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Autocracies Are Winning the Information War

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2024 › 05 › the-plot-to-discredit-democracy › 678315

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In The Atlantic’s newest cover story, Anne Applebaum details the onslaught of antidemocratic propaganda flooding the United States. If only Americans weren’t so ready to believe so much of it.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The real meaning of divestment Is Donald Trump trying to get thrown in jail? “Say plainly what the protesters want,” Jill Filipovic argues.

Propaganda for American Tastes

Back in 2017, I was asked by the State Department to give a series of lectures on disinformation to audiences in various cities in the Czech Republic. (I wrote about it here.) I was stunned, even then, at how the European information environment was poisoned by a deluge of Russian propaganda—including the obvious cross-pollination between Russians and malevolent actors in the United States. This global problem, Anne Appelebaum writes in our new cover story, has since gotten much worse.

As Anne points out, the Chinese, the Russians, and others are on a propaganda offensive around the world, even in places that most Americans don’t pay much attention to. She described how a European diplomat was “mystified” to find students in Africa parroting Russian talking points about the war in Ukraine. “He grasped for explanations,” she writes: “Maybe the legacy of colonialism explained the spread of these conspiracy theories, or Western neglect of the global South, or the long shadow of the Cold War.”

The simpler but more ominous truth, Anne explains, involved “China’s systematic efforts to buy or influence both popular and elite audiences around the world; carefully curated Russian propaganda campaigns, some open, some clandestine, some amplified by the American and European far right; and other autocracies using their own networks to promote the same language.”

These efforts differ from Cold War–era propaganda campaigns. In those days, the Soviets and others tried to paint a happy picture of the successes of their autocratic regimes as a way of legitimizing their rule and as a kind of enticement to other nations to join Team Red. Many of these efforts “backfired,” Anne writes, “because people could compare what they saw on posters and in movies with a far more impoverished reality.”

Those were the days. Now, Anne points out, the goal of most autocracies is not to replace truth with regime-friendly lies but to destroy truth itself, and to obliterate the human ability—or desire—to even distinguish between truths and lies. “The new authoritarians,” she writes, “have a different attitude toward reality.”

When Soviet leaders lied, they tried to make their falsehoods seem real. They became angry when anyone accused them of lying. But in [Vladimir] Putin’s Russia, Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, and Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuela, politicians and television personalities play a different game. They lie constantly, blatantly, obviously. But they don’t bother to offer counterarguments when their lies are exposed … This tactic—the so-called fire hose of falsehoods—ultimately produces not outrage but nihilism. Given so many explanations, how can you know what actually happened? What if you just can’t know?

The point of such efforts is not really to mobilize support for bad regimes but to numb the brains and neutralize the agency of citizens everywhere. As Anne writes, “If you don’t know what happened, you’re not likely to join a great movement for democracy, or to listen when anyone speaks about positive political change. Instead, you are not going to participate in any politics at all.”

I recommend that you read Anne’s article in its entirety to see the full spectrum of these autocratic efforts around the world, but I want to focus here on what’s happening in the United States. Americans are being targeted by foreign propagandists who are using the internet and social media to pump their toxic slurry directly into American veins. “A part of the American political spectrum is not merely a passive recipient of the combined authoritarian narratives that come from Russia, China, and their ilk,” Anne writes, “but an active participant in creating and spreading them. Like the leaders of those countries, the American MAGA right also wants Americans to believe that their democracy is degenerate, their elections illegitimate, their civilization dying.”

As is always the case, this propaganda has found willing customers in a bored and listless society that alleviates its ennui by gorging on entertaining conspiracy theories. Americans don’t have to seek out foreign propaganda when plenty of their fellow citizens are eager to sell them lies that have been altered to suit American tastes. But why does American society have so many takers for such soul-destroying nonsense? Anne points out that after the ISIS terrorist attack on a concert hall in Moscow in March, the former PayPal entrepreneur (and close pal of Elon Musk’s) David Sacks posted on X that “if the Ukrainian government was behind the terrorist attack, as looks increasingly likely, the U.S. must renounce it.” This inane and baseless charge has been viewed 2.5 million times.

More than David Sacks himself, however, the problem is a culture that even thinks to take people such as David Sacks seriously. Democracies have always had conspiracy theorists and other cranks wandering about the public square, sneezing and coughing various forms of weirdness on their fellow citizens. But even in the recent past, most people with a basic level of education and a healthy dollop of common sense had no trouble resisting the contagion of idiocy.

Today, the immune system of once-healthy democratic societies is compromised. Be it the idea that the moon landings were faked or the attacks on the legitimacy of elections, wild theories have become surprisingly easy for Americans to believe, a sign of a national gullibility that makes the United States an obvious target for outlandish propaganda.

