HARTFORD, Conn. — A woman approaches a drop box in the dark with what appears to be handfuls of ballots. At a different drop box, someone else is seen making multiple trips to insert ballots. At yet another, the same car stops on at least three separate occasions, with different people stepping out and heading to the box.
It’s not a trailer for the latest conspiracy movie about rigged elections. Instead, the video footage has become central to a real-world controversy over potential fraud involving ballot drop boxes, a favorite target of right-wing conspiracy theorists since former President Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 election.
The accusations of drop box fraud are not coming from those pushing fringe election claims or from skeptical Republicans who have long favored eliminating or severely restricting use of the boxes. They are being made by Democrats — two candidates vying for mayor in Connecticut’s largest city, in a heavily Democratic state that began allowing drop boxes to be used during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Republicans have seized on the spat, which is now headed to a legal showdown that could result in a new election, to say it validates their concerns that drop boxes are ripe for fraud.
State Rep. Doug Dubitsky, a Republican, evoked the widely debunked movie “2000 Mules” during a legislative debate over the controversy surrounding the Bridgeport mayor’s race.
“How do we know that it’s only Bridgeport?” said Dubitsky, who represents an area of the state that has grown more conservative in the Trump era. “This exact same thing could be happening in every single municipality in this state. We should get rid of these boxes completely.”
On the surface, the controversy is a local matter: Two candidates are accusing each other of fraud in a municipal election. But its ripple effects travel far beyond the city of 148,000 and could have implications for the elections next year across the country.
Trump, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, has been doubling down on his lies about his loss in the 2020 election as he faces criminal charges related to his attempts to overturn Democrat Joe Biden’s win. Despite mounds of evidence showing the election was fair and accurate, a solid majority of Republicans still believe it was not.
Among the many conspiracy theories that have fueled that belief on the right are those surrounding ballot drop boxes.
News of the Bridgeport videos has spread through right-wing social media platforms and on far-right media, connecting the controversy to the 2020 stolen election claims. Users have promoted the investigation as evidence for the persistent, false narratives about widespread fraud connected to ballot drop boxes.
The videos and the fact that the claims are being pushed by two Democratic candidates threaten to further inflame criticism from the right that drop boxes are vehicles for election mischief. It’s a perception that election officials have been fighting for three years.
“It risks making what is the exception the rule in some folks’ mind,” said David Levine, a former local election official in Idaho who is now a senior fellow with the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy. “It’s well established that drop boxes themselves are very safe and secure.”
The videos have trickled out in the weeks since the Sept. 12 primary in the Bridgeport mayor’s race between incumbent Joe Ganim and his challenger, John Gomes, the city’s former chief administrative officer. Gomes, who lost by 251 votes out of 8,173 cast, filed an election challenge a week later after a video appeared to show a Ganim supporter putting several envelopes into a drop box outside a city hall annex in the early morning.
Ganim, who has denied involvement, is pointing to another batch of videos posted online that appear to show Gomes’ supporters making multiple stops at other ballot drop boxes. Gomes has said he has spoken with those shown in the videos and been told they were dropping off ballots for relatives.
In Connecticut, voters using a drop box must return their completed ballot themselves or designate certain family members, police, local election officials or a caregiver to do it for them.
A judge will hear arguments in Gomes’ legal challenge this coming Thursday, with testimony expected over several days. Gomes is asking the judge to declare him the winner or order a new primary election.
The state has launched its own investigation. Some Republican lawmakers, who had raised concerns about the security of drop boxes during the pandemic, said the Bridgeport videos prove they were correct.
“No one can tell me that there are not people across this country, and certainly in this state, certainly in the last couple of weeks, that are not questioning the integrity of our elections. And I’m talking about people in both political parties,” said state Sen. Rob Sampson, the Senate’s top Republican on the General Assembly’s Government Elections and Administration Committee. “This is not isolated to President Trump saying the election was stolen in 2020.”
Drop boxes are considered by many election officials to be safe and secure and have been used to varying degrees by states across the political spectrum with few problems. A survey by The Associated Press of state election officials across the United States found no cases of fraud, vandalism or theft related to drop boxes in the 2020 presidential election that could have affected the results.
In many cases, drop boxes are placed in locations where they can be monitored by election staff or security cameras. Local election offices typically have procedures to ensure the security of the ballots from the time they are retrieved until they arrive at the election office.
Yet the conspiracy theories and efforts to get rid of them persist. Since the 2020 election, five states have moved to ban ballot drop boxes while six have moved to limit their availability, according to data collected by the Voting Rights Lab, which tracks voting-related legislation in the states and advocates for expanded voter access.
“It’s not the ballot boxes that are the problem,” said Cheri Quickmire, executive director of the voter advocacy group Common Cause in Connecticut. “In this particular case, it seems like the problem is the leadership of campaigns that permit that kind of activity, that has staff, that has campaign staff who … would put ballots in big envelopes and stuff them into the ballot box.”
Democrats, who control the Connecticut Legislature and all statewide offices, have so far been successful in pushing back against attempts to ban drop boxes while taking steps to address the controversy. They’ve also expressed shock over the videos but urged Republicans to wait for the investigations to play out.
“The one question for today, and that’s going to come up, is do you take a wrecking ball approach and ban everything for everybody else?” House Speaker Matt Ritter, a Hartford Democrat, told reporters late last month. “Or do you try to use more of a scalpel approach in dealing with a situation that we all agree is serious?”
___
Cassidy reported from Atlanta. Associated Press writer Christine Fernando in Chicago contributed to this report.
HARTFORD, Conn. — A woman approaches a drop box in the dark with what appears to be handfuls of ballots. At a different drop box, someone else is seen making multiple trips to insert ballots. At yet another, the same car stops on at least three separate occasions, with different people stepping out and heading to the box.
It’s not a trailer for the latest conspiracy movie about rigged elections. Instead, the video footage has become central to a real-world controversy over potential fraud involving ballot drop boxes, a favorite target of right-wing conspiracy theorists since former President Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 election.
The accusations of drop box fraud are not coming from those pushing fringe election claims or from skeptical Republicans who have long favored eliminating or severely restricting use of the boxes. They are being made by Democrats — two candidates vying for mayor in Connecticut’s largest city, in a heavily Democratic state that began allowing drop boxes to be used during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Republicans have seized on the spat, which is now headed to a legal showdown that could result in a new election, to say it validates their concerns that drop boxes are ripe for fraud.
State Rep. Doug Dubitsky, a Republican, evoked the widely debunked movie “2000 Mules” during a legislative debate over the controversy surrounding the Bridgeport mayor’s race.
“How do we know that it’s only Bridgeport?” said Dubitsky, who represents an area of the state that has grown more conservative in the Trump era. “This exact same thing could be happening in every single municipality in this state. We should get rid of these boxes completely.”
On the surface, the controversy is a local matter: Two candidates are accusing each other of fraud in a municipal election. But its ripple effects travel far beyond the city of 148,000 and could have implications for the elections next year across the country.
Trump, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, has been doubling down on his lies about his loss in the 2020 election as he faces criminal charges related to his attempts to overturn Democrat Joe Biden’s win. Despite mounds of evidence showing the election was fair and accurate, a solid majority of Republicans still believe it was not.
Among the many conspiracy theories that have fueled that belief on the right are those surrounding ballot drop boxes.
News of the Bridgeport videos has spread through right-wing social media platforms and on far-right media, connecting the controversy to the 2020 stolen election claims. Users have promoted the investigation as evidence for the persistent, false narratives about widespread fraud connected to ballot drop boxes.
The videos and the fact that the claims are being pushed by two Democratic candidates threaten to further inflame criticism from the right that drop boxes are vehicles for election mischief. It’s a perception that election officials have been fighting for three years.
“It risks making what is the exception the rule in some folks’ mind,” said David Levine, a former local election official in Idaho who is now a senior fellow with the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy. “It’s well established that drop boxes themselves are very safe and secure.”
The videos have trickled out in the weeks since the Sept. 12 primary in the Bridgeport mayor’s race between incumbent Joe Ganim and his challenger, John Gomes, the city’s former chief administrative officer. Gomes, who lost by 251 votes out of 8,173 cast, filed an election challenge a week later after a video appeared to show a Ganim supporter putting several envelopes into a drop box outside a city hall annex in the early morning.
Ganim, who has denied involvement, is pointing to another batch of videos posted online that appear to show Gomes’ supporters making multiple stops at other ballot drop boxes. Gomes has said he has spoken with those shown in the videos and been told they were dropping off ballots for relatives.
In Connecticut, voters using a drop box must return their completed ballot themselves or designate certain family members, police, local election officials or a caregiver to do it for them.
A judge will hear arguments in Gomes’ legal challenge this coming Thursday, with testimony expected over several days. Gomes is asking the judge to declare him the winner or order a new primary election.
The state has launched its own investigation. Some Republican lawmakers, who had raised concerns about the security of drop boxes during the pandemic, said the Bridgeport videos prove they were correct.
“No one can tell me that there are not people across this country, and certainly in this state, certainly in the last couple of weeks, that are not questioning the integrity of our elections. And I’m talking about people in both political parties,” said state Sen. Rob Sampson, the Senate’s top Republican on the General Assembly’s Government Elections and Administration Committee. “This is not isolated to President Trump saying the election was stolen in 2020.”
Drop boxes are considered by many election officials to be safe and secure and have been used to varying degrees by states across the political spectrum with few problems. A survey by The Associated Press of state election officials across the United States found no cases of fraud, vandalism or theft related to drop boxes in the 2020 presidential election that could have affected the results.
In many cases, drop boxes are placed in locations where they can be monitored by election staff or security cameras. Local election offices typically have procedures to ensure the security of the ballots from the time they are retrieved until they arrive at the election office.
Yet the conspiracy theories and efforts to get rid of them persist. Since the 2020 election, five states have moved to ban ballot drop boxes while six have moved to limit their availability, according to data collected by the Voting Rights Lab, which tracks voting-related legislation in the states and advocates for expanded voter access.
“It’s not the ballot boxes that are the problem,” said Cheri Quickmire, executive director of the voter advocacy group Common Cause in Connecticut. “In this particular case, it seems like the problem is the leadership of campaigns that permit that kind of activity, that has staff, that has campaign staff who … would put ballots in big envelopes and stuff them into the ballot box.”
Democrats, who control the Connecticut Legislature and all statewide offices, have so far been successful in pushing back against attempts to ban drop boxes while taking steps to address the controversy. They’ve also expressed shock over the videos but urged Republicans to wait for the investigations to play out.
“The one question for today, and that’s going to come up, is do you take a wrecking ball approach and ban everything for everybody else?” House Speaker Matt Ritter, a Hartford Democrat, told reporters late last month. “Or do you try to use more of a scalpel approach in dealing with a situation that we all agree is serious?”
___
Cassidy reported from Atlanta. Associated Press writer Christine Fernando in Chicago contributed to this report.
WASHINGTON — The Internal Revenue Service said Monday it is ending its decades-old policy of making unannounced home and business visits, in an effort to help keep its workers safe and to combat scammers who pose as IRS agents.
Effective immediately, revenue agents will no longer make unplanned visits to taxpayers’ homes and businesses “except in a few unique circumstances,” the Treasury Department said in a statement. The agency will instead mail letters to people to schedule meetings.
“Today’s announcement is the right thing to do, at the right time,” new IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel told reporters on a call Monday.
The change ends “an era at the IRS,” he said, reversing a practice by revenue officers whose duties include visiting homes and firms to resolve taxpayers’ liabilities by collecting unpaid taxes and unfiled tax returns.
The agency in recent years has experienced more threats, in part tied to conspiracy theories that agents were going to target middle-income taxpayers more aggressively after the passage of a climate, health care and tax bill that provided $80 billion to step up tax collections.
In response, the agency last August announced a comprehensive review of safety at its facilities. And in May, the agency said it would begin limiting workers’ personal identifying information on communications with taxpayers.
The Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration said in a report that it was “concerned that taxpayers and anti-government or anti-tax groups with malevolent intent may use the Internet or social media to track down and identify IRS employees, their families, their homes, and personal information to threaten, intimidate, or locate them for physical violence.”
The National Treasury Employees Union, which represents IRS workers, commended the agency for ending unannounced visits.
”The officers we represent will continue to efficiently and effectively carry out their mission of helping taxpayers meet their lawful tax obligations through other means of communication,” union leader Tony Reardon said in an emailed statement.
The issue of home visits has been politically contentious this year.
Ohio House Republican Jim Jordan sent a letter to Werfel and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen in March, asking why journalist Matt Taibbi received an unannounced home visit from an IRS agent shortly he gave testimony on Capitol Hill regarding his research into Twitter records.
Werfel said he thinks “the issues raised by unannounced visits, including ones that have been raised to us by the U.S. Congress, will be significantly mitigated” by the policy change.
The agency said an increase in scam artists posing as IRS agents also had created confusion about unannounced home visits.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. worked to defend himself Thursday against accusations that he traffics in racist and hateful online conspiracy theories, testifying at a House hearing on government censorship despite requests from outside groups to disinvite the Democratic presidential candidate after his recent antisemitic remarks.
The Republican-led Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government is amplifying GOP claims that conservatives and others are being unfairly targeted by technology companies that routinely work with the government to try to stem the spread of disinformation online. Democrats argued that free speech comes with responsibilities not to spread misinformation, particularly when it fans violence.
In opening remarks, Kennedy invoked his famous family’s legacy in decrying the complaints of racism and antisemitism against him.
“This is an attempt to censor a censorship hearing,” said Kennedy, the son of Robert F. Kennedy and the nephew of President John F. Kennedy.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is sworn-in during a House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government hearing on Thursday, July 20, 2023.
Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Growing animated at times, Kennedy defended his statements, which have delved into race, vaccine safety and other issues, as neither “racist or antisemitic.” He said his family has long believed in the First Amendment right to free speech.
“The First Amendment was not written for easy speech,” Kennedy said. “It was written for the speech that nobody likes you for.”
Republicans are eager to elevate Kennedy after he announced in April he was mounting a long-shot Democratic primary challenge to President Biden. Kennedy’s presidential campaign chairman, Dennis Kucinich, the former congressman and past presidential contender, sat in the front row behind him during the more-than-three-hours hearing.
The Big Tech companies have adamantly denied the GOP assertions and say they enforce their rules impartially for everyone regardless of ideology or political affiliation. And researchers have not found widespread evidence that social media companies are biased against conservative news, posts or materials.
The top Democrat on the House panel, Del. Stacey Plaskett of the Virgin Islands, said the Republican majority was giving a platform to Kennedy and others to promote conspiracy theories and a rallying cry for “bigotry and hate.”
“This is not the kind of free speech I know,” Plaskett said.
Plaskett warned against misinformation from Russia and other U.S. adversaries who have interfered in American elections and are expected to meddle again in the 2024 election.
Often emotional and heated, Thursday’s hearing came as subcommittee chairman Jim Jordan, a Republican of Ohio, portrayed what he claimed were examples of censorship, including a White House request to Twitter to remove a race-based post from Kennedy about COVID-19 vaccines.
“It’s why Mr. Kennedy is running for president — it’s to stop, to help us expose and stop what’s going on,” Jordan said.
A watchdog group asked Jordan to drop the invitation to Kennedy after he suggested COVID-19 could have been “ethnically targeted” to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people.
In those filmed remarks first published by The New York Post, Kennedy said “there is an argument” that COVID-19 “is ethnically targeted” and that it “attacks certain races disproportionately.”
