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

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

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      J.D. Vance Says He Will Accept Election Results, While Questioning 2020’s

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      J.D. Vance, the Republican nominee for Senate in Ohio, said Tuesday evening that he would accept the results of his election — while also saying he stood by his false claims that the 2020 election had been “stolen.”“I expect to win,” Mr. Vance said in a town-hall-style event hosted by Fox News, before adding: “But, of course, if things don’t go the way that I expect, I’ll support the guy who wins and I’ll try to be as supportive as I possibly can, even accepting that we’re going to disagree on some big issues.”But when one of the hosts, Martha MacCallum, noted that he had previously said the 2020 election was stolen from Donald J. Trump, whose endorsement propelled him to the nomination, Mr. Vance replied, “Yeah, look, I have said that, and I won’t run away from it.” He referred to state court rulings concerning elements of the way Pennsylvania had conducted its election, but none of those rulings called the results into question.The town hall event was split between Mr. Vance and his Democratic rival in the Senate race, Representative Tim Ryan, with each candidate appearing separately and fielding questions from the moderators and the audience.Mr. Ryan distanced himself from the left wing of the Democratic Party on inflation and abortion, something he has done often as he tries to win a Senate seat in a state that has shifted significantly to the right in recent years.While denouncing Republican abortion bans as extreme and inhumane, he said he believed third-trimester abortions should be allowed only in medical emergencies. That distinguishes him from many other Democrats, who have said that abortion should always be a decision between women and their doctors and that the government should play no role in regulating it. (Third-trimester procedures are very rare, accounting for less than 1 percent of abortions in the United States.)In promoting the ability of Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act to live up to its name, Mr. Ryan highlighted its natural gas provisions, saying they would bring construction jobs to Ohio, while calling for tax cuts like an expanded child tax credit in the short term. He explicitly aligned himself with Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, whose objections limited the size of the legislation and ensured that natural gas provisions accompanied its clean energy measures.Mr. Vance, in his own discussion of inflation, called for Congress to “stop the borrowing and spending” — without specifying the spending cuts he wanted — and alluded to more oil and gas production.On abortion, he said he believed that “90 percent of abortion policy” should be set by state governments, while also indicating that he supported the 15-week federal ban proposed by Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. More

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      With Falsehoods About Pelosi Attack, Republicans Mimic Trump

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

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      Inquiry Scrutinizes Trump Allies’ False Claims About Election Worker

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      Prosecutors are seeking testimony from three people who took part in the pressure campaign against the worker, Ruby Freeman, after the 2020 election.ATLANTA — One is a 69-year-old Lutheran pastor from Illinois. Another is a celebrity stylist who once described herself as a publicist for Kanye West. A third is a former mixed martial-arts fighter and self-described “polo addict” who once led a group called “Black Voices for Trump.”All three individuals now find themselves entangled in the criminal investigation into election interference in Georgia after former President Donald J. Trump’s loss there, with prosecutors saying they participated in a bizarre plot to pressure a Fulton County, Ga., election worker to falsely admit that she committed fraud on Election Day in 2020.The three — Trevian Kutti, the publicist; Stephen C. Lee, the pastor; and Willie Lewis Floyd III, the polo fan — have all been ordered to appear before a special grand jury in Atlanta, with a hearing for Mr. Lee scheduled for Tuesday morning at a courthouse near his home in Kendall County, Ill.None have been named as targets of the investigation or charged with a crime. Yet the decision to seek their testimony suggests that prosecutors in Fulton County are increasingly interested in the story of how the part-time, rank-and-file election worker, Ruby Freeman, 63, was confronted by allies of Mr. Trump at her home in the Atlanta suburbs in the weeks after he was defeated by President Biden.Ms. Freeman and her daughter were part of a team processing votes for the Fulton County Department of Registration and Elections on election night. Soon after, video images of Ms. Freeman and her daughter handling ballots were posted online and shared widely among some Trump supporters, who claimed falsely that the video showed the two women entering bogus votes to skew the election in Mr. Biden’s favor.Mr. Trump helped spread the fiction. During his now-famous telephone call to the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, on Jan. 2, 2021, when Mr. Trump implored Mr. Raffensperger, a fellow Republican, to “find” the votes Mr. Trump needed to win the state, Mr. Trump referred several times to Ms. Freeman, calling her a “vote scammer” and “hustler.”Ms. Freeman processing ballots in Atlanta during the 2020 general election.Brandon Bell/ReutersMs. Kutti, 52, is a Trump supporter based in Chicago who was once registered as an Illinois lobbyist supporting the cannabis industry; she had also previously worked as a publicist for R. Kelly, the disgraced R&B singer. Prosecutors sought her testimony in a May court filing; it is unclear if she has appeared before the special grand jury, which meets behind closed doors.But Ms. Kutti unquestionably met with Ms. Freeman on Jan. 4, 2021, after showing up in her neighborhood, cryptically claiming to work for “some of the biggest names in the industry.”After persuading Ms. Freeman to meet her at a police station in Cobb County, outside Atlanta — the police had been summoned when Ms. Kutti came to her home, and an officer recommended that they talk at the station — Ms. Kutti warned her that an event would soon occur that would “disrupt your freedom,” according to police body-camera video of the meeting. Ms. Kutti also offered help, telling Ms. Freeman that she was going to call a man who had “authoritative powers to get you protection.”Understand Georgia’s Investigation of Election InterferenceCard 1 of 5An immediate legal threat to Trump. More

