SOW DOUBT CHAOS

10/20 belated/redumbdent super-cat, combines tobacco --> FF denial w/ Putin disinfo to undermine faith in institutions (norms?)

1 26 TRUISM THAT NAZI DICT PLAYBOOK BLUR LINE BETWEEN LIES AND TRUTH -> PARALYSIS, AI SLOP, SOCIAL MEDIA

Stanford Law School Professor Nathaniel Persily, who focuses on democracy and elections-related law, told the Post, “I’m concerned about chaos and uncertainty in the administration of the 2026 election. There is a kind of avalanche of potential changes that are being proposed, and it’s at a time when people have lost trust in the election infrastructure and everybody’s on edge.” 1/11? TRUMP TOLD GOP MOC ALL ELECTIONS ARE RIGGED?! NO PUSHBACK

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an 1 26

One MS NOW producer is sounding the alarm about a comment President Donald Trump made during his extensive interview with theNew York Timesthat is telling about his 2026 intentions.

Kyle Griffin, executive producer of Weeknight wrote on Xthat the detail was a "BIG FLAG."

"Trump said during his interview with The New York Times that he regretted not ordering the National Guard to seize voting machines in swing states after his loss in the 2020 election. He doubted whether the Guard was 'sophisticated enough' to carry out the order effectively," Griffin said.

The comments come as the Washington Post reported Monday morning "if his party loses," in the 2026 midterm elections, it is expected that Trump will "sow doubt in their validity."

Trump's new plans included forcing Republican state lawmaker to redraw congressional lines in Republicans' favor. That step, however, was only the beginning. Trump is also pushing to make voter registration more difficult and end the use of voting machines and mail-in ballots.

"The administration has gutted the role of the nation’s cybersecurity agency in protecting elections; stocked the Justice Department, Homeland Security Department and FBI from top to bottom with officials who have denied the legitimacy of the 2020 election; given a White House audience to people who, like the president, promote the lie that he won the 2020 election; sued over state and local election policies that Trump opposes; and called for a new census that excludes noncitizens," the Post explained.

"The wide-ranging efforts seek to expand on some of the strategies he and his advisers and allies used to try to reverse the 2020 results that culminated in the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021," the report added.

The White House claims that they're focused on making sure only eligible American citizens vote.

While Trump has joked about canceling the 2026 election, he doesn't have the authority to do it because local and state officials handle elections — not the federal government. That will be the barrier to a lot of Trump's efforts to change mail-in ballots or bar certain voting machines.

Trump issued an executive order that aimed to stop any state from accepting mail-in ballots received after Election Day. In many states, as long as a voter has the ballot post marked by Election Day, it is legal. A lower court has blocked the order, but the U.S. Supreme Court will take up the matter this year.

In another matter, the Justice Department has been in a battle with at least 40 states and Washington D.C., demanding voter rolls with personal identifying information including birth dates and partial Social Security numbers. Ten states have agreed to cooperate with the DOJ.

Read the full list of efforts Trump has made to change the 2026 midterm elections here.

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1220 an hunter

sow doubt disinfo

...

In this particular case, however, (most) House Republicans do not sincerely intend to win. But neither would they feel chagrined if their actions further provoked the sort of far-right violence seen in Washington, D.C., this weekend—the very public suggestion that non-Republican rule can simply no longer be tolerated by the unwashed masses, and that their non-Republican opponents should begin contemplating their own safety if they intend to continue thwarting Republican demands. That is the goal behind nearly all of this nonsense: to delegitimize; to put the stochastic notion in public heads that if The Base suffers a setback in its ambitions, it can only be because The Base was conspired against. It was conspired against by the urban, and the globalists, and the socialists.

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no lnx vid

Expert breaks down the ultimate goal of Trump’s ‘classic Russian-style disinformation campaign’

The White House.

Elizabeth Preza November 29, 2020

Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, spoke with CNN's Brian Stelter on Sunday to explain the ultimate goal of President Donald Trump's false accusations of a rigged and stolen election.

Rauch was asked by Stelter if the issue is Trump is simply trapped in the delusion that he actually beat President-elect Joe Biden in the 2020 election.

"Is delusion a fair word for these election lies?" Stelter wondered.

