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      Giorgia Meloni Leads Voting in Italy, in Breakthrough for Europe’s Hard Right

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      ROME — Italy appeared to turn a page of European history on Sunday by electing a hard-right coalition led by Giorgia Meloni, whose long record of bashing the European Union, international bankers and migrants has sown concern about the nation’s reliability in the Western alliance. Early projections based on a narrow sampling of precincts, as well as exit polls, on Sunday night suggested that Ms. Meloni, the leader of the nationalist Brothers of Italy, a party descended from the remnants of fascism, had led a right-wing coalition to a majority in Parliament, defeating a fractured left and a resurgent anti-establishment movement. The final results would not be clear until Monday, and it will still be weeks before the new Italian parliament is seated and a new government is formed, leaving plenty of time for political machinations. But Ms. Meloni’s strong showing, with about 25 percent of the vote, the highest of any single party, makes her the prohibitive favorite to become the country’s first female prime minister. While she is a strong supporter of Ukraine, her coalition partners deeply admire Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, and have criticized sanctions against Russia.“From the Italians has arrived a clear indication,” Ms. Meloni, known for her crescendoing rhetoric and cult of personality, said in a measured victory speech at nearly 3 a.m., “for the center-right to guide Italy.”After saying she had suffered through a “violent electoral campaign” filled with unfair attacks, Ms. Meloni spoke about “reciprocal respect” and recreating “trust in the institutions.” She posed flashing a victory sign. “We are at the starting point,” she said, adding, “Italy chose us, and we will never betray it.”The victory, in an election with lower turnout than usual, comes as formerly taboo and marginalized parties with Nazi or fascist heritages are entering the mainstream — and winning elections — across Europe. This month, a hard-right group founded by neo-Nazis and skinheads became the largest party in Sweden’s likely governing coalition. In France this year, the far-right leader Marine Le Pen — for a second consecutive time — reached the final round of presidential elections. In Spain, the hard-right Vox, a party closely aligned with Ms. Meloni, is surging.But it is Italy, the birthplace of fascism and a founding member of the European Union, that has sent the strongest shock wave across the continent after a period of European-centric stability led by Prime Minister Mario Draghi, who directed hundreds of billions of euros in recovery funds to modernize Italy and helped lead Europe’s strong response to Russia. Giorgia Meloni preparing to cast her vote at a polling station in Rome on Sunday.Gianni Cipriano for The New York Times“This is a sad day for the country,” Debora Serracchiani, a leader of the Democratic Party, which will now lead the opposition, said in a statement early Monday morning.Ms. Meloni’s victory showed that the allure of nationalism — of which she is a strong advocate — remained undimmed, despite the breakthroughs by E.U. nations in coming together to pool sovereignty and resources in recent years, first to combat the coronavirus pandemic and then Mr. Putin’s initiation of the largest conflict in Europe since World War II.How, and how deeply, a right-wing coalition in Italy led by Ms. Meloni could threaten that cohesion is now the foremost concern of the European establishment.Ms. Meloni has staunchly, and consistently, supported Ukraine and its right to defend itself against Russian aggression. But her coalition partners — Matteo Salvini, the firebrand leader of the League, and the former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi — have clearly aligned themselves with Mr. Putin, questioning sanctions and echoing his propaganda. That fracture, and the bitter competition between the right-wing leaders, could prove fatal for the coalition, leading to a short-lived government. But some political analysts say Ms. Meloni, having attained power, may be tempted to soften her support for sanctions, which are unpopular in much of Italy. If she does, there is concern that Italy could be the weak link that breaks the European Union’s strong united position against Russia.Ms. Meloni had spent the campaign seeking to reassure an international audience that her support of Ukraine was unwavering. She sought to allay concerns by condemning Mussolini, whom she once admired, and Italy’s Fascist past. She also made more supportive noises about Italy’s place in the European Union and distanced herself from Ms. Le Pen and Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, whom she had previously emulated. But that pivoting was more for international markets than Italian voters, who didn’t much care about her past, or even her affinity for illiberal democracies. The Italian electorate had not moved to the right, political scientists said, but instead again resorted to a perennial desire for a new leader who could possibly, and providentially, solve all its ills. Ms. Meloni found herself in the right place at the right time. Hers was virtually the only major party to remain outside Mr. Draghi’s national unity government, allowing her to soak up an increasing share of the opposition. Her support surged from 4 percent to nearly about 25 percent.After a revolt by a party in Mr. Draghi’s broad unity government in July, the right-wing parties, eager to go to elections they were favored to win, sensed opportunity and bolted, with Ms. Meloni in the pole position.There is little concern in the Italian establishment that she will undermine Italian democracy — she has been a consistent advocate for elections during unelected technocratic governments and has long served in Parliament. There is also a widespread belief that Italy’s dependence on hundreds of billions of euros in relief funds from the European Union will force Ms. Meloni and her government to follow the spending plans, reforms and overall blueprint established by Mr. Draghi. The money comes in tranches and the plans have to meet strict criteria. If she reverses course, Italy could lose out on billions of essentially free euros as rising energy prices and inflation — much of it stemming from the sanctions against Russia — are expected to worsen in coming months.Giorgia Meloni, addressing supporters during a rally in Piazza Duomo in Milan earlier this month.Piero Cruciatti/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBut there is concern about Ms. Meloni’s lack of experience and her party’s lack of technical expertise, especially in running the eurozone’s third-largest economy, and Mr. Draghi has kept in close touch with her, both to ensure her support for Ukraine and, insiders say, to help find someone who can provide economic continuity.Nevertheless, Ms. Meloni represents a historic break at the top of Italian government. She came of political age in a post-Fascist, hard right that sought to redefine itself by seizing on new symbols and texts, especially “The Lord of the Rings” and other works by the British writer J.R.R. Tolkien, to distance itself from the taboos of Fascism. She grew up with a single mother in a working-class area of Rome, and being a woman, and mother, has been central to her political identity. She once ran for mayor while pregnant because she said powerful men had told her she couldn’t. Her most famous speech includes the refrain “I am a woman. I am a mother.” Being a woman has also distinguished her, and marked a major shift, from her coalition partners, especially Mr. Berlusconi, the subject of endless sex scandals.But Ms. Meloni, Mr. Berlusconi and Mr. Salvini share a hard-right vision for the country. Ms. Meloni has called for a naval blockade against migrants and spread fears about a “great replacement” of native Italians. The three share populist proposals for deep tax cuts that economists fear would inflate Italy’s already enormous debt, and a traditionalist view of the family that liberals worry will at least freeze in place gay rights and which could, in practice, roll back abortion rights.Despite the constraints of an Italian Constitution that is explicitly anti-Fascist and designed to stymie the rise of another Mussolini, many liberals are now worried that the right-wing coalition will erode the country’s norms. There was concern that if the coalition were to win two-thirds of the seats in Parliament, it would have the ability to change the Constitution to increase government powers. From left to right, Matteo Salvini, Silvio Berlusconi, and Giorgia Meloni attending the final rally of the center-right coalition in Rome on Thursday.Alessandra Tarantino/Associated PressOn Thursday, during one of Ms. Meloni’s final rallies before the election, she exclaimed that “if the Italians give us the numbers to do it, we will.”But the coalition appeared not to hit that mark. The main party of the left, the Democratic Party, all but guaranteed its defeat by failing to heal its differences with other liberal and centrist parties, including a new group of moderates. The moderates, backed by former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, and attracting some former leaders of Mr. Berlusconi’s party, who were disillusioned with his following of the hard right, did better than expected, but still seemed to remain in the single digits.What really held the right back from a landslide were their former governing partners, the Five Star Movement, the once anti-establishment movement that triggered the collapse of Mr. Draghi’s government when it revolted in July.In 2018, the party’s burn-down-the-elite rhetoric led it to become the country’s most popular party and largest force in Parliament. Years of governing — first with the hard-right Mr. Salvini, and then with the Democratic Party, and then under Mr. Draghi — exposed its incompetence and infighting and it imploded. It seemed on the brink of extinction. But during the campaign, led by former Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, the party surged in the country’s underserved south.That development was mainly because Five Star passed a broad unemployment benefit known as the “citizen’s income,” which though roundly criticized by moderates and the right as a handout to the lazy and a disincentive to work, has become a cherished benefit.As a result, Five Star appeared to be becoming the party of the south.“This is what is emerging,” said Angelo Tofalo, himself a southerner and a leader in the party, as he cheered Mr. Conte, at a rally in Rome on Friday. He said the party had laid down deep roots in the south, but acknowledged, “the citizen’s income is a factor.”That unexpected strength ate into Ms. Meloni’s support, while she devoured the backing of the League party of Mr. Salvini. Only years ago he was the country’s most popular populist. Now he appeared to sink to single digits. Mr. Berlusconi, once the hinge upon which the coalition turned, and who legitimized the marginalized post-Fascists and secessionist League in the 1990s, also registered a modest result.But together they had enough to govern and Ms. Meloni had the clearest claim on the office of prime minister during negotiations and consultations with Italy’s president, Sergio Mattarella, which will take place over the next month. The new government is likely to be seated in late October or early November.But the message of the end of a period of European taboos, and of new change, has already been sent.Ms. Meloni said in one of her last interviews before the election that her victory would be “a redemption” for all the people who “for decades had to keep their heads down” and who had an “alternative vision from the mainstream of the system of power.”Elisabetta Povoledo More

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      Will U.S. Democracy Survive the Threats?

