Bradley in 1992, I do find Mr. Racicot, as a former R.N.C. chair who publicly endorsed Joe Biden for president, to be a reliable sherpa in ascending to the ideal of country above party.“I don’t care about the things that are debatable, that thoughtful people can argue about and come to different conclusions,” he told me. “What I care about is betraying the country and betraying the democracy.” Because of fidelity to the Constitution, he argues that “a lot of people are to the point where they can finally say: ‘You know what, I’m not a Democrat first. I’m not a Republican first.’”A man in a bar recently asked Mr. Buchanan if he’s an F.B.I. agent or a Mormon. He looks like he served as Montana’s first Department of Commerce director in the early 1980s. Sounds dull, yet those were desperate years, when much of the old Montana up and died — the Butte copper mine, the Great Falls refinery and the Anaconda smelter shut down, and the farm crisis incited hundreds of farmers in Montana and the Midwest to take their own lives. Mr. Buchanan oversaw “Build Montana,” a program focused on beefing up what’s now the economic pillar of tourism. He created the still ubiquitous “Made in Montana” label to promote homegrown products, a marketing ploy I fall for every time I face life’s jelly and jam dilemmas. Endangered fossil fuel towns might appreciate his experience with tough transitions. And his fealty to the right to privacy in the Montana Constitution, which guarantees abortion rights (for now), provides an alternative to Representative Rosendale’s rigid opposition.Mr. Buchanan told me that when he’s out campaigning in the eastern district, he meets Montanans who have never heard of the category of independent, but they instantly see themselves in that word. More than 40 percent of Americans identify as independents, according to a Gallup poll — the biggest bloc in the country, outnumbering either party. That figure should shame both parties’ leaders into deep self-reflection.When I saw photos of Mr. Racicot and Ms. Bradley standing beside Mr. Buchanan for endorsement, my first reaction was relief that there might be a plausible home remedy to Representative Rosendale and his ilk. Last month, in Livingston, I noticed about a dozen Buchanan yard signs and zero for his major party opponents. I know hardcore liberals in Helena and the Shields Valley who plan to vote for him.While I wish I could reach a comforting conclusion about the improvised communities bucking up these western independents for the greater good, partisans putting aside heartfelt differences is not necessarily a sign of hope but a warning that the two-party system has failed them. Congress is supposed to compromise, not voters.Sarah Vowell is the author of, among other books, “Lafayette in the Somewhat United States” and the producer of an oral history of the Montana Constitutional Convention of 1972.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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      Online Fund-Raising Was Supposed to Save Politics. Instead, It’s Dragging Us to Hell.

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      In late 2003 the spirit of revolution was in the air and on our Yahoo browsers. Shock and awe had given way to the long slog of war. And the internet was allowing supporters of politicians to use new tools such as “the Web log, or ‘blog’” to plot together in real time.Amid this upheaval, Howard Dean’s presidential campaign saw an opportunity. It could leverage these new tools to raise money by channeling the “netroots” anger at the Republican president and the bipartisan establishment that got us into the quagmire in Iraq. Through this online community building, it brought in a record $14.8 million in a single quarter.Mr. Dean wasn’t the first to use online fund-raising in presidential politics. John McCain’s upstart campaign had leveraged it to a less prodigious degree in 2000. “McCain Gets Big Payoff on Web Site” was this paper’s headline a few days after his surprise New Hampshire win: He had brought in nearly a million dollars in “e-donations” in just two days.Mr. McCain and Mr. Dean both lost — but good-government types, the media and many regular Americans viewed this new funding mechanism and the little-d democratization of campaign finance as a way to challenge, and hopefully overtake, the corrupted status quo. “We really give people a lot of power, and other campaigns are scared to do that,” said Zephyr Teachout, the Dean campaign’s director of online organization, at the time.The dreams of an idealistic outsider disrupting the existing order quickly came to fruition in 2008 when Barack Obama upended the Clinton machine, then beat Mr. McCain at his own game with an unprecedented money bomb leveraging what the journalist Sasha Issenberg has called “the victory lab.”The overwhelmingly positive narrative about the power of small-dollar online fund-raising began to congeal: Grass-roots fund-raising is pure and good. Big-dollar donations from corporate cronies are suspect. This is what democracy looks like!!!As it turned out, grass-roots fund-raising is also what ending democracy looks like. As with any other mass movement, people-powered campaigns followed the standard Hofferian trajectory: beginning as a cause, turning into a business and becoming a racket. Our online fund-raising system is not only enriching scam artists, clogging our inboxes and inflaming the electorate; it is also empowering our politics’ most nefarious actors.It is how Donald Trump and his cast of clueless coupsters raised nine figures to “stop the steal” that they had fabricated to try to stay in power. It is one way our most extreme candidates dominate the conversation and gain power in our political system. It has redirected money from politicians who work to find compromises that might just help people, diverting it instead to those who either have no chance to win or, worse yet, can win and want to undermine that work for their own ends. And it’s hard to imagine how we can stop it.A warning of the hellscape to come took place in late 2009, when a little-known South Carolina congressman named Joe Wilson raised well over $2 million after he shouted “You lie!” at President Barack Obama during a health care address to a joint session of Congress. At first, the fallout from this incident transpired in a standard before-times fashion. Mr. Wilson, a mild-mannered Southerner, apologized to Mr. Obama for the outburst.But after the Democratic-controlled Congress censured him anyway, Mr. Wilson’s campaign team pressed the advantage. As CNN’s Peter Hamby reported at the time, it “bulked up to seize the fund-raising opportunity” and in the weeks that followed, Mr. Wilson retained a “new media strategist,” “uploaded fund-raising pleas to YouTube” and purchased banner ad space on The Drudge Report. The result: In just 12 days he collected more money than he spent during his entire previous campaign.This moment of proto-lib-owning virality offered a playbook for a new generation of political performance artists who were more native to these tools than Mr. Wilson and cared not at all about manners or