Tag: russian hacking
Mike Flynn's 'Digital Soldiers' Wage Conspiracy Warfare

Mike Flynn's 'Digital Soldiers' Wage Conspiracy Warfare

The three men and three women stood with their right arms raised. Behind them the remains of the daylight hued the sky a bluish gray. As a fire danced at their feet, they gazed straight ahead at a camera recording their words. The square-jawed man in the middle, retired Lieutenant General Michael T. Flynn, spoke first. The others, including members of his family, repeated after him.

“I do solemnly swear…”

I…do solemnly swear…

“That I will support and defend…”

That I will support and defend…

“The Constitution of the United States…”

The Constitution of the United States…

The setting for this oath-taking ceremony wasn’t West Point or a U.S. military base. It looked like someone’s backyard, and instead of formal military uniforms, the six participants wore khaki shorts, hoodies, and, in the case of one woman, a white dress decorated with political catchphrases such as “crooked Hillary,” “sleepy Joe,” and “rocket man.” After they had finished reciting the Army’s oath of office, Flynn added a final line: “Where we go one, we go all.”

Where we go one, we go all!

On July 4, 2020, Flynn uploaded this video and the hashtag “#TakeTheOath” to his Twitter account and shared it with his 781,000 followers.

His video quickly went viral and triggered a wave of news coverage. Those seven words Flynn tacked onto the end of the officer’s oath — “Where we go one, we go all” — had first appeared in a mediocre 1990s movie, White Squall, starring Jeff Bridges. More recently, though, the phrase and its acronym, WWG1WGA, had become a rallying cry associated with QAnon, the bizarre conspiracy theory about a supposed cabal of pedophile elites in the Democratic Party and Hollywood who secretly run the world, while harvesting the adrenal glands of children in order to live forever. The Flynn family insisted that the oath was a family tradition having nothing to do with QAnon. (Flynn’s relatives even sued media outlets that claimed a connection.)

In the two years since that moment, what strikes me about that video isn’t the possibility of a QAnon connection, which, to be clear, the Flynn family has unequivocally denied. What stays with me is the pseudo-oath itself and what it catches about this moment in our history.

As you’ll undoubtedly recall, in 2017, Flynn briefly served as President Donald Trump’s first national security adviser, a post he held until it emerged that he had misled the FBI and Vice President Mike Pence about conversations he’d had with the Russian ambassador during the 2016 election campaign. Before that, Flynn had served as a top intelligence officer in Iraq and then Afghanistan, where he worked closely with General Stanley McChrystal who commanded American forces there in 2009 and 2010.

After that perjury scandal drove him out of the Trump administration — don’t cry for Flynn; the president would later pardon him — Flynn returned to civilian life. And yet, to hear him tell it, he never left the battlefield. Where once he had led intelligence officers and trained soldiers in the Middle East, he began speaking about a different kind of battle space. Now, Flynn talks about armies of “digital soldiers” who’ve led an “insurgency” against the political establishment not abroad but right here in America. Flynn has even trademarked the phrase “digital soldiers” and has been listed as a speaker at a Digital Soldiers Conference.

“This was not an election,” he assured the attendees of a Young Americans for Freedom conference. “This was a revolution.”

It’s become common enough to talk about all the ways our wars have “come home.” By this, however, what’s usually meant is the way the veterans of this century’s all-American conflicts continue to grapple with physical disabilities or mental trauma; or perhaps the military-grade vehicles and weaponry the Pentagon has, in these years, handed out to police departments nationwide; or even the way Pentagon budgets continue to soar while lawmakers so often have trimmed federal funding for education, health care, and other safety-net activities.

But after spending the last five years writing a book about conspiracy theories, online cultures, and the real-world harm of digital disinformation, I’ve noticed another way our forever wars have come home. America’s war-making mindset now dominates basic aspects of our domestic political landscape, transforming what once were civil disagreements into a form of partisan or ideological combat. Michael Flynn and his digital soldiers are just symptoms of a country in which members of rival parties or tribes view each other as subhuman, as nothing short of the enemy. And the online spaces where those parties increasingly meet — Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social-media platforms — feel ever less like the proverbial public square and ever more like so many war zones.