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      A Powerful Theory of Why the Far Right Is Thriving Across the Globe

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      As we approach the 2022 midterms, the outlook for American democracy doesn’t appear promising. An increasingly Trumpist, anti-democratic Republican Party is poised to take over at least one chamber of Congress. And the Democratic Party, facing an inflationary economy and with an unpopular president in office, looks helpless to stop them.But the United States isn’t alone in this regard. Over the course of 2022, Italy elected a far-right prime minister from a party with Fascist roots, a party founded by neo-Nazis and skinheads won the second-highest number of seats in Sweden’s Parliament, Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party in Hungary won its fourth consecutive election by a landslide, Marine Le Pen won 41 percent of the vote in the final round of France’s presidential elections and — just this past weekend — Jair Bolsonaro came dangerously close to winning re-election in Brazil.Why are these populist uprisings happening simultaneously, in countries with such diverse cultures, economies and political systems?[You can listen to this episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, Google or wherever you get your podcasts.]Pippa Norris is a political scientist at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where she has taught for three decades. In that time, she’s written dozens of books on topics ranging from comparative political institutions to right-wing parties and the decline of religion. And in 2019 she and Ronald Inglehart published “Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit and Authoritarian Populism,” which gives the best explanation of the far right’s rise that I’ve read.We discuss what Norris calls the “silent revolution in cultural values” that has occurred across advanced democracies in recent decades, why the best predictor of support for populist parties is the generation people were born into, why the “transgressive aesthetic” of leaders like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro is so central to their appeal, how demographic and cultural “tipping points” have produced conservative backlashes across the globe, the difference between “demand-side” and “supply-side” theories of populist uprising, the role that economic anxiety and insecurity play in fueling right-wing backlashes, why delivering economic benefits might not be enough for mainstream leaders to stave off populist challenges and more.You can listen to our whole conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on Apple, Spotify, Google or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.(A full transcript of the episode will be available midday on the Times website.)Topjur01“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Emefa Agawu, Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Original music by Isaac Jones. Mixing by Jeff Geld. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin and Kristina Samulewski. More

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      Inflammatory Radio Ads From 2 Trump-Aligned Groups Are Airing in Battleground States

