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      State Dept.’s Fight Against Disinformation Comes Under Attack

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      The Global Engagement Center has become the focus of Republican-led criticism that the U.S. government coerces social media platforms into removing offensive content.A Republican-led campaign against researchers who study disinformation online has zeroed in on the most prominent American government agency dedicated to countering propaganda and other information operations from terrorists and hostile nations.The agency, the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, is facing a torrent of accusations in court and in Congress that it has helped the social media giants — including Facebook, YouTube and X — to censor Americans in violation of the First Amendment.The attorney general of Texas, Ken Paxton, and two conservative digital news outlets last week became the latest plaintiffs to sue the department and its top officials, including Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken. The lawsuit said the center’s work was “one of the most egregious government operations to censor the American press in the history of the nation.”The center faces a more existential threat in Congress. House Republicans blocked a proposal this month to reauthorize the center, which began in 2011 to counter the propaganda of terrorist groups like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. A small agency, with a regular staff of 125 people, many of them contractors, and a budget of $61 million, the center coordinates efforts across the government to track and expose propaganda and disinformation from Russia, China and other adversaries. With its mandate set to expire at the end of next year, the center is now operating under a shroud of uncertainty, even though its supporters say there is no evidence to back the charges against it.If the Republicans hold firm, as a core bloc in the House appear determined to do, the center would disband amid two major regional wars and a wave of elections in 2024, including the U.S. presidential campaign.James P. Rubin, the center’s coordinator since early this year, disputed the allegations that his organization censored Americans’ comments online. The center’s legal mandate, he said, was to “focus on how foreign adversaries, primarily China and Russia, use information operations and malign interference to manipulate world opinion.”“What we do not do is examine or analyze the U.S. information space,” he said.The center’s fate has become enmeshed in a much broader political and legal campaign over free speech and disinformation that has gained enough traction to reach the Supreme Court.A lawsuit filed last year by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana accused numerous government agencies of cajoling or coercing social media platforms into removing content that spread what officials called false or misleading information about the Covid-19 pandemic, the presidential election of 2020 and other issues.A federal court ruled in the plaintiffs’ favor in July, temporarily barring government officials from contacting officials with the companies except in matters of law enforcement or national security. An appeals court largely upheld the ruling in September but limited its reach, excluding several agencies from the lower court’s injunction against contacts, the Global Engagement Center among them.“There is no indication that State Department officials flagged specific content for censorship, suggested policy changes to the platforms or engaged in any similar actions that would reasonably bring their conduct within the scope of the First Amendment’s prohibitions,” wrote a three-judge panel for the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans.The Global Engagement Center, which is part of the State Department, is facing a torrent of accusations in court and in Congress that it has helped the social media giants to censor Americans.J. Scott Applewhite/Associated PressThe Supreme Court is expected to weigh in next spring on the Missouri case, a decision that could have big ramifications for the government and free speech in the internet era. The campaign against researchers who study the spread of disinformation has already had a chilling effect on universities, think tanks and private companies, which have found themselves smothered by subpoenas and legal costs.The efforts have been fueled by disclosures of communications between government officials and social media companies. Elon Musk who released a selection of messages after he purchased Twitter, since rebranded as X, called the Global Engagement Center “the worst offender in US government censorship & media manipulation.”“They are a threat to democracy,” wrote Mr. Musk, who has restored numerous accounts that Twitter had suspended for violating the platform’s guidelines for disinformation, hate speech and other content. (Over the weekend, he allowed the return of Alex Jones, a far-right conspiracy theorist who spent years falsely claiming the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012 was a hoax.)The Global Engagement Center has faced criticism before — not over censorship, but for having little effect at a time when global propaganda and disinformation has become more pernicious than ever with the rise of social media.A report by the State Department’s inspector general last year said the center suffered from a sclerotic bureaucracy that limited its ability to manage contractors and failed to create a strategic planning process that could measure its effectiveness. The department accepted the findings and promised to address them, the report said.Mr. Rubin, who was appointed at the end of last year, has sought to bolster the center’s core mission: challenging disinformation from foreign adversaries intent on undermining American democracy and influence around the world.In September, the center released a sweeping report that accused China’s Communist Party of using “deceptive and coercive methods” to try to control the global information environment. A month later it released two reports on Russia’s covert influence efforts in South America, including one intended to pre-empt an operation before it got off the ground.The Global Engagement Center began in 2011 to counter the propaganda of terrorist groups like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.Jon Elswick/Associated PressThe center has had regular interactions with the social media companies, but, the appeals court ruled, there is no evidence that its officials coerced or otherwise influenced the platforms. Federal regulations prohibit any agency from engaging in propaganda at home.“We are not in the business of deciding what is true or not true,” Mr. Rubin said, adding that the center’s role was to identify “the hidden hand” of foreign propaganda.Since the Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in January, however, the Global Engagement Center has faced numerous subpoenas from a subcommittee investigating the “weaponization of government,” as well as depositions in lawsuits and requests for records under the Freedom of Information Act.At public hearings, House Republicans have repeatedly threatened not to renew the center’s expiring mandate and have grilled department officials about Americans whose accounts have been suspended. “The onus on you is to change my mind,” Representative Brian Mast, a Republican from Florida, told Daniel Kimmage, the center’s principal deputy coordinator, at a hearing in October.The Democrats in both houses of Congress and the Republicans in the Senate reached an agreement to extend the center’s mandate as part of the defense authorization act — one of the few pieces of legislation that might actually pass this year — but House Republicans succeeded in stripping the provision out of the broader legislation.The plaintiffs in the lawsuit filed last week in Texas argued that the department had in effect sidestepped its legal constraints by providing grants to organizations that routinely identify sources of disinformation in public reports and private interactions with social media platforms. The organizations include the Global Disinformation Index, a nonprofit based in London; and NewsGuard, a company in New York.The two news organizations that joined Texas in filing the suit — The Federalist and The Daily Wire — were both listed by the Global Disinformation Index in a December 2022 report as having a high risk for publishing disinformation. (The New York Times was among those rated as having a minimum risk. The Times’s website, the report said, “was not always free of bias, but it generally avoided targeting language and adversarial narratives.”)The center’s grant to the group — $100,000 in total — went to a project focused on disinformation in Southeast Asia. But the lawsuit claimed that its support injured the outlets “by starving them of advertising revenue and reducing the circulation of their reporting and speech — all as a direct result of defendants’ unlawful censorship scheme.”Josh Herr, The Daily Wire’s general counsel, said the outlet might never know “the full extent of the business lost.”“But this lawsuit is not about quantifying those losses,” he said. “We are not seeking damages. What we are seeking is to protect our rights, and all publishers’ rights, under the First Amendment.”Nina Jankowicz, a researcher who briefly served as the head of a disinformation advisory board at the Department of Homeland Security last year before controversy scuttled her appointment and the board itself, said the argument that the State Department was responsible for the impact of research it did not finance was absurd.Ms. Jankowicz said that the campaign to cast efforts to fight disinformation as a form of censorship had proved politically effective even when evidence did not support the claims.“I think any American, when you hear, ‘Oh, the administration, the White House, is setting up something to censor Americans, even if that has no shred of evidence behind it, your ears are going to prick up,” she said. “And it’s really hard to disprove all that.” More

