attack strength

820 dunno if this need disambig, maybe swift boat sums it up

variant of rubber glue reverse/ projection?

marcotte make interesting tie to false equiv an bias BS ploy:

direct mail outrageous attack last minute so no way to counter?

origin of ploy? most infamous swift boat? boogie man atwater? rove?

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aha is this the/ an origin of post truth? lies smears ancient but to attack strength is different?

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To the extent LaCivita has achieved any notoriety in his career, it is for his role helping run the Swift Boat campaign that has been credited with sinking Kerry in 2004. Early in the campaign, allegations were bubbling on the right that the Democrat, campaigning as a war hero against post-9/11 George W. Bush, was inflating his record in Vietnam. These same veterans were furious Kerry had denounced the war after returning home, and one named John O’Neill teamed up with Jerome Corsi, who would later inspire Donald Trump on his birther crusade, to write a book called Unfit for Command. But it was LaCivita who turned their fringe allegations into a campaign funded by millions of dollars in shadowy contributions. The operation cut campaign ads with vet testimonials questioning Kerry’s service.

“He just knew how to frame the message and how to deliver it,” says one person involved in the effort. “We could have done cookie-cutter campaign ads, but he knew that wouldn’t have worked. He’s a political animal, and he always wants to be in the fight.”

The Swift Boat campaign stretched the boundaries of what had been considered within bounds of acceptable politics, both by using an outside, dark-money vehicle in a presidential campaign in the pre-super-PAC era, and also for broadcasting what were later revealed to be demonstrably false claims against Kerry.

Still, today most Republicans operatives view the episode as one to be proud of, and it provides a template for how LaCivita will go after Joe Biden and the Democrats: not by attacking what is perceived as Biden’s weaknesses but his strengths. If Biden portrays himself as the person defending American democracy from Trump, then, as LaCivita told the Line Drive podcast, they will argue “it’s Biden that’s really against democracy, right? Biden against democracy — that stands for BAD.”

“You lose elections when you surprise the electorate,” says Hogan Gidley, a Line Drive co-host who was the Trump 2020 campaign’s press secretary. “Everybody knew Clinton was a dirtbag, and so the whole Monica thing didn’t shock anybody. And so the media and the left want you to think that Joe is just Ol’ Steady Hand Joe who keeps everything stable. But then you have all the instability, all the chaos, and the projection onto our party of the things that Democrats are guilty of doing. Chris has a way of reframing the argument so that it takes away their opponent’s strongest argument and takes away something that America believes about a candidate.”

After cutting down John Kerry, LaCivita started to develop a reputation of bringing a kind of devil-may-care attitude to politics. In 2010, during Rand Paul’s run for Senate, GQ published a story about a bizarre tale from Paul’s college days when he and a buddy, both stoned, allegedly forced a fellow female student to worship a made-up god, “Aqua Buddha.” The campaign considered suing GQ, but, according to McKay Coppins’s book, LaCivita laughed it off as “fucking hilarious. I love that.”

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wired oct 21 2024

Russian-aligned propaganda network notorious for creating deepfake whistleblower videos appears to be behind a coordinated effort to promote wild and baseless claims that Minnesota governor and vice presidential candidate Tim Walz sexually assaulted one of his former students, according to several specialists tracking the disinformation campaign.

Experts believe that the campaign is tied to a network called Storm-1516, which has been linked to, among other things, a previous effort that falsely claimed vice president Kamala Harris perpetrated a hit-and-run in San Francisco in 2011. Storm-1516 has a long history of posting fake whistleblower videos, and often deepfake videos, to push Kremlin talking points to the West.

The propaganda unit’s work has successfully reached the highest levels of the Republican party, with vice presidential candidate JD Vance repeating at least one of their narratives. NBC reported this week that the group has pushed at least 50 false narratives in this manner since last fall, which comes amid a broader Russian government effort to disrupt next month’s election with the aim of helping former president Donald Trump return to the White House.

