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      Whatever the outcome of midterms, don’t expect Republicans to return to ‘normal’ | Cas Mudde

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      Whatever the outcome of the midterms, don’t expect Republicans to return to ‘normal’Cas MuddeAnyone hoping a poor election showing might pull the party back from extremism doesn’t see the unfortunate truth: Trump and his radicals now represent Republican values In 2010, the then conservative Canadian-American commentator David Frum feared that the conservative Tea Party movement would radicalize the Republican party, which would bring it short-term gain but long-term loss. Two years later, after some unconventional Tea Party candidates had defeated establishment “Republicans in name only” in primaries to then lose in the general elections – like Christine “I’m not a witch” O’Donnell in Delaware or Richard “God intended your rape child” Mourdock in Indiana – the Republican establishment successfully blamed the Tea Party movement for the party’s electoral defeats and regained control, albeit, as it turned out in 2015, for just a few years.Recently, some commentators have argued that radical outsiders once again endanger Republican success in the midterms. While this might be the case, don’t expect this to seriously change the far-right direction of the party.Trump 2024 campaign seeks to recruit man who smeared John Kerry – reportsRead moreMost of the media attention has gone to a group of radical outsiders, endorsed by Trump, who unexpectedly won their primaries but have struggled in the polls for the coming US Senate elections. The most important are former Georgia running back Herschel Walker, whose campaign consists of cosplaying as a law enforcement officer and dodging debates with his opponents; New Jersey resident and quack TV doctor Mehmet Oz, running for a seat in the neighboring state of Pennsylvania, whose social media team seems to hate him so much that his opponent, John Fetterman, simply has to retweet his tweets; and “venture capitalist” JD Vance, in Ohio, whose campaign is as entertaining as the movie based on his autobiography and is barely kept afloat by the largesse of Silicon Valley’s resident Trumpist, Peter Thiel.To be fair, these three are just the tip of the iceberg. There are several extremists contending for governor races, such as former news anchor Kari Lake, in Arizona, a Sarah Palin 2.0, or Christian nationalist Doug Mastriano, in Pennsylvania, who cosplayed as a Confederate soldier and is surrounded by a team of antisemites and self-proclaimed prophets.This is to say nothing of the House races, in which a host of candidates are trying to make Marjorie “Jewish space lasers” Taylor Greene look normal. There is a host of conspiracy thinkers running, including a large number of QAnon supporters, such as Sam Peters in Nevada and Ron Watkins in Arizona. And I am not even touching on Republicans running for legislative positions at the state level.To be clear, it is not even certain that most of these people will actually lose their election. Many are polling close to or even ahead of their actually normal Democratic opponents. But even should they lose – preventing Republican control of the Senate, and losing the party some governorships – there is no indication that this will substantially change the direction of the party.The architect of the anti-Tea Party counter-coup, Karl Rove, is as irrelevant in today’s Republican party as James Carville is in the current Democratic party. And the main contenders, real or illusionary, to lead a “post-Trump” Republican party are almost as, or even more, Trumpian than the former president.Most notably, the only Republican to potentially challenge, and even match, Trump’s popularity among the base is the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis. He tries to compensate for his lack of charisma with a relentless string of culture war attacks, which are not just red meat for the Republican base but also create liberal outrage, the lifeblood of the American far right.Some Republicans hope that the Georgia governor, Brian Kemp, could help the party “shake off” Trump. True, there is bad blood between Trump and Kemp, and the latter handsomely defeated the former’s handpicked opponent, former Georgia senator David Perdue, but the problems between the two are personal rather than ideological. After all, Kemp won the governorship with a Trumpian campaign steeped in vote manipulation and has been as radical as Trump on abortion, guns and immigration. The only thing that sets him apart from Trump, really, is his acceptance of the 2020 election results (in Georgia).In the same article in which Frum expressed fear that Tea Party radicalization would marginalize the Republican party, more than a decade ago, he also argued that “a party must champion the values of the voters it already has”. He didn’t see what has by now become crystal clear: Trump and his radical outsiders do represent the values of Republican voters. In the end, the Tea Party has won after all.
      Cas Mudde is a Guardian US columnist and the Stanley Wade Shelton UGAF professor in the school of public and international affairs at the University of Georgia
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      in Elections

      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 US Politics

      The attack on Paul Pelosi should be a moment of national reckoning | Jill Filipovic

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      The attack on Paul Pelosi should be a moment of national reckoning Jill FilipovicAll political violence is a problem, but in terms of sheer numbers, rightwing extremism is a much more significant problem than leftwing radicalism Much of American life has gotten coarser, uglier and crueler in the years since Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016. Even with Trump out of office, his legacy persists, and it erodes American life every day.On Friday, in a grisly act of political violence, a man broke into the home of the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, one of the US right’s most vilified political figures, and attacked her husband with a hammer, fracturing his skull and leaving him with serious injuries. The attacker, 42-year-old David DePape, was reportedly carrying zip ties and duct tape and yelling: “Where’s Nancy?”Paul Pelosi is lucky he wasn’t killed – a hammer to the skull can certainly do the job, especially when the victim is an elderly man. And while I imagine that Nancy Pelosi is feeling enormous grief and guilt over the fact that her husband was nearly murdered in an attack that seemed aimed at her, she’s also lucky she wasn’t home at the time of the assault.Such an extreme act should shock the conscience of the nation. Instead, it has shown just how immune to human decency and empathy the Trumpist right has become. Trump’s son Donald Jr tweeted an image of a pair of men’s underwear and a hammer with the caption “Got my Paul Pelosi Halloween costume ready”.His father has thus far remained silent, as have many Republican elected officials. Conservatives in the media, meanwhile, are working overtime to deny that the right holds any responsibility here, chalking this up to a random act of violence and arguing that sometimes leftists are violent, too.That’s not totally wrong: a mentally disturbed man was arrested outside supreme court justice Brett Kavanaugh’s house with a gun this past summer, and another shot at a bunch of Republican congressmen at baseball practice in 2017, nearly killing Representative Steve Scalise.But there are a few major differences, not least among them the fact that rightwing political violence is much more common than leftwing political violence, and that rightwing violence is much more likely to be fatal than leftwing violence. In the US, rightwing extremists aren’t just more dangerous than leftwing ones, but are more dangerous than Islamic radicals and those inspired by the Islamic State and al-Qaida. Since 1994, a majority of terrorist plots within the US were hatched by rightwing radicals.All political violence is a problem. But in terms of sheer numbers, rightwing violence is a much more significant problem than leftwing violence.That may be, in part, because of the right wing’s broad permission structure when it comes to unchecked misogyny, threatening and menacing political opponents, and refusing to forcefully condemn violent acts. When Scalise was shot and Kavanaugh was threatened, prominent Democrats didn’t sit in silence. Bernie Sanders, who was reportedly the favored candidate of the man who shot Scalise, immediately came out after the shooting to say, “I am sickened by this despicable act,” and emphasized that “real change can only come about through nonviolent action.” When the man menacing Kavanaugh was arrested, Joe Biden condemned the man’s actions in no uncertain terms, and supported expanded security measures for supreme court justices.And prominent liberals with national platforms and connections to Democratic administrations didn’t suggest dressing up as a bloody Steve Scalise or a dead Brett Kavanaugh on Halloween. The only prominent liberal to make such a tasteless joke – which had nothing to do with an actual assassination attempt – was the famously vulgar comedian Kathy Griffin, who posted a gory photo of herself holding the fake severed head of Donald Trump; for that, she lost most of her professional work and was booted from her television gigs, investigated by the Secret Service and, according to her, threatened with a charge of conspiracy to assassinate the president of the United States.By contrast, threatening and menacing Democrats has become a staple not just of conservative big mouths on YouTube and talk radio, but of Republicans seeking office. Trump, notoriously, used his rallies to encourage supporters to chant “lock her up” about Hillary Clinton. Republican representative Paul Gosar tweeted a bizarre cartoon video of him killing the Democrat representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and threatening President Biden; he refused to apologize for it, and his actions were not broadly condemned on the right.The Republican representative from Georgia Marjorie Taylor Greene has said that Pelosi has committed treason, a crime “punishable by death”. The Minnesota Republican representative Tom Emmer tweeted a video of himself shooting a gun, along with the words “Exercising my Second Amendment rights” and the hashtag #FirePelosi. Blake Masters, a Republican who is running for a Senate seat in Arizona, has published campaign ads in which he is holding guns (in one of the ads, he specifies: “It wasn’t designed for hunting – this is designed to kill people”) and has said that when it comes to what he believes is a war between left and right, “You can recite an eloquent poem about pacifism right before they line you up against the wall and shoot you.”Republican Eric Greitens ran for Senate with an ad featuring him armed and breaking down a door, saying: “Get a Rino-hunting permit. There’s no bagging limit, no tagging limit, and it doesn’t expire until we save our country.” (Rino stands for “Republican in name only”, slang for moderate members of the GOP.)There is also the fact of rightwing violence against women, which seems less and less like a political liability. Republicans do not have a total lock on misogynist violence, but the number of GOP candidates accused of abuse and assault is truly stunning – and so too is the party’s general shrug in response. This seems to be another outcome of the presidency of a man who bragged on video about sexually assaulting women: abusing women and girls is simply not a disqualifier for those on the Republican ticket.And finally, there is the rightwing conspiracy-mongering that predictably draws in those who are untethered to reality, and the related rhetoric that makes fixing the invented problem a kind of life-and-death battle of good versus evil. The anti-abortion movement truly pioneered this strategy, claiming abortion is murder and likening abortion clinics to Hitler’s extermination factories during the Holocaust.The outcome of telling people that millions of babies were being literally murdered in this clinic down the street was a predictable one: clinics attacked, women menaced and harassed, doctors and other workers murdered. And instead of losing, the anti-abortion terrorists won: the Republican party agreed with their political aims and Republican presidents appointed anti-abortion supreme court justices, and abortion is no longer a protected constitutional right.The US right has gotten even more unhinged in recent years, with many Trump supporters embracing the QAnon conspiracy theories, believing Democrats are trafficking children through pizza restaurants and in Wayfair furniture, and even mainstream Republicans are joining in on Trump’s “Stop the Steal” refrain that the 2020 election was stolen (it wasn’t).When you promulgate totally baseless, crazy ideas and convince your followers that the mainstream media are lying to them and that political opponents aren’t just ideologically different but are literally a threat to your life, and then you insist on living in a country where people can be armed to the teeth, it’s tough to act surprised when your followers are crazy and violent.There is a pattern here that you just don’t see on the left: the fetishization of deadly weapons; violence against women that goes unpunished by the party and its supporters; the kind of troubling conspiracy theories that are catnip for crazies and that demand extreme action in response; and the fantasizing about murdering one’s political opponents, all tossed into the cauldron together.It’s not a coincidence, given the hyper-masculine misogyny element to all of this, that much of the violent rightwing fantasizing is directed at women, Nancy Pelosi and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez chief among them. This isn’t the first time Nancy Pelosi was targeted by violent rightwing men. During the January 6 insurrection in 2021, she was a target of the rioters who broke into the Capitol building and wandered the halls calling her name in the kind of singsong voices usually reserved for horror movies: “Nancy, oh Nancy! Where are you, Nancy?”Republicans have largely refused to reckon with what happened on January 6. And even now, they are treating the Pelosi attack like a sideshow instead of the real warning it is. Just hours after Pelosi’s husband took a hammer to the head and as he was undergoing surgery to repair his cracked skull, Virginia’s Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, told an audience of rally-goers: “There’s no room for violence anywhere, but we’re going to send [Pelosi] back to be with him in California.”The attack on Paul Pelosi should be a moment of reckoning. For the past several years, it has felt like the wheels on this bus are getting progressively looser, and the risks of conflict, both political and interpersonal, rising higher. Depending on how Republicans react to this moment, it could simply be a footnote – a bad and tragic act, but one without lasting national effects – or one of those historical inflection points we look back on as indicative of the dangerous turn the nation was about to make.