After the video was made public, Kennedy posted on Twitter that his words were twisted and denied ever suggesting that COVID-19 was deliberately engineered to spare Jewish people. He called for the Post’s article to be retracted.
A clip from the video was aired at the hearing.
Kennedy has a history of comparing vaccines — widely credited with saving millions of lives — with the genocide of the Holocaust during Nazi Germany, comments for which he has sometimes apologized.
In heated exchanges, Democrats implored Kennedy and Republicans to consider the fallout from their words and actions — and noted that one of the posts Republicans had singled out at the hearing was not removed by any censors.
“Hate speech has consequences,” said Democratic Rep. Gerry Connolly of Virginia, who made reference to the mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue, among others. He called the hearing Orwellian.
Democratic Rep. Sylvia Garcia of Texas said she received a death threat after the last hearing of the Weaponization panel.
When Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Democrat of Florida, read aloud Kennedy’s postings and questioned his intent, Kennedy interjected that she was “slandering me” and claimed what the congresswoman was saying was a lie.
An organization that Kennedy founded, Children’s Health Defense, currently has a lawsuit pending against a number of news organizations, among them The Associated Press, accusing them of violating antitrust laws by taking action to identify misinformation, including about COVID-19 and COVID-19 vaccines.
Ahead of the hearing, Jordan said that while he disagreed with Kennedy’s remarks, he was not about to drop him from the panel. Speaker Kevin McCarthy took a similar view, saying he did not want to censor Kennedy.
The panel wants to probe the way the federal government works with technology companies to flag postings that contain false information or downright lies. Hanging over the debate is part of federal communications law, Section 230, which shields technology companies like Twitter and Facebook from liability over what’s said on their platforms.
Lawmakers on the panel were also hearing testimony from Emma-Jo Morris, a journalist at Breitbart News, who has reported extensively on Mr. Biden’s son, Hunter Biden; and D. John Sauer, a former solicitor general in Missouri who is now a special assistant attorney general at the Louisiana Department of Justice involved in the lawsuit against the Biden administration.
Morris tweeted part of her opening remarks in which she described an “elaborate censorship conspiracy” that she claimed sought to halt her reporting of Hunter Biden.
A witness called by Democrats, Maya Wiley, the president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, implored the lawmakers to consider the platforms where Americans share views — but also “how deeply vital that they be based in fact, not fiction.”
The U.S. has been hesitant to regulate the social media giants, even as outside groups warn of the rise of hate speech and misinformation that can be erosive to civil society.
DOVER, Del. — A former Donald Trump supporter who became the center of a conspiracy theory about Jan. 6, 2021, filed a defamation lawsuit against Fox News on Wednesday, saying the network made him a scapegoat for the U.S. Capitol insurrection.
Raymond Epps, a former Marine who said he was forced from his Arizona home because of threats, is asking for unspecified damages and a jury trial.
He filed his lawsuit in Superior Court in Delaware, the same court where Dominion Voting Systems sued Fox for lies broadcast following the 2020 presidential election. Shortly before a trial was to begin this spring, Fox agreed to pay Dominion $787 million to settle the charges.
Fox did not respond to texts, phone calls and emails seeking comment on Epps’ lawsuit.
The suit also states that the Justice Department told Epps in May that he faces criminal charges for his actions on Jan. 6. The lawsuit blames that on “the relentless attacks by Fox and Mr. Carlson and the resulting political pressure.”
Epps, who had traveled to Washington for the Jan. 6 demonstration, was falsely accused by Fox of being a government agent who was whipping up trouble that would be blamed on Trump supporters, the lawsuit claims.
“In the aftermath of the events of January 6th, Fox News searched for a scapegoat to blame other than Donald Trump or the Republican Party,” the lawsuit says. “Eventually, they turned on one of their own.”
Although the lawsuit mentions Fox’s Laura Ingraham and Will Cain, former Fox host Tucker Carlson is cited as the leader in promoting the theory. Epps was featured in more than two dozen segments on Carlson’s prime-time show, the lawsuit said. Fox News fired Carlson shortly after the Dominion settlement was announced.
Carlson “was bluntly telling his viewers that it was a fact that Epps was a government informant,” the lawsuit says. “And they believed him.”
Carlson ignored evidence that contradicted his theory, including Epps’ testimony before a congressional committee investigating the insurrection that he was not working for the government, and videos provided by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy that showed Epps’ efforts to try to defuse the situation, the lawsuit says.
Carlson is not named as a defendant in the lawsuit. Epps’ lawyer, Michael Teter, noted that Carlson “was an employee of Fox when he lied about Ray, and Fox broadcast those defamatory falsehoods.”
“Fox is therefore fully liable for Mr. Carlson’s statements,” Teter said.
The former Fox star did not respond to a text message seeking comment.
Also Wednesday, FBI Director Christopher Wray, in an appearance before the House Judiciary Committee, denied having any knowledge of Epps being a “secret government agent.”
“I will say this notion that somehow the violence at the Capitol on January 6 was part of some operation orchestrated by FBI sources and agents is ludicrous,” Wray told lawmakers. He refused to say, however, how many of the people who entered the Capitol and surrounding area on Jan. 6 were either FBI employees or people with whom the FBI had made contact.
Meanwhile, Epps claims in his lawsuit that, as a result of the alleged defamatory statements made by Fox, he and his wife have been the target of harassment and death threats from Trump supporters, forced to sell the Arizona ranch where they ran a successful wedding venue business, and now face financial ruin. According to the lawsuit, Epps and his wife are now living in a recreational vehicle in Utah.
The lawsuit displays threatening messages he says he received, including one that reads, “Epps, sleep with one eye open.”
In his defamation suit, Epps claims that on Jan. 5, the day before the storming of the Capitol, he tried to defuse a tense situation between Trump supporters and police, confronting an agitator referred to in the lawsuit as “Baked Alaska.” That man, later identified as far-right social media personality Anthime Gionet, was sentenced earlier this year to 60 days in prison.
Epps says that in an effort to persuade Trump supporters that he was on their side, he told them, “I’m probably gonna go to jail for this. Tomorrow, we need to go into the Capitol. Peacefully.”
Epps claims in the lawsuit that he was “shocked and disappointed” when demonstrators started climbing the scaffolding and walls around the Capitol.
“He had concerns about the election and believed it was his duty as a citizen to participate in the protest. But he did not believe violence was appropriate,” the lawsuit claims.
NEW YORK — Two years ago, signing a bill intended to punish Twitter and other major social media companies, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis blasted the platforms as “suppressing ideas” during the COVID-19 pandemic and silencing conservative voices.
What a turnaround.
The new Elon Musk-owned version of Twitter helped DeSantis launch his bid for the Republican presidential nomination Wednesday. Though it was marred by technical glitches and skewered by the candidate’s critics, the forum nevertheless underscored Twitter’s unmistakable shift to the right under Musk, who bought it for $44 billion and took over in October.
“The truth was censored repeatedly, and now that Twitter is in the hands of a free speech advocate, that would not be able to happen again on this Twitter platform,” DeSantis said during the Twitter Spaces event.
Musk, co-hosting the event, responded to the praise by saying, “Twitter was indeed expensive, but free speech is priceless.”
While Musk has promoted his platform as a haven for free expression, the site has been flooded with extremist views and hate speech since he bought it and fired or laid off roughly 80% of its staff.
That is raising alarms that Twitter — heavily used by candidates and government agencies, including those providing voting information — will become an open forum for conspiracy theories, fake content and election misinformation as a bitterly divided country heads into the 2024 presidential election.
Many Republicans have hailed Musk’s takeover of Twitter as creating one of the last mainstream online spaces where they can share their views without fear of removal. Prominent figures in conservative media, like former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and the podcasts hosts of The Daily Wire, say they plan to start streaming content on the site.
Democrats and anti-hate watchdogs, meanwhile, say Musk’s partisan comments and policy changes have effectively given a megaphone to far-right extremists.
Since Musk bought Twitter, he has overhauled the site’s verification system, removing safeguards against impersonation for some government accounts and political candidates. He also has personally indulged in far-right conspiracy theories on the site, reinstated accounts with a history of extremist rhetoric and gutted the team that had been responsible for moderating the content flowing across the platform.
That has coincided with a deluge of conspiracy theory rhetoric, according to the Anti-Defamation League, which reported that QAnon hashtags surged 91% on Twitter between May 2022 and May 2023, with about three-fourths of those messages posted after Musk’s takeover.
Several believers of the baseless QAnon theory, centered on the idea that former President Donald Trump is waging a secret war against “deep state” enemies and pedophiles, have committed acts of violence, including the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Musk’s decision to reinstate influential Twitter accounts with a history of spreading extremist views also has created spaces in their tweet reply threads where users are sharing antisemitic tropes, conspiracy theories and other types of hate, the ADL reported Wednesday.
The group’s vice president Yael Eisenstat, who leads its Center for Technology and Society, said Musk’s content moderation choices have “served to silence marginalized voices” by giving harassers and internet trolls free reign.
“It is one thing to say we want free speech on the platform,” she said. “It’s another thing to say we are going to allow extremists — conspiracy theorists — to contribute to normalizing this kind of rhetoric and antisemitism and racism.”
Twitter didn’t provide comment after repeated requests. It sent automated replies instead, as it does to most media inquiries.
Musk’s free speech rhetoric also has attracted conservatives who have been knocked off other platforms — or fired, in the case of Carlson.
Shortly after his ouster, Carlson went on Twitter May 9 to announce that he would be doing some version of his show on that platform. It’s still not clear what that would entail, or when he would start.
“There aren’t many platforms left that allow free speech,” Carlson said in a two-minute message viewed more than 132 million times. “The last big one remaining in the world, the only one, is Twitter, where we are now.”
Free speech and truth aren’t the same thing, however, and Carlson had been accused of spreading misinformation on his Fox show, most recently about the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection.
DeSantis has been a frequent guest on Fox News, and on the night of his presidential campaign announcement he appeared on the network for an interview — after the Twitter event.
Though DeSantis’ Twitter launch was severely delayed with site crashes and strained servers, his choice to debut his campaign on the platform illustrates that Fox will have more competition as a Republican kingmaker. His campaign said it had taken in $1 million online in the first hour after the announcement. Fox’s ratings have declined dramatically during its 8 p.m. Eastern hour, which Carlson used to fill.
The Daily Wire, whose podcast hosts include popular conservative influencers such as Ben Shapiro and Candace Owens, said Tuesday that it would bring its shows to stream on Twitter starting next week.
Doug Heye, a Republican strategist and former Republican National Committee communications director, said Twitter is “certainly going to be an increasing part” of GOP campaign strategies for the 2024 presidential primary.
“And that’s all because of what Elon Musk has said over the past few months as he’s taken Twitter over and sought to make it a space more friendly to conservatives,” he said.
Musk has leaned into Republican politics, tweeting in 2022 that Democrats “have become the party of division & hate.” While he has tweeted support for both DeSantis and South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, who also entered the GOP field this week, he said Tuesday he was not yet endorsing any particular presidential candidate.
Even as Democrats wince at the direction Musk has taken Twitter, most are staying put — at least for now. A recent Pew Research Center survey found that when looking to the future, just slightly more Democratic users than Republicans said it’s unlikely they will be on Twitter in a year.
Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon said he has been experimenting with the Twitter alternative BlueSky as a “more casual, fun and positive environment” than Twitter. But he also has continued to use Twitter to communicate with his constituents.
Jimmy Williams, a longtime Democratic political consultant, said he would advise Democrats not to “cede the space.” Indeed, Musk said Wednesday that his forum would be available to any politician.
“Twitter’s a two-way street,” Williams said.
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Associated Press media writer David Bauder in New York contributed to this report.
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Twilight offered welcome concealment when we met at the prearranged hour. “I really haven’t gone out anywhere” since well before the election, Bill Gates, the outgoing Republican chair of the Maricopa County board of supervisors, told me in mid-November. He’d agreed to meet for dinner at an outdoor restaurant in the affluent suburb of Scottsdale, Arizona, but when he arrived, he kept his head down and looked around furtively. “Pretty much every night, I just go home, you know, with my wife, and maybe we pick up food, but I’m purposely not going out right now. I don’t necessarily want to be recognized.” He made a point of asking me not to describe his house or his car. Did he carry a gun, or keep one at home? Gates started to answer, then stopped. “I’m not sure if I want that out there,” he said.
As a younger politician, not so long ago, Gates had been pleased and flattered to be spotted in public. Now 51 years old, he never set out to become a combatant in the democracy wars. He shied away from the role when it was first thrust upon him, after the 2020 election, recognizing a threat to his rising career in the GOP. But the fight came to him, like it or not, because the Maricopa County board of supervisors is the election-certification authority for well over half the votes in the state.
When we spoke, Kari Lake was still contesting her loss in Arizona’s gubernatorial election. Months later, she is still anointing herself “the real governor” and saying that election officials who certified her defeat are “crooks” who “need to be locked up.” She reserves special venom for Gates. Speaking to thousands of raucous supporters in Phoenix on December 18, beneath clouds of confetti, Lake denounced “sham elections … run by fraudsters” and singled him out as the figurehead of a corrupt “house of cards.”
“They are daring us to do something about it,” she said. “We’re going to burn it to the ground.” Then she lowered her mic and appeared to mouth, with exaggerated enunciation, “Burn the fucker to the ground.” To uproarious applause, she went on to invoke the Second Amendment and the bloody American Revolution against a tyrant. “I think we’re right there right now, aren’t we?” she said.
All of that may seem a little beside the point from afar, an inconsequential footnote to a 2022 election season that, mercifully, felt more normal than the last one. But Lake shares Donald Trump’s dark gift for channeling the rage of her supporters toward violence that is never quite spoken aloud.
In part as a result of her vilification campaign, Gates is stalked on social media, in his inbox and on voicemail, and in public meetings of the board of supervisors. Based on what law enforcement regarded as a credible death threat, Maricopa County Sheriff Paul Penzone removed Gates and his wife from their home in Phoenix on Election Night and dispatched them to a secure location under guard. They knew the drill. “I’ve done it so many times,” Gates recalled. “It’s like, ‘Here we go again.’”
In two successive elections, 2020 and 2022, Gates has had to choose: back his party, or uphold the law. Today, he is a leading defender—in news conferences, in court, and in election oversight—of Arizona’s democratic institutions.
I’d come to Phoenix to try to understand this moment in American politics. November’s midterm election was the first in the country’s history to feature hundreds of candidates running explicitly as election rejectionists. Enough of them were defeated to mark a salutary trend: Swing voters did not seem to favor blatant, self-serving lies about election fraud. That was an encouraging result for democracy, and a balm to many Americans eager for a return to something like political normalcy.
But it was not the whole story. Election deniers won races for secretary of state—the post that oversees election administration—in Alabama, Indiana, South Dakota, and Wyoming. They make up most of the Republican freshman class in Congress. Even some of the losers came very close. Lake’s election-denying ticket mate, Abe Hamadeh, lost the Arizona attorney general’s race by 280 votes.
Of greatest interest to me was the extent to which the narrow losses of MAGA conspiracists gained legitimacy from the words and actions of people like Gates—otherwise low-profile electoral officials, many of them Republican. I wanted to know how he saw the recent election, and what he expected of the next one. The more time I spent with him, and in Arizona, the more uncertain the reprieve of last November appeared.