Numerous figures in MAGA world boosted the Tim Walz assault claims, including Jack Posobiec, the Pizzagate promoter who is now a member of Trump’s campaign team, and Candace Owens, the popular right-wing podcaster. The claims went viral on X last week, when an anonymous account called Black Insurrectionist posted screenshots of emails from a purported victim. Other X users quickly debunked the claims, citing formatting errors in the images that suggested the emails were fake, but days later another conspiracist posted a video on X claiming he had spoken to one of Walz's supposed victims on the phone—without providing any proof. The video racked up millions of hits.

Then, on Wednesday, a video claiming to show a former student of Walz describing abuse by the former football coach spread widely on X. According to a WIRED analysis using several deepfake detector tools, the video was created using AI. The video, shared by a prominent anonymous QAnon-promoting account, garnered over 4.3 million views before it was deleted.

The campaign to attack Walz predates the video; it traces back to John Dougan, a former Florida cop who now lives in Moscow and runs a network of pro-Kremlin websites. Dougan appeared on Zak Paine’s QAnon show RedPill78 on October 5 with an anonymous man named “Rick,” who said he was a foreign exchange student at Mankato West High School in 2004 when Walz was a teacher there. “Rick” then claimed Walz assaulted him. Dougan did not respond to a request for comment.

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The claims, however, didn’t go viral until last week and the release of the deepfake video.

Darren Linvill, codirector at Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub, tells WIRED that he immediately recognized this tactic as part of Russia’s well-established disinformation playbook.

“There is little doubt this is Storm-1516,” says Linvill, whose team uncovered the network last fall.

Linvill says the account that first shared the AI-altered video bears all the hallmarks of previous Storm-1516 campaigns. “It is standard for them to create an X or YouTube account for initial placement of stories,” says Linvill.

The campaign orchestrated by Storm-1516 often begins with the posting of a fake story and video from a whistleblower or citizen journalist, the US mission to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe outlined in July. Disinformation is “amplified by other seemingly unaffiliated online networks,” the US mission stated. The claims then take on a life of their own, shared and reposted by unwitting social media users who likely have no idea of where the videos originated.

The fake stories can also be picked up by other media outlets that cover viral social media stories. In the case of the Walz claims, they ended up on MSN, a news aggregation site owned by Microsoft.

In the past, Storm-1516 has relied on a network of fake news websites run by Dougan to push its narratives. On Saturday, a story that referenced the RedPill78 interview, the Black Insurrectionist posts, and the deepfake video was published on over 100 of Dougan’s websites simultaneously.

This was first discovered by Alex Liberty, a researcher who tracks the activity of Russia’s propaganda networks and who agrees with Linvill’s assertion that the deepfake video bears all the hallmarks of a Storm-1516 campaign.

“We believe that it might be a coordinated campaign in [an] attempt to bring numerous false accusations of the same nature against Tim Walz through different channels and in different formats in order to bring an image of legitimacy to the narrative,” Liberty tells WIRED.

McKenzie Sadeghi, the AI and foreign influence editor at NewsGuard, agrees.

“The false narrative appears to be part of a wider campaign pushed by pro-Kremlin media and QAnon influencers ahead of the November 5, 2024, US elections aimed at portraying Walz, whose political appeal is as an everyman schoolteacher and coach, as a pedophile who had inappropriate relationships with minors,” Sadeghi wrote in an analysis of the deepfake video.

From the very beginning, the allegations against Walz were easily debunked. In his interview on the RedPill78 QAnon show, Dougan’s source claimed he was in the US thanks to the State Department–funded Future Leaders Exchange program, which allows students from countries formerly under the control of the Soviet Union the chance to study in the US for a year.

However, a spokesperson for the US State Department, told NewsGuard that it has no record of any Future Leaders Exchange student from Kazakhstan in Mankato area schools from 2000 through 2020. Mankato Area Public Schools communications director Mel Helling told NewsGuard the allegations were “outlandish.”

The baseless claims were shared by some far-right accounts in the days after the episode was published, but they didn’t really take hold until a week later, when the X account known as Black Insurrectionist posted a clip from Dougan’s RedPill78 episode. The clip was viewed over 800,000 times.

