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5 24

fox News and the MAGA media are lining up their shot at American democracy

The bullet is in the chamber

WRITTEN BY MATT GERTZ

PUBLISHED 05/14/24

With the presidential election less than half a year away, evidence is everywhere that the right is planning to end the American experiment in representative government if it fails to legitimately return Donald Trump to the White House.

It was clear just a few months after Trump’s seditious plot to subvert the 2020 presidential election concluded with a violent mob of his supporters storming the U.S. Capitol that the right-wing propaganda apparatus was laying the groundwork to try again in 2024. Fox News and the rest of the MAGA media, which spent the weeks after the 2020 election fabricating and amplifying a host of election fraud lies and conspiracy theories to undermine the results, had begun working to institutionalize Trump’s lie that the 2020 election had been stolen from him and to construct an alternative path to the presidency in which compliant party officials would secure a Republican victory by any means necessary.

Fox had become a loaded gun aimed at American democracy. Three years later, the bullet is in the chamber.

The disinformation ecosystem which revolves around Fox is telegraphing a plan to reject the results of the 2024 election if Trump loses. The former president’s propagandists will once again use baseless allegations of widespread fraud as a pretext to seek to overturn the vote — and GOP leaders are publicly signaling their willingness to comply.

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Ultimately, this preordained coup scheme may not matter. As in 2020, Joe Biden might win by too large a margin in too many states for the plot to succeed. Or, as in 2016, Trump might win outright.

But in the event that Biden triumphs in a close election, the MAGA faithful have developed and road-tested a plan to steal it.

Fox stars aided Trump’s 2020 subversion plot. They were lying. And they’ll do it again.

It is sometimes unclear whether Fox’s falsehoods are deliberate lies. But filings in Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation suit, which the network settled in April 2023 for $787.5 million, demonstrate beyond dispute that Fox’s coverage of the 2020 election results was rooted in malicious fabrication.

Fox’s top executives and biggest stars knew for a fact that Biden was the legitimate winner of the 2020 election, even as the network’s coverage sought to undermine the legitimacy of the vote. The network, filings show, was intentionally peddling conspiracy theories in support of Trump’s stolen-election deception in order to compete with its far-right rivals.

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These lies mattered. Communications revealed by the suit show that top Fox executives were aware the network was “uniquely positioned to state the message that the election was not stolen” but did not out of fears of losing viewers. They further show that when then-Fox Corp. Chair Rupert Murdoch asked his employees for evidence Fox had “fed the story that the election was stolen and that January 6 [was] an important chance to have the results overturned,” he received a list of 50 examples in response.

But the only lesson Fox’s executives apparently learned from fueling an attempted coup is that they need better lawyering to keep their damning internal emails and text messages off the front pages and avoid paying a record settlement.

Fox retained and even promoted some of its most unhinged election deniers, while punishing or even firing employees who fought the false narratives. In the years that followed, the network restocked its prime-time lineup with Trump loyalists who parrot whatever the former president says, put Trump allies and even a family member on the payroll, and replaced “news side” veterans with GOP operatives.

It’s no wonder that former employees keep loudly warning that Fox is a dangerous cesspool that produces Trumpian propaganda. The cogs who remain on the job, meanwhile, know without a doubt that they are part of a machine that manufactures lies. The pressure the network faces to hold on to its audience — including by promoting voter fraud conspiracy theories and other right-wing extremism — is stronger than ever. And so if Trump demands that Fox’s propagandists again focus on building him a pretext to overturn an election, they will do it.

The emerging right-wing scheme to overturn the 2024 election

Trumpists in the media and elsewhere have spent the years since Trump’s defeat laying the groundwork to rerun his subversion plot, systematically removing the guardrails that helped stymie the scheme in 2020, and helping him back to the Republican nomination. The result is a turnkey operation prepared to generate false election fraud claims and convert them into a rationale for Republican political leaders to reverse the results of the election and reinstall Trump in the White House.

MAGA propagandists are priming their audiences to disbelieve the election results and take action in response. They keep viewers in a state of terror with incendiary warnings that Biden is a jack-booted dictator who is deliberately trying to endanger their families, ensuring that some fraction would seek his removal by any means necessary. They valorize the January 6 insurrectionists as honorable patriots who did what they thought was right and were smeared by the media and punished by “deep state” malefactors. They flood the right-wing information ecosystem with lies and conspiracy theories about Democrats tainting past election results.