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      Inside the Troll Army Waging Trump’s Online Campaign

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      The video, called “Let’s Get Ready to Bumble,” is a slick mash-up of President Biden’s verbal slip-ups and his stumbles set to a thumping 1990s dance track. And when it was played on a big screen at Trump rallies late last year, it consistently drew laughs and jeers from the crowd.But Donald J. Trump thought he could improve it.So the former president asked an adviser to pass along a few notes to one of the video’s creators: It should include a clip of the president falling off a bicycle, he suggested, and another of him flubbing a line in a recent speech.The video’s co-creator — Bryan Heestand, a product engineer in Ohio who goes by the anonymous handle C3PMeme — rushed to incorporate the former president’s edits. He was delighted, he said later in a podcast interview, to see Mr. Trump play the new version at his final rally before the midterm elections, pausing his speech to watch it with well over a thousand supporters gathered at Dayton International Airport.“He had some suggestions. We made it happen,” Mr. Heestand said.Mr. Heestand doesn’t work for Mr. Trump, but he belongs to a small circle of video meme-makers who have effectively served as a shadow online ad agency for his presidential campaign. Led by a little-known podcaster and life coach, this meme team has spent much of the year flooding social media with content that lionizes the former president, promotes his White House bid and brutally denigrates his opponents.Much of the group, which refers to itself as Trump’s Online War Machine, operates anonymously, adopting the cartoonish aesthetic and unrelenting cruelty of internet trolls.Cheered on by Mr. Trump, the group traffics freely in misinformation, artificial intelligence and digital forgeries known as deepfakes. Its memes are riddled with racist stereotypes, demeaning tropes about L.G.B.T.Q. people and broad scatological humor.Their most vulgar invectives are often aimed at women, particularly those seen as enemies of Mr. Trump. In one video, the former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley’s face is pasted on the body of a nearly naked woman, who kicks a man with the face of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida in the groin. Another depicts Casey DeSantis, the governor’s wife, as a porn star. Women with ties to Mr. DeSantis are often shown with red knees, suggesting they have performed a sex act.The former president and his inner circle have celebrated the group’s work and helped it reach millions. Dan Scavino, Mr. Trump’s social media adviser; Steven Cheung, the campaign’s spokesman; and Donald Trump Jr. frequently share the memes on their social media accounts.Since March, Mr. Trump has posted videos made by the team to his Truth Social and Instagram accounts — which have more than 30 million followers combined — at least two dozen times. He tends to share the group’s less crude content, favoring memes that feature him in a positive light.But Mr. Trump and his campaign have also taken a more active role in the group’s activities, a New York Times review found. Over the past year, he and his campaign have privately communicated with members of the meme team, giving them access and making specific requests for content. In at least one instance, the campaign shared behind-the-scenes footage to be used in videos, according to members of the team.Late last month, Mr. Trump sent personalized notes to several of the group’s members, thanking them for their work. In September, Jason Miller, a senior Trump campaign adviser, posted that the meme team was “single-handedly changing the landscape of politics and social media.”Asked by The Times about the group, the Trump campaign on Tuesday cast them as mere volunteers.“Every campaign in politics has volunteers and shows appreciation to their volunteers,” said Mr. Cheung, the campaign spokesman, adding that the group had done a “masterful job” highlighting Mr. DeSantis’s “insecurities and blunders.”Viral memes have played a role in presidential races since Barack Obama’s first run for the White House in 2008. But the meme team’s work — blessed by Mr. Trump, polished and substantially scaled up — represents an evolution with the potential to transform campaigning online.In an age of social media, the power of memes is rising as the influence of traditional television ads fades. Cheap to make and free to distribute, they are largely unconstrained by regulations about accuracy, fairness and transparency that apply to television and radio advertising. And they are proliferating just as fewer internet platforms try to police political content.“It’s ominous,” said Saurav Ghosh, a former Federal Election Commission lawyer who now works at the Campaign Legal Center, a government watchdog nonprofit.Mr. Ghosh said the meme team’s activities appeared to fit the definition of a super PAC — an entity that can raise and spend unlimited sums to support a candidate or issue but must report its donors and spending. Yet because the group operates outside the campaign finance system, its finances and funders remain unknown.The lack of transparency “creates an avenue for lots of money to be spent in coordination with a campaign and having a serious impact on races without the public having any sense of what’s really going on,” Mr. Ghosh said.‘It Doesn’t Have to Be True’At the center of Mr. Trump’s meme militia is Brenden Dilley, a 41-year-old podcaster, failed congressional candidate and self-described social media and political influencer. Mr. Dilley doesn’t create the memes himself, but he provides the organizing force and smash-mouth ethos driving the crew.“It doesn’t have to be true. It just has to go viral,” he has said on his podcast.Brenden Dilley, a life coach and onetime congressional candidate, is the ringleader of the meme team. His podcast offers a running narrative of the team’s work and ambitions.The group’s more than two dozen members, posting under the hashtag #DilleyMemeTeam, convene in a private Telegram channel to share ideas and pick targets. Many also faithfully tune into Mr. Dilley’s daily podcast, where he talks at length about the group’s activities, interacts with a small but devoted audience and promotes his 2013 self-help book, “Still Breathin’: The Wisdom and Teachings of a Perfectly Flawed Man.”Most of the meme-makers post anonymously. The Times used podcast transcripts, photographs, news footage and public records to identify Mr. Heestand, who declined to comment.While some members have sizable followings, they have also been amplified by high-profile right-wing figures. Roger Stone, a longtime friend and adviser to Mr. Trump, hosted Mr. Dilley on his podcast last week, saying that he had “changed the course of history in this country.” The right-wing podcaster Jack Posobiec and the internet troll known as Catturd, who each have more than two million followers on X, regularly share the group’s work.But the team’s content isn’t just niche entertainment for the profoundly online; many memes have broken through to the mainstream.A video calling President Biden a “puppet candidate” and filled with conspiracy theories about election fraud went viral in July after Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster, posted his criticism, calling it “the most alarming political ad I’ve seen this year.”In an interview, Mr. Luntz said he worried that such spots would soon become commonplace. “They have figured out how to manipulate the public,” Mr. Luntz said, “and they frankly don’t care about the consequences.”In August, when Mr. Trump was indicted on conspiracy charges related to his attempts to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia, several team members produced a music video targeting the Fulton County district attorney, Fani T. Willis. A Kanye West parody, it used artificial intelligence to mimic Mr. Trump’s voice rapping lyrics that were peppered with racist dog whistles.The initial posting on social media, by the meme team member Ramble_Rants, logged 1.4 million views on X and was widely shared on other platforms.Nobody has borne the brunt of the group’s attacks more than Mr. DeSantis.Ron and Casey DeSantis have been mocked relentlessly by the Dilley Meme Team, which takes credit for some of its insults having broken into the mainstream media. Meg Kinnard/Associated PressThe meme team has produced hundreds of derisive posts attacking the Florida governor’s masculinity, demeanor, marriage and parenting, and his height.The group’s members have described the onslaught as part guerrilla messaging aimed at shaping coverage of the race and part psy-op aimed at the candidate himself. They take credit for catapulting “bootgate” — the unproven rumor that Mr. DeSantis wears lifts in his cowboy boots — into the mainstream media. (Politico published a 1,400-word investigation into the candidate’s footwear in October.) They also claim its barrage of mockery is the reason Mr. DeSantis wears the boots in the first place.