Google search trends data shows a huge spike in people searching for “Tim Walz pedophile” and “Tim Walz abuse” on October 13, the day the Black Insurrectionist account began posting their claims.

The Black Insurrectionist account is anonymous and launched a year ago; its followers include Donald Trump Jr. and former Trump adviser Roger Stone. The account’s bio reads: “I am MAGA.” It rose to prominence weeks before the Walz post, when it claimed to have been in contact with a whistleblower at ABC who said Harris had been provided with the questions ahead of her September debate with former president Donald Trump. Those claims were widely debunked by multiple major fact-checking and media organizations.

Last week, the Black Insurrectionist account shared screenshots of email correspondence the account had with an alleged victim on X. Almost immediately, the evidence was questioned when X users spotted a text cursor in one of the screenshots, suggesting that Black Insurrectionist was editing the document. Others pointed out that the date and time format shown in some of the screenshots was inconsistent with how they are displayed on real emails.

Black Insurrectionist initially defended itself before going silent. The account was deleted on Thursday.

The two dozen posts from Black Insurrectionist laying out their alleged evidence have been viewed over 33 million times, according to X’s own metrics, and have been shared on numerous other platforms, including Truth Social, Instagram, Telegram, and TikTok.

Among those sharing Black Insurrectiont’s claims was Paine, who hosted Dougan on his QAnon show. “I have no reason to doubt the veracity of this story,” Paine wrote on X.

The posts have also caught the attention of the wider MAGA universe in a way that Dougan’s initial claims didn’t. Prominent right-wing figures like Owens and Posobiec both flagged the “allegations” as something worth looking into.

Owens discussed the conspiracy on her top-rated podcast, with the episode racking up over 630,000 views on YouTube since it was posted on Wednesday.

Posobiec wrote on X that there were “lots of allegations going around regarding Tim Walz sexually abusing young student(s).” While he added that he didn’t “know about any of the recent allegations being made,” he did share a link to Dougan’s claims from earlier in the month.

When Harris replaced President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee for president in July, Russian-aligned propaganda networks struggled to mount effective disinformation campaigns targeting the vice president and her team.

But as Microsoft reported in the summer, those campaigns have started to find their footing. "The shift to focusing on the Harris-Walz campaign reflects a strategic move by Russian actors aimed at exploiting any perceived vulnerabilities in the new candidates," Clint Watts, head of Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center, wrote in August.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/the-republican-architect-of-the-2004-swift-boat-campaign-against-john-kerry-is-now-trying-to-swift-boat-biden-and-get-trump-reelected/

no vid

although Democrats have won the popular vote in six of the last seven presidential elections, 2004 is remembered as the year in which George W. Bush became the only GOP president to win both the electoral vote and the popular vote in a post-1980s election. Republican strategist Chris LaCivita, who coordinated the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth disinformation campaign against 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, can take some of the credit for Bush’s reelection — and in 2020, journalist Alex Isenstadt reports in Politico, LaCivita is overseeing a new super PAC designed to help President Donald Trump win a second term.

The super PAC is called Preserve America and, according to Isenstadt, “is poised to begin a $30 million advertising blitz” and “is expected to draw the support of a range of GOP megadonors, including Las Vegas casino mogul Sheldon Adelson and Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus.”

“The move comes as Republicans express mounting concern over the drubbing Trump has been taking on TV,” Isenstadt explains. “The president, in August, went dark in several battleground states and, in Wisconsin, was outspent more than 8 to 1, according to the media tracking firm Advertising Analytics. In Florida, Trump was outpaced by Biden more than 3 to 1.”

Given LaCivita’s track record, the Democratic National Committee and the 2020 campaign of former Vice President Joe Biden should not take him lightly. In 2004, the George W. Bush Administration drew a great deal of criticism over the Iraq War and the overthrow of dictator Saddam Hussein— one of the worst foreign policy blunders in U.S. history. But the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ran a campaign against Kerry that was both deceptive and effective. Although Kerry was a Vietnam veteran and Bush avoided the Vietnam War, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth managed to convince many gullible voters that Kerry was anti-military.

to this day, “Swift Boat” is used as a slang expression to describe a deceptive political takedown of an opponent. LaCivita, in other words, would love to Swift Boat Biden just as he Swift Boated Kerry 16 years ago.