“I’m politically dead,” Gates told me. It’s what he thinks most of the time, though not always. He toys with thoughts of running again, even running for higher office, but calculates that he has next to no chance of securing his party’s nomination for any office in 2024. If Trump or a successor tries to overturn the vote in January 2025, somebody else will have to be found to push back.
In Maricopa County alone, four of the five supervisors, all of whom have stood shoulder to shoulder in defense of the county’s election machinery, are Republicans. As ultra-MAGA conspiracists continue to dominate the GOP base, what kind of Republicans will be around to safeguard the next election, or the one after that?
Left: Ballot drop box outside the election center in Phoenix, Arizona. Right: “Unborn Lives Matter,” “Trump 2024 Take America Back,” and “Kari Lake for Governor” flags in a residential backyard in Peoria, Arizona. (Adam Riding for The Atlantic)
Something goes wrong in just about every voting cycle, and even when things go right, there are always details that can be made to look suspicious by fabulists intent on breaking public confidence. Sound elections rely on the competence, the fairness, the transparency, and, in recent years, the courage of election workers.
On Election Day 2022, Gates and other county authorities planned to ward off conspiracy theories with a smooth and efficiently functioning vote. The technology gods had other plans.
The first sign of trouble turned up around 6:30 a.m. One polling center reported what looked like a tabulator malfunction. Ballots were printing on demand, and voters were filling them in, but the tabulator spat them out unread. The troubleshooting hotline logged a second call a few minutes later, then a third. Soon, dozens of polling places had tabulation failures. Trouble spots filled the status board at the Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center, which stood behind a newly built security fence to keep protesters outside.
“And then it’s like, ‘Oh, crap,’” Gates recalled. “This is a widespread issue.” And “we have literally the eyes of the world on this election.” Voter lines backed up and tempers flared. Nobody knew what was wrong. Gates got on the phone with the president of Dominion Voting Systems, which made the tabulators.
Lake and the far-right information ecosystem had promoted the lie that the ballot was rigged long before Election Day. Social media now lit up with claims that election officials had sabotaged their own machines to suppress the vote in Republican neighborhoods. Lake went on television to say, falsely, that her voters were being turned away.
Gates and Stephen Richer, the county recorder, rushed out a video message at 8:52 a.m. Standing in front of a tabulator, Gates said, “We’re trying to fix this problem as quickly as possible, and we also have a redundancy in place. If you can’t put the ballot in the tabulator, then you can simply place it here where you see the number three. This is a secure box where those ballots will be kept for later this evening, where we’ll bring them in here to Central Count to tabulate them.”
It was the sort of rapid public response—factual, practical, and reassuring—that’s become essential since Trump first began poisoning voter confidence with false claims of fraud. But the Lake campaign and its allies nonetheless saw an opportunity to sow doubt and confusion.
“No. DO NOT PUT YOUR BALLOT IN BOX 3 TO BE ‘TABULATED DOWNTOWN,’” Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA tweeted repeatedly to nearly 2 million followers. Kelli Ward, the Arizona Republican Party chair, posted the same urgent, all-caps advice, adding falsely that “Maricopa County is not turning on their tabulators downtown today!”
Many Lake supporters refused to use the Box 3 option, fearful that their votes would not be counted, and Gates ordered that voters be allowed to try the tabulators as many times as they wanted. The chaos at some polling stations worsened.
The technical error, diagnosed by midmorning, turned out to be that the printers in 43 of the 223 polling places were printing ballots with ink too faint for the tabulators to read. Nobody knew why; the same settings and equipment had worked fine in the August primaries. By early afternoon, technicians had solved the problem by increasing the heat setting on the print fuser.
Lake spread conspiracy theories throughout the day and in the days that followed, as the vote count went on. All Gates and Richer could do was stand in front of cameras, over and over again, answering every question. Box 3, by one or another name, was a standard voting option, employed in most Arizona counties for decades. There were plenty of polling places with short lines. Fewer than 1 percent of ballots were affected by printer issues, and all of them were being counted anyway. A live public video feed showed the tabulation operations, 24 hours a day. No voter had been turned away because of the glitch.
The office of Mark Brnovich, Arizona’s Republican attorney general, amplified Lake’s accusations and warned in a letter against certifying the election results without addressing numerous “concerns regarding Maricopa’s lawful compliance with Arizona election law.” Gates’s lawyer responded that the attorney general’s office had its facts wrong. Gates and his fellow supervisors certified the canvass on November 28. Katie Hobbs, the Democrat, had beaten Lake by 17,117 votes.
Lake filed a lawsuit on December 9, a 70-page complaint filled with florid accusations: sabotaged printers and tabulators, “hundreds of thousands of illegal ballots,” thousands of Republican voters who’d been disenfranchised—all in Maricopa County alone. The judge threw out most of her charges in pretrial rulings. At trial, Lake was unable to supply any persuasive evidence of wrongdoing or identify even one disenfranchised voter or illegal ballot. She lost again in the Court of Appeals on February 16, and now vows to go to the state supreme court. She has raised more than $2.6 million since Election Day, spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C., this past weekend, and seems likely to run for the U.S. Senate next year.
Interior building details of the election center in Phoenix, Arizona (Adam Riding for The Atlantic)
M
ost of the election deniers who lost their races around the country in November conceded defeat, with varying degrees of grace. Pretending to win elections they lost turned out to be harder than Trump made it look. Not many politicians have the former president’s bottomless capacity to live and breathe an alternate reality—or make millions of people care. A pair of Joe Biden speeches on democracy, together with the public hearings of the January 6 committee, had also helped discredit election-fraud charges among independent voters. And right-wing media may have been more cautious about baseless fraud claims after the defamation lawsuits brought against them following their performance in 2020. Lake, a charismatic presence who had honed her television skills as a local news anchor, was one of the few candidates who doubled down on conspiracy talk.
But the impact of Lake’s performance was not hard to see. More than 1.2 million people voted for Lake in the governor’s race, three-quarters of a million of them in Maricopa. Many, swept up in her reality-distortion field, believed sincerely that the election had been stolen. Scores of them surged into the board of supervisors’ hearing room on November 16, eight days after the election. Gates had scheduled public comments on election procedures. He sat on the dais with the demeanor of a nervous high-school principal, determined to keep rowdy students under control.
“I’m just going to say this right now: We have children watching this,” he told the crowd, improbably. “So please, no profanity.”
Everyone who signed up to speak would have two minutes. No interruptions. “We’re not going to have any outbursts, okay?” he said. The audience laughed, mocking him.
A woman named Raquel stood up.
“Mr. Chairman Bill Gates and Recorder Richer, you both have lost all credibility and any shred of integrity—”
Applause interrupted her. Gates narrowed his eyes.
Raquel accused Gates of founding “a political-action committee to specifically defeat MAGA candidates” and asked how he could fairly run an election. In 2021, amid a spurious “forensic audit” that tried to prove that Trump had won Arizona the previous year, Gates had made a $500 contribution to a PAC formed by Richer, the county recorder, called Pro-Democracy Republicans of Arizona—“The Arizona election wasn’t stolen” was the first line on its website—but he’d had no role in distributing its funds.
Another woman, Kimberly, told the supervisors that she knew they had sabotaged the ballot printers. “As a former programmer myself, I can tell you there’s no such thing as a glitch,” she said. The crowd, stirring, murmured its assent.
Jeff Zink, a MAGA Republican who had just lost his race for U.S. Congress, brought a more direct sense of grievance. The only reason he had not won, he said, was that “an algorithm took place which shows that at no time did I ever gain any ground whatsoever.” He did not explain what he thought an algorithm is. It did not matter: He had the room behind him.
Some witnesses made specific allegations. Many simply flung vitriol. “I’m just disgusted by your behavior,” said Sheila, a retired city worker. “Look at all these people out here who are suffering so badly because of your falsehoods.”
“You are the cancer that is tearing this nation apart,” said Matt, another speaker, to louder and angrier applause.
“Thank you,” Gates replied tightly.
Several speakers invoked higher powers and threatened divine retribution—or, anyway, retribution in God’s name. “Beware, your sins will find you out,” one speaker said in a quavering voice. Another, a hulk of a man named Michael, said that “God knows what you’ve done … I warn you and I caution you, we got a big God in Jesus’s name.”
Another burst of applause amid angry buzzing. Audience members were beginning to rise from their seats. Two sheriff’s deputies made as if to move toward them and then thought better of it. My sense, sitting near the front, was that the gathering was just below full boil. If the crowd got any hotter, two deputies would not be enough.
“You need to resign today. And I pray that God is going to convict your heart and for what you’ve done,” yelled a furious Lake supporter named Lisette.
Gates tried to respond, beginning to speak of the electoral redundancies that ensure that every vote is counted. But the crowd was standing and shouting. He adjourned the meeting and slipped out a side door, stage right. I joined him a few minutes later in his office across the street. I told Gates that it had looked to me as though the crowd had been making up its mind about whether to rush the dais.
“This is not a game,” he said. “This is very serious. And the danger of violence is just right under the surface.”
Gates picked without enthusiasm at a container of plain chicken and steamed carrots that his wife, the county’s associate presiding judge, had cooked for his lunch. “We’re doing this diet right now,” he said, a bit mournfully. “We’re trying to be good.”
He had rejected the option of packing the room with security, he said. “These are challenging times, because you also don’t want to create a police state, you know? And that’s something that we’re balancing.”
Gates has learned to live with a constant stream of abuse. It began long before the 2022 midterms and has not let up since those elections concluded. One persistent correspondent has written to him several times a month since early 2021. One day, he writes, “Hey I hear little bitch Bill Gates is in hiding? Why? Cause you worked extra hard to steal tao elections … or more? Keep hiding rat shit.” Four days later: “You are scum and deserve to be tried for treason.”
A voicemail left for his chief of staff, Zach Schira, twisted with rage: “I really believe that what we used to do to traitors is what we should do today. Give ’em a fucking Alabama necktie, you piece of shit. Fucking traitor, just like your fucking boss, rigging the election for a little bit of dough, you know? Piece of shit.” (The good old boy who left the message was probably aiming for a lynching metaphor, but he had hit on something else.)
In December, Gates woke up one morning and was moved to post on Twitter about the beauty around him: “If you are in @maricopacounty, step outside and look at the sunrise. We are blessed to live here.” The responses, dozens of them, were almost comically savage.
“Hopefully soon you won’t be able to see that beautiful sunrise, bc you’ll be locked up!”
“Treeeeaaasooon.”
“Quick question. Do you happen to know the penalty for treason? Just curious is all.”
There was more, calling him subhuman, soulless, satanic.
Every now and then, something sufficiently threatening crosses Sheriff Penzone’s desk, and he notifies Gates that it is time to sleep somewhere else. On other occasions, the sheriff will post a pair of undercover deputies outside his home. Most of the time, though, Gates walks and drives and puts himself out there in the world all alone.
A residential property in Peoria, Arizona (Adam Riding for The Atlantic)
Gates knows he is far from the only election official under threat. On January 16, police in Albuquerque, New Mexico, arrested a failed Republican political candidate who’d rejected his defeat and allegedly paid gunmen to shoot at the homes of four Democratic officeholders. On January 26, over in Arizona’s Cochise County, the elections director resigned her post after years of abuse, citing an “outrageous and physically and emotionally threatening” working environment.
Gates stays in touch with peers around the country, mostly Republicans, who have stood up against election denial and faced the consequences. They form a little community, like an internet support group, dishing out comfort on bad days and dispatching a friendly word when they see one another in the news.
One member of this informal group is Al Schmidt, who was the sole Republican on the Philadelphia board of elections in the 2020 election and received a deluge of death threats after Trump accused him of being party to corruption. Gates also corresponds with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and his chief operating officer, Gabriel Sterling, both of whom pushed back against Trump’s demands to “find” enough votes to upend Biden’s victory in that state.
“We have done Zoom meetings,” he told me. “We have met in person. We talk on the phone. We text one another. And it’s very helpful because … if you haven’t gone through this, you don’t really understand. And if you have gone through it, you do.”
The simple banter reminds Gates that he has allies, even if far away.
“Yesterday, Trump endorsed an all-in stop the steal candidate for AG so look for me in handcuffs in early 2023. 😊,” Gates said in a text last June to Maggie Toulouse Oliver, the secretary of state of neighboring New Mexico. He was only half-joking: Abe Hamadeh, who nearly went on to win the attorney general’s race, was vowing to prosecute election officials whom he accused of fraud.
“Omg. Well I’ll come bail you out!! ❤️,” Oliver replied.
Chair of the board of supervisors is not even a full-time job in Maricopa, the fourth-largest county in America, with a population of 4.5 million and a $4.5 billion budget. Gates’s day job is associate general counsel for Ping, a large Phoenix-based manufacturer of golf clubs and bags. His position is not undemanding, but election controversies sometimes keep him away from the office for days or weeks at a time. His bosses, he said, “have been very understanding.”
It is hard to convey how little his world resembles the one Gates signed up for when he first ran for county supervisor. He grew up as a self-described “political dork” in Phoenix and chose Drake University, in Des Moines, for college because of its champion mock-trial team and because he wanted to see the Iowa caucuses in person. Jack Kemp, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush were his political heroes.
In 2009, Gates won an appointment to the Phoenix city council, where he developed a reputation as an urban technocrat. When he ran for county supervisor in 2016, the planks of his platform involved vacant strip malls, water and sewer problems, and garbage pickup. He called himself an “economic-development Republican” who “wants government to get out of the way to allow … free enterprise to flourish.”
Left: A polling-place tabulator and ballot box. Right: Election canvassing books at the election center in Phoenix. (Adam Riding for The Atlantic)
The warehouse section of the election center in Phoenix (Adam Riding for The Atlantic)
Gates did not much like Trump in the 2016 campaign, and voted for John Kasich in the primary. When Trump came to town for a rally, Gates told The Arizona Republic that Trump’s views “do not reflect the majority of Arizonans and the majority of Arizona Republicans.”
Even so, like a lot of reluctant Republicans, Gates voted for Trump over Hillary Clinton that year. “I believed he would nominate judges to the federal bench who would exercise judicial restraint, and that Mike Pence would have a calming influence,” he told me. Now that he represents the election-certification authority, Gates will not say how he voted in 2020.
If 2022 was hard on Gates and his colleagues, 2020 was worse—a fact that can reasonably support either optimism or pessimism for 2024. The presidency was at stake, not the governor’s office, and the aftermath of the election fell upon Gates and his fellow supervisors like a toxic spill. Arizona, and Maricopa County in particular, became a major focus of Trump’s cries of fraud. Angry mobs descended on the election command center and the homes of some of the supervisors, shouting “Stop the steal.” Alex Jones of Infowars and Representative Paul Gosar worked up the crowds. Gates called the scene outside the command center “Lollapalooza for the alt right.” Police put up temporary fencing to protect the ongoing tabulation. Inside, the staff could hear chanting and the reverberation of drums.
The incumbent president, wielding all the authority of his position, mobilized not only the MAGA grassroots but also the GOP establishment in service of his pressure campaign. Trump twice tried to get one of Gates’s colleagues, then-chair Clint Hickman, on the phone. Ward, the state Republican chair, began calling and texting Gates relentlessly as the deadline neared to certify the presidential vote, on November 20. “Here’s Sidney Powell’s phone number,” she said, according to Gates, referring to a Trump lawyer who would become notorious for outlandish claims. “Will you please call her?”
“I’m going, ‘Who’s Sidney Powell?’” Gates told me. “I never returned that call.”
