In the middle of the Thanksgiving holiday stretch, Donald Trump announced what might be his most extreme and controversial appointment yet: Kash Patel for FBI director. There are many reasons why this decision is outrageous. Patel is a MAGA combatant who has fiercely advocated Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump and who has championed January 6 rioters as patriots and unfairly persecuted political prisoners. (The still ongoing January 6 case, including scores of prosecutions for assaults on police, is one of the FBI’s largest and most successful criminal investigations ever.) Patel is also a fervent promoter of conspiracy theories. At the end of Trump’s first presidency, when he was a Pentagon official, he spread the bonkers idea that Italian military satellites had been employed to turn Trump votes to Joe Biden votes in the 2020 election. And he has falsely claimed that the Trump-Russia scandal was a hoax cooked up by the FBI and so-called Deep State to sabotage Trump.

Moreover, Patel has been supportive of the most loony conspiracy theory in MAGA land: QAnon.

The QAnon theory, which arose in 2017, holds that an intelligence operative known only as Q has revealed through cryptic messages that a cabal of global, Satanic, cannibalistic elitists and pedophiles is operating a child sex trafficking operation as it vies for world domination and conspires against Trump. This evil band supposedly includes Democratic politicians, Hollywood celebrities, business tycoons, and other notables. Those who believe this bunk see Trump as a hero who is secretly battling this conspiracy in a titanic, behind-the-scenes struggle. It is pure nuttery. Worse than that, QAnon has sparked multiple acts of violence.

Yet Patel repeatedly has hailed QAnoners and promoted this conspiracy theory. In early 2022, when he sat on the board of Trump’s social media company, Truth Social, Patel amplified an account called @Q that pushed out QAnon messaging. As Media Matters reported: “Patel’s catering to the QAnon community has also gone beyond the @Q account. In July, he posted an image featuring a flaming Q on Truth Social and starting in at least April, he went on numerous QAnon-supporting shows to promote Truth Social—urging viewers to join the platform, praising hosts for being on the platform, and promising to promote the hosts there.” On one show, Patel declared, “Whether it’s the Qs of the world, who I agree with some of what he does and I disagree with some of what he does, if it allows people to gather and focus on the truth and the facts, I’m all for it.”

“There’s a lot of good to a lot of it,” Patel said of QAnon, which he called a “movement.”

On another show, Patel acknowledged he was courting the QAnon crowd for Truth Social: “We try to incorporate it into our overall messaging scheme to capture audiences because whoever that person is has certainly captured a widespread breath of the MAGA and the America First movement. And so what I try to do is—what I try to do with anything, Q or otherwise, is you can’t ignore that group of people that has such a strong dominant following.” He praised QAnon, saying, “There’s a lot of good to a lot of it,” and he agreed with a host who said Q had “been so right on so many things.” Patel praised Q for starting a “movement.”

Appearing on Grace Time TV in Septmeber 2022, Patel said of the QAnon community, “We’re just blown away at the amount of acumen some of these people have.” He added, “If it’s Q or whatever movement that’s getting that information out, I am all for it, every day of the week.”

When Patel was promoting a children’s book he wrote—about a King Donald who is persecuted by his political enemies—he offered ten copies in which he signed the books and added a special message: “WWG1WGA!”” That’s the QAnon motto: “Where we go one, we go all.” He hyped this special offer on Truth Social using the hashtag “#WWG1WGA.”

“Let’s have fun with the truth,” Patel said.

Appearing on the MatrixxxGrove Show, Patel defended his use of the QAnon motto: “People keep asking me about all this Q stuff. I’m like, what does it matter? What I’m telling you is there is truth in a lot of things that many people say, and what I’m putting out there is the truth. And how about we have some fun along the way?” He added, “Let’s have fun with the truth.” He also characterized the QAnon movement as being a vital part of the national debate: “Basically, the bottom line is—and I get attacked for calling out some of the stuff that quote-unquote Q says and whatnot. I’m like, what’s the problem with that? It’s social discourse.”

Patel is a purveyor of far-right conspiracism in other ways that overlap with QAnon. He claims a nefarious Deep State controls the US government and is arrayed against Trump and conservatives. He encourages paranoia and calls for revenge. Talking to MAGA strategist Steve Bannon on Bannon’s podcast last year, Patel proclaimed, “We will go and find the conspirators—not just in government, but in the media. Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens to help Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We’re going to come after you, whither its criminally or civilly.”

Here is Trump’s nominee for FBI Director Kash Patel calling for “offensive operations” to jail Americans who they consider “the enemy.”“We will go out and find the conspirators… Yes, we are going to come after the people in the media."

— Brian Tyler Cohen (@briantylercohen.bsky.social) 2024-12-01T01:02:24.157Z

Seeking retribution, spreading conspiracy theories, backing an attempt to overthrow a presidential election, supporting J6 rioters, echoing Moscow talking points—none of this is what one would see in a responsible choice for FBI director. But Patel’s cozying up to QAnon is especially troubling. Among many vital duties, the FBI director oversees the federal government’s efforts to combat violent crime—an area where QAnon remains a concern. Patel’s relationship with QAnon shows either that he has a severely distorted view of reality or that he will recklessly exploit dangerous, misguided, and false ideas for political benefit. Neither is an approach suitable for the most powerful and important law enforcement agency in the land.

In the middle of the Thanksgiving holiday stretch, Donald Trump announced what might be his most extreme and controversial appointment yet: Kash Patel for FBI director. There are many reasons why this decision is outrageous. Patel is a MAGA combatant who has fiercely advocated Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump and who has championed January 6 rioters as patriots and unfairly persecuted political prisoners. (The still ongoing January 6 case, including scores of prosecutions for assaults on police, is one of the FBI’s largest and most successful criminal investigations ever.) Patel is also a fervent promoter of conspiracy theories. At the end of Trump’s first presidency, when he was a Pentagon official, he spread the bonkers idea that Italian military satellites had been employed to turn Trump votes to Joe Biden votes in the 2020 election. And he has falsely claimed that the Trump-Russia scandal was a hoax cooked up by the FBI and so-called Deep State to sabotage Trump.

Moreover, Patel has been supportive of the most loony conspiracy theory in MAGA land: QAnon.

The QAnon theory, which arose in 2017, holds that an intelligence operative known only as Q has revealed through cryptic messages that a cabal of global, Satanic, cannibalistic elitists and pedophiles is operating a child sex trafficking operation as it vies for world domination and conspires against Trump. This evil band supposedly includes Democratic politicians, Hollywood celebrities, business tycoons, and other notables. Those who believe this bunk see Trump as a hero who is secretly battling this conspiracy in a titanic, behind-the-scenes struggle. It is pure nuttery. Worse than that, QAnon has sparked multiple acts of violence.

Yet Patel repeatedly has hailed QAnoners and promoted this conspiracy theory. In early 2022, when he sat on the board of Trump’s social media company, Truth Social, Patel amplified an account called @Q that pushed out QAnon messaging. As Media Matters reported: “Patel’s catering to the QAnon community has also gone beyond the @Q account. In July, he posted an image featuring a flaming Q on Truth Social and starting in at least April, he went on numerous QAnon-supporting shows to promote Truth Social—urging viewers to join the platform, praising hosts for being on the platform, and promising to promote the hosts there.” On one show, Patel declared, “Whether it’s the Qs of the world, who I agree with some of what he does and I disagree with some of what he does, if it allows people to gather and focus on the truth and the facts, I’m all for it.”

“There’s a lot of good to a lot of it,” Patel said of QAnon, which he called a “movement.”

On another show, Patel acknowledged he was courting the QAnon crowd for Truth Social: “We try to incorporate it into our overall messaging scheme to capture audiences because whoever that person is has certainly captured a widespread breath of the MAGA and the America First movement. And so what I try to do is—what I try to do with anything, Q or otherwise, is you can’t ignore that group of people that has such a strong dominant following.” He praised QAnon, saying, “There’s a lot of good to a lot of it,” and he agreed with a host who said Q had “been so right on so many things.” Patel praised Q for starting a “movement.”

Appearing on Grace Time TV in Septmeber 2022, Patel said of the QAnon community, “We’re just blown away at the amount of acumen some of these people have.” He added, “If it’s Q or whatever movement that’s getting that information out, I am all for it, every day of the week.”

When Patel was promoting a children’s book he wrote—about a King Donald who is persecuted by his political enemies—he offered ten copies in which he signed the books and added a special message: “WWG1WGA!”” That’s the QAnon motto: “Where we go one, we go all.” He hyped this special offer on Truth Social using the hashtag “#WWG1WGA.”

“Let’s have fun with the truth,” Patel said.

