👖🔥 vance on fire
Before we get to the good stuff:
Check out the investigation that The American Sunlight Project released this week! We found over 1000 pro-Russian bot accounts on X that have gone undetected in some cases for over a decade. Read the AFP’s exclusive on the network here.
Bill Adair’s new book, Beyond the Big Lie is out this week. He explores my experience being the target of a national harassment and disinfo campaign. I'll forever be thankful to Bill for telling my story so well when so few cared to. Grab your copy today.
Is it just me, or does it feel like last week the United States took a presidential election that was already crammed with Lifetime-movie-levels of plot twists and merged it with a fascist’s wet dream?
Since then, Trump has twice* invoked the “enemy from within,” claiming the citizens he is running to represent are a “greater threat than China and Russia.” In at least one case, he said that the National Guard or the military should deal with “sick people and radical left lunatics.”** The former president has falsely alleged that around the world, people describe our country as “occupied” by “vicious and bloodthirsty criminals,” and announced that Election Day will be known as “Liberation Day.”***
Given the prevalence of overt fascism in the discourse, you’d be forgiven if you missed another anti-democratic pronouncement from the Trump-Vance camp this week. But when the good senator JD Vance, self-appointed paragon of American values, was in conversation with Lulu Garcia-Navarro of The New York Times, he was given five chances to state the truth: that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. He chose not to.
More worryingly, when asked if he would have certified the 2020 election had he been Vice President, Vance doubled down on the conspiracy theory he floated during the debate: the completely made-up specter of anti-Trump online censorship. The whole exchange between Garcia-Navarro and Vance is worth reading:
LGN: Senator, yes or no. Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election?
JDV: Let me ask you a question. Is it OK that big technology companies censored the Hunter Biden laptop story, which independent analysis have said cost Donald Trump millions of votes?
LGV: Senator Vance, I’m going to ask you again. Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election?
JDV: Did big technology companies censor a story that independent studies have suggested would have cost Trump millions of votes? I think that’s the question.
LGV: Senator Vance, I’m going to ask you again.
JDV: Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election? And I’ve answered your question with another question. You answer my question and I’ll answer yours.
LGN: Senator, would you have certified the election in 2020? Yes or no?
JDV: I’ve said that I would have voted against certification because of the concern that I just raised. I think that when you have technology companies —
LGN: The answer is no.
JDV: When you have technology companies censoring Americans at a mass scale in a way that, again, independent studies have suggested affect the vote. I think that it’s right to protest against that, to criticize that, and that’s a totally reasonable thing.
Let me put this as simply as possible: a sitting senator and candidate for Vice President is asserting that it is “totally reasonable” to disrupt the democratic process, eschewing the legal system and the Constitution, over a far-fetched lie.
For those that might not be following every hallucination in this particular conservative fever dream, allow me to bring you up to speed. As I recently wrote for MSNBC, for the past several years:
The narrative that government, academia and the private sector have been supposedly colluding on a massive scale for years to suppress Americans’ political opinions has grown from its roots on the fringes of the internet to the halls of Congress. This manufactured controversy preys upon genuine concerns: It would indeed be bad if the U.S. government were coercing social media platforms to remove speech. But its thin record relies heavily on scaremongering, context collapse and research mistakes that would make a grade schooler blush.
The Hunter Biden laptop debacle is the crux of much of this fiasco. In 2020, weeks before the election, Twitter briefly decided to suppress links from a New York Post story about the salacious contents of a laptop alleged to be Hunter Biden’s. Fifty-one former intelligence officials wrote a letter alleging that the laptop “ha[d] all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” Importantly, they wrote: “We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement — just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.”
I told the AP that the laptop should be “treated as a Trump campaign product” and tweeted that I was suspicious of a “fairy tale about a laptop repair shop”—two assertions that Republicans have widely cited as proof that I believe the “Russia collusion hoax.” In context, my comments, and those in the infamous intel officials’ letter, are more nuanced. As the intelligence officials pointed out, there were a lot of reasons to be “deeply suspicious” of the contents of the laptop in that moment. At the time, neither Giuliani nor the New York Post were allowing other outlets or cybersecurity experts to verify the contents of the laptop; the public had to take Giuliani at his word, which was understandably not worth much at that juncture. Twitter, acting in an abundance of caution, hoping not to repeat the mistakes of 2016, briefly blocked links to the Post story under their “hacked materials” policy.