And they have already begun warning that the 2024 election will be rife with election fraud — and that only such cheating could explain a Trump defeat.

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CitationFrom the March 25, 2024, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

STEVE BANNON (HOST): There are no “issues" with the 2020 election — they stole it. Let me repeat that. They stole it. And they hate when we say this. They stole it. And they're on notice. They're not going to be able to steal it again. People are doing a ton of work on this, and that's still not enough, but it's going to get better. The hairy eyeball is going to be on them.

The only way they defeat Trump is to steal it. The only way they defeat Trump is they steal it. The only way they defeat Trump is they steal it. He is unstoppable.

We saw how this played out in 2020: Trump’s coup plan relied on blanketing right-wing media with stolen-election lies in order to provide cover for GOP partisans to reverse the outcome in states Biden won. Under pressure from the Fox-addled rank and file, Republican election officials would refuse to certify results in key areas, GOP state legislators would overturn the results, and GOP members of Congress and Vice President Mike Pence would hand Trump the election.

This scheme failed in part because too many Republican officials were unwilling to aid the effort. But since then, Trumpist propagandists like War Room host Steve Bannon and Fox’s lineup of right-wing stars have helped make election denial a core GOP value, and now, the guardrails are collapsing:

Donald Trump will once again stand as the Republican presidential nominee this fall, less than four years after he attempted a coup to remain in office. He still maintains, unbowed by time, notoriety, or criminal charges, that the 2020 election was stolen. At the same time, he has embraced the January 6 offenders, regularly describing them as “hostages,” promising to consider blanket pardons for their actions, and treating their attack on the Capitol as “not a moment of national shame but of celebration,” as NPR described it.

None of this seemed to give right-wing propagandists much pause as Trump romped to the nomination. The Murdochs may have begun the primary season with other plans, but Fox had spent years crafting a political environment in which any criticism of Trump was inherently illegitimate, and its stars ultimately rallied to his side.

As Trump’s victory became inevitable, his vanquished rivals were reduced to complaining — accurately — that Fox and its ilk had taken Trump’s side, while the few right-wing commentators who had criticized Trump and endorsed his primary opponents bent the knee.

If he loses in 2024, Trump will reject the results and seek to overturn them, as he has throughout his political career. Indeed, he began laying the groundwork for such a strategy during the GOP primaries, warning that only Democratic “cheating” could explain such an outcome. And he has no apparent qualms over whether his deliberate radicalization of his supporters leads to right-wing political violence. Indeed, he is signaling that is exactly what he wants.

No one can say they didn’t know what was coming

Here’s part of an interview with Trump that Time magazine published on April 30, six months before Election Day:

Mr. President, in our last conversation you said you weren't worried about political violence in connection with the November election. You said, “I think we're going to win and there won't be violence.” What if you don't win, sir?

Trump: Well, I do think we're gonna win. We're way ahead. I don't think they'll be able to do the things that they did the last time, which were horrible. Absolutely horrible. So many, so many different things they did, which were in total violation of what was supposed to be happening. And you know that and everybody knows that. We can recite them, go down a list that would be an arm’s long. But I don't think we're going to have that. I think we're going to win. And if we don't win, you know, it depends. It always depends on the fairness of an election. I don't believe they'll be able to do the things that they did the last time. I don't think they'll be able to get away with it. And if that's the case, we're gonna win in record-setting fashion.

Polls suggest that the 2024 presidential election will be close. But according to Trump, he’s “way ahead” and on track to win “in record-setting fashion.” The only thing that can prevent that outcome, Trump claims, is “the things that they did the last time,” i.e. the Democratic election fraud conspiracy theories he’s been hocking since before the 2020 vote. And if that happens, Trump says, his supporters might respond to such a result with violence.

None of this is even remotely subtle.

In the lead-up to the 2020 election, some political commentators expressed doubts over whether Trump would really respond to defeat by refusing to accept the election results and taking action to try to remain in office.

But that is precisely what Trump did. Now he is saying quite clearly that he will do it again if given the chance. And his propagandists in the right-wing media will have had four years to lay the groundwork to ensure his plot’s success.

Five days after the Time interview dropped, Semafor founder Ben Smith published a Q-and-A with Joe Kahn, the executive editor of The New York Times. The interview began like this:

Ben Smith: Dan Pfeiffer, who used to work for Barack Obama, recently wrote of the Times: “They do not see their job as saving democracy or stopping an authoritarian from taking power.” Why don’t you see your job as: “We’ve got to stop Trump?” What about your job doesn’t let you think that way?