Appearing on the MatrixxxGrove Show, Patel defended his use of the QAnon motto: “People keep asking me about all this Q stuff. I’m like, what does it matter? What I’m telling you is there is truth in a lot of things that many people say, and what I’m putting out there is the truth. And how about we have some fun along the way?” He added, “Let’s have fun with the truth.” He also characterized the QAnon movement as being a vital part of the national debate: “Basically, the bottom line is—and I get attacked for calling out some of the stuff that quote-unquote Q says and whatnot. I’m like, what’s the problem with that? It’s social discourse.”

Patel is a purveyor of far-right conspiracism in other ways that overlap with QAnon. He claims a nefarious Deep State controls the US government and is arrayed against Trump and conservatives. He encourages paranoia and calls for revenge. Talking to MAGA strategist Steve Bannon on Bannon’s podcast last year, Patel proclaimed, “We will go and find the conspirators—not just in government, but in the media. Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens to help Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We’re going to come after you, whither its criminally or civilly.”

Here is Trump’s nominee for FBI Director Kash Patel calling for “offensive operations” to jail Americans who they consider “the enemy.”“We will go out and find the conspirators… Yes, we are going to come after the people in the media."

— Brian Tyler Cohen (@briantylercohen.bsky.social) 2024-12-01T01:02:24.157Z

Seeking retribution, spreading conspiracy theories, backing an attempt to overthrow a presidential election, supporting J6 rioters, echoing Moscow talking points—none of this is what one would see in a responsible choice for FBI director. But Patel’s cozying up to QAnon is especially troubling. Among many vital duties, the FBI director oversees the federal government’s efforts to combat violent crime—an area where QAnon remains a concern. Patel’s relationship with QAnon shows either that he has a severely distorted view of reality or that he will recklessly exploit dangerous, misguided, and false ideas for political benefit. Neither is an approach suitable for the most powerful and important law enforcement agency in the land.

On Tuesday, President-elect Donald Trump announced that he would nominate Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to lead the National Institutes of Health, a government agency composed of more than 18,000 employees with an annual budget of $47 billion. Bhattacharya, a professor of economics and health policy at Stanford University, has no leadership experience in either government or large organizations, but, like some other Trump nominees, he is outspoken about what he sees as the tyranny of public health restrictions and censorship on social media platforms. Bhattacharya came into prominence as a strong critic of Covid vaccine mandates, though he has said publicly that he supports some routine childhood vaccinations, including those that prevent polio and measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR).

Bhattacharya, who didn’t respond to a list of questions emailed by Mother Jones, has held several appointments at Stanford, including at the university’s libertarian-leaning Hoover Institution. But it was during the pandemic that he emerged as a high-profile public health iconoclast, criticizing lockdowns, and then mask and vaccine mandates. Bhattacharya was one of the three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, a 2020 document—developed at a meeting of the American Institute for Economic Research, a libertarian think tank—that recommended that the United States achieve Covid herd immunity by employing a strategy of mass infection. Bhattacharya and his co-authors—biostatistician Martin Kulldorff and epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta—suggested sequestering vulnerable populations, such as the elderly and those with weakened immune systems, while permitting other citizens to go about business as usual.

At a conference hosted by the anti-lockdown group the Brownstone Institute in November 2021, nearly a year after the rollout of the Covid vaccines, Bhattacharya lamented that public health had become a tool “for authoritarian power” and “to enforce the biosecurity state.” He has repeatedly criticized the agency he is now poised to lead, suggesting that it punishes scientists who buck consensus by denying them funding.

Bhattacharya lamented that public health had become a tool “for authoritarian power” and “to enforce the biosecurity state.”

Bhattacharya’s critique of pandemic protocols caught on in right-wing circles, and he became a regular at conservative gatherings. He railed against what he called the stifling of academic freedom at events at the ultra-right-wing Hillsdale College, as well as the rally where then–presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced lawyer and philanthropist Nicole Shanahan as his running mate.

But in other venues, Bhattacharya’s criticisms of pandemic management haven’t gone over as well. The Great Barrington Declaration was panned by the American Public Health Association; in a public letter in the Lancet, a group of 80 scientists called it “a dangerous fallacy unsupported by scientific evidence.” In 2021, as journalist Walker Bragman reported, Bhattacharya testified in a Tennessee court in favor of Gov. Bill Lee’s order to allow parents to send their children to school unmasked. The US district judge, Waverly D. Crenshaw, blocked the order and wrote that Bhattacharya’s “demeanor and tone while testifying suggest that he is advancing a personal agenda.”

Bhattacharya has questioned the effectiveness of masks in preventing the spread of Covid, often citing a 2023 review by the medical database Cochrane Library. “It has been disheartening to watch once reputable experts discount the Cochrane review’s negative verdict on community masking to prevent Covid spread in favor of low-quality evidence,” he posted to his 548,000 followers on X. “Medicine has rejected evidenced-based medicine.” Yet Cochrane itself disagrees with Bhattacharya’s conclusion. “Many commentators have claimed that a recently-updated Cochrane Review shows that ‘masks don’t work’, which is an inaccurate and misleading interpretation,” wrote Karla Soares-Weiser, editor-in-chief of the Cochrane Library.

Meanwhile, Bhattacharya’s connections with powerful conservative groups and Silicon Valley titans have increased his status and visibility. PayPal founder and conservative super-donor Peter Thiel praised Bhattacharya and referred to him as his friend at the 2021 National Conservatism conference, WhoWhatWhy’s Allison Neitzel reported. The following year, shortly after Tesla CEO Elon Musk bought Twitter, Musk invited Bhattacharya to the Twitter headquarters, where the two discussed the platform’s alleged “blacklisting” of him for his tweets that criticized public health guidelines around the pandemic.

It will take some time to find out more about what led Twitter 1.0 to act so imperiously, but I am grateful to @elonmusk, who has promised access to help find out. I will report the results on Twitter 2.0, where transparency and free speech rule.
4/4

— Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) December 11, 2022

In 2023, a promotional video for Teneo Group, a political strategy organization helmed by the conservative judicial kingmaker Leonard Leo, included a montage that briefly showed Bhattacharya.

Since the start of the pandemic, Bhattacharya has been outspoken about the censorship that he claimed was silencing scientists who, like himself, questioned the wisdom of the government’s approach to pandemic restrictions. He was especially critical of the censorship he saw at his own university—specifically the pandemic disinformation-tracking work at the Stanford Internet Observatory’s Virality Project. Bhattacharya claimed that the group served as “a conduit to launder Biden Administration social media censorship activities” and embedding “within social media companies and pass on gov’t censorship demands.” Renée DiResta, a disinformation scholar who served as the group’s technical research manager, said she was instructed by her bosses not to publicly refute Bhattacharya’s claims—and that the damage he did to the group’s reputation may have contributed to the dissolution of the group earlier this year. Bhattacharya’s criticisms, she told me, “led to continued public pressure and the university deciding that some of the work was not worth continuing to support.” Stanford University didn’t respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones.

In 2022, Bhattacharya joined a group of plaintiffs in suing the Biden administration, claiming that the US government had pressured social media companies to suppress posts that criticized pandemic policies. He was represented pro bono by the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a legal group that says it aims to “tame the unlawful power of state and federal agencies,” and the case wound its way up to the US Supreme Court, which dismissed it earlier this year because the plaintiffs lacked standing.

As the pandemic increasingly receded from view, Bhattacharya became involved in causes beyond public health. Today, he serves as an adviser to Third Rail, a consulting group that says it helps “neutralize” “self-censoring environments” and “counterproductive DEI initiatives.” The group’s founder is former New York City Community Education Council president Maud Maron, who has crusaded against transgender inclusivity initiatives. Last year, Bhattacharya joined independent journalist Rav Arora in creating a podcast called Illusion of Consensus, in which the two hosts “dissect the misconceptions of consensus in science, from COVID-19 policies to gender-affirming care.” Earlier this year, Neitzel reported, Bhattacharya joined a group of scientists who aim to convince the public that Covid-19 was the result of a lab leak.

If confirmed as the director of NIH, Bhattacharya would be in charge of the agency responsible for allocating government funding for biomedical and public health research in the United States. He would help shape the research goals of the 27 institutes within the agency, including the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the group that Dr. Anthony Fauci led until he retired in 2022.

In a post on X, before he was announced as the official nominee, Bhattacharya vowed to his followers that “no matter what happens, I will do my best in the coming years, in whatever role I have, to help support the reform of the American scientific and public health institutions after the Covid era fiasco so that they work for the benefit of the American people.”

On Thursday afternoon, a federal bankruptcy judge in Texas ordered an evidentiary hearing to review the auction process that resulted in Infowars being sold to satire site the Onion, saying he wanted to ensure the “process and transparency” of the sale. Infowars’ founder, the conspiracy mega-entrepreneur Alex Jones, has unsurprisingly declared that the auction process was “rigged” and vowed that the review process will return the site to him, while the Onion’s CEO told Mother Jones and other news outlets that the sale is proceeding. For reasons that no one has yet explained, attorneys for X, formerly known as Twitter, the social media giant now owned by Elon Musk, entered an appearance during the hearing and asked to be included on any future communications about the case.

