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This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
During a Washington Nationals baseball game on May 17, 2026, three people unfurled a large banner from the upper deck of Nationals Park displaying a link to a white nationalist website.
The website, warning of the replacement of whites by people of color, called for the deportation of 100 million people from the United States.
The disturbing incident reflects the broader ascendance of the “great replacement theory,” the xenophobic conspiracy theory asserting that shadowy elites are embracing permissive immigration policies to replace native-born white Americans with immigrants of color.
Prominent Republicans, including President Donald Trump, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and conservative podcaster Tucker Carlson, have echoed ideas associated with the great replacement theory. And conservative media outlets, such as Fox News, have disseminated them to millions of viewers.
But are the xenophobic ideas recently expressed at Nationals Park limited to a small number of extremists, or are they also endorsed by the broader public? If the latter, how do political and media elites contribute to their spread?
To answer these questions, our team has conducted several nationally representative surveys that ask Americans about their support for key tenets of the great replacement theory.
We consistently found that a substantial minority of Americans agree with the sentiment that new immigrants threaten the political, cultural and economic power of white Americans. In our latest poll of 1,000 Americans fielded in March 2026, 36% agreed with the statement: “Native-born Americans are losing their economic, political, and cultural influence in this country because of the growing population of immigrants.”
A notable number of Americans – 26% – also believed political elites are trying to “replace” the existing white population, agreeing with the statement: “There are people who secretly work to make sure immigrants will eventually replace real Americans.”
Support for these beliefs is concentrated most heavily among white Americans, Republicans, conservatives and self-identifying members of Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again movement. Indeed, more than 3 in 4 members of the MAGA movement and close to 6 in 10 Republicans agreed with the statement: “Immigrants invade and colonize the United States.”
But what explains this spread of the great replacement theory?
In our newly published, peer-reviewed study, we used nationally representative panel survey data that tracked over 500 white Americans over time to attempt to answer this question.
We found that white Americans who identified as Republican, who are conservatives and who have negative views of people from other racial backgrounds are all more likely to express support for key tenets of the great replacement theory. Moreover, we uncovered clear evidence that white Americans who watch Fox News are also more likely to agree with the conspiracy theory.
Given the popularity of Fox News, we believe this latter point deserved further investigation. As detailed in our paper, while 39% of all white Americans agree that immigrants invade and colonize the U.S., 61% of white Americans who watch Fox News agree with this view. Even when taking into account partisan identification, ideology, racial attitudes and demographic characteristics, Fox News viewership remains significantly associated with more support for the great replacement theory.
Additionally, because we tracked white Americans over time, we could observe changes in their support for the conspiracy theory in response to variations in their viewership of Fox News. Simply put, the more Fox News programming that a white American watches, the more likely they are to adopt the conspiracy theory.
Our research builds on decades of work showing that public opinion is strongly influenced by media consumption. Recent scholarship, in particular, highlights the influence of Fox News on public opinion. It shows how exposure to Fox News leads Americans to express more conservative attitudes about the COVID-19 pandemic, immigration policies and criminal justice issues.
Given the attention that Fox News hosts, elected officials and pundits dedicate to the great replacement theory, our results suggest that this coverage has indeed influenced the views of white Americans. The great replacement theory is no longer purely on the fringes of society.
In our view, this is troubling, not only because the conspiracy theory treats immigration as an existential issue — where the stakes are framed as the very preservation of one’s self and country — but also because the theory is also linked to numerous instances of political violence directed at people of color and religious minorities.
As America approaches its 250th birthday, the nation will no doubt continue to grapple with the topic of immigration, race and what it means to be an American.
While there’s plenty of room for disagreement over immigration policy, conspiracy theories make it much harder to find common ground or craft political compromises. What we’ve found is that when prominent media embrace conspiracy theorizing, increased public endorsement of conspiracies will follow.
Adam Eichen is a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science at UMass Amherst; Jesse Rhodes is Associate Professor of Political Science at UMass Amherst, and Tatishe Nteta is Provost Professor of Political Science at UMass Amherst
Filed Under: conspiracy theories, great replacement theory, immigration, rupert murdoch
Companies: fox news, news corp.
The hype and madness surrounding 5G has always been pretty wild to watch.
On one hand, wireless carriers spent years implying that 5G was some type of cancer curing miracle technology (it’s not). At the same time, oodles of conspiracy theorists, celebrities, and various grifters tried to claim 5G was a rampant health menace (it’s not). In reality, 5G’s not actually interesting enough to warrant either position, but that never stopped anybody in the post-truth era.
The Trump administration’s pseudo-populist attempt to tap into the more delirious and desperate segments of the electorate has long taken advantage of this latter group’s often-legitimate distrust of modern medicine, corporations, and public safety regulators.
That’s once again the obvious plan for CDC conspiracy chief RFK Jr., who continues to purge government websites of any language that points out that cellular phone human health risks have not been scientifically proven via peer-reviewed, large studies:
“The FDA removed online information that said scientists have not connected exposure to radiofrequency (RF) waves, emitted by cell phones, to health problems in users.
Some of the removed webpages contained “old conclusions,” an HHS spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal. The spokesperson also said that researching cell phone radiation would “identify gaps in knowledge.” The agency provided a similar statement to Scientific American, adding that the research was “directed by President Trump’s MAHA Commission.”