In her text messages, which Gates provided to me, Ward recited multiple alleged anomalies and conspiracy theories. She attributed a baseless allegation about the corrupt design of Dominion software to an unnamed “team of fraud investigators.” She worried that “fellow Repubs are throwing in the towel. Very sad. And unAmerican.” She noted, “You all have the power that none of the rest of us have.”
The texts went on and on, alternately lawyerly, angry, and pleading.
Gates replied in the end with four words: “Thanks for your input.”
Had he felt threatened by all the arm-twisting from the state party chair? I asked.
“Threat is a strong word,” he told me, adding, “I felt pressure. I felt like if I didn’t do what she wanted to do, that there would be political ramifications, certainly.”
Gates grew up in local government and had a politician’s instinct not to make enemies. But if he fulfilled his lawful duty, he would become a pariah in the state GOP and an enemy of the president of the United States. Knowing that—and Ward made sure he knew—was supposed to crush all thoughts of resistance.
“Once you make that vote to certify, you know you’re not coming back from that,” Gates said. “People thought because I was nice over all these years that I was weak.”
Gates and his fellow supervisors voted unanimously, on schedule, to certify the 2020 election. But that didn’t slow the campaign to overturn the results. “Stop the steal” sentiment intensified as the year drew to a close. The Republican-dominated State Senate issued a subpoena for all of the county’s paper ballots and voting machines, planning to hand them over to a MAGA-run outfit called Cyber Ninjas to “audit” the results. Gates and his colleagues refused to comply, believing that would be illegal. They filed a lawsuit to void the subpoena.
Gates was doing last-minute shopping at Walgreens at about 5 p.m. on Christmas Eve when Rudy Giuliani called him. He did not recognize the number and ignored it, but he kept the voicemail, which he played for me.
“I have a few things I’d like to talk over with you,” Giuliani says, after introducing himself. “Maybe we can get this thing fixed up. You know, I really think it’s a shame that Republicans, sort of, we’re both in this kind of situation. And I think there may be a nice way to resolve it for everybody. So give me a call, Bill. I’m on this number, any time, doesn’t matter, okay? Take care. Bye.”
Gates shook his head at the memory.
“Someone who on 9/11 I had great respect for,” he said. “I didn’t return his call.”
In early 2021, state legislators moved to have Gates and his colleagues taken into custody for contempt if they did not hand over the ballots, notwithstanding the pending court case. Gates assured his crying daughters—there are three of them, now all in college—that he would be all right.
“So I actually shot a video on my camera—this was sort of like, you know, a hostage video,” Gates said. “Like, ‘If, you know, if you’re watching this, I’m now in custody,’ kind of explaining why I had done what I did, why I thought we were right.”
For all the sense of menace, there was something liberating about this period, Gates told me, and it was around this time that he began to speak out more often and more forcefully in defense of elections and the people who run them.
“They made allegations that our employees had deleted files, basically committed crimes,” Gates said. “That’s when this board, along with Recorder Richer and other countywide electeds, stood up and said, ‘We’re going to push back now. This is a lie. You’re accusing our folks of committing crimes. We can’t stand by silent.’”
The county court eventually ruled that Maricopa had to turn over the ballots and voting machines, and the Cyber Ninjas circus began. It found no evidence of fraud but stretched on for months, keeping Gates in the news as a foil.
His career, he believed then, was finished. He had no reason to hold back.
“Once you’re dead, there’s nothing they can do to you,” he said. “Right?”
Pedestrians walking along Mill Avenue in Tempe, Arizona (Adam Riding for The Atlantic)
“You know,” Gates told me, “I think this is the most dangerous time for the state of our democracy other than the Civil War.”
By any accounting, the 2020 election was more dangerous than the one last year. Gates knows as well as anyone that it’s too soon to say the worst is behind us. As a presidential nominee, Trump or another candidate could bring a subversive focus and intensity to the party that’s all but impossible during the midterms. More than a third of Republicans are still hard-core Trump supporters, and nearly two-thirds still believe the 2020 election was rigged. The race late last month for chair of the Republican National Committee pitted an incumbent who was all in for Trump against two challengers who competed to be more so.
Yet for all that, and despite what he’s just been through (again), Gates does see hopeful possibilities—possibilities he didn’t see two years ago. Many of the most strident election deniers did lose, he points out. Gripped by MAGA fever, the GOP has now experienced three successive setbacks at the ballot box, in 2018, 2020, and 2022. Some of the party’s elected leaders have distanced themselves from Trump since the midterms, and polls of GOP voters show some softening of support.
If Arizona rejected the extremists who ran for statewide office—Lake and Hamadeh and Mark Finchem, who ran for secretary of state—does that mean a politician like Gates might still have a chance? It’s an important question, because extremists who win primaries won’t always lose local general elections, and in the worst case, it wouldn’t take many extremists in roles like his to throw the country into chaos.
There is no clear answer yet, for Gates or for American democracy. In the biggest picture, the range of plausible outcomes in 2024 is as wide as it has been in living memory.
On January 11, Gates handed over the chair’s gavel to his colleague Clint Hickman. Until next year, when his term expires, Gates will simply be one of five members of the county board.
Recently, he has allowed himself to imagine running for statewide office. Democrats defeated all of the Arizona election deniers in 2022, but perhaps a mainstream Republican could win next time.
“Maybe we can take another shot at this. Maybe we can fight to get candidates who can appeal to the big tent,” he said. “That was the party that I joined.”
Did he really think it could happen as soon as 2024? I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Things change. Two years is a long time in politics.”
This article initially misstated Bill Gates’s job title at Ping.
According to a report by CNBC, The Global Times called the Tesla and Twitter CEO out for advancing what they call a “conspiracy theory that slanders China” about covid leaking from a Chinese lab.
Musk was responding to a tweet claiming that Anthony S. Fauci, the former medical adviser to President Biden and Trump, funded the creation of the coronavirus.
“He did it via a pass-through organization (EcoHealth),” Musk tweeted, implying that the unproven theory was true.
In a social post of their own,The Global Times snapped back, “these remarks of his have been continuously used by those US right-wing and anti-China media hostile to China as material to frame China.”
The Global Times also asked if Musk is “breaking the pot of China,” an expression similar to the English phrase “biting the hand that feeds you,” according to CNBC reporter Eunice Woon.
Bad relations with the Chinese government could be disastrous for business. China is Tesla’s second-largest market after the United States, making up around 40 percent of its total sales. Tesla also has a massive factory in Shanghai.
NEW YORK — Richard Belzer, the longtime stand-up comedian who became one of TV’s most indelible detectives as John Munch in “Homicide: Life on the Street” and “Law & Order: SVU,” has died. He was 78.
Belzer died Sunday at his home in Beaulieu-sur-Mer, in southern France, his longtime friend Bill Scheft said. Scheft, a writer who had been working on a documentary about Belzer, said there was no known cause of death, but that Belzer had been dealing with circulatory and respiratory issues. The actor Henry Winkler, Belzer’s cousin, tweeted, “Rest in peace Richard.”
For more than two decades and across 10 series — even including appearances on “30 Rock” and “Arrested Development” — Belzer played the wise-cracking, acerbic homicide detective prone to conspiracy theories. Belzer first played Munch on a 1993 episode of “Homicide” and last played him in 2016 on “Law & Order: SVU.”
Belzer never auditioned for the role. After hearing him on “The Howard Stern Show,” executive producer Barry Levinson brought the comedian in to read for the part.
“I would never be a detective. But if I were, that’s how I’d be,” Belzer once said. “They write to all my paranoia and anti-establishment dissidence and conspiracy theories. So it’s been a lot of fun for me. A dream, really.”
From that unlikely beginning, Belzer’s Munch would become one of television’s longest-running characters and a sunglasses-wearing presence on the small screen for more than two decades. In 2008, Belzer published the novel “I Am Not a Cop!” with Michael Ian Black. He also helped write several books on conspiracy theories, about things like President John F. Kennedy’s assassination and Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.
“He made me laugh a billion times,” his longtime friend and fellow stand-up Richard Lewis said Sunday on Twitter.
Born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, Belzer was drawn to comedy, he said, during an abusive childhood in which his mother would beat him and his older brother, Len. He would do impressions of his childhood idol, Jerry Lewis. “My kitchen was the toughest room I ever worked,” Belzer told People magazine in 1993.
After being expelled from Dean Junior College in Massachusetts, Belzer embarked on a life of stand-up in New York in 1972. At Catch a Rising Star, Belzer became a regular performer and an emcee. He made his big-screen debut in Ken Shapiro’s 1974 film “The Groove Tube,” a TV satire co-starring Chevy Chase, a film that grew out of the comedy group Channel One that Belzer was a part of.
Before “Saturday Night Live” changed the comedy scene in New York, Belzer performed with John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Bill Murray and others on the National Lampoon Radio Hour. In 1975, he became the warm-up comic for the newly launched “SNL.” While many cast members quickly became famous, Belzer’s roles were mostly smaller cameos. He later said “SNL” creator Lorne Michaels reneged on a promise to work him into the show.
But Belzer became one of the era’s top stand-ups. He was known especially for his biting, cynical attitude and his witty, sometime combative banter with the audience. As one of the most influential comedians of the ’70s, Belzer was a master of crowd work.
“My style evolved from dealing with drunken people at twelve, one, two in the morning and trying to be like an alchemist and get the lead of their lives and turn it into golden jokes,” Belzer told Terry Gross on “Fresh Air.”
Belzer would later write an irreverent self-help book titled “How to Be a Stand-Up Comic” with advice on things like how to to apologize to Frank Sinatra when you made fun of him onstage or how to deal with hecklers. One of his favorite lines was: “I have a microphone. You have a beer. God has a plan and you’re not in on it.”
Belzer often played a stand-up comic in film, including in 1980s’ “Fame” and 1983’s “Scarface.” He had small roles here and there, including in “Night Shift” in 1982, and “Fletch Lives” in 1989. But Munch would change Belzer’s career.
As ”Homicide” co-creator Tom Fontana said, “Munch was the spice in these dishes,” Belzer told the AV Club. “Munch was based on a real guy in Baltimore who was a star detective, in a way. He would come onto grisly murder scenes, start doing one-liners, because someone had to break the tension. So Munch served a very important function. Not only was he a dissident who said what was on his mind, he kind of had the gallows humor that’s needed in a homicide squad.”
When “Homicide” wrapped in early 1999, Munch called Dick Wolf to see if the character could join another NBC series, “Law & Order,” where Munch had popped up in a few previous episodes. Wolf already had his leads for “Law & Order,” but he wanted Belzer to star in a spinoff. That fall, “Law & Order: SVU” premiered, with Belzer starring alongside Mariska Hargitay and Christopher Meloni in a storyline written as though Munch had transferred from Baltimore to New York.
“Richard Belzer’s Detective John Munch is one of television’s iconic characters,” Wolf said in a statement.
“I first worked with Richard on the ‘Law & Order’/‘Homicide’ crossover and loved the character so much,” Wolf said. “I wanted to make him one of the original characters on ‘SVU.’ The rest is history. Richard brought humor and joy into all our lives, was the consummate professional and we will all miss him very much.”
Belzer is survived by his third wife, the actress Harlee McBride, whom he married in 1985. For the past 20 years, they lived mostly in France, in homes he purchased partially from the proceeds of a lawsuit with Hulk Hogan. In 1985, Belzer had Hogan as a guest on his cable TV talk show “Hot Properties” to perform a chin-lock on him. Belzer passed out, hit his head and sued Hogan for $5 million. They settled out of court. ___
This story has been corrected to reflect that Belzer died in Beaulieu-sur-Mer, France, not Bozouls, as Scheft originally told The Hollywood Reporter.
Richard Belzer, who played one of TV’s most indelible detectives as John Munch in “Homicide: Life on the Street” and “Law & Order: SVU,” has died
NEW YORK — Richard Belzer, the longtime stand-up comedian who became one of TV’s most indelible detectives as John Munch in “Homicide: Life on the Street” and “Law & Order: SVU,” has died. He was 78.
Belzer died Sunday at his home in Bozouls in southern France, his longtime friend Bill Scheft told The Hollywood Reporter. Comedian Laraine Newman first announced his death on Twitter. The actor Henry Winkler, Belzer’s cousin, wrote “Rest in peace Richard.”
For more than two decades and across 10 series — including even appearances on “30 Rock” and “Arrested Development” — Belzer played the wise-cracking homicide detective prone to conspiracy theories. Belzer first played Munch on a 1993 episode of “Homicide” and last played him in 2016 on “Law & Order: SVU.”
Belzer never auditioned for the role. After hearing him on “The Howard Stern Show,” executive producer Barry Levinson brought Belzer in to read for the part.
“I would never be a detective. But if I were, that’s how I’d be,” Belzer once said. “They write to all my paranoia and anti-establishment dissidence and conspiracy theories. So it’s been a lot of fun for me. A dream, really.”
Kasey watched as her sister, now living just a few blocks from where they had grown up, tried to put a girl-power branding on QAnon. When I talked to Kasey in July 2020, a month after she had first asked me for help, she was losing hope that her sister would ever leave Steinbart’s group. Mutual friends who saw Kiley’s increasingly QAnon-focused posts asked Kasey if her sister had lost her mind.
“She’s more into it than even before,” she said.
I never heard from Kasey again. After we spoke in July, she stopped responding to my calls and text messages. But in videos posted by Steinbart’s group, Kiley addressed her sister’s recent death. Kasey died of a heart attack at twenty-seven years old.
With Kasey gone, I lost my closest connection to Steinbart’s group, right as he drew in more followers and became a more vocal figure in QAnon. But internally, Steinbart’s compound had already started to collapse.
The Ranch crew projected a cheerful image online, coming off like a season of The Real World with a time-traveler for a roommate. Steinbart’s videos garnered tens of thousands of views, filled with responses from QAnon believers convinced he was Q.
It seemed like there was nothing those closest to Steinbart wouldn’t accept. They didn’t seem to mind that there was no evidence that he had billions of dollars. At times, it seemed like Steinbart had set up a force field outside the Ranch that no sense of reality could penetrate.
The fun-loving portrayal of life at the Ranch belied the fact that Steinbart faced a mountain of legal problems that could send him to prison for years. Steinbart’s bail conditions prohibited him from drinking alcohol or using drugs, rules he freely flouted in the company of his followers. Tellingly, visitors were required to sign non-disclosure agreements prohibiting them from discussing any such drinking or smoking “habits” they witnessed at the Ranch. But Steinbart’s drug and alcohol use became a vulnerability as some of his followers started to become suspicious about his claims.
A follower named Mike became disaffected. Instead of working to carry out “Operation QAnon,” Mike noticed, residents at the Ranch just drank all night and slept the day away. And while Steinbart claimed that he had enough money to fund the entire Space Force, he asked his followers to pay whenever he wanted a six-pack of beer.
“He never paid for a single thing there,” Mike said in a video posted online, urging other Steinbart followers to abandon their leader.
The Ranch purge began. He began to suspect that his once-loyal aides had installed hidden cameras around the house to catch him breaking his bail conditions.
Somehow, whether from one of Steinbart’s defectors or some other means, court officials discovered that Steinbart had violated his bail restrictions. He was arrested again in September 2020, and admitted to drinking alcohol and smoking marijuana. When police searched his house, they found a “Whizzinator,” a prosthetic penis meant to cheat drug tests. A judge ruled him held until trial.
Steinbart’s imprisonment shattered the Ranch. With their charismatic leader now in only sporadic contact via a jailhouse telephone, some of Steinbart’s remaining followers began to wonder what they were doing with their lives.