“I was told Elon is going to be very involved in this,” Jones said during a live broadcast on X. After Infowars was seized and the site shut down, Jones promptly began operating under the name and branding of a new venture, dubbed the Alex Jones Network, which streams on X. Jones noted that lawyers for X were present at the hearing, adding, somewhat mysteriously, “The cavalry is here. Trump is pissed.” (He later elaborated that “Trump knows I’m one of his biggest defenders.”)

“I was told Elon is going to be very involved in this,” Jones said.

An attorney who entered an appearance for X didn’t respond to a request for comment; nor did X’s press office. Onion CEO Ben Collins, previously a journalist at NBC News covering disinformation, told Mother Jones on Friday morning, “We won the bid. The idea that he was just going to walk away from this gracefully without doing this sort of thing is funny in itself.” In a statement reprinted by Variety and other outlets, Collins said that the sale is “currently underway, pending standard processes.” Collins had said previously that the plan was to relaunch Infowars as a satirized version of itself in January.

As this odd situation played out, however, Infowars’ website came back online on Friday afternoon; soon after, Jones and his staff had also returned to Infowars‘ studios. Throughout Friday and Saturday morning, the site was full of stories preemptively declaring Jones’ victory over the Onion. 

“I told you,” Jones crowed during a Friday night broadcast, back behind his usual desk. “If you want a fight, you got one.”

(After the original publication of this article, Collins responded to the revival of Infowars in a Twitter thread, reiterating that the Onion won the bid and writing that his company “left the hearing with clear next steps to complete the sale. InfoWars’ current management asked to continue operating until then. We always knew the guys who currently run InfoWars were going to take this badly and use a loss to fundraise off of it. They did not disappoint!”)

Jones also vowed that even if Infowars is sold he would sue anyone who “impersonates” him, as well as “the big Democrat gun control group,” involved in the sale. (The New York Times has reported that Everytown for Gun Safety, which advocates for gun law reform, plans to advertise on the relaunched, satire version of the site.)

Judge Christopher Lopez of Texas’ Southern District has been overseeing the years-long bankruptcy process for Infowars. The company and Jones personally filed for bankruptcy protection amid civil lawsuits brought by the parents of children who died at Sandy Hook. Jones was found liable by default for defaming the Sandy Hook families by repeatedly claiming that the mass shooting was a “hoax” and suggesting some of the parents were actors. In the Thursday hearing, Lopez said, “nobody should feel comfortable with the results of the auction” until the evidentiary hearing was held. Christopher Murray, the court-appointed bankruptcy trustee who declared the Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron LLC, to be the auction’s winner, considered the bids in private. According to Bloomberg, Murray told Lopez that Global Tetrahedron’s bid was a better option because the Sandy Hook families agreed to waive some of the money owed to them in order to pay off Jones’ other creditors. 

“I’ve always thought my goal was to maximize the recovery for unsecured creditors,” Murray said, per Bloomberg. “And under one bid, they’re clearly better than they were under the other.” 

Jones has made it clear that he was working with a group of what he dubbed “good guy” bidders, who he hoped would buy the site and keep him on air. The only other bid besides the Onion’s was $3.5 million from First United American Companies LLC, the company that operates Jones’ online supplement store. 

The evidentiary hearing is expected to be held next week. 

In the days following Donald Trump’s clear win, conspiracy theories about how votes were tampered with or how the election was stolen from Kamala Harris have spread on the left, with viral tweets, TikTok videos, and posts on Threads making a chaotic and spotty case alleging a fishy result.

“I’m beginning to believe our election was massively hacked,” wrote former journalist and documented conspiracy theorist Wayne Madsen on Threads, neatly pouring every flavor of suspicion into one overfilled bottle. “Think Elon Musk, StarLink, Peter Thiel, Bannon, Flynn and Putin. 20 million Democratic votes don’t disappear on their own.”

Infowars’ Alex Jones claimed Democrats attempted pro-Harris fraud but simply failed.

Such post-election delusions aren’t particularly surprising—as political science professors Joe Uscinski and Joseph Parent have written, indelicately but accurately, conspiracy theories are for “losers,” and tend to resonate when groups are “suffering from loss, weakness, or disunity.” But what’s far stranger is that conspiracy theories about election tampering are somehow, still, also happening among the winners on the right. 

On the left, Harris voters attempting to make sense of their loss have turned to baseless fears that Trump-backing billionaire Elon Musk somehow tampered with the vote through Starlink. While that satellite internet company is wholly owned by his company SpaceX, it is not, contrary to many of these claims, used by any state to tabulate votes. There’s also the separate claim that 20 million votes are “missing” when compared to the last presidential election. That also isn’t true: results are still being tabulated, and the overall number of votes is on track to be extremely close to 2020’s total. On a broader level, Jen Easterly, the director of the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, reports it has “no evidence of any malicious activity that had a material impact on the security or integrity of our election infrastructure.”

The Meta-owned social media site Threads has been particularly full of left-and-liberal election denialism. As journalist Taylor Lorenz explains, the situation illustrates “how Meta’s efforts to downrank and minimize journalistic content on the app have helped to create a vacuum in which misinformation thrives unchecked and users are unable to find reliable, accurately reported news.” It’s also a clear sign that some social media users are finding that dabbling in election conspiracy theories earns much-craved attention and engagement, with some posts alleging a Starlink plot racking up thousands of views.

There were early signs America was heading toward a post-election season characterized by broad suspicions of fraud: in an October 3 Marist poll, 58 percent of respondents said they were either “concerned” or “very concerned” that voter fraud might occur this year. Of course, fears of voter fraud have haunted American elections for almost as long as we’ve been a country, and have been harnessed by politicians and activists since the early 19th century to motivate their own base to vote—and to change the rules to try to keep some voters, especially immigrants and the poor, from the polls. 

In the run up to last week’s vote, Trump and his allies regularly pushed such fears, raising the false specter of American voters being overwhelmed at the polls by illegal non-citizen voters. That came on top of years of similar claims, and against the backdrop of Trump’s false contention he won the 2020 election. But while the firehose of voter fraud accusations slowed down dramatically after Trump’s win last week, it didn’t stop entirely.

In the very early morning of November 6, not long after polls closed, Mike Adams, who runs the conspiracy site Natural News, wrote that “Dems still have a chance to cheat their way to ‘victory’ in the hours ahead, and trucks of ballots are now seen unloading tens of thousands of ballots in Philadelphia.” While multiple conspiracy peddlers reported on a supposed convoy of trucks bringing fraudulent ballots to Pennsylvania, most dropped the claim after Trump’s win in the state was secured.

Conspiracy theories are for “losers….suffering from loss, weakness, or disunity.”

A similar pattern played out in Arizona, where TruthSocial and right-wing Twitter users claimed early on that voter fraud was occurring against Donald Trump. The day after the election, far-right news site Real America’s Voice devoted a lengthy segment to “apparent voter fraud” in Arizona. “This is such a shady state,” commentator Ben Bergquam proclaimed, claiming that “they are allowing people to vote who they know are not registered voters. They’re allowing fraudulent votes.”

But when Trump’s victory in the state became clear on November 11, prominent Trump fans and conspiratorial news sites maintained that fraud had somehow taken place in down-ballot races, even if it had not in deciding the presidency. After Democrat Ruben Gallego triumphed over ultra-conservative Kari Lake in Arizona’s Senate race, Rogan O’Handley, a conservative commentator who uses the handle DC Draino on Twitter, claimed without evidence (as Lake has) that Gallego was “cartel-linked,” and suggested that had something to do with his win: “I’ll give you a hint. It’s fraud.”

Twitter’s “Election Integrity Community” also focused its muddled attention on Arizona, as well as on the Wisconsin Senate race. In an otherwise triumphal tweet the night after the election, Musk himself conspiratorially wrote that the “few states that didn’t go red are mostly ones without voter ID requirements. Must be a coincidence,” punctuated with an eye-roll emoji. His America PAC tweeted a similar claim earlier in the day; these claims ignore that 36 states already request or require some form of voter ID. Many of the ones that don’t are ideologically Democratic-leaning states where Harris was heavily favored to win.

In what seems to be an emerging narrative on the far-right, Infowars conspiracy kingpin Alex Jones claimed that Democrats tried to carry out election fraud on behalf of Harris and simply failed. “I think the face of the police and the poll watchers and the lawyers, they went, ‘We just can’t do this anymore, this is too obvious,’” he declared. “And then boom, we saw Trump win. That’s not even conjecture. That’s what happened.” 