RFK Jr. says he’s launching new “studies” (whatever that means given the standards we’ve seen applied in his unscientific anti-vaccination rhetoric) exploring the impact of 5G wireless on human health, and has been making the rounds making scary noises to what’s left of U.S. journalism institutions (like the pretty feckless USA Today):
“Generally speaking, electromagnetic radiation is a major health concern,” Kennedy said in the exclusive interview, when asked for his concerns about 5G towers. “I’m very concerned about it.”
In these interviews, RFK Jr. is making completely false claims that there’s “more than 10,000 studies” proving a clear risk of human harm from cell phone use. The World Health Organization found no justification for health concerns after a meta-analysis of nearly thirty years of research.
While it’s hubris to insist we know everything about wireless’ impact on human health, the science we do have traditionally points to a very clear conclusion: 5G isn’t likely to seriously to hurt you. In fact, in many ways 5G is potentially less harmful than previous iterations given that the millimeter wave spectrum being used in many cities can barely penetrate walls, much less human skin.
As Scientific American notes, while there have historically been studies suggesting potential cancerous impact from massive exposure using rats, “studies in humans have been inconsistent and limited in scope and efficacy.” The FDA had previously, and correctly, stated that “the weight of scientific evidence has not linked exposure to radio frequency energy from cellphone use with any health problems.”
Now if the Trump administration was actually serious about launching real-world scientific inquiries into cell phone health’s impact, that might be something. But we’re long past the point where this weird assortment of zealots deserve any benefit of the doubt. Especially given RFK Jr.’s history of completely unscientific, fear mongering gibberish.
Trump authoritarians love leaning into conspiracy theories for several reasons.
One, it exploits often legitimate frustration with institutional failures to tap into a neglected part of the electorate they can farm for support with fake populism (you see this commonly across the “MAHA” set, the anti-war lies, and the fake administration claim to support meaningful “antitrust reform”).
Two, it helps create an information fog of war where the electorate finds it harder to reliably identify what’s true, in turn making people more distrustful of the few legitimate media organizations still interested in the truth. This in turn makes it easier for authoritarians to lie to you (and the movement’s adjacent grifter economy to rip you off with false promises and cures).
Three, it distracts the public from what the Trump administration is actually doing most of the time, which in telecom and cellular has largely involved destroying any remaining oversight of our shitty telecom monopolies that are keen to rip you off.
It’s not populism, it’s exploitation. There are no answers here, only more confusion and chaos for suffering people. All to mask broad, grotesque corruption by a broad assortment of terrible human beings.
Many of these MAHA segments being targeted by Trump grifters (see: RFK Jr.’s siren call to angry Lyme Disease patients) spent decades feeling legitimately exploited and abused by corporate power, institutional failure, and U.S. health care dysfunction only to walk straight into the maw of some of the biggest grifting shitbags America may have ever spawned (which is really saying something).
Filed Under: 5g, cdc, cellular, conspiracy, conspiracy theories, disinformation, fda, health, health and human services, rfk Jr, wireless
This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.
Heather Honey, a high-profile denier of Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 election, has been appointed to a senior position in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in which she’ll help oversee the nation’s election infrastructure.
Honey is a protege of Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who tried to help Trump overturn the 2020 election results. In 2024, ProPublica reported that Honey had played a key role in Mitchell’s behind-the-scenes effort to change Georgia’s election rules to allow Republican officials to contest a potential Trump loss in that year’s presidential race. Honey also promoted election conspiracy theories, including one Trump cited in a speech to his followers before they stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Though states do the on-the-ground work of running elections, DHS supports them with tasks beyond their capacities, such as protecting IT infrastructure and voter databases from foreign intrusions. The agency, with bipartisan support, took on this role in the aftermath of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.
Experts on voting and state election officials warned that Honey’s appointment as DHS’ deputy assistant secretary of election integrity could erode trust between state and federal officials, prompting states not to share information with the agency.
“We are witnessing a dangerous trend: the elevation of known bad-faith actors like Heather Honey,” said Adrian Fontes, Arizona’s Democratic secretary of state, in a statement, citing Honey’s “well-documented history of spreading election lies that have been debunked in court.”
Fontes called her involvement with DHS “deeply troubling” and said “when the agency gives a platform to individuals who have actively worked to erode public trust, it becomes harder to view DHS as a reliable partner in election security.”
A DHS spokesperson did not answer questions from ProPublica on Honey’s appointment or the exact nature of her responsibilities. Honey didn’t respond to calls or emails. The White House also didn’t respond to a request for comment. Her name is listed on the organization’s leadership structure online, and her appointment was first reported by the website Democracy Docket.
In the first Trump administration, the federal government set up programs designed to shield U.S. elections from foreign interference, including the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, an arm of DHS. But Trump soured on this and other initiatives after the director of CISA publicly rebutted his claims that the 2020 election was stolen.
Since the start of the second Trump presidency, the administration has gutted those programs, cutting hundreds of employees at CISA. Its director, Chris Krebs, is now under federal investigation, DHS has said; Krebs told CNN that the investigation appeared to be an act of political retribution. The Justice Department has also rolled back a program aimed at combatting foreign influence campaigns. Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote in a memorandum that the Justice Department’s program was disbanded to “free resources to address more pressing priorities, and end risks of further weaponization and abuses of prosecutorial discretion.”
David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonprofit focused on building trust in American elections, said the cuts had dismantled “nearly all” of DHS’ capacity to protect election infrastructure. He said state elections officials feared that Honey’s appointment, combined with the program cuts, signaled the Trump administration’s intent to eliminate bulwarks of fair U.S. elections.
“The hiring of an election conspiracy theorist with no election knowledge or expertise is the culmination of this reversal,” Becker said. “DHS now appears poised to become a primary amplifier of false election conspiracies pushed by our enemies.”