      Jill Filipovic is the author of OK Boomer, Let’s Talk
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      in Elections

      In California, Democrats Square Off in Fierce 2022 Warfare

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      The liberal state, where Democrats often run against fellow Democrats in November thanks to an unconventional election system, is the unlikely backdrop of some of this year’s most bitter political campaigns.LOS ANGELES — The mailers and online ads vividly paint David Kim as a right-wing extremist, accusing him of running for a House seat in California “with QAnon-MAGA support” from “QAnon Republicans.”But Mr. Kim is not a Republican. He’s a progressive Democrat who supports “Medicare for all” and a Green New Deal. And the attacks come from a fellow progressive Democrat, Representative Jimmy Gomez, who is fighting to keep his seat in Congress.The vitriol in what is normally a quiet race for a decidedly safe Democratic seat illustrates how liberal California, of all places, has become home to some of this year’s most vicious political mudslinging — and not across party lines.Unlike a vast majority of the country, where voters are mulling the yawning ideological gaps between Republicans and Democrats on their midterm ballots, California has a top-two open primary system, which means two Democrats can — and often do — square off against each other in general elections. And in many cases, those candidates prove strikingly similar on policy, forcing them to dig deep to distinguish themselves.Lately, it’s grown pretty nasty.Democrats are running against Democrats in six House races, 18 state races, and dozens of municipal and local elections around California in November. In many contests, the candidates have resorted to extreme and divisive language, in a reflection of the growing polarization of American politics.An array of mailers and ads have targeted Mr. Kim.Illustration by The New York TimesThat’s particularly the case in azure-blue Los Angeles, where nearly every elected office is held by a Democrat, only a single Republican has served as mayor in the past half-century, and an explosive racism scandal involving three members of the City Council plunged the city’s political world into chaos just weeks before the election.Take the race to be the city’s next controller, typically a dull contest with few, if any, pyrotechnics. But this year, Paul Koretz, a progressive city councilman with more than three decades in public office, has taken to calling his opponent, Kenneth Mejia, “dangerous,” saying he is an antisemite and an “anarchist” who is little different from the rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.“He’s the phoniest Democrat you can find,” Mr. Koretz said in an interview of Mr. Mejia, a relative political newcomer and former Green Party member who has supported a reduction in police funding and backs a national tenants’ bill of rights.Mr. Mejia’s campaign manager, Jane Nguyen, called Mr. Koretz’s accusations “ridiculous smears” and said he was “out of touch.” Since the leak this month of a recording of City Council members in a discussion that involved offensive comments, she and other allies of Mr. Mejia have sought to portray Mr. Koretz as a racist, accusations he denies.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsElection Day is Tuesday, Nov. 8.A Pivotal Test in Pennsylvania: A battle for blue-collar white voters is raging in President Biden’s birthplace, where Democrats have the furthest to fall and the most to gain.Governor’s Races: Democrats and Republicans are heading into the final stretch of more than a dozen competitive contests for governor. Some battleground races could also determine who controls the Senate.Biden’s Agenda at Risk: If Republicans capture one or both chambers of Congress, the president’s opportunities on several issues will shrink. Here are some major areas where the two sides would clash.Ohio Senate Race: Polls show Representative Tim Ryan competing within the margin of error against his G.O.P. opponent, J.D. Vance. Mr. Ryan said the race would be “the upset of the night,” but there is still a cold reality tilting against Democrats.Some Democrats worry that the poisonous environment is bad for party unity.“There are wild charges going back and forth about whether one candidate is a closet conservative and one is a closet Marxist,” said Garry South, a longtime Democratic strategist. “I just don’t think these runoffs between Democrats should turn into a derby about who can accuse the other of being the most extreme. That’s not a healthy debate to have.”Mr. South and other consultants pointed out several other races where the animosity was at full pitch, including a contest for a City Council seat on the wealthy Westside of Los Angeles. One candidate, a centrist Democrat with a background in employment law, has tried to link her progressive opponent, a criminal defense lawyer, to pedophiles and rapists. That lawyer, in turn, has called her a racist.Mr. Kim checking in with his campaign team and volunteers after canvassing in Los Angeles on Saturday.Alisha Jucevic for The New York TimesIn a race for a State Senate district encompassing parts of Downtown and South Los Angeles, two Democrats with nearly identical policy positions have accused each other of being pro-business and anti-tenant..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.“It’s a race to the bottom,” Mr. South said.For more established candidates, the negative messaging may come from a place of desperation: Even before the controversy consumed City Hall early in October, an anti-incumbent mood seemed to have settled over Los Angeles.In the June 7 primary, two sitting City Council members lost decisively to inexperienced challengers, one by a wide enough margin to preclude a runoff.In their primary, Mr. Mejia walloped Mr. Koretz by nearly 20 percentage points, though he fell short of the 50 percent threshold that would preclude a runoff. Afterward, Mr. Mejia gained several key endorsements, including from The Los Angeles Times and Councilman Mike Bonin, whose son was the subject of some of the racist comments at the heart of the unwinding scandal.Mr. Koretz, by contrast, had been endorsed by all three City Council members caught on the now-infamous recording. After the scandal broke, his campaign website was scrubbed of mentions of their support, cached versions of the site show.In their race for Congress, Mr. Gomez and Mr. Kim have a history.In 2020, Mr. Gomez, who has served in the House since 2017, also faced Mr. Kim, an immigration lawyer. That time, Mr. Gomez won the primary by almost 30 points and went on to the general election without paying much, if any, attention to his rival. “He never even mentioned my name,” Mr. Kim said over a breakfast burrito at a restaurant this month.Representative Jimmy Gomez with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in Washington in 2020.Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesBut Mr. Gomez ended up winning the 2020 general election by a surprisingly slim margin of six points. In April 2021, he asked the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee to inject money into the contest for what has traditionally been a safe seat for the party, telling donors he was “in a very tough race,” HuffPost reported.This past August, Mr. Gomez’s campaign unveiled a website titled “Who Is the Real David Kim?” that accuses him of failing to support democracy and of hiding a “QAnon MAGA endorsement”; a core falsehood of QAnon is that a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles is trying to control politics and the news media. In October, Mr. Gomez has sent out three mailers juxtaposing photos of Mr. Kim with an image of Jan. 6 rioters climbing up the walls of the Capitol, and has paid for internet ads with side-by-side pictures of his rival and former President Donald J. Trump.The QAnon reference, explained Steven Barkan, a consultant for Mr. Gomez’s campaign, stems from the fact that, in 2020, Mr. Kim asked for and received endorsements from the losing candidates in the primary. One of them, Joanne Wright, a Republican, turned out to have embraced conspiracy theories, and had a “Q” image on her Twitter page before being kicked off the platform. Mr. Barkan said that Ms. Wright’s views were exposed before the primary, and he argued that Mr. Kim either knew or should have known whom he was dealing with. (Ms. Wright did not respond to requests for comment.)“It is correct to say we don’t think he’s QAnon,” Mr. Barkan conceded. “But he ran with QAnon support. It is serious when people like Kim give credibility to QAnon.”Some of the Gomez campaign’s attacks have also centered on the fact that Mr. Kim was once a registered Republican; Mr. Kim says he was raised in a Republican family but long ago changed his registration.Mr. Kim called the advertising campaign a dirty tactic and said the endorsements, which included one from a Democrat he defeated, showed that he was “a unifying candidate and leader” willing to work with people who hold different viewpoints. He also pointed out that the endorsement occurred in the 2020 race, yet was being misleadingly presented as if it happened in the current campaign.Mona Perez, left, talking with Mr. Kim about student loan debt.Alisha Jucevic for The New York Times“People like Jimmy continue to add to the extreme polarization of our country and government,” Mr. Kim said.Bill Przylucki, the executive director of Ground Game LA, a nonprofit group that promotes progressive politics and candidates, frowns on messaging that associates left-wing candidates with extremists at a time when more than 370 Republican candidates for influential offices nationwide have cast doubt on the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election.“Given the national picture, I think that’s a bad strategy overall for the Democrats,” Mr. Przylucki said, comparing the approach to “red-baiting.”Some political observers note that it has scarcely been a decade since California moved to an open primary system, and say that some adjustment is necessary. But Mr. Przylucki argued that the hostilities emerging in the current system called for a complete rethinking of traditional Democrat-versus-Republican politics.“Democrats are trying to figure out what it means to be a party in a place like Los Angeles,” he said. “Or whether it even makes sense.” More

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      Nancy Pelosi, Vilified by G.O.P. for Years, Is a Top Target of Threats

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      The attack on the husband of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, which appeared to target her, came after more than a decade of Republican efforts to demonize and dehumanize the most powerful woman in Washington.WASHINGTON — In 2006, as Nancy Pelosi was poised to become the first female speaker of the House, Republicans made a film spoof that portrayed an evil Democratic empire led by “Darth Nancy.”In 2009, the Republican National Committee ran an advertisement featuring Ms. Pelosi’s face framed by the barrel of a gun — complete with the sound of a bullet firing as red bled down the screen — a takeoff on the James Bond film “Goldfinger” in which the woman second in line to the presidency was cast as Pussy Galore.This year, a Republican running in the primary for Senate in Arizona aired an ad showing him in a spaghetti western-style duel with Democrats, in which he shoots at a knife-wielding, mask-wearing, bug-eyed woman labeled “Crazyface Pelosi.”The name echoed former President Donald J. Trump’s many derisive monikers for Ms. Pelosi, including “Crazy Nancy.”The attack on Ms. Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, on Friday, which left him with a fractured skull and appeared to be part of a planned attack on the speaker herself, came after a yearslong campaign by Republicans to demonize and dehumanize Ms. Pelosi in increasingly ugly ways.For the better part of two decades, Republicans have targeted Ms. Pelosi, the most powerful woman in American politics, as the most sinister Democratic villain of all, making her the evil star of their advertisements and fund-raising appeals in hopes of animating their core supporters. The language and images have helped to fuel the flames of anger at Ms. Pelosi on the right, fanned increasingly in recent years by a toxic stew of conspiracy theories and misinformation that has thrived on the internet and social media, with little pushback from elected Republicans.Ms. Pelosi is now one of the most threatened members of Congress in the country.After the grisly assault on Mr. Pelosi, 82, many Republican lawmakers and leaders denounced the violence, but hardly any spoke out against the brutal political discourse that has given rise to an unprecedented wave of threats against elected officials. Most instead tried to link the incident to rising crime rates across the country that the party has made a centerpiece of its campaign message ahead of the midterm elections that are just days away.“You can’t say people saying, ‘Let’s fire Pelosi’ or ‘Let’s take back the House’ is saying, ‘Go do violence.’ It’s just unfair,” Ronna McDaniel, the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, said on “Fox News Sunday.” “And I think we all need to recognize violence is up across the board.”Yet it is clear that the targeting of Ms. Pelosi, who was not at home during the attack, was not random violence. The suspect, David DePape, 42, who is accused of yelling “Where is Nancy?” after entering the couple’s home, had zip ties with him when he entered the home, according to a person with knowledge of the investigation. He appears to have been obsessed with right-wing conspiracy theories, including false claims about the 2020 election being stolen and the Jan. 6, 2021, riot, as well as concerns about pedophilia, anti-white racism and “elite” control of the internet. Ms. Pelosi in recent years has been a leading character in such viral falsehoods about Democratic misdeeds, including QAnon, and Republican leaders have blamed her groundlessly for the Jan. 6 attack.