But true to form, Jones also couldn’t resist pointing to supposed fraud somewhere, darkly claiming that “glitches” flipping seats from Republican to Democrat had been “exposed” by Lara Trump and Susie Wiles, Trump’s incoming chief of staff. That narrative echoed one pushed by Gateway Pundit, which speciously seized on a report that the apparent winners of some county-level races in Michigan could change as votes continue to be tabulated, a process known colloquially as “counting votes.”   

Even Donald Trump himself had to find ways to reconcile an uncomplicated victory with his incessant advance warnings of fraud. He turned to newly relevant slogan, posting a red-tinted photo of a crowd of his supporters, overlaid with the words “TOO BIG TO RIG.”

The morning of Election Day, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger blamed Russia for creating bomb scares at polling places in the swing state of Georgia. “They’re up to mischief it seems,” Raffensperger said at a press conference of Russia’s efforts. “They don’t want us to have a smooth, fair, and accurate election.”

The bomb threats temporarily closed two voting sites in Union City, Georgia, just outside Atlanta, according to the Election Protection Coalition, which monitors Election Day disruptions. Union City is nearly 90 percent Black and therefore tends to be overwhelmingly Democratic. The county is attempting to extend voting hours at the affected locations.

Five non-credible bomb threats were called in on Tuesday morning. Raffensperger said Russia was the culprit and that federal law enforcement had helped make that determination.

The presidential race in Georgia is expected to be very close and it is one of the states that could determine who wins the White House. Russian President Vladimir Putin has a clear interest in former president Donald Trump retaking the White House. Trump is much more interested in appeasing Putin’s war in Ukraine, has expressed little loyalty to other allies, and is generally solicitous of the authoritarian leader. Vice President Kamala Harris, conversely, has stated her commitment to supporting Ukraine as well as strengthening NATO.

Georgia appears to be a target of Russian meddling this year. A fake video purporting to show recent Haitian immigrants illegally voting for Harris in the state was produced and disseminated by a Russian disinformation outfit, US intelligence officials revealed last week. And this is only the most recent example of a months-long effort by Russian-backed propaganda to target the Harris campaign. As Mother Jones previously reported, the disinformation group responsible for the Georgia video also is believed to be behind another fake video purporting to show ballots for Trump being destroyed in Pennsylvania.

Cliff Maloney is the founder of Pennsylvania Chase, a door-knocking, “ballot chasing” operation meant to encourage conservative voters in that crucial swing state to return mail-in ballots. The 32-year-old is also, of late, the face of a particularly bumbling public attempt to root out supposed illegal voting—one that, despite him having already been heartily scolded by a group of nuns for intimating they were involved in election fraud, he’s largely refusing to retreat from.

As one nun wrote, “His insisting does not change reality, at least not on this planet.”

As has been widely reported, Maloney tweeted on October 22 that one of his organization’s staff members visited an address in Pennsylvania where 53 voters are registered. 

“Turns out it’s the Benedictine Sisters of Erie and NO ONE lives there,” he wrote, adding, “Our attorney’s [sic] are reviewing this right now. We will not let the Dems count on illegal votes.” The post has been viewed 2.8 million times, and also featured repeatedly in Twitter/X’s conspiracy-addled “Election Integrity” community.

But the Benedictine Sisters of Erie do live there, and the very next day the nuns issued a sternly-worded press release in which their prioress, Sister Stephanie Schmidt, pointed out that Maloney could have done the barest amount of due diligence before accusing the nuns of nonexistence, voter fraud, or a puzzling combination of the two. 

“We do live at Mount Saint Benedict Monastery and a simple web search would alert him to our active presence in a number of ministries in Erie,” Schmidt said, per the release. “A free republic depends on free and fair elections. It depends equally on a discerning and conscientious citizenry who do not unquestioningly accept the word of anyone who has a social media platform.”

When reached for comment by Mother Jones on November 1, Maloney refused to admit any error, and insisted that a “staff member”—possibly a receptionist, he thought, “or whatever the politically correct term is these days”—at the monastery had deceived his ballot chaser into believing no one lived on the property as part of a deliberate plot “to paint [Pennsylvania Chase] as ‘election deniers.'”

“Did you ask the nuns why their staff member lied?,” he wrote in a Twitter direct message. “Not one reporter has included that in their story. Sad, really.” 

Maloney repeatedly referred to the sisters as “the pro trans, pro Ukraine group,” and didn’t directly respond to my efforts to clarify why. (The Benedictine Sisters of Erie have hosted sister nuns from Ukraine to speak about religious life in a country under siege. A handful of them also joined a “read-in” supporting a local library after it faced complaints over stocking LGBTQ+ children’s books.)

“I’m Catholic,” he explained at one juncture, adding that he used to sing in a campus choir. “They are nuns. The problem is their staffer bold face lying. No one wants to report that.”

When reached for comment on Maloney’s latest claims, Sister Linda Romey OSB, the monastery’s coordinator of communications and development, reiterated to Mother Jones that no one would have told ballot chaser that “no one lives” in the place where they live. “Our receptionists are our sisters,” she explained. “And there is no sister who would say no one lives at the monastery where we have been living since we built it in the late 1960s. We have been in Erie since 1856.”

“None of our sisters had such an interaction with the canvasser,” she continued. “If he had come in and spoken with a sister he would most likely have been invited to prayer and possibly a meal—hospitality is one of our values.” 

“That said,” Sister Romey added, “even if Mr. Maloney’s canvasser did come into our monastery (which means he was buzzed in) and spoke with someone, I suppose it is possible that he has hearing issues and maybe misunderstood. But even so, once the misinformation was corrected, the appropriate thing for Mr. Maloney to do would have been to simply acknowledge the error and post an apology for the accusation and for violating our sisters privacy by posting their personal information online.” 

“I suppose it is possible that he has hearing issues and maybe misunderstood.”

‘Mr. Maloney can insist all he wants but his insisting does not change reality, at least not on this planet,” she told Mother Jones. “It is an outright falsehood that he continues [to] promote… The fact is that PA CHASE and Mr. Maloney cannot admit they made a mistake and take responsibility for posting misinformation. It’s that simple.” 

Maloney claims that, in the wake of his post about the monastery and the blowback that followed, his ballot chasers have been subject to threats and “defamation,” as he put it, at the hands of media organizations. “Death threats… vile comments,” he wrote. (Ellipses his.) “The uniparty is unhinged.”  

“It’s a lynching of Republican ballot chasers and I won’t stand for it,” he wrote.

Pennsylvania Chase is sponsored by the Citizens Alliance of Pennsylvania, whose funders include libertarian billionaire Jeff Yass, the richest man in the state, a longtime Rand Paul supporter who has thrown his financial weight behind electing Donald Trump. (He also owns a stake in TikTok.) Pennsylvania Chase has set ambitious goals to increase Republican turnout, with support from characters like Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk. 

Maloney is not unfamiliar with controversy; as The Spectator recently reported, he was previously the president of Young Americans for Liberty, a right-wing student group, before being removed from that position in 2021 over allegations of sexual misconduct against him and other leaders. Maloney denied those allegations at the time; as Spectator reporter Jacqueline Sweet noted, he also “voluntarily surrendered his Pennsylvania teaching credentials” after being charged in 2022 with raping a first-year student at the University of Pittsburgh-Johnstown in 2013 when he was a resident assistant there; a jury acquitted him last year of four counts, and the other two were dismissed by a judge after the jury could not reach a verdict on them.

The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.

For almost a decade, our world has been shaped and distorted by the lies of Donald Trump. He slithered his way into the White House eight years ago and was expelled four years later by popular demand. Yet like a monster in a horror film, he was not dispatched for good. He defied norms and the Constitution and attacked American democracy. He failed in his underhanded effort to overturn the election, but he succeeded in persuading millions of our fellow citizens to believe the baseless conspiracy theory that he had been swindled out of victory by a nefarious cabal of Deep State actors, the Democrats, the media, and other evildoers. That was quite the accomplishment. During his presidency, according to the Washington Post, Trump had made at least 30,573 false or misleading statements. (And the newspaper did not fact-check all of his utterances.) Yet he still maintained the trust of a large chunk of Americans.

Trump is unparalleled in the annals of deception. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a New York University historian who studies authoritarianism, recently told me, “Trump is one of the most successful propagandists in history. He managed to convince tens of millions that he won a national election working not in a domesticated media system or a one-party state but in a fully pluralist media environment in a democracy. No one has ever done that on that scale. Also look at what he’s accomplished with the perception of January 6.”

As we approach yet another judgment day for Trump, like many of you, I remained puzzled by Trump’s ability to maintain his standing as a champion for so many Americans, despite his obvious lies and profoundly low and mean-spirited character. He’s a con man whose deceptions and hypocrisies are easy to detect (including his consequential lies about the pandemic and the assault on the US Capitol he incited). The question won’t fade: How does he get away with it?