Two sources familiar with Honey’s hiring at DHS said she began working for the agency last week. An organizational chart dated Aug. 18 on the department’s website identifies her as a leader in the agency’s Office of Strategy, Policy and Plans. Her position wasn’t on a version of the website archived in July, and officials in former administrations said that there’s been no such job previously.
It’s not clear yet what Honey will oversee, but former DHS officials said that deputy assistant secretaries are typically the agency’s top experts in their subject areas. They’re often involved in drafting executive orders and crafting policies. They also serve as liaisons to the White House and the National Security Council.
Since Honey started, Trump has announced “a movement to get rid of” mail-in ballots and voting machines via executive order, though a top aide subsequently said the administration would pursue those goals through legislative action. DHS has also threatened to cut off about $28 million in grants to help states prepare for terrorism and disasters if they don’t change voting rules to conform to the administration’s priorities, NPR has reported.
Honey’s duties likely would include helping to organize the government’s policy responses if foreign actors make intrusions into the nation’s election systems, former officials said. To do this, and to assess the security of election infrastructure, someone in her position would typically have access to classified information, including the government’s election-related intelligence.
Experts expressed concern about Honey’s portfolio, given her history of spreading misinformation.
“Heather Honey’s past misleading claims about vote counts in Pennsylvania, among other things, have helped fuel false conspiracy theories about stolen elections,” said Larry Norden, an election expert at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law, a nonpartisan law and policy group.
Before becoming swept up in the “Stop the Steal” movement, Honey had no experience in the federal government or as an election administrator, working as a Pennsylvania-based private investigator.
After the 2020 election, she became a contractor for a Republican-backed audit seeking proof of fraud in ballots cast in Maricopa County, Arizona. According to emails between employees working on the review, which ended up reaffirming Biden’s win, Honey helped draft the final report.
Since then, Honey has led at least three organizations devoted to transforming election systems in ways championed by conservatives, such as tightening eligibility requirements for people to be on voter rolls. Members of Honey’s Pennsylvania Fair Elections, a state chapter of Mitchell’s nationwide Election Integrity Network, have challenged the eligibility of thousands of residents to be on voter rolls.
Honey has also been involved in numerous other efforts to transform elections around the country, including a successful push to get many states with Republican leadership to pull out of a bipartisan interstate partnership to share data to make voting more secure.
Filed Under: cleta mitchell, conspiracy theories, dhs, donald trump, election denialism, election security, elections, heather honey
We’ve already demonstrated over the course of plenty of posts that RFK Jr. is wildly incapable of running Health and Human Services. The fact that he was even nominated for a role in managing American health is absolutely bonkers, but that a Senate filled with supposed grown adults voted to confirm his appointment to HHS should, and I believe will, become a historical stain on the legacy of that particular institution. But while Kennedy has demonstrated he’s incapable of applying real medical science to his job, and indeed sometimes even a basic level of humanity, he’s also infecting HHS with his conspiracy theories.
Anti-vaxxers running ACIP, the panel that approves of vaccination schedules? Check! A committment to have HHS get to the bottom of all those chemtrails in the sky? Check! But if you want to really see the conspiracy theories run amok, you need only look at a drafted report from HHS entitled Make Our Children Healthy Again Strategy.
Does it have a strategy for reducing ultra-processed foods in the diets of children? Nope! How about pesticides? Nope! New regulations on industry to create a healthier ecosystem for children? Nope! But it does include some of Kennedy’s favorite conspiracy theories.
That includes attacking water fluoridation, casting doubt on the safety of childhood vaccines, pushing for more physical activity in children to reduce chronic diseases, getting rid of synthetic food dyes, and claiming that children are being overprescribed medications.
While the importance of water quality is raised in the report, it’s only in the context of fluoride and not of any other key contaminants, such as lead or PFAS. And although the draft strategy will prioritize “whole, minimally processed foods,” it offers no strategy for reducing the proportion of ultra-processed food (UPF) in Americans’ diets. The strategy merely aims to come up with a “government-wide definition” for UPF to guide future research and policies.
Also notably absent is any mention of the leading cause of death in children, which is lead poisoning. A very specific kind of lead poisoning, in fact, as in the it’s from the kind of lead that gets fired out of a firearm. It is just completely unaddressed, inconvenient to Kennedy’s narrative and thusly ignored. If we could solve that problem, combined with reducing motor vehicle deaths for children, you’d essentially cut the number of child deaths in half. Neither issue even gets a mention in the report.
Instead we’re out here battling flouride over the objections of dentists everywhere, food dyes (which, fine, whatever), and I guess potentially 5G and WiFi signals?
Amid the predictable MAHA topics and industry concessions, one short section stands out for its obvious link to conspiracy theories. The draft includes a brief section on electromagnetic radiation that says the health department, along with other unnamed federal agencies, will conduct studies to find “gaps in knowledge” regarding safety and efficacy.
While the section is vague, it brings to mind Kennedy’s long history of falsely claiming that electromagnetic radiation, in the form of Wi-Fi and 5G, causes a variety of health problems— including cancer, autism, a variety of mental and cognitive problems, post-traumatic stress, fatigue, and Type 2 diabetes.
Yes, it’s vague, but Kennedy has been much more explicit about this sort of thing prior to his profane appointment in government.
In a 2023 podcast with Joe Rogan, Kennedy made the unsupported claim that “Wi-Fi radiation opens up your blood-brain barrier, so all these toxins that are in your body can now go into your brain.”