“They all went straight to his head,” Ramble_Rants posted last month.The DeSantis campaign did not respond to a request for comment.Mr. Dilley has sworn to “destroy” the governor’s career and make him “unelectable,” even if he drops out of the 2024 race. A recent Christmas-themed meme directed at Mr. DeSantis ended with: “Forever you will be mocked.”The Dilley Meme Team’s work is often cartoonish and rife with mockery, savaging Mr. Trump’s opponents while lionizing the former president. A video that focused on President Biden was played at Trump rallies last year. A recent meme delivered a message to Mr. DeSantis. Another appeared to use behind-the-scenes images of Mr. Trump. Mr. Dilley declined to be interviewed for this article, and the team subsequently produced a video mocking The New York Times. Mr. Dilley told his podcast listeners that he planned to hang a copy of this article next to a signed letter from Mr. Trump.“Thanks to your efforts,” that letter reads, according to photos posted to social media, “we exposed Joe Biden’s failures and lies for the whole country to see.”Gratitude and AccessMr. Dilley has been a supporter of Mr. Trump for years, and in 2018 he unsuccessfully ran for Congress in Arizona as a “staunch believer in the Make America Great Again movement.” But until recently, his devotion always came from a distance.Today, Mr. Dilley, who now lives north of Atlanta, says he has visited Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort three times in the past year. He and his team have posted numerous photos of themselves posing with Mr. Trump, spending time with his advisers and attending events at Trump properties.During an episode of his show just before Thanksgiving, Mr. Dilley claimed to be texting one of those advisers, asking if he could join the former president at a football game at the University of South Carolina. That weekend, he and his wife were photographed by Mr. Miller in the governor’s box at Williams-Brice Stadium in Columbia, S.C., along with Mr. Trump.A video that Mr. Dilley’s wife, Reanna, shot of Mr. Trump walking on the field at halftime was subsequently viewed millions of times online and reposted by the former president on Truth Social.Like many other influencers, Mr. Dilley appears to receive talking points from the campaign. He also claims more exclusive access, describing phone calls from advisers to Mr. Trump to discuss memes his team is producing and whether they strike the desired tone.In July, one of the group’s most prolific contributors — a musician from outside San Diego named Michael Beatty, who goes by the handle Miguelifornia — mentioned that Mr. Scavino and Mr. Miller “gave us tons of great video” shot at a Trump rally in South Carolina.Days later, the team released a clip that appeared to use behind-the-scenes footage of Mr. Trump at a rally. The moody meme, cast in blue monochrome and set to a Phil Collins song, cast Mr. Trump as a serious, heroic leader and concluded with information on how to text a donation to the campaign.“This is a campaign ad if I’ve ever seen one,” one team member, who goes by MAGADevilDog, wrote on X.A Plan to Avoid ‘a Ton of Oversight’Because the Dilley Meme Team’s content is shared on the internet, rather than on television or radio, it generally isn’t subject to laws requiring ads to include disclosure about who paid for them.“If it goes on the internet, there’s essentially no regulation,” said Richard L. Hasen, an elections law expert at the University of California, Los Angeles. And without regulation, he added, it’s impossible to know who is paying for the content.But campaign finance experts pointed to two other unknowns about the Dilley Meme Team’s operations: coordination and compensation.If a group is receiving compensation to help a candidate get elected, then it could be considered a super PAC and should be registered and reporting its donors and spending.If it is not compensated but is coordinating with the campaign, then it may run afoul of strict limits on in-kind contributions, said Paul S. Ryan, who serves as deputy executive director of the pro-democracy group Funders’ Committee for Civic Participation.Mr. Ryan said receiving video footage that was not publicly available could be considered coordination.Memes created with input from the campaign, he said, “are just as good as a direct contribution to the campaign” and may be worth far more than the $6,600 individual limit per election cycle.Mr. Dilley and other members of the meme team often claim they receive no financial compensation for their efforts.“Everything they do, they do it for free and out of love of country,” said Alex Bruesewitz, a Republican strategist close to Mr. Trump, who frequently shares Dilley Meme Team posts.Mr. Dilley, who in 2019 was found to have failed to pay more than $24,000 in child support and interest, says he now makes “multiple six figures” a year. That income, he said on his podcast last month, comes from a combination of sources: podcast subscriptions and sponsors, sales of apparel, his life-coaching business and streaming revenue from the video platform Rumble, where the Dilley Show has more than 12,000 subscribers.“There’s nothing here that’s mysterious,” he said. “It’s all transparent.”Federal Election Commission records show no payments from any political committee to Mr. Dilley or other members of the meme team.Mr. Dilley has claimed to have received gifts from Mr. Trump. Last March, he posted video of a box filled with 28 Make America Great Again hats, each signed by the former president. The package was sent by the campaign in thanks for assisting with “rapid response” during President Biden’s State of the Union address, Mr. Dilley said.Signed MAGA hats can sell for as much as $1,000 on the secondary market.Mr. Dilley also said he got access to dozens of V.I.P. tickets to a Trump rally in Hialeah, Fla., on Nov. 8, which he gave to supporters of his show. It is unclear how much the tickets were worth, but tickets for other rallies have sold for as much as $1,500 apiece.Mr. Dilley has been clear that he is looking for more than just thank-you gifts.In October, he told his podcast audience that he wanted to use limited liability companies to receive money from Trump donors to fund his team’s work. The idea, he said, is to avoid “a ton of red tape” and “a ton of oversight” that come with operating as a super PAC or being paid by the campaign.“If you go super PAC or official campaign, you can get paid, but the problem is a lawyer has to watch every single thing you put out, and we don’t want that,” Mr. Dilley said on his podcast in October. “What we need is people that were going to give huge dollar amounts to the super PACs and the campaigns to just give directly to us.”“We already have L.L.C.s formed,” he added. “We’re ready to rock ’n’ roll.”Brett Kappel, a campaign finance lawyer who advises both Democrats and Republicans, described that plan as “problematic” because it implies a clear goal of circumventing public disclosure as required by the F.E.C.“People can take advantage of those failures of the regulatory system to promote the interests of a candidate without the public ever being aware of it,” Mr. Kappel said. In that landscape, he added, “L.L.C.s have become the tool of choice” because they can be layered to obscure both the source and recipient of payments.The Dilley Meme Team was registered as a business in July, using the address of a UPS store outside Tampa, according to Florida business records. Mr. Dilley acknowledged being involved in its parent company, Counter Productions Digital Media L.L.C., which was registered at the same address in early 2022. He denies having said he set up any L.L.C.s to avoid campaign finance rules.On his podcast, Mr. Dilley has laid out his vision for his team, saying he hopes to hire all 27 meme team members full time through the 2024 election. “We need 12 months of everyone full time working to meme Donald Trump back into the White House while destroying Joe Biden,” he said.Jaymin Patel contributed research. More