Preserve America’s anti-Biden ads are veryTrumpian in tone, resorting to hysterical fear-mongering — something LaCivita has a long history of doing —  and claiming that Biden is anti-law enforcement : [2 vids]

the super PACs that have been keeping busy in 2020 range from the pro-Trump America Action First to the pro-Biden Priorities USA. Trump supporters, Isenstadt notes, have been frustrated to see Priorities USA raising more money than America Action First — and Republicans are hoping that Preserve America will give Trump’s campaign a fundraising advantage.

Preserve America is already going after key battleground states. Isenstadt notes that its first commercials will begin airing this Tuesday, September 1 in “in Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, Iowa and Georgia.”

“Roughly $25 million of the total buy will be invested on TV, a figure that nearly matches what America First Action and Priorities USA have spent on the airwaves over the course of the entire election cycle,” Idenstadt reports. “The remaining $5 million will appear on digital platforms.”

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8/13

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/trumps-campaign-is-quietly-getting-more-competent-but-its-age-old-strategy-still-seems-to-be-failing/

Mere hours after former Vice President Joe Biden made history by picking Sen. Kamala Harris of California as his running mate — making her the first Black and Asian woman on a presidential ticket — Donald Trump coughed up his response. A little after 10 p.m. on Wednesday night, Trump posted a tweet claiming that “Joe Biden has a racism problem.”

The response on Twitter was, as one can imagine, contemptuous, given that Trump is an overt racist who leans heavily on white nationalist rhetoric. His niece, psychologist Mary Trump, says she’s heard him use the N-word, an accusation that no one sincerely doubts.

“Let’s be real: Trump attacking Biden as racist after Biden nominates the first woman of color for vice president in American history is beyond idiotic,” tweeted Mark Follman, the national affairs editor at Mother Jones, in a typical response.

“Not to mention Trump’s ‘white power’ tweet, his boost for ‘very fine’ torch carrying neo-Nazis etc etc etc,” Follman added.

but this wasn’t yet another case of the president of the United States, intoxicated from Fox News, idiotically lashing out on Twitter. On the contrary, the “racism problem” tweet was a well-edited video that had clearly been put together by the Trump campaign, compiling audio clips of Biden misspeaking or saying tone-deaf things about race, including comments about his 1970s relationships with segregationist senators, for which Harris famously criticized him in a 2019 debate.

In other words, this was a strategic choice by the Trump campaign, which has quietly become more competent in recent weeks (despite having to manage an overgrown toddler as a candidate), after dumping relative newbie Brad Parscale as campaign manager in favor of the more experienced Bill Stepien. This was an example of thefalse-equivalence strategy, and Democrats should be on alert, since earlier versions of this same strategy were used to great effect to defeat Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Al Gore in elections Democrats expected to win.

Folks who dunk on Trump on Twitter don’t understand that this strategy isn’t meant to convince anyone that Trump isn’ta racist, which Stepien and other campaign officials know full well is an impossible task. The point is to convince potential Democratic voters that both candidates are irredeemably flawed, and they might as well sit this election out rather than sullying themselves by voting for “the lesser of two evils.”

This isn’t even really a Trump innovation, but pretty standard operating procedure in Republican politics. A GOP candidate’s team figures out the various strengths that the Democrat has over their candidate and then systematically starts trying to sow doubt about that with voters, often by projecting their own candidate’s flaws onto the Democrat.

What Republicans understand, and too many political commentators don’t, is that no election is strictly a choice between two candidates. There are always other choices: Not voting at all or throwing your vote away on a third-party candidate. Republicans know they can’t win over more voters than the ones they’ve got, so they win by poisoning the well against the Democrat.