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      One of the biggest radio ad blitzes in the final stretch of the midterm elections is a provocative package of advertisements aimed at deepening cultural divides over transgender care for children and racial tensions.Financed by two groups run by former Trump administration officials, the ads have been placed with Black and Hispanic radio stations, along with conservative talk radio stations.But the inflammatory radio spots contrast with a more standard-issue ad campaign this month from former President Donald J. Trump. Mr. Trump’s TV spots, created by his super PAC, MAGA Inc., have promoted messages on inflation and crime that generally align in both issue and tone with those of many Republican candidates seeking federal office.The radio spots strike a more visceral chord.One ad from America First Legal, a group started by Stephen Miller, who was a top policy adviser in the Trump White House, accuses the Biden administration of “anti-white bigotry” while claiming that corporations, airlines and universities “all openly discriminate against white Americans.” “When did racism against white people become OK?” the narrator asks.Another radio ad from the group says that the Biden administration wants to pave the way for children “to remove breasts and genitals.” “Not long ago, everyone knew that you’re either born a boy or a girl,” the narrator says. “Not anymore.”A similar spot that aired in Tennessee during a radio broadcast of the Tennessee Titans game, according to WPLN-FM, claimed, “They push girls to take testosterone so they grow facial hair.”Ammar Moussa, a spokesman for the Democratic National Committee, called the spots “racist, divisive and false.”The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsElection Day is Tuesday, Nov. 8.A Pivotal Test in Pennsylvania: A battle for blue-collar white voters is raging in President Biden’s birthplace, where Democrats have the furthest to fall and the most to gain.Governor’s Races: Democrats and Republicans are heading into the final stretch of more than a dozen competitive contests for governor. Some battleground races could also determine who controls the Senate.Biden’s Agenda at Risk: If Republicans capture one or both chambers of Congress, the president’s opportunities on several issues will shrink. Here are some major areas where the two sides would clash.Ohio Senate Race: Polls show Representative Tim Ryan competing within the margin of error against his G.O.P. opponent, J.D. Vance. Mr. Ryan said the race would be “the upset of the night,” but there is still a cold reality tilting against Democrats.“It’s disgusting and Democrats will stay laser-focused on not only combating these lies, but ensuring voters have the information they need to see right through these inflammatory ads,” Mr. Moussa said.Another radio spot that targets transgender issues is from Citizens for Sanity, a group whose board includes Gene Hamilton, Ian Prior and John Zadrozny, all former Trump administration officials who have also worked for Mr. Miller’s America First Legal group, according to documents first reported by Open Secrets, a campaign finance watchdog.The Citizens for Sanity ad warns that “so-called health organizations are promoting experimental, dangerous and irreversible drugs and surgeries” that “leave young children sterile, infertile and sexually undeveloped for life.”.css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.“Stop the woke war on our children,” the narrator says. “Stop the far-left assault on our youth. Stop the madness. Stop the insanity.”The two groups are registered as nonprofits and, by law, aren’t supposed to participate in political activity that supports or opposes specific candidates. The only politicians mentioned in the ads are President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, who aren’t candidates for political office this year.The groups have also promoted their messages in English- and Spanish-language mailers, according to The Colorado Sun. And Citizens for Sanity has spent about $20 million on TV ads in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania that focus on illegal immigration, crime and other issues.In a statement, Mr. Hamilton described the spots as “educational.”Justin Unga, the director of strategic initiatives for the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy organization, said that the ads were intended to “animate the most extreme and dangerous elements” of the conservative base with misrepresentations of transgender care and warned that there were “real-life consequences” for such heated language. Mr. Unga pointed to statistics signaling a rise in deadly violence aimed at transgender women of color.Airing the radio spots on Black and Hispanic radio stations, Mr. Unga said, was an attempt to fuel frustration among traditionally Democratic voters and “get them so fed up that they stay home and decide that there’s no good choice.”He added, “It’s a cynical ploy to dissuade people from participating in our democracy.”Voto Latino, a national organization focused on registering Latino voters and engaging them in the political process, has responded with its own spot that will start airing Tuesday on Spanish-language stations in Arizona, Georgia and Nevada, a spokesman for the group said.The Voto Latino spot opens with audio of Mr. Trump falsely claiming he won the 2020 election and a narrator telling listeners that “the same people who brought us the big lie of election fraud now bring us this tale.”“We have seen these attacks before,” the narrator says, according to a transcript of the spot. “They are lies fabricated to distract us from their real agenda: to take away our right to vote and control what our children learn in school.”Mr. Hamilton defended his group’s ads, saying that the spots inform people “about something they all know to be true in 2022, but that major news outlets fail to report on.” Several of the claims in the ad accusing the Biden administration of discriminating against white people have been previously discussed in the conservative news media and found by independent fact-checkers to be either misleading or taken out of context. The spot was first reported by Politico.“Our advertisements make the point that racism is always wrong, regardless of who it is targeted against,” Mr. Hamilton said.The radio spots from the two groups have aired in 24 markets across several states in the past month before Election Day, according to data from AdImpact, an ad-tracking firm. The two groups have aired radio ads in the same markets in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, Tennessee and Texas. America First Legal has also run ads in Colorado, Michigan and Nevada.In total, America First Legal has spent more than $5 million on its radio ads. Only the Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC aligned with Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader, has spent more on ads in the final month of the election. The fund has collected more than $250 million this campaign cycle.America First Legal’s total radio budget, when combined with the $1.6 million that Citizens for Sanity has also spent on the radio since Oct. 7, accounts for 15 percent of the $44.5 million that all Republican groups are spending during that same time, according to AdImpact. More