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      More from our inbox:Women, ‘Stay Loud’A Childhood HomeGet a Living WillIllustration of the American flag.Illustration by Matt ChaseTo the Editor:Re “Democracy Challenged,” by David Leonhardt (front page, Sept. 18):Your excellent, and frightening, article suggests that our democracy is facing two simultaneous crises: Republicans who refuse to accept defeat in an election, and a growing disconnect between political power and public opinion. But there is a third, equally serious danger.While it is critical to get rid of dark money (reversing Citizens United) and gerrymandering, and to set term limits on the Supreme Court, an equally significant element of the current nightmare is coming from social media.Indeed, the degree to which social media has not only ginned up but actually created some or much of the current social-cultural-political zeitgeist is not well understood or acknowledged. For all the positives it provides, social media has become a cancer on society — one that has metastasized and continues to do so, often with the full knowledge (and even complicity) of social media companies.If we are going to begin arresting, and then (hopefully) reversing, the crisis described in the article, we need to address the social media issue as urgently as we need to address the overtly political ones. Addressing the latter without the former simply will not do the job.Ian AltermanNew YorkTo the Editor:Our democracy and our constitutional republic are not only challenged, but are on the verge of collapse. Should the Republicans capture the House and the Senate in the midterm elections, I believe that it will be a long time before we have another free and fair election in this country.The G.O.P. has stacked state houses with MAGA Republicans who, if given the chance, will do what Donald Trump wanted done in 2020: refuse to certify the will of the voters. In other areas we are rapidly losing our freedoms. We are in danger of losing the right to choose whether or not to bring a child into the world, the right to read or watch whatever we choose, and in many cases, the right to vote.The Republican Party has developed into a race-baiting, hateful group of people, inspired and directed by Mr. Trump, and Americans need to beware the consequences of electing more of their ilk at the local, state and federal level.Henry A. LowensteinNew YorkTo the Editor:“Democracy Challenged” is a chilling portrait of the bitter ideological civil war raging in America today. While not a conflict exacting physical wounds for the most part, it is for many of us emotionally exhausting, compounded by the realization that no obvious relief or solution is evident. It is almost impossible to watch cable news or read the daily papers without feeling despondent about the widening philosophical gulf separating the two parties.It is ironic that Democratic-leaning states contribute more to the federal government than they receive, in effect subsidizing Republican state policies that Democrats strongly oppose.I look forward to future articles in which I can hopefully discover a nugget of hope.Howard QuinnBronxTo the Editor:Thank you for all of your efforts to highlight the challenges to democracy and fair elections, but what I believe you are failing to do is sell democracy. You assume that democracy will sell itself. It won’t. There was a time when it would, but not today.Not only do you need to sell democracy — that is, emphasize its benefits — but you also need to highlight the cons of the alternative.We must sell democracy as if our lives depended on it. Because they do.Dan BuchanCheyenne, Wyo.To the Editor:While David Leonhardt is correct, of course, that the Republican Party’s increasing inclination to refuse to accept defeat in an election constitutes an existential threat to our democracy, so, too, does the likelihood that some of the large number of election deniers now running for statewide or local positions of electoral authority will prevail in November.Such a calamitous result would mean that if the outcome of a subsequent election is called into question by a defeated, victimized Democrat with legitimate cries of foul, it will be met with derision and scorn by the faux patriot MAGA crowd, and upheld by judges and justices whose allegiance to one man outweighs any sense of loyalty to the Constitution they might once have held sacrosanct.Edward PellSanta Monica, Calif.Women, ‘Stay Loud’ Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesTo the Editor:“Trolls in Russia Schemed to Divide Women’s March,” by Ellen Barry (front page, Sept. 19), is a thorough, well-researched piece about how Russian trolls deliberately created discord within the Women’s March and across the women’s rights movement more broadly.While the details may be shocking to many, it’s old news that women are in the sightlines. Whether the actors are foreign or domestic, we’ve long been the targets of disinformation, harassment and violence, against our bodies and our freedoms.We’ve had to create programs like Digital Divas and Digital Defenders to combat disinformation, because it is still happening and only going to get worse as we fight back. In addition to digital spaces, we’re leaning on proven analog tactics, including get-out-the-vote training, phone banking and postcard mailing.Thousands of women, including many who have never volunteered before, are active ahead of the critical midterm elections to get people registered to vote and educated on the issues. We saw in the abortion referendum in Kansas last month how our efforts can succeed.Silence us, they will not. Women more than ever need to stay loud in the battle for equality. Neither a Russian bot nor a domestic terrorist will silence us into submission.Emiliana GuerecaLos AngelesThe writer is the founder and president of Women’s March Foundation and Action.A Childhood Home Marine BuffardTo the Editor:Re “Your Childhood Home Is in Front of You. Do You Go In?,” by Mark Vanhoenacker (Opinion guest essay, Sept. 12):I enjoyed this article, which described the pull toward one’s childhood home. As a psychiatrist, I begin my journey with patients by asking about their earliest years.“Who lived with you during your childhood?”“Were there any disruptive moves or departures?”By exploring these distant memories, I begin to understand their path to my office, and how I can help them shape a healthier future.If looking back is a positive experience, I may encourage those struggling with insomnia to imagine a virtual tour of their earliest home, focusing on even the most minute details. “What do you see as you look around your bedroom?”As a busy working mom, I find that this technique has helped me return to sleep despite my anxious mind, a soothing recall of a childhood filled with safety and love.Jennifer ReidMoorestown, N.J.Get a Living Will Emiliano PonziTo the Editor:Re “The Space Between Brain Death and Organ Donation,” by Daniela J. Lamas (Sunday Opinion, Sept. 18):It behooves everyone to make their wishes clear regarding organ donation (like on a driver’s license). Just as important, if not more so, is that each of us make our wishes clear regarding life support and other artificial means: respirator, feeding tube, etc.Making our wishes known in a living will not only has cost-saving implications but also assures our dignity.Pankaj GuptaEdison, N.J.The writer is a geriatrician. More

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      Some Women Fear Giorgia Meloni’s Far-Right Agenda Will Set Italy Back

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      Some fear that the hard-right politician, whose party is expected to be the big winner in the election on Sunday, will continue policies that have kept women back.ROME — Being a woman, and mother, has been central to the political pitch of Giorgia Meloni, the hard-right politician who is likely to become Italy’s prime minister after elections on Sunday.She once ran for mayor seven months pregnant because she said powerful men had told her she couldn’t. Her most famous speech includes the refrain “I am a woman. I am a mother.” She often talks with pride about how she started a party, Brothers of Italy, and rose to the top of national politics without any special treatment.But as happy as women’s rights activists are about that fact that a woman could finally run Italy, many wish it was essentially any other woman in Italy. They fear that Ms. Meloni’s hard-right agenda, her talk about preventing abortions, opposing quotas and other measures will set back the cause of women.“It’s not a gain at all and, indeed, a possible setback from the point of view of women’s rights,” said Giorgia Serughetti, who writes about women’s issues and teaches political philosophy at Bicocca University in Milan.More than in neighboring European Union countries, women in Italy have struggled to emerge in the country’s traditionally patriarchal society. Four out of 10 Italian women don’t work. Unemployment rates are even higher for young women starting careers. Female chief executive officers lead only a tiny percentage of companies listed on Milan’s stock exchange, and there are fewer than 10 female rectors at Italy’s more than 80 universities.And for many Italian women, finding a suitable work-life balance becomes nearly impossible once children enter the equation. Affordable, all-day, public child care is nonexistent in many areas, and women paid the highest price during the pandemic, staying home even after periods of lockdown when schools were shut.All national and international indicators suggest that if women in Italy worked more, gross domestic product would largely benefit and increase.“Half of Italian women do not have economic independence,” said Linda Laura Sabbadini, a statistician and director of new technologies at Italy’s National Institute of Statistics. “That can’t just be cultural; politics clearly hasn’t done enough for women so far.”Ms. Meloni has presented herself as someone who will help, but on key issues to women, the coalition has been vague and short on details. And a coalition partner, Matteo Salvini of the anti-immigrant League party, has admired Victor Orban, the conservative prime minister of Hungary, and his family policies. The League’s leader recently said that Mr. Orban had drafted the “most advanced family policy” giving “the best results at the European level.”Matteo Salvini, right, then the Italian interior minister, next to Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary at a news conference in Milan in 2018.Marco Bertorello/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMr. Orban has encouraged Hungarian mothers to procreate prolifically to counter the dropping birthrate. This month, the Hungarian government passed a decree that would require women seeking an abortion to observe fetal vital signs before moving forward with the procedure.Concerns have emerged in Italy that Ms. Meloni’s center-right coalition could make it harder for women to have abortions in a country where the procedure has been legal since 1978 but is still very difficult to obtain.Asked about the law, Ms. Meloni, who has said her mother nearly aborted her, vowed in an interview that she “wouldn’t change it” as prime minister, and that abortion would remain “accessible and safe and legal.” But she added that she wanted to more fully apply a part of the law “about prevention,” which, she said, had been effectively ignored until now.Critics fear that approach would allow anti-abortion organizations to play a more prominent role in family-planning clinics and encourage even more doctors to avoid the procedure. Only about 33 percent of doctors perform legal abortions in Italy, and even less, 10 percent, in some regions.Laura Lattuada, an actress in Rome, said she was concerned that the abortion law could be chipped away with Ms. Meloni in power.“She’s constantly saying she wants to improve it, but I am not sure that her conception of protecting women and the family corresponds to the improvement of women’s rights,” she said.Abortion is hardly the only issue that has given activists pause. Italy introduced and has progressively extended the so-called pink quotas, a mandated percentage of female representation in politics and boardrooms. Many women say quotas in politics better reflect the population, while quotas in companies help overcome “old boys” networks, giving women equal access to higher paying jobs. They also give women greater visibility, they said.A mural in Rome painted by a street artist known as Harry Greb showing Ms. Meloni and other Italian politicians.Fabio Frustaci/EPA, via ShutterstockMs. Meloni is against the quotas. She argues that as a woman, she climbed the political ladder on her own and is now poised to run the country. She says that she is proof that women don’t need government interference to enforce diversity.Her supporters agreed.“They never gave her anything, she took it. She won on her own,” said Lucia Loddo, 54, who was waving a banner supporting Ms. Meloni at a rally in Cagliari. She said that for women, Ms. Meloni’s ascent “is the most beautiful thing. All of the men have been disasters. She is prepared.”About 25 percent of Italian woman voting on Sunday are expected to cast their ballots for Ms. Meloni, though pollsters failed to ask women whether her gender was a factor in their vote, which is itself telling of the attention given to women voters here. Ms. Meloni is polling at least 25 percent nationally, the highest of any candidate.Ms. Meloni has won voters over with her down-to-earth and straight-talking manner (she often speaks in Roman dialect). But the secret to her popularity has less to do with her personality or policy proposals than that she was essentially the lone leader of a major party to stay in the opposition during the national unity government of Mario Draghi.That allowed her to campaign in a country that is perennially looking for someone new as a fresh face, even though she has been in Parliament for nearly two decades and was a minister in a past government.In that time, Italy has had a lackluster track record in empowering women in the work force, and experts say something else needs to be done.