Joe Kahn: Good media is the Fourth Estate, it’s another pillar of democracy. One of the absolute necessities of democracy is having a free and fair and open election where people can compete for votes, and the role of the news media in that environment is not to skew your coverage towards one candidate or the other, but just to provide very good, hard-hitting, well-rounded coverage of both candidates, and informing voters. If you believe in democracy, I don’t see how we get past the essential role of quality media in informing people about their choice in a presidential election.

To say that the threats of democracy are so great that the media is going to abandon its central role as a source of impartial information to help people vote — that’s essentially saying that the news media should become a propaganda arm for a single candidate, because we prefer that candidate’s agenda. It is true that Biden’s agenda is more in sync with traditional establishment parties and candidates. And we’re reporting on that and making it very clear.

It’s also true that Trump could win this election in a popular vote. Given that Trump’s not in office, it will probably be fair. And there’s a very good chance, based on our polling and other independent polling, that he will win that election in a popular vote. So there are people out there in the world who may decide, based on their democratic rights, to elect Donald Trump as president. It is not the job of the news media to prevent that from happening. It’s the job of Biden and the people around Biden to prevent that from happening.

> It’s our job to cover the full range of issues that people have. At the moment, democracy is one of them. But it’s not the top one — immigration happens to be the top [of polls], and the economy and inflation is the second. Should we stop covering those things because they’re favorable to Trump and minimize them? I don’t even know how it’s supposed to work in the view of Dan Pfeiffer or the White House. We become an instrument of the Biden campaign? We turn ourselves into Xinhua News Agency or Pravda and put out a stream of stuff that’s very, very favorable to them and only write negative stories about the other side? And that would accomplish — what?

That exchange generated a lot of smart responses. Critics pointed out that Smith’s question mischaracterized Pfeiffer’s critique; that Kahn’s response ignores the actual criticisms mounted by his paper’s critics, including Biden himself; that the Times’ business interests lead Kahn to endorse “a kind of performative neutrality in politics coverage”; and that, contra Kahn’s claims, the Times does not generally base its coverage decisions on polling and, if it did, the result should be a greater focus on the impact of Trump’s policy proposals on inflation and immigration than the paper actually provides.

What strikes me most about Kahn’s answer is his apparent lack of urgency. A former president left office after using the lie that the election he lost had been rigged to try to reverse the outcome, culminating in a violent assault by his supporters on the U.S. Capitol. He has all but promised to try again, and after transforming his party into a personality cult which treats the insurrectionists as heroes and his election lie as unvarnished truth, he very well could succeed.

That is the central reality of the 2024 presidential election, one that should be foregrounded to the readers and viewers on news outlets at every opportunity but often fades from the discourse. The former president’s media allies are foreshadowing their eagerness to take every possible opportunity to participate in his scheme. And the leader of the nation’s most powerful mainstream press organ gives no indication that he has considered those implications in any but the shallowest way. We are all in a lot of trouble.

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Fox News propagandists and GOP leaders are pushing the country toward the abyss

11/06/20

Fox News is a loaded gun aimed at American democracy

05/14/21

They did it and will do it again – if no one stops them

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tHE NEWS

Think tanks often act as an administration-in-waiting for presidents — a place to stash future appointees, generate policy plans, and flag promising young staffers. This year their role on the right is taking on outsized importance, however, as the 2024 Republican field has made overhauling the bureaucracy with more reliable allies one of their top stated goals.

That’s where the Heritage Foundation, alongside 50-plus conservative organizations in partner roles, hopes to come in. In April, the conservative nonprofit unveiled the start of a new $22 million project intended to staff the next Republican presidential administration from day one — a “private LinkedIn for conservatives,” as Paul Dans, the lead of “Project 2025,” described it.

Their work dovetails with the goals expressed in Donald Trump’s calls to “destroy the deep state,” for example, and his plans to fire and replace federal workers en masse. Rivals like Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy have already accused Trump of not going far enough as president in rooting out ineffective or disloyal appointees and civil servants.

“What fundamentally unites our coalition is deconstructing the administrative state,” Dans told Semafor.

“The overall principle of this project is, you know, we've got to reassert political control over the government, reassert presidential control over the executive branch,” the project’s associate director, Spencer Chretien, later added.

besides the database the group is continuing to compile, the conservative think-tank’s ambitious effort is comprised of three additional pillars: A policy book for the next administration, an organized training effort dubbed the “Presidential Administration Academy,” and eventually a “180-day game plan of regulations and executive orders that a president could sign on day one,” Dans explained.