“How did he get to that point?” said Mona Lena Krook, a professor of political science at Rutgers University who began studying violence against women in politics in 2014, referring to the suspect. “This has to do with things that he sees in the media, things he sees on social media, the people he socializes with that he felt like it was necessary and justified to attack her.”As a wealthy woman from the progressive bastion of San Francisco, and her party’s leader in the House for 20 years, Ms. Pelosi has long represented a singular target for her political opponents.“It is gender. It is class. The whole idea of a wealthy San Francisco liberal woman. The whole package is there,” said David Axelrod, the Democratic strategist and former top adviser to President Barack Obama. “The difference is what began as a way to raise money and gin up turnout has now become a much more deadly game.”Even in 2012, when Ms. Pelosi served as minority leader, wielding less power than Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic majority leader at the time, Republican television ads were six times more likely to mention Ms. Pelosi than to mention Mr. Reid, according to the Wesleyan Media Project, which tracks political advertising.As she has risen in prominence, Ms. Pelosi has become a more frequent target. Since 2018, Republicans have spent more than $227 million on advertisements featuring her, according to data provided by AdImpact, an organization that tracks political advertisements. They aired nearly 530,000 times. This year alone, Republicans poured more than $61 million into advertisements featuring Ms. Pelosi that aired about 143,000 times.The efforts to vilify Ms. Pelosi have yielded mixed political results; Democrats managed to win the House majority twice as attacks against her surged over the past 16 years.But they have persisted, even as Ms. Pelosi has become a reviled figure in the far-right reaches of the internet and social media platforms. Before taking office, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, who at the time openly embraced QAnon, claimed that Ms. Pelosi was “guilty of treason,” adding, “it’s a crime punishable by death, is what treason is.” She liked a Facebook post that advocated “a bullet to the head” for Ms. Pelosi, according to posts unearthed by CNN.(When it surfaced, Ms. Greene claimed that not all of her Facebook likes had been by her or reflected her views.).css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.Such statements have brought no consequences from Republican leaders. Representative Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California and the minority leader, rebuked Ms. Greene for the comments but declined to punish her, instead elevating her within his conference.When asked to address it in an interview on Breitbart radio on Friday, Mr. McCarthy called it “wrong” and condemned political violence, noting that he had reached out to Ms. Pelosi with a text message.The two have a toxic relationship, and Mr. McCarthy once mused publicly about wanting to hit Ms. Pelosi with the oversized wooden speaker’s gavel, a remark his aides said was a joke.A spokesman for the Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC affiliated with Mr. McCarthy, said it would not be pulling its attack ads against Ms. Pelosi in light of the assault.For those close to Ms. Pelosi, the attack at her home was something they have long dreaded. Few lawmakers have been targeted and threatened as routinely as Ms. Pelosi, according to a review by The New York Times of people charged with threatening lawmakers since 2016, which found the speaker was the target of more than one in 10. Threats that were serious enough to result in criminal charges appeared to spike after the 2020 presidential election and through January 2021, around the time of the attack on the Capitol and President Biden’s inauguration.But Republicans have been taking aim at Ms. Pelosi for far longer. In 2010, John Dennis, who challenged Ms. Pelosi in her re-election race, circulated a campaign advertisement in which an actor playing Ms. Pelosi was presiding over an animal sacrifice, and another that depicted her as a wicked witch from “The Wizard of Oz.” In the ad, Mr. Dennis threw a bucket of water labeled “freedom” to melt her away.“It has grown ever more virulent,” said Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland and a Pelosi ally who served as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in both the 2008 and 2010 election cycles. He said the Republican efforts to demonize Ms. Pelosi intensified after passage of the Affordable Care Act, which she helped push through Congress.“The attacks on her have been especially personal — not only attacking her politically, but also personally,” Mr. Van Hollen added. “It has been unrelenting.”The vilification of Ms. Pelosi increased in recent years, when she emerged as the Democrats’ most potent foil to Mr. Trump. Where the left turned her into a sunglasses-wearing icon, Mr. Trump branded her “crazy as a bedbug,” and circulated a photograph of her telling him off at the White House, branding her “Nervous Nancy” and accusing her of having an “unhinged meltdown.”Ms. Pelosi for years has shrugged off the attacks, characterizing them as a badge of honor.“If I weren’t effective, I wouldn’t be a target,” Ms. Pelosi told Time magazine in 2018.“She would flick at her shoulder and say, ‘It is just dust on my jacket,’” said Brendan Daly, a former spokesman. “I think she would always take it as a point of pride.”But in a letter to her colleagues on Saturday, the speaker said she and her family were “heartbroken and traumatized by the life-threatening attack” on her husband.The assault has underscored the dangers all members of Congress have faced, but none more than Ms. Pelosi. She was a particular fixation of the rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, who hunted for her and menacingly called her name. “Bring her out here,” one woman yelled at the Capitol Police. “We’re coming in if you don’t bring her out.”And she has been the object of many other threats that garnered far less attention. In Ohio, a 53-year-old man called police departments across the country a week after the 2020 presidential election and described online his plans to kill Ms. Pelosi “because she is committing treason against the United States of America.”A heavily armed Georgia man who traveled from Colorado to Washington on Jan. 6 but arrived too late to participate in the rally sent a text message saying he would put “a bullet in her noggin on Live TV.”And a 27-year-old Maryland man who was charged with threatening to blow up the I.R.S. building made additional threats on Twitter against the speaker, federal prosecutors said, writing that he was “laser focused on thinking about ways to kill Nancy Pelosi.”Ms. Pelosi has usually taken the vitriol aimed at her in stride. She understood when Democratic candidates had to distance themselves from her to win elections and has internalized the attacks as part of her political identity, people close to her said.When Mr. Biden addressed House Democrats in March at their retreat in Philadelphia, he lamented the abuse he receives across the country, including signs that address him with an expletive. “Little kids giving me the finger,” Mr. Biden said. “You guys probably don’t get that kind of response when you go out some places.”Ms. Pelosi interjected, “I do.”The crowd chuckled.Stephanie Lai More

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      La desinformación es más difícil de combatir en EE. UU.

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      La proliferación de redes sociales alternativas ha ayudado a afianzar la información falsa y engañosa como elemento clave de la política estadounidense.La mañana del 8 de julio, el expresidente Donald Trump recurrió a Truth Social, la plataforma de redes sociales que fundó con gente cercana a él, para afirmar que había ganado las elecciones presidenciales del 2020 en el estado de Wisconsin, a pesar de todas las pruebas que evidenciaban lo contrario.Alrededor de 8000 personas compartieron esa misiva en Truth Social, cifra que distó mucho de los cientos de miles de respuestas que sus publicaciones en Facebook y Twitter solían generar antes de que esas plataformas le apagaran el micrófono tras los mortíferos disturbios en el Capitolio el 6 de enero de 2021.A pesar de ello, la afirmación infundada de Trump pululó en la conciencia pública. Saltó de su aplicación a otras plataformas de redes sociales, por no hablar de pódcast, la radio y la televisión.Al cabo de 48 horas de publicado su mensaje, más de un millón de personas lo habían visto en al menos una decena de otros lugares. Apareció en Facebook y Twitter, de donde fue eliminado, pero también en YouTube, Gab, Parler y Telegram, según un análisis de The New York Times.La difusión de la afirmación de Trump ilustra cómo la desinformación ha hecho metástasis desde que los expertos comenzaron a sonar la alarma sobre la amenaza que supone y todo esto ocurre justo antes de las elecciones de mitad de mandato de este año. A pesar de los años de esfuerzos de los medios de comunicación, de los académicos e incluso de las propias empresas de redes sociales para hacer frente al problema, se puede decir que hoy en día está más generalizado y extendido.“Para ser honesta, me parece que el problema está peor que nunca”, comentó Nina Jankowicz, experta en desinformación que condujo durante un periodo breve un consejo consultivo dentro del Departamento de Seguridad Nacional dedicado a combatir la desinformación. La creación del panel desató furor y provocó su renuncia y la disolución del consejo consultivo.No hace mucho, la lucha contra la desinformación se centraba en las principales plataformas de redes sociales, como Facebook y Twitter. Cuando se les presionaba, solían eliminar los contenidos problemáticos, incluida la información errónea y la desinformación intencionada sobre la pandemia de COVID-19.Sin embargo, ahora hay decenas de plataformas nuevas, incluidas algunas que se enorgullecen de no moderar —censurar, como lo denominan— las declaraciones falsas en nombre de la libertad de expresión.Otras personalidades siguieron los pasos de Trump y se cambiaron a estas nuevas plataformas tras ser “censuradas” por Facebook, YouTube o Twitter. Entre ellos, Michael Flynn, el general retirado que sirvió brevemente como principal asesor de Seguridad Nacional de Trump; L. Lin Wood, una abogada pro-Trump; Naomi Wolf, una autora feminista y escéptica de las vacunas, así como diversos seguidores de QAnon y los Oath Keepers, un grupo de militantes de extrema derecha.Al menos 69 millones de personas se han unido a plataformas como Parler, Gab, Truth Social, Gettr y Rumble, que se promueven como alternativas conservadoras a las grandes empresas tecnológicas, según declaraciones de las empresas mismas. Aunque muchos de esos usuarios ya no tienen cabida en las plataformas más grandes, siguen difundiendo sus opiniones, que a menudo aparecen en capturas de pantalla publicadas en los sitios que les prohibieron la entrada.“Nada en internet existe de manera aislada”, afirmó Jared Holt, gestor principal en la investigación sobre odio y extremismo del Instituto para el Diálogo Estratégico. “Lo que ocurre en plataformas alternas como Gab o Telegram o Truth tarde o temprano llega a Facebook, Twitter y otras”, agregó.Los usuarios han migrado a aplicaciones como Truth Social luego de haber sido “censuradas” por Facebook, YouTube o Twitter.Leon Neal/Getty ImagesEl discurso político se ha radicalizado por la difusión de las personas que propagan desinformación, indicó Nora Benavidez, abogada sénior en Free Press, un grupo de defensa de los derechos digitales y la transparencia.“Nuestro lenguaje y nuestros ecosistemas en línea se están volviendo cada vez más corrosivos”, dijo.Los cambios en el paisaje de la desinformación se están haciendo más evidentes con el ciclo electoral en Estados Unidos. En 2016, la campaña encubierta de Rusia para difundir mensajes falsos y divisorios parecía una aberración en el sistema político estadounidense. Hoy la desinformación, procedente de enemigos extranjeros y nacionales, se ha convertido en una característica del mismo.La idea infundada de que el presidente Joe Biden no fue electo de manera legítima se generalizó entre los miembros del Partido Republicano, e hizo que funcionarios de los estados y los condados impusieran nuevas restricciones para votar, a menudo solo con base en teorías de la conspiración que se cuelan en los medios de comunicación de derecha.Los votantes no solo deben filtrar un torrente cada vez mayor de mentiras y falsedades sobre los candidatos y sus políticas, sino también información sobre cuándo y dónde votar. Los funcionarios nombrados o elegidos en nombre de la lucha contra el fraude electoral han adoptado una postura que implica que se negarán a certificar los resultados que no sean de su agrado.Los proveedores de desinformación también se han vuelto cada vez más sofisticados a la hora de eludir las normas de las principales plataformas, mientras que el uso del video para difundir afirmaciones falsas en YouTube, TikTok e Instagram ha hecho que los sistemas automatizados tengan más dificultades para identificarlos que los mensajes de texto.TikTok, propiedad del gigante chino de la tecnología ByteDance, se ha vuelto uno de los principales campos de batalla en la lucha actual contra la desinformación. Un informe del mes pasado de NewsGuard, una organización que da seguimiento al problema en línea, mostró que casi el 20 por ciento de los videos que aparecían como resultados de búsqueda en TikTok contenían información falsa o tendenciosa sobre temas como los tiroteos en las escuelas y la guerra de Rusia en Ucrania.Katie Harbath en el “sala de operaciones” de Facebook, donde se monitoreaba el contenido relacionado con las elecciones en la plataforma, en 2018Jeff Chiu/Associated Press“La gente que hace esto sabe cómo aprovechar los vacíos”, explicó Katie Harbath, exdirectora de políticas públicas de Facebook que ahora dirige Anchor Change, una consultora estratégica.A pocas semanas de las elecciones de mitad de mandato, las principales plataformas se han comprometido a bloquear, etiquetar o marginar todo lo que infrinja las políticas de la empresa, incluida la desinformación, la incitación al odio o los llamados a la violencia.Sin embargo, la industria artesanal de expertos dedicados a contrarrestar la desinformación —los grupos de expertos, las universidades y las organizaciones no gubernamentales— mencionan que la industria no está haciendo suficiente. El mes pasado, por ejemplo, el Centro Stern para los Negocios y los Derechos Humanos de la Universidad de Nueva York advirtió que las principales plataformas seguían amplificando el “negacionismo electoral” de maneras que debilitaban la confianza en el sistema democrático.Otro desafío es la proliferación de plataformas alternativas para esas falsedades y opiniones aún más extremas.Muchas de esas nuevas plataformas florecieron tras la derrota de Trump en 2020, aunque todavía no han alcanzado el tamaño o el alcance de Facebook y Twitter. Estas plataformas afirman que las grandes empresas tecnológicas están en deuda con el gobierno, el Estado profundo o la élite liberal.Parler, una red social fundada en 2018, era uno de los sitios que más crecía, hasta que las tiendas de aplicaciones de Apple y Google lo expulsaron tras los disturbios mortales del 6 de enero, alimentados por la desinformación y los llamados a la violencia en línea. Desde entonces ha vuelto a ambas tiendas y ha empezado a reconstruir su audiencia apelando a quienes sienten que sus voces han sido silenciadas.