He’s a con man whose deceptions and hypocrisies are easy to detect. The question won’t fade: How does he get away with it?

As we approach yet another judgment day for Trump, like many of you, I remained puzzled by Trump’s ability to maintain his standing as a champion for so many Americans, despite his obvious lies and profoundly low and mean-spirited character. He’s a con man whose deceptions and hypocrisies are easy to detect (including his consequential lies about the pandemic and the assault on the US Capitol he incited). The question won’t fade: How does he get away with it?

Not long ago, I came across an academic study that sought to answer this question. In 2018, Oliver Hahl of the Carnegie Mellon University Tepper School of Business and Minjae Kim and Ezra Zuckerman Sivan of the MIT Sloan School of Management published an article in the American Sociological Review titled “The Authentic Appeal of the Lying Demagogue: Proclaiming the Deeper Truth About Political Illegitimacy.” As they put it, they were looking to explain “a puzzling pattern that has been discussed widely since the 2016 U.S. presidential election…[H]ow can a constituency of voters find a candidate ‘authentically appealing’ (i.e., view him positively as authentic) even though he is a ‘lying demagogue’ (someone who deliberately tells lies and appeals to non-normative private prejudices)?” In short, how to understand Trump’s popular support.

This trio noted that during the 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton “was harmed by the perception that she was inauthentic.” Fairly or not, many voters saw her as motivated by self-interest and not honest. But, they write, Trump was “perceived by his supporters as appealingly authentic despite abundant evidence that (1) he was at least as sensitive to private self-interest as Clinton, with no corresponding record of public service; (2) he was considerably more prone to falsehood than Clinton; and (3) he deliberately flouted many norms that had been taken for granted for many years and were widely endorsed.”

After reviewing existing literature on populist demagogues and conducting a couple of studies, these three academics derived an explanation. Here it is (without the citations):

We argue that a particular set of social and political conditions must be in place for the lying demagogue to appear authentically appealing to his constituency. In short, if that constituency feels its interests are not being served by a political establishment that purports to represent it fairly, a lying demagogue can appear as a distinctively authentic champion of its interests. As first noted by [political scientist Seymour Martin] Lipset, such a “crisis of legitimacy” can emerge under at least two conditions: (1) when one or more social groups are experiencing what we call a “representation crisis” because the political establishment does not appear to govern on its behalf; and (2) when an incumbent group is experiencing a “power-devaluation crisis” because the political establishment is favoring new social groups over established groups. These scenarios broadly reflect the basis for populist ideologies that promote a “politics of resentment,” whereby the aggrieved constituency comes to believe that the establishment’s claim to represent the interests of the “real people” belies an ulterior agenda they feel powerless to stop. As such, a candidate who engages in lying demagoguery can be perceived as bravely speaking a deep and otherwise suppressed truth. By flagrantly violating norms on which the establishment insists, and thereby earning the opprobrium of this establishment, the candidate appears highly committed to the interests of her constituency. By contrast, an earnest opposition candidate seems less authentic.

I would shorten their conclusion to this: Trump voters like the lying. Or, the lying is the point.

Trump’s boldly false proclamations—about himself, about his rivals and critics, about the world—are not a bug. They’re a feature. They demonstrate he is sticking it to the other side. To the elites, the media, the establishment, the government, academia, Hollywood, the libs, the woke crowd, the minorities, the…whoever it is his supporters resent, despise, or disregard. So if he lies about legal migrants eating pets, or about Kamala Harris being “low IQ,” not really Black, and a communist, or about schools performing gender-affirming operations on kids without their parents’ consent, or about doctors in Democratic states killing babies after they’re born, or about criminal gangs of foreign thugs conquering cities and towns across the Midwest, or about the US economy being a hellscape, or about his majestic accomplishments as president, or about evil Democrats purposefully bringing undocumented people (and criminals) into the United States to destroy the nation, or that you can’t cross the street these days without being mugged, raped, or killed, it doesn’t matter.

Certainly, some of Trump’s supporters buy his bunk. But I suspect many don’t care whether it’s true or not. For them, it’s truthy, in that it corresponds to what they feel and what they think may be true.

Trump is demonstrating that he does not play by the rules of the establishment that these people perceive (for an assortment of reasons) as the enemy.

His wild assertions, narcissistic boasts, and offensive insults need not be factual. Trump’s ability to say whatever the hell he wants is not for his cultish followers only telling it like it is. It is a sign of strength. It’s his way of giving the finger to them. Trump is demonstrating that he does not play by the rules of the establishment that these people perceive (for an assortment of reasons) as the enemy. That’s the same reason they are not put off by—or even embrace—his crudeness, mean-spiritedness, bigotry, misogyny, and racism.

Trump’s lying and indecency are evidence to them that he will do whatever it takes to be their hero. And some Trumpers probably envy his ability to say whatever he wishes and escape the usual consequences. Trump can pull all this off because millions want him to be able to pull it off. His lies are not merely a personal flaw. His manifold deceits and their acceptance by tens of millions are a sign that our politics, maybe our nation, is broken. How broken will be determined by what happens on Tuesday and in the days and weeks afterward.

On October 8, about two dozen conservative activists gathered in the rotunda of the Georgia State Capitol, where a meeting of the state election board was taking place. A US Army veteran named Richard Schroeder, from Hall County, in the northeastern part of the state, led the group in prayer. Schroeder, who testified that day, was a regular presence at the board meetings, where he has spread debunked claims about election security and once identified himself as a poll worker in charge of tabulating votes. 

Schroeder first asked God for forgiveness for allowing the “evil” of migrants and transgender people to permeate the country. Then he turned to voting machines. 

“Nobody’s got more votes than President [Donald] Trump ever in the world,” Schroeder said. He and other members of the prayer circle wore shirts that read “IYKYK dvscorp08!,” referring to an alleged password to Georgia’s voting machines that was obtained by right-wing election deniers and spread online. 

“Our votes have been stolen,” he continued in prayer. “The Dominion voting machines have taken our God-given dominion and have been selecting winners—not electing winners.”

“Amen,” responded David Hancock, a member of the Gwinnett County board of elections. 

The activists were part of a small but influential network of election deniers who had successfully convinced the board’s pro-Trump majority to launch probes into unfounded claims of election fraud. They also persuaded the board, which issues guidance to county election officials and investigates problems with the voting process, to pass a series of controversial rules in the runup to the November election that Fulton County Superior Court Judge Thomas Cox recently deemed “illegal” and “unconstitutional.” In August, Trump had touted the trio of sympathetic board members by name at a campaign rally, calling them “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory.” 

The rules would have led to the spread of misinformation and could have been used as a justification not to certify results, Democrats and voting rights advocates warned. The changes also would have slowed the counting of votes, according to Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. “Everything we’ve been fighting for since 2020 has been to give the voter quicker response, quicker results,” Raffensperger said on October 14, noting that one of the board’s rules, requiring a hand count of ballots on Election Day, could have delayed the reporting of results into the wee hours of the morning. “Really, that just becomes a breeding ground for conspiracy theories.” 

Democrats and election watchdogs breathed a sigh of relief when Georgia courts blocked the Trump-inspired rules, including two that would have given local election officials more power to attempt to block certification. But they should not rest easy, as significant peril still remains. At least 21 election skeptics who have expressed support for Trump’s false claims about election fraud sit on county election boards throughout the state. And over the past four years, Trump-aligned election deniers have asserted their power throughout local GOP organizations, according to the Center for Media and Democracy, a nonprofit watchdog.

Together, these MAGA Republicans could throw the election in Georgia—and thus the nation—into disarray. Officials at the county level, for instance, could still attempt to refuse to certify the results if Kamala Harris carries Georgia, while the state election board could amplify false allegations and launch bogus investigations supporting Trump’s inevitable claims of a stolen election. And those are just a couple of the nightmarish scenarios that could unfold next week.

Whatever transpires in the November 5 election, the radicalization of the board into a nakedly partisan arm of Trump’s election denial machine shows that our democratic system rests on a knife’s edge. What took place in Georgia can—and is—happening throughout the country. The takeover of much of Georgia’s election apparatus offers a distressing vision of the future if Trump returns to the White House, one in which the federal government is run by zealots whose only qualification is their fealty to Trump. 

“That’s exactly what Project 2025 is all about,” says Sara Tindall Ghazal, the state election board’s lone Democrat. “It is about replacing the bureaucrats within the federal government with political employees whose sole requirement for the job is loyalty to the president.” Tindall Ghazal points out that some of those people “don’t understand and don’t care about what the law requires. They’re completely unconstrained in their actions.”