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      Kari Lake and the Rise of the Republican Apostate

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      On Apr. 8, 2020, in the chaotic early days of the coronavirus pandemic, Fox News host Laura Ingraham welcomed a little-known state senator onto her prime time show. With his unmistakable Minnesota accent and an aw-shucks bearing, Scott Jensen, a Republican, was the furthest thing from the typical fire-breathing cable news guest. But the message that he wanted to share was nothing short of explosive.He told Ms. Ingraham that he believed doctors and hospitals might be manipulating the data about Covid-19. He took aim at new guidelines issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warning that they could lead medical institutions to inflate their fees‌. “The idea that we are going to allow people to massage and sort of game the numbers is a real issue because we are going to undermine the trust” of the public, he said.Ms. Ingraham’s guest offered no evidence or data to back up this serious allegation. Coming from a random state senator, the claim might have been easily dismissed as partisan politics. What gave it the sheen of credibility was his other job: He is a medical doctor.He would go on to make numerous appearances on far-right conservative outlets. In February of this year, Ms. Ingraham invited Dr. Jensen back on to her show. Dr. Jensen was, in Ms. Ingraham’s telling, a truth-teller who had been demonized by the media and the left, a medical professional who’d had the temerity to defy the establishment and call out the corruption when he saw it. “You were vilified,” Ms. Ingraham said. “I was vilified for featuring you.”By that point, Dr. Jensen, 67, had left the State Senate after a single term in office. Instead, he was a leading contender for the Republican nomination for governor of Minnesota. Riding a wave of grass-roots support, he easily won the primary after defeating four other candidates, including the former Republican majority leader of the State Senate, at the party’s endorsement convention. Dr. Jensen’s Covid theories proved central to his message. “I dared to lead when it wasn’t popular,” he said at the G.O.P. convention. “I dared to lead when it wasn’t politically safe.”At the heart of Scott Jensen’s candidacy is a jarring contradiction: a medical doctor who downplays, if not outright denies, the science of a deadly pandemic. And yet Dr. Jensen’s self-abnegation captures something essential about the nature of today’s Republican Party, its voters and its candidates. Kari Lake, the Republican nominee for Arizona governor, is a former journalist who never misses an opportunity to attack the “corrupt, rotten media” that wants to “brainwash” Americans. And there are lawyers like Matthew DePerno, the Republican nominee for Michigan attorney general, who have centered their campaigns on the baseless claim that the 2020 election was fraudulent and that President Biden is therefore an illegitimate president — in other words, lawyers who are campaigning against the rule of law itself.It is possible to see Dr. Jensen, Ms. Lake, Mr. DePerno and their ilk as simply pandering to the MAGA base. But their appeal runs deeper than that. They have tapped into an archetype that’s almost as old as humanity itself: the apostate. The history of American politics is littered with such figures who left one party or faction for another and who profess to have a righteous knowledge that was a product of their transformation.Watching Dr. Jensen’s swift rise from a backbencher to party figurehead and seeing so many other apostates like him on the ballot in 2022, I wanted to know why voters respond so adoringly to them. What about this political moment makes these modern apostates so compelling? Can their rise help explain how the Republican Party has ended up at this dark moment in its history — and where it might be headed next?The apostate evokes images of a distinctly religious variety. The fourth-century Roman emperor Julian, who pushed to abandon Christianity and return to paganism. Freethinkers tortured and burned at the stake for daring to question the official orthodoxy of their era. And yet for as long as the word apostate has existed, it has possessed a certain allure.To become one requires undertaking a journey of the mind, if not the soul, a wrenching transformation that eventually leads one to reject what was once believed to be true, certain, sacred. That journey not only requires a conversion of the mind and soul, resulting in glorious righteousness. They’ve