“En Parler creemos que el individuo es quien debe decidir lo que cree que es la verdad”, dijo en una entrevista, Amy Peikoff, la directora de políticas de la plataforma.Argumentó que el problema con la desinformación o las teorías de la conspiración se derivaba de los algoritmos que las plataformas usan para mantener a la gente pegada a internet y no del debate sin moderar que fomentan sitios como Parler.El lunes, Parler anunció que Kanye West había, en principio, accedido a comprar la plataforma en un acuerdo que el rapero y el diseñador de moda, ahora conocido como Ye, formuló en términos políticos.“En un mundo en que las opiniones conservadoras se consideran controversiales, debemos de asegurarnos de tener el derecho a expresarnos libremente”, dijo, según el comunicado de la compañía.Los competidores de Parler son ahora BitChute, Gab, Gettr, Rumble, Telegram y Truth Social, y cada uno de ellos se presenta como un santuario frente a las políticas de moderación de las principales plataformas en todo tipo de temas, desde la política hasta la salud.Una nueva encuesta del Centro de Investigaciones Pew descubrió que el 15 por ciento de las cuentas destacadas en esas siete plataformas habían sido desterradas previamente de otras como Twitter y Facebook.Las aplicaciones como Gettr se publicitan como alternativas a los gigantes tecnológicosElijah Nouvelage/Getty ImagesSegún la encuesta, casi dos terceras partes de los usuarios de esas plataformas dijeron que habían encontrado una comunidad de personas que compartían sus opiniones. La mayoría son republicanos o se inclinan por ese partido.Una consecuencia de esta atomización de las fuentes de las redes sociales es que se refuerzan las burbujas de información partidista en las que viven millones de estadounidenses.Según el Centro Pew, al menos el seis por ciento de los estadounidenses se informa de manera habitual en al menos uno de estos sitios relativamente nuevos, que a menudo “ponen de relieve puntos de vista del mundo que no pertenecen a la corriente dominante y, a veces, utilizan un lenguaje ofensivo”. La encuesta encontró que una de cada 10 publicaciones en estas plataformas que mencionaban cuestiones relacionadas con la comunidad LGBTQ incluían alegatos peyorativos.Estos nuevos sitios siguen siendo marginales comparados con las plataformas más grandes; por ejemplo, Trump tiene 4 millones de seguidores en Truth Social, en comparación con los 88 millones que tenía cuando Twitter cerró su cuenta en 2021.Aun así, Trump ha retomado cada vez más sus publicaciones con el ímpetu que antes mostraba en Twitter. El allanamiento del FBI en Mar-a-Lago volvió a poner sus últimos pronunciamientos en el ojo del huracán político.Para las principales plataformas, el incentivo financiero para atraer usuarios, y sus clics, sigue siendo poderoso y podría hacer que den marcha atrás a las medidas que tomaron en 2021. También hay un componente ideológico. El llamado a la libertad individual, con tintes emocionales, impulsó en parte la oferta de Elon Musk para comprar Twitter, que parece haberse reactivado tras meses de maniobras legales.Nick Clegg, el presidente de asuntos globales de Meta, la empresa matriz de Facebook, incluso sugirió hace poco que la plataforma podría restablecer la cuenta de Trump en 2023, antes de la que podría ser otra carrera presidencial. Facebook había dicho previamente que solo lo haría “si el riesgo para la seguridad pública ha disminuido”.Nick Clegga, el presidente de asuntos globales de MetaPatrick T. Fallon/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesUn estudio de Truth Social realizado por Media Matters for America, un grupo de monitoreo de medios con tendencia de izquierda, examinó la forma en que la plataforma se ha convertido en hogar de algunas de las teorías de conspiración más marginales. Trump, que empezó a publicar en la plataforma en el mes de abril, ha amplificado cada vez más el contenido de QAnon, la teoría de conspiración en línea.Ha compartido publicaciones de QAnon más de 130 veces. Los seguidores de QAnon promueven una falsedad amplia y compleja centrada en Trump como líder que se enfrenta a una conspiración de una camarilla de pedófilos del Partido Demócrata. Dichas opiniones han hallado cabida durante las primarias de este año en las campañas electorales de los republicanos.Jankowicz, la experta en desinformación, mencionó que las divisiones sociales y políticas habían agitado las olas de la desinformación.Las controversias sobre la mejor manera de responder a la pandemia de COVID-19 profundizaron la desconfianza en el gobierno y los expertos médicos, sobre todo entre los conservadores. La negativa de Trump a aceptar el resultado de las elecciones de 2020 condujo a la violencia en el Capitolio, pero no terminó con ella.“Deberían habernos unido”, dijo Jankowicz, refiriéndose a la pandemia y a los disturbios. “Pensé que quizás podrían servir como una especie de poder de convocatoria, pero no lo fueron”Steven Lee Myers cubre desinformación para el Times. Ha trabajado en Washington, Moscú, Bagdad y Pekín, donde contribuyó a los artículos que ganaron el Premio Pulitzer al servicio público en 2021. También es el autor de The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin. @stevenleemyers • FacebookSheera Frenkel es una reportera de tecnología premiada que tiene su sede en San Francisco. En 2021, ella y Cecilia Kang publicaron Manipulados. La batalla de Facebook por la dominación mundial. @sheeraf More

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      Ahead of Midterms, Disinformation Is Even More Intractable

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      On the morning of July 8, former President Donald J. Trump took to Truth Social, a social media platform he founded with people close to him, to claim that he had in fact won the 2020 presidential vote in Wisconsin, despite all evidence to the contrary.Barely 8,000 people shared that missive on Truth Social, a far cry from the hundreds of thousands of responses his posts on Facebook and Twitter had regularly generated before those services suspended his megaphones after the deadly riot on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6, 2021.And yet Mr. Trump’s baseless claim pulsed through the public consciousness anyway. It jumped from his app to other social media platforms — not to mention podcasts, talk radio or television.Within 48 hours of Mr. Trump’s post, more than one million people saw his claim on at least dozen other sites. It appeared on Facebook and Twitter, from which he has been banished, but also YouTube, Gab, Parler and Telegram, according to an analysis by The New York Times.The spread of Mr. Trump’s claim illustrates how, ahead of this year’s midterm elections, disinformation has metastasized since experts began raising alarms about the threat. Despite years of efforts by the media, by academics and even by social media companies themselves to address the problem, it is arguably more pervasive and widespread today.“I think the problem is worse than it’s ever been, frankly,” said Nina Jankowicz, an expert on disinformation who briefly led an advisory board within the Department of Homeland Security dedicated to combating misinformation. The creation of the panel set off a furor, prompting her to resign and the group to be dismantled.Not long ago, the fight against disinformation focused on the major social media platforms, like Facebook and Twitter. When pressed, they often removed troubling content, including misinformation and intentional disinformation about the Covid-19 pandemic.Today, however, there are dozens of new platforms, including some that pride themselves on not moderating — censoring, as they put it — untrue statements in the name of free speech.Other figures followed Mr. Trump in migrating to these new platforms after being “censored” by Facebook, YouTube or Twitter. They included Michael Flynn, the retired general who served briefly as Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser; L. Lin Wood, a pro-Trump lawyer; Naomi Wolf, a feminist author and vaccine skeptic; and assorted adherents of QAnon and the Oath Keepers, the far-right militia.At least 69 million people have joined platforms, like Parler, Gab, Truth Social, Gettr and Rumble, that advertise themselves as conservative alternatives to Big Tech, according to statements by the companies. Though many of those users are ostracized from larger platforms, they continue to spread their views, which often appear in screen shots posted on the sites that barred them.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsBoth parties are making their final pitches ahead of the Nov. 8 election.Where the Election Stands: As Republicans appear to be gaining an edge with swing voters in the final weeks of the contest for control of Congress, here’s a look at the state of the races for the House and Senate.Biden’s Low Profile: President Biden’s decision not to attend big campaign rallies reflects a low approval rating that makes him unwelcome in some congressional districts and states.What Young Voters Think: Twelve Americans under 30, all living in swing states, told The Times about their political priorities, ranging from the highly personal to the universal.Debates Dwindle: Direct political engagement with voters is waning as candidates surround themselves with their supporters. Nowhere is the trend clearer than on the shrinking debate stage.“Nothing on the internet exists in a silo,” said Jared Holt, a senior manager on hate and extremism research at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. “Whatever happens in alt platforms like Gab or Telegram or Truth makes its way back to Facebook and Twitter and others.”Users have migrated to apps like Truth Social after being “censored” by Facebook, YouTube or Twitter.Leon Neal/Getty ImagesThe diffusion of the people who spread disinformation has radicalized political discourse, said Nora Benavidez, senior counsel at Free Press, an advocacy group for digital rights and accountability.“Our language and our ecosystems are becoming more caustic online,” she said. The shifts in the disinformation landscape are becoming clear with the new cycle of American elections. In 2016, Russia’s covert campaign to spread false and divisive posts seemed like an aberration in the American political system. Today disinformation, from enemies, foreign and domestic, has become a feature of it.The baseless idea that President Biden was not legitimately elected has gone mainstream among Republican Party members, driving state and county officials to impose new restrictions on casting ballots, often based on mere conspiracy theories percolating in right-wing media.Voters must now sift through not only an ever-growing torrent of lies and falsehoods about candidates and their policies, but also information on when and where to vote. Officials appointed or elected in the name of fighting voter fraud have put themselves in the position to refuse to certify outcomes that are not to their liking.The purveyors of disinformation have also become increasingly sophisticated at sidestepping the major platforms’ rules, while the use of video to spread false claims on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram has made them harder for automated systems to track than text.TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese tech giant ByteDance, has become a primary battleground in today’s fight against disinformation. A report last month by NewsGuard, an organization that tracks the problem online, showed that nearly 20 percent of videos presented as search results on TikTok contained false or misleading information on topics such as school shootings and Russia’s war in Ukraine.Katie Harbath in Facebook’s “war room,” where election-related content was monitored on the platform, in 2018.Jeff Chiu/Associated Press“People who do this know how to exploit the loopholes,” said Katie Harbath, a former director of public policy at Facebook who now leads Anchor Change, a strategic consultancy.With the midterm elections only weeks away, the major platforms have all pledged to block, label or marginalize anything that violates company policies, including disinformation, hate speech or calls to violence.Still, the cottage industry of experts dedicated to countering disinformation — think tanks, universities and nongovernment organizations — say the industry is not doing enough. The Stern Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University warned last month, for example, that the major platforms continued to amplify “election denialism” in ways that undermined trust in the democratic system.Another challenge is the proliferation of alternative platforms for those falsehoods and even more extreme views.Many of those new platforms have flourished in the wake of Mr. Trump’s defeat in 2020, though they have not yet reached the size or reach of Facebook and Twitter. They portray Big Tech as beholden to the government, the deep state or the liberal elite.Parler, a social network founded in 2018, was one of the fastest-growing sites — until Apple’s and Google’s app stores kicked it off after the deadly riot on Jan. 6, which was fueled by disinformation and calls for violence online. It has since returned to both stores and begun to rebuild its audience by appealing to those who feel their voices have been silenced.