“We have to create the conditions for employment because we are at the bottom of the list in Europe,” said Ida Maggi of Stati Generali delle Donne, an association working to get women’s issues on the electoral agenda. It makes Italy “look bad,” she said.One area where Ms. Meloni and even her most committed critics agree is the need for more nursery schools. The government of Mr. Draghi last year allocated billions of euros to build nurseries and extend child care services. But the problem is by no means solved.In many Italian regions, a shortage of free nursery schools, along with short school days and three-month vacations, make sit difficult for working mothers to juggle their schedules. Even though many women are staying at home, the country has one of the lowest birthrates in Europe, something Ms. Meloni’s center-right coalition has pledged to redress.Speaking to supporters in Milan this month, Ms. Meloni said that she and her allies would work toward getting free child-care services, part of “a huge plan to boost the birthrate, to support motherhood.” With only 400,000 births last year, Italy was going through more than a demographic winter, she said: “It’s an ice age.”Ms. Meloni addressing supporters in Piazza Duomo in Milan in September.Piero Cruciatti/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“I don’t want this nation to disappear,” she said, adding that the problem should not be solved through immigration. “I want our families to have children,” she added to a roar of applause.But critics are not convinced her party, or likely coalition, is entirely committed to the cause of women.Polls carried out last year show that while the majority of Italians said more should be done to reach gender equality, those numbers were considerably lower among supporters of Brothers of Italy and the League.One campaign video for a candidate from the Forza Italia party, another coalition ally, was roundly mocked for promising a salary to women who don’t work outside the home. The party is led by Silvio Berlusconi, who, Ms. Meloni said in the interview, put her “in difficulty as a woman” with his sex scandals when she was a young minister in his government.After decades of unfulfilled campaign promises, there is skepticism writ large that any of the parties will really champion women’s causes.Promises about “the needs and priorities of women” — including free day care and subsidies for families — tend to vanish once it’s time to actually put measures in place, said Laura Moschini, whose organization, the Gender Interuniversity Observatory, has drafted a “handbook for good government” highlighting women’s concerns.Those issues have discouraged women from voting, and the possibility of electing Ms. Meloni as the first female prime minister is not motivating women. Heading into the election on Sunday, polls suggest that more than a third of Italian women probably won’t vote.Ms. Meloni with Mr. Salvini, left, and Silvio Berlusconi at the center-right coalition’s closing rally in Rome on Thursday.Gregorio Borgia/Associated Press“I’m disgusted by the entire political system,” said Laura Porrega, who described herself as a “desperate housewife” because she wasn’t able to find a job. “When they want your taxes, they remember your name, but I’ve gotten nothing from the country at all.” she said.Ms. Serughetti, the Bicocca professor, said that women “don’t see their interests being represented,” so they’d rather abstain.“The decision of women not to vote is a sort of protest to this order of things,” she said.Jason Horowitz More

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      Cómo fue que cuentas rusas ayudaron a desmantelar la Marcha de las Mujeres

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      Linda Sarsour despertó el 23 de enero de 2017, entró a internet y sintió náuseas.El fin de semana anterior, había ido a Washington para estar al frente de la Marcha de las Mujeres, una movilización contra el entonces presidente Donald Trump que superó todas las expectativas. Las multitudes se habían congregado antes del amanecer y para cuando ella subió al escenario, se extendían a lo lejos.Más de cuatro millones de personas de todo Estados Unidos habían participado, según cálculos posteriores de los expertos, que decían que esta marcha era una de las protestas de un solo día más grandes en la historia del país.Pero luego algo cambió, al parecer de la noche a la mañana. Lo que ella vio en Twitter ese lunes fue un torrente de quejas centradas en ella. En sus 15 años de activista, en su mayoría defendiendo los derechos de las personas musulmanas, había enfrentado respuestas negativas, pero esto era de otra magnitud. Una pregunta comenzó a formarse en su mente: ¿realmente me odian tanto?Esa mañana, sucedían cosas que Sarsour no podía ni imaginarse.A casi 6500 kilómetros de distancia, organizaciones vinculadas con el gobierno ruso habían asignado equipos para actuar en contra de la Marcha de las Mujeres. En los escritorios de las anodinas oficinas de San Petersburgo, los redactores estaban probando mensajes en las redes sociales que criticaban el movimiento de la Marcha de las Mujeres, haciéndose pasar por estadounidenses comunes y corrientes.Publicaron mensajes como mujeres negras que criticaban el feminismo blanco, mujeres conservadoras que se sentían excluidas y hombres que se burlaban de las participantes como mujeres quejumbrosas de piernas peludas. Pero uno de los mensajes funcionó mejor con el público que cualquier otro.En él se destacaba un elemento de la Marcha de las Mujeres que, en principio, podría parecer un simple detalle: entre las cuatro copresidentas del evento estaba Sarsour, una activista palestinoestadounidense cuyo hiyab la señalaba como musulmana practicante.Linda Sarsour, una de las líderes de la Marcha de las Mujeres, en enero de 2017. A los pocos días, los troles rusos la atacaron en internet.Theo Wargo/Getty ImagesDurante los 18 meses siguientes, las fábricas rusas de troles y su servicio de inteligencia militar se esforzaron por desacreditar el movimiento mediante la difusión de relatos condenatorios, a menudo inventados, en torno a Sarsour, cuyo activismo la convirtió en un pararrayos para la base deTrump y también para algunos de sus más ardientes opositores.Ciento cincuenta y dos cuentas rusas distintas produjeron material sobre ella. Los archivos públicos de las cuentas de Twitter que se ha comprobado que son rusas contienen 2642 tuits sobre Sarsour, muchos de los cuales llegaron a grandes audiencias, según un análisis de Advance Democracy Inc., una organización sin fines de lucro y apartidista que realiza investigaciones y estudios de interés público.Muchas personas conocen la historia sobre cómo se fracturó el movimiento de la Marcha de las Mujeres, que dejó cicatrices perdurables en la izquierda estadounidense.Una coalición frágil al principio, entró en crisis por la asociación de sus copresidentas con Louis Farrakhan, el líder de la Nación del Islam, ampliamente condenado por sus declaraciones antisemitas. Cuando esto salió a la luz, los grupos progresistas se distanciaron de Sarsour y de las copresidentas de la marcha, Carmen Pérez, Tamika Mallory y Bob Bland, y algunos pidieron que dimitieran.Pero también hay una historia que no se ha contado, que solo apareció años después en la investigación académica, de cómo Rusia se insertó en este momento.Durante más de un siglo, Rusia y la Unión Soviética trataron de debilitar a sus adversarios en Occidente al avivar las tensiones raciales y étnicas. En la década de 1960, oficiales de la KGB con base en Estados Unidos pagaron a agentes para que pintaran esvásticas en las sinagogas y profanaran los cementerios judíos. Falsificaron cartas racistas, supuestamente de supremacistas blancos, a diplomáticos africanos.No inventaron estas divisiones sociales, Estados Unidos ya las tenía. Ladislav Bittman, quien trabajó para la policía secreta en Checoslovaquia antes de desertar a Estados Unidos, comparó los programas de desinformación soviéticos con un médico malvado que diagnostica con pericia las vulnerabilidades del paciente y las explota, “prolonga su enfermedad y lo acelera hasta una muerte prematura en lugar de curarlo”.Hace una década, el presidente de Rusia, Vladimir Putin, supervisó un renacimiento de estas tácticas, con el fin de socavar las democracias de todo el mundo desde las sombras.Las redes sociales proporcionaban ahora una forma fácil de alimentar las ideas en el discurso estadounidense, algo que, durante medio siglo, la KGB había luchado por hacer. Y el gobierno ruso canalizó secretamente más de 300 millones de dólares a partidos políticos en más de dos docenas de países en un esfuerzo por influir en sus políticas a favor de Moscú desde 2014, según una revisión de la inteligencia estadounidense hecha pública la semana pasada.El efecto que estas intrusiones tuvieron en la democracia estadounidense es una cuestión que nos acompañará durante años. Las redes sociales ya estaban amplificando los impulsos políticos de los estadounidenses, dejando tras de sí un rastro de comunidades dañadas. La confianza en las instituciones estaba disminuyendo y la rabia aumentaba en la vida pública. Estas cosas habrían sido ciertas aun sin la interferencia rusa.Pero rastrear las intrusiones rusas durante los meses que siguieron a esa primera Marcha de las Mujeres es ser testigo de un persistente esfuerzo por empeorarlas todas.Después de las elecciones de 2016, la operación de desinformación rusa de la Agencia de Investigación de Internet cambió el enfoque de Donald Trump y Hillary Clinton a objetivos más amplios de Estados Unidos.James Hill para The New York Times‘Refrigeradores y clavos’A principios de 2017, la operación de troleo se encontraba en su fase imperial y rebosaba confianza.Las cuentas de la Agencia de Investigación de Internet, una organización cuya sede se encuentra en San Petersburgo y es controlada por un aliado de Putin, se había ufanado de impulsar a Trump a la victoria. Ese año, el presupuesto del grupo casi se había duplicado, según comunicaciones internas hechas públicas por los fiscales estadounidenses. Pasó más de un año antes de que las plataformas de las redes sociales realizaran una amplia purga de cuentas de títeres respaldados por Rusia.Para los troles, era una hora clave.En estas condiciones propicias, sus objetivos pasaron de la política electoral a algo más general: la meta de agudizar las fisuras en la sociedad estadounidense, dijo Alex Iftimie, un exfiscal federal que trabajó en un caso de 2018 contra un administrador del Proyecto Lakhta, que supervisaba la Agencia de Investigación de Internet y otras operaciones de troleo ruso.“Ya no se trataba exclusivamente de Trump y Clinton”, dijo Iftimie, ahora socio de Morrison Foerster. “Era más profundo y más siniestro y más difuso en su enfoque de explotar las divisiones dentro de la sociedad en cualquier número de niveles diferentes”.Había una rutina: al llegar a su turno, los trabajadores escudriñaban los medios de comunicación de los márgenes ideológicos, de la extrema izquierda y de la extrema derecha, en busca de contenido extremo que pudieran publicar y amplificar en las plataformas, alimentando las opiniones extremas en las conversaciones principales.Artyom Baranov, quien trabajó en una de las filiales del Proyecto Lakhta de 2018 a 2020, concluyó que sus compañeros de trabajo eran, en su mayoría, personas que necesitaban el dinero, indiferentes a los temas sobre los que se les pedía que escribieran.“Si se les asignaba un texto sobre refrigeradores, escribían sobre refrigeradores, o, digamos, sobre clavos, escribían sobre clavos”, dijo Baranov, uno de un puñado de antiguos troles que han hablado públicamente sobre sus actividades. Pero en lugar de refrigeradores y clavos, era “Putin, Putin, luego Putin, y luego sobre Navalny”, en referencia a Alekséi Navalny, el líder de la oposición encarcelado.El trabajo no consistía en exponer argumentos, sino en provocar una reacción visceral y emocional, idealmente de “indignación”, explicó Baranov, psicoanalista de formación, a quien se le asignó escribir publicaciones en línea sobre política rusa. “La tarea es hacer una especie de explosión, causar controversia”, agregó.Cuando una publicación lograba enfurecer a un lector, dijo, un compañero de trabajo comentaba a veces, con satisfacción, Liberala razorvala. Un liberal fue destrozado. “No se trataba de discutir hechos o dar nuevos argumentos”, dijo. “Siempre es una forma de hurgar en los trapos sucios”.El feminismo era un objetivo obvio, porque se consideraba una “agenda occidental” y hostil a los valores tradicionales que representaba Rusia, dijo Baranov, quien habló de su trabajo con la esperanza de advertir a las personas de que fueran más escépticas con el material que hay en línea. Desde hace meses, las cuentas rusas que pretenden pertenecer a mujeres negras han estado investigando las divisiones raciales dentro del feminismo estadounidense:“El feminismo blanco parece ser la tendencia más estúpida del 2k16”“Mira cómo Muhammad Ali calla a una feminista blanca que critica su arrogancia”“No tengo tiempo para tu basura de feminista blanca”“Por qué las feministas negras no le deben su apoyo a Hillary Clinton”“UN POCO MÁS FUERTE PARA LAS FEMINISTAS BLANCAS DE ATRÁS”En enero de 2017, mientras se acercaba la Marcha de las Mujeres, probaron distintos enfoques con distintas audiencias, como lo habían hecho previo a las elecciones presidenciales de 2016. Publicaban como mujeres trans resentidas, mujeres pobres y mujeres contra el aborto. Desacreditaban a quienes marchaban por ser peones del multimillonario judío George Soros.Y se burlaron de las mujeres que planeaban participar, a menudo en términos crudamente sexuales. En coordinación, a partir del 19 de enero, 46 cuentas rusas lanzaron 459 sugerencias originales para #RenameMillionWomenMarch, un hashtag creado por un conductor de pódcast de derecha de Indiana:La Marcha de: ¿Por qué nadie me quiere?La marcha de las mujeres fuertes que se hacen las víctimas constantementeLa Marcha de la Solitaria Señora de los GatosEl campamento de los cólicosLa