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      How Senator Ron Johnson Helps Erode Confidence in Government

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      Pushing false theories on the virus, the vaccine and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, Mr. Johnson, the Republican senator from Wisconsin, has absorbed his party’s transformation under Donald Trump.BROOKFIELD, Wis. — Senator Ron Johnson incited widespread outrage when he said recently that he would have been more afraid of the rioters who rampaged the Capitol on Jan. 6 had they been members of Black Lives Matter and antifa.But his revealing and incendiary comment, which quickly prompted accusations of racism, came as no surprise to those who have followed Mr. Johnson’s career in Washington or back home in Wisconsin. He has become the Republican Party’s foremost amplifier of conspiracy theories and disinformation now that Donald Trump himself is banned from social media and largely avoiding appearances on cable television.Mr. Johnson is an all-access purveyor of misinformation on serious issues such as the pandemic and the legitimacy of American democracy, as well as invoking the etymology of Greenland as a way to downplay the effects of climate change.In recent months, Mr. Johnson has sown doubts about President Biden’s victory, argued that the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol was not an armed insurrection, promoted discredited Covid-19 treatments, said he saw no need to get the coronavirus vaccine himself and claimed that the United States could have ended the pandemic a year ago with the development of a generic drug if the government had wanted that to happen.Last year, he spent months as chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee seeking evidence that Mr. Biden had tried to pressure Ukrainian officials to aid his son Hunter, which an Intelligence Community report released on Monday said was misinformation that was spread by Russia to help Mr. Trump’s re-election.Mr. Johnson has sown doubts about President Biden’s victory, argued that the attack on the Capitol was not an armed insurrection and promoted discredited Covid-19 treatments.Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesMr. Johnson has also become the leading Republican proponent of a revisionist effort to deny the motives and violence of the mob that breached the Capitol. At a Senate hearing to examine the events of that day, Mr. Johnson read into the record an account from a far-right website attributing the violence to “agents-provocateurs” and “fake Trump protesters.” On Saturday, he told a conference of conservative political organizers in Wisconsin that “there was no violence on the Senate side, in terms of the chamber.” In fact, Trump supporters stormed the chamber shortly after senators were evacuated.His continuing assault on the truth, often under the guise of simply “asking questions” about established facts, is helping to diminish confidence in American institutions at a perilous moment, when the health and economic well-being of the nation relies heavily on mass vaccinations, and when faith in democracy is shaken by right-wing falsehoods about voting.Republicans are 27 percentage points less likely than Democrats to say they plan to get, or have already received, a vaccine, a Pew Research Center study released this month found. In an interview, Mr. Johnson repeatedly refused to say that vaccines were safe or to encourage people to get them, resorting instead to insinuations — “there’s still so much we don’t know about all of this” — that undermine efforts to defeat the pandemic.The drumbeat of distortions, false theories and lies reminds some Wisconsin Republicans of a figure from the state’s past who also rarely let facts get in the way of his agenda: Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose witch hunt for communists in and out of government in the 1950s ruined lives and bitterly divided the country.“Wisconsin voters love mavericks, they really love mavericks — you go way back to Joe McCarthy,” said Jim Sensenbrenner, a long-serving Republican congressman from the Milwaukee suburbs who retired in January. “They do love people who rattle the cage an awful lot and bring up topics that maybe people don’t want to talk about.”For Democrats, who have never forgotten Mr. Johnson’s defeat of the liberal darling Russ Feingold in 2010, and again in a 2016 rematch, regaining the Senate seat in 2022 is a top priority. Though he has yet to announce whether he would be seeking a third term, Mr. Johnson recently said that the fury that Democrats had directed his way had made him want to stay in the fight. Still, he has raised just $590,000 in the past two years — a paltry sum for an incumbent senator.Mr. Johnson’s most recent provocation came on March 12, when he contrasted Black Lives Matter protesters to the Trump supporters “who love this country” and stormed the Capitol, the carnage resulting in 140 injured police officers and more than 300 arrests by federal authorities. During an interview with a right-wing radio host, Joe Pagliarulo, Mr. Johnson said: “Joe, this will get me in trouble. Had the tables been turned and President Trump won the election and those were tens of thousands of Black Lives Matter and antifa protesters, I might have been a little concerned.”Research on the protests against racial injustice over the summer showed that they were largely nonviolent.In the interview with The Times, Mr. Johnson rejected comparisons to McCarthy. And he insisted he had no racist intent in making his argument.Like former President Donald J. Trump, Mr. Johnson proved himself remarkably adept at adopting the misinformation that increasingly animated right-wing media. Erin Schaff/The New York Times“I didn’t feel threatened,” he said. “So it’s a true statement. And then people said, ‘Well, why?’ Well, because I’ve been to a lot of Trump rallies. I spend three hours with thousands of Trump supporters. And I think I know them pretty well. I don’t know any Trump supporter who would have done what the rioters did.”On Sunday, Senator Roy Blunt, Republican of Missouri, denounced Mr. Johnson’s distortion of the events of Jan. 6. “We don’t need to try and explain away or come up with alternative versions,” he said on the NBC program “Meet the Press.” “We all saw what happened.”Mr. Johnson, in the Times interview, also faulted the federal government for what he called its “tunnel vision” pursuit of a Covid-19 vaccine while not more deeply studying treatments such as hydroxychloroquine — the anti-malarial drug promoted by Mr. Trump that the Food and Drug Administration says is not effective against the virus. That strategy, he said, cost “tens of thousands of lives.”Conspiracy theories and a defiant disregard of facts were a fringe but growing element of the Republican Party when Mr. Johnson entered politics in 2010 — notably in the vice-presidential candidacy of Sarah Palin two years earlier. But under Mr. Trump, the fringe became the mainstream. Fact-free assertions by the president, from the size of his inaugural crowd in 2017 to the “big lie” of a stolen election in 2020, required Republican officials to fall in line with his gaslighting or lose the support of the party’s base voters.Mr. Johnson proved himself remarkably adept at adopting the misinformation that increasingly animated Fox News commentators and right-wing talk radio.“Through the years, as the party has morphed into a muscular ignorance, Q-Anon sect, he’s followed along with them,” said Christian Schneider, a former Republican political operative in Wisconsin who embedded with the Johnson campaign in 2010 to write a glowing account for a local conservative magazine. “Now, he’s a perfect example of that type of politics.”Mr. Johnson entered politics as a businessman concerned about federal spending and debt in 2010, defeating the Democratic senator Russ Feingold.Narayan Mahon for The New York TimesMr. Johnson was the chief executive of a plastics company started by his wife’s family when he first ran for the Senate in 2010. He campaigned as a new-to-politics businessman concerned about federal spending and debt, and he spent $9 million of his own money on the race.But there were signs in that first campaign of Mr. Johnson’s predilection for anti-intellectualism. On several occasions, he declared that climate change was not man-made but instead caused by “sun spots” and said excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere “helps the trees grow.” He also offered a false history of Greenland to dismiss the effects of global warming.“You know, there’s a reason Greenland was called Greenland,” Mr. Johnson told WKOW-TV in Madison back then. “It was actually green at one point in time. And it’s been, you know, since, it’s a whole lot whiter now so we’ve experienced climate change throughout geologic time.”In the interview on Thursday, Mr. Johnson was still misinformed about the etymology of Greenland, which got its name from the explorer Erik the Red’s attempt to lure settlers to the ice-covered island.