In his Senate confirmation in January, Kennedy confirmed in an exchange with Senator Andrew Kim (D-NJ) that he still believes that and that 5G is equally harmful. He added that it “changes DNA” and does “other things.” He has previously stated that 5G is being used for mass surveillance.
You can bet that’s exactly what Kennedy is going to pursue from that vague section. This entire report reads like a list of his favorite unproven or debunked pet conspiracy theories. The exceptions, such as ultra-processed foods and pesticides, both of which were also big priorities of Kennedy prior to joining the government, are those that would annoy industry and commerce.
He’s not a crusader. If he was, it wouldn’t matter that big business didn’t like his report. I’m not even sure if he’s a true believer any longer. He might just be a conspiracy-addled and/or peddling charlatan setting himself up for more power or pay.
But he is dangerous, to be sure. And this report is nonsense and devoid of actual science.
Filed Under: 5g, chemtrails, conspiracy theories, fluoride, health and human services, maha, processed foods, rfk jr., wifi
It’s one of those things I don’t discuss on main. I’m not really sure why. Maybe it was my strict religious upbringing, which made discussing anything outside of preferred interpretations of the Bible sacrilegious, if not actually blasphemous. Or maybe it was a concern about being a bit outside of the mainstream, which might result in fewer opportunities to “tap the keg” or whatever.
But I — like my hero Black Francis/Frank Black (former and [now] current lead singer of the Pixies) — have always had a fascination with UFOs. To my ultra-religious parents, any unidentified flying object was most likely a demonic manifestation. (I wish that was a punchline. It isn’t. This is something they actually said.)
To me, UFOs were unexplained, which was fascinating to me because so much in life is, and so much of it is over-explained.
It also was my own expression of faith: a belief in something I couldn’t readily understand. And while that created friction with my own resistance to Christianity (another belief that couldn’t be grounded in reality), I always considered my irrational belief to be superior. Why? Because what harm has believing in UFOs ever posed to other human beings? No crusades have been carried out in Area 51’s name. No Roswell residents have ever bombed members of other religions into non-existence.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve shed some of that willingness to believe. I mean, I definitely don’t trust the government, which means I can theoretically build a better case for stashing greys in an underground Nevada lab. On the other hand, I just got older, which meant being less fascinated by things that are undeniably fascinating. It happens to all of us. When I was five, particularly large tractors fascinated me. Forty-plus years on, particularly large tractors are just annoyances slowing me down during my drive to my day job.
We can never truly regain the magical sense of wonder we had when we were younger. But for a short period of time, the X-Files TV show reignited my fascination with the not-immediately explainable. It also made me a Mulder: someone who feared explanations almost as much as he suspected powerful people might be hiding something from him.
Whatever was left of that delayed childhood was stripped away by the normal stuff: jobs, parenthood, a steady stream of releases from the federal government explaining away pretty much every UFO, or at least, making otherworldly explanations far less probable. It also stripped away that magical abbreviation, replacing it with “UAP:” unidentified aerial phenomenon. And that kind of sucks.
“Phenomenon” should mean once in a lifetime experiences. Instead, it just means anything that happens that the government doesn’t have an immediate explanation for, even when the “phenomena” was witnessed by hundreds of people.
This massively overlong intro leads to this: the disheartening (for younger me at least!) revelation that Area 51’s UFO roots are inextricably tied (most likely!) to the government’s interest in engaging the UFO crowd in a snipe hunt to better protect the seemingly magical vehicles and devices it hoped to use for the decidedly less-magical purpose of, you know, killing people.
A tiny Pentagon office had spent months investigating conspiracy theories about secret Washington UFO programs when it uncovered a shocking truth: At least one of those theories had been fueled by the Pentagon itself.
The congressionally ordered probe took investigators back to the 1980s, when an Air Force colonel visited a bar near Area 51, a top-secret site in the Nevada desert. He gave the owner photos of what might be flying saucers. The photos went up on the walls, and into the local lore went the idea that the U.S. military was secretly testing recovered alien technology.
But the colonel was on a mission—of disinformation. The photos were doctored, the now-retired officer confessed to the Pentagon investigators in 2023. The whole exercise was a ruse to protect what was really going on at Area 51: The Air Force was using the site to develop top-secret stealth fighters, viewed as a critical edge against the Soviet Union. Military leaders were worried that the programs might get exposed if locals somehow glimpsed a test flight of, say, the F-117 stealth fighter, an aircraft that truly did look out of this world. Better that they believe it came from Andromeda.
Where did this come from? Oddly enough, it comes from an investigation clearing the government of any wrongdoing. The internal investigation was only tasked with finding out whether or not the government had lied about its knowledge of the existence of extraterrestrial life. That it covered it up its own UAP activities by planting stories about UFOs was considered to be the sort of thing a government should do to protect national security.
In other words, there was a cover-up. But not the cover-up people expected, at least not those prone to believe in UFOs and little green/grey men. Instead, the government pushed the UFO narrative to encourage the public to believe the unexplainable stuff they saw in the sky should be attributed to interstellar invaders, rather than the US’s own attempts to outmaneuver the Commies.
Even more strangely, the government insisted on continuing the cover-up of flight activity until the year of our lord two thousand twenty-four, despite years of accounts of UFOs and anal-probing aliens being treated as no more credible than Virgin Mary appearances on local tortillas. When the Pentagon was forced to relinquish UFO/UAP files, it still pretended stuff needed to remain classified, even when it discussed technology more than a half-century old.