The path to this troubling reality began on election night 2020, when Republican activists began spreading claims of widespread voter fraud. Believing that Trump ballots had been thrown out, a crowd gathered at an election office in Griffin, the seat of Spalding County, an hour south of Atlanta. Led by a county commissioner who filmed election workers through the glass, some in the crowd eventually climbed into a dumpster to find the supposedly discarded ballots. In Marietta, an Atlanta suburb, Salleigh Grubbs, the Cobb County GOP chair, chased a truck she believed contained shredded ballots. In an Atlanta ballot-counting facility, plastic bins under a folding table were labeled the infamous “suitcases full of ballots” that supposedly flipped the election in favor of Joe Biden. In the small town of Douglas in south Georgia, a county election board official claimed that voting machines had flipped votes. The state became ground zero for election fraud claims. 

None of it proved true. The dumpster in Griffin contained no ballots—just empty ballot envelopes that had been thrown away by election workers. The truck in Marietta did not have shredded ballots, Grubbs eventually discovered. The boxes under the table in Atlanta didn’t hold ballots for Biden that were double-counted to seal his victory over Trump. Instead, they just held regular ballots that were opened when workers were told by the secretary of state’s office to stay late and count more votes. The Dominion voting machines Grubbs and others prayed over never actually flipped votes—in Douglas or anywhere else—but they were broken into by local officials and attorneys working on behalf of Trump.

At least 21 election skeptics who have expressed support for Trump’s false claims about election fraud sit on county election boards throughout the state.

From these debunked origins, the claims of a stolen election grew, spreading to include other outlandish allegations of a plot that supposedly involved Italians and Venezuelans hacking voting machines and the forgery of untold thousands of ballots that were placed in drop boxes by “mules.” 

Top Georgia election officials repeatedly discredited claims of a stolen election, as did multiple legal proceedings and court judgments. Three separate counts of ballots reaffirmed Biden’s 2020 victory. Voting-machine companies won major settlements against Fox News and Newsmax for airing false claims about their machines. A Fulton County judge threw out a lawsuit filed by DeKalb County Republicans challenging the security of the state’s voting machines. Two Georgia poll workers in Fulton County won a $148 million defamation judgment against Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani for spreading the myth of “suitcases” of ballots. Jenna Ellis, another top lawyer for Trump, took a plea agreement in a wide-ranging election interference case and admitted she made false statements about illegal ballots being counted. 

Nonetheless, Trump-aligned Republicans throughout the state and nation began amplifying these claims and calling for investigations. They also got to work making sure “the steal” couldn’t happen again, beginning at the local level, where influential figures like Steve Bannon and Michael Flynn were encouraging Trump supporters to take over local election boards. In 12 counties, local representatives in the state legislature passed laws that remade county election boards in favor of Republicans. One of the bills, HB 769, transformed the Spalding County board of elections from a mundane government body on which Black Democrats held a majority to an activist board controlled by white Republicans who amplified Trump’s election lies. 

When Spalding County officials first heard about HB 769 in the spring of 2021, they were confused. Typically, when the county’s representatives in the state legislature introduce a bill that affects the county, local officials are part of the process. But that wasn’t the case with this measure, which changed how the members of the board of elections were chosen. The board had always been essentially split between the parties—Democrats got two appointments and Republicans got two, with the foursome then choosing a fifth member to serve as chair. But HB 769 changed that—the board’s fifth member would now be chosen by local judges in a closed-door process and secret vote. In May 2021, the judges chose Republican Jim Newland, giving election deniers control over the board. 

Two of the new Republicans—Ben Johnson and Roy McClain—believed Trump had rightfully won the election. Johnson is a Trump-supporting QAnon fan and Elon Musk aficionado who frequently posts on Facebook about various right-wing culture war grievances and conspiracies, including that voting machines were subject to hacking and fraud. McClain has pushed for automatic hand recounts of all elections and in 2023 made a public showing of his refusal to certify results while privately signing off on certification, fulfilling his legal duty while maintaining his MAGA bonafides. Both Johnson and McClain were involved in a brief but failed effort in August 2021 to hire an Atlanta law firm to help them access voting machines in their hunt for evidence of election fraud. The plan was nixed when Raffensperger’s office warned them that it would be illegal to allow a third party to access election equipment.

Even in counties where election boards weren’t overhauled to favor Republicans, election deniers still had a presence. In Fulton County, home to Atlanta, two election deniers sit on the election board. Boards in the Atlanta metro counties of Cobb, DeKalb, Floyd, and Gwinnett also include skeptics who, while not holding a majority, frequently amplify misinformation about elections. By early 2024, at least 21 election deniers were in place on election boards in nine counties.

As election deniers won seats on election boards, they also gained power in local GOP chapters. In Spalding County, Republicans who refused to go along with Trump’s claims of a stolen election were pushed out of the local party. There and elsewhere, Republicans refused to give campaign funds raised from donors to Gov. Brian Kemp for his unwillingness to toe the line on Trump’s lies about election fraud, said Mary Braun, a Republican in Spalding County who told Mother Jones that Johnson and some local party members had a “vendetta” against her for opposing the false claims spread by her colleagues. (Johnson and other members of the Spalding County election board, along with its election supervisor and county attorney, did not respond to a request for comment.)

Meanwhile, Republican state lawmakers set their sights on perhaps the biggest prize of all, the state election board. In March 2021, the GOP-controlled legislature tucked a provision into a sweeping new voter suppression bill that removed Raffensperger as chair and a voting member of the board, a previously obscure body of appointed officials whose meetings were scantly attended and typically mundane. Raffensperger had become a leading target of election deniers for defending the legitimacy of the 2020 election and refusing Trump’s demand to “find 11,780 votes” to reverse Biden’s victory. In addition to removing Raffensperger, Georgia lawmakers gave the state election board the authority to investigate the secretary of state for his handling of the 2020 investigation—and virtually anything else the board dreamed up. 

“This was punishment for him not obeying the president and revealing that conversation,” Tindall Ghazal, the Democratic member of the board, said of Trump’s infamous phone call to Raffensperger, pressuring him to overturn the 2020 election.

After ousting Raffensperger, influential state Republicans continued to remake the board in Trump’s image by pushing out establishment Republicans and replacing them with election deniers. In 2022, the Georgia GOP used its appointment to place Dr. Janice Johnston on the board. (Each party gets an appointment to the five-member board, both chambers of the legislature pick a member, and the legislature chooses the chair unless it is out of session, in which case the governor appoints the chair.) A former obstetrician, Johnston served as a poll watcher in Fulton County in 2020 alongside Julie Adams, an election denier who currently sits on Fulton’s election board. Johnston began frequently attending Fulton County board meetings after the election, spreading false claims about the 2020 vote count. 

In January 2024, the state Senate appointed Rick Jeffares, a former GOP state senator, to replace a well-regarded conservative election attorney Matthew Mashburn, who had opposed investigating Raffensperger. Jeffares was handpicked by his neighbor, Georgia Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, a fake elector for Trump in 2020, who said Jones urged him to “be strong” on the board. (Jones did not respond to a request for comment.) Jeffares had spread memes on social media questioning the outcome of the 2020 election, including false claims that dead people had voted by mail, and had few obvious qualifications for the job. The owner of three wastewater treatment companies, Jeffares went on to solicit a director position at the Environmental Protection Agency in a second Trump administration through a campaign intermediary while serving in his role on the State Election Board, which Democrats said raised ethical questions about his independence on the board. 

At that point, election deniers were one vote short of a majority on the board. So they began to pressure Edward Lindsey, a lawyer and former Republican member of the state House, who had also voted against bogus investigations into the 2020 outcome, to resign. Lindsey’s term was up in May 2024, but he told Republican House Speaker Jon Burns that he was willing to serve through the election to maintain continuity on the board. 

“I think they want to remove source documents from the election department prior to certification so that all weekend, they can comb through things with their friends and start whatever narrative they want. I don’t use the term ‘conspiracy’ lightly, but this is a conspiracy, full stop.”

At a board meeting in February 2024, Johnston introduced a resolution asking the legislature to repeal no-excuse absentee voting, which MAGA Republicans blamed for Trump’s defeat in 2020, and to limit mail voting to those who were disabled, over 75, or out of town. Lindsey voted against it, blocking the resolution from passing. “We should not as a board, only a few months before the 2024 election…start to limit the ability of people to vote, particularly people who find it most difficult to stand in line because of certain life situations,” he said.

That infuriated Trump, who privately told Georgia Republicans that Lindsey had “got to go,” according to Rolling Stone. Local GOP chapters called on Lindsey to step down. In May 2024, Lindsey voted against referring officials in Fulton County to the attorney general for prosecution over their handling of the 2020 election. Election deniers who packed the state board meeting responded with jeers and carried signs that said, “Time to Go Ed!”