Steinbart was out of jail by the summer of 2021, after pleading guilty in April 2021 to the extortion charge and being sentenced to eight months time-served. But his path back to QAnon greatness had vanished. The Ranch collective dissolved in his absence. The post-riot social media crack-down on QAnon followers obliterated his YouTube and Twitter accounts. And while Steinbart claimed he had won new adherents in jail, many of his genuine followers had returned to their pre-Steinbart lives.
Michael Rae Khoury, a Steinbart follower who had put $40,000 of his own money into the group invited me to Phoenix to see Steinbart give a speech at the premiere of an election fraud documentary. Other QAnon believers treated Steinbart’s flock like “lepers,” Khoury complained, but they didn’t know what was really going on since Steinbart’s release. I should come see it for myself.
I couldn’t turn down the chance. Steinbart’s QAnon experiment had burned itself out, but it was still one of the strangest ways that QAnon had played out in the real world. And I wanted to find out what had happened to Kiley Mayer.
Steinbart had somehow snagged a speaking spot at the premiere of a conspiracy-theory film about election fraud.
Steinbart helped secure a church on the outskirts of Phoenix for the premiere, and his remaining followers passed out flyers to drum up interest. The premiere coincided with the end of Arizona Republicans’ controversial inspection of millions of votes—an attempt to find any scrap of evidence to dispute the fact that Biden had won the state—and the premiere doubled as a party for the audit team. It had drawn some boldface names on the right, including Michael Flynn’s brother and some state lawmakers.
Steinbart struggled to get invited to conferences for mainline QAnon believers, who still saw him as, at best, a crank. But he had no problem getting a booth at the premiere, where his roughly dozen remaining supporters advertised a club service called “Q Meetups”—Steinbart’s latest attempt to take his version of QAnon nationwide.
NEW YORK (AP) — When some of the world’s wealthiest and most influential figures gathered at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting last year, sessions on climate change drew high-level discussions on topics such as carbon financing and sustainable food systems.
But an entirely different narrative played out on the internet, where social media users claimed leaders wanted to force the population to eat insects instead of meat in the name of saving the environment.
The annual event in the Swiss ski resort town of Davos, which opens Monday, has increasingly become a target of bizarre claims from a growing chorus of commentators who believe the forum involves a group of elites manipulating global events for their own benefit. Experts say what was once a conspiracy theory found in the internet’s underbelly has now hit the mainstream.
“This isn’t a conspiracy that is playing out on the extreme fringes,” said Alex Friedfeld, a researcher with the Anti-Defamation League who studies anti-government extremism. “We’re seeing it on mainstream social media platforms being shared by regular Americans. We were seeing it being spread by mainstream media figures right on their prime time news, on their nightly networks.”
The meeting draws heads of state, business executives, cultural trendsetters and representatives from international organizations to the luxe mountain town. Though it’s always unclear how much concrete action will emerge, the meeting is slated to take on pressing global issues from climate change and economic uncertainty to geopolitical instability and public health.
Hundreds of public sessions are planned, but the four-day conference is also known for secretive backroom meetings and deal-making by business leaders. This gap between what’s shown to the public and what happens behind closed doors helps make that makes the meeting a flashpoint for misinformation.
“When we have very high levels of ambiguity, it’s very easy to fill in narratives,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, who is the director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania and also studies misinformation.
Theories about influential global leaders are not new, she said, but scrutiny of the forum and its chairman, Klaus Schwab, intensified in 2020 in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. That year, the theme of the annual meeting was “The Great Reset.” The initiative envisioned sweeping changes to how societies and economies would work to recover from the pandemic and build a more sustainable future.
Now, in increasingly mainstream corners of the internet and on conservative talk shows, “The Great Reset” has become shorthand for what skeptics say is a reorganization of society, using global uncertainty as a guise to take away rights. Believers argue that measures including pandemic lockdowns and vaccine mandates are tools to consolidate power and undercut individual sovereignty.
In a time of mounting anxiety, Jamieson says the public has become more susceptible to falsehoods, as conspiracy theories emerge as a tool to cut through the chaos. Researchers who monitor extremism say these beliefs are becoming more popular and more concerning.
At a rally staged on the grounds of an upstate New York church last fall, a photo of Schwab was displayed on the center of a large screen alongside other “villains” accused of threatening American values. The crowd of thousands had gathered in a revivalist tent at a traveling roadshow used as a recruiting tool for an ascendant Christian nationalist movement. Participants discussed “The Great Reset,” among a host of other theories, as an assault on America’s foundations.
The phrase was used more than 60 times across all programs on Fox News in 2022, according to one tally generated by the Internet Archive’s TV news database. That’s up from 30 mentions in 2021 and about 20 in 2020. It was discussed most frequently on “The Ingraham Angle” and “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”
And in August, amid a defamation trial for calling the Sandy Hook Elementary School attack a hoax, Infowars host Alex Jones released a book called “The Great Reset: And The War For the World.” It’s described as an analysis of “the global elite’s international conspiracy to enslave humanity and all life on the planet.”
As the World Economic Forum has become intertwined with this narrative, a steady stream of claims have plagued the organization. While some people offer legitimate criticisms of the forum — namely that it hosts wealthy executives who fly in on emissions-spewing corporate jets — others spread unverified or baseless information as fact.
For example, a site known for spreading fabricated stories falsely claimed last month that Schwab publicly encouraged the decriminalization of sex between children and adults, using an invented quote and other baseless statements. Still, it drew tens of thousands of shares on Twitter and Facebook.
Meanwhile, the popular claim that the forum wants people to replace meat with bugs is a distorted reference to an article once published on the organization’s website. In another instance, a widely shared post claimed without evidence that the forum had “appointed” U.S. Rep. Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the House before the actual vote had taken place.
The concern, Friedfeld says, is that posts like these could introduce people to more fringe and dangerous conspiracy theories or even translate into real-world violence. Yann Zopf, head of media for the forum, says the organization has increased its monitoring of this kind of online activity and carefully watches for direct threats.
“Creating all that kind of stuff can generate enemies that people believe are responsible for whatever bad thing is happening in the world,” Friedfeld said. “Once that happens, when you believe that that things are happening in the world and a certain person or group of people is responsible for these attacks, all of a sudden, the idea of using violence to resist becomes more plausible.”
When some of the world’s wealthiest and most influential figures gathered at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting last year, sessions on climate change drew high-level discussions on topics such as carbon financing and sustainable food systems.
But an entirely different narrative played out on the internet, where social media users claimed leaders wanted to force the population to eat insects instead of meat in the name of saving the environment.
The annual event in the Swiss ski resort town of Davos, which opens Monday, has increasingly become a target of bizarre claims from a growing chorus of commentators who believe the forum involves a group of elites manipulating global events for their own benefit. Experts say what was once a conspiracy theory found in the internet’s underbelly has now hit the mainstream.
“This isn’t a conspiracy that is playing out on the extreme fringes,” said Alex Friedfeld, a researcher with the Anti-Defamation League who studies anti-government extremism. “We’re seeing it on mainstream social media platforms being shared by regular Americans. We were seeing it being spread by mainstream media figures right on their prime time news, on their nightly networks.”
The meeting draws heads of state, business executives, cultural trendsetters and representatives from international organizations to the luxe mountain town. Though it’s always unclear how much concrete action will emerge, the meeting is slated to take on pressing global issues from climate change and economic uncertainty to geopolitical instability and public health.
Hundreds of public sessions are planned, but the four-day conference is also known for secretive backroom meetings and deal-making by business leaders. This gap between what’s shown to the public and what happens behind closed doors helps make that makes the meeting a flashpoint for misinformation.
“When we have very high levels of ambiguity, it’s very easy to fill in narratives,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, who is the director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania and also studies misinformation.
Theories about influential global leaders are not new, she said, but scrutiny of the forum and its chairman, Klaus Schwab, intensified in 2020 in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. That year, the theme of the annual meeting was “The Great Reset.” The initiative envisioned sweeping changes to how societies and economies would work to recover from the pandemic and build a more sustainable future.
Now, in increasingly mainstream corners of the internet and on conservative talk shows, “The Great Reset” has become shorthand for what skeptics say is a reorganization of society, using global uncertainty as a guise to take away rights. Believers argue that measures including pandemic lockdowns and vaccine mandates are tools to consolidate power and undercut individual sovereignty.
Extremist beliefs take root
In a time of mounting anxiety, Jamieson says the public has become more susceptible to falsehoods, as conspiracy theories emerge as a tool to cut through the chaos. Researchers who monitor extremism say these beliefs are becoming more popular and more concerning.
At a rally staged on the grounds of an upstate New York church last fall, a photo of Schwab was displayed on the center of a large screen alongside other “villains” accused of threatening American values. The crowd of thousands had gathered in a revivalist tent at a traveling roadshow used as a recruiting tool for an ascendant Christian nationalist movement. Participants discussed “The Great Reset,” among a host of other theories, as an assault on America’s foundations.
The phrase was used more than 60 times across all programs on Fox News in 2022, according to one tally generated by the Internet Archive’s TV news database. That’s up from 30 mentions in 2021 and about 20 in 2020. It was discussed most frequently on “The Ingraham Angle” and “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”
And in August, amid a defamation trial for calling the Sandy Hook Elementary School attack a hoax, Infowars host Alex Jones released a book called “The Great Reset: And The War For the World.” It’s described as an analysis of “the global elite’s international conspiracy to enslave humanity and all life on the planet.”
As the World Economic Forum has become intertwined with this narrative, a steady stream of claims have plagued the organization. While some people offer legitimate criticisms of the forum — namely that it hosts wealthy executives who fly in on emissions-spewing corporate jets — others spread unverified or baseless information as fact.
For example, a site known for spreading fabricated stories falsely claimed last month that Schwab publicly encouraged the decriminalization of sex between children and adults, using an invented quote and other baseless statements. Still, it drew tens of thousands of shares on Twitter and Facebook.
Bug eaters?
Meanwhile, the popular claim that the forum wants people to replace meat with bugs is a distorted reference to an article once published on the organization’s website. In another instance, a widely shared post claimed without evidence that the forum had “appointed” U.S. Rep. Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the House before the actual vote had taken place.
The concern, Friedfeld says, is that posts like these could introduce people to more fringe and dangerous conspiracy theories or even translate into real-world violence. Yann Zopf, head of media for the forum, says the organization has increased its monitoring of this kind of online activity and carefully watches for direct threats.
“Creating all that kind of stuff can generate enemies that people believe are responsible for whatever bad thing is happening in the world,” Friedfeld said. “Once that happens, when you believe that that things are happening in the world and a certain person or group of people is responsible for these attacks, all of a sudden, the idea of using violence to resist becomes more plausible.”
The National Archives released nearly 13,000 secret files related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. However, thousands of files are still being withheld from the public.
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Academy Award winner Al Pacino may have opened the 2022 Game Awards, a night of industry recognition and expensive marketing for the biggest games around, but it was a new type of internet celebrity who closed it out. “I want to nominate this award to my reformed Orthodox Rabbi Bill Clinton,” said a young kid with long hair who appeared onstage suddenly after Elden Ring was crowned Game of the Year. He was wearing an ill-fitting coat, sneaking up on stage behind the the Elden Ring development team.
Security followed, and chaos ensued online as everyone tried to figure out what the hell had just happened during host Geoff Keighley’s otherwise heavily orchestrated three-hour event. But this was far from the first time the young man, whose name Kotaku believes to be Matan Even, had sprung to brief internet fame through internet-pilled trolling, even if it might have been his weirdest.
After the ceremony finished, Keighley tweeted that the “individual who interrupted” the event had been arrested. Five hours later, however, Even was already tweeting. “Today there is a lot of talk, and speculation,” he wrote. “More information will be released on all fronts sooner than later.”
When asked about what transpired after the incident, the LAPD media relations office contradicted Keighley’s account, saying a report had been taken but no arrest was made. When asked to square that, a spokesperson for The Game Awards provided a more detailed account.
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They said Even was taken to a “secure area” inside the Microsoft Theater by TGA security staff where he was then questioned by venue security as well as “TGA-hired onsite LAPD officers.” They said he was then taken into custody and transported to a local police station for booking by the TGA-hired LAPD officers in their patrol vehicle. When asked about that version of events, a representative from the LAPD would only confirm that the individual had been transported to a station. Since no arrest was made, it’s unclear how long he was held for questioning.
While this may be the first time Even risked arrest, it was far from his first publicity stunt. Before stealthing his way on stage at one of the gaming industry’s biggest events of the year in front of an audience of over a million people, Even crashed a BlizzCon panel, went viral for pranking the L.A. Clippers fan cam, and appeared on right-wing conspiracy show Infowars at least twice.
The Clippers stunt came in October 2019. Amid the Hong Kong protests, Even momentarily appeared on the fan cam at the team’s home stadium, only to immediately hold up a black t-shirt that read, “Fight for Freedom Stand with Hong Kong.” China had blacklisted the Houston Rockets after their general manager tweeted out a picture of the same t-shirt just a couple of weeks earlier.
The next month, Even interrupted a BlizzCon 2019 panel with a similar message in support of the Hong Kong protests. Blizzard had suspended Overwatchpro Chung “Blitzchung” Ng Wai the prior month for doing the same, and along with the NBA and other companies, came under fire at the time for its failure to stand up for Hong Kong’s democratic protesters.
As Motherboard points out, this made Even a ripe target to be co-opted by right-wing political actors who saw the opportunity to attack seeming liberal hypocrisy on the issue. But Even was also apparently already a big fan of at least one of Infowars’ hosts, Owen Shroyer. He said as much in a 2019 appearance, calling Shroyer his “favorite person on Infowars,” while in a second appearance in 2020 Shroyer called Even “one of the young stars of the conservative movement.”
While Even’s own social media activity appears to be almost exclusively concerned with the Hong Kong protests and censorship by the Chinese government, his journey from protester to Infowars guest is also a perfect example of the ambiently reactionary online pipeline that can lead one from Googling political issues to ending up on right-wing content channels. (Even was seemingly 12 during his first Infowars appearance.) It’s also a reason why some were quick to interpret his nonsensical remarks about Bill Clinton and Orthodox Judaism as potentially antisimetic.
Prior to last night, Even’s last tweets were from March 2021 and were about concerns over the rise in hate crimes toward Asian Americans. Infowars, meanwhile, has seen founder Alex Jones successfully sued for hundreds of millions by the parents of the Sandy Hook school shooting victims. Most recently, however, the site tried to hold court with Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, who used the appearance to praise Hitler, a heel turn that comes amid a larger wave of antisemitism in conservative circles.
It was in front of that backdrop that some worried Even’s stunt was secretly some racist 4Chan deepcut. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, who interviewed Even earlier today, said he appeared to understand Hebrew, and called him “almost certainly a Jewish prankster.”
He’s also disavowing his previous Infowars appearances, even while continuing his trolling in messages with other journalists.
“I never was an avid viewer [of Infowars] nor am I now,” he told Motherboard. He reportedly went on to call Clinton “a true inspiration, especially in the gaming space.”
Authorities arrested more than two dozen people in connection with an alleged plot to overthrow the German government. CBS News reporter Anna Noryskiewicz joined Vladimir Duthiers and Lana Zak from Berlin to discuss.