experienced an awakening that few others have, suffered for their awakening, and now believe they see the world for what it is.You can trace the birth of the modern Republican Party to just such a conversion. Before he was a conservative icon and an evangelist for small government, before he so memorably told the American people that “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem,” Ronald Reagan was a “near-hopeless hemophilic liberal,” as he would later write in his autobiography. As a young man and an up-and-coming actor, Reagan was a loyal Democrat who could recite Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s famous “fireside chats” from memory. He embraced F.D.R.’s New Deal, the most ambitious social-works program in American history. He campaigned for Richard Nixon’s Democratic opponent in a 1950 Senate race. Two years after that, he urged Dwight Eisenhower to run for president on the Democratic ticket.Yet by the time Reagan embarked on his own political career, he had renounced his liberal past. In his telling, he had no choice but to disavow the party of Roosevelt and Kennedy. “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party,” Reagan liked to say, “the Democratic Party left me.”This was a clever bit of sloganeering by the future president. It was also the testimony of an apostate.Reagan’s ascent transformed the set of beliefs that underpinned the Republican Party. Lower taxes, limited government, less federal spending: These principles animated the party from Reagan onward; they were canon, inviolate. Stray from them — as George H.W. Bush famously did, raising tax rates after his infamous “read my lips” quip — and the voters cast you out.After four decades of Reaganism, a new apostate emerged. Like Reagan, Donald Trump had spent much of his life as a Democrat, only to slough off that association and seek elected office as a freshly minted Republican. But what made Mr. Trump an apostate was not the mere fact of his switch from one party to the other, a move borne out of convenience and opportunism and not any ideological rebirth in the spirit of Reagan.Instead, Mr. Trump’s sacrilege was his willingness to challenge the fundamental premise of America’s greatness. Pre-Trump, it was just about mandatory for any Republican (or, for that matter, Democratic) candidate for office to invoke tired clichés about “American exceptionalism” and the “city upon a hill,” the paeans to a military that was nothing less than the “finest fighting force” the world had ever seen, and so on.Mr. Trump’s trademark slogan — Make America Great Again — put forward the notion that this rah-rah, chest-beating patriotism was wrong. The way he saw it, the country had fallen on hard times, its stature in the world diminished. “We don’t win anymore, whether it’s ISIS or whether it’s China with our trade agreements,” he said in early 2015 as he prepared to run for president. “No matter what it is, we don’t seem to have it.”No major party had nominated a candidate for the presidency in living memory who had described America in such terms. There was the real possibility that such a dark view might backfire. Yet Mr. Trump successfully tapped into the distrust, resentment and grievance that so many Americans had come to feel. This grim mood had its roots in real events: Sept. 11, the grinding war in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, the housing meltdown and 2008 financial crash, stagnant wages, vast income inequality. Anyone could look around and see a country in trouble. And in the Republican Party especially, fear of a changing country where the white Christian population was no longer the majority and the church no longer central in American life left so many people feeling, as the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild put it, like “strangers in their own land.” Little wonder many people responded to a candidate who broke from every other politician and defied so many norms and traditions by speaking directly to that grievance and fear.Perhaps it shouldn’t have come as a surprise what happened next: As president, Mr. Trump did little to fix the problems or allay the fears he’d tapped into as a candidate. Instead, he governed by stoking them. He presented himself as the one and only leader of his political party, the keeper of truth. His opponents — mainly Democrats — were “un-American” and “evil.” Court decisions he opposed were a “disgrace” and judges who ruled against him were “putting our country in great danger.”By doing so, he accelerated a rupture already underway within the Republican