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"No, actually, I don't think it is," Rauch replied. "It's hard to know what's going on in the mind of the president, but you don't really need to. What you need to know is that what he is running right now is a classic Russian-style disinformation campaign of a type known as the firehose of falsehood. That's when you utilize every channel, not just media, but also the bully pulpit, even litigation to push out as many different stories and conspiracy theories and lies and half-truths as you possibly can in order to flood the zone if with disinformation."

"The goal here is to confuse people, and he is doing very well at that," Rauch continued. "This is classic propaganda tactic. he is very good at it. doesn't matter what's going on in his head. what matters is what he is doing.

Rauch described Trump's tactic as "information warfare," arguing he's "manipulating and organizing the social environment and the media environment to confuse and discombobulate [his] enemies, to isolate them, to demoralize them so they don't know what's true or false anymore, they get very frustrated."

Stelter then asked if the issue is that Trump is engaging in a "massive conspiracy theory" which in turn creates a "collective identity" among his supporters. Rauch disagreed with that suggestion.

"There actually is no theory here," Rauch replied. "In a fire hose falsehood campaign, it's not about having one idea and pumping it out consistently. It's about throwing spaghetti against the wall. It's anything and everything. It can be wild. iI can be random. It's to create confusion and epistemic chaos. That's what we are seeing. That's very hard for democracies to deal with it."

Watch the interview below, via CNN:

‘Firehose of falsehood’

youtu.be

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long

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/2020-election/

steven r

georgia's Trump supporters are not giving up. On Saturday, scores massed outside the statehouse in Atlanta, a small sea of mostly men in red MAGA hats hoisting signs hurling accusations against Joe Biden and wearing campaign tee-shirts saying "STOP the STEAL."

It barely mattered that Georgia's Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger had certified Biden's unexpected nearly 13,000-vote victory one day before. Also irrelevant was Georgia's unprecedented manual hand count of presidential votes on 5 million paper ballots, which was more than any 2020 swing state has done since Election Day to verify its votes.

Instead, Trump supporters in Georgia, like many across the country, are not just embracing a growing catalog of vote-counting conspiracy theories as the president pressures state officials to reject the popular vote and select him, via Electoral College slates, for another term. Among Trump's ranks are activists who witnessed the latest vote-counting steps as credentialed GOP observers and have studied these steps via social media and online forums. These activists appear to be coalescing into a new right-facing election reform movement, much like left-leaning activists launched a progressive "election integrity" movement after the fraught presidential elections in Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004.

"Oh my God, where do I begin?" exclaimed Stacey, an official Republican Party observer during Georgia's hand count last week in DeKalb County near Atlanta. Stacey, who didn't want her last names used, was a blond woman in her 40s wearing an American flag sweatshirt and a bracelet with red, white and blue rhinestones and Trump's name spelled out in baby beads. She was taking a break with a friend, another GOP observer.

The pair, like many Trump supporters watching Georgia's audit, said they were citizens who cared about democracy and honest elections. But instead of appreciating that Georgia's first-ever hand count of millions of paper ballots had found and fixed mistakes that added more than 1,000 votes to Trump's total, they were increasingly incensed by the fine print in the election process they witnessed. Their discovery that election administration was under-resourced, complex, opaque and at times, mistake-prone, only affirmed their belief that the process had conspired to defeat Trump. Election officials across Georgia might have been counting every ballot, but that exercise and the overall process lacked the tools to convince a slice of the public that was critical and cynical.

"We're not allowed to talk to anybody—so you can't even ask questions," Stacey said, when asked what concerned her, as she sat in the viewing area inside a vacant department store that DeKalb County had converted into an early voting center and then used for the hand count.

"There's a lot of things," she said. "Like here's a box [of paper ballots]. What is this box? What is it that you're doing? You can't tell. You can't see anything. They're supposed to sort them first, according to the person they voted for, and then they're supposed to count them… But I can't see, because I'm so far away, if that really is a Biden vote going for Biden in the Biden pile—or was a Trump vote, or a Jorgensen vote."

"There's so many unknowns," her friend and fellow GOP observer added. "We don't know where they're bringing them from. We don't know where they're taking them to. Who's watching? Who's watching?" She sighed. "There's a lot of question marks. We feel really powerless. We want to be here with good intentions. But we feel powerless."