“I could be wrong there, but that’s always been my assumption that, at some point in time, those early explorers saw green,” Mr. Johnson said. “I have no idea.”Just as Mr. Trump would later use Fox News to build a national political persona, Mr. Johnson did so on Wisconsin’s wide network of conservative talk-radio shows. His political rise would not have been possible without support from Charlie Sykes, then an influential radio host in Milwaukee who once read an entire 20-minute speech by Mr. Johnson on the air.Mr. Sykes, who since 2016 has been a harsh critic of Trump-era Republicans, said last week of Mr. Johnson: “I don’t know how he went from being a chamber of commerce guy to somebody who sounds like he reads the Gateway Pundit every day. He’s turned into Joe McCarthy.”This month alone, Mr. Johnson has made at least 15 appearances on 11 different radio shows.Conspiracy theories and a defiant disregard of facts were a fringe but growing element of the Republican Party when Mr. Johnson entered politics in 2010.Morry Gash/Associated PressOn Tuesday he appeared with Vicki McKenna, whose right-wing show is popular with Wisconsin conservatives. She began by attacking public-health guidance on wearing a mask and maintaining social distance, arguing it is a Democratic plot to control Americans. Mr. Johnson agreed with Ms. McKenna and her assessment that public-health experts in the federal government are misleading the country when they promote the coronavirus vaccine.“We’ve closed our minds to all of these other potentially useful and cheap therapies all on the holy grail of a vaccine,” he said. Dr. Fauci, he added, is “not a god.”In the interview, the senator said it was not his responsibility to to use his public prominence to encourage Americans to get vaccinated.“I don’t have all the information to say, ‘Do this,’” Mr. Johnson said.His false theories about the virus and the vaccine are reminiscent of other misinformation that Mr. Johnson has amplified. During a 2014 appearance on Newsmax TV, he warned of Islamic State militants infecting themselves with the Ebola virus and then traveling to the United States. In 2015, he introduced legislation directing the federal government to protect itself against the threat of an electromagnetic pulse, a conspiracy theory that has long lived on the far right of American politics.Last year’s monthslong investigation by Mr. Johnson’s Homeland Security committee into the Bidens and Ukraine concluded with the G.O.P. majority report finding no wrongdoing by the former vice president. An Intelligence Community assessment declassified and released on Monday concluded that Russia had spread misinformation about Hunter Biden to damage his father’s campaign and to help Mr. Trump win re-election.Mr. Johnson, who was not named in the assessment, was adamant that his work was not directly, or unwittingly, influenced by Russians.“Read the report — show me where there’s any Russian disinformation,” he said. “Anybody who thinks I spread disinformation is uninformed because I haven’t.”For weeks after the November election, Mr. Johnson refused to acknowledge Mr. Biden as the winner while echoing Mr. Trump’s false statements about rampant fraud. He convened his committee in December to air baseless claims of fraud and mishandling of ballots, even as dozens of claims of fraud made by the Trump campaign were being tossed out of courts across the country.Mr. Johnson has refused to say that coronavirus vaccines are safe or to encourage people to get them.Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesIn a cascade of interviews with friendly conservative outlets, Mr. Johnson has lately portrayed himself as a victim of “the radical left” that is waging a scorched-earth campaign to flip his Senate seat.“The best way to maintain power is to destroy your political opposition, and they’re targeting me,” he told the Oshkosh radio host Bob Burnell on Tuesday. “This is obviously a vulnerable Senate seat in a swing state so they think I’d probably be the target No. 1. And I am target No. 1.”Mr. Johnson’s defenders say he is fighting the liberal media’s attempts to silence him.“I see the same thing happening with Senator Johnson that the media did with Donald Trump,” said Gerard Randall, the chairman of the Republican Party of Wisconsin’s African-American Advisory Council. “I know Senator Johnson personally, and I know that he is not a racist.”If Mr. Johnson seeks a third term, the race is likely to be decided in the Milwaukee suburbs, which used to deliver Republican landslides but have moved away from the party since the Trump era.The city of Brookfield, for example, backed Mr. Trump by a margin of just nine percentage points in November, after voting for him by 20 points in 2016 and President George W. Bush by 39 points in 2004.“There was a lot of eye-rolling” about Mr. Johnson’s recent comments about the Capitol siege, said Scott Berg, a conservative who has served as a Brookfield city alderman for 20 years. “If I were in the leadership of the Wisconsin Republican Party, I’d be out shopping for candidates” for the Senate in 2022, he added.Still, in 2016, Mr. Johnson ran 10 percentage points ahead of Mr. Trump in Brookfield. Voters there suggested the suburb might not be drifting from Republicans as fast as some Democrats had hoped.“I’m a Johnson supporter — I voted for him twice — but I think he’s going down a rabbit hole I don’t want any part of,” said John Raschig, a retiree who was leaving a Pick ‘n Save supermarket. “It’s sort of like Trump: I’d vote for him because the other side’s awful, but I’d prefer somebody else.”Trip Gabriel More

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      How Anti-Asian Activity Online Set the Stage for Real-World Violence

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      On platforms such as Telegram and 4chan, racist memes and posts about Asian-Americans have created fear and dehumanization.In January, a new group popped up on the messaging app Telegram, named after an Asian slur.Hundreds of people quickly joined. Many members soon began posting caricatures of Asians with exaggerated facial features, memes of Asian people eating dog meat and images of American soldiers inflicting violence during the Vietnam War.This week, after a gunman killed eight people — including six women of Asian descent — at massage parlors in and near Atlanta, the Telegram channel linked to a poll that asked, “Appalled by the recent attacks on Asians?” The top answer, with 84 percent of the vote, was that the violence was “justified retaliation for Covid.”The Telegram group was a sign of how anti-Asian sentiment has flared up in corners of the internet, amplifying racist and xenophobic tropes just as attacks against Asian-Americans have surged. On messaging apps like Telegram and on internet forums like 4chan, anti-Asian groups and discussion threads have been increasingly active since November, especially on far-right message boards such as The Donald, researchers said.The activity follows a rise in anti-Asian misinformation last spring after the coronavirus, which first emerged in China, began spreading around the world. On Facebook and Twitter, people blamed the pandemic on China, with users posting hashtags such as #gobacktochina and #makethecommiechinesepay. Those hashtags spiked when former President Donald J. Trump last year called Covid-19 the “Chinese virus” and “Kung Flu.”While some of the online activity tailed off ahead of the November election, its re-emergence has helped lay the groundwork for real-world actions, researchers said. The fatal shootings in Atlanta this week, which have led to an outcry over treatment of Asian-Americans even as the suspect said he was trying to cure a “sexual addiction,” were preceded by a swell of racially motivated attacks against Asian-Americans in places like New York and the San Francisco Bay Area, according to the advocacy group Stop AAPI Hate.