Convención de Mujeres BarbudasViejas rotas arengandoEl camino de las lágrimas liberalesEl festival de las perras de Coyote UglyMientras tanto, otra línea de mensajes más efectiva se desarrollaba.Sarsour recordó el abrumador torrente de ataques. “Imagínese que todos los días al levantarse son un monstruo”, dijo.Brad Ogbonna/Redux‘Fue como una avalancha’Como una de las cuatro copresidentas de la Marcha de las Mujeres, Sarsour llegó con un historial, y con carga.Sarsour, hija de un tendero palestinoestadounidense de Crown Heights, en Nueva York, se había convertido en la voz de los derechos de los musulmanes después de los atentados del 11 de septiembre. En 2015, cuando tenía 35 años, un perfil del New York Times la ungió —“una chica de Brooklyn con hiyab”— como algo raro: una potencial candidata araboestadounidense a un cargo de elección pública.En 2016, el senador Bernie Sanders la invitó a un evento de campaña, un sello de aprobación de uno de los progresistas más influyentes del país. Eso molestó a los políticos pro-Israel en Nueva York, que señalaron su apoyo al movimiento de boicot, desinversión y sanciones, que busca asegurar los derechos de los palestinos aislando a Israel. Los críticos del movimiento sostienen que amenaza la existencia de Israel.Rory Lancman, entonces concejal de la ciudad del barrio de Queens, recuerda su inquietud cada vez mayor cuando ella comenzó a aparecer con regularidad en los eventos en los que se apoyaban causas de izquierda no relacionadas con Israel, como los salarios justos, donde, en su opinión, “su verdadera agenda estaba tratando de casar una agenda antiisraelí con diferentes causas progresistas”.Para Lancman, demócrata, la noticia de que Sarsour era una de las líderes de la Marcha de las Mujeres le pareció “desgarrador —esa es la palabra—, que el antisemitismo se tolere y racionalice en espacios progresistas”.Eso era la política de siempre, y Sarsour estaba acostumbrada a ello: la larga disputa entre los demócratas sobre las implicaciones de criticar a Israel.Pero 48 horas después de la marcha, hubo un cambio de tono en línea, con el surgimiento de publicaciones que describían a Sarsour como una yihadista radical que se había infiltrado en el feminismo estadounidense. Sarsour lo recuerda muy bien, porque se despertó con un mensaje de texto preocupado de una amiga y fue en Twitter para descubrir que era tendencia.No todas las respuestas negativas fueron orgánicas. Esa semana, las cuentas rusas de amplificación comenzaron a circular publicaciones centradas en Sarsour, muchas de las cuales eran incendiarias y se basaban en falsedades, ya que afirmaban que era una islamista radical: “Una musulmana que odiaba a los judíos y estaba a favor del Estado Islámico y en contra de Estados Unidos”, a la que “se había visto mostrando el cartel del Estado Islámico”.Algunas de estas publicaciones fueron vistas por muchas personas. A las 7 p. m. del 21 de enero, una cuenta de la Agencia de Investigación de Internet identificada como @TEN_GOP, un supuesto estadounidense de derecha originario del sur del país, tuiteó que Sarsour estaba a favor de imponer sharía o ley islámica en Estados Unidos, haciendo eco de una popular teoría de la conspiración antimusulmana que Trump había ayudado a popularizar en la campaña.Este mensaje cobró impulso y acumuló 1686 respuestas, se retuiteó 8046 veces y obtuvo 6256 “me gusta”. Al día siguiente, casi de manera simultánea, un pequeño ejército de 1157 cuentas de derecha retomó la narrativa y publicó 1659 mensajes sobre el tema, según un análisis realizado por la empresa de análisis online Graphika en nombre del Times.Vladimir Barash, jefe científico de Graphika, dijo que el patrón de interferencia era “estratégicamente similar” a la actividad de los troles en las vastas protestas anti-Putin de 2011 y 2012, con cuentas falsas “tratando de secuestrar la conversación de manera similar, a veces con éxito”.“Hay algunas pruebas circunstanciales de que aprendieron en un contexto doméstico y luego trataron de replicar su éxito en un contexto extranjero”, dijo Barash.Las cosas estaban cambiando sobre el terreno en Nueva York. En la Asociación Árabe Estadounidense de Nueva York, la organización sin fines de lucro de defensa a los migrantes que Sarsour dirigía en Bay Ridge, comenzó a llegar una gran cantidad de correo de odio: tarjetas postales, reclamos escritos a mano en papel de cuaderno, su foto impresa y desfigurada con equis rojas.“Se trataba de un nivel totalmente nuevo, y se sentía extraño, porque venía de todo el país”, dijo Kayla Santosuosso, entonces subdirectora de la organización sin fines de lucro, que recuerda haber llevado el correo a Sarsour en cajas de zapatos. Sarsour, a quien preocupaba haberse convertido en “un lastre”, renunció a su puesto en febrero de ese año.Para la primavera, la respuesta contra Sarsour se había convertido en un espectáculo de política divisoria. “Era como una avalancha”, dijo. “Como si estuviera nadando en ella todos los días. Era como si nunca saliera de ella”.Cuando fue invitada a dar el discurso de graduación de la Facultad de Salud Pública de la Universidad de la Ciudad de Nueva York (CUNY, por su sigla en inglés), el furor comenzó con semanas de antelación. Llamó la atención del polemista de extrema derecha Milo Yiannopoulos, quien viajó a Nueva York para una protesta que atrajo, como escribió un reportero del Times, “una extraña mezcla, incluyendo judíos y sionistas de derecha, comentaristas como Pamela Geller y algunos miembros de la extrema derecha”.“Linda Sarsour es una bomba de relojería del horror progresista, amante de la sharia, que odia a los judíos”, dijo Yiannopoulos a la multitud.Sarsour recuerda el momento previo al discurso de graduación como particularmente estresante. A medida que se acercaba, tuvo visiones de una figura que salía de las sombras para matarla, “alguna pobre persona desquiciada que se consumía en los rincones oscuros de internet, que sería alimentada por el odio”.Las cuentas de los troles rusos formaron parte de ese clamor; desde más de un mes antes de su discurso, un puñado de cuentas de amplificación gestionadas por la mayor agencia de inteligencia militar de Rusia, el GRU, hicieron circular expresiones de indignación por su elección, a menudo con el hashtag #CancelSarsour.Cuando Yiannopoulos habló, @TEN_GOP tuiteó las frases más jugosas —la línea “bomba de relojería del horror progresista”— y acumuló 3954 retuits y 5967 likes.Pronunció su discurso de graduación sin incidentes. Después, parece ser que los troles esperaron que dijera o hiciera algo divisorio. Y eso sucedió a principios de julio cuando, envalentonada tras su aparición en la CUNY, exhortó a la audiencia musulmana fuera de Chicago a rebelarse contra las políticas injustas del gobierno, que describió como “la mejor forma de yihad”.En el islam, la palabra “yihad” puede denotar cualquier lucha virtuosa, pero en el contexto político estadounidense es inextricable del concepto de guerra santa. Un político más pragmático podría haber evitado utilizarla, pero Sarsour se sentía como la de antes. “Así es como soy en la vida real”, dijo. “Soy de Brooklyn y soy palestina. Es mi personalidad”.Para los troles rusos, era una oportunidad.La semana siguiente, las cuentas rusas aumentaron de manera considerable su volumen de mensajes sobre Sarsour y produjeron 184 publicaciones en un solo día, según Advance Democracy Inc.Una vez más, el público respondió: cuando @TEN_GOP tuiteó: “Linda Sarsour pide abiertamente a los musulmanes que hagan la yihad contra Trump, por favor, investiguen este asunto”, recibió 6222 retuits y 6549 me gusta. Las cuentas mantuvieron un intenso enfoque en ella durante el mes de julio, cuando produjeron 894 publicaciones durante el mes siguiente y continuaron hasta el otoño, descubrió el grupo.Y una vez más, la reacción se extendió por las redes sociales. Los manifestantes acamparon frente al restaurante de parrilla kosher donde su hermano, Mohammed, trabajaba como gerente, exigiendo que fuera despedido. Dejó el trabajo y, finalmente, Nueva York.Su madre abrió un paquete que le llegó por correo y gritó: era un extraño libro autopublicado, titulado A Jihad Grows in Brooklyn, que pretendía ser la autobiografía de Sarsour y estaba ilustrado con fotografías familiares.“Digo, imagínense que todos los días al levantarse son un monstruo”, comentó Sarsour”.Los grupos progresistas se distanciaron de Sarsour, a la izquierda, y de sus compañeras copresidentas de la marcha, Tamika Mallory y Carmen Pérez.Erin Scott/ReutersA la caza de fantasmasResulta enloquecedoramente difícil decir con certeza qué efecto han tenido las operaciones de influencia rusas en Estados Unidos, porque cuando se afianzaron se apoyaron en divisiones sociales reales. Una vez introducidas en el discurso estadounidense, el rastro ruso desaparece, como el agua que se ha añadido a una piscina.Esto crea un enigma para los especialistas en desinformación, muchos de los cuales dicen que se ha exagerado el impacto de las intervenciones rusas. Después de las elecciones presidenciales de 2016, culpar a Rusia de los resultados no deseados se convirtió en “la salida emocional”, dijo Thomas Rid, autor de Desinformación y guerra política: historia de un siglo de falsificaciones y engaños.“Te juegan una mala pasada”, dijo Rid, profesor de la Escuela de Estudios Internacionales Avanzados de la Universidad Johns Hopkins. “Te conviertes en un idiota útil si ignoras las operaciones de información eficaces. Pero también si la ensalzas contando una historia, si la haces más poderosa de lo que es. Es un truco”.Las divisiones al interior de la Macha de las Mujeres ya existían.Las discusiones intestinas sobre la identidad y el antisemitismo habían tensado al grupo desde sus primeros días, cuando una de sus organizadoras, Vanessa Wruble, quien es judía, fue expulsada después de lo que describió como tensas conversaciones con Pérez y Mallory sobre el papel de los judíos en el racismo estructural. Pérez y Mallory han rebatido esa versión.Y la incomodidad con Sarsour había disminuido el entusiasmo entre algunos progresistas judíos, dijo Rachel Timoner, la rabina principal de la Congregación Beth Elohim en Park Slope, Brooklyn.Recordó haber salido en defensa de Sarsour contra los ataques “racistas e islamófobos”, solo para descubrir, cada vez, que surgía una nueva tormenta de fuego, a menudo como resultado de algo inflamatorio y “en última instancia indefendible” que Sarsour había dicho.A medida que pasaban los meses, dijo la rabina Timoner, los judíos comenzaron a preguntarse si estaban siendo excluidos de los movimientos progresistas.En 2018, se desató una nueva crisis interna por la asistencia de Mallory al Día del Salvador, una reunión anual de la Nación del Islam encabezada por Farrakhan.Mallory creció en Harlem, donde muchos veían positivamente a la Nación del Islam y a su fundador, como cruzados contra la violencia urbana. La presionaron para que rechazara a Farrakhan, a lo que se negó, aunque dijo que no compartía sus posturas antisemitas. Después del asesinato del padre de su hijo, explicó: “Fueron las mujeres de la Nación del Islam quienes me apoyaron”.“Siempre las he llevado cerca de mi corazón por esa razón”, dijo.Después de eso, el tejido de la coalición se rompió, de manera lenta y dolorosa. Sarsour y Perez se mantuvieron al lado de Mallory, y en poco tiempo, los grupos progresistas comenzaron a distanciarse de las tres. Bajo una intensa presión para que dejaran de ser las líderes, Sarsour, Perez y una tercera copresidenta, Bland, lo hicieron en 2019, un movimiento que, según dicen, estaba planeado desde hace tiempo.Las cuentas rusas aumentaron su producción en torno a Farrakhan y las lideresas de la Marcha de las Mujeres esa primavera, con 10 a 20 publicaciones al día, pero no hay pruebas de que fueran un motor principal de la conversación.Más o menos en ese momento, perdemos de vista la mayoría de los mensajes rusos. En el verano de 2018, Twitter suspendió 3841 cuentas vinculadas a la Agencia de Investigación de Internet y conservó 10 millones de sus tuits para que pudieran ser estudiados por los investigadores. Unos meses después, la plataforma suspendió y guardó el trabajo de 414 cuentas producidas por el GRU, la agencia de inteligencia militar.Con ello, se silenció un coro de voces que, durante años, habían ayudado a dar forma a las conversaciones estadounidenses sobre Black Lives Matter, la investigación de Mueller y los jugadores de la NFL arrodillados durante el himno nacional. El registro de los mensajes en torno a la Marcha de las Mujeres también se rompe ahí, congelado en el tiempo.La explotación rusa de Sarsour como figura divisoria debe entenderse como parte de la historia de la Marcha de las Mujeres, dijo Shireen Mitchell, una analista de tecnología que ha estudiado la interferencia rusa en el discurso afroestadounidense en línea.Ella comentó que las campañas rusas eran expertas en sembrar ideas que fluían hacia el discurso principal, después de lo cual, agregó, podían “solo sentarse y esperar”.“Es la preparación de todo eso, empezando por el principio”, dijo Mitchell, fundadora de Stop Online Violence Against Women. “Si esos miles de tuits causan una división entre los grupos que importan, si abren y permiten esa división, ya no es una grieta. Se convierte en un valle”.Otros consideraron que el papel de Rusia era marginal y entraba en los límites de un debate estadounidense necesario.“Es una pena que Linda Sarsour haya dañado ese movimiento intentando inyectar en él ideas nocivas que no tenían razón de ser en la Marcha de las Mujeres”, dijo Lancman, el exconcejal. “Por desgracia”, añadió, los rusos “parecen muy adeptos a explotar esas fisuras”.La rabina Timoner sonaba triste, al recordar todo lo que había pasado. Las heridas que se abrieron entre los progresistas aquel año nunca han terminado de cicatrizar, dijo.“Hay mucho dolor judío aquí”, dijo. “Esos bots rusos estaban hurgando en ese dolor”.La Marcha de las Mujeres continuó bajo un nuevo liderazgo, pero durante los meses de controversia, muchas mujeres que habían sido impulsadas por la primera marcha se alejaron.