Party. The principles and ideas that had fueled the party for decades — low taxes, small government, free markets — fell away. In their place, Mr. Trump projected his own version of identity politics: He was the party. He was the country. The central organizing force of his presidency was fear of the other. Who better to foment that fear than someone who’d renounced his old ties with that enemy? His success and standing mattered above all else. If democracy didn’t deliver what Mr. Trump wanted, then democracy was the problem.In April, a lawyer named Matthew DePerno appeared before Michigan’s Court of Appeals for his latest hearing in a long-running and quixotic legal battle involving the 2020 election result in Antrim County, a tiny community in the northern part of the state.Antrim had become a rallying cry among Trump supporters who believed human error on election night was in fact evidence of a widespread conspiracy to rig the election for Joe Biden. (The county was initially called for Biden, but after a clerical mistake was caught and corrected, Mr. Trump won the county handily.) There was no evidence to support this wild theory, but Mr. DePerno refused to give up the fight, spending approximately the past year and a half pushing for that audit.A judge had dismissed Mr. DePerno’s suit in a lower court. Now, standing before the appeals court, Mr. DePerno argued that the state Constitution gave every citizen of Michigan the right to demand a statewide audit of any election. A lawyer with the Michigan attorney general’s office replied that such a theory could mean as many as eight million audits every election. It would “mean that no election results would ever be final.” (The court dismissed Mr. DePerno’s suit, saying he had “merely raised a series of questions about the election without making any specific factual allegations as required.”)Mr. DePerno’s argument is extreme. What makes it chilling is that Mr. DePerno is the state Republican Party’s nominee to be attorney general in the 2022 midterms. As a lawyer, he is one of the most vocal and active figures in the movement to find (nonexistent) evidence of rampant illegality or vote-rigging in the 2020 election. If he wins his election this November, he could play a key role in enforcing — or not — his state’s election laws.A lawyer undermining the fundamental premise of democracy — in a bygone era, such a contradiction might have disqualified a candidate from the outset. But in a Republican Party still in thrall to the former president, Mr. DePerno’s legal background only enhances his credibility. “He is a killer,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. DePerno, whom he has endorsed. “We need a killer. And he’s a killer in honesty. He’s an honest, hard-working guy who is feared up here.”Kari Lake, the Republican nominee for Arizona governor, has also won Mr. Trump’s praise with her insistence that Mr. Biden is not the lawful president. Ms. Lake, too, has drawn on her previous career as a local TV anchor to connect with voters even as she attacks the media’s credibility. “I was in their homes for the good times and the bad times,” she told The Times in an interview. “We’ve been together on the worst of days, and we’ve been together on the best of days.” In one campaign ad, Ms. Lake wields a sledgehammer and smashes a stack of TVs playing cable news. “The media isn’t just corrupt,” she says in another spot. “They are anti-American.”As for Dr. Jensen in Minnesota, despite his lack of evidence, his Covid theories spread widely in a country grasping for solid information about the risk of the coronavirus. He opposed the sitting governor’s public-health policies and endorsed unproven treatments such as ivermectin. Dr. Jensen has said he has not been vaccinated (he claimed he would get the vaccine if he did not already have antibodies from a minor case of Covid-19 even though the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s guidelines recommend the vaccine in such cases). He also added his name to a lawsuit filed by a group of vaccine-skeptic doctors seeking to block 12- to 15-year-olds from receiving the shots. Those stances elevated him from an obscure family physician to a sought-after voice in a budding movement.Soon, the idea of an inflated death or case count had become gospel on the far right. Mr. Trump retweeted a QAnon supporter who argued that only 6 percent of Covid-related deaths counted by the CDC were due to the coronavirus itself. Mr. Trump also retweeted a popular conservative pundit who had asked: “Do you really think these lunatics wouldn’t inflate