In this online battlespace, victory is fleeting and defeat never final, but the casualties are all too real — of fact and truth, memory and reality. I know this because I’ve spent half a decade walking the trenches of those digital forever wars as I pieced together the story of one of their casualties. I was seeking to understand how we got here and whether there’s a way out.

His Name Was Seth Rich

In the early morning hours of July 10, 2016, 27-year-old Seth Rich was walking home from a bar in northwest Washington, D.C. He worked for the Democratic National Committee (DNC), that party’s central organizing hub, and was on the cusp of accepting a job with Hillary Clinton’s campaign and so fulfilling a childhood dream of working on a presidential run. Rich was two blocks from his house when he was shot and killed in what police believe was an attempted armed robbery.

In the months to come, however, his murder would reverberate all too eerily through Washington and across the country. It was hard not to feel grief upon learning that such a bright light had been extinguished so cruelly and suddenly. As it happened, Rich and I even had friends in common. We had played on the same weekend recreational soccer team. In fact, our biographies weren’t all that different — two Midwestern guys, him from Nebraska, me from Michigan, who had moved to Washington after college to try to leave our marks on the world, him in politics and me in journalism. When I learned about his murder, I felt a profound sadness. I also couldn’t shake a there-but-for-the-grace-of-god-go-I feeling that it could’ve been me after a late night out with friends.

Once Rich’s family had laid him to rest in his native Omaha, I expected, like so many others, that the brief frenzy of attention his death had brought would simply vanish. The nosy reporters and TV cameramen would move on to their next story. Rich’s family would receive the space they needed to grieve. They and his friends would gather to remember him on the anniversary of his death or his birthday. They’d tell stories about the head-to-toe Stars-and-Stripes outfits he sometimes wore or his obsession with The West Wing TV show. Perhaps they’d even toast his memory with pints of his favorite beer, Bell’s Two-Hearted Ale.

But that isn’t what happened. Not faintly.

As the police search for Rich’s killer or killers dragged on, a howling mob began to fill the void. Wild speculation and fantastical theories about his death started to appear online with viral hashtags — #IAmSethRich, #HisNameWasSethRich, #SethRich — while memes surfaced on political message boards leading, eventually, to elaborate conspiracy theories that would spread globally. Those theories initially originated on the far left, with claims (lacking a shred of evidence) that Rich had been killed by the Clinton family for trying to blow the whistle on or expose wrongdoing by the DNC.

And then, like a virus jumping from host to host, a new version of that conspiracy theory took a firm hold on the far right, its promoters insisting — again, without a scintilla of evidence — that Rich, not Russian-affiliated hackers (as concluded by cybersecurity experts, federal law enforcement, and the U.S. intelligence community), had hacked the DNC and stolen tens of thousands of its emails and other records, later providing those pilfered documents to the radical transparency group WikiLeaks. After WikiLeaks published those stolen DNC documents at the height of the 2016 campaign, its founder Julian Assange, in an apparent attempt to obfuscate the source of those records, dangled Rich’s name in a way that suggested he, not Russia, might have been the source.

In the hands of online commenters, political operatives like Republican dirty trickster Roger Stone, crowdfunded MAGA influencers, and primetime Fox News hosts including Sean Hannity, the story of Seth Rich’s life and death would then be warped into something altogether different: a foundational conspiracy theory for the twenty-first century.

Casualty of a Culture War

My book about the Rich saga, A Death on W Street: The Murder of Seth Rich and the Age of Conspiracy, began when I asked myself a simple question: How could that young man’s death have grown into something so vast and hideous? And what did it say about this increasingly strange country, our ever more perverse politics, and what may lie in our future? Put another way, I wanted to know how a regular guy, someone not so different from me, could become the fixation of millions, his name and face strewn across the Internet, his life story exploited and contorted until it became unrecog­nizable to those who knew him.

