Harnessing Americans as Useful Idiots – Election Disinformation

Breakfast with Bwana

By Anil Madan

The Chairman of the United States Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Mark Warner (D-Va) has warned that the U.S. may be more vulnerable to Russian, Chinese, and Iranian efforts to undermine its democracy by spreading disinformation as we enter the final months of campaigning for the 2024 election for president. 

Senator Warner’s alert is a sharp contrast to the description of the 2020 presidential election as “the most secure election certainly in modern history,” by Christopher Krebs who was then the Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA). Donald Trump had, falsely of course, claimed that the 2020 election was stolen and declared himself the real winner. The history of those absurd claims rejected by courts in some 63 lawsuits, his subsequent actions, and the lack of any evidence of fraud that changed the outcome, have been well documented. Rudy Giuliani, formerly lauded as “America’s Mayor” after the September 11, 2001, attack on The World Trade Center and now disgraced prevaricator, famously told a judge: “We don’t have evidence, but we have theories.” For his “disloyalty” to Trump in speaking the truth, Krebs was fired from his position by Trump.

Election Disinformation in the US. Pic – Press Relations

Why would Russia, China and Iran want to undermine America’s elections and confidence in the electoral system of the most significant democracy in the world? Interpretations vary, and range from ascribing Russia’s efforts to undermining U.S. support for Ukraine—and thus indirectly promoting Trump’s candidacy—China’s efforts to undermine U.S. commitments to come to Taiwan’s defense in the event of a Chinese attack—and again, indirectly promoting Trump—and Iran’s efforts to become a nuclear weapons power and to erode the outsize role of Israel as a force in the Middle East in an effort to dominate the UAE, Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Gulf Arabs, Egypt, and Jordan.

Russia’s prowess in Internet hacking is well known. If China can be called a second-level power in this role, so can Iran. Adding the use of artificial intelligence or AI to create massive amounts of generated videos, images, and simulated scenarios exacerbates the problem since it is often nearly impossible to separate genuine recordings from fake. 

Both Russia and China seek to recruit what are known as useful idiots to their causes. The tragedy is that such unwitting recruits may not be required to commit overt acts of disloyalty. Merely having them cast their misguided vote on the basis of disinformation is what the meddlers seek to achieve.

So, Senator Warner and the American intelligence community are well justified in raising alarms about foreign interference in America’s democracy

A society receptive to falsehoods

But there is more to the story. It seems undisputable beyond cavil that for foreign actors to gain traction with disinformation, they must find a society receptive to their falsehoods and alternative narratives. This is, of course, true also of home-grown candidates and groups who seek to gain an advantage from spreading falsehoods and rumors.

Just about a year ago, Robert Yoon, an AP reporter noted that with Donald Trump facing felony charges over his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, he was flooding his social media platform with distortions, misinformation and unfounded conspiracy theories about his defeat.

Yoon noted that Trump’s efforts were resonating as a poll showed that 57% of Republicans believed that Biden was not legitimately elected as president.

The disinformation was palpable. Reviews and recounts had confirmed Biden’s victory. And it was not close. Biden won 306 Electoral College votes to Trump’s 232 and trounced him in the popular vote by 7 million.

Yoon recounted that state after state (the so-called swing states in particular), from Arizona to Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin confirmed Biden’s win. In Wisconsin, the state’s Assembly speaker, a Republican, ordered a separate review, which a state judge said found “absolutely no evidence of election fraud.”

The Associated Press review also produced no evidence to support Trump’s claims that states tabulated more votes than there are registered voters.

To put matters in perspective, Biden won Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and their 79 Electoral College votes by a combined 311,257 votes out of 25.5 million ballots cast. The disputed ballots represent just 0.15% of his victory margin in those states.

I would be remiss if I did not mention that Trump’s claims about voting machine fraud proved to have no basis in fact and, indeed, News Corp., the parent company of Fox News paid a $787 million settlement to settle a claim of defamation by Dominion Voting Machines. A second similar case by Smartmatic has been okayed to proceed by a New York court.

Donald Trump has not relented. The other day, he declared in Minnesota: “If they don’t cheat, we win this state easily. They cheat. They have no shame. They cheat…. They cheated in the last election and they’re going to cheat in this election, but we’re going to get ‘em.” Aside from the fact that no presidential candidate has ever talked like this, the absurdity of Trump’s claim is underscored by the fact that Minnesota has not voted for a Republican since Richard Nixon ran in the 1972 election. Even in the Reagan landslide of 1980, Minnesota was the lone blue (Democrat) holdout.

Trump’s brazenness is to a great extent, also his greatest strength. Psychological studies have shown that assertive and seemingly positive liars are more effective than equivocal ones. That is why Trump would be called a Confidence Man. Parenthetically, I note that Maggie Haberman’s 2022 book is titled ‘Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America’.

The more curious question is why are so many Americans willing to believe lies about the election and all else? And they continue to believe this sort of nonsense even when it leads to events such as the assault on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. The unthinking and unfathomable belief persists despite the fact that Trump’s irresponsible comments have brought death threats to election workers and undermined the confidence of Americans in our system.

If we search for larger forces at work, we must return to Ronald Reagan’s campaign for the presidency in which he called government the problem and not the solution. In his previous campaign, Jimmy Carter had presented a vision of a “purposeful, manageable and competent Government that served the people.

We find echoes of these divergent visions in today’s campaign. Trump’s vision is closer to Reagan’s vision of Government as a failed or failing entity, something that we can live without, and the parts that we are willing to preserve, will serve his ideology more than the needs of the people. Kamala Harris’s vision is more of the promise that is America, of hope, of opportunity, and of service.