A few weeks after that vote, and just days before Georgia Republicans met for their state convention, the House speaker announced he was replacing Lindsey with Janelle King, a conservative media personality with no election experience who was married to a Republican candidate who lost the 2022 GOP primary for US Senate to Herschel Walker. King tweeted on election night in 2020 that she had “questions!!” about the “vote counting process” and later said on her podcast that she opposed no-excuse absentee voting. 

The MAGA takeover over the board was complete. “I believe when we look back on November 5, 2024, we’re going to say getting to that 3–2 election integrity–minded majority on the state election board made sure that we had the level playing field to win this election,” Georgia Republican Party Chair Josh McKoon said at the party’s convention after King was appointed to the board. 

The takeover of the state board went mostly without notice until August, when Trump praised Johnston, Jeffares, and King during his Atlanta rally, saying they were “on fire” while going on a 10-minute tirade against Kemp for refusing to overturn the 2020 election. Johnston sat in the second row and stood and waved to the crowd when Trump name-checked her. (Johnston, Jeffares, and King declined to comment for this article.)

With mainstream Republicans out of the way, the board’s pro-Trump majority quickly got to work. State election board meetings became election denial symposiums, where conspiracy theorists spoke for hours about their demands for investigations and rule changes. Anyone can introduce a rule to the board, but in recent months, almost all of the new rules proposed have come from the network of election skeptics that includes some of the people who held a prayer vigil at the state Capitol in October. Between September 2022 and May 2024, no new rules were introduced. Since then, election denial activists and officials have introduced 31 rules for the board to consider. Of those, 15 have passed or are under consideration by the board. 

Days after Trump’s August visit to the state, the board passed its first controversial rule change. It came from Adams, the Fulton County election board member who served as a poll watcher with Johnston in 2020 and had refused to certify the state’s May primary election. Adams works with the Tea Party Patriots, which helped organize the “Save America” rally that preceded the January 6 insurrection. She also serves as regional coordinator for the Election Integrity Network founded by Cleta Mitchell, a Trump attorney who worked to overturn the 2020 election and was on the call in which Trump demanded Raffensperger reverse Biden’s victory. Finally, Adams is a member of a state network of activists and officials called the Georgia Election Integrity Coalition. The rule Adams introduced, which was eventually blocked by a state court, could have allowed local officials to refuse to certify election results if a “reasonable inquiry” determined that fraud had occurred. The rule did not spell out what a “reasonable inquiry” entailed, and voting rights advocates warned that it could be used as a pretext by GOP officials not to certify the results if a Democrat won Georgia. 

At another contentious board meeting a few weeks later, Grubbs, the GOP chair of Cobb County, introduced a rule that allowed county election board members to request a virtually unlimited amount of records and documents relating to voting machines and vote tabulation before certifying results—what became known as the “examination” certification rule. The measure, which passed 3–2, was a welcome addition to officials like Adams in Fulton County and David Hancock in Gwinnett County, both of whom had demanded scores of records before refusing to certify results in recent years. 

In abstaining from a vote to certify the results of both a May primary and a runoff election in June 2024, Adams said she had not received election records and documents she wanted to inspect for evidence of fraud. Cathy Woolard, at the time the Democratic chair of the Fulton County board, said Adams had received extensive records and documents related to the collection and tabulation of votes.

“Julie asked for these things with great authority, but she has no idea what she’s looking at,” Woolard told Mother Jones. “When she gets the records, she goes outside in the hallway and calls somebody. I can’t quite figure it out; the only thing I can come up with is, they just want to be right. They want to be right for Trump so they can say, ‘See, I told you guys, you cheated.’ Nothing of the sort happened.” (Adams did not respond to a request for comment.) This has led Democratic officials and voting rights groups to allege that Adams and her fellow election deniers at the local level are coordinating with national Republicans to enact skewed rules that could rig the state for Trump. Adams continues to push for more power to refuse to certify results as part of a lawsuit she filed with the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute. 

“Here’s what I think they really want,” Woolard says. “I think they want to remove source documents from the election department prior to certification so that all weekend, they can comb through things with their friends and start whatever narrative they want. I don’t use the term ‘conspiracy’ lightly, but this is a conspiracy, full stop.” 

“The 2020 election taught us to be ready for every possible permutation of legal argument and also every possible factual scenario. I don’t think that Democrats in Congress were ready for a whole decision tree of different parliamentary objections. The decision tree is a decision forest right now.”

Finally, in late September, just weeks before early voting began, the state election board approved another rule that would have required poll workers to “reconcile” the number of ballots cast on Election Day with the number of voters who checked in at every precinct in the state. This time-consuming task—referred to as a hand count—would have slowed the tallying of returns throughout the state, Raffensperger said. He accused the board of engaging in “activist rulemaking” and, along with Attorney General Chris Carr, also a Republican, said the board was both acting outside of its authority and passing rules that were in direct conflict with Georgia election law. 

The board’s MAGA majority had overstepped the law. Amid a national outcry, its rule changes were blocked by Fulton County judges as early voting began. The Republican National Committee appealed, but the Georgia State Supreme Court declined to reinstate the rules before November. 

Trump supporters throughout Georgia denounced the state Supreme Court’s decision. McKoon, the state GOP chair, called the rules “common sense” on X, claiming they would enhance election security. He blamed “Democrats and their allies” for the court’s ruling, even though the court is composed solely of conservative justices. 

But court rulings can do only so much to restrain a movement that has already shown how far it will go to undermine democratic norms. 

Hancock said in an email that Gwinnett County had passed its own ordinance requiring the release of a lengthy list of documents that he and other election board members could inspect before certifying results in November. 

“Even if the policy is somehow revoked, I will still be looking at these documents,” Hancock vowed in the wake of a judge’s decision that the “examination” certification rule conflicted with Georgia election law. (He did not respond to a request to explain his comments.)

Despite a separate court ruling in October reaffirming that election certification is mandatory for county officials, Tindall Ghazal worries that some counties under the sway of pro-Trump activists could still attempt to refuse to certify results “in a bad-faith way.”

A nightmare scenario in which numerous county election board members refuse to certify results could require Carr, the attorney general, to step in, filing court orders known as writs of mandamus to force officials to certify. Carr has tried to have it both ways when it comes to pro-Trump election deniers, his critics say. He sent a letter to the State Election Board saying many of its rules were illegal, including the hand-counting rule. But an attorney in Carr’s office also defended the state election board in a separate lawsuit over the certification rules that were challenged by Democrats. Moreover, Carr shielded Kemp from responsibility over the board when Democrats alleged ethics violations on the part of Johnston, Jeffares, and King in a lawsuit. In a motion to dismiss the suit, Carr wrote that Kemp didn’t have the authority to consider removing the members. 

“He’s less solid” than Raffensperger, state Sen. Elena Parent, a Democrat, said of Carr. “He’s not an election denier, however, he’s planning to run for governor and has to contend with that base who believes the election was stolen.”

Widespread certification refusals could cause Kemp to miss a crucial federal deadline on December 11. That’s the day Kemp will have to certify slates of presidential electors for whoever wins Georgia’s popular vote. Unlike in 2020, when Trump pressured Raffensperger to “find” the votes he needed to defeat Biden, it could be Kemp, who has backed Trump’s presidential bid despite the abuse he has received from the former president, getting a call from Trump urging him not to certify Harris electors. 

Missing the December 11 deadline is one of the scenarios that might allow congressional Republicans to reject certification of a Harris win—and install Trump regardless of how Americans voted, according to US Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), an election law expert and former member of the congressional January 6 committee. 

“The 2020 election taught us to be ready for every possible permutation of legal argument and also every possible factual scenario,” Raskin said in an interview. “I don’t think that Democrats in Congress were ready for a whole decision tree of different parliamentary objections. The decision tree is a decision forest right now.” If Georgia misses the deadline to certify its electoral votes, depriving either candidate of a majority in the Electoral College, the election would be decided by the House of Representatives, where a majority of House delegations, not a majority of members, choose the winner. Because Republicans control a majority of those delegations, that could allow them to install Trump as president in a disputed election. 

Courts have dulled the Georgia election board’s fangs for the moment. But in the longer term, the threats to fair elections continue. The trio of Johnston, Jeffares, and King appear to be laying the groundwork to potentially take over election administration in Fulton County, the epicenter of past and ongoing election lies. The board could also pressure Georgia’s General Assembly to enact more voter suppression laws or give them the power to certify election results instead of the secretary of state. Recently, Johnston was voted vice chair of the board.

“Despite a judge blocking their unconstitutional rules changes, the MAGA board members continue plotting ways to plunge our election into chaos,” said Max Flugrath of Fair Fight, a progressive voting rights organization. 

Johnston has already sown distrust about the results in Fulton County, questioning the legitimacy of a monitoring team that is overseeing election administration there as part of the county’s punishment for erroneously double-counting ballots in 2020. (About 3,600 ballots were double-counted in Fulton County in 2020 but were found not to have changed the results of the election.) Johnston had proposed her own monitoring team that would oversee elections in Fulton, what Flugrath called an attempt to “force partisan monitors onto the county, with the ultimate goal of undermining confidence in the election, to provide Trump fodder to claim fraud if and when he loses.”