There's a direct line between campaign observers such as these women and the affidavits—or sworn statements by witnesses in lawsuits—that Trump's lead lawyer, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, was waving at a widely ridiculed 90-minute news conference on Thursday, November 19. Giuliani reeled off allegations of dishonest election administration and vote-counting processes in other states that Biden won—denying Trump another term. Giuliani's affidavits, often based on what people thought they saw, which was not necessarily accurate nor the full picture, were from Republican observers like Stacey and her friend.

This sprint by Trump's team to get witness statements from allies and activists on the frontlines in 2020's swing states was what Green and Libertarian Party lawyers did in Ohio in 2004, when they assumed that the election had been stolen for President George W. Bush—not just won by brazen GOP voter suppression tactics. That scramble in Ohio and its aftermath sparked a left-leaning election integrity movement that endures to this day.That movement has helped push every state (including Georgia) to recently replace the all-electronic voting systems acquired a dozen years ago with more accountable paper ballot-based voting. In Georgia, the type of audit that was be done before certifying the general election's winners—which turned into the hand count that drew Trump observers—also emerged in the aftermath of Florida and Ohio.

But now, in 2020, it looks like Trump supporters are discovering election administration issues and may be changing the script that emerged after Ohio's election in 2004 and was embraced in red-run states. That playbook greatly exaggerated the threat of voter fraud—or one person repeatedly voting—to overly police the voting process. State-level responses, such as passing stricter voter ID laws, happened to impede more voters in blue than red epicenters.

Since 2020's Election Day, Trump's supporters have discovered a palette of problems focused less on individuals and more on systemic issues with how elections are run, including Trump supporters discovering how much privatized technology, paid consultants and frustratingly opaque administrative procedures undergird American elections.

For example, after Guiliani spoke, Sydney Powell, a Trump team lawyer,echoed and amplified the kinds of suspicions heard from Trump supporters on Georgia's frontlines. Powell declared that the firms that made America's voting systems were infiltrated with leftist foreigners who could sabotage results. Beyond an operatic performance that caused her to be dismissed by the weekend, that screed was an example of disinformation based on taking a small thread of truth (foreign investment among America's handful of voting system vendors) and layering fearful partisan clichés on top. Where did her claim originate? A blogger active in progressive election integrity circles since Ohio said that it had been "bastardized" from his website.

"This is stunning, heartbreaking, infuriating and the most unpatriotic acts I can even imagine for people in this country to have participated in," Powell declared, speaking of the hidden hands and local election officials who conspired and acted to deprive Trump of a second term.

"It's completely pointless," said Stacey, the Trump observer in Dekalb County, Georgia, saying much the same thing though not on national television. "This is optics. Take a look around you. I don't care what side of the fence you're on. You can just feel the attitude. There are too many cooks in this stew. They're too many things going on. They bring in ballots to the ballot room. Where's the ballot room?"

"People are assuming that what they are counting is valid," she said, referring to the assembled paper ballots with votes for president. "Where did that come from?"

A New Cause

These sentiments and a growing distrust of election administration and voting technology are not likely to vanish. Legal scholars, such as the University of California Irvine's Rick Hasen, who curates the country's most influential election law blog, have focused on the higher altitude impacts of Trump's failing legal strategies. The president's attacks and smears, though not succeeding in court, were eroding public trust in the democratic process and could even pressure some courts and legislatures to embrace new anti-voting measures.

"The good news is that there is no real prospect that Mr. Trump can avoid a reluctant handover of power on Jan. 20," Hasen wrote for the New York Times. "The bad news is that Mr. Trump's wildly unsubstantiated claims of a vast voter fraud conspiracy and the litigation he has brought against voting rights have done — and will increasingly do — serious damage to our democracy. Our problems will deepen, in particular, because Mr. Trump's litigation strategy has led to the emergence of a voter-hostile jurisprudence in the federal courts."

At the grassroots level, hundreds of thousands of Trump supporters are discovering eye-popping features about the mechanics of America's voting systems that are fueling more doubt, speculation and outrage. One video that went viral explained that an unadvertised feature in the software used to compile a spreadsheet of all of the votes cast in a county could apply $fractional value$ to any column of vote totals. That feature, called weighted voting, was put there by the country's biggest voting system makers for use in private-sector elections, such as counting different classes of stock in shareholder elections. If someone knew how to use this application, which can multiply any vote total by a fractional value that's greater or less than one, and were not caught doing so, they could possibly alter the reported results. Trump's supporters are seizing such tidbits as revelations of how invisible strings can be pulled.