With time, I came to see Rich’s life and death as a genuine, if grim, parable for twenty-first-century America — a “skeleton key” potentially capable of unlocking so many doors leading toward a clearer understanding of how we ended up here. By here, of course, I mean a nation millions of whose citizens believe that the last election was stolen or fraudulent, that Covid vaccines can’t be trusted, and that only Donald Trump can defeat the secret cabal of pedophile elites and “deep state” operatives who supposedly pull all the strings in America.

As I write in my new book, we now live in

“a time when it feels like truth is what­ever the loudest and most extreme voices say it is, not where the evi­dence leads, what the data show, or what the facts reveal. A moment when people can say whatever they want about anyone else, dead or alive, famous or obscure, and in the wrong hands, that information can take on a life of its own.”

But it wasn’t until I rewatched Michael Flynn’s 2020 #TakeTheOath video that I saw the connection between America’s disastrous forever wars and its fractured political system at home.

A vicious conspiracy theory such as QAnon or Pizzagate, a dark and disturbing fiction about a supposed child-trafficking operation run by Democratic Party leaders out of a D.C. pizzeria, does more than advance some fantastical and wildly implausible claim about a group of people. It dehumanizes them. By accusing someone of the most evil acts imaginable, you rob him or her of humanity and dignity. In the simplest yet most warlike terms imaginable, you cast them as the enemy, as someone to be defeated — if not with real weapons, then with cruel tweets and deceptive videos.

And of course, there’s no shortage of evidence that digital soldiering can lead to actual violence. In December 2016, a North Carolina man who had watched Pizzagate videos online drove to that D.C. pizza joint targeted by conspiracy theories, walked inside armed with an AR-15 rifle, and fired three shots into a closet. He believed himself on a mission to save the children. Instead, he received a four-year prison sentence. And it’s only gotten worse since. The January 6, 2021, insurrection might have been the starkest evidence that Internet-fueled fantasies — in that case, of a stolen presidential election — could have grave consequences in the actual world.

The casualties of such conspiracy theories are all too real. Four Trump supporters died on January 6th during the insurrection, while multiple police officers at the Capitol that day would die in the weeks that followed. And even though Seth Rich was killed by an unknown assailant — the investigation into his homicide remains ongoing — you could say that he, too, was a casualty of our online wars. His name and memory were twisted and weaponized into something wholly unrecognizable, then harnessed for causes he would never have endorsed by people he would have been unlikely to agree with. Seth’s mother, Mary, once described to an interviewer what all this felt like to her: “Your son is murdered again and this time it’s worse than the first time. We lost his body the first time and the second time we lost his soul.”

Lay Down Your Digital Arms

What, if anything, can be done to demobilize those armies of digital soldiers? What could convince people to lay down their “arms” and treat so many of the rest of us with humanity, even if they disagreed with us?

I’ve thought a lot about such questions in the past several years. The spread of online disinformation has been deemed a crisis by experts and watchdogs — in 2020, former president Barack Obama called it “the single biggest threat to our democracy” — but what to do about it is an especially thorny question in a country with strong protections for free speech.

There are any number of ideas floating around about how to combat disinformation and conspiracy theories, while putting facts and truth back at the heart of our political system. Those include forcing Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to rework their algorithms to deemphasize hyperbolic content and using “prebunks” before such deceptive information appears to inoculate people against it rather than having to debunk it later.

I have a few ideas of my own after spending five years on a book significantly about the conspiracy theories spreading ever more widely and wildly in our world. But let me here just offer a couple of modest suggestions for each of us in our daily lives.

The first is simple enough: Think before you post. (Or tweet, or TikTok, or whatever.) Disinformation spreads because people — and occasionally bots — spread it, sometimes on purpose, but often enough remarkably unwittingly. Before you retweet that spicy takedown tweet or share a friend’s fiery Facebook post, read it again and think twice. Check that it’s real. And take a moment to ponder whether adding your voice to a growing din of outrage is really what this world of ours needs right now.