“Surges in anti-Asian rhetoric online means increased risk of real-world events targeting that group of people,” said Alex Goldenberg, an analyst at the Network Contagion Research Institute at Rutgers University, which tracks misinformation and extremism online.He added that the anti-China coronavirus misinformation — including the false narrative that the Chinese government purposely created Covid-19 as a bioweapon — had created an atmosphere of fear and invective.Anti-Asian speech online has typically not been as overt as anti-Semitic or anti-Black groups, memes and posts, researchers said. On Facebook and Twitter, posts expressing anti-Asian sentiments have often been woven into conspiracy theory groups such as QAnon and in white nationalist and pro-Trump enclaves. Mr. Goldenberg said forms of hatred against Black people and Jews have deep roots in extremism in the United States and that the anti-Asian memes and tropes have been more “opportunistically weaponized.”But that does not make the anti-Asian hate speech online less insidious. Melissa Ryan, chief executive of Card Strategies, a consulting firm that researches disinformation, said the misinformation and racist speech has led to a “dehumanization” of certain groups of people and to an increased risk of violence.Negative Asian-American tropes have long existed online but began increasing last March as parts of the United States went into lockdown over the coronavirus. That month, politicians including Representative Paul Gosar, Republican of Arizona, and Representative Kevin McCarthy, a Republican of California, used the terms “Wuhan virus” and “Chinese coronavirus” to refer to Covid-19 in their tweets.Those terms then began trending online, according to a study from the University of California, Berkeley. On the day Mr. Gosar posted his tweet, usage of the term “Chinese virus” jumped 650 percent on Twitter; a day later there was an 800 percent increase in their usage in conservative news articles, the study found.Mr. Trump also posted eight times on Twitter last March about the “Chinese virus,” causing vitriolic reactions. In the replies section of one of his posts, a Trump supporter responded, “U caused the virus,” directing the comment to an Asian Twitter user who had cited U.S. death statistics for Covid-19. The Trump fan added a slur about Asian people.In a study this week from the University of California, San Francisco, researchers who examined 700,000 tweets before and after Mr. Trump’s March 2020 posts found that people who posted the hashtag #chinesevirus were more likely to use racist hashtags, including #bateatingchinese.“There’s been a lot of discussion that ‘Chinese virus’ isn’t racist and that it can be used,” said Yulin Hswen, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of California, San Francisco, who conducted the research. But the term, she said, has turned into “a rallying cry to be able to gather and galvanize people who have these feelings, as well as normalize racist beliefs.”Representatives for Mr. Trump, Mr. McCarthy and Mr. Gosar did not respond to requests for comment.Misinformation linking the coronavirus to anti-Asian beliefs also rose last year. Since last March, there have been nearly eight million mentions of anti-Asian speech online, much of it falsehoods, according to Zignal Labs, a media insights firm..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-rqynmc{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.9375rem;line-height:1.25rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-rqynmc{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-rqynmc strong{font-weight:600;}.css-rqynmc em{font-style:italic;}.css-yoay6m{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-yoay6m{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1dg6kl4{margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:15px;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}.css-1pd7fgo{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1pd7fgo{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-1pd7fgo:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1pd7fgo{border:none;padding:20px 0 0;border-top:1px solid #121212;}.css-1pd7fgo[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-1pd7fgo[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-1pd7fgo[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-1pd7fgo[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-coqf44{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-coqf44 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-coqf44 em{font-style:italic;}.css-coqf44 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;}.css-coqf44 a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#333;text-decoration-color:#333;}.css-coqf44 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}In one example, a Fox News article from April that went viral baselessly said that the coronavirus was created in a lab in the Chinese city of Wuhan and intentionally released. The article was liked and shared more than one million times on Facebook and retweeted 78,800 times on Twitter, according to data from Zignal and CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned tool for analyzing social media.By the middle of last year, the misinformation had started subsiding as election-related commentary increased. The anti-Asian sentiment ended up migrating to platforms like 4chan and Telegram, researchers said.But it still occasionally flared up, such as when Dr. Li-Meng Yan, a researcher from Hong Kong, made unproven assertions last fall that the coronavirus was a bioweapon engineered by China. In the United States, Dr. Yan became a right-wing media sensation. Her appearance on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show in September has racked up at least 8.8 million views online.In November, anti-Asian speech surged anew. That was when conspiracies about a “new world order” related to President Biden’s election victory began circulating, said researchers from the Network Contagion Research Institute. Some posts that went viral painted Mr. Biden as a puppet of the Chinese Communist Party.In December, slurs about Asians and the term “Kung Flu” rose by 65 percent on websites and apps like Telegram, 4chan and The Donald, compared with the monthly average mentions from the previous 11 months on the same platforms, according to the Network Contagion Research Institute. The activity remained high in January and last month.During this second surge, calls for violence against Asian-Americans became commonplace.“Filipinos are not Asians because Asians are smart,” read a post in a Telegram channel that depicted a dog holding a gun to its head.After the shootings in Atlanta, a doctored screenshot of what looked like a Facebook post from the suspect circulated on Facebook and Twitter this week. The post featured a miasma of conspiracies about China engaging in a Covid-19 cover-up and wild theories about how it was planning to “secure global domination for the 21st century.”Facebook and Twitter eventually ruled that the screenshot was fake and blocked it. But by then, the post had been shared and liked hundreds of times on Twitter and more than 4,000 times on Facebook.Ben Decker More

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      In Restricting Early Voting, the Right Sees a New ‘Center of Gravity’

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      Donald Trump is no longer center stage. But many conservative activists are finding that the best way to raise money and keep voters engaged is to make his biggest fabrication their top priority.For more than a decade, the Susan B. Anthony List and the American Principles Project have pursued cultural and policy priorities from the social conservative playbook, one backing laws to ban abortion once a fetal heartbeat could be detected and the other opposing civil rights protections for L.G.B.T.Q. people. From their shared offices in suburban Virginia, they and their affiliated committees spent more than $20 million on elections last year.But after Donald J. Trump lost his bid for a second term and convinced millions of Americans that nonexistent fraud was to blame, the two groups found that many of their donors were thinking of throwing in the towel. Why, donors argued, should they give any money if Democrats were going to game the system to their advantage, recalled Frank Cannon, the senior strategist for both groups.“‘Before I give you any money for anything at all, tell me how this is going to be solved,’” Mr. Cannon said, summarizing his conversations. He and other conservative activists — many with no background in election law — didn’t take long to come up with an answer, which was to make rolling back access to voting the “center of gravity in the party,” as he put it.Passing new restrictions on voting — in particular, tougher limits on early voting and vote-by-mail — is now at the heart of the right’s strategy to keep donors and voters engaged as Mr. Trump fades from public view and leaves a void in the Republican Party that no other figure or issue has filled. In recent weeks, many of the most prominent and well-organized groups that power the G.O.P.’s vast voter turnout efforts have directed their resources toward a campaign to restrict when and how people can vote, with a focus on the emergency policies that states enacted last year to make casting a ballot during a pandemic easier. The groups believe it could be their best shot at regaining a purchase on power in Washington.Their efforts are intensifying over the objections of some Republicans who say the strategy is cynical and shortsighted, arguing that it further commits their party to legitimizing a lie. It also sends a message, they say, that Republicans think they lost mostly because the other side cheated, which prevents them from grappling honestly with what went wrong and why they might lose again.Some also argue that setting new restrictions on voting could undercut the party just as it was making important gains with Black and Latino voters, who are more likely to be impeded by such laws.