"Those who pretend to be for Election Integrity but mock the many intelligent and passionate voices calling into question the veracity of our election system simply because they are pro-Trump are themselves making a mockery of the topic," commented one activist on an email thread. "The media, and many of the pretenders in this group, were all for looking into hacking and other forms of election fraud, until...Orange Man Bad. Now, for the first time there is incredible grassroots support to make a real impact on our entire election system."

Meanwhile, broader statements from voting system manufacturers denying that their systems were vulnerable to manipulation and errors are not persuading many Trump supporters. Nor were daily assertions from top statewide election officials in Georgia that the discovery of uncounted Trump votes during the state's hand count were caused by human errors, not the underlying technology or system design.

Since last week's hand count in Georgia, where Voting Booth profiled how Trump observers kept raising claims of stolen votes without producing any evidence, this reporter has heard new details and explanations for behind the scene breakdowns that occurred during the hand count audit. (The presidential recount that begins on Tuesday will use high-speed scanners).

Why were memory cards with uncounted votes left in precinct scanners?Because the state's new machinery from Dominion Voting Systems does not alert poll workers if vote count data on thumb drives in precinct scanners has been successfully uploaded, a longtime voting consultant who was in touch with contractors hired for Georgia's audit said. That exact same problem has roiled countywide elections in Florida, he added.

Did local officials in one Georgia county panic after they could not find 600 paper ballots, but not tell state officials? Yes, this same source said, adding that they found the missing ballots not by recounting every batch of ballots by hand (the audit's protocol), but by weighing the sealed bags containing ballots —one bag was too heavy.

This design flaw (not confirming precinct vote-count data was sent) and panic moment (due to a ballot inventory error that should have been caught before the audit began) were kept hidden from the press and public during the audit. But they are part of an election administration landscape that a cadre of Trump supporters have been discovering.

As Georgia's hand count began, election integrity activist Garland Favorito, who has worked with progressives for 15 years, said that he sympathized with the Trump activists. There were "three top things" driving Trump's supporters, he explained. They did not understand how a candidate who could fill arenas lost to a candidate who had barely left home. They did not trust that millions of mailed-out ballots had not been tampered with somewhere along the line. And they felt abused by mainstream media, who they despised more than Democrats.

Trump's frontline election observers had little appreciation that Georgia's hand count, which was not without flaws, was still more transparent than anything that had been done before. They had little appreciation for the thousands of people who were spending days counting 5 million paper ballots by hand. They did not think that Trump's ongoing efforts to smear the process was at odds with their quest for truth and honest elections. They also did not like Voting Booth's profile of their efforts, they said, because they looked foolish. They did not contest its accuracy, nor realize that reporters from the New York Times, PBS and other media stood near them during the hand count and could have written the same account.

But the cadre of Trump supporters who have discovered the world of election administration are not going away. They don't like what they have seen, even if they do not fully understand what they are looking at. Meanwhile, they and the president are fueling dizzying conspiracies where Americans who don't follow the arcana of elections do not know what to believe. And election officials are not helping to clear the air. Their systems, procedures and technologies do not easily convey ground truths—how votes are cast, counted, secured and verified—apart from noise from campaigns and the backdrop of partisan rules affecting who can vote.

Deep new currents are stirring, despite what many policy experts have said was a well-run election—given the pandemic, unprecedented attacks on the post office and millions of people voting by mail for the first time. How the festering distrust among Trump's supporters evolves into a new right-facing election reform movement is not yet clear. The seeds are planted.

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.

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aha 1120: trump clown car legal disaster: rooted in hofstaedter paranoid style? trump trial ballooning lots of anti-socialist, extreme-ist BS in campaign, trying to make us afraid of green new deal AOC The Squadantifa arsonists who are coming to your burbs; (not so much socialized medicine?)

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stop the steal is a stew of recycled remixed conspiracy memes? building on GOP newt Koch Fox ~ AGW BS Vlad Kremlin GRU sow doubt about validity of system provides basis/rational for authoritarian coup.

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vaxxer started/boosted by RFK kernal of truth mercury probably bad idea for preservative, but really took off with Jenny McCarthy has been actres proto-influencer but most important interwebs were new so Nigerian dictator (they wouldn't let you print/post it unless true, right?) 1st mass media eith no filter/fact check/correction [10k eyeballs?]