The second suggestion is something of a throwback: Put down your devices. Talk to a neighbor. Talk to a stranger. In person. It’s a lot harder to demonize or dehumanize someone you disagree with if you meet them face to face. It’s an old-school solution to a decidedly postmodern problem. Still, it may, in the end, be the only reasonable way to defuse this fraught political moment — one where, in a distinctly over-armed country, all too many Americans are dreaming about a future civil war — and find our way back to something approaching common ground.

Copyright 2022 Andy Kroll

Andy Kroll is an investigative journalist with ProPublica based in Washington, D.C. His just-published book isA Death on W Street: The Murder of Seth Rich and the Age of Conspiracy. Follow him on Twitter at @AndyKroll and on Facebook.

Reprinted with permission from TomDispatch

Five Major Pro-Putin, Anti-Ukraine Things Trump Did To Stoke Crisis

Five Major Pro-Putin, Anti-Ukraine Things Trump Did To Stoke Crisis

As Ukraine and its people continue to face Russian aggression and attacks, citizens in the West and Russia itself watch in horror at what one megalomaniac gone mad is doing to a sovereign land and its innocent people. America and its European allies stand together and are doing everything to stop Putin from continuing his naked aggression and tyrannical aspirations. Well, except for the Biden-hating traitors at Fox News and in the Republican party.

Hours before Putin ordered his forces into Ukraine, Fox News’ Tucker Carson (or Putin's cuck boy) was still heaping praise and worship on the Russian autocrat. Putin’s belligerent threats towards Ukraine and build-up of roughly 190,000 troops on the country’s border, was, according to Carlson, a mere “border dispute”. Carlson placated Putin and went so far as to play into Kremlin talking points by declaring that Ukraine was “not a democracy” in a sickening attempt to humanize the evil scumbag.

Maybe We Need To Freeze This Russian Asset

Tucker Carlson loves Putin

Meme by Michael Hayne

And while slimy and feckless Republicans look to score cheap political points by attacking President Biden ahead of midterms, it's vital to remind these disingenuous Trumplicans just how much Trump was pro-Putin and anti-Ukraine.

1. Trump Hired Pro-Russian Criminal To Run His 2016 Campaign

Manafort was hired by former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, a controversial pro-Russia politician who was ousted from power twice. After Yanukovych was elected president in 2010, Manafort reportedly stayed on as an adviser and worked on other projects in Eastern Europe, including the Party of Regions political party (Politico)

In early 2016, Manafort became Trump's campaign chairman. Manafort’s resignation from the campaign was announced on August 19, 2016, after The Times reported that he'd received $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments from Yanukovych’s pro-Russian party between 2007 and 2012. Manafort and Donald Trump Jr., the president's eldest son, met with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya in June 2016. She reportedly was said to have damaging information on Trump’s campaign rival, Hillary Clinton, which was "part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump." (Fox News)

2. Trump Rewrote 2016 Campaign GOP Platform To Make It Anti-Ukraine

The Trump campaign convinced the platform committee to change GOP Platform committee member Diana Denman's proposal of bulking up security for Ukraine. It went from calling on the U.S. to provide Ukraine "lethal defensive weapons" to the more benign phrase "appropriate assistance." (NPR) Oh, and who can forget the decidedly anti-Ukraine act of threatening to withhold security assistance from the country unless it helped smear Joe Biden ahead of the 2020 election. You know, the very thing that spawned impeachment number 1.

3. Trump Gave Classified Intel To Russia

Trump disclosed highly classified information to Russia’s foreign minister about a planned Islamic State operation, two U.S. officials revealed, plunging the White House into controversy just months into Trump’s term. (Reuters)

4. Trump Refused to Impose New Sanctions On Russia

In 2018, The Trump administration announced it wouldn't impose additional sanctions on Russia, despite Congress passing a law allowing the President to do so. (Independent)

5. Trump Attacked And Weakened NATO At Every Chance

Trump repeatedly unleashed attacks on the major western alliance in existence since the end of World War II, threatening to withhold money and even calling NATO "obsolete” and “unfair, economically, to … the United States.” Worse yet, it seems that Trump was aiming to leave NATO altogether if he somehow won reelection.