To be clear, there may still be some form of “Deep State” operative in the US government. But it’s not subject to partisan pressure. It’s only subject to its deeply paranoid beliefs that there’s something out there. And that “something” is the public’s understandable desire to learn more. Secrets have to be maintained, even when they no longer serve a purpose. The truth will always be out there, Mulder. But what that truth is may disappoint you more than it surprises you.
Final note: I referenced Frank Black/Black Francis/Pixies earlier and I realize many of you may not know how much the lead singer of this seminal band was infatuated with UFOs. To clear this up, here are a few picks from one of the greatest bands/lead singers ever.
Pixies – Motorway to Roswell (self-explanatory but enjoy the keyboard work from Pere Ubu member Eric Drew Feldman)
Pixies – The Thing (a b-side shortening of “The Happening,” but pay attention to the “good man” whose name was “Bill.” IT’S A CLUE.)
Finally:
Pixies – Lovely Day (A regular-ass love song, except for this tag line “You will be my martian honey all the day”)
Filed Under: area 51, defense department, disinformation, fox mulder, ufos
Let me start this off with a brief confession: while I’m not particularly into conspiracy theories in general, the JFK assassination is an outlier for me. I’ve been fascinated with JFK since I was a child and I don’t believe the official version of the story is the entire story, at a minimum. That throat clearing isn’t the main topic of this post, but it will inform you as to why any new information that comes out about the topic is of great interest to me.
So, while I’m no fan of the current administration, I did sit up and take notice when Trump released additional government files about the assassination in his first term, and again recently when the administration announced the release of the rest of the documents it has on the matter. I’m also completely unsurprised that the main reaction to what has been reviewed in the new files thus far has been mostly “meh.” I have not seen anything that remotely looks like a counterfactual to the official story in these documents and I didn’t expect to. There wasn’t going to be some secret document in there entitled, “Here’s how we killed him and who was involved.”
But I also didn’t expect to learn that the administration released the documents in such a disorganized and careless manner that they essentially doxxed a bunch of people who are very much still alive today.
And in typical Trump fashion, the release has been chaotic and slipshod. The files aren’t organized, summarized, or labeled in a way that makes sense. It’s just raw PDFs with a long numeric string uploaded onto a website. Click the PDF and see what you get. And, according to one lawyer going through them, they include the sensitive personal information of living people.
“The Trump Administration dox’d countless people who served on the staff of the House Select Committee on Assassinations back in 1977-79 by releasing their SSNs in full,” Mark Zaid, an attorney who works on National Security issues, said on Bluesky. “Some of these people are alive. I know them. This was totally unnecessary & contributed nothing to understanding 11/22/63.”
What is darkly funny about all of this is that the only reason Trump didn’t release these very files the first time around was, according to the man himself, so that the government could go through the documents to redact anything that pertained to current security concerns or corporeal human beings. Five years later, upon release, we learn that said review either wasn’t done at all, was done exceptionally poorly, or that this sensitive and personal information of living human beings was done purposefully.
Given the disorderly manner in which this release occurred, I would guess the last of those was not the actual intention. Never assume malice where incompetance is an equal or better explanation, as the saying goes. But with this adminstration, one fueled by grievance and revenge, you never can tell, I guess.
To be clear, more government transparency is a good thing, even if it has to come with several decades worth of baggage. But just like the supposed aim to reduce government spending, there is the orderly and intelligent way to approach it all, or the Trump way. The latter is done so incompetently so as to cause collateral damage. That’s the problem.
Filed Under: donald trump, doxxing, jfk, jfk assassination, social security numbers
Donald Trump spent the four years between presidential terms complaining about a “stolen” election. He — and his enablers — made multiple baseless claims about election fraud and claimed the entire system was rigged against him. His lawyers and supporters suggested voting machines were so insecure that the Venezuelan government itself might have been involved in his loss to Joe Biden.
These claims about a rigged system evaporated when Trump won the 2024 election. But he’s not about to let the perceived slight of the 2020 election evaporate along with his insistence the electoral system is so deeply corrupt it would never let him ascend to the Oval Office again.
But he does know there’s still plenty of performative hay to be made by re-stoking the fires of the “stolen election” conspiracy. While he and his fellow shitheels do their best to dismantle pretty much every part of the federal government Trump doesn’t like, elections are possibly on their way to being as insecure as Trump claimed they were before he urged his crowd of willing insurrectionists to raid the Capitol on January 6, 2020.
CISA (Cyber security and Infrastructure Security Agency) has been doing its best to thwart security threats and deter the spread of misinformation about government security. Trump apparently doesn’t like that. He’d rather turn the agency on itself to serve his own egotistical ends while turning CISA into just another distribution option for his “stolen election” conspiracy theories. Here’s Eric Geller, reporting for Wired.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has frozen all of its election security work and is reviewing everything it has done to help state and local officials secure their elections for the past eight years, WIRED has learned. The move represents the first major example of the country’s cyber defense agency accommodating President Donald Trump’s false claims of election fraud and online censorship.
In a memo sent Friday to all CISA employees and obtained by WIRED, CISA’s acting director, Bridget Bean, said she was ordering “a review and assessment” of every position at the agency related to election security and countering mis- and disinformation, “as well as every election security and [mis-, dis-, and malinformation] product, activity, service, and program that has been carried out” since the federal government designated election systems as critical infrastructure in 2017.