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aha // domin theocracy and qanon? ghost dance

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/mcconnell-treason/

Despite being polarized, Americans really do agree on the fundamentals. Is the president above the law? No. Does every citizen have a right to vote? Yes. Should powers be separated? Yes. Are checks and balances good? Yes. Should people be free to worship as they wish? Yes. Are the people the ultimate sovereign? Yes. And so on.

Theory isn't the same as practice, obviously, but even so, there's only one correct answer to fundamental political questions. If there were other correct answers—if these questions hinged on differences of opinion—we would not be members of a political community whose outlines were established long ago. We would be part of another kind of political community, one none of us would recognize as familiar, legitimate or good. Our nation would be something else. It would not be America.

These fundamentals and the outlines of our political community that were derived from them constitute a contract among and between citizens and noncitizens. We agree to them, consciously or subliminally, because if we did not, we wouldn't participate in the union we all actually participate in. We'd be in something else that does not exist.

In the run-up to Election Day, CNN's Jake Tapper urged counting of every vote. He was not violating the norms of journalism. He was not taking a position. With respect to voting, there's no position to take. Counting every vote is what we do. If we do not count every vote, we are not America. Very few things in this country are either-or, right or wrong, but fundamental questions are. They are, because they must be. They must be, because we want them to be. We want them to be, because we are America.

The president and the Republican leaders are failing the test of fundamentals. Should they recognize as legitimate the outcome of a lawful democratic process? The only answer is yes. That's the only correct answer, because either the American people are sovereign or they are not. If they are not, we do not live in a representative democracy. Anything less than yes indicates unwillingness to participate in the union as it stands. Anything less than an immediate yes indicates a certain softness of dedication to the US Constitution and the republic. Yet Donald Trump, and now Mitch McConnell and the rest of the Republican Party, are refusing to recognize Joe Biden's victory.

I'm told this is theater. I'm told this is about fundraising. Campaign debts must be paid, after all. I trust some of this is true. I also trust history, though. No president has ever denied the reality of his defeat. (Biden has now eclipsed Ronald Reagan's share of the popular vote, 50.8 percent to 50.7. It is the highest for a challenger since Franklin Roosevelt beat Herbert Hoover in 1932. And the counting continues.) No president has ever refused to concede in the face of a mathematical certainty. To my knowledge, no political party has ever gotten behind an incumbent's effort to steal an election.

That effort will fail. (I say "will" but honestly I'm as full of dread as you are.) The president's legal scheme has so far floundered. Every one of his suits has been thrown out, because there's no evidence of voter fraud on the scale he's alleging. On the off-chance of one of these lawsuits getting to the US Supreme Court, I'm guessing the conservative justices there will buy themselves legitimacy by dismissing the case outright. Accusations can work in politics, less in court. As GOP Sen. John Cornyn said: "In the end, they're going to have to come up with some facts and evidence."

But even in failure, the president and the Republicans will have accomplished something. (It will benefit the GOP, of course, not the president; Trump will face legal scrutiny the minute he's out of office.)They will have succeeded in three things. One, establishing doubt in Biden's legitimacy. Two, establishing the groundwork for obstructing his agenda. More important, though, is three. They will have deepened an assumption already at work in the background of Republican discourse. Democrats don't count. Anything they do, whether criticizing Republicans or beating them by a landslide in national elections, deserves any reaction up to and including murder.

In a very real sense, the Republicans are constituting a nation inside this nation, a confederacy of the mind and spirit to be made real so "real Americans" chosen by God can dominate the whole in God's name. They are constituting a separate and unequal system inside the one everyone else recognizes as legitimate, in which a small minority is privileged over a majority bound by law but not protected by it. They are, ultimately, on the path toward suicide. When parasites kill their hosts, they kill themselves, too.

The most extreme view among pundits is that the Republicans won't recognize Joe Biden's legitimacy. That's not extreme enough. They are creating a beachhead inside the United States from which to continue covert civil warfare against the United States. The Republicans are committing treason literally, yet they're being afforded respect, as if accepting the outcome of a lawful democratic process were a matter of opinion. Wrong. There's only one correct answer to that fundamental question. Anything less than fully accepting the people's will is desiring an America that will never exist.

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Trump's election battle has left lawyers from both parties baffled

Meaghan Ellis November 06, 2020

Lawyers from both sides of the political aisle are baffled by what appears to be President Donald Trump's strategy to wage war on states where the election results are not in his favor.