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      Political Debate Is Rife on TikTok. Politicians? Not So Much.

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      President Biden and the White House regularly post to millions of followers on social media, talking about the economy on Facebook, sharing Christmas decorations on YouTube, showcasing pardoned turkeys on Instagram, posting about infrastructure on the X platform. They’re even on Threads.But they aren’t speaking directly to 150 million Americans on TikTok. There’s no official @POTUS, White House or Biden-Harris 2024 account. You’ll find only one of the Republican presidential candidates there — and just 37 sitting Congress members, according to a New York Times review of accounts.Some pundits call next year the “TikTok election” because of the ballooning power and influence of the video app. TikTok may have been known for viral dances in 2020, but it has increasingly become a news source for millennials and Gen Z-ers, who will be a powerful part of the electorate. But less than a year from the election, most politicians are keeping their distance from the app, as efforts grow in Washington and elsewhere to restrict or ban it because of its ownership by the Chinese company ByteDance. Many lawmakers and regulators have expressed concern that TikTok could put users’ information into the hands of Beijing officials — an argument that the company disputes.By passing up a huge microphone because of those concerns, however, politicians are running the risk that they and their campaigns will not directly reach young people on the app. They might also be upstaged by savvy challengers who may not feel so conflicted and who can figure out how to use TikTok to their advantage.Many campaigns are trying to hedge their bets by turning to a growing network of TikTok political influencers to share their messages or by making short videos on YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels in hopes that they’ll end up trending on TikTok. They have to give up some control to do that, and they need to persuade creators to work with them, often for little to no pay.To many political consultants, the politicians’ absence on TikTok is perhaps untenable.“The discourse is being shaped by this thing even if you yourself don’t use it,” said Teddy Goff, a top digital strategist for President Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign.Eric Wilson, a Republican digital strategist, said that he was telling candidates “if you didn’t get it banned in 2023, you need to get on in 2024.”Several Republican presidential candidates have slammed TikTok at their recent debates and criticized Vivek Ramaswamy, the one candidate who has joined the app despite previously referring to it as “digital fentanyl.” He has defended joining TikTok, saying he did it to reach young voters.Mr. Biden’s re-election campaign team said that it did not need its own TikTok accounts to reach voters.“The reality is us having an account would not make a substantial difference in what we need to do on TikTok,” said Rob Flaherty, Mr. Biden’s deputy campaign manager and the former White House director of digital strategy. “The most important thing you can do is work through influencers.”TikTok arrived as a political force during the 2022 midterm campaign, when Senator John Fetterman, Democrat of Pennsylvania, successfully roasted his opponent, Dr. Mehmet Oz, in a flurry of cutting videos, and Representative Jeff Jackson, Democrat of North Carolina, used a video filter to make his head look like a piece of broccoli while talking about reaching younger audiences.Annie Wu Henry, a 27-year-old digital strategist who helped run Mr. Fetterman’s TikTok account in 2022, said his use showcased TikTok’s potential reach and influence. She said she was amazed as she watched clips and memes that Mr. Fetterman’s campaign posted on the app take off “and become actual parts of conversation or picked up by traditional media sources.”Annie Wu Henry helped run social media for John Fetterman’s Senate campaign last year.Michelle Gustafson for The New York TimesWeeks after the elections, though, Washington’s sentiment toward the company turned sour. The Biden administration, as well as most states, some cities and some college campuses, has barred the app from being used on official devices. Some lawmakers have called for a national ban.Today, just 7 percent of the 533 Senators and Representatives have verified accounts on TikTok, and some have never posted, according to the analysis by The Times. None are Republican. The few who have joined often post to the app from separate “TikTok phones” because of security concerns, said Mike Nellis, a Democratic digital strategist.Mr. Jackson is the most popular, with 2.5 million followers, and Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, comes in second, with 1.4 million. Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota each have over 200,000 followers.Ms. Wu said campaigns, including Mr. Biden’s, were potentially leaving major audiences on the table.“It needs to be figured out, and there’s almost this rush right now of who’s going to do it,” she said.The White House has tapped into TikTok in the past few years by working with social media stars to promote access to Covid-19 vaccines and to brief viewers on the Russia-Ukraine war and the Inflation Reduction Act. Several stars told The Times they weren’t paid but were eager to participate.That sort of workaround is expected to be even more popular next year. “There’s this booming industry under the surface of both agencies and platforms that are helping political organizations, social impact groups and politicians themselves sponsor content on TikTok and partner with creators and influencers to put out messaging,” said Brian Derrick, a political strategist and co-founder of Oath, a platform for guiding donations to Democratic campaigns.TikTok prohibits paid political ads, including paying creators for endorsements. It doesn’t encourage politicians to join the platform, though it does verify official accounts.A White House spokesperson, when asked about the use of TikTok, pointed to a rule barring the app from being used on federal devices as of March and declined to comment further.Harry Sisson, a 21-year-old junior at New York University and a political commentator on TikTok, is a rising creator, sharing news and opinions against backdrops of social media posts and articles.Yuvraj Khanna for The New York TimesHarry Sisson, a 21-year-old junior at New York University and a political commentator on TikTok, started posting in 2020, when he was a high school senior, to help Mr. Biden’s campaign for president. He has amassed 700,000 followers.Mr. Sisson said that in the past year and a half, Democratic groups had offered him more opportunities, including filming voting videos with Mr. Obama and watching the State of the Union at the White House. He wasn’t paid but was thrilled to be involved.With the White House in particular, he said, “They’ve always stressed, we’re not here to tell you guys what to say, if you disagree with us, we’re not going to be upset.”Mr. Sisson said he earned money through views on his TikTok videos and accepted some paid collaborations with advocacy groups that he believed in like Planned Parenthood, but his goal was to help elect Democrats. A.B. Burns-Tucker, a political TikTok creator, believes that her content has influenced voters, pointing to the approval of a recent Ohio ballot measure that enshrined a right to abortion in the State Constitution.Maggie Shannon for The New York TimesA.B. Burns-Tucker, 34, is another political content creator who has joined White House briefings. She posts on TikTok as @iamlegallyhype, and has over 700,000 followers. She said her account took off after she made a popular explainer video about the Russia-Ukraine war, which colloquially referred to world leaders as “Big Daddy Biden” and “Big Bad P.” She says she’s now a news source for people who don’t tune in elsewhere.“I talk about current events with my friends all the time, but most of them are like, ‘Girl, I don’t watch the news, if you don’t tell me I don’t know,’” she said. “I took that and ran with it.”Ms. Burns-Tucker believes that she has influenced voters, pointing to the approval of a recent Ohio ballot measure that enshrined a right to abortion in the State Constitution. She was paid by Ohioans United for Reproductive Rights to make a TikTok video that urged people to vote for the ballot measure, which aligned with her personal beliefs, she said. “A lot of people in the comment section were like, I didn’t even know, I’ll be in line first thing tomorrow,” she added. The video passed 45,000 views.People like Mr. Sisson and Ms. Burns-Tucker don’t have a parallel among conservatives, said Amanda Carey Elliott, a digital consultant for Republicans.Ms. Elliott said that she was firmly against using TikTok based on the party’s stance on China — but that there was also less incentive for Republicans to use it.“There’s not a huge culture of TikTok influencers on the right — it’s just not the same for us,” she said.Still, some Republican consultants say the opportunity is too big to pass up. Mr. Wilson, the Republican strategist, has been trying to guide candidates on how to sign up for the app after criticizing it.“Candidates drive in cars all the time — that doesn’t mean they want cars to be unregulated,” he said. “There’s not necessarily a hypocrisy there if you’re clear about what your position is and how you’re using it.” More