There it is: CISA will now deploy its resources to investigate itself, in hopes of coaxing out some “evidence” that will allow Trump to claim the agency was utilized by the Biden Administration to silence Trump voters and mute their false claims about voter fraud. On top of that, it will be prevented from addressing election misinformation going forward, which will certainly aid whatever conspiracy theorist chooses to follow in Trump’s footsteps for the 2028 election. I mean, assuming we still have the national election option at that point.
Bridget Bean is the acting director of CISA. Prior to obtaining this position, she held an executive position at FEMA as a Trump appointee during his first term. Bean claims forcing CISA away from the important work of deterring actual election fraud and interference is non-negotiable, pointing to a Trump executive order that vaguely asserts its goal is “restoring free speech and ending federal censorship.”
What that means in this context is that CISA will no longer offer guidance to private companies when it comes to handling misinformation, disinformation, and mal-information (the “MDM” referred to in the memo). Of course, the only people complaining about CISA’s efforts were loyal Trumpists, who seemed to believe they should be allowed to make false claims without fear of reprisal, much less crowd-sourced correction. And it’s even more of a problem now, what with the nation’s most-used social media service having already abandoned fact-checking in order to more closely align its feeds (and its founder) with Trump and his supporters.
By the time this is all said and done, people who did important work in the election security/fraud field will be out of job and the agency they used to work for will be nothing more than a political weapon to be wielded against those who opposed the current president and his successors, who — if they’re from the Republican party — will be just as dishonest and self-serving as the man we are again asked to pretend is our nation’s “leader.”
Bean’s memo indicates that CISA’s internal review will cover every agency position related to election security, as well as performance plans for employees involved in that work; all support services provided to the election community; and all election security guidance and publications. Bean wrote that CISA will describe any steps necessary to “correct any activities identified as past misconduct by the Federal Government related to censorship of protected speech,” including eliminating programs or roles.
Comply or GTFO. That’s the message. Either you’re going to do the “Dear Leader” thing or you can start updating your resume. Whatever resources Elon Musk allows CISA to utilize will be used to conduct an internal witch hunt that will only be allowed to produce evidence that supports Trump’s “stolen election” hallucinations. This country is in the hands of sociopaths who view the Night of the Long Knives as a squad goal. This is not going to end well. If you harbored any doubts about the legitimacy of past elections, you’re only going to have more doubts going forward. And that’s the entire point: to find just enough something to allow petty would-be despots to dispute any election outcome they don’t like for years to come.
Filed Under: cisa, conspiracy theories, election security, january 6th, misinformation
Last week, we highlighted how the richest person on the planet — Elon Musk, who currently appears to have unparalleled, Constitutionally-violating control over the US government — was running around repeating every confused 4chan dipshit’s conspiracy theory about USAID, all of which were easily debunked if you… understood how reality worked.
Now it turns out that someone actually was getting USAID money: Elon Musk.
The conspiracy theories were absolute bullshit. For example, we explored how an anonymous account on ExTwitter convinced Elon Musk that conservative pundit Bill Kristol had received USAID funds based on an embarrassing total misunderstanding of what a “donor advised fund” actually is. As we noted, the accusation against Kristol was the equivalent of saying that any two entities that use the same bank for their checking account are funding each other.
It was utter nonsense. It was also the kind of thing the world’s richest man who is in control of the government (including USAID) could have easily found out the truth about. But instead, he’s retweeting an anon account on ExTwitter whose conspiracy theory was basically red yarn on a corkboard.
Still, that kicked off a trend where the edgelord dipshits are now accusing basically anyone pointing out that USAID does a ton of important work around the world of being recipients of USAID funds. Multiple commenters here insisted that Techdirt must receive USAID funds, which is laughable. We have never received anything from USAID. But just the fact we have to say that shows how stupid this debate has become.
Reporters are rushing to point out that what these basement-dwellers are tweeting (and what Elon is boosting) has basically no basis in reality.
Most of Musk’s more than 160 posts about USAID have been responses to a handful of small but influential verified accounts, many of them using pseudonyms. The most popular — including posts from Wall Street Apes, Kanekoa the Great, Chief Nerd and Autism Capital — have been viewed hundreds of millions of times, amplified by Musk and his 216 million followers, according to X metrics. As the theories spread, they are repackaged, and in many cases added upon, to further the claims.
A review of the accounts’ profiles reveals how a lengthy crusade to paint USAID as a malevolent force built up in recent years in relatively fringe internet circles, only to be suddenly elevated and acted upon by Musk. The pattern is similar to one that played out with the so-called Twitter Files in 2022, when selectively framed narratives and out-of-context internal documents were weaponized to fuel allegations of a grand government censorship conspiracy. And it is one likely to continue under Trump and Musk, who have histories of trafficking in falsehoods.
But here’s where the story takes an especially rich turn. While Musk and his followers were busy constructing elaborate conspiracy theories about USAID funding, they somehow missed (or deliberately ignored) a rather obvious USAID connection: Elon Musk himself. Oddly, none of his usually-vocal fan accounts have mentioned this particular detail:
Before Musk led the charge to terminate USAID, his companies worked with and took funding from it. Tesla holds a stake in a company called Zola, which is funded in part by USAID to bring renewable energy to agricultural communities in sub-Saharan Africa. And Musk’s aerospace and defense contractor, SpaceX, partnered with USAID to bring its Starlink satellite internet service to Ukraine in 2022 after Russia’s invasion destroyed telecommunications infrastructure.
While some might claim that’s a reason to trust his claims about USAID, there are two problems with that. First of all, if you can accept that he (who has received money from USAID) can call out what he claims are problems, then why do you immediately insist that anyone else who might receive those funds is clearly compromised?