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As of Friday morning, Trump has unleashed a barrage of lawsuits to contest election results in multiple swing states including Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, Arizona, and Pennsylvania. In addition to the lawsuits, Trump has repeatedly taken to Twitter with fear mongering remarks that discredit United States' election system.

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At one point, Trump even claimed his lead "magically disappeared." In fact, Eric Trump, the president's son, even scrutinized vote counting in Pennsylvania as he described it as "fraud."

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"Guys, this is fraud. This is absolute fraud," Eric Trump said. "They're trying to make a mockery of the election of this country."

However, legal experts are pushing back against the president's claims. In fact, many are puzzled by the president's strategy, according to ABC News. Wendy Weiser, director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, admitted she does not even see a legal strategy but rather a publicity stunt based on Trump's latest antics.

"I don't see any real legal strategy here," Weiser said, "They look more like public relation stunts meant to create a false impression that the election is filled with improprieties and fraud."

Even Trump's personal attorney former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, admitted that they must abide by the law and allow all votes to be counted.

"We were supposed to be allowed by law to observe the counting of the ballots," Giuliani, said Wednesday.

However, he also claimed that the Trump campaign team "has not been able to see if ballots were properly postmarked, properly addressed, properly signed on the outside," per the publication. According to Giuliani, their concerns are "all the things that often lead to disqualification of ballots."

However, in all states where vote counting is underway, there are Republican and Democratic state officials overseeing tabulation. Despite the Trump campaign's claims, Weiser also suggested that Trump's attack on the election process looks "more like an effort to inject conspiracy theory" as opposed to a legitimate claim of wrong doing on the part of election officials.

"It all looks more like an effort to inject conspiracy theory into the public," Weiser said, "an attempt to sway public opinion to believe something dramatic is going on when there actually is no drama."

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idiot am

1952 Reader's Digest reprint Christian Herald artl on " cancer by the carton" [vig ventiry bk?] --> JH Hill & K response; tob CEO mtg NYC 12/53: as long as doubt, not proven; hired biologist Clarence Cook Little quit U Mich after decry low morals while diddling coed; hereditarian evol --> eugenices 30's; all disease genetic; he was orig of doubt strat?

2002 Luntz memo; "sound sci" debate closing but not yet closed; "conservationists"; gut vs liberal or elitist 206

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/youre-not-supposed-to-understand-the-hunter-biden-smear-chaos-is-the-point

kos

Acclaimed journalist and historianAnne Applebaumunderstands the universe of propaganda as well as anyone alive today. Winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, she has devoted the past three decades to studying Russia and Eastern and Central Europe, with an emphasis on disinformation and propaganda so acute that she washerself targeted—by a Russian-originated smear campaign in retaliation for her writings about Vladimir Putin's annexation of Crimea. She now contributes her cache of knowledge toThe Atlantic, among other publications.

For someone so well-versed, analyzing the blatant behavior of propagandist right-wing media outlets such as Fox News is something akin to a chess master analyzing the strategy of Tic-Tac-Toe—simple, and even relaxing. So after watching the antics of Donald Trump during his final debate with Joe Biden, she wrote a piece for The Atlanticon Friday that explains what millions of Americans are still shaking their heads in bewilderment about today: the source—and more importantly, the purpose—of Trump's bizarre accusations about Hunter Biden and his allegedly nefarious dealings with certain obscure individuals.

Of course the direct conduits of this nonsense are what we in the sane world regard as the fever swamps of paranoiac right-wing conspiracy thinking, most visibly manifested on the Fox News channel. As Applebaum notes, the actual storyline, spun out of whole cloth, is purposefully designed to be opaque, leading someone trying to divine the actual facts to become frustrated and give up trying to make sense of them. In fact, as her article's title suggests, "You're not supposed to understand the rumors about Biden."

Because the story is not intended to make sense, but to create a fog of doubt.

Just like the fictional legend these same people wove around "Hillary's emails," the Hunter Biden fiction also concerns emails—these ones allegedly kept by a former business partner of Hunter Biden, and miraculously disclosed to a peripheral former and supposed "investigative journalist" named Matthew Tyrmand. Tyrmand, notably, was formerly (and peripherally) associated with the right-wing fraudster and provocateur James O'Keefe.