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      4,789 Facebook Accounts in China Impersonated Americans, Meta Says

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      The company warned that the inauthentic accounts underscored the threat of foreign election interference in 2024.Meta announced on Thursday that it had removed thousands of Facebook accounts based in China that were impersonating Americans debating political issues in the United States. The company warned that the campaign presaged coordinated international efforts to influence the 2024 presidential election.The network of fake accounts — 4,789 in all — used names and photographs lifted from elsewhere on the internet and copied partisan political content from X, formerly known as Twitter, Meta said in its latest quarterly adversarial threat analysis. The copied material included posts by prominent Republican and Democratic politicians, the report said.The campaign appeared intended not to favor one side or another but to highlight the deep divisions in American politics, a tactic that Russia’s influence campaigns have used for years in the United States and elsewhere.Meta warned that the campaign underscored the threat facing a confluence of elections around the world in 2024 — from India in April to the United States in November.“Foreign threat actors are attempting to reach audiences ahead of next year’s various elections, including in the U.S. and Europe,” the company’s report said, “and we need to remain alert to their evolving tactics and targeting across the internet.”Although Meta did not attribute the latest campaign to China’s Communist government, it noted that the country had become the third-most-common geographic source for coordinated inauthentic behavior on Facebook and other social media platforms, after Russia and Iran.The Chinese network was the fifth that Meta has detected and taken down this year, more than in any other nation, suggesting that China is stepping up its covert influence efforts. While previous campaigns focused on Chinese issues, the latest ones have weighed more directly into domestic U.S. politics.“This represents the most notable change in the threat landscape, when compared with the 2020 election cycle,” the company said in the threat report.Meta’s report followed a series of disclosures about China’s global information operations, including a recent State Department report that accused China of spending billions on “deceptive and coercive methods” to shape the global information environment.Microsoft and other researchers have also linked China to the spread of conspiracy theories claiming that the U.S. government deliberately caused the deadly wildfires in Hawaii this year.The latest inauthentic accounts removed by Meta sought “to hijack authentic partisan narratives,” the report said. It detailed several examples in which the accounts copied and pasted, under their own names, partisan posts from politicians — often using language and symbols indicating the posts were originally on X.Two Facebook posts a month apart in August and September, for example, copied opposing statements on abortion from two members of the U.S. House from Texas — Sylvia R. Garcia, a Democrat, and Ronny Jackson, a Republican.The accounts also linked to mainstream media organizations and shared posts by X’s owner, Elon Musk. They liked and reposted content from actual Facebook users on other topics as well, like games, fashion models and pets. The activity suggested that the accounts were intended to build a network of seemingly authentic accounts to push a coordinated message in the future.Meta also removed a similar, smaller network from China that mostly targeted India and Tibet but also the United States. In the case of Tibet, the users posed as pro-independence activists who accused the Dalai Lama of corruption and pedophilia.Meta warned that while it had removed the accounts, the same networks continued to use accounts on other platforms, including X, YouTube, Gettr, Telegram and Truth Social, warning that foreign adversaries were diversifying the sources of their operations.In its report, Meta also weighed in on Republican attacks on the U.S. government’s role in monitoring disinformation online, a political and legal fight that has reached the Supreme Court in a challenge brought by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana.While Republicans have accused officials of coercing social media platforms to censor content, including at a hearing in the House on Thursday, Meta said coordination among tech companies, government and law enforcement had disrupted foreign threats.“This type of information sharing can be particularly critical in disrupting malicious foreign campaigns by sophisticated threat actors who coordinate their operations outside of our platforms,” the report said. More

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      in Elections

      Can Taiwan Continue to Fight Off Chinese Disinformation?