But, more importantly, there’s an even more revealing detail here: USAID has been investigating Starlink for improper behavior following the Ukraine debacle. And suddenly the timing of Musk’s crusade against USAID takes on a whole new meaning. Nothing says “let’s destroy an agency” quite like finding out they’re investigating your company:
While Musk and his businesses were lauded initially for bringing Wi-Fi service to Ukraine, controversy erupted after SpaceX withheld Starlink access from Ukraine’s military, effectively thwarting its drone attack on Russia’s Black Sea Fleet in 2022, which Musk said he did to avoid being complicit in a “major act of war.” Russian troops also reportedly obtained and began using Starlink against Ukraine within its borders. Musk denied Starlink terminals were sold to Russia. Last year, Democrats on the House Oversight Committee initiated a probe, and USAID’s inspector general was investigating Starlink’s use in Ukraine as part of its own accountability checks.
You can almost always set your watch to the idea that Elon Musk will bend over backwards to hide from any form of accountability. And what better way to discredit an investigation than by convincing millions of followers that the investigating agency is part of some vast conspiracy?
So long as he can continue to push Russian propaganda, I guess:
On Wednesday, Musk shared a faked video claiming USAID had sponsored celebrity visits to Ukraine. Darren Linvill, a co-director of Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub, told NBC News the video was manufactured Russian propaganda.
The pattern here is impossible to miss: Take money from USAID, sabotage their Ukraine efforts, face investigation, launch an attack on the agency’s credibility, use your newfound illegitimate government power to shut it down, and cap it off by amplifying Russian disinformation about USAID.
The Russians must be laughing hysterically at how this is playing out.
It would be almost comical if it weren’t for the fact that the world’s richest man is successfully convincing millions of people to help him destroy the US government.
Filed Under: conspiracy theories, elon musk, funding, usaid
Companies: spacex, starlink, zola
I talk a lot about confirmation bias here because it’s at the heart of many of the debates and discussions regarding disinformation. It’s something we can all fall prey to, at times. But lately, I’ve been thinking a lot more about what makes one more susceptible to confirmation bias, and I’m increasingly coming around to the idea that it has to do with a combination of intellectual curiosity and trust.
I had a bit of a Baader-Meinhof moment over the weekend, when I heard variations on the same phrase twice, in two completely unrelated contexts. The first was in an MSNBC article by former Twitter employee Eddie Perez talking about how little Elon Musk understands how elections work. He started out his piece with this phrase:
Here’s a timeless dictum that aptly applies to election administration: Everything looks suspicious when you don’t know how anything works.
There are some really good points in Perez’s article, including this tidbit:
Perhaps Musk’s most bizarre argument came when he argued U.S. elections are vulnerable due to a lack of paper ballots. “The last thing I would do is trust a computer program,” he told the audience. This was a very strange comment from a businessman who is pitching automated driverless robotaxis and robovans that depend on computer-driven artificial intelligence to protect human lives, as well as computer-driven rockets that hope to extend human civilization through the colonization of Mars.
I’m certainly sensitive to questions around electronic voting, as someone who spent many of the early years of this blog calling out sketchy electronic voting schemes. However, really over the last decade, there have been vast improvements in the security and process behind electronic voting, such that most such systems now include important safety valves and backstops, including voter-verified paper trails and risk-limiting audits. Not every state has those systems yet (even though they should!) but calling for such things is very, very different from saying that all electronic voting is untrustworthy.
But, by now it’s clear that if anyone lacks intellectual curiosity to understand reality, it’s Elon Musk. After all, he’s not only (falsely) trashing electronic voting, but he’s also been trashing mail-in ballots (which he calls “insane”), even as his own Super PAC is pushing people to vote early by mail. Oh, and also, Elon himself has regularly voted by mail.
But, back to that statement. The same day I read Eddie’s piece, I also saw the recent Hank Green video in which he talks about how he received his election ballot in Montana, and at first worried that something nefarious was underfoot. On his ballot, he noticed that in every category, the Democrat was listed last on the ballot, and he wondered if it was an attempt to sway votes (there is some science suggesting that people lower on a ballot get fewer votes).
However, Hank (unlike Elon) didn’t just run with his hunch. He investigated things and found that his worry was not valid. Montana “randomizes” the ballots by starting in alphabetical order by candidates, but then rotating the candidates down one on different ballots, so that each candidate appears on the bottom and the top of the list an equal amount of times.
In other words, election officials in Montana do something right, even if seeing just the one bit of info caused Hank to worry they might have done something wrong. Hank calls out a (more popular) variation on the quote that Eddie uses above, citing the saying:
“Everything is a conspiracy theory when you don’t understand how anything works.”
I like that formulation even better. But, as Hank points out, this saying is a bit too mean and inaccurate. A more accurate version would be:
“Everything is a conspiracy theory when you don’t trust anything.”
I’d add a caveat to that as well, though. You have to not trust anything and also not have the intellectual curiosity to find out what’s true. Hank is the kind of person who does have that intellectual curiosity. Even though he was initially concerned, before he spouted off, he did the research and found out that his concerns were unfounded.
Elon Musk, somewhat incredibly, seems to lack the basic intellectual curiosity to ever try to seek out why something is the way it is. He always assumes he can somehow “reason from first principles” as to why things are the way they are. This makes him ever more susceptible to the dumbest fucking conspiracy theories around. He’s constructed for himself a media environment mostly designed to reinforce those biases, rather than challenge them.