“No puedo recordar todas las historias negativas, solo recuerdo que había muchas”, dijo Jennifer Taylor-Skinner, una mujer de Seattle que, después de la marcha de 2017, dejó su trabajo en Microsoft y fundó The Electorette, un pódcast orientado a las mujeres progresistas. Ella nunca ha recuperado ese sentimiento de unidad.“Solo de pensarlo, todavía me siento un poco desvinculada de cualquier movimiento central”, dijo. “Aquí se estaba formando una posible coalición que se ha roto”.Una réplicaSarsour, de 42 años, había regresado a su oficina en Bay Ridge la primavera pasada, cinco años después de la primera Marcha de las Mujeres, cuando se enteró, por un reportero, de que había sido víctima del gobierno ruso.En la actualidad, rara vez la invitan a las plataformas nacionales y, cuando lo hacen, suele haber protestas. El rumor que había en torno a ella como futura candidata política se ha calmado. Sabe cómo se la ve, como una figura polarizadora. Se ha adaptado a esta realidad, y se ve a sí misma más como una activista, en el molde de Angela Davis.“Nunca voy a conseguir un trabajo de verdad” en una organización sin fines de lucro o corporación importante, comentó. “Ese es el tipo de impacto que estas cosas tienen en nuestras vidas”.Los datos sobre los mensajes rusos relacionados con la Marcha de las Mujeres aparecieron por primera vez a finales del año pasado en una revista académica, donde Samantha R. Bradshaw, experta en desinformación de la American University, revisó la injerencia del Estado en los movimientos feministas.Ella y su coautora, Amélie Henle, descubrieron un patrón de mensajes por parte de influentes cuentas de amplificadores que buscaban desmovilizar el activismo de la sociedad civil, impulsando las críticas interseccionales al feminismo y atacando a los organizadoras.Los movimientos, sostiene Bradshaw, son estructuras frágiles, que a menudo no están preparadas para hacer frente a campañas de sabotaje con buenos recursos y respaldadas por el Estado, especialmente cuando se combinan con algoritmos que promueven contenidos negativos. Pero los movimientos sociales saludables son esenciales para las democracias, dijo.“No vamos a tener una esfera pública robusta si nadie quiere organizar protestas”, dijo.Sarsour no es una académica, pero lo entendió bastante bien.“Señor, ten piedad”, dijo, al echar un vistazo a las conclusiones de Bradshaw.Sarsour trató de entenderlo: todo ese tiempo, el gobierno ruso la tenía en la mira. Hacía tiempo que creía saber de dónde venían sus críticos: la derecha estadounidense y los partidarios de Israel. Nunca se le ocurrió que pudieran provenir de un gobierno extranjero.“Pensar que Rusia va a usarme es mucho más peligroso y siniestro”, comentó. “Me pregunto cómo se beneficia Rusia de aprovechar mi identidad para debilitar movimientos contra Trump en Estados Unidos, me parece”, hizo un pausa. “Es solo que… vaya”.Entender lo que hicieron los troles rusos no cambiaría su posición.Aun así, la ayudó a entender esa época de su vida, en la que había estado en el centro de una tormenta. No eran únicamente sus compatriotas los que la odiaban. No fueron solamente sus aliados los que la repudiaron. Eso había pasado. Pero no era toda la historia.Llamó a Mallory.“No estábamos locas”, dijo.Aaron Krolik More

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      Elise Stefanik Says She’s Confident a Republican Wave Is Coming to the House

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      Representative Elise Stefanik, the No. 3 House Republican, also spoke about her PAC’s success in backing female candidates, 23 of whom are running in the fall.Today’s newsletter is a guest dispatch from Annie Karni, a congressional correspondent in Washington.Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, the No. 3 House Republican, predicted on Wednesday that her party would pick up as many as three dozen House seats in November, despite signs that the red wave many predicted months ago might not form after all.And, brushing aside concerns from many Republicans that the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade has saddled them with an unpopular position that is energizing Democrats all over the country, Stefanik told reporters defiantly at a news conference that “we will have a pro-life Republican majority in the next Congress.”Stefanik, who was first elected in 2014 to her upstate New York seat as a relative moderate, became a star of the MAGA universe thanks to her role as President Donald J. Trump’s chief defender on the House Intelligence Committee during his first impeachment trial.She has translated her Trump-refracted fame into a fund-raising boon for female Republican candidates she is boosting in critical House races — a move that is also helping build a base in the G.O.P. House conference for a politician with big ambitions.“My own experience going through impeachment No. 1, where I played an outsized role on the House Intelligence Committee — we built up a national donor list,” Stefanik said Wednesday at a briefing at the Republican National Committee about the midterm elections. “We’ve been able to have that donor list support other women candidates across the country.”Stefanik, 38, founded her political action committee, Elevate PAC, or E-PAC, in 2018, when only 13 Republican women served in the House of Representatives. At the time, her goal was to elect more conservative women to Congress.In 2020, 11 of the 15 House seats that Republicans flipped were won by women that E-PAC had endorsed. Today, there are 34 Republican women in the House.During this campaign cycle, Stefanik’s organization has raised and donated more than $1 million directly to female Republican candidates, and 23 women endorsed by E-PAC are running in the general election. Since its creation, E-PAC has raised $4 million to date.Another part of Stefanik’s aim is to help with news coverage. “One thing that is very clear to me is Democrat women get outsized coverage in the media,” Stefanik said. “They get magazine covers.” Those she helps, she said, “deserve glossy magazines as well.”The outcome of those races will help determine Stefanik’s clout as a queenmaker in the current, Trump-controlled version of the Republican Party. Her activities are also a key part of the G.O.P.’s overall midterm strategy to expand beyond the core political base of right-wing and conservative voters with a more diverse slate.The push to elevate female candidates comes as the Republican Party struggles to overcome political gains Democrats have made on the issue of abortion since the overturning of Roe v. Wade.In an election year when political tensions are running high over gender and social issues, liberal groups are willing to give Stefanik only so much credit for helping to elect women.“There are challenges that all women face in running for office,” said Christina Reynolds, a spokeswoman for Emily’s List, a group that backs Democratic female candidates who support abortion rights. “I understand why there’s a need for this on both sides of the aisle.”But she added, “To support women’s rights, to support our freedoms, we think it’s critical that we elect Democratic, pro-choice women.”Stefanik shrugged off questions about how the issue of abortion will affect the midterms. Her party has struggled to unite behind a strategy on a fraught social issue that is reshaping campaigns across the country and, in some cases, forcing Republicans to backpedal on hard-line positions they took to win their primaries.“On the issue of abortion, Democrats are working overtime to force the American people to rethink what their top priorities are,” Stefanik said. “In every poll, inflation is the No. 1 issue. In my district, Second Amendment issues are second. Our candidates know how to communicate on this issue.”Stefanik also emphasized that many of the candidates she is backing are mothers. “I think that’s a very compelling message to voters,” she said, noting that one congressional candidate in Ohio, Madison Gesiotto Gilbert, gave birth just days ago.E-PAC’s slate of candidates includes seven who are Hispanic, four who are veterans and one who is Black. Stefanik said it was the most diverse group of candidates her PAC had supported to date.Stefanik said she had no ideological litmus test for candidates to gain her organization’s financial backing and endorsement.This cycle, she has backed candidates who falsely claim that Trump won the 2020 election, like Karoline Leavitt in New Hampshire’s First Congressional District and Yesli Vega in Virginia’s Seventh District.Vega has come under attack for questioning on tape whether a woman was less likely to become pregnant after a rape.Stefanik also supported Representative Mayra Flores, who won a special election in Texas’s 34th District after saying, falsely, that the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol was stoked by members of Antifa and used a hashtag associated with the QAnon conspiracy theory in tweets that were later deleted.At the same time, Stefanik is backing Barbara Kirkmeyer, a state senator running in Colorado’s competitive Eighth District, who said President Biden legitimately won the 2020 election.Stefanik simply interviews candidates who are able to raise $250,000 in their first quarter, she said, and decides which of them have what it takes, based on her gut feeling and experience.“I interview and talk with everyone,” she said. “I put candidates through their paces. I ask how they would answer certain questions from the media.”After meeting hundreds of candidates across the country over the years, she said, “I’m able to tell pretty quickly, No. 1, if they have the fire in the belly, and also if they’re speaking from the heart on behalf of their district. I don’t do any ideological litmus test. These are all strong, conservative Republicans.”Karoline Leavitt with Senator Ted Cruz before her primary. “When you start your campaign as an outsider, you’re looking for that early support and help,” Leavitt said of Stefanik’s political action committee.Brian Snyder/ReutersIn some cases, Stefanik’s endorsements have put her at odds with leadership. She endorsed Leavitt, a 25-year-old hard-right Republican who served as an assistant in Trump’s White House press office before winning the G.O.P. nomination for a House seat in New Hampshire. Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, was backing Leavitt’s rival, Matt Mowers, in the primary.“When you start your campaign as an outsider, you’re looking for that early support and help,” Leavitt said on Wednesday, joining Stefanik briefly as an example of an E-PAC success story. She said that Stefanik, whom she once worked for, was “someone that I leaned on, not only for financial support through E-PAC but also for advice and support.”Republicans are expected to win back control of the House next year, although in recent weeks, the political winds that once favored them have shifted toward Democrats.Still, for Democrats to retain a majority, they will have to hold virtually all their tossup districts in addition to flipping some tossup seats Republicans currently hold.Stefanik said she remains bullish about a red wave.“I remember on election night in 2020 when people said Nancy Pelosi would pick up 15 seats,” she said, referring to the House speaker. “Well, Republicans picked up 15 seats.”She added: “Eighty percent of their dollars are on defense. Do I think we have the opportunity to earn that historic majority of 35 seats? I do. I’ve always thought that this cycle.”What to readToday’s big story: Letitia James, the attorney general of New York, filed a lawsuit accusing the Trump Organization, former President Trump and three of his children of what she called “staggering fraud.” Jonah E. Bromwich, William K. Rashbaum and Ben Protess wrote the main article examining the 220-page claim, and I have a short piece on the politics at play.The House voted mostly along party lines to overhaul the 135-year-old Electoral Count Act, the law that Trump tried to exploit to overturn his defeat, Carl Hulse reports.At the United Nations, President Biden called on countries to unify in the face of Russian aggression in Ukraine. Moscow’s goal, he said, is “extinguishing Ukraine’s right to exist as a state.” Follow our live coverage of the U.N. General Assembly here.The Federal Reserve tightened interest rates by a further three-quarters of a percentage point fewer than seven weeks before the November elections, an effort to stem inflation that remains stubbornly high. Chairman Jerome Powell said the U.S. economy was fundamentally healthy, however. The Times’s economic team covered all the angles here.Thank you for reading On Politics, and for being a subscriber to The New York Times. — BlakeRead past editions of the newsletter here.If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters here.Have feedback? Ideas for coverage? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      Our Assumptions About the Maternal Instinct