We all know today's GOP is totally immune to facts and reality, but it's imperative to make sure that those of us still residing in Reality Town know the truth behind every vile and hypocritical smear a desperate and power-hungry GOP makes.

Michael Hayne is a comedian, writer, voice artist, podcaster, and impressionist.Follow his work on Facebook and TikTok

In Major Speech, Hillary Clinton Warns Of Four Top Threats To 2020 Election

In Major Speech, Hillary Clinton Warns Of Four Top Threats To 2020 Election

Hillary Clinton warned that American elections are under escalating assault from domestic and foreign forces threatening the right to vote on Tuesday in a far-ranging speech delivered at the In Defense of Democracy conference in Washington, D.C. (Video of her full speech is embedded below.)

“I really believe we are at a moment of national soul-searching,” said the 2016 Democratic Party presidential candidate and ex-secretary of state at a forum on civic participation organized by the American Federation of Teachers. “We stand at a crossroads of our own, a crisis in democracy. Racist and white supremacist views are lifted up in the media and in the White House. Hard-fought-for civil rights are being stripped back. The rule of law is being undermined. The norms and institutions that provide the foundation of our democracy are under assault.”

In her speech, Clinton detailed how partisan Republicans have hijacked the rules that govern electoral participation to seize and hold power in a manner that echoes infamous authoritarian rulers. She pointed to a catalog of voter suppression laws newly resurrected in states dominated by Republicans. The impact of those tactics, she said, is magnified by online partisan propaganda and foreign intervention.

“We are witnessing a deliberate and ongoing effort to undermine the integrity of our elections, and to silence the voices of millions of Americans, particularly young people, the elderly, women, and people of color,” said Clinton. “And this isn’t just about 2016 or even 2018. It’s about 2019, 2020, and every election after that. Because as the teachers in this room know so well, if we don’t learn the lessons of the past, we are doomed to repeat history.”

Clinton called out the tactics used by Republican governors and legislatures, from stricter voter ID laws, voter roll purges, fewer voting options and backlogs in processing voter registrations to poor election administration. The result is to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters in Wisconsin, Michigan, and many other states.

Such tactics, she said, “were literally made up for the purpose of preventing certain people from actually being able to cast a vote that would be counted. We saw fewer voting places, long lines, and malfunctioning equipment, again, in certain places [where blue-leaning voters predominated]. … That is no accident. It is in service to their larger political goals of obtaining and keeping power.”

“Just think about what happened last week,” she went on, “when President Trump went to North Carolina on the eve of a special election—an election that had to be redone as a direct result of Republican cheating—he didn’t condemn that, of course. Instead, he claimed again that [pro-Clinton] voter fraud was rampant in 2016.”

“Sometimes it’s hard to process all of this because he lies so much. But let that sink in,” Clinton said. “The president of the United States is lying to Americans to delegitimize the democratic process. Yes, of course, it’s abhorrent. It’s delusional. But it’s also strategic. And that should bother every one of us.”

Four Warnings About 2020

Clinton spoke most fervently about the advice she is giving to Democratic presidential candidates. After answering their questions, said Clinton, she would end those conversations by citing four trends that would threaten their candidacies: voter suppression, hacking, fake news, and cybersecurity.

“Let me tell you what I think the biggest obstacle might very well turn out to be,” Clinton said, recounting her talks with 2020 Democratic hopefuls. “You can run the best campaign. You can have the best plans. You can get the nomination. You can win the popular vote. And you can lose the Electoral College and therefore the election for these four reasons: number one, voter suppression.”

“We saw what happened in Georgia, where Stacey Abrams should be governor of that state,” she said, referring to the 2018 election. “Registered voters were kept off the rolls. Their registrations just piled up in some back office with no intention to ever enroll them so that they could actually vote.”