In 2016, the Republicans were saddled with a candidate who is a pathological liar with a long history of corruption, and who doesn’t seem to be in the greatest mental or physical condition. So they turned around and falsely accused Clinton of all these things, giving her the nickname “Crooked Hillary” and claiming she had secret health problems she was hiding from the public.

It was the same story with the 2004 election, when Democrats ran Kerry, a decorated Vietnam veteran, against George W. Bush, whose draft-dodging only made his eagerness to send other people’s kids into a quagmire of a foreign war more suspect. But the Bush campaign directly attacked Kerry’s record, falsely accusing him of embellishing his service record and implying he hadn’t earned his Purple Hearts.

Same story, again, with the 2000 election, in which the Bush campaign was successful in portraying Gore as a liar and a fabulist, and distracting from Bush’s own habit of telling lies — including the ones he unfortunately employed shortly after that, trying to justify his invasion of Iraq.

This “I know you are, but what am I” strategyonly works because the mainstream media — living in perpetual fear of conservatives accusing them of “bias” (which they’ll do no matter what) — is all too eager to play along with Republican efforts to wildly exaggerate Democratic flaws, all so journalists can crow about how they give it equally to “both sides,” and without quite noticing that they are abandoning their duty to the truth with these false equivalences.

The 2016 election offers a perfect example of how the media falls for this trick. Clinton is actually one of the most honest politicians in America, pretty much free of any proven “corruption” despite endless harassment and investigation. Nonetheless, journalists ran with every fake Clinton scandal right-wingers threw at them, from the false accusations against the Clinton Foundation to the email server debacle, because they were more motivated by the desire to look “balanced” than they were by telling the truth. (Sexist stereotypes about female mendacity also drove much of the coverage.) Kerry and Gore got similarly unfair treatment by the press in the name of “balance.”

As I warned repeatedly in 2019 — to no avail — Biden’s foot-in-mouth disease makes this an easy play for the Trump campaign. As my colleague Chauncey DeVega explained this week, Biden possesses a “sense of affinity” with Black voters that makes him too comfortable and leads him to share “impolitic observations at inappropriate times.”

In the past, that kind of nuanced explanation has too often fallen on deaf ears in a media environment more driven by the need to portray “both sides” as equivalent than to explore the truth.

That said, there’s reason this time around to be mildly optimistic that Trump’s efforts at sowing a “both sides are bad, so don’t vote” narrative might not work as well as it did for him in 2016, or as well as it did for Bush in 2000 and 2004. The media just doesn’t seem as interesting in elevating nonsense this time around.

That’s probably because the Trump presidency has been such a massive disaster that even the journalists most devoted to both-sides-ism have, however temporarily, been shocked out of their addiction to false equivalency. As the economy collapses and the U.S. succumbs to the coronavirus pandemic in a way unmatched by the rest of the world — all because of Trump’s maliciousness and recklessness, as well as Republican opposition to competent governance — it’s become impossible to keep a straight face while asserting any moral or political equivalence between Democrats and Republicans.

A similar situation happened in 2008, when the disaster of the George W. Bush presidency finally overcame the mainstream media’s desire to pretend there was no meaningful difference between Democrats and Republicans. Oh, there were efforts to scandalize Obama with nonsense, such as when right-wingers got journalists to take the bait of painting Obama’s Chicago pastor as anti-white and anti-American. But it basically never worked, because that kind of circus sideshow seemed weak in the face of the economic disaster of 2008, the failed response to Hurricane Katrina and the ill-fated invasion of Iraq.

Compared to Donald Trump, Bush is small potatoes in the failed-presidency department. The seriousness of our current crisis makes it difficult for the press to play their silly both-sides false games. So it’s not working for Trump so far.

But it’s still two and a half months until the election, and we know it will feel longer than that. The media’s desire to appear “unbiased” is strong, even in the face of an economic catastrophe and a soaring COVID-19 death rate. Trump will keep trying to make this election about bullshit, and it’s important to stay vigilant against a press that struggles to resist the siren call of false equivalency.

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