They’ve even recently begun taking the show on the road — some of the project’s top members have already visited Hillsdale College and Florida International University — to try and attract more promising young conservatives to Washington. (There’s also an upcoming visit to Denver for the Western Conservative Summit planned). Eventually, they hope to begin hosting roundtables and debates featuring some of the experts involved in the project’s policy book, and are even considering setting up posts along the campaign trail in key early primary states like Iowa and New Hampshire.

SHELBY'S VIEW

“Project 2025” is, at its core, a response to Trump’s win back in 2016. In an interview, Dans said how his upset victory “took Conservative, Inc., by surprise” and thus the movement was unprepared to properly help him as he took office.  Trump, who was superstitious about preparing a transition before winning, struggled to fill in the gaps himself.

“They certainly hadn't done a lot of homework to support them,” Dans said, later adding: “I think we acknowledge, if nothing else, Biden was prepared to go in there.”

Heritage’s efforts also tie into ongoing conservative allegations of “weaponization” of government officials against their priorities (which are fiercely disputed by Democrats.) This is perhaps the most organized effort thus far to respond by trying to pack the executive branch with staff of their choosing.

Prior to this, the most aggressive attempt came from Trump, who issued an executive order dubbed “Schedule F” late in his term, with guidance from former Heritage staffers. The proposal —reversed by President Biden — sought to allow the White House to get rid of huge numbers of civil servants, who are typically protected against the whims of a new president. It’s now a key part of his plans for a second term.

“I think any candidate is going to have to, at a minimum, embrace a Schedule F sort of major reform,” Dans told Semafor. “We're embarking on the 100 year reform period here in the United States.”

Heritage is also distributing its dense 887-page policy booklet, which covers topics ranging from, as Dans put it, “ending the woke military” to establishing “full spectrum energy dominance,” to 2024 presidential hopefuls plus some notable politicians. They’ve passed it on to Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin — who closed a door on launching a presidential run this year but has left open a crack that he may still enter as a last minute candidate — as well as Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a critic of COVID-19 policies and a prominent spreader of anti-government conspiracy theories, and former Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard.

THE VIEW FROM DEMOCRATS

Democrats and many critics on the left see Trump’s “Schedule F” proposals as an attempt to undermine the basic functionings of government and consolidate power.

“This is a classic case of what Republicans love to do — to tell people that government doesn’t work for them and then work to dismantle and break the government on purpose,” a national Democratic operative said of the latest effort.

ROOM FOR DISAGREEMENT

Trump’sfiery denunciations of appointees and staff who have defied his orders — including those who testified about his behavior as part of impeachment trials and federal investigations — have some observers worried his plans would be a step toward silencing his critics (or a Trump-like president’s) and enabling corruption.

“The last thing we need is for a president to fire dedicated and experienced public servants and replace them with sycophants and grifters without the skills to carry out the functions of government within the rule of law,” Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md.said last year after introducing legislation with other Democrats to try and prevent any sort of “Schedule F” executive orders from going into effect in the future.

NOTABLE

In an op-ed published by The Hill, Donald F. Kettl recently argued that the Heritage Foundation’s efforts amount to “reaching back to the government of the past instead of forward to the government of the future.” Kettl adds that, instead of “reorganiz[ing] our way out of important problems,” the next administration should be focusing on “bridgebuilders” who can help solve some of government’s biggest problems.

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welcome back to HEATED, a newsletter for people who are pissed off about the climate crisis—written by me, Emily Atkin.

Today we have a follow-up on Wednesday’s article about Semafor, the global news company that is allowing the world’s second-largest polluting company to sponsor and spread misinformation in its climate change newsletter. (Apologies for the delay on this; it was supposed to be sent yesterday, but I had to drive 7 hours, and I was just too tired).

This was also supposed to be for paid subscribers only, but then I figured, we’re writing about press transparency here. It doesn’t exactly do folks much of a service to have it behind a paywall.

The questions Semafor ignored

Judging from the news company's canned response to other outlets, it's easy to see why HEATED's inquiry about Chevron's misleading ad went unanswered.

EMILY ATKIN   OCT 28

Screenshots from Thursday’s edition of Semafor.

The second-largest polluting corporation in the world is still sponsoring and spreading misinformation in the climate change newsletter of Semafor, the new global news company founded by ex-Buzzfeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith and ex-Bloomberg Media CEO Justin Smith.