Next, Clinton cited the Republican-run state of Wisconsin.

“We also saw what happened in 2016. Experts estimate that anywhere from 27,000 to 200,000 Wisconsin citizen voters, predominantly in Milwaukee, were turned away from the polls,” she continued. “They showed up, but maybe they didn’t have the correct form of identification. Maybe the name on their driver’s license included a middle name or an initial that wasn’t on their voter registration. But officials made every excuse in the book to prevent certain people from voting in that election.”

Purges—or preemptively removing otherwise eligible registered voters from rolls—was “another form of voter suppression,” she said, noting that 12 million voters were purged from 2012 to 2016.

“They were purged in Wisconsin, in Michigan, in Ohio, in Florida, in other places,” Clinton said, citing key presidential swing states. “And when you have a Republican-controlled state government, as we did in those states back in 2016, it’s practically impossible—in fact, I’ll say it is impossible—to fight back, let alone to stop, that very deliberate form of [voter] suppression.”

The second threat facing 2020 candidates, Clinton said, was hacking—or breaking into, stealing, and possibly manipulating data and other records. In 2016, Russian spies broke into Democratic National Committee computers and took strategy documents and also stole her senior staff’s emails. The action was this century’s version of the 1970s Watergate break-in of DNC offices by aides of then-president Richard Nixon, a Republican. Unlike Watergate, the stolen materials were published widely and became fodder for incessant attacks on her candidacy.

“I tell every candidate, ‘if you have not had your personal and campaign emails hacked, they will be. So will the emails of people working for you,’” Clinton said. “‘Your information will be stolen and then weaponized against you in the most pernicious ways. Remember Pizzagate? WikiLeaks?’”

Pizzagate referred to a right-wing conspiracy theory that she was running a human trafficking and child sex ring from a Washington pizza parlor, according to supposedly coded messages in the stolen emails. Far-right online media provoked a North Carolina man to drive to the District of Columbia and fire an assault rifle at the restaurant. WikiLeaks is where DNC and Clinton campaign documents stolen by Russian spies were published.

“Cybersecurity is an essential component of protecting our democracy, but it’s very difficult for campaigns on their own to be able to do that,” she said. “You need a national commitment to cybersecurity. And as many cyber experts have already told us, that [national defense] just doesn’t exist. And there is no real effort being made to install such a system that will protect voters.”

Clinton was referring to the refusal by the Trump White House and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to acknowledge Russian meddling in 2016, as detailed in the report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and to take additional steps to secure computer systems managing America’s election infrastructure.

She cited academics who described how the “hacking, stealing, weaponizing information was so impactful [in 2016]. And it will be again. And we will have to hope that not only candidates, but the press and the public, will be able quickly to discredit what is being presented. And we won’t face the horrible kinds of outcomes we saw before, where people believed Pizzagate.”

Clinton continued with the third trend that she said would threaten any Democratic candidate: deliberately fake news posted online, especially on giant platforms such as Facebook that won’t delete it. She singled out deceptively edited videos called “deep fakes.”

“Remember what happened to Nancy Pelosi a few months ago?” she asked. “Somebody spliced words from different presentations, put them together and presented them as though it were real. And think how hard it was to convince the major tech platforms, who admitted it was fake, to take it down. Some did, but many did not. And their answer—in particular, Facebook’s answer—was, ‘Well, we’re going to let people decide for themselves.’ How can you decide for yourself when what is presented is blatantly false and manufactured?”

That trend has continued on Facebook, Clinton said, pointing to an uptick in Trump campaign misinformation—specifically, paid ads that “violate Facebook’s stated terms of service, [but] they’re still up.”

The final threat that 2020 candidates will face, according to Clinton, is “the lack of security in our election system itself,” she said. Russia’s attacks were wider than has been acknowledged, she said, citing the White House’s reluctant admission that voting systems in two Florida counties were breached before November 2016.