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      More from our inbox:The ‘No Labels’ Plan for a Centrist AlternativeSupport Us at WorkBaseball, FasterA Billionaire’s Giveaway Csilla KlenyánszkiTo the Editor:Re “The Pernicious Myth of Maternal Instinct,” by Chelsea Conaboy (Opinion guest essay, Aug. 28):My husband and I are two dads who raised a boy and a girl from birth to adulthood in small-town America.As gay dads, we got to pull back the curtain of the assumptions about maternal instinct. I showed up at the Mommy and Me music classes, the P.T.A. meetings and the informal klatches waiting at school for the kids at 3 p.m.When our kids came to us as newborns, I worried that we, as two men, might not be as naturally nurturing or “motherly” as a woman would be. But observing the many moms in action, I was disabused of that fear.The range of parenting was huge. Quite a few moms were not particularly “maternal” at all. Even though most were good parents, many were impatient, cold, sharp-edged. Several clearly had never wanted children.Would I say that, on average, the moms were more “nurturing” than the dads? Yes, and I won’t wade into the debate over how much of this is hormonal rather than cultural. But the bell curve was huge, as with all gender assumptions, and quite a few dads were more nurturing than the average mom.I also recall feeling, when I held my newborn daughter against my naked chest, capsules of fierce, inexplicable parental love bursting in my bloodstream in a way I’d never experienced. I later read a study of gay men whose oxytocin levels soared to levels similar to that of nursing moms when they held infant babies to their bosom. Perhaps we should start calling it “parental instinct.”Ken DorphSag Harbor, N.Y.To the Editor:Oh, hurray, another gloomy take on mothering in 2022. “To become a parent is to be deluged” … “brutal” … “a rock at the ocean’s edge, battered by waves and tides and sun and wind.” Come on, really?Maybe the reason that today’s writing on motherhood so often describes it in terms of various degrees of torture is that many young mums, to their great credit, and having read chapter and verse on the subject, try to do the job perfectly. Then they torment themselves when they can’t.The good news is that there is no such thing as perfect mothering, just good enough mothering, and that is manageable by most. Welcome to the ranks, moms. Rest assured you are doing a good job. Bless you all, and, dare I say it, have fun.Margaret McGirrGreenwich, Conn.To the Editor:Chelsea Conaboy seems to dismiss the “myth” of maternal instinct because it has been misused by some to limit the role of women in society. Nonsense! Because it has been misused is no reason to reject the importance of this most wondrous of emotions.Who cannot be awed and deeply respectful of the mother elephant, tenderly using her trunk to help her newborn stand, or of the mother dog or cat as she tends to her newborn pups after birth, licking off the birth membranes and carefully positioning them for nursing. Has anyone seen a father do that? And yet, I doubt that there has been a cabal of animal fathers scheming to assign this task to the mothers. Why should humans be any different?Thank God for maternal instinct.Robert H. PalmerNew YorkThe ‘No Labels’ Plan for a Centrist Alternative Samuel Corum for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “If an Alternative Candidate Is Needed in 2024, These Folks Will Be Ready,” by David Brooks (column, Sept. 5):To the Editor:David Brooks tells us that a new political group called No Labels may offer a way out of our political crisis. He writes, “If ever the country was ripe for something completely different, it’s now.”He did not ask the simplest and most important question: Where does its money come from? If we are truly ready for something new, then the first principle is transparency about sources of funding. Much of No Labels’ money comes through super PACs, which means that donors can give very large amounts, shape the group’s goals and preserve their anonymity.To accept the worst of American political abuses — ones brought to us by Citizens United — is, by definition, not to make a clean new start.Steven FeiermanPhiladelphiaTo the Editor:The idea of a No Labels presidential candidate is destined to fail. A better challenge would be for all candidates to commit themselves to choosing a vice president from the other party. Now that, in David Brooks’s own words, would be “something completely different.”Lawrence RosenBar Harbor, MaineSupport Us at Work Lily PadulaTo the Editor:Re “So You Wanted to Get Work Done at the Office?” (Business, Sept. 12):While there is more discussion about what makes a productive work environment, this isn’t a new issue for many of us who are neurodivergent, disabled, burned out or healing from trauma.We have been acutely aware of how difficult it can be to operate in a workplace that doesn’t support personal sensory needs — lights, sounds, temperature, positioning, etc.Unsupportive work environments can affect employees’ focus, job satisfaction and productivity. We must normalize communication about sensory experiences in the workplace, and that can also promote inclusion and equity for all.Let’s go beyond thinking that this is just a pandemic-related issue. This problem has been present and it will continue because we all have sensory, emotional and cognitive needs. The workplace is just one important setting where we notice them.Nicole VillegasPortland, Ore.The writer is an occupational therapist and a teaching professional at Boston University.Baseball, Faster John Minchillo/Associated PressTo the Editor:Re “M.L.B. Bans Shift, Adds Pitch Clock and Enlarges the Bases” (Sports, Sept. 10):So, just like that, Major League Baseball has decided to join the fast-paced and restless world in instituting, among other changes, a 15- or 20-second timer between pitches. The thinking goes that this will yield a more action-packed and less stagnant game.That’s a shame. Don’t get me wrong: I work in the technology start-up sector and am well accustomed to the incessant movement, constant productivity and “go go go” mind-set of our modern world.But I’m also a psychiatrist who understands the restorative power of mindfulness and meditative experience. And baseball, with all its beautiful pauses and inherent stillness, has provided me with just that from a very young age.David Y. HarariBurlington, Vt.A Billionaire’s GiveawayYvon Chouinard founded Patagonia in 1973.Natalie Behring for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Billionaire Gives Away His Company to Fight Climate Change” (Business, Sept. 15), about the founder of Patagonia transferring ownership of his company to a trust and a nonprofit organization:Billionaires should be a very rare thing! But even as we rightly congratulate Yvon Chouinard for reducing their number by one with his visionary benevolence, let’s not forget that his money will be doing the job our own government should be doing, if only it were allowed to operate as intended by taxing the wealthy and redistributing the funds for the benefit of all.Elisa AdamsNew Hyde Park, N.Y. More

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      How Russian Trolls Helped Keep the Women’s March Out of Lock Step

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      Linda Sarsour awoke on Jan. 23, 2017, logged onto the internet, and felt sick.The weekend before, she had stood in Washington at the head of the Women’s March, a mobilization against President Donald J. Trump that surpassed all expectations. Crowds had begun forming before dawn, and by the time she climbed up onto the stage, they extended farther than the eye could see.More than four million people around the United States had taken part, experts later estimated, placing it among the largest single-day protests in the nation’s history.But then something shifted, seemingly overnight. What she saw on Twitter that Monday was a torrent of focused grievance that targeted her. In 15 years as an activist, largely advocating for the rights of Muslims, she had faced pushback, but this was of a different magnitude. A question began to form in her mind: Do they really hate me that much?That morning, there were things going on that Ms. Sarsour could not imagine.More than 4,000 miles away, organizations linked to the Russian government had assigned teams to the Women’s March. At desks in bland offices in St. Petersburg, using models derived from advertising and public relations, copywriters were testing out social media messages critical of the Women’s March movement, adopting the personas of fictional Americans.They posted as Black women critical of white feminism, conservative women who felt excluded, and men who mocked participants as hairy-legged whiners. But one message performed better with audiences than any other.It singled out an element of the Women’s March that might, at first, have seemed like a detail: Among its four co-chairs was Ms. Sarsour, a Palestinian American activist whose hijab marked her as an observant Muslim.Linda Sarsour, a leader of the initial Women’s March in January 2017. Within days, Russian trolls were targeting her online.Theo Wargo/Getty ImagesOver the 18 months that followed, Russia’s troll factories and its military intelligence service put a sustained effort into discrediting the movement by circulating damning, often fabricated narratives around Ms. Sarsour, whose activism made her a lightning rod for Mr. Trump’s base and also for some of his most ardent opposition.One hundred and fifty-two different Russian accounts produced material about her. Public archives of Twitter accounts known to be Russian contain 2,642 tweets about Ms. Sarsour, many of which found large audiences, according to an analysis by Advance Democracy Inc., a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that conducts public-interest research and investigations.Many people know the story about how the Women’s March movement fractured, leaving lasting scars on the American left.A fragile coalition to begin with, it headed into crisis over its co-chairs’ association with Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader, who is widely condemned for his antisemitic statements. When this surfaced, progressive groups distanced themselves from Ms. Sarsour and her fellow march co-chairs, Carmen Perez, Tamika Mallory and Bob Bland, and some called for them to step down.But there is also a story that has not been told, one that only emerged years later in academic research, of how Russia inserted itself into this moment.For more than a century, Russia and the Soviet Union sought to weaken their adversaries in the West by inflaming racial and ethnic tensions. In the 1960s, K.G.B. officers based in the United States paid agents to paint swastikas on synagogues and desecrate Jewish cemeteries. They forged racist letters, supposedly from white supremacists, to African diplomats.They did not invent these social divisions; America already had them. Ladislav Bittman, who worked for the secret police in Czechoslovakia before defecting to the United States, compared Soviet disinformation programs to an evil doctor who expertly diagnoses the patient’s vulnerabilities and exploits them, “prolongs his illness and speeds him to an early grave instead of curing him.”A decade ago, Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, oversaw a revival of these tactics, seeking to undermine democracies around the world from the shadows.Social media now provided an easy way to feed ideas into American discourse, something that, for half a century, the K.G.B. had struggled to do. And the Russian government secretly funneled more than $300 million to political parties in more than two dozen countries in an effort to sway their policies in Moscow’s favor since 2014, according to a U.S. intelligence review made public last week.What effect these intrusions had on American democracy is a question that will be with us for years. It may be unanswerable. Already, social media was amplifying Americans’ political impulses, leaving behind a trail of damaged communities. Already, trust in institutions was declining, and rage was flaring up in public life. These things would have been true without Russian interference.But to trace the Russian intrusions over the months that followed that first Women’s March is to witness a persistent effort to make all of them worse.After the 2016 election, the Russian disinformation operation at the Internet Research Agency shifted focus from Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton to broader U.S. targets.James Hill for The New York Times‘Refrigerators and Nails’In early 2017, the trolling operation was in its imperial phase, swelling with confidence.Accounts at the Internet Research Agency, an organization based in St. Petersburg and controlled by a Putin ally, had boasted of propelling Mr. Trump to victory. That year, the group’s budget nearly doubled, according to internal communications made public by U.S. prosecutors. More than a year would pass before social media platforms executed sweeping purges of Russian-backed sock-puppet accounts.For the trolls, it was a golden hour.Under these auspicious conditions, their goals shifted from electoral politics to something more general — the goal of deepening rifts in American society, said Alex Iftimie, a former federal prosecutor who worked on a 2018 case against an administrator at Project Lakhta, which oversaw the Internet Research Agency and other Russian trolling operations.“It wasn’t exclusively about Trump and Clinton anymore,” said Mr. Iftimie, now a partner at Morrison Foerster. “It was deeper and more sinister and more diffuse in its focus on exploiting divisions within society on any number of different levels.”There was a routine: Arriving for a shift, workers would scan news outlets on the ideological fringes, far left and far right, mining for extreme content that they could publish and amplify on the platforms, feeding extreme views into mainstream conversations.Artyom Baranov, who worked at one of Project Lakhta’s affiliates from 2018 to 2020, concluded that his co-workers were, for the most part, people who needed the money, indifferent to the themes they were asked to write on.