“Restricting voting is only a short-term rush. It’s not a strategy for future strength,” said Benjamin Ginsberg, one of the Republican Party’s most prominent election lawyers, who has criticized Mr. Trump and other members of the party for attacking the integrity of the voting process.Former President Donald J. Trump speaking in 2018 at a Susan B. Anthony List gala in Washington.  Many conservative groups have raised money off his baseless claims of election fraud, and supported the Republican push to roll back voting rights.Doug Mills/The New York Times“Look at what it really means,” Mr. Ginsberg added. “A party that’s increasingly old and white whose base is a diminishing share of the population is conjuring up charges of fraud to erect barriers to voting for people it fears won’t support its candidates.”Just as notable as the brand-name conservative groups that are raising money off Mr. Trump’s revisionism — Susan B. Anthony List, the Heritage Foundation, the Family Research Council, Tea Party Patriots — are some of the heavy hitters that are sitting this fight out. Americans for Prosperity, the political organization funded by the Koch fortune, is not supporting the efforts to pass more ballot access laws, nor are other groups in the multimillion-dollar Koch political network.The debate over voting laws is also part of the bigger fight over the future of the Republican Party, and whether it should continue being so focused on making Mr. Trump and his hard-core voters happy.For now, many conservative groups are choosing to side with the former president, even at the risk of feeding corrosive falsehoods about the prevalence of voter fraud.It is certainly the more financially secure path and, some say, the one where they will encounter the least resistance. With polls showing that at least two-thirds of Republicans harbor doubts about President Biden’s legitimacy or believe that Mr. Trump somehow won more votes despite receiving seven million fewer than his opponent, Republican consultants said they were following their party.Some expressed a certain resignation about the situation: Mr. Trump created a perception that is now their party’s reality.“I’m not someone who thinks that China hacked the voting machines,” said Terry Schilling, the president of the American Principles Project. But at the same time, he said, “if you’re a conservative organization and you have small-dollar donors, you’re hearing this from everywhere: ‘Well, what’s the point in voting?’”One major focus for conservatives is rolling back the Covid-related changes that states enacted to make absentee voting easier last year. Mr. Schilling said his group’s intention was to “restore lost faith” in the process with policies that don’t allow those emergency procedures to become permanent. The American Principles Project, like other groups on the right, supports making states verify signatures on absentee ballots with signatures they have in their voter databases, and wants ballots sent only to people who request them.Shortly after Election Day, Trump supporters protested the results at the Georgia State Capitol in Atlanta.Audra Melton for The New York TimesVoters in Georgia who were disillusioned after Mr. Trump’s defeat — many of whom believed his far-fetched and debunked claims of voting by pets, dead people and other irregularities — helped cost Republicans control of the Senate. Georgia Republicans are now pushing a raft of new voting restrictions that Democrats have called political payback under the guise of “election integrity.” Many of the conservative organizations jumping in have a large network of activists in churches and anti-abortion groups across the country.The Susan B. Anthony List and the American Principles Project recently announced a joint “election transparency” campaign and set a fund-raising goal of $5 million. They hired a top conservative activist who is a former Trump administration official to lead it. They have organized conference calls for activists with other social conservative groups across the country, and say they have found participants to be enthusiastic about getting involved even if election law is entirely new to them.The Family Research Council, which advised the Trump administration on policies like ending military eligibility for transgender people and expanding the definition of religious freedom, recently dedicated one of its regular online organizing sessions, the “Pray Vote Stand Townhall,” to encouraging people to lobby their state legislators.Tony Perkins, the group’s president, expressed optimism about the number of voting bills that were moving along and suggested that last year’s election results were tainted. “We’ve got 106 election-related bills that are in 28 states right now,” he said to the audience. “So here’s the good news: There is action taking place to go back and correct what was uncovered in this last election.”Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, suggested that the results of the 2020 election couldn’t be trusted.Mark J. Terrill/Associated PressJoining Mr. Perkins on the stage was Michael P. Farris, the president of the deep-pocketed and powerful Christian legal group Alliance Defending Freedom. He chimed in approvingly: “Let me just say, ‘Amen,’” he said.Also throwing its weight behind the campaign is the influential Heritage Foundation and its political arm, Heritage Action for America, which recently announced that it planned to spend millions of dollars to support voting policies that are popular with conservatives. Those include laws that would require identification for voters and limit the availability of absentee ballots, as well as other policies that Heritage said would “secure and strengthen state election systems.”Several Republican strategists said that while the “stolen” election canard was accepted widely among rank-and-file Republican voters, they were surprised to find how deeply it had taken hold with major donors, who seem the most convinced of its truth and eager to act.Groups that are fighting these attempts to restrict ballot access said that the organizing on the right was so new that its impact had been hard to gauge. Michael Waldman, the president of the Brennan Center for Justice, said Republican legislatures seemed to understand the power of this issue on their own and didn’t need much persuasion to act.“Are we seeing a lot of new lawsuits, new lobbying, other things on the ground?” he said. “The answer is mostly no. We’re seeing a lot of fund-raising.” Still, the number of groups involved and the salience of the issue was striking, he said.“There’s massive organizational infrastructure behind it,” Mr. Waldman said. “It’s hard to identify too many unifying issues right now in the Republican Party. But this seems to be one of them.”As contentious as some of the past conservative-led campaigns to restrict voting were, this time is even more emotionally and politically charged given how closely associated it is with Mr. Trump and the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol that he incited. Some conservatives said the association with that day complicated what could be relatively uncontroversial changes to regulate how absentee ballots are sent out, collected and counted now that so many more people are likely to request them in the future.“We also took a look at the election results, and we don’t believe that it was stolen. But that doesn’t mean we don’t think there aren’t things that can be improved,” said Jason Snead, the executive director of the Honest Elections Project. The group supports a range of changes: Some would regulate mail-in voting at the margins, like requiring that ballots are mailed out no earlier than three weeks before the election and received by the time polls close on the day of.Others would no doubt be more controversial, like banning the organized, third-party collection of ballots that conservative critics call ballot harvesting.Mr. Snead said it was problematic that the 2020 election and its aftermath had cast a shadow over the entire issue. “There’s definitely a recognition that we don’t want this to be something that is tied to the last election,” he said. But as someone who started his work on election law before Mr. Trump was elected and shares the broader goal of establishing more conditions on voting, he acknowledged that the environment had never been riper.“It has risen to a degree of prominence it probably has never enjoyed,” Mr. Snead said. More

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      The Intelligence on Russia Was Clear. It Was Not Always Presented That Way.