the mortality rates by underreporting the infection rates in an attempt to steal the election?”Dr. Jensen’s popularity almost surely would not have been possible without the Covid-19 pandemic. Millions of people were primed to distrust the C.D.C. and Dr. Anthony Fauci. They didn’t want to believe that locking down civil society was one of the best tools for slowing the spread of the virus and saving lives. When a doctor — one who sometimes wears a white lab coat in his public appearances — showed up on their television screens telling them that the medical establishment was lying to them, they had a strong motivation to believe him.Ms. Lake, Mr. DePerno, Dr. Jensen — what do these apostate candidates tell us? For one, the apostate’s path usually brings a degree of suffering, a requisite for traveling the path from darkness to enlightenment. But these candidates have mostly avoided that fate, with the party faithful rewarding them for their political opportunism masquerading as bravery. While polls suggest that Dr. Jensen faces long odds to win in the general election, Ms. Lake is a competitive candidate with a strong chance of winning in Arizona, and Mr. DePerno has narrowed the gap in his race to unseat Michigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel.The fact that these three politicians got as far as they did catches something about this political moment. The real danger posed by today’s apostate candidates — Dr. Jensen, Ms. Lake, Mr. DePerno and others — is that they don’t want to start a debate about bigger or smaller government. They seemingly have no desire to battle over tax policy or environmental regulation. Mr. Trump and Trumpism caused a disruption in American politics — and this may be the 45th president’s legacy — that made such clashes over ideology and policy electorally meaningless.It’s why Ivy League graduates like Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz play dumb and feed into election denialism. As Mike Madrid, a Republican political consultant and former leader of the Lincoln Project, told me, Trumpism makes ignorance a virtue and rewards fealty as a principle. Fighting the right villains — the “Marxist” left, medical experts, woke corporations — matters more than any well-crafted policy. The Republican Party led by Mr. Trump and his loyal followers is now an organization that will reduce to rubble any institution that stands between it and the consolidation of power.The election of these apostates could see this governing style, as it were, come into practice across the nation. Governors’ mansions would be a new frontier, with potentially enormous consequences. A Governor Jensen could, for example, pack his state’s medical licensing board (which he says has investigated him five times) with his own nominees and refuse to implement any statewide public-health measures in the event of another Covid-19 outbreak. A Governor Lake could approve new legislation to eliminate mail-in voting and the use of ballot-counting machines; come 2024, she could refuse to sign any paperwork certifying the results of the election to appease her party’s most die-hard supporters. An Attorney General DePerno in Michigan, meanwhile, could open criminal investigations into sketchy, unproven claims of election fraud.In the starkest of terms, the rise of these apostate politicians shows how the modern G.O.P. has become more a countercultural movement than a political party of ideas, principles and policies. It reveals how deeply millions of Americans have grown suspicious of the institutions that have made this country the envy of the world — medicine, the rule of law, the Fourth Estate. It’s “a rejection of modernity, rejection of social progress, rejection of social change,” says Mr. Madrid, whose criticism of Trump and the MAGA movement turned him into an apostate himself.There are few more powerful messages in human psychology than that of the apostate: Believe me. I used to be one of them. But the new apostates of the Republican Party have shown no interest in using their credibility to reimagine their party just as Reagan did all those years ago. Indeed, the Republican Party may be just another institution that totters and falls on account of these candidates. If Dr. Jensen, Ms. Lake and Mr. DePerno get into office and make good on their word, the crises facing the country will reach far beyond the Republican Party.Andy Kroll (@AndyKroll) is a reporter at ProPublica and the author of “A Death on W Street: The Murder of Seth Rich and the Age of Conspiracy.”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