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      Ahead of a presidential election in January, Taiwanese fact checkers and watchdogs say they are ready for Beijing. But they are still worried.Suspicious videos that began circulating in Taiwan this month seemed to show the country’s leader advertising cryptocurrency investments.President Tsai Ing-wen, who has repeatedly risked Beijing’s ire by asserting her island’s autonomy, appeared to claim in the clips that the government helped develop investment software for digital currencies, using a term that is common in China but rarely used in Taiwan. Her mouth appeared blurry and her voice unfamiliar, leading Taiwan’s Criminal Investigation Bureau to deem the video to be almost certainly a deepfake — an artificially generated spoof — and potentially one created by Chinese agents.For years, China has pummeled the Taiwanese information ecosystem with inaccurate narratives and conspiracy theories, seeking to undermine its democracy and divide its people in an effort to assert control over its neighbor. Now, as fears over Beijing’s growing aggression mount, a new wave of disinformation is heading across the strait separating Taiwan from the mainland before the pivotal election in January.Perhaps as much as any other place, however, the tiny island is ready for the disinformation onslaught.Taiwan has built a resilience to foreign meddling that could serve as a model to the dozens of other democracies holding votes in 2024. Its defenses include one of the world’s most mature communities of fact checkers, government investments, international media literacy partnerships and, after years of warnings about Chinese intrusion, a public sense of skepticism.The challenge now is sustaining the effort.“That is the main battlefield: The fear, uncertainty, doubt is designed to keep us up at night so we don’t respond to novel threats with novel defenses,” said Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s inaugural digital minister, who works on strengthening cybersecurity defenses against threats like disinformation. “The main idea here is just to stay agile.”Taiwan, a highly online society, has repeatedly been found to be the top target in the world for disinformation from foreign governments, according to the Digital Society Project, a research initiative exploring the internet and politics. China was accused of spreading rumors during the pandemic about the Taiwanese government’s handling of Covid-19, researchers said. Representative Nancy Pelosi’s visit to the island as speaker of the House last year set off a series of high-profile cyberattacks, as well as a surge of debunked online messages and images that fact checkers linked to China.For all of Beijing’s efforts, however, it has struggled to sway public opinion.In recent years, Taiwan’s voters have chosen a president, Ms. Tsai, from the Democratic Progressive Party, which the Communist Party views as an obstacle to its goal of unification. Experts and local fact checkers said Chinese disinformation campaigns were a major concern in local elections in 2018; the efforts seemed less effective in 2020, when Ms. Tsai recaptured the presidency in a landslide. Her vice president, Lai Ching-te, has maintained a polling lead in the race to succeed her.China has denied interloping, instead saying it is the “top victim of disinformation.”News about the presidential race on a television in a Taipei noodle restaurant. Many Taiwanese have internal “warning bells” for disinformation, a founder of a group called Fake News Cleaner said.An Rong Xu for The New York TimesMs. Tsai has repeatedly addressed her government’s push to combat Beijing’s disinformation campaign, as well as criticism that her strategy aims to stifle speech from political opponents. At a defense conference this month, she said: “We let the public have knowledge and tools that refute and report false or misleading information, and maintain a cautious balance between maintaining information freely and refusing information manipulation.”Many Taiwanese have developed internal “warning bells” for suspicious narratives, said Melody Hsieh, who co-founded Fake News Cleaner, a group focused on information literacy education. Her group has 22 lecturers and 160 volunteers teaching anti-disinformation tactics at universities, temples, fishing villages and elsewhere in Taiwan, sometimes using gifts like handmade soap to motivate participants.The group is part of a robust collective of similar Taiwanese operations. There is Cofacts, whose fact-checking service is integrated into a popular social media app called Line. Doublethink Lab was directed until this month by Puma Shen, a professor who testified this year before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, an independent agency of the U.S. government. MyGoPen is named after a homophone in the Taiwanese dialect for “don’t fool me again.”Taiwan’s anti-disinformation groups include Doublethink Lab, formerly led by Puma Shen.Chiangying-Ying/Associated PressMascots at the entrance of the Taiwan Fact Check Center in Taipei.An Rong Xu for The New York TimesCitizens have sought out fact-checking help, such as when a recent uproar over imported eggs raised questions about videos showing black and green yolks, Ms. Hsieh said. Such demand would have been unthinkable in 2018, when the heated emotions and damaging rumors around a contentious referendum inspired the founders of Fake News Cleaner.“Now, everyone will stop and think: ‘This seems odd. Can you help me check this? We suspect something,’” Ms. Hsieh said. “This, I think, is an improvement.”Still, fact-checking in Taiwan remains complicated. False claims swirled recently around Mr. Lai, an outspoken critic of Beijing, and his visit to Paraguay this summer. Fact checkers found that a memo at the center of one claim had been manipulated, with changed dates and dollar figures. Another claim originated on an English-language forum before a new X account quoted it in Mandarin in a post that was shared by a news website in Hong Kong and boosted on Facebook by a Taiwanese politician.China’s disinformation work has had “measurable effects,” including “worsening Taiwanese political and social polarization and widening perceived generational divides,” according to research from the RAND Corporation. Concerns about election-related fake news drove the Taiwanese government last month to set up a dedicated task force.A banner in Taipei depicts Sun Yat Sen, the first president of the Republic of China, and Taiwan’s flag.An Rong Xu for The New York TimesTaiwan “has historically been Beijing’s testing ground for information warfare,” with China using social media to interfere in Taiwanese politics since at least 2016, according to RAND. In August, Meta took down a Chinese influence campaign that it described as the largest such operation to date, with 7,704 Facebook accounts and hundreds of others across other social media platforms targeting Taiwan and other regions.Beijing’s disinformation strategy continues to shift. Fact checkers noted that Chinese agents were no longer distracted by pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong, as they were during the last presidential election in Taiwan. Now, they have access to artificial intelligence that can generate images, audio and video — “potentially a dream come true for Chinese propagandists,” said Nathan Beauchamp-Mustafaga, a RAND researcher.A few months ago, an audio file that seemed to feature a rival politician criticizing Mr. Lai circulated in Taiwan. The clip was almost certainly a deepfake, according to Taiwan’s Ministry of Justice and the A.I.-detection company Reality Defender.Chinese disinformation posts appear increasingly subtle and organic, rather than flooding the zone with obvious pro-Beijing messages, researchers said. Some false narratives are created by Chinese-controlled content farms, then spread by agents, bots or unwitting social media users, researchers say. China has also tried to buy established Taiwanese social media accounts and may have paid Taiwanese influencers to promote pro-Beijing narratives, according to RAND.Disinformation that directly addressed relations between China and Taiwan grew rarer from 2020 to 2022, the Taiwan Fact Check Center said last month. Instead, Chinese agents seemed to focus more on stoking social division within Taiwan by spreading lies about local services and health issues. Sometimes, other experts said, questionable posts about medical remedies and celebrity gossip guided viewers to conspiracy theories about Taiwanese politics.The ever-present menace, which the Taiwanese government calls “cognitive warfare,” has led to several aggressive attempts at a crackdown. One unsuccessful proposal last year, modeled after regulations in Europe, would have imposed labeling and transparency requirements on social media platforms and forced them to comply with court-ordered content removal requests.Critics denounced the government’s anti-disinformation campaign as a political witch hunt, raising the specter of the island’s not-so-distant authoritarian past. Some have pointed out that Taiwan’s media ecosystem, with its diverse political leanings, often produces pro-Beijing content that can be misattributed to Chinese manipulation.At an event in June, President Tsai stressed that “well-funded, large-scale disinformation campaigns” were “one of the most difficult challenges,” pitting Taiwanese citizens against one another and corroding trust in democratic institutions. Disinformation defense, she said, must be “a whole-of-society effort.”Fact checkers and watchdog groups said public apathy was a concern — research suggests that Taiwanese people make limited use of fact-checking resources in past elections — as was the risk of being spread too thin.“There’s mountains of disinformation,” said Eve Chiu, the chief executive of the Taiwan FactCheck Center, which has around 10 fact checkers working each day. “We can’t do it all.”From left, Lu Hong-yu, Lee Tzu-ying and Cheng Hsu-yu placed third as a team in a Taiwan fact-checking competition.An Rong Xu for The New York TimesAttempts to increase interest in media literacy have included a nationwide campaign, “humor over rumor,” which leveraged jokey meme culture and a cute dog character to debunk false narratives. In September, the Taiwan FactCheck Center also held a national virtual competition for youths that drew students like Lee Tzu-ying, Cheng Hsu-yu and Lu Hong-yu.The three civics classmates, who finished in third place, acknowledged that Taiwan’s raucous politics allowed disinformation to breed confusion and chaos. Their Taiwanese peers, however, have learned caution.“If you see something new, but don’t know if it is true or false, you need to verify it,” Ms. Lee, 16, said. “I just want to know the truth — that’s very important to me.” More