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She was very late. A man named Barry was compelled to lead the room in a rendition of Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” to stall for time. But when she did arrive, the tardiness was forgiven and the Cobb County Republican Party’s November breakfast was made new. She wasn’t greeted. She was beheld, like a religious apparition. Emotions verged on rapture. Later, as she spoke, one man jumped to his feet with such force that his chair fell over. Not far away, two women clung to each other and shrieked. I was knocked to my seat when a tablemate’s corrugated-plastic FLOOD THE POLLS sign collided inadvertently with my head. Upon looking up, I came eye-level with a pistol tucked into the khaki waistband of an elderly man in front of me. “She is just so great,” I heard someone say. “I mean, she really is just amazing.”
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Marjorie Taylor Greene arrived in Congress in January 2021, blond and crass and indelibly identified with conspiracy theories involving Jewish space lasers and Democratic pedophiles. She had barely settled into office before being stripped of her committee assignments; she has been called a “cancer” on the Republican Party by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell; and she now has a loud voice in the GOP’s most consequential decisions on Capitol Hill because her party’s leaders know, and she knows they know, that she has become far too popular with their voters to risk upsetting her.
Nobody saw her coming. Not even Greene saw Greene coming.
II.
She was a product, her family loved to say, of the “Great American Dream.” There was a three-story home at the end of a shaded driveway in the small town of Cumming, Georgia, north of Atlanta; there was a finished basement in which Marge—and that is what she was called, Marge—and her friends would gather in faded nylon one-pieces after a swim in Lake Lanier.
Her father was Robert David Taylor, a Michigan transplant for whom a three-story home had never been guaranteed but who had believed acutely in its possibility. Bob Taylor was the son of a steel-mill worker; he had served in Vietnam; he had hung siding to pay for classes at Eastern Michigan University. He had married the beautiful Carrie Fidelle Bacon—“Delle,” to most people, but he called her Carrie—from Milledgeville, Georgia, and rather than continue with college, he had become a contractor and built a successful company called Taylor Construction. For Marjorie Taylor, the first of Bob and Delle’s two children, the result was a world steeped in a distinctly suburban kind of certainty: packed lunches and marble kitchen countertops, semiannual trips to the beach, and the conviction that everything happens for a reason.
She came of age in Cumming, the seat of Forsyth County. With her turtleneck sweaters and highlighted mall bangs, Marge Taylor might have been any other teenage girl in America. At South Forsyth High School, class of 1992, she was a member of the Spanish club and a manager of the soccer team. She may not have been voted Most Spirited, but she dressed to theme during homecoming week; she may not have had the Best Sense of Humor, but by graduation she had amassed her share of inside jokes with friends. “Shh … It’s the people outside!” her senior quote reads in the high-school yearbook. “Run the cops are here! I’m gone!!” She was “nice to everyone,” “upbeat,” with “tons of confidence,” recalls Leslie Hamburger, a friend of hers and her brother David’s. “I have nothing but good memories.” The good-but-not-great student was hardly, in other words, an overachieving scold already plotting her ascent to Washington. It’s difficult to imagine an 18-year-old Ted Cruz bothering with something called the Hot Tuna Club.
Illustration by Eric Yahnker. Source image: South Forsyth High.
Forsyth County was a calm, quiet, ordered place. But it had a history. In September 1912, an 18-year-old white girl was found bloodied and barely breathing in the woods lining the Chattahoochee River; she died two weeks later. Within 24 hours of her discovery, four Black men had been arrested and charged with assault. A white mob dragged one of the suspects from his cell and hanged him from a telephone pole. Two others were tried and executed. White residents then decided to undertake nothing short of a racial cleansing. On horseback, armed with rifles and dynamite, they drove out virtually all of the county’s Black population—more than 1,000 people. So successful were their efforts that the county would experience the modern civil-rights era vicariously at best. There were no whites only signs to fuss over in Cumming, because there were no Black people to keep separate.
In January 1987, a white resident organized a “Walk for Brotherhood” to commemorate what had happened 75 years earlier. The project was complicated by the immediate wave of death threats he received. Arriving from Atlanta, the civil-rights leader Hosea Williams called Forsyth the most racist county in the South. Oprah Winfrey came down to cover the event. But most people in Forsyth ignored the whole affair; broach it in conversation, and you were considered a pot-stirrer. George Pirkle, the county’s resident historian, was reminded of this as recently as 2011, when he readied for publication TheHeritage Book of Forsyth County. He told the mayor of Cumming about his plans to include the region’s Black history in the volume, and got an incredulous response: “Well, why in the world would you want to do that?” As Martha McConnell, the local historical society’s co-president then and now, told me, the subtext was clear: “Don’t be starting things.”
In the end, the Heritage Book did not go starting things. Look through it today and you will see the neatly arranged census data that cuts off at 1910. To include 1920, of course, would have revealed that the Black population was suddenly gone. To go beyond 1920 would have revealed that the Black population never came back.
All of which is to say that Marge Taylor’s worldview was shaped in a community artificially devoid of sociocultural conflict, a history scrubbed of tension. That’s the basic attitude here toward the past, Pirkle told me: “If you don’t talk about it, it goes away.”
Decades later, as they considered her scorched-earth rise to power—the conspiracy theories and racist appeals and talk of violence against Democratic leaders—some of her teachers would find themselves wondering how they’d failed to notice the young Marge Taylor. How was it that they had no memory of her holding forth in civics class, or waging a boisterous campaign for student office? How could it possibly be that in fact they had no memory of her at all?
III.
She did as she was supposed to do, graduating from South Forsyth High and then packing up and moving an hour and a half away, to Athens, for four years at the University of Georgia. She would flit all but anonymously through the campus of 20,000 undergraduates. For Marge Taylor, UGA was about becoming the first in her family to graduate from college—setting herself up to run Taylor Construction. Almost certainly it was also about meeting a nice man. Perry Clarke Greene was a nice man. Three years her senior, he was tall and earnest and came from Riverdale. He, too, was in the university’s Terry College of Business. They exchanged vows the summer before her senior year, in 1995.
Among the things I do not know about Marjorie Taylor Greene—she would not speak with me for this story—is what her wedding was like. A newspaper account, if it exists, has yet to turn up. I do not know whether she stood before an altar laden with white gladioli, as her grandmother once had, or whether the reception was a small affair at her parents’ home in Cumming or something bigger somewhere else. I also do not know whether, on that day, she was happy: whether the quiet and respectable life that now unfurled before the new Mrs. Perry Greene felt like enough.
The young couple moved into a three-bed, three-bath colonial with symmetrical shrubbery in the north-Atlanta suburb of Roswell. Perry Greene became an accountant at Ernst & Young, and Marjorie Greene became pregnant. In January 1998, she smiled alongside the other mothers with tired eyes and loose clothing as they learned to exercise and massage their newborns in the North Fulton Regional Hospital’s “Mother Lore” class.
It wasn’t long before Perry started working for his father-in-law as general manager of the family business. After facilitating the sale of Taylor Construction, in 1999, he moved on to Taylor Commercial, a former division of the company, which specialized in siding for apartment complexes and subsidized-housing projects. Soon after, Bob Taylor named his son-in-law president of the company.
Marjorie, meanwhile, tended to their one, two, and finally three children. There were lake days with Mimi and Papa, three-week Christmas vacations in the sun, and annual drives to visit Perry’s extended family in Oxford, Mississippi. A lot of time was spent traveling to fast-pitch softball tournaments—Taylor, the middle child, was barely a teenager when she started getting noticed. (“Can’t believe she is being recruited in 8th grade,” Greene would write on her personal blog after a weekend at one university.)
As for Taylor Commercial, it was eventually bought by Marge and Perry. Financial-disclosure documents filed in 2020, when Greene first ran for office, reveal a company whose value ranged from $5 million to $25 million. There is a photograph that Greene cherishes: of her as a child smiling alongside her father at a construction site. Bob did not want his daughter to see her inheritance as a given; Greene has said that her father once fired her from a job she held at the company as a teenager. But now the girl in the photograph was chief financial officer of Taylor Commercial; her college sweetheart was its president; her family was by that point living in a tract mansion in Milton, which borders Alpharetta. Who could say, of course, how regularly she made use of the indoor pool, or marveled at the built-in aquarium on the terrace level—two features of this “smart-home luxury estate,” in the words of a recent listing. But she could at least enjoy the fact of them.
Another thing I do not know about Marjorie Taylor Greene: I do not know precisely how long it was before the shape of her life—the quiet, the respectability, the cadence of carpooling and root touch-ups—began to assume the dull cast of malaise. Perhaps it was during one of the many softball tournaments, another weekend spent crushed against the corner of an elevator at the Hilton Garden Inn by grass-stained girls and monogrammed bat bags. Perhaps her Age of Anxiety arrived instead on a quiet Tuesday in the office of her multimillion-dollar company, when it occurred to her that running this multimillion-dollar company just might not be her purpose after all.
What I do know, after dozens of conversations with Greene’s classmates and teachers, friends and associates, is that by the time she reached her late 30s, something in her had started to break.
IV.
Later, on the campaign trail, Greene would anchor much of her story in the fact that she was a longtime business owner: a woman who’d always more than held her own in the male-dominated world of construction. In beautifully shot television ads, voters saw a woman whose days were a relentless sprint between building sites—hard hats, reflector vests, jeans—and light-filled conference rooms, where she wore dresses with tasteful necklines and examined important blueprints.
That is not a fully accurate picture. People at Taylor Commercial seem to have liked Greene personally, but she spent only a few years on the job and did not put her stamp on the company. Call her on a weekday afternoon, and there was a good chance she’d answer from the gym. She had “nothing to do with” Taylor Commercial, one person familiar with the company’s operations told me. “It was entirely Perry.” A 2021 article in The Atlanta Journal-Constitutionnoted that the Taylor Commercial website during those years scarcely hinted at Greene’s existence. The only flicker of acknowledgment came in the last line of Perry Greene’s bio, a reference to the wife and three children with whom he shared a home.
By 2011, the Journal-Constitution reported, Greene was no longer listed as the chief financial officer, or any other kind of officer. A year earlier, the company had been hit with state and county tax liens. Greene would one day joke about her lack of business acumen. But it doesn’t seem to have been terribly funny in the moment. Greene simply didn’t love the work. She had grown up with this business; she had gone to school for this business. And yet the girl in the photograph, as it turned out, had little interest in running this business.
Some people close to Greene would describe the ensuing dynamic—her own connection to the business weakening while her husband’s grew stronger—as a source of tension for the couple. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s path to Congress could perhaps be said to have begun here: when, in the aftermath of her tenure as CFO, she appeared determined to strike out in search of something to call her own.
In 2011, the same year she stepped away from her job, Greene decided to commit herself to Jesus Christ. Or recommit herself, perhaps. Last spring, Greene revealed, apparently for the first time publicly, that she was a “cradle Catholic,” born and raised in the Church. This disclosure was occasioned after Greene told Church Militant, a right-wing Catholic website, that efforts by bishops to aid undocumented immigrants reflected “Satan controlling the church.” In response, Bill Donohue of the conservative Catholic League demanded that Greene apologize. Greene felt moved thereafter to share the details of her own personal relationship with Catholicism, explaining that she had stopped attending Mass when she became a mother: when she’d “realized,” she said in a statement, “that I could not trust the Church leadership to protect my children from pedophiles, and that they harbored monsters even in their own ranks.”
Greene eventually decided to join North Point Community Church, one of the largest nondenominational Christian congregations in the country. And so during a service one Sunday, as applause and encouragement echoed across the sanctuary, Greene waited her turn to be immersed, blond hair tucked behind her ears, Chiclet-white teeth fixed in a nervous smile.
Many baptisms at North Point are accompanied by testimony, in which the congregant shares a brief word about her journey to Christ. Video of Greene’s testimony is no longer on the church’s website, but the journalist Michael Kruse described its key moments in an article for Politico. From the stage that morning, he wrote, Greene spoke about “the martyrs book,” meaning, I think, the Book of Martyrs, John Foxe’s 16th-century history and polemic on the persecution of Protestants under Queen Mary. As she’d considered the “conviction” of such men and women, “how they died for Christ,” Greene said, “I realized how small my faith was if I was scared to do a video and get baptized in front of thousands of people.” Before those thousands of people, she accepted Jesus as her lord and savior.
Greene’s congressional biography leaves the impression of deep and meaningful engagement with North Point, but according to a person in the church leadership, her involvement tapered off after several years. This person noted, somewhat ruefully, that Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state who defied President Donald Trump, has long been involved in North Point, but “no one ever asks me about him.”
V.
It was around this same time that Greene, as she later put it on a local radio show, “finally got brave enough” to step into a CrossFit gym. Greene’s original gym of choice had been the Alpharetta branch of Life Time. The gym, with its LifeSpa and LifeCafe, bills itself as a “luxury athletic resort,” and it’s easy to see how Greene might have tired of the ambience. She is not—has never been—the kind of biweekly gym-goer who walks for 45 minutes on the treadmill while watching Stranger Things on an iPad. In one of the few candid shots of Greene in her 11th-grade yearbook, she is flat on her back on a weight bench, lifting two heavy-looking dumbbells. “Marge Taylor pumps some Iron,” the caption reads.
In 2007, a workout partner at Life Time told Greene about CrossFit, a fitness regimen that combines Olympic weight lifting with calisthenics and interval training; it has long been popular among law enforcement and members of the military. The two women went on CrossFit.com and printed out the workout of the day, or “WOD,” in CrossFit parlance. This was, in the early years of CrossFit, how most newcomers engaged with the program, printing out the WOD and heading to their regular gym. By the end of that first WOD, Greene was sold. In 2011, she started going to the CrossFit gym in Alpharetta.
What Greene found at the gym (or “box,” as it is known) was community. The coaches, the members, the stragglers who popped in “just to see what this is all about”—they loved her. This is something many observers in Washington and elsewhere do not appreciate about Greene: that she can be extremely likable, so long as you are not, in her estimation, among “the swamp rat elites, spineless weak kneed Republicans, and the Radical Socialist Democrats who are the demise of this country that we all love and call home.” She has a sugary voice and a personable, generous affect; she is, when she wants to be, the sort of person whom a stranger might meet briefly and recall fondly to their friends as “just the nicest woman.” “The softer side of Marjorie Taylor Greene is what her friends, neighbors, and the people who elected her know,” Jamie Parrish, a Georgia Republican and close friend of Greene’s, told me. Her supporters back home can seem genuinely confused by her chilly or hostile portrayal and reception elsewhere.
At CrossFit, Greene’s warmth made her a star. “CrossFit’s really intimidating,” she explained in one radio interview. “Most people’s experience with CrossFit is … they run across ESPN, and they see these monster people doing crazy amazing things, and they’re usually like, ‘Ohhh, I’m never gonna do that.’ ” But Greene could put people at ease. When she started coaching classes herself, the reviews were stellar. “I loved working out with Marjorie Greene,” Carolyn Canouse, a former client, told me by email. “She was patient with my lack of athleticism, and always encouraging and supportive to everyone in the gym. She would bring her dog to work with her sometimes (he was adorable!), as well as her children who were all down to earth and nice to be around.”
Eric Yahnker
Greene trained on most days and competed in a workout challenge known as the CrossFit Open; at her peak, she was ranked 47th in the U.S. in her age group. Over time, she seemed to regard CrossFit less as a grounding for the rest of her life and more as an escape from it altogether.