“If they were assigned to write text about refrigerators, they would write about refrigerators, or, say, nails, they would write about nails,” said Mr. Baranov, one of a handful of former trolls who have spoken on the record about their activities. But instead of refrigerators and nails, it was “Putin, Putin, then Putin, and then about Navalny,” referring to Aleksei Navalny, the jailed opposition leader.The job was not to put forward arguments, but to prompt a visceral, emotional reaction, ideally one of “indignation,” said Mr. Baranov, a psychoanalyst by training, who was assigned to write posts on Russian politics. “The task is to make a kind of explosion, to cause controversy,” he said.When a post succeeded at enraging a reader, he said, a co-worker would sometimes remark, with satisfaction, Liberala razorvala. A liberal was torn apart. “It wasn’t on the level of discussing facts or giving new arguments,” he said. “It’s always a way of digging into dirty laundry.”Feminism was an obvious target, because it was viewed as a “Western agenda,” and hostile to the traditional values that Russia represented, said Mr. Baranov, who spoke about his work in hopes of warning the public to be more skeptical of material online. Already, for months, Russian accounts purporting to belong to Black women had been drilling down on racial rifts within American feminism:“White feminism seems to be the most stupid 2k16 trend”“Watch Muhammad Ali shut down a white feminist criticizing his arrogance”“Aint got time for your white feminist bullshit”“Why black feminists don’t owe Hillary Clinton their support”“A LIL LOUDER FOR THE WHITE FEMINISTS IN THE BACK”In January 2017, as the Women’s March drew nearer, they tested different approaches on different audiences, as they had during the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. They posed as resentful trans women, poor women and anti-abortion women. They dismissed the marchers as pawns of the Jewish billionaire George Soros.And they derided the women who planned to participate, often in crudely sexual terms. In coordination, beginning on Jan. 19, 46 Russian accounts pumped out 459 original suggestions for #RenameMillionWomenMarch, a hashtag created by a right-wing podcaster from Indiana:The Why Doesn’t Anybody Love Me MarchThe Strong Women Constantly Playing the Victim MarchThe Lonely Cat Lady MarchThe Cramp CampThe Bearded Women ConventionBroken Broads BloviatingThe Liberal Trail of TearsCoyote Ugly BitchfestIn the meantime, another, far more effective line of messaging was developing.Ms. Sarsour recalled the overwhelming torrent of attacks. “I mean, just imagine,” she said, “every day that you woke up, you were a monster.”Brad Ogbonna/Redux‘It Was Like an Avalanche’As one of the four co-chairs of the Women’s March, Ms. Sarsour came with a track record — and with baggage.The daughter of a Palestinian American shopkeeper in Crown Heights, she had risen to prominence as a voice for the rights of Muslims after 9/11. In 2015, when she was 35, a New York Times profile anointed her — a “Brooklyn Homegirl in a Hijab” — as something rare, a potential Arab American candidate for elected office.In 2016, Senator Bernie Sanders featured her at a campaign event, a stamp of approval from one of the country’s most influential progressives. That troubled pro-Israel politicians in New York, who pointed to her support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which seeks to secure Palestinian rights by isolating Israel. Critics of the movement contend that it threatens Israel’s existence.Rory Lancman, then a city councilman from Queens, recalls his growing alarm as she began to appear regularly at events for left-wing causes unrelated to Israel, like fair wages, where, he felt, “her real agenda was trying to marry an anti-Israel agenda with different progressive causes.”The news that Ms. Sarsour was among the leaders of the Women’s March, said Mr. Lancman, a Democrat, struck him as “heartbreaking — that’s the word — that antisemitism is tolerated and rationalized in progressive spaces.”That was politics as usual, and Ms. Sarsour was accustomed to it: the long-running feud among Democrats over the implications of criticizing Israel.But forty-eight hours after the march, a shift of tone occurred online, with a surge of posts describing Ms. Sarsour as a radical jihadi who had infiltrated American feminism. Ms. Sarsour recalls this vividly, because she woke to a worried text message from a friend and glanced at Twitter to find that she was trending.Not all of this backlash was organic. That week, Russian amplifier accounts began circulating posts that focused on Ms. Sarsour, many of them inflammatory and based on falsehoods, claiming she was a radical Islamist, “a pro-ISIS Anti USA Jew Hating Muslim” who “was seen flashing the ISIS sign.”Some of these posts found a large audience. At 7 p.m. on Jan. 21, an Internet Research Agency account posing as @TEN_GOP, a fictional right-wing American from the South, tweeted that Ms. Sarsour favored imposing Shariah law in the United States, playing into a popular anti-Muslim conspiracy theory that Mr. Trump had helped to popularize on the campaign trail.This message took hold, racking up 1,686 replies, 8,046 retweets and 6,256 likes. An hour later, @PrisonPlanet, an influential right-wing account, posted a tweet on the same theme. The following day, nearly simultaneously, a small army of 1,157 right-wing accounts picked up the narrative, publishing 1,659 posts on the subject, according to a reconstruction by Graphika, a social media monitoring company.Things were changing on the ground in New York. At the Arab American Association of New York, the nonprofit immigrant advocacy organization Ms. Sarsour ran in Bay Ridge, hate mail began to pour in — postcards, handwritten screeds on notebook paper, her photo printed out and defaced with red X’s.“This was an entirely new level, and it felt weird, because it was coming from all over the country,” said Kayla Santosuosso, then the nonprofit’s deputy director, who remembers bringing the mail to Ms. Sarsour in shoe boxes. Ms. Sarsour, worried that she had become “a liability,” stepped down from her position there that February.By the spring, the backlash against Ms. Sarsour had developed into a divisive political sideshow, one that easily drowned out the ideas behind the Women’s March. Every time she thought the attacks were quieting, they surged back. “It was like an avalanche,” she said. “Like I was swimming in it every day. It was like I never got out of it.”When she was invited to appear as a graduation speaker at the City University of New York’s graduate school of public health, the furor began weeks in advance. It caught the attention of the far-right polemicist Milo Yiannopoulos, who traveled to New York for a protest that attracted, as a Times reporter wrote, “a strange mix, including right-leaning Jews and Zionists, commentators like Pamela Geller, and some members of the alt-right.”“Linda Sarsour is a Shariah-loving, terrorist-embracing, Jew-hating, ticking time bomb of progressive horror,” Mr. Yiannopoulos told the crowd.Ms. Sarsour recalls the period leading up to the graduation speech as particularly stressful. As it approached, she had visions of a figure coming out of the shadows to kill her, “some poor, like, deranged person who was consumed by the dark corners of the internet, who would be fueled by hate.”Russian troll accounts were part of that clamor; beginning more than a month before her speech, a handful of amplifier accounts managed by Russia’s largest military intelligence agency, the G.R.U., circulated expressions of outrage at her being selected, often hashtagged #CancelSarsour.When Mr. Yiannopoulos spoke, @TEN_GOP tweeted the juiciest phrases — the “ticking time bomb of progressive horror” line — and racked up 3,954 retweets and 5,967 likes.Her graduation speech passed without incident. Then the trolls waited, it seems, for her to say or do something divisive. And that happened in early July, when, emboldened after her C.U.N.Y. appearance, she urged a Muslim audience outside Chicago to push back against unjust government policies, calling it “the best form of jihad.”In Islam, the word “jihad” can denote any virtuous struggle, but in the American political context it is inextricable from the concept of holy war. A more pragmatic politician might have avoided using it, but Ms. Sarsour was feeling like her old self. “That’s who I am in real life,” she said. “I’m from Brooklyn, and I’m Palestinian. It’s my personality.”To the Russian trolls, it was an opportunity.The following week, Russian accounts dramatically increased their volume of messaging about Ms. Sarsour, producing 184 posts on a single day, according to Advance Democracy Inc.Once again, the audience responded: When @TEN_GOP tweeted, “linda sarsour openly calls for muslims to wage jihad against trump, please look into this matter,” it received 6,222 retweets and 6,549 likes. The accounts sustained an intense focus on her through July, producing 894 posts over the next month and continuing into the autumn, the group found.And once again, the backlash spilled out from social media. Protesters camped outside the kosher barbecue restaurant where her brother, Mohammed, worked as a manager, demanding that he be fired. He left the job, and, eventually, New York.Her mother opened a package that arrived in the mail and screamed: It was a bizarre self-published book, titled “A Jihad Grows in Brooklyn,” that purported to be Ms. Sarsour’s autobiography and was illustrated with family photographs.“I mean, just imagine,” Ms. Sarsour said, “every day that you woke up, you were a monster.”Progressive groups distanced themselves from Ms. Sarsour, left, and her fellow march co-chairs Tamika Mallory and Carmen Perez.Erin Scott/ReutersChasing GhostsIt is maddeningly difficult to say with any certainty what effect Russian influence operations have had on the United States, because when they took hold they piggybacked on real social divisions. Once pumped into American discourse, the Russian trace vanishes, like water that has been added to a swimming pool.This creates a conundrum for disinformation specialists, many of whom say the impact of Russian interventions has been overblown. After the 2016 presidential election, blaming unwelcome outcomes on Russia became “the emotional way out,” said Thomas Rid, author of “Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare.”“It’s playing a trick on you,” said Dr. Rid, a professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. “You become a useful idiot if you ignore effective info ops. But also if you talk it up by telling a story, if you make it more powerful than it is. It’s a trick.”The divisions within the Women’s March existed already.Internal disputes about identity and antisemitism had strained the group from its early days, when one of its organizers, Vanessa Wruble, who is Jewish, was pushed out after what she described as tense conversations with Ms. Perez and Ms. Mallory about the role of Jews in structural racism. Ms. Perez and Ms. Mallory have disputed that account.And discomfort with Ms. Sarsour had dampened enthusiasm among some Jewish progressives, said Rachel Timoner, the senior rabbi of Congregation Beth Elohim in Park Slope, Brooklyn.She recalled stepping up to defend Ms. Sarsour against “racist and Islamophobic” attacks, only to find, each time, that a new firestorm would arise, often resulting from something inflammatory and “ultimately indefensible” Ms. Sarsour had said.As the months wore on, Rabbi Timoner said, Jews began asking themselves whether they were being excluded from progressive movements.In 2018, a new internal crisis was triggered by Ms. Mallory’s attendance at Saviours’ Day, an annual gathering of the Nation of Islam led by Mr. Farrakhan.Ms. Mallory grew up in Harlem, where many viewed the Nation of Islam and its founder positively, as crusaders against urban violence. Pressured to disavow Mr. Farrakhan, she refused, though she said she did not share his antisemitic views. After her son’s father was murdered, she explained, “it was the women of the Nation of Islam who supported me.”“I have always held them close to my heart for that reason,” she said.After that, the fabric of the coalition tore, slowly and painfully. Ms. Sarsour and Ms. Perez stuck by Ms. Mallory, and before long, progressive groups began distancing themselves from all three. Under intense pressure to step down as the leaders, Ms. Sarsour, Ms. Perez, and a third co-chair, Bob Bland, did so in 2019, a move they say was long planned.Russian accounts boosted their output around Mr. Farrakhan and the Women’s March leaders that spring, posting 10 or 20 times a day, but there is no evidence that they were a primary driver of the conversation.Around this time, we largely lose our view into Russian messaging. In the summer of 2018, Twitter suspended 3,841 accounts traced to the Internet Research Agency, preserving 10 million of their tweets so they could be studied by researchers. A few months later, the platform suspended and preserved the work of 414 accounts produced by the G.R.U., the military intelligence agency.With that, a chorus of voices went silent — accounts that, for years, had helped shape American conversations about Black Lives Matter, the Mueller investigation and NFL players kneeling during the national anthem. The record of the messaging around the Women’s March breaks off there, too, frozen in time.Russia’s exploitation of Ms. Sarsour as a wedge figure should be understood as part of the history of the Women’s March, said Shireen Mitchell, a technology analyst who has studied Russian interference in Black online discourse.Russian campaigns, she said, were adept at seeding ideas that flowed into mainstream discourse, after which, as she put it, they could “just sit and wait.”“It’s the priming of all that, starting from the beginning,” said Ms. Mitchell, the founder of Stop Online Violence Against Women. “If those thousand tweets hit a division between the groups that matter, if they open and allow that division, it’s no longer a crack. It becomes a valley.”Others saw Russia’s role as marginal, tinkering around the edges of a necessary American discussion.“It’s a shame that Linda Sarsour damaged that movement by trying to inject into it noxious ideas that had no reason to be part of the Women’s March,” said Mr. Lancman, the former city councilman. “Unfortunately,” he added, Russians “seem very adept at exploiting these fissures.”Rabbi Timoner sounded sad, recalling all that had happened. The wounds that opened up between progressives that year have never quite healed, she said.“There is so much Jewish pain here,” she said. “Those Russian bots were poking at that pain.”The Women’s March continued under new leadership, but during the months of controversy, many women who had been galvanized by the first march drifted away.“I can’t remember all the negative stories, I just remember that there were so many of them,” said Jennifer Taylor-Skinner, a Seattle woman who, after the 2017 march, quit her job at Microsoft and founded “The Electorette,” a podcast geared toward progressive women. She hasn’t ever recaptured that feeling of unity.