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      A newly declassified intelligence report made clear that government agencies long knew of Russia’s work to aid Donald Trump, but he and allies muddied the waters.WASHINGTON — Representative Jason Crow listened during a classified briefing last summer while a top intelligence official said that Russia was hurting Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s campaign to help President Donald J. Trump.Mr. Crow, Democrat of Colorado, held up an intelligence agency news release from days earlier and demanded to know why it said nothing about Russia’s plans.“‘When are you going to come out publicly and correct this record?’” Mr. Crow recalled asking the official, William R. Evanina. “‘Because there’s a massive disconnect between what is in your news releases and what you’re saying publicly — because of the pressure of the president.’”A report released Tuesday made clear that the intelligence community believed that Russia had long attacked Mr. Biden for the benefit of Mr. Trump. But throughout 2020, senior officials bowed to Mr. Trump’s hostility toward any public emphasis of the threat from Russia, and they offered Congress and the public incomplete or misleading portraits of the intelligence on foreign influence in the election.The picture is complicated. While Mr. Trump’s enmity toward the intelligence community loomed, and his political appointees emphasized the threat from China and Iran, not Russia, career officers did also get key findings about Russian intelligence declassified and disclosed last year.Soon after that briefing to Congress, Mr. Evanina released details about Kremlin-backed operatives denigrating Mr. Biden, fulfilling the demands of Mr. Crow and other lawmakers. In an interview, Mr. Evanina credited Congress for pushing for more information, but said it took time and effort to get other intelligence officials to declassify the information.Once made public, the information broke new ground in describing Russian activity, but it also angered the White House.“We were out there on our island,” Mr. Evanina said. “The White House was unhappy with us, and so were the Democrats.” After Mr. Evanina’s disclosure, Mr. Trump and senior administration officials worked to play down the intelligence about Russian interference or to redirect focus to China’s work.Their efforts allowed Americans to dismiss a widely accepted intelligence assessment as politics, deepening distrust and division among the electorate, current and former officials said, adding that a divided country was vulnerable to foreign interference.“We’re so polarized,” Mr. Evanina said, “we’re going to be even more susceptible for this kind of activity moving forward.”Former Trump administration officials defended their public assessments of the intelligence. Some administration officials saw intelligence analysts, particularly the C.I.A.’s Russia experts, as presenting an overly dramatic analysis of the Kremlin’s intentions.The newly released report, former Trump administration officials argued, blurs the definitions of influence and interference. Russia’s effort was always more about spreading misinformation and propaganda, the former officials said, and there was no evidence that the Kremlin changed votes, the report’s definition of interference.“There is zero evidence,” said Richard Grenell, the former acting director of national intelligence. “Key judgment No. 1 is that no one interfered. This is influence vs. interference.”Throughout 2020, current and former intelligence officials privately expressed concern about how the White House characterized intelligence. Inside the intelligence agencies, officers continued to develop classified information on Russian interference and worked to present it honestly. For example, the designated election security czar, Shelby Pierson, was consistent in how she portrayed Russian actions in briefings to Congress, according to people familiar with her testimony.“We’re so polarized, we’re going to be even more susceptible for this kind of activity moving forward,” said William R. Evanina, a former top intelligence official.Joshua Roberts/ReutersBut one of her briefings, in which Ms. Pierson told lawmakers Russia favored Mr. Trump and was working for his re-election, prompted outrage among Republicans and contributed to the ousting of Joseph R. Maguire as the acting director of national intelligence. Mr. Evanina was then put in charge of briefing Congress, a role he was abruptly thrust into with little preparation, officials said.For Mr. Evanina’s first meeting with lawmakers on election security last March, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, then run by Mr. Grenell, prepared a document that tried to temper Ms. Pierson’s February warning by cautioning that officials had not concluded that Russia was backing Mr. Trump.“The I.C. has not concluded that the Kremlin is directly aiding any candidate’s re-election or any other candidates’ election,” an unclassified summary given to lawmakers said, using shorthand for the intelligence community. “Nor have we concluded that the Russians will definitely choose to try to do so in 2020.”Mr. Grenell privately pushed intelligence officials to provide evidence to back up their conclusion that Russian disinformation activity was about influencing the elections, rather than simply an effort to stoke divisive debates in the United States. He has in the past defended the March briefing as an accurate summary of the intelligence.But the intelligence community ombudsman said in January that there were substantive differences between talking points for briefing Congress and what the intelligence community really thought.The newly declassified report showed that the March briefing was at best misleading to Congress and backed Ms. Pierson’s February testimony.The report laid out how the Russian strategy of attacking Mr. Biden goes back to 2014, before Mr. Trump was a serious candidate for office. While some senior intelligence officials have suggested that intelligence on Russia was in flux at various points in 2020, the new report made clear that the intelligence community’s view on President Vladimir V. Putin’s support for Mr. Trump was little changed from 2016 to 2020.Senior Trump administration officials’ comments about China were also at odds with the report.John Ratcliffe, Mr. Trump’s final director of national intelligence, said publicly before and after the election that China was the greatest national security threat. In a letter to Congress, he said the intelligence community was not applying the same definition to Chinese influence operations as it was to Russia’s.Some intelligence officials defended Mr. Ratcliffe’s comments on China, noting that Beijing was the most serious long-term threat to the United States and that it clearly tried to influence how it was viewed in America and elsewhere. The January ombudsman report did find merit in Mr. Ratcliffe’s critique of how intelligence on Chinese influence operations was handled.Mr. Grenell said his successor was right to focus on China, and that it was wrong to dismiss his critique of the intelligence agencies because analysts used different standards when looking at China’s influence operations compared with Russia’s. “China is a crisis,” Mr. Grenell said. “Russia is a problem.”Still, in appearances on Fox News, Mr. Ratcliffe’s relentless focus on China, rather than Russia, had the effect of leaving the impression, particularly with the president’s most enthusiastic supporters, that China was the most urgent threat to the 2020 election.The new report rejected that assertion.“Trying to equate, or at times suggest that, China was actually more actively interfering than Russia, it just wasn’t true,” said Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California and the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. “I certainly tried to call them out on it at the time but wasn’t able to hold up the classified intelligence document to show how misleading they had been. But I think this report makes it very clear.”Even if China is a long-term national security threat, Russia will continue to be the larger threat in the next few elections, Mr. Evanina said.“There’s some political speak about China being a bigger, more existential threat,” Mr. Evanina said. “Sure they are, but not when it comes to elections.” More

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      Many Iowans Are Uncomfortable With a New Voting Restriction, Poll Finds