“We actually know that it is more, but they won’t admit that,” she said. “Rep. Stephanie Murphy [D-FL], gave an incredible statement the other day, saying, ‘I have been briefed, along with my Republican colleagues, about what actually happened in Florida, but I am prohibited from telling you.’ Think about that. A direct assault by a foreign adversary on a state’s election system—and citizens of that state and our country can’t know about it? Can’t know the details? How are we to protect ourselves?”

The Mueller Report said Russia had “interfered in the 2016 election in a sweeping and systematic fashion,” Clinton noted. “I don’t think ‘sweeping and systematic’ describes two counties in Florida.” She also cited election infrastructure—the voting and counting systems—as inadequately protected to counter current threats.

“In recent years we’ve seen practices that should concern us all: from remote access software installed in election management systems to ballot scanners that connect to the internet, opening them up to potential hacking,” Clinton said, quoting voting rights activists. “So this is a both-sides problem. It is a problem of a foreign adversary actually interfering, hacking, and it is a problem of our own decisions about what kinds of equipment and systems we are going to employ. Both of those deserve the most serious attention.”

All of these threats challenge the very basis of American elections, Clinton said, which starts with exercising the right to vote. But Republican Party leaders won’t place the national interest ahead of their party and its tactics to retain power. At the federal level, both McConnell and Trump were “abdicating their responsibility to protect and defend the Constitution,” she said, citing their oath of office.

A Deepening Crisis 

Today’s Republican Party leaders remind Clinton of history’s authoritarians, whose legacy she encountered as President Obama’s secretary of state.

“We used to have a phrase about authoritarian leaders who would be originally elected or appointed pursuant to the rules of election, like [Benito] Mussolini, like [Adolf] Hitler,” she said. “We would say about them that they believed in elections, all right—that they believed, ‘One and you’re done.’ Get in. Change the rules to perpetuate your own power, to grow your own authoritarian rule.”

The only response to these threats was reasserting the right to vote and taking back representative political power through voting, she said. While the task is formidable, Clinton said she feels encouraged because many people clearly saw the stakes.

“The right to vote powers every change we seek, every future we envision,” Clinton said. “Because the ability to choose who represents us, getting the accurate information we need to be informed, and protecting us from the weaponization of information and misinformation, they’re all critical to making sure we can get things done to make progress together.”

“I think it means everything,” she said of the right to vote and casting a ballot that is counted. “It’s why the forces of corruption and power, ideology, and dominance at home and abroad are trying to distort and undermine our values, our trust, and confidence in ourselves and in each other.”

IMAGE: Hillary Rodham Clinton, Photo by REUTERS/Chris Keane

Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has reported for National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Christian Science Monitor Radio, as well as a wide range of progressive publications including Salon, AlterNet, The American Prospect, and many others.

This article was produced by Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

 

 

 

GOP Leader McCarthy: Trump Would Never Do What He Said He’d Do

GOP Leader McCarthy: Trump Would Never Do What He Said He’d Do

On Thursday morning, Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy defended Trump’s admission that he would collude with foreign governments by saying there is no way Trump would actually do what he said.

“I think if you ask the president, he would be very clear about it — not allowing any foreign countries to interfere in our elections,” McCarthy said at his weekly press conference.

In fact, when Trump was asked about foreign interference in our elections, he was very clear that he would welcome it.

“I think I’d take it,” Trump said Wednesday when asked how he would deal with countries like Russia or China offering dirt on his political opponents. Trump begged Russia to interfere in the 2016 election, and they did so just hours later when hackers targeted Hillary Clinton’s emails.

On Wednesday, Trump opened the door for any foreign entity — friendly or not — to do the same, and suggested they could get in his good graces by passing along dirt about his political opponents.

“I think you might want to listen. There isn’t anything wrong with listening. If somebody called from a country, Norway, [and said] ‘we have information on your opponent, oh, I think I’d want to hear it,” Trump said Wednesday.

Rather than condemn Trump’s desire to undermine America’s elections, McCarthy claimed Trump said the opposite of what everyone heard.

Published with permission of The American Independent.