“Just thinking about it, I still feel a bit unmoored from any central movement,” she said. “There was a coalition possibly forming here that has been broken up.”An AftershockMs. Sarsour, 42, was back in her old office in Bay Ridge this past spring, five years after the first Women’s March, when she learned, from a reporter, that the Russian government had targeted her.She is seldom invited to national platforms these days, and when she is, protests often follow. Whatever buzz there was around her as a future political candidate has quieted. She knows how she is seen, as a polarizing figure. She has adjusted to this reality, and sees herself more as an activist, in the mold of Angela Davis.“I’m never going to get a real job,” at a major nonprofit or a corporation, she said. “That’s the kind of impact that these things have on our lives.”Data on Russian messaging around the Women’s March first appeared late last year in an academic journal, where Samantha R. Bradshaw, a disinformation expert at American University, reviewed state interference in feminist movements.She and her co-author, Amélie Henle, found a pattern of messaging by influential amplifier accounts that sought to demobilize civil society activism, by pumping up intersectional critiques of feminism and attacking organizers.Movements, Dr. Bradshaw argues, are fragile structures, often unprepared to weather well-resourced state-backed sabotage campaigns, especially when combined with algorithms that promote negative content. But healthy social movements are essential to democracies, she said.“We’re not going to have a robust public sphere if nobody wants to organize protests,” she said.Ms. Sarsour isn’t an academic, but she understood it well enough.“Lord have mercy,” she said, glancing over Dr. Bradshaw’s findings.Ms. Sarsour tried to get her head around it: All that time, the Russian government had been thinking about her. She had long had a sense of where her critics came from: the American right wing, and supporters of Israel. A foreign government — that was something that had never occurred to her.“To think that Russia is going to use me, it’s much more dangerous and sinister,” she said. “What does Russia get out of leveraging my identity, you know, to undermine movements that were anti-Trump in America — I guess —” she paused. “It’s just, wow.”Understanding what Russian trolls did would not change her position.Still, it helped her understand that time in her life, when she had been at the center of a storm. It wasn’t just her fellow countrymen hating her. It wasn’t just her allies disavowing her. That had happened. But it wasn’t the whole story.She placed a call to Ms. Mallory.“We weren’t crazy,” she said.Aaron Krolik More

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      Giorgia Meloni May Lead Italy, and Europe Is Worried

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      The hard-right leader has excoriated the European Union in the past, and she regularly blasts illegal immigrants and George Soros. But she is closer than ever to becoming prime minister.CAGLIARI, Sardinia — Giorgia Meloni, the hard-right leader of a party descended from post-Fascist roots and the favorite to become Italy’s next prime minister after elections this month, is known for her rhetorical crescendos, thundering timbre and ferocious speeches slamming gay-rights lobbies, European bureaucrats and illegal migrants.But she was suddenly soft-spoken when asked on a recent evening if she agreed, all caveats aside, with the historical consensus that the Fascist leader Benito Mussolini — whom she admired in her youth as a “good politician” — had been evil and bad for Italy.“Yeah,” she said, almost inaudibly, between sips of an Aperol Spritz and drags on a thin cigarette during an interview in Sardinia, where she had completed another high-decibel political rally.That simple syllable spoke volumes about Ms. Meloni’s campaign to reassure a global audience as she appears poised to become the first politician with a post-Fascist lineage to run Italy since the end of World War II.Such a feat seemed unimaginable not so long ago, and to pull it off, Ms. Meloni — who would also make history as the first woman to lead Italy — is balancing on a high-stakes wire, persuading her hard-right base of “patriots” that she hasn’t changed, while seeking to convince international skeptics that she’s no extremist, that the past is past, not prologue, and that Italy’s mostly moderate voters trust her, so they should, too.On Sept. 25, Italians will vote in national elections for the first time since 2018. In those years, three governments of wildly different political complexions came and went, the last a broad national unity government led by Mario Draghi, a technocrat who was the personification of pro-European stability.Ms. Meloni led the only major party, the Brothers of Italy, to stay outside that unity government, allowing her to vacuum up the opposition vote. Her support in polls steadily expanded from 4 percent in 2018 to 25 percent in a country where even moderate voters have grown numb to Fascist-Communist name calling, but remain enthusiastic about new, and potentially providential, leaders.As populism swept Italy in the last decade, Ms. Meloni adopted harsher tones and created the hard right’s latest iteration, the Brothers of Italy.Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesMs. Meloni said her skyrocketing popularity did not mean the country had “moved to the extremes,” but that it had simply grown more comfortable with her and confident in her viability, even as she has tried to reposition herself closer to the European mainstream. Ms. Meloni, whose campaign slogan is “Ready,” has become a staunch supporter of NATO and Ukraine, and says she backs the European Union and the euro. The State of the WarDramatic Gains for Ukraine: After Ukraine’s offensive in its northeast drove Russian forces into a chaotic retreat, Ukrainian leaders face critical choices on how far to press the attack.How the Strategy Formed: The plan that allowed Ukraine’s recent gains began to take shape months ago during a series of intense conversations between Ukrainian and U.S. officials.Putin’s Struggles at Home: Russia’s setbacks in Ukraine have left President Vladimir V. Putin’s image weakened, his critics emboldened and his supporters looking for someone else to blame.Southern Counteroffensive: Military operations in the south have been a painstaking battle of river crossings, with pontoon bridges as prime targets for both sides. So far, it is Ukraine that has advanced.Global markets and the European establishment remain wary. “I fear the social and moral agenda of the right wing,” Frans Timmermans, the European Commission’s vice president, said recently about the threat Ms. Meloni’s coalition posed to E.U. values. As recently as last month, she called for a naval blockade against migrants. She has depicted the European Union as an accomplice to “the project of ethnic replacement of Europe’s citizens desired by the great capitals and international speculators.”She has in the past characterized the euro as the “wrong currency” and gushed with support for Viktor Orban of Hungary, Marine Le Pen of France and the illiberal democracies in Eastern Europe. She excoriated “Brussels bureaucrats” and “emissaries” of George Soros, a favorite boogeyman of the nationalist right and conspiracy theorists depicting a world run by Jewish internationalist financiers.There remains concern that, once in power, Ms. Meloni would toss off her pro-European sheep’s wool and reveal her nationalist fangs — reverting to protectionism, caving in to her Putin-adoring coalition partners, rolling back gay rights and eroding liberal E.U. norms.Ms. Meloni called for a naval blockade against migrants as recently as last month.Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesInternational investors and global leaders are wrong to be “afraid,” said Ms. Meloni, who is as affable and easygoing in private as she is vitriolic in public. Even in the midst of a heated campaign, she refused to take the bait from a desperate leader of the divided Italian left, who sounded “the alarm for Italian democracy.”“They’ll accuse me of being a Fascist my whole life,” Ms. Meloni said. “But I don’t care because in any case the Italians don’t believe anymore in this garbage.”She is delivering rations of red meat to her base (mass immigration is “an instrument in the hands of big great powers” to weaken workers, she growled in Cagliari) and is trying to mend fractures with the other right-wing leaders she is running with in a coalition.Her chief ally, Matteo Salvini, became the darling of the hard right in 2018 when he pivoted his once-secessionist northern-based League party into a nationalist force. But Ms. Meloni said those hard-right voters “came back home, because I am of that culture, so no one can do it better than I can.”Even so, Mr. Salvini is already creating problems for Ms. Meloni by urging a reconsideration of sanctions against Russia.Ms. Meloni acknowledged that her other coalition partner, Silvio Berlusconi, the former prime minister who famously named a bed after President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, had put her “in difficulty as a woman” during his Bunga Bunga sex scandals with young women, when she was herself a young woman in his government. Neither of her partners, she suspects, wants a woman in charge.“I would like to say, ‘No, it’s not a problem that I’m a woman,’” Ms. Meloni said. “But I’m no more sure about that.”Ms. Meloni suspects that her coalition partners don’t want a woman in charge.Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesBut when it comes to being a woman in politics, Ms. Meloni has leaned in. Her veneer of Roman-accented authenticity and her escalating and incensed style have become a part of the Italian political, and pop, landscape.In 2019, her hard-line defense of the traditional family, and against L.G.B.T.Q. marriage and adoption — while herself being an unwed mother — prompted D.J.s to mockingly put one of her furious refrains, “I am Giorgia, I am a woman, I am a mother, I am Italian, I am Christian,” to a beat. It went viral. Ms. Meloni used it as a calling card. She titled her best-selling book “I am Giorgia.”Ms. Meloni grew up without her father, who when she was a toddler set sail for the Canary Islands, where she learned Spanish on summer visits. After a fire that she and her older sister accidentally started, her mother, who at one point wrote romance novels to make ends meet, moved the family into the working class and left-leaning Garbatella neighborhood of Rome.Ms. Meloni was overweight and introverted, but as a 15-year-old fan of fantasy books (and Michael Jackson, from whom she said she learned her good English) found what she has called a second family in the hard-right Youth Front of the post-Fascist Italian Social Movement.She considered herself a soldier in Rome’s perpetual, often violent and sometimes fatal ideological wars between Communist and post-Fascist extremists, where everything from soccer games to high schools was politicized. Her party leader went to Israel to renounce the crimes of Fascism at the same time as she was rising quickly, later becoming the republic’s youngest-ever minister.But as populism swept Italy in the last decade, Ms. Meloni adopted harsher tones and created the hard right’s latest iteration, the Brothers of Italy. She said she resented its members’ being depicted as “nostalgic imbeciles,” because she had worked hard to purge Fascists and build a new history.An activist was detained by law enforcement agents for interrupting Ms. Meloni’s rally in Cagliari.Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesLike Mr. Salvini, she turned her social media accounts into populist pasta on the wall as she desperately sought traction. In the town of Vinci she accused the French of trying to claim Leonardo da Vinci as one of their own. She went to a grappa distillery to call the president then of the E.U., Jean-Claude Juncker, a drunk. She warned about an “empire” of “invaders” consisting of President Emmanuel Macron of France, Angela Merkel of Germany, Mr. Soros and Wall Street.At her annual political conference in 2018, she hosted Stephen K. Bannon and said that she supported his effort “to build a network that goes beyond the European borders,” and that “I look with interest at the phenomenon of Donald Trump” and at the “phenomenon of Putin in Russia.” She added, “And so the bigger the network gets, the happier I am.”But on the threshold of running Italy, Ms. Meloni has pivoted. After years of fawning over Ms. Le Pen, she is suddenly distancing herself. (“I haven’t got relations with her,” she said.) Same for Mr. Orban. (“I didn’t agree with some positions he had about Ukrainian war.”) She now calls Mr. Putin an anti-Western aggressor and said she would “totally” continue to send offensive arms to Ukraine.But critics say she revealed her true self during a recent speech at a conference supporting Spain’s hard-right Vox party. “There is no possible mediation. Yes to the natural family. No to the L.G.B.T. lobbies,” she bellowed in Spanish. “No to the violence of Islam, yes to safer borders, no to mass immigration, yes to work for our people. No to major international finance.”A supporter of the Brothers of Italy in Cagliari.Gianni Cipriano for The New York Times“The tone, that was very wrong,” she said in the interview. “But it happens to me when I’m very tired,” she said, adding that her passionate delivery “becomes hysteric.”There are things she won’t give up on, including the tricolor flame she inherited as her party symbol. Many historians say it evokes the flickers over the tomb of Mussolini.The flame, she has said, has “nothing to do with fascism but is a recognition of the journey made by the democratic right in our Republican history.”“Don’t extinguish the flame, Giorgia,” a supporter shouted as Ms. Meloni commanded the stage in Cagliari, where she reserved her sharpest invective for leftist attacks that she said tried to depict her as “a monster.”“They don’t scare me,” she screamed above chants of “Giorgia, Giorgia, Giorgia.” “They don’t scare me.” More