When Greene was running for Congress, a man named Jim Chambers, jarred by her self-presentation as a paragon of family values, wrote about her alleged extramarital affairs at the gym in a Facebook post. (The New Yorker’s Charles Bethea later reported on text messages from Greene apparently confirming one of the affairs.) Her first alleged relationship was with a fellow trainer. Chambers, who owned one of the CrossFit boxes at which Greene coached, recalled viewing her initially as “this married lady who was at least nominally Christian, maybe not especially, but led a very suburban life. And then, like, quickly thereafter, she confessed that her marriage was on the rocks and falling apart.” According to Chambers, Greene made no secret of the affair with the trainer. She talked openly about her problems with Perry—“different lives and interests … typical stuff,” as Chambers summarized it. “She struck me as an extremely bored person,” he added. Later, Greene apparently had an affair with another man at CrossFit, a manager whom Chambers had recently hired from Colorado; this relationship, Chambers said, was more serious, more involved, “a real affair.” (Greene’s office did not respond to a list of questions about the alleged affairs and other matters.)
By March 2012, she and Perry had separated. Four months later, she filed for divorce. Two months after that, the couple reconciled.
The family appeared to resume its ordinary rhythms. By January, Perry was posting again on Tripadvisor. This was no small thing. Before the separation, he had been in the habit of reviewing, with great earnestness, establishments ranging from the local Melting Pot (“As stated this is a fondue restaurant, so it is very unique”) to the Cool Cat Cafe on Maui (“My family loves their burgers so much we have ‘Burger Sunday’ every Sunday as our family dinner”), only to go conspicuously dark during the sadness and tumult of 2012. But come the new year he was back, sharing his thoughts about the Encore, in Las Vegas (“Great ambience. Wife and I loved it!!!”), and an Italian restaurant in Alpharetta whose wine list, he judged, was “pretty good!”
Marjorie, meanwhile, worked with a personal coach in the hope of qualifying to compete in the international CrossFit Games. For the next two years, she would busy herself with his intense weekly prescriptions, all the while chronicling her experience on a WordPress blog. “Test post,” she began in April 2013. “I’m testing posting on my blog from my iPhone … See if this works.”
Scattered among the posts about creatine supplements (“I love that stuff”) and the iPhone footage of Greene’s triple jumps, there are glimmers to suggest that her family had found its way back. “I decided that I’m going to make a little home gym in my basement,” Greene wrote in May 2013. “This way, on days I’m not coaching I can train at home and be around my kids. My husband thinks it’s a great idea. Hopefully, they can see Mom working hard, and I can set a good example for them.” Six months later: “Just hanging around the house this weekend with my family, and I’m really happy with that.”
Much of the time, however, the blog posts suggest someone pinballing from aggressive cheerfulness (“Totally doing the happy dance!!”) to the “negative thoughts” that could rush in with no warning: “I wish there was a switch to turn off those thoughts.”
VI.
“Confidence is also an area that I struggle in,” Greene wrote in one of her blog posts. “But I’ve decided to say ‘why not me?’ ”
In 2013, she set out to become a businesswoman again. Partnering with Travis Mayer, a 22-year-old coach and one of the top CrossFit athletes in the world, Greene opened a 6,000-square-foot box called CrossFit Passion, on Roswell Street, in Alpharetta. Two years later, they relocated to a space nearly twice the size. In 2016, however, Greene sold her stake. She no longer blogged about her WODs or anything else related to CrossFit.
It’s unclear what prompted so abrupt a turnaround; Greene hasn’t discussed the subject publicly. “She would go through a really hard workout and then just stop in the middle of it and start crying,” a person who was close to Greene during this time told me. “And that started happening more regularly toward the end. It was just too much stress.” (Mayer, who went on to rename the gym United Performance, which he still owns and operates today, did not respond to requests for comment.)
The other thing that happened to Marjorie Taylor Greene in 2016 was Donald Trump. Greene’s family had never been especially political. Every fourth November, minus a cycle or two, Bob and Delle Taylor made sure to stop by the library or the First Baptist Church and cast a vote. It is reasonable to assume that the Taylors leaned right. For years, the family’s construction company was a major sponsor of the Atlanta libertarian Neal Boortz’s eponymous talk show. Boortz, one of the most popular radio personalities in America during the late 1990s and early 2000s, told me that Bob (who died in 2021) had been a good friend for decades. Still, the family did not give money to candidates, Republican or Democrat; they did not hold fundraisers at the house on Lake Lanier. For the Taylors, the 2016 presidential election commenced with no more fanfare than any other. On Super Tuesday, Bob, Delle, and Marjorie did not vote in either party’s primary. In fact, Marjorie had not voted since 2010.
Greene’s political origin story was not unlike that of millions of other Trump supporters. Despite having never hinted at an interest in politics, she found herself suddenly beguiled by a feeling, a conviction that despite the distance between Trump’s gold-plated world and her own, she knew exactly who he was. “He reminded me of most men I know,” she has said. “Men like my dad.”
In some ways, he was like her dad. Bob Taylor may not have been overtly partisan, but he rivaled Trump in his tendency to self-mythologize. In 2006, Greene’s father had published a novel with the small publisher Savas Beatie called Paradigm. As best I can tell, this is Taylor’s effort to demonstrate the value of a system he invented called the “Taylor Effect”—which purports to predict the stock market based on the gravitational fluctuations of Earth—in the form of a high-stakes international caper. The story follows twin scientists who discover an ancient Egyptian box in the bowels of the Biltmore estate, the contents of which, they soon realize, could “destroy many of the world’s most powerful families” if ever made public.
He considered his stock-market theory to be “the Genuine Article”; in the afterword, he likened himself to da Vinci, Galileo, Edison, Marconi, and the Wright brothers. “History,” he wrote, “is filled with characters who endured ridicule, imprisonment, and even death because they discovered things we know today with absolute certainty to be true.” Suzanne Thompson, a North Carolina author hired to help Taylor write Paradigm, recalls that Taylor had “a bit of an exalted sense of himself.” She was unaware that he was Marjorie Taylor Greene’s father, and gasped with dismay when I told her. “Oh my gosh, I had no idea. Oh my God.”
Although Greene’s political awakening was sudden, she would later portray her support for Trump as the unveiling of a well-formed political identity that she’d had no choice but to keep hidden. “I’ve always had strong feelings about politics, but when you’re a business owner, you have to really, really be careful about what you say,” she told a conservative YouTube vlogger in 2019. But when she sold her gym, “something magically happened to me: I didn’t have to worry about what members thought anymore.”
Greene may now have felt free to speak, but it was not clear what she wanted to say. It was clear only that she wanted to say something. It was as though she spent the first six months of Trump’s administration gathering up the scattered feelings and dim instincts that informed her attraction to his brand of politics and examining them under a microscope, twisting the knob until the edges came into focus. By July 2017, Greene was ready to start posting about politics.
She headed to American Truth Seekers, a now-defunct fringe-right website run by a New York City public-school counselor who went by the name Pat Rhiot. The contents of Greene’s earliest posts have been lost to the ether, but the headlines, archived by the Wayback Machine, summarize the brand Greene set out to establish from the very beginning: “Caitlyn Jenner Considering What?” was the first headline, followed over the next few days by “Female Genital Mutilation: America’s Dirty Little Secret” and “Exposed! Confidential Memo to Take Down Trump and Silence Conservatives!”
By August, when the full text of many of her blog posts become available, she was establishing her fierce devotion to gun rights and Donald Trump, and her antipathy toward conventional Republican politicians:
MAGA means get rid of our ridiculous embarrassing massive $20 Trillion dollar DEBT you put us in!! … You see we elected Donald Trump because he is NOT one of you, a politician. He is a business man, and a VERY successful one. WE elected him because he clearly knows how to manage business and money because we all know he has made plenty of it. Oh but not you people!
September saw her going after Hillary Clinton:
You know how we all have that one friend or family member that shows up to the party uninvited and just causes non-stop drama? They lie and make up stories and shift blame to everyone and everything, but constantly refuse to accept reality or the fact that maybe it’s their own fault. They ruin the party and make everyone miserable with all the crap they blubber out of their mouths, while they try to push their agenda on everyone and no one wants it. Yep Hillary. Can she just go away? Can she just go to jail?
Greene’s posts, by the standards of the 2017 far-right blogosphere, were more or less the usual fare, nothing terribly new or uniquely provocative. But Greene, in her brief time posting, had already picked up on something remarkable: People liked that she was ordinary. In the present landscape of conservative politics, ordinariness was a branding opportunity. Ordinariness ensured that even her most banal reflections would sparkle. Ordinariness allowed Greene to offer conservatives what the Alex Joneses couldn’t: affirmation that your neighborhood “full-time mom” and “female business owner” and “patriot” was fed up too. In the fall of 2017, Greene created a new Facebook page exclusively for the dissemination of her political thoughts.
The Republican base was in the market for a Marjorie Taylor Greene—a suburban woman who not only didn’t recoil from Trump but was full-throated MAGA. All over the internet, it seemed, were women who claimed to be conservative and yet could do nothing but choke on their pearls and complain about Trump’s tweets. But now here was regular Marge, who would put America first. Sweet southern Marge, who loved “family, fitness, travel, shooting, fun, and adventure,” and who, as would soon be clear, wanted very much to save the children.
VII.
Perhaps, decades fromnow, what will stand out most is how easily the dominoes fell.
Imagine it like this: #SaveTheChildren, right there at the top of the feed. You click on the hashtag—because who, given the choice, would not want to save the children?—and then, suddenly, you are looking with new eyes at the chevron Wayfair rug beneath your feet. It had been 40 percent off during the Presidents’ Day sale, but now you’re wondering: Had this one been used to transport a child, a trafficked innocent rolled up inside? And then not 10 clicks later you find yourself wondering about other things, too—other conspiracies, other dark forces. Because it is curious, now that you’re here, now that you’re wondering, that you can’t recall any CCTV footage of the airplane as it hit the Pentagon on 9/11. You had gone online to check if Theresa had posted photos from the baby shower and now, 20 minutes later, you log off with an entirely new field of vision, the unseen currents of the world suddenly alive.
Perhaps, for Marjorie Taylor Greene, the rug had been houndstooth and the baby shower had been Kerrie’s. But you don’t need the site-by-site search history to understand the narrative of Greene’s descent into QAnon, because the basics are so often the same.
QAnon followers subscribe to the sprawling conspiracy theory that the world is controlled by a network of satanic pedophiles funded by Saudi royalty, George Soros, and the Rothschild family. Though Republican officials have insisted that QAnon’s influence among the party’s base is overstated, former President Trump has come to embrace the movement plainly, closing out rallies with music nearly identical to the QAnon theme song, “WWG1WGA” (the initials stand for the group’s rallying cry, “Where we go one, we go all”). Yet since its inception, in the fall of 2017, when “Q,” an anonymous figure professing to be a high-level government official, began posting tales from the so-called deep state, no politician has become more synonymous with QAnon than Greene. To an extent, Greene had already signaled her attraction to conspiracy theories, questioning on American Truth Seekers whether the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas was a false-flag operation to eliminate gun rights. But with Q, Greene was all in. She has gone so far as to endorse an unhinged QAnon theory called “frazzledrip,” which claims that Hillary Clinton murdered a child as part of a satanic blood ritual.
Ramon Aponte, a right-wing blogger known as “The Puerto Rican Conservative,” became friendly with Greene soon after she began posting about Pizzagate, the conspiracy theory that a Washington, D.C., restaurant was involved in a Democratic-run child-sex ring. “Even though the mainstream news media ‘debunked’ it, nobody ever conducted an investigation on it,” Aponte told me. “And Marjorie Taylor Greene knew this … She was a voice for the silent majority.” (After a North Carolina man’s armed raid of the restaurant, in December 2016, Washington police did, in fact, investigate, and pronounced the theory “fictitious.”)
Was Greene a true believer? Her early outpouring of breathless posts gives that strong impression—she comes across as a convert intoxicated by revelation. But in time, her affiliation with QAnon brought undeniable advantages. It was not until she latched on to Q and Q-adjacent theories that Greene’s political profile achieved scale and velocity. The deeper she plunged, the larger her following grew. And the more confident she became.
As the months passed, she started experimenting with a new tone; she would still be regular Marge and sweet southern Marge, but she would also be Marge who told the “aggressive truth”—who wasn’t afraid to be real. In Facebook videos posted from 2017 to 2019, Greene talked about the “Islamic invasion into our government offices.” She said: “Let me explain something to you, ‘Mohammed’ … What you people want is special treatment, you want to rise above us, and that’s what we’re against.” She talked about how it was “gangs”—“not white people”—who were responsible for holding back Black and Hispanic men. She objected to the removal of Confederate statues, saying: “But that doesn’t make me a racist … If I were Black people today, and I walked by one of those statues, I would be so proud, because I’d say, ‘Look how far I’ve come in this country.’ ” The most “mistreated group” in America, she went on to say, was “white males.”
Illustration by Eric Yahnker. Source image: Marjorie Taylor Greene / YouTube.
By the end of 2018, Marjorie Taylor Greene was awash in validation. Especially from men. She found herself suddenly fielding marriage proposals in the comments beneath her selfies. “Ok ok ok so you’re totally gorgeous I got that the first time I saw u,” one person wrote, “but you seal the deal with what’s in your head, I love the message of truth u bring and inform all who will listen I’M SOLD!!!” Greene, as she often would upon reading such comments, clicked the “Like” button in response.
Greene began to meet up with people from her Facebook circle. In March 2019, she traveled to Washington, D.C., as the Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings on restrictive gun legislation. At one point, in a now-infamous confrontation, Greene began following David Hogg, a survivor of the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida. The shooting had left 17 dead, and Hogg had come to Washington to make the case for gun-control measures. Wearing a black blazer and leggings, a pink Michael Kors tote slung over her shoulder, Greene accosted the 18-year-old and, with a friend capturing the encounter on video, badgered him about his support for the bill: “You don’t have anything to say for yourself? You can’t defend your stance? How did you get over 30 appointments with senators? How’d you do that? How did you get major press coverage on this issue?” Hogg walked on in silence as Greene continued: “You know if school zones were protected with security guards with guns, there would be no mass shootings at schools. Do you know that? The best way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun.”
Greene would later trace her decision to run for office to the frustration she’d felt during that trip: No one had paid her any attention. That would have to change. As she posted on a website called The Whiskey Patriots just after the Hogg incident, and just before she launched her bid for Congress: “Let the war begin …”
VIII.
She ran and she won, of course, in Georgia’s Fourteenth District, in a largely rural outpost in the northwest corner of the state. Voters did not seem to care that Greene, who had judged the solidly conservative area to be friendlier to her chances than her home district in suburban Atlanta, had never actually lived there.
Shortly after she was sworn into office, in January 2021, her harassment of Hogg, as well as old social-media posts in which she endorsed the claim that the Parkland shooting was a false-flag operation, surfaced into public view. In her maiden speech on the floor of the House of Representatives, she set out to blunt the criticism she was receiving. Much of the speech was a disavowal of her own past statements. She conceded, for example, that 9/11 had actually happened, and that not all QAnon posts were accurate. “I was allowed to believe things that weren’t true,” she protested.
As for David Hogg, she recounted an episode at her own high school when, she said, the “entire school” had been taken hostage by a gunman—an episode that she continues to invoke as a touchstone to explain everything that is wrong about security in schools and how she has a right to browbeat a school-shooting survivor like Hogg. But if her account failed to engender much sympathy, it was because it only nominally resembled reality.