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      in US Politics

      Did the assassination of JFK kickstart the conspiracy theory movement? – podcast

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      This week marked 60 years since President John F Kennedy was shot dead as he travelled in the back of a car through the streets of Dallas, Texas. From the moment the news broke, people had their theories about what happened.
      So why did the assassination of JFK spawn dozens of conspiracy theories that have persisted for decades? Is there a reason why Americans are quick to believe their government is covering something up? And despite multiple examples of when conspiracies turn dangerous, are politicians today, including Kennedy’s own nephew, using conspiracy theories for political gain?
      This week, Jonathan Freedland speaks to Prof Kathryn Olmsted, author of Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know More

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      in Elections

      Georgia Judge Weighs Revoking Bail for a Trump Co-Defendant, Harrison Floyd

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      Prosecutors say the defendant, Harrison Floyd, has been intimidating potential witnesses in the racketeering case with his social media posts.In a fiery courtroom presentation, the prosecutor overseeing the Georgia racketeering case against former President Donald J. Trump argued on Tuesday that one of Mr. Trump’s co-defendants had intimidated potential witnesses on social media and should be sent to jail.But Judge Scott McAfee of Fulton County Superior Court chose not to revoke the bond of Harrison Floyd, the co-defendant. Instead, he signed off on modified terms prohibiting Mr. Floyd from posting further comments about witnesses in the case.Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Ga., took the unusual step of personally arguing on behalf of the prosecution, a few days after she filed a motion accusing Mr. Floyd of intimidating an elections worker and other witnesses for the state — including Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger — through his posts on X, formerly known as Twitter.Mr. Floyd’s lawyers noted that Mr. Trump himself had issued provocative social media posts about the Georgia case, and that no action had been taken against him. That, they argued, made “the state’s decision to go after Harrison Floyd hard to justify.”They also argued that Mr. Floyd had not been trying to intimidate or threaten anyone with his posts. But they acknowledged by the end of Tuesday’s hearing that he had “walked up close to the line” of violating the terms of his bond.Mr. Floyd, once the head of a group called Black Voices for Trump, was paid by the 2020 Trump campaign. He is one of 19 people, including the former president, who were named as defendants in a 98-page racketeering indictment in August.The indictment charges them with orchestrating a “criminal enterprise” to reverse the results of the 2020 election in Georgia. Four of the defendants have pleaded guilty and have promised to cooperate with prosecutors.In addition to a state racketeering charge, Mr. Floyd faces two other felony counts in the case, for his role in what the indictment describes as a scheme to intimidate Ruby Freeman, a Fulton County elections worker, and pressure her to falsely claim that she had committed electoral fraud.Ms. Freeman and her daughter were part of a team processing votes in Fulton County on election night in November 2020. Soon after, video images of the two women handling ballots were posted online, and Trump supporters falsely claimed that the video showed them entering bogus votes to skew the election in President Biden’s favor.Ms. Freeman became the target of so many threats that she was forced to leave her home.Her lawyer was a witness for the prosecution at Tuesday’s hearing, producing a report that he said showed a recent “spike” in online mentions of Ms. Freeman. That spike led her to adopt a fresh set of security measures, her lawyer said.Mr. Floyd’s lawyers, John Morrison and Chris Kachouroff, called the effort to revoke his bond “a retaliatory measure” — in part, they said, because Mr. Floyd recently turned down a plea agreement offered by the state. They argued that “tagging” people in posts did not constitute contact with witnesses, and was no different from yelling “a message to someone else sitting on the opposite side of a packed Mercedes-Benz stadium during the middle of an Atlanta Falcons football game.” Ms. Willis responded that “this notion that tagging someone doesn’t get a message to them is really lunacy,” She also called Mr. Floyd’s posts “disgusting,” adding that “what he really did is spit on the court.”And she was explicit about the stakes as she saw them: Election workers, she said, should not be intimidated for doing their jobs.Judge McAfee said that it appeared that Mr. Floyd had committed a “technical violation” of his bond by communicating with witnesses in the case, but seemed reluctant to take the step of jailing Mr. Floyd. “Not every violation compels revocation,” he said.Ms. Willis’s forceful stance on Mr. Floyd’s posts could have repercussions for Mr. Trump, who is enmeshed in battles over gag orders in other civil and criminal cases against him. Mr. Trump’s bond agreement in Georgia specifies that he “shall perform no act,” including social media posts, “to intimidate any person known to him or her to be a co-defendant or witness in this case or to otherwise obstruct the administration of justice.”Mr. Floyd was the only one of the original 19 co-defendants in Georgia to spend days in jail in August while waiting to make bond. At Tuesday’s hearing, he cut a colorful figure at the defense table, wearing a green blazer adorned with polo horses. Before the hearing began, he appeared to be reading a book about the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius.As the two sides worked out the new terms of the bond agreement, Ms. Willis made a reference to “Trump,” prompting Mr. Floyd to interject, “President Trump.”The judge told Mr. Floyd that it was not his place to talk. More