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      A new survey by one of the country’s top pollsters hinted at discomfort among voters in the state about new balloting restrictions.Republican state lawmakers across the country have responded to President Biden’s victory in November by proposing a raft of new restrictions on voting, aiming to tamp down early voting and absentee balloting in moves that would make it harder to participate on Election Day.But in Iowa — a state that’s been trending red for years, and where Donald Trump won by over eight percentage points in November — a new survey by one of the country’s top pollsters suggests that voters are irked by the latest push to curtail voting access.Last week, the state’s Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, signed a bill passed by the G.O.P.-led state legislature that includes a number of restrictions on voting, including shortening the early-voting period by nine days and closing the polls an hour earlier on Election Day.The new poll, conducted by Selzer & Co. for The Des Moines Register and released today, found that 52 percent of Iowans were opposed to condensing the early-voting period, and 42 percent were in favor.There was a deep partisan divide, with 71 percent of Republicans favoring the move and 81 percent of Democrats opposed. Among independents, 51 percent were against the change, while 43 percent were in favor.The poll found that Iowans were evenly split on Reynolds’s job performance, with 46 percent approving and 47 percent disapproving. But 52 percent said they hoped she wouldn’t run for re-election next year, and just 41 percent said they wanted her to.Asked about Biden’s work so far as president, 47 percent gave him positive marks and 44 percent gave him a thumbs-down.The voting bill Reynolds just signed is one of hundreds that have been making their way through Republican-led state legislatures across the country. Proponents of these bills often cite the risk of voter fraud as a motivating factor, even though in reality fraud is vanishingly rare — and restrictions on access to the ballot tend to do more to disenfranchise legitimate voters than to cut down on illegitimate voting.The rash of state-level restrictions has drawn fire from advocates of voting rights, and Democratic lawmakers in Washington have recommitted themselves to passing two major voting-rights bills that would invalidate many of the state laws.But on a national level, it’s not yet clear that Democrats have won the battle over messaging. A poll published this month by CNN found that 53 percent of Americans said they were more worried that voting rules might not be “strict enough to prevent illegal votes from being cast,” while just 39 percent were more concerned that voting laws might “make it too difficult for eligible citizens” to cast a ballot.Fears of anti-Asian violence rise after a deadly rampage in Georgia.The killings of eight people, including six women of Asian descent, during a shooting spree in the Atlanta area yesterday have prompted a national outcry, and at a news conference today Biden noted a “very, very troubling” pattern of violence against Asian-Americans in recent months.“Whatever the motivation here,” Biden said, “I know Asian-Americans are very concerned.” But the president stopped short of saying that the killings had been racially motivated, citing an ongoing investigation.Investigators said they had not ruled out bias as a motivating factor in the shootings, which were carried out at three massage parlors, although the suspect denied racial animus once in custody.The suspect in the killings was charged today with murder. He told the police that he had a “sexual addiction” and had carried out the shootings to eliminate his “temptation,” the authorities said on Wednesday.Vice President Kamala Harris, the first woman and the first Asian-American person to hold the office, expressed condolences for the families of the victims today.“I do want to say to our Asian-American community that we stand with you and understand how this has frightened and shocked and outraged all people,” she said.Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders were targeted in nearly 3,800 hate incidents reported over the past year, according to Stop AAPI Hate. The incidents compiled by the group included mostly verbal harassment and name-calling, which accounted for about 68 percent of those reported. Shunning, or the deliberate avoidance of Asian-Americans, composed about 20 percent. About 11 percent of the reports involved physical assault, the report said.Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms of Atlanta said of the shootings, “Whatever the motivation was for this guy, we know that the majority of the victims were Asian.”She added: “We also know that this is an issue that is happening across the country. It is unacceptable, it is hateful and it has to stop.”— More

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      Putin Authorized Russian Interference in 2020 Election, Report Says

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      The assessment was the intelligence community’s most comprehensive look at foreign efforts to interfere in the election.WASHINGTON — President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia authorized extensive efforts to hurt the candidacy of Joseph R. Biden Jr. during the election last year, including by mounting covert operations to influence people close to President Donald J. Trump, according to a declassified intelligence report released on Tuesday.The report did not name those people but seemed to refer to the work of Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, who relentlessly pushed accusations of corruption about Mr. Biden and his family involving Ukraine.“Russian state and proxy actors who all serve the Kremlin’s interests worked to affect U.S. public perceptions,” the report said.The declassified report represented the most comprehensive intelligence assessment of foreign efforts to influence the 2020 vote. Besides Russia, Iran and other countries also sought to sway the election, the report said. China considered its own efforts but ultimately concluded that they would fail and most likely backfire, intelligence officials concluded.A companion report by the Justice and Homeland Security Departments also rejected false accusations promoted by Mr. Trump’s allies in the weeks after the vote that Venezuela or other countries had defrauded the election.The reports, compiled by career officials, amounted to a repudiation of Mr. Trump, his allies and some of his top administration officials. They reaffirmed the intelligence agencies’ conclusions about Russia’s interference in 2016 on behalf of Mr. Trump and said that the Kremlin favored his re-election. And they categorically dismissed allegations of foreign-fed voter fraud, cast doubt on Republican accusations of Chinese intervention on behalf of Democrats and undermined claims that Mr. Trump and his allies had spread about the Biden family’s work in Ukraine.The report also found that neither Russia nor other countries tried to change ballots themselves. Efforts by Russian hackers to gain access to state and local networks were unrelated to efforts by Moscow to influence the presidential vote.The declassified report did not explain how the intelligence community had reached its conclusions about Russian operations during the 2020 election. But the officials said they had high confidence in their conclusions about Mr. Putin’s involvement, suggesting that the intelligence agencies have developed new ways of gathering information after the extraction of one of their best Kremlin sources in 2017.Foreign efforts to influence United States elections are likely to continue in coming years, American officials said. The public has become more aware of disinformation efforts, and social media companies act faster to take down fake accounts that spread falsehoods. But a large number of Americans remain open to conspiracy theories pushed by Russia and other adversaries, a circumstance that they will exploit, officials warned.“Foreign malign influence is an enduring challenge facing our country,” Avril D. Haines, the director of national intelligence, said in a statement. “These efforts by U.S. adversaries seek to exacerbate divisions and undermine confidence in our democratic institutions.”While it was declassified by the Biden administration, the report is based on work done during the Trump administration, according to intelligence officials, reflecting the vastly different views that officers had from their political overseers, who were appointed by Mr. Trump.The report rebutted yearslong efforts by Mr. Trump and his allies to sow doubts about the intelligence agency’s assessments that Russia not only wanted to sow chaos in the United States but also favored his re-election.“They were disingenuous in downplaying Russia’s influence operations on behalf of the former president,” Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California, who leads the House Intelligence Committee, said in an interview. “It was a disservice not to level with the public and to try to fudge the intelligence in the way they did.”Some of the report’s details were released in the months leading up to the election, reflecting an effort by the intelligence community to disclose more information about foreign operations during the campaign after its reluctance to do so in 2016 helped misinformation spread.During the 2020 campaign, intelligence officials outlined how Russia was spreading damaging information about Mr. Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, in an attempt to bolster Mr. Trump’s re-election chances. It also outlined efforts by Iran in the final days before the election to aid Mr. Biden by spreading letters falsely purporting to be from the Proud Boys, a far-right group.Accusations of election interference have been some of the most politically divisive in recent years. The intelligence report is akin to a declassified assessment in early 2017 that laid out the conclusions about Russia’s efforts in Mr. Trump’s electoral victory, further entrenched the partisan debate over his relationship with Moscow and cemented his enmity toward intelligence and law enforcement officials.With Mr. Trump out of office and the new report’s conclusions largely made public in releases during the campaign, the findings were not expected to prompt as much partisan fury. But elements of the report are likely to be the subject of political fights.Its assessment that China sat on the sidelines is at odds with what some Republican officials have said. In private briefings on Capitol Hill, John Ratcliffe, Mr. Trump’s last director of national intelligence, said Chinese interference was a greater threat in 2020 than Russian operations.The declassified documents released on Tuesday included a dissenting minority view from the national intelligence officer for cyber that suggested that the consensus of the intelligence community was underplaying the threat from China.In a letter in January, Mr. Ratcliffe wrote in support of that minority view and said that the report’s main conclusions about China “fell well short of the mark.” He said the minority conclusion was more than one analyst’s view and argued that some intelligence officials were hesitant to label Chinese actions as influence or interference. Privately, some officials defended the consensus view, saying their reading of the intelligence supported the conclusions that China sought some level of influence but avoided any direct efforts to interfere in the vote.The most detailed material in the assessment was about Russia, which sought to influence how the American public saw the two major candidates “as well as advance Moscow’s longstanding goals of undermining confidence in U.S. election processes.”Moscow used Andriy Derkach, a pro-Russian member of Ukraine’s Parliament, to undermine Mr. Biden, the report confirmed. Mr. Derkach released leaked phone calls four times to undermine Mr. Biden and link him to Ukrainian corruption. The report said Mr. Putin “had purview” over the actions of Mr. Derkach, who had ties to Russian intelligence.Citing in one instance a meeting between Mr. Derkach and Mr. Giuliani, intelligence officials warned Mr. Trump in 2019 that Russian intelligence officers were using his personal lawyer as a conduit for misinformation.Mr. Giuliani also provided materials from Ukraine to American investigators to push for federal inquiries into Mr. Biden’s family, a type of operation that the report mentioned as an example of Russia’s covert efforts without providing names or other identifying details.The report also named Konstantin V. Kilimnik, a former colleague of Mr. Trump’s onetime campaign manager Paul Manafort, as a Russian influence agent. Mr. Kilimnik took steps throughout the 2020 election cycle to hurt Mr. Biden and his candidacy, the report said, helping pushed a false narrative that Ukraine, not Russia, was responsible for interfering in American politics.During the 2016 campaign, Mr. Manafort shared inside information about the presidential race with Mr. Kilimnik and the Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs whom he served, according to a bipartisan report last year by the Senate Intelligence Committee.“Kilimnik was back at it again, along with others like Derkach,” Mr. Schiff said. “And they had other conduits for their laundered misinformation, including people like Rudy Giuliani.”Neither Mr. Giuliani nor his representatives returned a request for comment.Collecting intelligence to feed to Mr. Trump’s allies and use against Mr. Biden was a priority for Russian intelligence. Moscow’s military intelligence unit, the G.R.U., conducted a hacking campaign against a Ukrainian energy firm, Burisma, in what was most likely an attempt to gather information about Mr. Biden’s family and their work for the company, the report confirmed.In the closing weeks of the campaign, intelligence officials also said that Russian hackers had broken into state and local computer networks. But the new report said those efforts were not aimed at changing votes.Unmentioned in this report was the wide-ranging hacking of federal computer systems using a vulnerability in software made by SolarWinds. The absence of a concerted effort by Russia to change votes suggests that Moscow had refocused its intelligence service on a broader effort to attack the U.S. government.Earlier in 2020, American officials thought Iran was likely to stay on the sidelines of the presidential contest. But Iranian hackers did try a last-minute effort to change the vote in Florida and other states. Iranian hackers sent “threatening, spoofed emails” to Democratic voters that purported to be from the Proud Boys, the report said. The group demanded that the recipients change their party affiliation and vote for Mr. Trump. They also pushed a video that supposedly demonstrated voter fraud.The Iranian effort essentially employed reverse psychology. Officials said Iranian operatives hoped the emails would have the opposite effect of the message’s warning, rallying people to vote for Mr. Biden by thinking Mr. Trump’s supporters were playing dirty campaign tricks. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, authorized the campaign, the report said. More

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      Facebook Ends Ban on Political Advertising

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyFacebook Ends Ban on Political AdvertisingThe social network had prohibited political ads on its site indefinitely after the November election. Such ads have been criticized for spreading misinformation.Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook chief executive, testifying in October. Before the ban on political ads, he had said he wanted to maintain a hands-off approach toward speech on Facebook.Credit…Pool photo by Michael ReynoldsMarch 3, 2021Updated 6:16 p.m. ETSAN FRANCISCO — Facebook said on Wednesday that it planned to lift its ban on political advertising across its network, resuming a form of digital promotion that has been criticized for spreading misinformation and falsehoods and inflaming voters.The social network said it would allow advertisers to buy new ads about “social issues, elections or politics” beginning on Thursday, according to a copy of an email sent to political advertisers and viewed by The New York Times. Those advertisers must complete a series of identity checks before being authorized to place the ads, the company said.“We put this temporary ban in place after the November 2020 election to avoid confusion or abuse following Election Day,” Facebook said in a blog post. “We’ve heard a lot of feedback about this and learned more about political and electoral ads during this election cycle. As a result, we plan to use the coming months to take a closer look at how these ads work on our service to see where further changes may be merited.”Political advertising on Facebook has long faced questions. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, has said he wished to maintain a largely hands-off stance toward speech on the site — including political ads — unless it posed an immediate harm to the public or individuals, saying that he “does not want to be the arbiter of truth.”But after the 2016 presidential election, the company and intelligence officials discovered that Russians had used Facebook ads to sow discontent among Americans. Former President Donald J. Trump also used Facebook’s political ads to amplify claims about an “invasion” on the Mexican border in 2019, among other incidents.Facebook had banned political ads late last year as a way to choke off misinformation and threats of violence around the November presidential election. In September, the company said it planned to forbid new political ads for the week before Election Day and would act swiftly against posts that tried to dissuade people from voting. Then in October, Facebook expanded that action by declaring it would prohibit all political and issue-based advertising after the polls closed on Nov. 3 for an undetermined length of time.The company eventually clamped down on groups and pages that spread certain kinds of misinformation, such as discouraging people from voting or registering to vote. It has spent billions of dollars to root out foreign influence campaigns and other types of meddling from malicious state agencies and other bad actors.In December, Facebook lifted the ban to allow some advertisers to run political issue and candidacy ads in Georgia for the January runoff Senate election in the state. But the ban otherwise remained in effect for the remaining 49 states.Attitudes around how political advertising should be treated across Facebook are decidedly mixed. Politicians who are not well known often can raise their profile and awareness of their campaigns by using Facebook.“Political ads are not bad things in and of themselves,” said Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media studies professor and the author of a book studying Facebook’s effects on democracy. “They perform an essential service, in the act of directly representing the candidate’s concerns or positions.”He added, “When you ban all campaign ads on the most accessible and affordable platform out there, you tilt the balance toward the candidates who can afford radio and television.”Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, has also said that political advertising on Facebook can be a crucial component for Democratic digital campaign strategies.Some political ad buyers applauded the lifting of the ads ban.“The ad ban was something that Facebook did to appease the public for the misinformation that spread across the platform,” said Eileen Pollet, a digital campaign strategist and founder of Ravenna Strategies. “But it really ended up hurting good actors while bad actors had total free rein. And now, especially since the election is over, the ban had really been hurting nonprofits and local organizations.”Facebook has long sought to thread the needle between forceful moderation of its policies and a lighter touch. For years, Mr. Zuckerberg defended politicians’ right to say what they wanted on Facebook, but that changed last year amid rising alarm over potential violence around the November election.In January, Facebook barred Mr. Trump from using his account and posting on the platform after he took to social media to delegitimize the election results and incited a violent uprising among his supporters, who stormed the U.S. Capitol.Facebook said Mr. Trump’s suspension was “indefinite.” The decision is now under review by the Facebook Oversight Board, a third-party entity created by the company and composed of journalists, academics and others that adjudicates some of the company’s thorny content policy enforcement decisions. A decision is expected to come within the next few months.On Thursday, political advertisers on Facebook will be able to submit new ads or turn on existing political ads that have already been approved, the company said. Each ad will appear with a small disclaimer, stating that it has been “paid for by” a political organization. For those buying new ads, Facebook said it could take up to a week to clear the identity authorization and advertising review process.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      The Brewing Voting Rights Clash

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyOn PoliticsThe Brewing Voting Rights ClashRepublicans are reuniting — and re-energized — as they pursue a longstanding political goal.March 2, 2021, 6:47 p.m. ETCredit…Antonio de LucaThe 2020 election was a wild one. And under the strange circumstances, Republicans wound up turning against one another on an issue that tends to unite them: voting access and elections.Some Republican officials fought to restrict access to the ballot amid the pandemic, while others endorsed mail-in voting and other methods to make voting easier. After the election, some Republicans backed President Donald Trump’s unfounded claims of election fraud, while a number of state-level officials — such as Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia and his secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger — defended the integrity of their own election systems.But now that the election is behind us, Republicans are reuniting on this issue, leading efforts around the country to restrict access to the vote. And in many cases they’re weaponizing Trump’s fabrications from 2020 to justify doing it. In Georgia this week, the Republican-led state legislature is moving forward with a bill to restrict absentee voting and limit early voting on weekends.The G.O.P. has one big advantage here: a newly cemented 6-to-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court, which is broadly seen as receptive to restrictions on voting, even if it didn’t support Trump’s efforts to overturn the election. The justices heard oral arguments today in a challenge to the Voting Rights Act stemming from policies in Arizona during the 2020 election, and the court appeared sympathetic to the Republican plaintiffs’ arguments.Democrats, meanwhile, are equally unified in their efforts to preserve widespread voting access, particularly in Black and brown communities that are most heavily targeted by restrictive voting laws. The House today held a debate on the For the People Act, known as H.R. 1, which among other things would create a basic bill of rights for voting access. The legislation is expected to pass the chamber tomorrow along party lines.To put this all in perspective, I called Wendy Weiser, who studies these issues as the director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at N.Y.U.’s law school. She took time out of a whirlwind news day on the voting front to answer a few questions for On Politics. The interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.Hi, Wendy. Let’s begin with the news from Georgia. What is the significance of the legislation making its way through the state legislature there, and is it part of a trend?The bill in Georgia is one of the most significant and restrictive voter suppression bills in the country, but it is not unique right now. We’ve been tracking the legislation to restrict and also to expand voting access across the country for over a decade, and right now we have well over 250 bills pending in 43 states across the county that would restrict access to voting. That is seven times the number of restrictive voting bills we saw at the same time last year. So it is a dramatic spike in the push to restrict access to voting.So we’ve seen this is a growing movement. It’s not brand-new this year, it wasn’t invented by Donald Trump, but it was certainly supercharged by his regressive attack on our voting systems. We’re seeing its impact in Georgia, but also across the country.Republicans have been talking about voter fraud, and attempting to limit access to the ballot, for many years. How much is the current surge in restrictive voting legislation related to Donald Trump and the conspiracy theories he pushed last year, during and after the campaign?Many of these bills are fueled by the same rhetoric and grievances that were driving the challenges to the 2020 election. In addition to expressly referencing the big lie about widespread voter fraud and that Trump actually won the election, they’re targeting the methods of voting that the Trump campaign was complaining about. So, for example, the single biggest subject of regressive voter legislation in this session — roughly half the bills — is mail voting.That is new this year. We’ve been tracking efforts to restrict access to voting for a very long time, and absentee voting has not been the subject of legislative attack before. It was the politicization of that issue in the 2020 election, principally by the Trump campaign and allies, that I think helped elevate that issue to a grievance level that would cause it to be the subject of legislative attack.The Supreme Court today heard oral arguments in a challenge to the Voting Rights Act, brought by the attorney general of Arizona. What is at stake in that case?On a narrow level, the case is challenging two provisions of an Arizona law that made it harder for voters of color in Arizona to participate in the election process, but the case’s significance is much broader. The plaintiffs and the Republican National Committee are actually arguing to dramatically scale back the strength of the nationwide protections against voting discrimination in the federal Voting Rights Act.About eight years ago, the Supreme Court gutted the most powerful provision of the Voting Rights Act, the preclearance provision, which applied to states with a history of discrimination. That led to disastrous outcomes across the country, but it did not invalidate the nationwide protections against discrimination in voting, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. So this is the next shoe, which I hope will not drop.At a time when voting rights in America are under significant attack, more than they have been in decades — an attack through racially targeted efforts to restrict access to voting — we need the protections of the Voting Rights Act more than ever. So this is absolutely the wrong direction to go in.With the Voting Rights Act in peril, Democrats in Congress are moving forward with legislation to ensure people’s access to the ballot. What are their proposals?There are two major pieces of voting rights legislation that are moving through Congress. The one that was not voted on today is called the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and it would restore the preclearance provision of the Voting Rights Act, which requires a federal review of changes in certain states to see if they’re discriminatory. It would also make other improvements to the Voting Rights Act to make it more effective.The other bill, which was voted on today, is called the For the People Act, H.R. 1. It would create a baseline level of voter access rules that every American could rely on for federal elections. This one would address almost comprehensively the attacks on voting rights that we’re seeing in state legislatures across the country. So, for example, in many states we’re seeing attempts to eliminate no-excuse absentee voting. H.R. 1 would require all states to offer no-excuse absentee voting. Every state would then offer that best practice of voting access, and it would no longer be manipulated, election by election, by state legislators to target voters they don’t like.On Politics is also available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More