“We believe at Parler that it is up to the individual to decide what he or she thinks is the truth,” Amy Peikoff, the platform’s chief policy officer, said in an interview.She argued that the problem with disinformation or conspiracy theories stemmed from the algorithms that platforms use to keep people glued online — not from the unfettered debate that sites like Parler foster.On Monday, Parler announced that Kanye West had agreed in principle to purchase the platform, a deal that the rapper and fashion designer, now known as Ye, cast in political terms.“In a world where conservative opinions are considered to be controversial, we have to make sure we have the right to freely express ourselves,” he said, according to the company’s statement.Parler’s competitors now are BitChute, Gab, Gettr, Rumble, Telegram and Truth Social, with each offering itself as sanctuary from the moderating policies of the major platforms on everything from politics to health policy.A new survey by the Pew Research Center found that 15 percent of prominent accounts on those seven platforms had previously been banished from others like Twitter and Facebook.Apps like Gettr market themselves as alternatives to Big Tech.Elijah Nouvelage/Getty ImagesNearly two-thirds of the users of those platforms said they had found a community of people who share their views, according to the survey. A majority are Republicans or lean Republican.A result of this atomization of social media sources is to reinforce the partisan information bubbles within which millions of Americans live.At least 6 percent of Americans now regularly get news from at least one of these relatively new sites, which often “highlight non-mainstream world views and sometimes offensive language,” according to Pew. One in 10 posts on these platforms that mentioned L.G.B.T.Q. issues involved derisive allegations, the survey found.These new sites are still marginal compared with the bigger platforms; Mr. Trump, for example, has four million followers on Truth Social, compared with 88 million when Twitter kicked him off in 2021.Even so, Mr. Trump has increasingly resumed posting with the vigor he once showed on Twitter. The F.B.I. raid on Mar-a-Lago thrust his latest pronouncements into the eye of the political storm once again.For the major platforms, the financial incentive to attract users — and their clicks — remains powerful and could undo the steps they took in 2021. There is also an ideological component. The emotionally laced appeal to individual liberty in part drove Elon Musk’s bid to buy Twitter, which appears to have been revived after months of legal maneuvering.Nick Clegg, the president of global affairs at Meta, Facebook’s parent company, even suggested recently that the platform might reinstate Mr. Trump’s account in 2023 — ahead of what could be another presidential run. Facebook had previously said it would do so only “if the risk to public safety has receded.”Nick Clegg, Meta’s president for global affairs.Patrick T. Fallon/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesA study of Truth Social by Media Matters for America, a left-leaning media monitoring group, examined how the platform had become a home for some of the most fringe conspiracy theories. Mr. Trump, who began posting on the platform in April, has increasingly amplified content from QAnon, the online conspiracy theory.He has shared posts from QAnon accounts more than 130 times. QAnon believers promote a vast and complex falsehood that centers on Mr. Trump as a leader battling a cabal of Democratic Party pedophiles. Echoes of such views reverberated through Republican election campaigns across the country during this year’s primaries.Ms. Jankowicz, the disinformation expert, said the nation’s social and political divisions had churned the waves of disinformation.The controversies over how best to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic deepened distrust of government and medical experts, especially among conservatives. Mr. Trump’s refusal to accept the outcome of the 2020 election led to, but did not end with, the Capitol Hill violence.“They should have brought us together,” Ms. Jankowicz said, referring to the pandemic and the riots. “I thought perhaps they could be kind of this convening power, but they were not.” More

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      The Problem of Marjorie Taylor Greene

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      “There’s going to be a lot of investigations,” Marjorie Taylor Greene said, describing what she anticipates if the Republicans regain the House majority this November. “I’ve talked with a lot of members about this.”It was early September, two months before the midterm elections, and Greene, the first-term congresswoman from Georgia, was sitting in a restaurant in Alpharetta, an affluent suburb of greater metropolitan Atlanta. Among the fellow Republicans with whom Greene said she had been speaking about these investigations was the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy. Just a couple of weeks later, on Sept. 23, Greene sat directly behind McCarthy in a manufacturing facility in Monongahela, Pa., as he publicly previewed what a House Republican majority’s legislative agenda would look like. Among the topics she and her colleagues have discussed is the prospect of impeaching President Joe Biden, a pursuit Greene has advocated literally since the day after Biden took office, when she filed articles of impeachment accusing Obama’s vice president of having abused his power to benefit his son Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine. “My style would be a lot more aggressive, of course,” she told me, referring to McCarthy. “For him, I think the evidence needs to be there. But I think people underestimate him, in thinking he wouldn’t do it.”In Greene’s view, a Speaker McCarthy would have little choice but to adopt Greene’s “a lot more aggressive” approach toward punishing Biden and his fellow Democrats for what she sees as their policy derelictions and for conducting a “witch hunt” against former President Trump. “I think that to be the best speaker of the House and to please the base, he’s going to give me a lot of power and a lot of leeway,” she predicted in a flat, unemotional voice. “And if he doesn’t, they’re going to be very unhappy about it. I think that’s the best way to read that. And that’s not in any way a threat at all. I just think that’s reality.”Though the 48-year-old self-described “Christian nationalist” possesses a flair for extreme bombast equal to that of her political role model Trump, Greene’s assessment of her current standing within the Republican Party — owing to the devotion accorded her by the party’s MAGA base — would seem to be entirely accurate.Over the past two years, Greene has gone from the far-right fringe of the G.O.P. ever closer to its establishment center without changing any of her own beliefs; if anything, she has continued to find more extreme ways to express them. When she entered electoral politics in 2019, she had spent much of her adult life as a co-owner, with her husband, of her family’s construction company. (Her husband, Perry Greene, recently filed for divorce.)She threw herself into her first campaign, that May, with almost no strategic planning or political networking, and a social media history replete with hallucinatory conspiracy theories. When she switched to a more conservative district in the middle of the 2020 campaign and won, she was roundly dismissed as an unacceptable officeholder who could be contained, isolated and returned to sender in the next election. And yet in 2021, her first year in Congress, Greene raised $7.4 million in political donations, the fourth-highest among the 212 House Republicans, a feat made even more remarkable by the fact that the three who outraised Greene — McCarthy, the minority leader; Steve Scalise, the minority whip; and Dan Crenshaw of Texas — were beneficiaries of corporate PACs that have shunned Greene. (As Trump did during his candidacy, Greene maintains that it is in fact she who refuses all corporate donations.)In another measure of her influence within the national party, Greene’s endorsement and support have been eagerly sought by 2022 G.O.P. hopefuls like the Arizona gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake and the Ohio U.S. Senate candidate J.D. Vance. Within the House Republican conference, McCarthy has assiduously courted her support, inviting her to high-level policy meetings (such as a discussion about the National Defense Authorization Act, which sets Department of Defense policy for the year) and, according to someone with knowledge of their exchanges, offering to create a new leadership position for her.McCarthy’s spokesman denies that the minority leader has made such an offer. When I asked Greene if the report was inaccurate, she smiled and said, “Not necessarily.” But then she added: “I don’t have to have a leadership position. I think I already have one, without having one.”Greene’s metamorphosis over the past year and a half from pariah to a position of undeniable influence presents a case study in G.O.P. politics in the Trump era. The first time I saw Greene in person was on the morning of Jan. 6, 2021. She was barreling down a crowded corridor of the Longworth House Office Building, conspicuously unmasked at a time when masks were still mandated by U.S. Capitol rules. Her all-male retinue of staff members striding briskly beside her were also maskless. In the late hours after that day’s insurrection — one that the Georgia freshman arguably had egged on with her innumerable claims that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen and her assertion to a Newsmax interviewer that Jan. 6 would be “our 1776 moment” — Greene stood on the House floor and objected to the Michigan election results, a move that was promptly dismissed by the presiding officer, Vice President Mike Pence, because the congresswoman had no U.S. senator to join her in the motion as the rules prescribed.The day after the insurrection, Greene sat in a corner of her office in the Longworth building, being interviewed for a right-wing YouTube show by Katie Hopkins, a British white nationalist who had been banished from most social media outlets for her Islamophobic and racist comments (the channel that carried her show has since been taken down by YouTube). The Georgia freshman reflected somberly on the events of the previous day: “Last night and into the early-morning hours was probably one of the saddest days of my life. Scariest and loneliest days of my life. On the third day on the job as a new member of Congress, um, just having our Capitol attacked, being blamed on the president that I love, and I know it’s not his fault; and then having it blamed on all the people that support him, 75 million people — 75-plus million people that have supported President Trump and have truly appreciated all his hard work and America First policies and everything about Make America Great Again.” (Trump received 74.2 million votes in 2020.) “It was extremely lonely in there, watching, basically, the certification of the Electoral College votes for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, even though we know the election was stolen, and the Democrats were working so hard on it, but Republicans too, there were Republicans also.”Hopkins listened attentively, her face knotted with anguish, and observed, “It’s almost as if you’re one of them — you’re almost like one of those who could’ve been at the rally.”