The link was blocked for a total of 24 hours. In that time, an independent, contemporaneous analysis found that Twitter’s decision actually precipitated an increase in discussion of the New York Post’s article: Zignal [Labs, a media intelligence firm], found a surge of shares immediately after Twitter instituted the block, jumping from about 5.5 thousand shares every 15 minutes to about 10 thousand.” Google Trends supports this hypothesis, as Philip Bump wrote in The Washington Post in 2022: “It was only after the social media companies moved to restrict sharing of the story that search interest began to climb. The peak came in the early evening, at which point searches in the U.S. were five times what they’d been in the morning.” In short, it’s incredibly dubious that Twitter’s decision had enough of an effect to swing the election; in fact, it may mean more people knew about the “laptop from hell” as a result.
So what is JD Vance going on about? He’s likely citing a methodologically-unsound poll conducted by the conservative Media Research Center. (Don't be confused by that benign name, they're unhinged conspiracy theorists, e.g. they're still regularly publishing incendiary lies that I used government "ties" to "silence" them.) Here’s WaPo’s Bump on the poll:
It presented respondents with a sweeping claim linking Biden to foreign business interests, asking whether awareness of that purported link would have led people to reconsider their votes. A chunk of self-reported Biden voters said they would have.
Setting aside the vast inaccuracies inherent in having people assess what they would have done had the conditions of their decision-making been slightly different, the question didn’t even center on the New York Post story! It was about purported Chinese investors and used the same “Biden family” framing on which the failed Republican impeachment probe depended.
But according to Yale Law-educated JD Vance, who definitely knows better, this questionable piece of research is cold, hard, proof that Donald Trump would have won the 2020 election if not for that pesky 24 hours of link suppression (that likely increased awareness of the story!) by a social media platform that only about 11 percent of the U.S. population was actively using.****
The argument, even in its most generous interpretation, is rain-soaked-newsprint-thin. But that doesn’t make it any less frightening. The broader version of this argument—alleging that there is a vast cabal of woke liberal researchers working in cahoots with the government and tech companies to censor conservatives—has had very real impacts on the safety and security of those it targets.
My life has been changed forever by baseless allegations that I am in favor of or ran a censorship unit at the Department of Homeland Security. On a near-daily basis, I am still accused of treason and invoked as a caricature of what “real” Americans should fear. Coming out of a campaign that is actively encouraging the use of the military against its “enemies,” it is incredibly scary to hear Vance invoking a conspiracy theory in which I have been made the villain.
On a higher plane, that Vance is crying “censorship” as he carefully lays the groundwork for his campaign’s rejection of a potential electoral loss means the sort of violence and lawlessness he and Trump embody and encourage could be much more commonplace soon. What would happen if Vance’s dreams were realized? Would we rerun the election somehow? Does victory just get declared for whichever side claims “censorship” the fastest, in a game of Spit where control of the most powerful country in the world is the prize?
This isn’t just another crazy conspiracy theory from MAGA-land that everyone chuckles at. It is a lie that extends and amplifies the effects of January 6, undermining the truth, free expression, the rule of law, and our democratic processes. If Trump and Vance are successful, the implications will reverberate for generations.
*Trump to Maria Bartiromo on Fox: “I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within ... sick people, radical left lunatics. And it should be easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military." // Trump, onstage in Aurora, Colorado: “...The enemy from within. All the scum we have to deal with who hate our country. That’s a bigger enemy than China and Russia.”
** See second link above.
*** Trump on X: “We are now known, all throughout the world, as OCCUPIED AMERICA...But to everyone here in Colorado and all across our nation, I make you this vow: November 5th, 2024 will be LIBERATION DAY in America. I will rescue Aurora and every town that has been invaded and conquered—and we will put these vicious and bloodthirsty criminals in jail or kick them the hell OUT OF OUR COUNTRY.”
**** Statista estimates that Twitter’s monetizable daily active users in the fourth quarter of 2020 amounted to 37 million people. The population of the United States in 2020 was 329 million. Registered voters in 2020 were 168 million, but it is impossible to measure how many registered voters were using Twitter.