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      in Elections

      An Old Hate Cracks Open on the New Right

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      A dam burst last week on the right, and a wave of grotesque antisemitism poured out all over the internet.In August, I wrote about the “lost boys” of the American right, many of them young and relatively unknown, who were outed for having secret or anonymous online profiles and using those profiles to spread raw bigotry, including antisemitism. Some of these people worked for the right wing’s biggest names, including Tucker Carlson, Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump.What started in the shadows is now right in the open. It’s being advanced by some of the most powerful and influential people in America, and there is nothing subtle about it. The latest eruption started with a fight between the Daily Wire co-founder Ben Shapiro and his Daily Wire colleague Candace Owens. Both are immensely popular right-wing stars. Owens, for example, has more than four million followers on X, formerly known as Twitter, and more than five million on Instagram.On Nov. 3, Owens posted on social media, “No government anywhere has a right to commit a genocide, ever. There is no justification for a genocide. I can’t believe this even needs to be said or is even considered the least bit controversial to state.” Many of her followers interpreted this as a criticism of Israel, and Shapiro, who staunchly supports Israel in its present conflict with Hamas, was later caught on tape at a private event saying Owens’s behavior during the war has been “disgraceful.”Daily Wire drama should be of little interest to anyone outside The Daily Wire, but what happened next was truly alarming. First, Jason Whitlock, a leading personality at The Blaze, one of the largest right-wing websites, accused Shapiro of dual loyalties: “The guy has multiple loyalties. He loves America, but he loves Israel too. And maybe he loves Israel and he loves America too.” Owens, he said, “is a bit more America first. She only has one loyalty.”Then Owens went on Carlson’s show on X, where he ranted against the “biggest donors at, say, Harvard,” asking where they were when members of the Harvard community “were calling for white genocide.”“White genocide” is a term of art on the racist right and is linked to the so-called great replacement theory, the notion that leftists (including Jewish progressives) are trying to import people of color to replace America’s white majority. This is the theory that motivated the shooter in the Tree of Life synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh. It is false, evil and very dangerous.The same day, an obscure far-right personality posted the same conspiracy theory on X: “Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.”“I’m deeply disinterested,” he continued, “in giving the tiniest shit now about western Jewish populations coming to the disturbing realization that those hordes of minorities that support flooding their country don’t exactly like them too much.”The post wouldn’t be notable, except as yet another example of the bigoted filth that dominates discourse on X, but Elon Musk — the world’s richest man and the owner of X — responded with an endorsement. “You have said the actual truth,” he replied.Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, one of the largest right-wing youth organizations in the country, jumped in the next day to defend both the original post and Musk on “The Charlie Kirk Show.” While he hedged by saying that he doesn’t like to generalize, Kirk argued that “the first part” of the original post “is absolutely true.” He then reread the post and repeated the old Jews-and-money trope: “It is true that some of the largest financiers of left-wing anti-white causes have been Jewish Americans.”While there are more examples of right-wing antisemitism spilling into the public square, I’m going to stop there. I by no means want to minimize the antisemitism we’ve seen from the far left, including on campuses and in the streets, but I am focusing on the people I just mentioned because they are some of the most prominent figures on the right.What is going on? For the past several decades, the Republican Party has been a strong ally of Israel, so much so that the regard evangelical voters have for Israel has been the subject of considerable criticism. In my years as a Republican and a conservative lawyer, I never witnessed a trace of antisemitism. The answer to my question, however, is clear. The “new” American right isn’t that new at all. It has rejected Reaganism, yes, but in doing so, it’s reconnecting with older and darker forces on the right.The ghost of Charles Lindbergh is haunting us. Lindbergh, readers may recall, was the hero aviator who flew solo across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927. He later grew to admire German fascism and gave a famous speech in September 1941 in which he accused Jews of attempting to push America into World War II.“The three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war,” he said, “are the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration.” And while Lindbergh expressed sympathy for Jews facing Nazi persecution, he went straight to the same tropes that were deployed last week, claiming that the Jewish people’s “greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.”More recently, we see the influence of Pat Buchanan, a former Richard Nixon speechwriter and so-called paleoconservative whom William F. Buckley Jr. denounced for his antisemitism in 1991. A central part of the case against Buchanan once again related to matters of war and peace. In the run-up to the first Iraq war, Buchanan said, “There are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in the Middle East — the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States.” And that was a benign comment compared with many of his later pronouncements. In 2010 he wrote that if Elena Kagan were to be confirmed as a Supreme Court justice, “Jews, who represent less than 2 percent of the U.S. population, will have 33 percent of the Supreme Court seats. Is this Democrats’ idea of diversity?”Buchanan is no minor figure. As Nicole Hemmer wrote in 2022, his presidential campaigns in the 1990s forecast the present moment in Republican politics. The party “traded Reaganism for Buchananism,” she contended. The evidence that she was correct grows by the day.Everything about the New Right mind-set told us that this devolution was inevitable. It scorns character, decency and civility in the public square, often turning cruelty into a virtue. This was a necessary precondition for the entire enterprise. Decent people can be misguided, certainly, but they are not consumed with hate. Decent people do not indulge bigots.The New Right rejects the norms and values of what it calls the uniparty or the cathedral: the center-left and center-right American elite. And one of those values is a steadfast opposition to racism and prejudice. The rejection first manifests itself in the form of just asking questions, then it veers into direct challenge of conventional norms, followed by a descent into true darkness.Hostility unmoored from character quickly turns conspiratorial, and the world of conspiracy theories is where antisemites live and thrive. And finally, the term “America First,” popular with the New Right and the older, Lindbergh right, has always been misleading. It actually means some Americans first or “real” Americans first, and “real” Americans do not include the ideological or religious enemies of the New Right.It is no coincidence, for example, that after the Owens-Shapiro confrontation, many New Right figures began posting “Christ is king,” an obvious shot at Shapiro’s Jewish beliefs.Evolution is a concept that applies to biology, not human nature. It turns out that humanity does not grow out of the darkness of the past. It has to be contested by every generation. We are neither imprisoned by darkness nor ever fully captured by light.America is no exception. From before the founding, our so-called new world has been plagued by all the sins of the old. Set against that human depravity, however, are the great aspirations of the founding, including the central declaration that “all men are created equal.”American progress was never inevitable. It took immense courage to move haltingly to the more just, more fair country we live in today. We can’t presume that progress is permanent. It never is. No one is more aware of that than America’s most marginalized and vulnerable communities. They feel the effects very keenly when we take steps backward, when our commitment to our principles falters in the face of our own sin.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