the media elite’s opinion. They learned that they could raise money and gain influence not through the long slog of relationship and coalition building in Washington but instantaneously by being jerks on the internet and calling out their voters’ enemy du jour in the most ostentatious manner they could summon.It’s created a perverse incentive structure, empowering the congressional shock jocks at the expense of actual legislators. Meanwhile, a series of court decisions supercharged political fund-raising generally. The new no-limits era allowed big donors to maximize huge contributions to political committees and blasted billions in dark money through the system, continually raising the stakes of each fund-raising deadline.The elevation of the small-dollar donor has created other nightmarish unintended consequences, however. Democratic candidates with no hope of winning are raising ungodly sums from online liberals drawn to their flashy videos and clever slams. This is particularly the case when said candidates are running against notably loathed Republicans. In 2020, this meant Jaime Harrison, the current Democratic National Committee chairman, raised a record-breaking $131 million in his campaign against Senator Lindsey Graham, despite the fact that Mr. Harrison lost by double digits and never really had a prayer.The story was similar for Amy McGrath, who ran against Senator Mitch McConnell, and Randy “Ironstache” Bryce, who got shaved clean by Bryan Steil. The lesson remains unlearned: This year Marcus Flowers has raised $10 million in his assuredly hopeless race against Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene — double the receipts of more competitive races. Added together, hundreds of millions of dollars are being pumped into hopeless hype candidates. At a minimum, that money could be used more efficiently by the Democratic Party. But that entire way of thinking might be a reflection of broken politics brain. Aren’t there myriad better uses for all that altruism than pumping out hokey attack ads?As the social media outrage fund-raising model began to come into form, the political parties began to professionalize their grass-roots outreach using email and then text messages. Gone was the decentralized model Mr. Dean had road-tested, whereby supporters organized among themselves, recruiting neighbors and message board friends toward a common cause. By the 2010s, that was displaced by centralized, beta-tested boiler rooms that used powerful digital tools to prey on people’s emotions. The result is very little message variation within the party coalitions. We’ve seen a few exceptions, most notably Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign. But overall, it’s a race to the bottom to inflame a party’s own voters with the most intensity and frequency.To get a sense of just how noxious and stupid the material is that reaches America’s inboxes, I like to peruse The Archive of Political Emails’ The Firehose from time to time. A colleague of mine engineered the site for archival purposes, signing up for various lists and funneling them to the same place. You won’t be surprised to find out that The Firehose is largely devoid of that community-minded hopey-changey stuff that we were promised in the aughts. Instead it’s peppered with conspiracies, fearmongering, hyperbole, flat-out lies, gimmickry, rage fuel and a meme or two that I admit will get me to chuckle from time to time. (We all have our weaknesses.)Can we ever know the full effect that years of emails, texts, Facebook ads and viral Twitter ads with doom-driven fund-raising appeals have had on the average voter’s conception of the country and politics? How those stimuli may have contributed to the radicalization of their recipients, especially those who aren’t in on the joke (a nihilistic campaign politics trope in which the strategists make arguments they know are phony)?This part is a deep, bipartisan problem. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee might be the longest-running offender when it comes to sending apocalyptic, wheels-off messages demanding voters’ money. It has even been chastised from within its own ranks — to little effect.There is also the more direct grift. Last year I wrote about how the National Republican Congressional Committee’s donation form used a prechecked box scheme, which automatically doubled the dollar amount and made it recurring. A warning aggressively threatened donors if they unchecked the box. Similar tactics resulted in the Trump campaign’s having to return $122 million to supporters who had been duped and, in some cases, financially devastated. If the old fund-raising system was transactional, this new one is dominated by the eternal and emotionally toxic hunt for the small donor.As gross and unethical as those tactics are, the greatest threat resulting from all of this is how the very politicians who are refusing to abide by the results of democratic elections are often being funded: by the once vaunted online donor, even if this one just wants to watch the whole system burn.Senator Josh Hawley raised around $3 million in the first quarter of 2021, mostly after he was pictured giving a salute to the rioters about to storm the Capitol. He’s even merchandising this asininity. Most of the Republican leadership has fund-raised on Mr. Trump’s conspiracy-addled social media site. Rank-and-file voters who preferred candidates who promised to decertify the last election or who might certify the next one only if they get their preferred winner (or both) helped fund those candidates in Republican primaries this year.Many of these candidates have struggled to raise what is required for the general elections, in part because Mr. Trump is sucking up nine figures for his PACs, at least one of which spent copiously on legal fees this summer while spending little on supporting Republican candidates. But some wild-eyed insurrectionists might get swept into office during an election cycle in which Republicans perform well, and that is dangerous enough.Maybe, then, given the results of our two-decade experiment in people-powered politics, we might temper rhetoric that glorifies the mighty grass-roots dollar. And reflect on how we might reform our financing system to disincentivize the crazy-making. Empowering the little guy and draining the swamp sounds nice and all, but as it turns out, there is something to be said for a little gatekeeping.And if you don’t believe me, the O.G. disrupter basically admitted as much.Last week I called Mr. Dean to ask him to reflect on the devolution of the netroots model that seemed to offer so much hope for doe-eyed reformers two decades ago.“At the time, it was a way that a young generation could start pushing their way up by using technology,” he said, “and it was incredible.”“But now that technology has been abused,” he continued. “The right-wingers are using it in service of fascism.” He added, “And I just send all my fund-raising emails to junk.”Tim Miller, a writer at The Bulwark, is the author of “Why We Did It: A Travelogue From the Republican Road to Hell.”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