That piece of critical information would lead most knowledgeable people to immediately shelve the unfounded Hunter Biden scheme in that mental compartment where bad ideas go to eventually die. But the Fox News audience is by definition anything but "knowledgeable people." On that network, the Hunter Biden nonsense is not something analogous to the disappointingly empty caverns of "Al Capone's vault," but rather an ever-opening flower, chock full of conspiracy-thinking goodness.

In releasing the 26,000 emails, Tyrmand and his collaborator, the Breitbart News contributor Peter Schweizer, are not bringing forth any evidence of actual lawbreaking, or an actual security threat, by either Hunter or Joe Biden. They are instead creating a miasma, an atmosphere, a foggy world in which misdeeds might have taken place, and in which corruption might have happened. They are alsoproviding the raw material from which more elaborate stories can be constructed. The otherwise incomprehensible reference in last night's debate to "the mayor of Moscow's wife," from whom Joe Biden somehow got rich, was an excellent example of how this works.A name surfaces in a large collection of data; it is detached from its context; it is then used to make an insinuation or accusation that cannot be proved; it is then forgotten, unless it gains some traction, in which case it is repeated again.

Applebaum provides some basic background for the uninformed and uninitiated (i.e., normal Americans).

Those who live outside the Fox News bubble and intend to remain there do not, of course, need to learn any of this stuff. Judging by what has been published, the very worst thing that Tyrmand's email cache could reveal (if it is authentic) is that some unattractive people sought to use Hunter Biden's surname and connections to get business deals or score a visit to the White House for their clients. But we already know about Hunter Biden's involvement with unattractive people, and his struggles with addiction; we also know that, under normal circumstances, dozens of people visit the White House every day. On the grand scale of misdeeds committed by politicians and their relatives, this kind of thing barely registers.

Applebaum then helpfully includes a laundry list of Trump's corruption that puts to shame whatever the right hopes to spin out of this email concoction. As readers of Daily Kos, you're more than familiar with these.

But there is a purpose lurking here in the mind of Fox News mogul Rupert Murdoch. The first and most obvious? To assist Trump in deflecting attention—for these final 10 days—from his horrific malfeasance in the face of a pandemic whose vicious resurgence is soon likely to be the sole focus of the nightly newscasts. The second reason is to provide a ready well of sludge to draw upon in the seemingly likely event (as Murdoch himself has acknowledged) that the polls turn out to be correct, and Trump loses the election.

They will continue to serve a function after the election as well. If Biden wins, Foxworld will need some way to keep its audience focused on something other than the Cabinet he appoints, the new legislation he passes, and all the other events, decisions, and changes that used to constitute "news." Instead of all that real-life stuff—laws and regulations, statistics and investigations, debates about the economy and health care—the leading figures of the right-wing conspiracy bubble will,over the next months and years, dip into the email caches to keep their followers focused on an alternate reality in which Joe Biden is a secret oligarch, his son is an important figure in the Chinese mafia, and LOL nothing matters. Just as you need to know the backstories of the stars in the DC Comics universe in order to understand the nuances of a Batman movie, six months from now you might also need to know all about Cooney and Archer and the wife of the mayor of Moscow if you want to understand Ingraham's monologues.

Applebaum, a rapt student of propaganda, knows that outside of hosting the inevitable guest appearances (between court dates) that Donald Trump will insist on during the next four years—assuming he loses—the Fox News yappers need something to talk and talk about, and it certainly isn't going to be Republican policies. So this fictional narrative serves the interests both of Fox News—whose main concern is keeping its soon-to-be demoralized audience content and soporific—and also helps to deflect the inevitable horror stories that will be uncovered by a Democratic-controlled Congress investigating the Trump crime family's vast trail of detritus throughout our government.

By talking about Hunter Biden, the Trump family, especially the Trump children, also hopes to deflect attention from their own greatest weakness, namely the amoral, kleptocratic nepotism that they embody like no family ever before in American history...

[...]

None of them can win using ideas anymore, because they don't have any. All they can do is seek attention: gesticulate, wave their arms in the air, shout at the crowd, invent things, and try to attract the fame and attention they feel they deserve, even though they can no longer explain why they deserve it.

Put simply, assuming Joe Biden wins this election, we should all gear up for four long years of Fox News-inspired fantasy programming.

Of course, there's always the mute button.

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