“I am one of those people,” Greene said emphatically. “That’s exactly who I am.”Hastily, as if realizing the implication of what she had said, she added: “I’m not one of those people that attacked the Capitol yesterday. I completely condemn that. I completely condemn attacking law enforcement; I support our police officers. And I thank them for their courage yesterday in keeping us safe. I know there were bad actors involved and investigations are underway — and it’s Antifa.” (In subsequent months, Greene would blame the F.B.I. for possibly instigating the violence on Jan. 6. She also voted against awarding police officers who defended the Capitol that day the congressional gold medal, its highest honor.)Greene also said to Hopkins, “I’m not a politician.” Like much of what she said during their interview, this statement was not altogether accurate. Her precocious gift for offending and demonizing qualified her as a natural for the trade as it had come to be reimagined by Trump and his acolytes.Greene at a rally in Mesa, Ariz., in October.Adam Riding for The New York TimesStill, days after her swearing-in, Greene came off as a somewhat desperate attention-seeker with nowhere to go but down. Some in her own party mocked her for her past allegiance to the QAnon conspiracy theory, made public in Facebook posts and videos that have since been deleted, and for her abiding fealty to a disgraced former president. Ronna McDaniel, the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee and a Trump ally, would soon publicly describe some of Greene’s comments as “atrocious.” The Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, would refer to her views as a “cancer” on the party. Her victory, in the mostly white and rural 14th congressional district of Georgia, was cast as a kind of epochal fluke, a wrong turn that would surely be corrected with the next election, not a foretelling of where the Republican Party was headed in the wake of Trump’s presidency.A month later, I sat in the House Press Gallery as Greene was stripped by the Democrat-controlled House of her two committee assignments after several of her past outrageous social media posts surfaced. But Greene had learned from Trump the value of never admitting wrongdoing or asking for forgiveness. I attended her news conference the next day, at which she declared: “The party is his. It doesn’t belong to anybody else.” The committeeless freshman proceeded to spend her ample available time on right-wing media outlets, like Newsmax and the former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast. An early sign that she was not an ineffectual outlier came that April, when she reported raising a staggering $3.2 million in her first quarter, a majority of it coming from small donors.In the wake of Trump’s departure from the White House, Greene fulfilled a yearning from the MAGA base for a brawler who shared their view that the left had stolen its way to victory and was bent on destroying America. In May 2021, I attended an “America First” rally in Mesa, Ariz., featuring two of the state’s well-known congressmen — the House Freedom Caucus chairman Andy Biggs and the veteran right-winger Paul Gosar — along with Greene and her fellow MAGA foot soldier Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida. As she paced the stage, Greene’s hold over the Arizona audience that night was confirmation that her constituency extended well beyond northwest Georgia. “Who do you think won Arizona on November 3?” she asked the crowd. When they replied by chanting Trump’s name, Greene said: “That’s how we feel in Georgia, too. As a matter of fact, that’s how Michigan feels. Pennsylvania. Wisconsin. I think that’s how at least 74-plus million people feel. As a matter of fact, no one went out for Biden. Did you see rallies like Trump had?”By this time, I had visited her district and had begun getting to know her top aides. In February, they persuaded Greene to meet with me in Rome, Ga., for an off-the-record lunch. Three months later, I watched her campaign in her district just before the Georgia primary as she ran for re-election. She and I spent more than an hour talking one on one on the record that day. Subsequently, we met three times in Washington and once in Alpharetta for on-the-record interviews, and once more in her Washington office, also on the record, so that I could see her interact with her congressional staff and colleagues.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.Arizona’s Governor’s Race: Democrats are openly expressing their alarm that Katie Hobbs, the party’s nominee for governor in the state, is fumbling a chance to defeat Kari Lake in one of the most closely watched races.Herschel Walker: The Republican Senate nominee in Georgia reportedly paid for an ex-girlfriend’s abortion, but members of his party have learned to tolerate his behavior.Throughout this 18-month span of reporting, Greene’s messaging machine achieved a kind of wall-of-sound inescapability. Her daily litany of often-vicious taunts, factual contortions and outright falsehoods on social media and behind any available lectern depicted a great nation undone by Biden’s Democrats, with allusions to undocumented immigrants as rapists, transgender individuals as predators, Black Lives Matter protesters as terrorists, abortion providers as murderers and her political opponents as godless pedophilia-coddling Communists. The Trumpian media ecosystem where these phantasms originated saw Greene as their most able exponent, while Trump himself, in a news release earlier this year, proclaimed her “a warrior in Congress,” adding, “She doesn’t back down, she doesn’t give up, and she has ALWAYS been with ‘Trump.’” The latter distinction mattered. By they end of 2021, the House G.O.P.’s most powerful female member, the conference chairwoman Liz Cheney, had been booted out of her leadership position and demonized by the base for condemning Trump. Two months into 2022 — barely over a year into her career as an elected official — Greene told me that she and the former president had already discussed the possibility of her being his running mate in 2024.“I would be honored,” she said of this prospect, though she also acknowledged that G.O.P. advisers would urge Trump to think twice about a candidate as divisive as herself: “I think the last person that the R.N.C. or the national party wants is me as his running mate.” Regardless of her future prospects, Greene’s observation to me in September that she didn’t need an official leadership position to enjoy an unofficial one seems beyond dispute.What has received far less discussion than the outrageousness of her daily utterances is what the sum total of them portends for America under a Republican majority with Greene in the vanguard. In recent months, she has continued to insist that Trump won the 2020 election. She maintains that America should have a Christian government and that open prayer should return to classrooms. She has called for the impeachment of not just Biden but also Attorney General Merrick Garland and the secretary of homeland security, Alejandro Mayorkas; for the defunding of the F.B.I., after the agency searched Mar-a-Lago to retrieve secret government documents that Trump took from the White House; for the expulsion from Congress of those she claimed were Communists (and among those she has referred to as Communists are the progressive icon Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and the Jan. 6 Committee member Jamie Raskin of Maryland); and for a congressional investigation into the business activities of Biden’s son Hunter. She has introduced legislation to suspend all immigration into the United States for the next four years, as well as a bill that would impose up to 10-to-25-year prison sentences on medical specialists who provide hormone treatment or surgery to transgender youth under 18.Greene believes that abortion should be banned and that gun-control laws should be overturned. She favors eliminating any and all regulations that were intended to address climate change because, in her view, “The climate has always changed, and no amount of taxes and no government can do anything to stop climate change.” In late September, and hardly for the first time, she excoriated a number of her Republican colleagues, suggesting they were abettors to a globalist conspiracy in tweeting “21 Republican Senators just voted with the woke climate agenda” by ratifying an international agreement to phase down the use of hydrofluorocarbon pollutants in coolant systems.More than once, Greene has insisted to me that her “America First” agenda, divisive at its core, nonetheless commands a vast following, including some Democrats who may not care for her coarse rhetoric but still embrace one or more of her precepts. “I’m speaking for so many people,” she told me in Alpharetta, two months before an election that may give voters a preview of an America under an army of Marjorie Taylor Greenes.Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene wearing a “Trump Won” mask during a joint session of Congress to certify the Electoral College votes on Jan. 6, 2021.Stefani Reynolds/Getty ImagesHer political career began in the early months of 2019, when then-citizen Greene began showing up on Capitol Hill — in part to boost her social media standing by posting YouTube videos of her harassing Democratic staff members but also to try to lobby G.O.P. senators against gun-safety legislation. Greene was outraged to see the 18-year-old Parkland school-shooting survivor David Hogg — who, in one of her more notorious videos, she taunted while chasing him outside the Capitol — sauntering in and out of several Senate offices. Greene had considerably less success scoring appointments with Republican senators. “I had zero,” she lamented to her social media followers. “Guess what: I’m a gun owner. I’m an American citizen, and I have nothing. But this guy, with his George Soros funding, and his major liberal funding, has got everything. I want you to think about that.”Greene was certainly thinking about it. She was thinking about it as she got turned away from the offices of Republican senators like Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and her own Georgia senators, David Perdue and Johnny Isakson. She was thinking about it as she stood in a line in March 2019 to attend a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing to consider gun-control legislation — a lone opponent surrounded by gun-safety activists. “I’ve been feeling really outnumbered and really sad standing in this line,” she confided to her Facebook Live audience.A month later, Greene acknowledged to a fellow right-wing YouTuber, Alex Madajian, that not all the progressives she encountered were funded by Soros. Many of them, like her, “were just showing up. And they took off work to be there, too. I think conservatives have got to stop making the excuses.” She went on: “Conservatives are going to have to get over themselves. Conservatives, we’re so selfish in so many ways. We will spend, spend, spend on our very nice handbags and we will spend on our golf clubs.”Less than a month after that April interview, Greene, who had previously identified herself on Federal Election Commission donor forms (as a contributor to the Trump campaign) as, variously, a construction firm owner, a CrossFit gym owner and a homemaker, decided to run for elective office to represent Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District, where she resided. It was a story she would tell friends — how she, a taxpayer and job creator who cared about the Constitution, had been turned away by Republicans whose salary she paid. That was why she decided to run for Congress.On May 30, 2019, Greene announced her candidacy on a conservative talk-radio show, followed by a Facebook Live post. A local Republican activist, Lawton Sack, happened to catch the announcement on Facebook Live. Wondering who Greene was, Sack started searching the internet. He came upon several of her Facebook videos, including one posted two years earlier in which Greene suggested that the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas was staged by leftists as a pretext for seizing Americans’ guns. Sack posted on his website GeorgiaPol.com that same afternoon under the headline “Las Vegas Shooting Conspiracist Running in GA-6.”Sack’s post went unnoticed. Despite Greene’s preternatural talent for attracting attention, her obscurity in the political world worked to her benefit in the early months, when her principal competition in the Sixth District’s Republican field was its former congresswoman, Karen Handel. As soon as Greene announced her campaign, she pledged her allegiance as the Trumpiest candidate in the primary: “Everyone knows I support @realDonaldTrump. Always have, right from the start!”The last part was untrue: Greene did not vote in the 2016 primary, nor did she contribute to Trump’s campaign until a few weeks before he was elected president. What was true was that “right from the start” of her own campaign, Greene was telling local Republicans that she intended to run just as Trump had: all heat and hyperbole, reliant on small online donations and her personal wealth rather than the establishment Republicans who wanted nothing to do with her. Like Trump, she described herself as a successful business owner. His campaign slogan was “Make America Great Again”; hers was “Save America Stop Socialism.”Few believed she had any chance of winning — probably not against Handel, and almost certainly not in the general election against the incumbent Democrat, Lucy McBath. Then Greene received a decisive break. That December, Tom Graves, the G.O.P. congressman representing the 14th District in northwest Georgia, announced that he would not run for another term, one in a growing number of establishment Republicans who had made for the exits during the Trump era. An open seat, in a district that Trump carried by 53 points in 2016, was suddenly up for grabs. Though Greene had made a virtue of her residency in the Sixth District — even telling the local podcast host Ben Burnett just a couple of days before Graves’s surprise announcement: “I understand our district. I understand it uniquely, because it’s where I’ve always lived, and it’s where I’ve raised my family and worked for so many years” — she would now cheerfully run as a carpetbagger.Instantly, her political fortunes changed. Running as a Trumpist firebrand in a suddenly vacant seat, Greene received pledges of support from the most prominent conservative in the G.O.P. House, Jim Jordan of Ohio; and Debbie Meadows, the wife of Trump’s eventual chief of staff, Mark Meadows and founder of Right Women PAC. Greene’s campaign staff immediately printed a flyer highlighting Jim Jordan’s seal of approval. Her first campaign ad began with “AOC wants to plunge us into Communism,” referring to Ocasio-Cortez, and ended with “President Trump needs more support in Congress.” After a Black man, George Floyd, was killed by a Minneapolis police officer on Memorial Day and nationwide protests erupted, some leading to violence and significant property damage, Greene posted on June 2 on her campaign website a video of herself holding a custom AR-15 pistol, accompanied by these words: “Here’s my message to ANTIFA terrorists: Stay the HELL out of NW Georgia. You won’t burn our churches, loot our businesses, or destroy our homes.”Already covering two races that could determine control of the Senate, the Georgia media took little notice of the congressional race in the state’s northwestern corner — much less of the wealthy far-right conspiracist who didn’t even live in the district. But in her thousands of doorstep conversations in the 14th District, Greene did not encounter indifference. No one was laughing in her face for describing AOC and Antifa as enemies of America. No one lectured her on the imprudence of wielding a military-style weapon in campaign ads. On the contrary: Walking door to door throughout northwest Georgia, Greene could see very early on, she would tell me more than a year later, that its constituents saw the world through the same lens that she did. Within days, she was certain that a majority of these voters would be hers.On June 9, 2020, Greene came in first in the G.O.P. primary, 19 points ahead of the establishment Republican who had been expected to win, the neurosurgeon John Cowan. Trump tweeted his approval: “A big winner. Congratulations!” In the August runoff, Greene thrashed Cowan (whose endorsers included the House minority whip, Steve Scalise) by 14 points. At her victory party in Rome that evening, the exultant winner said of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, “We’re going to kick that bitch out of Congress.”The next day, Greene received a congratulatory phone call from the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, who later told a confidant (according to that person), “Clearly, I’m going to have to sit her down and tell her that you can’t call the speaker a bitch.” Instead, Greene tripled down. The day she received congratulations from McCarthy, she memorialized her “kick that bitch out of Congress” sentiment on Twitter. The day after that, she told a Georgia radio interviewer: “In a fired-up moment, I did call her a dirty name. But I don’t back down. I don’t apologize.”In November 2020, during the weeklong orientation period for newly elected members of Congress, Julie Conway, the director of the prominent conservative women’s political action committee VIEW PAC, hosted a reception at the G.O.P.