Governments alone cannot solve this problem. Individual citizens have to take the initiative—as exhausting as it might be—to confront one another over bad information. They need to ask questions: Where did you hear that? Why do you trust that source? Do you think that I, as a friend or a family member, am lying to you if I tell you it’s not true? People who have already been captured by propaganda will not believe official disclaimers from authoritative sources, and will see such disclaimers only as further proof of the conspiracy. But when conspiracists and deeply misinformed people encounter people close to them, those whom they care about, who gently but firmly refuse to join them in the maze of misinformation, such discussions can sometimes have a positive effect, at least in the short term.

What I am suggesting is not fun, and should be limited to friends and family. (It’s probably not a strategy to pursue at a bar with strangers after a few drinks.) And it may not change very much. But right now, it’s all any of us can do.

Today’s News

Hamas laid out a proposal for a cease-fire in Gaza that the group’s political leader said was based on a plan from Egypt and Qatar. Israel’s leadership said that the terms were “far from Israel’s essential demands” but that it would be sending a delegation to Cairo to continue the negotiations. The judge in Donald Trump’s hush-money criminal trial ruled that the former president was in contempt of court after he once again broke a gag order preventing him from attacking jurors and others involved in the trial. The Israeli cabinet voted to ban Al Jazeera yesterday and immediately moved to shut down the news channel’s offices in the country and to seize some of the company’s communication equipment.

Dispatches

The Wonder Reader: The new question du jour is “What is milk?” Isabel Fattal examines the factors complicating milk’s identity.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Harold M. Lambert / Getty

Is It Wrong to Tell Kids to Apologize?

By Stephanie H. Murray

Say you’re sorry. For generations, parents have leaned on the phrase during sibling tiffs and playground scuffles. But it has lately become controversial, particularly among a certain subset of Millennial parents—those for whom the hallmark of good parenting is the reverence they show for their kids’ feelings. Under this model, gone are the days of scolding a child for melting down, sending them to a time-out, or ignoring them until they settle. (Joining them for “time-ins” to help them process their emotions? That’s okay.) The guiding principle seems to be to take children’s current or future feelings into consideration at every parental decision point—even when they are the ones who have hurt the feelings of someone else.

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Trump’s VP Search Is Different This Time

found 6 May The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2024 › 05 › trumps-vp-search-is-different-this-time › 678296

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By killing her dog, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem may have also killed her chances of becoming Donald Trump’s vice president. So who else is on the list? We’ll get into Trump’s options after four new stories from The Atlantic:

The blindness of elites What’s left to restrain Donald Trump? David Frum: What Joe Biden needs to say about anti-Semitism Mark Leibovich: “House Republicans showed up at a campus protest. Of course.”

Trump’s Big Decision

As a reporter, it is my duty to remind you that Trump’s team loves messing with the media almost as much as it loves jockeying for influence with the big man himself. Trump’s advisers might dish, for example, that after careful consideration, so-and-so is off the vice-president list, and you know who is back on. They might explain that, actually, some of the usual considerations of geography and gender aren’t playing a role in this VP decision.

But the truth is, none of these supposed insiders really knows much. No one has any idea what Trump is thinking, except for Trump himself. And the former president is quite famously unpredictable, with a well-established tendency to make decisions based on his most recent conversation. Predicting his Veep pick, then, is a bit futile. It’s also really early: Candidates don’t typically choose a running mate until around the party convention, in late summer. And Trump will likely try to milk as much media coverage as he can out of making people wait.

Still, without prognosticating too much, we can anticipate what Trump is probably looking for in a vice president. He’ll want someone who looks good on television but not someone who might outshine him. Someone who isn’t polarizing to the MAGA base but who demonstrates range. He’ll choose a candidate with experience, or at least with some record of being a winner. He is probably not looking for a politician to “balance” out his ticket like Mike Pence did in 2016, when Trump desperately needed to win over evangelicals.

Above all, of course, Trump will want someone unfailingly loyal to him. This time around, it’s not about logic or persuasion—it’s about personality. The Republican strategists Doug Heye and Mike Murphy, neither of whom are involved with the Trump campaign, walked me through some of Trump’s VP options.

South Carolina Senator Tim Scott

Why does this name keep floating around? Well, the senator, who’s been in office for more than a decade, has always been popular. He’s a former insurance salesman who knows how to schmooze, and, Heye told me, he’s also a “prodigious fundraiser.” Scott never fully cozied up to Trump while the latter was president, but he didn’t criticize him much either. “He played it smart,” Murphy told me, by not getting too close or too far. The dynamic changed when Scott launched his own presidential campaign last year. “He was the puppy on his back, supplicant,” even while he was running against Trump, Murphy said, and that loyalty “will appeal to Trump.”

Scott could also—the thinking goes—help Trump appeal to Black voters, who have already started peeling off from Democrats, albeit in a small way. Trump and his campaign have seemed obsessed with this task as they try to avoid a repeat of 2020, and Scott could help them do it.

Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders

Trump’s former press secretary was on even the earliest iterations of his 2024 VP shortlist. She is in her first term as a state governor and has enacted plenty of MAGA-style legislation. She’s smart and spent two years working for Trump, which means that she’s familiar with handling the D.C. media and that Trump is probably pretty comfortable with her. Having a woman like Sanders on the ticket could help Trump pick up women voters, another demographic he’s struggled with. “She’s never going to have any agenda or not be the completely loyal type,” Murphy said. “And [she’s] less of a star, so no worry of [Trump] being diminished at all.”

North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum

Burgum has been governor for eight years and seems well liked. He’s personally wealthy, like Trump, but not famous. He’s ambitious, but not in a way that intimidates Trump. He ran for president this cycle too, remember? If you don’t, that’s probably a plus for Trump.

When you pick a vice president, you should “pick a slightly less impressive version of yourself,” Murphy told me—like when Bill Clinton picked Al Gore, another moderate, Protestant white man. “When you’re John McCain, [if] you pick a Sarah Palin, it’s just trouble,” he said. Could Burgum be that slightly less impressive version of Trump?

New York Representative Elise Stefanik

This 39-year-old House Republican has been openly auditioning for the VP slot for years now. She’s a gifted fundraiser and easily the most powerful Republican in New York. She has establishment bona fides—Harvard, the George W. Bush White House, aide to Paul Ryan—but has devoted herself entirely to Trump’s defense and the MAGA cause. She’s a competent woman who could help Trump appeal to other educated women. The problem, of course, is that he may not find her particularly authentic. “She’d poison her mother to get two points on Election Day,” Murphy said. “And I think he would smell that.”

Ohio Senator J. D. Vance

The Hillbilly Elegy author and former venture capitalist seems to share Trump’s populist sensibilities. Vance was once a Trump critic but changed his tune when he ran for the Senate. He’s ambitious in a way that Trump might read as disingenuous—probably because it is. “If I were Trump, I’d be troubled by the fact that J. D. Vance was calling [Republican strategists] to ask about running as an anti-Trump Republican when he first looked at running statewide in Ohio,” Murphy said. Then again, he said, “Vance is a clever-enough chameleon to be able to suck up to Trump with skill.”

Former Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson

Carson, a former neurosurgeon, ran for president against Trump back in 2016. He worked in the administration for a while, heading up HUD. We haven’t heard much from him since then, but he does seem to hang out in Trump’s circles, and has been spotted at Mar-a-Lago on more than one occasion.

Carson could, in theory, help Trump appeal to Black voters. But he doesn’t have quite the political credentials that Scott does. “I was meeting a friend for drinks back in February, and he said he knows for a fact that it’s going to be Ben Carson,” Heye told me. “I’m like, ‘Okay, well, one, it’s February. Two, why Ben Carson?’”

Florida Senator Marco Rubio

Rubio is young and telegenic, with two terms in the Senate (plus a failed presidential campaign) under his belt. The son of Cuban immigrants, he could theoretically help Trump appeal to Latino voters. The problem is, Rubio would have to resign from the Senate. He’d also have to change his residence, because the Constitution bars electors from voting for a president and a vice president from the same state. Trump picking Rubio is “completely far-fetched—with the caveat that when you’re dealing with Donald Trump, far-fetched things happen,” Heye said.

Kari Lake

The Arizona TV anchor turned Stop the Steal devotee would clearly love to serve as Trump’s vice president. (See her here, vacuuming a red carpet for the former president.) But Lake has never actually won a race, and Trump, as we all know, prefers a winner.

South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem

She’s still on the list, because in Trumpworld anything is possible. But shooting a dog in a gravel pit? It’s about the worst thing you can do for your political career.

Today’s News

The Justice Department announced that Texas Representative Henry Cuellar and his wife, Imelda, have been indicted on bribery and money-laundering charges. In a statement, Cuellar said that he and his wife are innocent of the charges. The former White House official Hope Hicks, who once was one of Donald Trump’s closest advisers, testified at Trump’s hush-money criminal trial. Canadian police arrested three people tied to last year’s killing of a prominent Sikh separatist in British Columbia, and are continuing to investigate allegations that the individuals were hired by the Indian government.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Poetry is an act of hope, Maya Chung writes. It can help us come closest to capturing events that exist beyond our capacity to describe them. Atlantic Intelligence: New consumer gadgets are coming out, and their entire selling point revolves around artificial intelligence, Damon Beres writes. The broken-gadget era is upon us.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani. Source: Getty.

Racehorses Have No Idea What’s Going On

By Haley Weiss

This weekend, more than 150,000 pastel-wrapped spectators and bettors will descend upon Louisville’s Churchill Downs complex to watch one of America’s greatest competitive spectacles. The 150th running of the Kentucky Derby, headlined by animals whose names (Resilience, Stronghold, Catching Freedom) sound more like Taylor Swift bonus tracks than living creatures, is expected to bring more revenue to the city and venue than ever, with resale tickets reportedly at record highs. If you count TV spectators, nearly 16 million people are expected to tune in to an event that awards major titles to athletes who may not know they’ve won and cannot be interviewed.

Read the full article.