Of course, the moneyed class and the powerful will see Trump’s vision as serving their needs and Harris’s vision as presenting a danger to their position of comfort and entitlement. Lost in this is any understanding that the American economy is large and powerful enough to expand to embrace all its citizens without depreciating the lifestyle of its elites. The reluctance to share in abundance is often the petty response of those who have the most. A charitable mind is not the default human condition. The grasping of the greedy has for long outpaced their reach.

Humans relish confirmation bias

At a more microscopic level, we have a sea change in the way that media and news outlets distribute their content. Readers can control the door that they open to invite information. Studies show that humans relish confirmation bias. It is not common for the average person to seek information that is hostile to his own views. As one of my friends quipped some thirty years ago, the average person is below average.

We must understand, however, that the Internet allows us the power to exclude what we do not wish to see. The quest to have one’s beliefs reinforced rather than to seek knowledge is the hallmark of an unintelligent and unthinking person. Sadly, too many Americans are unintelligent and unthinking because they close off their minds. Even sadder is the fact that otherwise intelligent and sophisticated people do this. I suspect that avoiding discomfort and challenge to one’s belief system are powerful motivators.

The other day, in an exchange of texts about Trump and Harris, a friend sent this message to me: “You believe different news sources than I believe, and you may have started smarted [smart?], but what’s left is anyone’s guess.” In a strange way, this encapsulates what the problem is. To highlight the point, over the years, I have continued to exchange emails with my right-wing yahoo friends. What strikes me most penetratingly is their absolute unwillingness to read beyond their own sphere. Heaven forbids that I should send an article from The New York Times, The Washington Post, or msn.com, cnn.com, or MSNBC. I am inclined to agree with MSNBC as it is a channel that I last watched about six years ago and have seen only a few snippets since. I may occasionally review a short video of its offerings but usually tend to cut short my engagement with their nonsense.

My offerings of articles from The New York Times or CNN are usually met with a terse response: “I don’t read that lefty rag,” or “I don’t read Communist sources.” When I sent a copy of the indictments of Trump that Jack Smith and Fani Willis had filed in court so that my friends could understand what “facts” were being alleged, the response was: “I’m not going to read that fake news from the liberals.”

Sealing off information that is contrary to or hostile to one’s own views is indicative of a closed mind. The scientific method is one of establishing truth by verification. An experiment can be repeated to produce the posited result, or it cannot. If it does repeat, you have established a set of conditions that define truth. And if you can repeat it once more, you have—hopefully—established a reliable fact. But then, you must have a willingness to try again and verify.

If you cannot replicate and verify, you cannot establish the truth. If you refuse to even try to replicate, you are straddling the line between foolishness and ignorance.

My friend’s comment that she believes different news sources than I believe is telling. Of course, she could not have known which news sources I believe or indeed, whether I believe news sources at all. I do not. I am a skeptic at heart. I find myself reading multiple sources and trying to verify accuracy. Indeed, I will confess that I frequently turn on Fox News just to get a sense of what they are saying about major events. I usually don’t last more than four minutes into their nonsensical diatribes, but this makes me wonder about those who do, and about those who watch this stuff all day long.

Ultimately, there is either a certain level of complacency, or of stupidity, about those who believe Donald Trump’s lies. I was reminded of this when I read the transcript of a video that Tucker Carlson broadcast. This was in connection with video footage of the January 6, 2020, attack on the Capitol. The Fox News viewers were not shown video of people destroying the Capitol building or beating police officers. As it happened, on that day, there was indeed a gathering of tourists a short distance away. Fox News viewers were shown videos of actual tourists and led to believe that the Capitol rioters were assembling peacefully. This was an utter lie.

One police officer who was beaten, Brian Sicknick, died a few days later of a stroke. Four other officers also wounded that day, took their own lives shortly thereafter. Carlson portrayed claims associating the deaths of these five officers as lies ostensibly because they did not all die on January 6. It matters not that no one ever said that they all died on January 6. Carlson’s viewers and Fox News viewers, for the most part, accepted these false assertions readily — different news sources, indeed!  Sometimes, literal truth can be contextually immaterial. Is the average person equipped to make these fine distinctions especially if he/she has not seen the original video? And what if the video is manipulated by AI?

If one envisions an ideal democratic society, one can contemplate a consensus on goals with subtle differences about solutions. Those differences may well end up fractionating people into close to a 50-50 split in favor of one side or the other. But since the proffered end point will likely be the same, it is easy to see even an idle democracy surviving a close vote.

But what if there is no consensus on the solutions we seek or on the causes of the problems we seek to solve? Often, humans attack the perceived “cause” of a problem rather than work toward a solution. In such situations, the “solution” proffered by each side may be 180º different from the opposing solution. The problem that democracy allows a very slim majority to impose its “solutions” on a large minority then becomes stark.

Even a vigilant democracy is unlikely to survive such attacks if only because when the other side gains control, they will claim it is their time to feast.

We are facing such a moment in America. Indeed, because our Electoral College system allows a candidate with less than a majority of the popular vote to ascend to the highest office, the likelihood that a powerful or evil-minded minority can become an overlord to the majority remains.

Disinformation from foreign actors can exacerbate the threat of such an eventuality. But so can our own actions at home. Only we can prevent such threats from becoming a reality and consuming us.

Controlling our useful idiots is as important as controlling malign foreign actors.

Cheerz…
Bwana

Mauritius Times ePaper Friday 9 August 2024