On a September morning in 1990, during Greene’s junior year, a history teacher named Johnny Tallant was holding his class at South Forsyth High School when an armed sophomore entered the classroom next door, fired a rifle overhead, and marched the students there into Tallant’s classroom; for the next few hours, the sophomore held some 40 of his classmates, and Tallant, at gunpoint. The hostages later said they were initially terrified; the student threatened to kill them if his demands for candy, soda, and a school bus were not met. Eventually their nerves quieted. Many of the students knew their captor at least somewhat, and they weren’t altogether surprised when he put down his gun and began sharing with them “everything that was going on in his head,” as one hostage recalled. “He said he wanted to get away from things and make a point,” recalled another, adding that the student had repeatedly promised not to hurt them. “He said his parents were mean, that he was tired of how they treated him, and that he had no friends and just wanted to get away.” Gradually, as police delivered the snacks he’d asked for, the sophomore let most of the hostages go, including all the girls but one, who knew the student well and stayed behind to keep talking to him. Five hours in, when the remaining hostages moved to grab his gun, he did not resist; when the police burst in moments later, he did not fight back.
Tallant recalls that Greene reached out to him sometime before she launched her bid for Congress, in the spring of 2019. He had no idea who she was, or why she was calling him at home. He listened that day as the unfamiliar woman explained that she wanted to speak with him about the events of 1990—that she’d been a student at South Forsyth when everything happened. Still, Tallant struggled to place her. Greene had not been in his classroom. Everyone else at the school, including Greene, had been quickly evacuated and bused away. Tallant was taken aback by Greene’s intensity, her apparently sudden need, decades later, to discover flaws in the school’s handling of things: “She was asking me some crazy questions about—she was saying we should have had guns ourselves, you know … She sounded like kind of a nut.”
Tallant would not give her what she wanted. “I told her right off, we didn’t need guns,” he said. It wasn’t a political statement; for Tallant, it was just reality—the only conclusion you could draw if you took care to examine the particulars of the crisis, of the teenage boy at the center of it. The sophomore was known by classmates and teachers to struggle with seizures and other symptoms of epilepsy. As one of the hostages later put it: “I wasn’t scared of him. I was scared of what the police would do when he stepped into the hall, and I was afraid of what the police were planning to do as he walked from the room to the bus.”
But never mind. Greene hung up with Tallant and eventually proceeded with her preferred version of the story in her speech on the House floor: “You see, school shootings are absolutely real,” Greene said, her navy face mask emblazoned with the words FREE SPEECH in red letters. “I understand how terrible it is because when I was 16 years old, in 11th grade, my school was a gun-free school zone, and one of my schoolmates brought guns to school and took our entire school hostage.”
“I know the fear that David Hogg had that day,” she pronounced. “I know the fear that these kids have.”
Did it even matter that Greene had not been taken hostage, or that the episode had been handled wisely and without bloodshed, or that the teacher in the classroom had told her she was wrong about her memories and her conclusions? By now, it may have occurred to Greene that performance was enough. That politics might in fact be that easy—as long as you were angry, or at least good at acting like it, most people wouldn’t bother to look beneath the hood.
IX.
In late September 2022, Perry Greene filed for divorce from Marjorie Taylor Greene on the grounds that the marriage was “irretrievably broken.” His timing—so close to the midterm election—did not go unnoticed in Georgia political circles. Six weeks later, on November 8, Marjorie easily won reelection to her second term in the House of Representatives.
Given her popularity among a segment of the Republican base, she is certain to play a major role in the GOP leadership, whether that role comes with a specific title and assignment or not. She wields power much like Donald Trump, doing or saying the unthinkable because she knows that most of her colleagues wouldn’t dare jeopardize their own future to stop her.
What Marjorie Taylor Greene has accomplished is this: She has harnessed the paranoia inherent in conspiratorial thinking and reassured a significant swath of voters that it is okay—no, righteous—to indulge their suspicions about the left, the Republican establishment, the media. “I’m not going to mince words with you all,” she declared at a Michigan rally this fall. “Democrats want Republicans dead, and they’ve already started the killings.” Greene did not create this sensibility, but she channels it better than any of her colleagues.
In her speech at the Cobb County GOP breakfast, Greene bemoaned “the major media organizations” for creating a caricature of her “that’s not real” without ever, she said, giving her the chance to speak for herself. Afterward, I introduced myself, noted what she had just said, and asked if she was willing to sit down for an interview. “Oh,” she said, “you’re the one that’s going around trying to talk to [all my friends]. This is the first time you’ve actually tried to talk to me.” I explained that I had tried but had been repeatedly turned away by her staff. “Yeah, because I’m not interested,” she snapped. “You’re a Democrat activist.” Some of her supporters looked on, nodding with vigor.
Whether Greene actually believes the things she says is by now almost beside the point. She has no choice but to be the person her followers think she is, because her power is contingent on theirs. The mechanics of actual leadership—diplomacy, compromise, patience—not only don’t interest her but represent everything her followers disdain. To soften, or engage in better faith, is to admit defeat.
I think often of Greene’s blog post from July 26, 2014, and the question she posed to herself during her crisis of confidence. “Why not me?” she had written tentatively, trying it on for size. I think of it whenever I see Greene onstage, on YouTube, on the House floor, making performance art of rage and so clearly at ease with what she is. Were the question not in writing, I’m not sure I’d believe there was a time in her life when she’d been afraid to ask.
This article appears in the January/February 2023 print edition with the headline “Why Is She Like This?”
A surge of anti-Jewish vitriol, spread by a world-famous rapper, an NBA star and other prominent people, is stoking fears that public figures are normalizing hate and ramping up the risk of violence in a country already experiencing a sharp increase in antisemitism.
Leaders of the Jewish community in the U.S. and extremism experts have been alarmed to see celebrities with massive followings spew antisemitic tropes in a way that has been taboo for decades. Some said it harkens back to a darker time in America when powerful people routinely spread conspiracy theories about Jews with impunity.
Former President Donald Trump hosted a Holocaust-denying white supremacist at Mar-a-Lago. The rapper Ye expressed love for Adolf Hitler in an interview. Basketball star Kyrie Irving appeared to promote an antisemitic film on social media. Neo-Nazi trolls are clamoring to return to Twitter as new CEO Elon Musk grants “amnesty” to suspended accounts.
“These are not fringe outliers sending emails from their parents garage or idiots no one has ever heard of. When influential mainstream cultural, political and even sports icons normalize hate speech, everyone needs to be very concerned,” said Miami Beach Mayor Dan Gelber, a leader in South Florida’s Jewish community.
Northwestern University history professor Peter Hayes, who specializes in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, said normalizing antisemitism is a “real possibility” when there is a “public discussion of things that used to be beneath contempt.”
“I’m very concerned about it,” Hayes said. “It’s one of the many ways in which America has to get a grip and and stop toying with concepts and ideas that are potentially murderous.”
Trump hosted Ye — the rapper formerly known as Kanye West — and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes for dinner at his Florida home on Nov. 22.
Fuentes was a Boston University student when he attended a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that erupted in violence in 2017. He became an internet personality who used his platform to spread white supremacist and antisemitic views. Fuentes leads a far-right extremist movement called “America First,” with supporters known as “Groypers.”
On Thursday, Fuentes joined Ye in appearing on the Infowars show hosted by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Ye praised Hitler during the interview, ratcheting up the rhetoric that already cost him a lucrative business deal with Adidas.
Jonathan Greenblatt, national director and CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, said it is astonishing and alarming that two of the nation’s leading purveyors of antisemitism were “breaking bread with the erstwhile head of the GOP.”
“I would characterize this as the normalization of antisemitism. It has now become part of the political process in a way we hadn’t seen before,” Greenblatt said. “And that is not unique to Republicans. It is not just a Republican problem. It is a societal problem.”
Most Americans knew it was “beyond the pale” when torch-toting white supremacists marched through the University of Virginia’s campus on the eve of the 2017 rally, said Amy Spitalnick, executive director of Integrity First for America, a group that backed a lawsuit against organizers of the Charlottesville rally.
“What’s even more dangerous than Nazis with torches chanting, ‘Jews will not replace us,’ is when we have political leaders and others espousing those same conspiracy theories in increasingly normalized ways,” she said.
Spitalnick said the virulent hatred that Ye has been spewing can make diluted expressions of antisemitism seem more normal in contrast.
“It’s crucial that we hold Kanye and Irving and these other public figures accountable for their antisemitism. But it means nothing if we’re not also recognizing and holding accountable the ways in which this antisemitism and extremism has seeped into the mainstream of one of our major political parties and become commonplace in our political discourse,” she said.
Trump’s critics and even some of his allies condemned the former president for hosting Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago. Trump claimed that he knew nothing about Fuentes before the dinner and defended his decision to host Ye at his club.
Twitter suspended Ye’s account this week after he tweeted a picture of a swastika merged with the Star of David. Musk tweeted that Ye had violated a rule against inciting violence.
Musk announced last week that his “amnesty” plan applied to accounts that haven’t “broken the law or engaged in egregious spam.” Online safety experts predict that the move will lead to a rise in harassment and hate speech.
Groups that monitor Twitter for racist and antisemitic content say toxic speech already has been on the rise in the month since Musk took over the platform and fired thousands of employees. Content moderators were among those who lost their jobs.
Watchdogs also have rebuked Musk for some of his own tweets, including posting a meme featuring Pepe the Frog, a cartoon character that was hijacked by far-right extremists.
In April, the Anti-Defamation League announced that its annual tally of antisemitic incidents reached a record high last year. The organization counted 2,717 incidents of assault, harassment and vandalism in 2021, a 34% increase over the previous year and the highest number since the ADL began tracking the events in 1979.
Generations ago, famous Americans including Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh unapologetically expressed antisemitic sentiments in a way that would have shocked Americans in more recent decades. Now, the internet and social media make it easy for world-famous celebrities to normalize anti-Jewish hate.
For somebody of Ye’s status to praise Nazis and Hitler is “escalating from ugliness to a kind of incitement,” Greenblatt said. He noted that Jewish institutions already have to beef up security to protect against attacks such as the one in which a gunman killed 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018.
“Our community still has to brace for the consequences of those ideas going mainstream,” Greenblatt said.
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Associated Press Writer Freida Frisaro in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, contributed to this report.
Conspiracy theories about mail ballots. Anonymous text messages warning voters to stay home. Fringe social media platforms where election misinformation spreads with impunity.
Misinformation about the upcoming midterm elections has been building for months, challenging election officials and tech companies while offering another reminder of how conspiracy theories and distrust are shaping America’s politics.
The claims are fueling the candidacies of election deniers and threatening to further corrode faith in voting and democracy. Many of them can be traced back to 2020, when then-President Donald Trump refused to accept the outcome of the election he lost to Joe Biden and began lying about its results.
“Misinformation is going to be central to this midterm election and central to the 2024 election,” said Bhaskar Chakravorti, who studies technological change and society and is the dean of global business at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. “The single galvanizing narrative is that the 2020 election was stolen.”
A look at key misinformation challenges heading into the 2022 election:
Trump, a Republican, attacked the legitimacy of the election even before he lost. He then refused to concede, spreading lies about the election that inspired the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. His contention was rejected in more than 60 court cases and by his own attorney general, William Barr.
Together, these misleading claims about the nation’s electoral system have led some Republicans to say they’re going to hold onto their mail ballots until Election Day — a move that could slow down the count.
Others vow to monitor the polls to prevent cheating, leading to concerns about intimidation and even the possibility of violence at election sites.
Tech companies say they’ve implemented new policies and programs designed to ferret out misinformation.
“We’ve seen hundreds of elections play out on our platforms in recent years and we’ve been applying lessons from each one to strengthen our preparations,” Facebook and Instagram owner Meta said in a statement.
Yet critics say the volume of false claims spreading now shows there’s more to be done, such as better enforcement of existing rules or government regulations requiring more aggressive policies.
“This is no longer a new problem,” said Jon Lloyd, senior adviser at the nonprofit Global Witness, which last week released a report showing that TikTok failed to remove many advertisements that contain election misinformation. Big social media platforms, he said, “are still simply not doing enough to stop threats to democracy.”
MISTAKES WILL HAPPEN — WHILE CLOCK IS TICKING
Elections involve the combined efforts of tens of thousands of people working under pressure. Mistakes are expected, which is why there’s a robust system of checks and balances to ensure errors are found and corrected.
Taken out of context, stories about glitchy voting machines, mixed-up ballots or even “suspicious” vehicles arriving at election centers can become fodder for the next election fraud myth.
And with so much work to do at such a fast pace, election workers, local officials and even the media can have little time to push back on such claims before they go viral.
In Georgia in 2020, a water leak at a site where ballots were being counted was used to spin a far-fetched tale of ballot rigging. In Arizona, the choice of pens given to voters filling out ballots led to similarly preposterous claims.
To avoid falling for a misleading claim, consult multiple sources including local election offices. Any significant voting irregularity will be covered by multiple news outlets and addressed by election officials. Be skeptical of claims from second-hand sources, said Shaye-Ann McDonald, a behavioral researcher at Duke University who studies ways to improve resistance to misinformation.
The most viral misinformation often elicits anger or fear that motivates readers to repost it before they’ve had time to coolly consider the underlying claim.
“When you read about something that provokes a strong emotion, that should be a warning sign,” McDonald said.
A MULTILINGUAL CHALLENGE
Just before the 2020 election, Spanish-language Facebook ads falsely claimed Biden, a Democrat, was a communist. On other platforms, posts warned Latinos in the U.S. not to vote at all.
Misinformation in non-English languages is a particular concern cited by researchers who say the major platforms — most of them U.S.-based — are focused on content moderation in English. Automated systems written to detect misinformation in English don’t work as well when applied to other languages.
“As bad as they (tech companies) are moderating content in English, they’re even worse when it comes non-English languages,” said Jessica Gonzalez, co-CEO of Free Press, a nonprofit that works on issues of racial justice and technology.
MISINFORMATION BY TEXT?
While misinformation about elections spreads easily on big social media platforms like Facebook, it also has taken root on a long list of less familiar platforms: Gab, Gettr, Parler and Truth Social, Trump’s platform.
Meanwhile, TikTok has emerged as a key network for younger voters — and the politicians who want to reach them. The platform, owned by a Chinese company called ByteDance, has created an election center to connect users with trustworthy information about elections and voting. But nonetheless misinformation persists.
The problem isn’t limited to social media. The number of false claims transmitted by text and email has steadily increased in recent years. Last summer, Democratic voters in Kansas received misleading texts telling them a yes vote on an upcoming referendum would protect abortion rights; the opposite was true.
MUSK AND TWITTER
Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter just weeks before the 2022 election upended that platform’s plans for combating misinformation ahead of the midterms.
Musk quickly fired the executive who had overseen content moderation. Over the weekend he posted a tweet advancing a baseless conspiracy theory about the attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, before deleting it.
Musk has called himself a free speech absolutist and had said he disagreed with the decision to boot Trump from the platform for incitement of violence on Jan. 6, 2021.
He has said that a content moderation committee will examine possible revisions to Twitter’s rules but that no changes would be made until after the election.
“We’re staying vigilant against attempts to manipulate conversations about the 2022 US midterms.” Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of safety and integrity, tweeted Tuesday.
THREATS FOREIGN AND DOMESTIC
Russian efforts to interfere in U.S. elections go back years, and there are indications that China and Iran are stepping up their game.
Brooklyn Nets star Kyrie Irving recently tweeted a link to an antisemitic documentary that pushed conspiracy theories about Jewish people and the slave trade. The NBA is facing criticism for its silence in response. Michael George has the latest.
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