In the long run, I’d say folks are better off being more like Hank Green (intellectually curious, willing to seek out information and be proven wrong) and less like Elon Musk (intellectually uncurious, willing to believe utter nonsense so long as it reinforces your priors).
Filed Under: ballots, conspiracy theories, elections, elon musk, hank green, intellectual curiosity, research, voting
Please. I beg of people: stop it. Stop it with the conspiracy theories. Stop it with the nonsense. If you can’t find something you want on social media, it’s not because a billionaire is trying to influence an election. It might just be because some antifraud system went haywire or something.
Last week we wrote about totally overreacting to the Kamala Harris campaign account on ExTwitter triggering some rate limiting efforts. It appeared to be fairly typical (if poorly implemented) tools to prevent spam accounts and such. But people insisted that it must be Elon putting his finger on the scale, with some even suggesting it must be “election interference.” It was not.
Of course, perhaps it’s no wonder that people thought this, because lots of people seem to want to believe that any anomalous thing they see that looks negative for the candidate they support must be “election interference.”
Even Elon.
You might think, being the super genius he supposedly is, that just days after he was falsely accused of engaging in election interference for just poorly implemented algorithmic stuff, he might be more prone to taking a breath before screaming the same thing about others. But nope. Not Elon “Confirmation Bias is my Middle Name” Musk.
Here’s Elon insisting that it must be election interference because on his personal Google search, he typed in “President Donald” and it didn’t show a search result for Donald Trump:
First of all, multiple people responded noting that they’re not getting those results. I checked the same search and did, in fact, see Trump recommended (actually, it recommended Trump as soon as I typed “President”):
But, more to the point, assuming Elon is actually seeing that, it’s almost certainly some weird temporary glitch, just like Elon’s site making it briefly harder to follow the Harris campaign. These things happen. You would think that Elon would recognize how unlikely and improbable it is that Google would be removing Donald Trump from Google’s autocomplete “predictions” system. And, even if they did, who in their right mind would think that would be a useful way to influence an election?
I mean, how stupid would that be? Who is not going to vote for Trump because autocomplete doesn’t name him that one time you did a search?
And you’d think that Elon would be even more thoughtful on this, given that not a day goes by without people overreacting and freaking out over things that they falsely believe he’s doing.
For example, this weekend, people flipped out claiming that former White House photographer Pete Souza had been banned by Elon for posting a recent AP photo and calling out that Trump’s ear no longer looked injured (which seems like a non-story in its own right; it was grazed, and grazes heal).
People were sending this to me and saying I should write it up. But it seemed pretty clear that Souza had shut down his own account, because it says “Something went wrong.” When an account is suspended, it says that the account had been suspended. And, sure enough, on Monday, Souza went to Instagram to note that he’d just gotten tired of harassment and had chosen to shut down the account.
And, then, of course, on Monday night, ExTwitter actually did suspend the “official” account for the “White Dudes for Harris” campaign, around the same time that group completed a fundraising Zoom that raised about $4 million for the campaign. Unlike the Souza account, you’ll notice it actually does say account suspended:
The account itself posted that the account was “locked” due to “unusual activity.”
And, uh, yeah? That’s not that surprising. Shouldn’t an account suddenly amassing a ton of followers with no clear official connection to the campaign and pushing people to donate maybe ring some internal alarm bells on any trust and safety team? It wouldn’t be a surprise if it tripped some guardwires and was locked and/or suspended briefly while the account was reviewed.
That’s how this stuff works.
Someone associated with the account separately shared that it was suspended for “violating our rules against evading suspension.”
Many people immediately cried foul and again insisted that Elon was deliberately trying to tip the scales. But again, there remains no evidence that that is the case. The message is a bit confusing, but that rule violation message shows up semi-frequently, often when multiple people are registering similar accounts. There were reports of other similarly named accounts being registered at the same time. And that could certainly lead to triggering some internal trust & safety alerts of either attempted fraud or setting up backup accounts, knowing that some accounts were planning to violate rules.
And, of course, soon after everyone lost their minds and insisted that this was Elon freaking out, the account came back online. Also, of course, it wasn’t the ExTwitter account that was raising the money. It was the Zoom call.
So, please, would everyone just chill out. These all seem like pretty typical things that happen all the time. No, these systems don’t always work perfectly, or the way that you want them to work. But stop with the conspiracy theories or the idea that there are evil billionaires behind everything not working exactly the way you want it to.
And no, none of this is “election interference.” Even when Elon Musk infringes on a photographer’s copyright to show a hashmoji of Donald Trump with a raised fist any time someone posted the #Trump2024 hashtag.
Nor is it election interference when Elon Musk shares a doctored video of Kamala Harris on his widely followed ExTwitter account. It’s in poor taste and an almost certain violation of Elon’s own rules for the platform, but he’s allowed to break those rules because he gets to make them.
The key point here is that some of this stuff just happens. It’s part of how algorithms work. Sometimes they make mistakes. Sometimes you disagree with why they do things. And people need to stop overreacting to it all. Most of the examples discussed in this article were just normal things that happen all the time, but which got a ton of extra attention because everyone’s on edge and amped up.
That doesn’t mean people shouldn’t be on the lookout for stuff, but don’t immediately jump to conclusions and assume malfeasance.
And that goes both ways for Elon: dude, you should fucking know better. And for everyone rushing to blame Musk, focus on the shit he actually does do, not the stuff you’re sure he must be doing without proof.
Filed Under: account suspensions, algorithms, conspiracy theories, election interference, elon musk, pete souza, trust & safety, white dudes for harris
Companies: google, twitter, x
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