-affiliated Capitol Hill Club for the 30 or so House Republican women it had endorsed. A single uninvited guest arrived, one who happened to be the only maskless person in the room, according to multiple attendees with knowledge of what took place..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.“Julie,” one of the women whispered in Conway’s ear, “she’s coming at you.”Marjorie Taylor Greene introduced herself. Then she added, in a voice both hurt and defiant, “I know that you and VIEW PAC weren’t supportive during the campaign.”Conway replied: “Well, to be fair, no one here was. But look, Marjorie, you’re part of the team, if you want to be. It’s a legislative body. If you don’t want to work together, well, that’s your choice.”Greene had arrived in Washington for freshman orientation on a red tide of grievance. Just the week earlier, she upbraided Crenshaw, her fellow Republican member and a former U.S. Navy SEAL, on Twitter for what she termed his “loser mindset” in not challenging the 2020 election results, prompting Crenshaw to fire back: “You’re a member of Congress now, Marjorie. Start acting like one.” Also on Twitter, she complained that because of the pandemic and what she termed “Democrat tyrannical control,” no local gyms were open. (“There is literally a gym around the corner from the hotel she is staying at,” Ruben Gallego, a Democratic congressman from Arizona, tweeted in response.) But something else occurred during that same orientation week that would alter Greene’s trajectory and ultimately that of the Republican Party as well. At what was intended to be a perfunctory congratulatory meeting in the Oval Office with three new G.O.P. congresswomen — Greene, Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Yvette Herrell of New Mexico — Trump met Greene for the first time. She immediately launched into what she later told me was a preconceived strategy about how and where Trump needed to campaign in Georgia to help swing the two U.S. Senate runoff elections there into the Republican column. According to a person familiar with the meeting (and who requested anonymity in order to speak candidly): “She owned that room with Trump. Boebert and Herrell are not pushovers. But 90 to 95 percent of the conversation was Marjorie and the president.”In June, I asked Greene about reports I had heard that McCarthy had vowed to award her plum committee assignments in exchange for her support for his bid as House speaker. “Robert, I don’t believe anything until I see it,” she told me. “I’m pretty smart. I’ve been around people. People take me for granted a lot. I’ve been around the block one too many times to be handed a load of [expletive], so to speak.”Later, she told me what her committee preferences would be. “I would like to be on Oversight,” she said. “I would also like to be on Judiciary. I think both of those I’d be good on.” When I observed that serving on both committees — high-profile investigative perches that had elevated Republicans like Darrell Issa, Trey Gowdy and Jim Jordan into household names — constituted a pretty big ask, Greene shot back: “I completely deserve it. I’ve been treated like [expletive]. I have been treated like garbage.”In a statement for this story, Representative James Comer, the Oversight Committee’s ranking member and most likely its chairman should the Republicans win back the House, said, “If Americans entrust Republicans with the majority next Congress, we look forward to the Steering Committee adding new G.O.P. members to the committee like Rep. Greene with energy and a strong interest in partnering with us in our efforts to rein in the unaccountable Swamp and to hold the Biden Administration accountable for its many self-inflicted crises that it has unleashed on the American people.”But Greene’s comments about what she deserves and how she feels she has been treated reveal a deeply personal grievance against her fellow Republicans that abides to this day, despite the party’s accommodations to her. It extends back to when she was denied an audience with Republican senators as a visitor to the Capitol in 2019; then to her being shunned by the G.O.P. establishment during her 2020 campaign; and finally to what she views as a less-than-fulsome defense of her a month into her congressional tenure, when House Democrats along with 11 Republicans voted to strip her of her committee assignments. This event, a rarity in the history of Congress, was prompted by the surfacing, late that January, of more of her previous social media posts. They included her outlandish suggestions that the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School mass shooting in Parkland, Fla., was staged, and that a wildfire in California that same year was ignited by a laser beam shot from space by a prominent Jewish family, the Rothschilds, the subjects of many antisemitic conspiracy theories. Such delusions were commonly embraced in the community of QAnon followers.A week after Greene’s past musings were disclosed, the House G.O.P. conference convened to discuss whether to remove Liz Cheney from her leadership post after she voted to impeach Trump. But midway into the four-hour discussion, the other elephant in the room stepped up to the microphone.“Well,” Greene began, according to a recording of the meeting I obtained, “many of you I’ve enjoyed getting to know in my one month that I’ve been here in Congress. But there’s also many more of you that I haven’t gotten to meet yet, and you haven’t gotten to know me. Some of you attack me every single day, and usually I find that it’s those of you attacking me are the ones that don’t know me, and that’s unfortunate.”Greene then tried to explain how it was that she came to embrace the conspiracy theories of the QAnon community that now scandalized the Republican Party and jeopardized her political career. “I was upset about Russian collusion conspiracy lies that I was seeing on the news every single day,” Greene recalled to her colleagues. “So I looked into the internet — and was like, ‘What is going on?’ I stumbled across something called QAnon. Yep, I did. I read about it, I posted about it, I talked about it, and I asked questions about it.”Here, more precisely, is what she did: By the summer of 2017, Greene had made contact online with a counselor in the New York public school system who shared her affinities for both President Donald Trump and dark conspiracy theories. That July, she began writing for the counselor’s online publication, American Truth Seekers, under her great-grandmother’s name, Elizabeth Camp.Greene’s argument was that the “Russian collusion conspiracy lies” had created a kind of permission structure in her mind. As she would say on the House floor, “I was allowed to believe things that weren’t true.”In this passive-voice explanation, Greene was “allowed to believe” that a Democratic staff member named Seth Rich had been murdered by Hillary Clinton’s top adviser, John Podesta, in order to cover up the fact that it was Rich, not Russia, who had leaked Democratic emails to WikiLeaks. (Later, Greene would modify this conspiracy theory: It was the Latino gang MS-13, “the henchmen of the Obama administration,” who had murdered Seth Rich.) Greene was “allowed to believe” that Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Trump’s ties to Russia, was actually quietly working to bring down the Clintons. And that “many in our government are actively worshiping Satan.” And that Trump was single-handedly battling evil — that, as she reposted from the website MAGAPILL, “thousands of Pedophiles and Child Traffickers have been arrested since Trump was sworn in.” This “Global Evil,” she was allowed to believe, was all being funded by the Saudi royals in concert with Jewish billionaires: George Soros and the Rothschild family.Greene believed all this, she claimed, not only because the media had made up lies about Trump but also because in some dark corner of the internet, an anonymous person claiming to have military intelligence “Q clearance” had said so.She concluded her monologue to her new G.O.P. colleagues with an admonition: “Let’s make sure we keep our eyes on the enemy. Because they’re really wanting to take all of us out.” About a third of her colleagues rose to applaud her as she took her seat among them.Not everyone in the conference was moved. “The headline tonight,” warned the South Carolina freshman Nancy Mace, “is that we tried to kick out Liz Cheney, and we gave a standing ovation to Marjorie Taylor Greene.”Tom Reed, a moderate from New York, spoke before Mace and was even more pointed. “I’m committed to winning the majority,” he told his colleagues. “So how is this going to look if we kick out Liz Cheney and keep Marjorie Greene? How is this going to play across the United States of America? How am I going to stand in front of my kids and go, You know what you did, Tom?” He went on, “‘Dad, you kicked out a person who stood on her conscience and voted for impeachment, but you retained an individual’ — and this is what the perception’s going to be, Marjorie, and I don’t mean to offend you — ‘that stood for white supremacy, that stood for a laser in the sky that supposedly the Jews controlled to start a fire in California.’”The question now confronting McCarthy, the House minority leader, was whether he could dissuade the Democratic majority from stripping Greene of her committee assignments. The day before the Feb. 3 Republican meeting, according to a source with knowledge of the exchange, he contacted the House majority leader, Steny Hoyer — the only Democratic leader with whom he had a relationship, as Pelosi spoke openly of her lack of respect for McCarthy — and asked, “What if we just put Marjorie on the Small Business Committee?” Hoyer advised McCarthy that this would probably not fly with the Democrats.On the morning of Feb. 3, according to the same source, McCarthy called Hoyer once more. Hoyer conveyed his caucus’s view that if McCarthy wasn’t going to take care of his party’s Marjorie Taylor Greene problem, then the Democrats intended to do so.McCarthy was apoplectic. “You mark this down in the history books,” he said heatedly, threatening that once the Republicans took back the majority, they would strip Democrats of committee assignments with impunity.“Kevin,” Hoyer replied, “you mark this day down. This is the day I told you that your pandering for Trump is bad for your party, bad for the country and bad for your career.”Greene emerged from the episode unrepentant and unburdened of lawmaking responsibilities — and enjoying the continued support of Trump, who called to offer solace the day her committee assignments were taken away. Greene did not sense the same allyship from House Republican leaders like McCarthy. “I think they stood back and said, ‘Let it happen,’” she asserted to Steve Bannon on his podcast a few weeks later.There remain some Republicans — albeit fewer who still hold office — who believe that, far from being “treated like garbage,” as she sees it, Greene has been coddled by Republican leadership. A former longtime moderate Republican member, Charles W. Dent of Pennsylvania, told me that he recalled saying on CNN in 2020 that the G.O.P. should have explicitly marginalized Greene from the moment she won her election: barring her from the House conference, offering her no committee assignments and immediately endorsing a 2022 primary opponent. “They obviously chose a different course,” Dent said with evident chagrin. “Letting her into the tent to some extent normalized her.”And, Dent went on to say, granting extreme elements like Greene so prominent a role in the party was almost certain to make life harder for Republicans in swing districts, starting with the 2022 midterms, which were shaping up to be less of a certain win for the G.O.P. “If the Republicans underperform in the midterms,” Dent told me, “then maybe they’ll start realizing you can’t just throw away these seats. Maybe losing is what it’ll take to course-correct.”This September, on a Wednesday afternoon in Greene’s office in the Longworth building in Washington, I bumped into Ed Buckham, an unassuming 63-year-old man who seemed out of place amid the walls covered with fan notes written to Greene from all over the nation. Buckham has been the Georgia freshman’s chief of staff for nearly a year. “She’s been so great to work for, an absolute pleasure,” he told me, adding that his last job on the Hill was two decades earlier, when Buckham served as chief of staff for the Republican House majority whip, Tom DeLay, one of the most effective legislative operators in modern times.