Semafor released its second climate newsletter sponsored by Chevron on Thursday. Titled “World’s climate fail,” the newsletter contained details of a new U.N. report showing that the world is failing to meet its climate goals. It also contained the samepaltering Chevron ad as last week, which misleads its readers about the oil giant’s efforts to fight climate change.

Semafor refused to defend the Chevron ad to HEATED when we called it out on Wednesday. Ben Smith, the editor-in-chief, affirmatively declined to answer questions about it. Instead, he directed HEATED to a spokesperson who he said could answer questions related to advertising. That spokesperson then ignored HEATED’s questions.

The Semafor spokesperson did not, however, ignore everyone’s inquiries about the Chevron sponsorship. They provided identical statements to Molly Taft at Earther, and to Isobel Cockerell at Coda. The statements read:

Advertisers have no bearing on our editorial coverage and we maintain a strict separation between news and third-party advertisement. Semafor adheres to robust ad acceptability guidelines that are industry standard. Any ads that are featured across our products are transparently positioned to the reader and clearly contextualized as advertising.

Judging from that response, it becomes easy to see why Semafor chose to ignore HEATED’s questions. In our inquiry, we specifically told Semafor we weren’t looking for answers related to their editorial independence. We said we were only asking about one specific thing: whether Semafor is selling advertisers on opportunities to spread misinformation on its platform.

Semafor couldn’t answer that. So they didn’t.

Read HEATED’s full inquiry to Semafor

To be sure, it’s completely possible (and perhaps probable!) that Semafor ignored HEATED because it thinks we’re small potatoes; that nothing this tiny reader-funded outlet will say could affect their$25 million corporate-funded operation.

But I personally like to believe it’s because of our detailed inquiry, which specifically said we were not looking for unrelated answers about Semafor’s editorial independence, which news outlets commonly use to deflect questions about their misleading fossil fuel ads.

As we said on Wednesday, “It’s an incredibly disingenuous response, and frankly an insult to the reason we ask the question. … We just don’t want to see your readers misled. Why don’t you?”

Here’s our full, unanswered inquiry to Semafor’s advertising team:

This is Emily Atkin, I write a popular climate newsletter called HEATED. Ben Smith gave me your contact info and said you'd be able to provide context on a recent Chevron ad that ran in Semafor climate, which I'm writing about for my newsletter tomorrow.

I'm writing about the ad because it is misleading your readers about Chevron's massive impact on the climate crisis. It is a textbook example of greenwashing, a misinformation tactic sometimes used by high-polluting corporations to falsely paint their operations as environmentally-friendly.

Specifically, the claim that Chevron is "working toward a lower carbon future" by investing in renewable natural gas is paltering, the practice of saying things that on their own are literally true, but create a misleading overall impression of the company. Sure, renewable natural gas is technically a "lower carbon" technology, but it is also not renewable, not natural, and not a large-scale climate solution. In addition, scientists say a zero carbon or carbon neutral future is necessary to avoid climate catastrophe—not a “lower carbon” future, which is purposefully vague.

Climate misinformation such as this plays a huge role in placating the public, falsely soothing them into believing polluters are taking meaningful action to solve this horrible crisis, when they are not. So I hope Semafor takes it seriously.

My questions for you are:

What are Semafor's policies on misleading and deceptive advertising, including greenwashing?

Does this Chevron advertisement meet Semafor's requirements for truthful advertising?

The Guardian and other news outlets have banned fossil fuel advertisements specifically because they so often mislead people into thinking the companies are climate-friendly. What was the process of creating Semafor's advertising guidelines, and were the ethics of fossil fuel advertising ever considered?

I also want to emphasize that I am not asking about the firewall between Semafor's editorial and advertising teams. I am asking about whether Semafor is selling advertisers on opportunities to spread misinformation on its platform.

My deadline is COB today, and I can be reached here by e-mail or at [phone number]. I appreciate the attention.

Also, here’s a separate inquiry I sent to Ben Smith after he had already declined to be interviewed over text:

Hi Ben, I tried to send this over text, but it is not going through. I have a couple editorial questions unrelated to advertising that I figured I'd try you on.

My questions are:

-How does Semafor plan to cover climate misinformation and greenwashing? How seriously will Semafor take these topics?

-Will Semafor's climate coverage include fact-checking the paltering and greenwashing commonly found in oil industry climate ads, including the ones it runs?

My deadline is COB today. Thanks

It also went unanswered.