“I hired him because I want to be a very serious legislator,” Greene told me later that evening, after she had cast a succession of “no” votes to various bipartisan House resolutions. (One of them established a National Center for the Advancement of Aviation.) “I want to be a very serious member of Congress. And it’s because I have true goals in Congress, and then also for the Republican Party. I think our party needs a lot of work.”Greene had previously and notoriously hired as a staff assistant the right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, who had become a leper in conservative circles after remarking approvingly in 2016 of “relationships between younger boys and older men.” (Greene quietly parted ways with Yiannopoulos earlier this year.) By contrast, the fact that Tom DeLay’s former top lieutenant was now her own had received no attention.Among Ed Buckham’s virtues that Greene enumerated for me was that he was “a strong Christian.” Greene has recently identified herself as a “Christian nationalist”; this, she maintained to me, meant nothing more and nothing less than a Christian who loves her country. “I didn’t even know there was a history with that phrase,” she insisted. This past summer, she stood on a stage during a live broadcast of the religious-right program “FlashPoint” and was prayed over by the right-wing Christian author Dutch Sheets, who has stated, “Don’t separate God and government,” and who concluded his prayer over Greene with “You are highly favored, you will not fail, in Jesus’ name, Amen!” Two months ago, at a Turning Point USA event, another far-right pastor, Rob McCoy, concluded an interview with Greene by saying, “Someday, please God, may she be president of the United States.”Greene told me that while she wasn’t advocating that Christianity become America’s national religion, she believed that “right now, Christianity is practically persecuted in America.” She wants to see teachers leading students in prayer and to see American presidents set a Christian example. Invoking Jesus, Greene said: “He fought against what was wrong. He ran the money changers out of the temple. He threw their tables over. So he stood strongly against things that were wrong.”Though she readily volunteers that she is “a sinner,” Greene has frequently used the word “godless” to describe Democrats, including Pelosi, a practicing Catholic. (Greene told me that Pelosi’s support of abortion rights essentially disqualifies the House speaker from being a true Christian. She does, however, ruefully admire how Pelosi wields power, and she recently told the conservative activist Charlie Kirk on his podcast that if she ever managed to hold that same position, “I would reign with an iron fist.”) When I mentioned this to Emanuel Cleaver, a 77-year-old United Methodist pastor from Missouri who has been a Democratic member of Congress since 2005, he replied: “I believe that she actually believes that about us. But as I remind myself all the time, sincerity alone does not make a weak doctrine strong.”Cleaver went on to say: “We are in an era of nationalism, all across the world and here at home. And there’s a symbiotic relationship between nationalism and religion. Human beings often mix their political belief with religious fervor. It allows them to think that they’re God’s agent.” Cleaver told me that he had been unable to forget the video clip from the Jan. 6 insurrection in which a QAnon adherent named Jacob Chansley joined other rioters in storming the vacant chamber of the Senate. Chansley, the so-called Q Shaman, stood at the rostrum and led others in prayer, saying: “Thank you for allowing the United States of America to be reborn. Thank you for allowing us to get rid of the Communists, the globalists and the traitors within our government.”“It doesn’t take much theology to understand that what many of them at the Capitol that day believed was that they were an army of God,” Cleaver told me. “And that’s what scares me about Christian nationalism here in America.”Greene with former President Donald Trump at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., in July.Doug Mills/The New York TimesGreene’s political operation is committed to the goal of reflexively demonizing nearly anyone and anything she opposes, regardless of what it costs her. Twitter has permanently suspended her personal account for repeatedly spreading untruths about Covid vaccines. Her refusal to wear a mask on the House floor during the pandemic resulted in Greene’s being fined more than $100,000. Her appearance onstage in February with the avowed white supremacist Nick Fuentes caused Bannon to cancel a public appearance with her in Georgia. (Bannon has since brought Greene back on his podcast.) Earlier this year, she traveled with a bodyguard (which, as The Times reported, Greene paid for with campaign funds) because of threats that she says have been made against her. In August, according to the local police, her house in Rome, Ga., was repeatedly “swatted” — someone claimed to a 911 operator that a violent crime was taking place in Greene’s household, compelling a SWAT team to enter her home — apparently by someone who objected to her anti-transgender rhetoric, according to a report she obtained from the police and released.But the attention economy manifestly rewards her performative combativeness, both in online donations and in social media ubiquity. That this was not just some happy coincidence, but in fact an assiduously strategized core of Greene’s political machine, became evident more than a year ago, when I met two of her seniormost advisers (who, as a precondition for our conversation, requested anonymity so that they could speak freely about their boss) at a restaurant in the Atlanta suburbs.One of them challenged me: “Who do you think are the top five Republicans in the House, other than the ones in leadership?” The adviser then clarified that this was not a Beltway lobbyist popularity contest. “I’m not talking about who K Street wants. I’m talking about, if you had five House Republicans on a national ballot, who would the public vote for?”It was a revealing question. Tom DeLay had once told me that there were three career paths for any member of Congress: to be in leadership, to be a committee stalwart or to be a tireless advocate for your district. Greene had chosen a fourth path. Her ambition was to be a national figure.She has achieved this distinction in part through an extremist posture that may well be earnestly felt but is also politically calculated. In May, I accompanied Greene on a 13-hour primary-campaign swing through her district. Two years earlier, her campaign slogan was “Save America Stop Socialism.” Now her yard signs read: “Save America Stop Communism.” Her senior adviser Isaiah Wartman said, “We’ve moved the needle.”That Greene honestly believes America has now fallen prey to a Communist regime seems unlikely. (When I asked her about a claim she had made that Jamie Raskin is a Communist, Greene responded: “Yes! Have you read about his father?” Marcus Raskin was a longtime progressive government staff member and never a member of the Communist Party.) It has therefore been tempting for her detractors, and for that matter many Washington journalists, to regard her as pernicious but ultimately unserious — and, like her political godfather, Trump, as someone who appears more attuned to what works as an applause line than what fits her core beliefs. I tended toward this view in my early appraisal of Greene, particularly after she accosted Ocasio-Cortez on the House floor and challenged her to a debate in April 2021, promoting the hashtag #MTGvsAOC and a month later chasing the Democrat down a corridor of the Capitol, yelling in full view of reporters: “Alexandria! Alexandria! Why won’t you debate me?”But enough time spent in her orbit revealed that Greene’s ceaseless quest for attention did not prove or disprove anything about her right-wing fervor. Her commitment to the MAGA agenda equals if not surpasses Trump’s. More significant, she has every intention of enacting what her Republican colleagues failed to ratify of Trump’s agenda.“I’ve said it to them at conference,” Greene told me in May in the back of her black S.U.V., headed to a campaign event in the northwest Georgia town Ringgold. “I’ve said it over and over: ‘The whole reason I ran for Congress was, you basically [expletive] the bed when you had your chance. You didn’t fund and build the wall. You didn’t repeal Obamacare — you didn’t do anything about it. You call yourselves pro-life, and you guys funded Planned Parenthood. You can’t fail any worse than that!’ So, no: I literally ran for Congress because they failed so badly that Nancy Pelosi became speaker again.”Among the questions facing Greene is whether the pugnacity she displays toward her fellow Republicans is politically sustainable. “When you ask yourself how things could end up for her,” Brendan Buck, who served as counselor and chief communications adviser to the former speaker Paul Ryan, said to me, “one likely possibility is that it ends when you start becoming a problem for your colleagues. Steve King became a problem for his colleagues, and so did Madison Cawthorn.” Buck was referring, respectively, to the former Iowa congressman who was marginalized by the House G.O.P. for expressing white-supremacist views, and to the freshman from North Carolina who was defeated by a Republican primary challenger after a series of incidents that included claiming that fellow Republicans had invited him to cocaine-fueled orgies. Buck continued: “It’s very easy to see her becoming a problem as well, whether it’s continually claiming they’re not conservative enough or them continually having to respond to her craziness. That’s the quickest way to see yourself out of the chamber.”Even without alienating her Republican colleagues, Buck said, Greene faced an additional conundrum. “The driving dynamic among members like her has been the battle for relevance,” he told me. “Everything revolves around making your voice matter and making your voice heard in the conservative media ecosystem writ large. Turning the party in the direction you want requires your viewpoint being echoed hundreds of thousands of times.”Greene once told me that when the Georgia G.O.P. establishment first encountered her in 2019, “They looked at me like I was a three-headed monster.” This was hardly the case anymore. Every Republican candidate in her state — and more across the country — seemed to be mimicking her. Georgia’s 10th Congressional District, to take just one example, had been vacated by the Republican incumbent Jody Hice and subsequently had a field of candidates that included three Greene wannabes. One was a demolition-company owner whose kickoff ad featured the candidate bashing various walls and doors with a sledgehammer while promising to “crush the woke mob and their cancel culture.” A second pledged to introduce articles of impeachment against Biden on his first day in office, just as Greene had done. A third, Mike Collins, who ended up as the nominee, vowed during his announcement speech, “I’ll make a great teammate for Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene.”When I brought this up to Greene, she replied, “It’s almost cookie-cutter for some of these candidates.”She didn’t look or sound especially happy to be the recipient of such flattery. I thought I understood why. “If everybody starts acting like Marjorie Taylor Greene,” I said, “then Marjorie Taylor Greene is no different from anyone else. And in the view of some people, this is Trump’s problem now.”“Too much Trump?” She asked it rhetorically; it was clear that the question was one she had already been pondering. Neither of them was an inside operator like Kevin McCarthy or Mitch McConnell. Both derived their outsize influence in the G.O.P. from their ability to command the airspace of the right-wing ecosystem. They achieved this not simply by being the most outrageous voices in the room but also by being more outrageous today than they were the day before. They were competing against themselves and against their adoring mimics. Their rhetorical one-upmanship was increasingly dark and violent. At a Trump rally in Michigan on Oct. 1, the former president claimed, “Despite great outside dangers, our biggest threat remains the sick, sinister and evil people from within our country.” Greene, as part of Trump’s warm-up act, was willing to get even more ominously specific: “Democrats want Republicans dead, and they have already started the killings.” The previous month, sharing an image of a darkly lit Biden speech in which the president warned that some on the right were threats to democracy, Greene tweeted, “Joe Biden is Hitler,” with the hashtag #NaziJoe.Such was the dangerous game of relevancy that Greene was pursuing. In victory, her voice might well become drowned out amid the growing chorus of MAGA supplicants. Impeach Biden? When she first proposed it in January 2021, eyes rolled. Now it was all but a given that a G.O.P. House majority would seize upon some rationale to swiftly begin impeachment proceedings. Democrats were not just radical socialists but Communists? Greene had begun making this assertion about Democratic members of Congress back in June 2021. Now even the National Republican Congressional Committee — the House G.O.P.’s official political organization — has solicited donations warning of creeping Communism under Pelosi’s Democrats.Greene’s message was prevailing. What her inflammatory rhetoric might consume or ignite, and whether that would bring her ever closer to the center of power or lead to her being cast out, was yet to be known. “Part of my problem is,” she said quietly as her S.U.V. rolled through northwest Georgia, “I’ve been too early.”This article is adapted from “Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party Lost Its Mind,” published this month by Penguin Press.Robert Draper is a contributing writer for the magazine. He is the author of several books, most recently “Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party Lost Its Mind,” from which this article about Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is adapted. Stephen Voss is a photographer in Washington known for his portraits of political figures. His photographs are held in the permanent collection of the Library of Congress. More