Instead, the county chose a monitoring team that includes Ryan Germany, a former staffer in Raffensperger’s office, who is a frequent target of election deniers because he defended the legitimacy of the 2020 election and debunked conspiracies about ballot counting in Fulton. “Will the Ryan Germany Monitoring Team account for all absentee ballots?” Johnston posted on X.

Perhaps most importantly, the board could amplify disinformation spread by Trump and his MAGA allies, like US Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has falsely claimed that voting machines “switched” votes during the state’s early voting period. In reality, the incident Greene referenced happened as a result of a Republican voter who made an error on her own ballot, but Greene’s post on X went viral nonetheless, garnering nearly 4 million views.

Election deniers at the county level—influenced by the likes of Greene and members of the state board—could use false claims of fraud to refuse certification in defiance of the law, furthering the distrust of the election process that Trump’s movement has weaponized so successfully. 

“The only reason not to to certify is to provide fodder for an election challenge and for the disinformation grist mill,” Tindall Ghazal says. “Disinformation is what led to January 6.” 

Correction: The original version of this story misidentified a member of the prayer circle gathered at the Georgia capitol.

On October 8, about two dozen conservative activists gathered in the rotunda of the Georgia State Capitol, where a meeting of the state election board was taking place. A US Army veteran named Richard Schroeder, from Hall County, in the northeastern part of the state, led the group in prayer. Schroeder, who testified that day, was a regular presence at the board meetings, where he has spread debunked claims about election security and once identified himself as a poll worker in charge of tabulating votes. 

Schroeder first asked God for forgiveness for allowing the “evil” of migrants and transgender people to permeate the country. Then he turned to voting machines. 

“Nobody’s got more votes than President [Donald] Trump ever in the world,” Schroeder said. He and other members of the prayer circle wore shirts that read “IYKYK dvscorp08!,” referring to an alleged password to Georgia’s voting machines that was obtained by right-wing election deniers and spread online. 

“Our votes have been stolen,” he continued in prayer. “The Dominion voting machines have taken our God-given dominion and have been selecting winners—not electing winners.”

“Amen,” responded David Hancock, a member of the Gwinnett County board of elections. 

The activists were part of a small but influential network of election deniers who had successfully convinced the board’s pro-Trump majority to launch probes into unfounded claims of election fraud. They also persuaded the board, which issues guidance to county election officials and investigates problems with the voting process, to pass a series of controversial rules in the runup to the November election that Fulton County Superior Court Judge Thomas Cox recently deemed “illegal” and “unconstitutional.” In August, Trump had touted the trio of sympathetic board members by name at a campaign rally, calling them “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory.” 

The rules would have led to the spread of misinformation and could have been used as a justification not to certify results, Democrats and voting rights advocates warned. The changes also would have slowed the counting of votes, according to Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. “Everything we’ve been fighting for since 2020 has been to give the voter quicker response, quicker results,” Raffensperger said on October 14, noting that one of the board’s rules, requiring a hand count of ballots on Election Day, could have delayed the reporting of results into the wee hours of the morning. “Really, that just becomes a breeding ground for conspiracy theories.” 

Democrats and election watchdogs breathed a sigh of relief when Georgia courts blocked the Trump-inspired rules, including two that would have given local election officials more power to attempt to block certification. But they should not rest easy, as significant peril still remains. At least 21 election skeptics who have expressed support for Trump’s false claims about election fraud sit on county election boards throughout the state. And over the past four years, Trump-aligned election deniers have asserted their power throughout local GOP organizations, according to the Center for Media and Democracy, a nonprofit watchdog.

Together, these MAGA Republicans could throw the election in Georgia—and thus the nation—into disarray. Officials at the county level, for instance, could still attempt to refuse to certify the results if Kamala Harris carries Georgia, while the state election board could amplify false allegations and launch bogus investigations supporting Trump’s inevitable claims of a stolen election. And those are just a couple of the nightmarish scenarios that could unfold next week.

Whatever transpires in the November 5 election, the radicalization of the board into a nakedly partisan arm of Trump’s election denial machine shows that our democratic system rests on a knife’s edge. What took place in Georgia can—and is—happening throughout the country. The takeover of much of Georgia’s election apparatus offers a distressing vision of the future if Trump returns to the White House, one in which the federal government is run by zealots whose only qualification is their fealty to Trump. 

“That’s exactly what Project 2025 is all about,” says Sara Tindall Ghazal, the state election board’s lone Democrat. “It is about replacing the bureaucrats within the federal government with political employees whose sole requirement for the job is loyalty to the president.” Tindall Ghazal points out that some of those people “don’t understand and don’t care about what the law requires. They’re completely unconstrained in their actions.”

The path to this troubling reality began on election night 2020, when Republican activists began spreading claims of widespread voter fraud. Believing that Trump ballots had been thrown out, a crowd gathered at an election office in Griffin, the seat of Spalding County, an hour south of Atlanta. Led by a county commissioner who filmed election workers through the glass, some in the crowd eventually climbed into a dumpster to find the supposedly discarded ballots. In Marietta, an Atlanta suburb, Salleigh Grubbs, the Cobb County GOP chair, chased a truck she believed contained shredded ballots. In an Atlanta ballot-counting facility, plastic bins under a folding table were labeled the infamous “suitcases full of ballots” that supposedly flipped the election in favor of Joe Biden. In the small town of Douglas in south Georgia, a county election board official claimed that voting machines had flipped votes. The state became ground zero for election fraud claims. 

None of it proved true. The dumpster in Griffin contained no ballots—just empty ballot envelopes that had been thrown away by election workers. The truck in Marietta did not have shredded ballots, Grubbs eventually discovered. The boxes under the table in Atlanta didn’t hold ballots for Biden that were double-counted to seal his victory over Trump. Instead, they just held regular ballots that were opened when workers were told by the secretary of state’s office to stay late and count more votes. The Dominion voting machines Grubbs and others prayed over never actually flipped votes—in Douglas or anywhere else—but they were broken into by local officials and attorneys working on behalf of Trump.

At least 21 election skeptics who have expressed support for Trump’s false claims about election fraud sit on county election boards throughout the state.

From these debunked origins, the claims of a stolen election grew, spreading to include other outlandish allegations of a plot that supposedly involved Italians and Venezuelans hacking voting machines and the forgery of untold thousands of ballots that were placed in drop boxes by “mules.” 

Top Georgia election officials repeatedly discredited claims of a stolen election, as did multiple legal proceedings and court judgments. Three separate counts of ballots reaffirmed Biden’s 2020 victory. Voting-machine companies won major settlements against Fox News and Newsmax for airing false claims about their machines. A Fulton County judge threw out a lawsuit filed by DeKalb County Republicans challenging the security of the state’s voting machines. Two Georgia poll workers in Fulton County won a $148 million defamation judgment against Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani for spreading the myth of “suitcases” of ballots. Jenna Ellis, another top lawyer for Trump, took a plea agreement in a wide-ranging election interference case and admitted she made false statements about illegal ballots being counted. 

Nonetheless, Trump-aligned Republicans throughout the state and nation began amplifying these claims and calling for investigations. They also got to work making sure “the steal” couldn’t happen again, beginning at the local level, where influential figures like Steve Bannon and Michael Flynn were encouraging Trump supporters to take over local election boards. In 12 counties, local representatives in the state legislature passed laws that remade county election boards in favor of Republicans. One of the bills, HB 769, transformed the Spalding County board of elections from a mundane government body on which Black Democrats held a majority to an activist board controlled by white Republicans who amplified Trump’s election lies. 

When Spalding County officials first heard about HB 769 in the spring of 2021, they were confused. Typically, when the county’s representatives in the state legislature introduce a bill that affects the county, local officials are part of the process. But that wasn’t the case with this measure, which changed how the members of the board of elections were chosen. The board had always been essentially split between the parties—Democrats got two appointments and Republicans got two, with the foursome then choosing a fifth member to serve as chair. But HB 769 changed that—the board’s fifth member would now be chosen by local judges in a closed-door process and secret vote. In May 2021, the judges chose Republican Jim Newland, giving election deniers control over the board. 

Two of the new Republicans—Ben Johnson and Roy McClain—believed Trump had rightfully won the election. Johnson is a Trump-supporting QAnon fan and Elon Musk aficionado who frequently posts on Facebook about various right-wing culture war grievances and conspiracies, including that voting machines were subject to hacking and fraud. McClain has pushed for automatic hand recounts of all elections and in 2023 made a public showing of his refusal to certify results while privately signing off on certification, fulfilling his legal duty while maintaining his MAGA bonafides. Both Johnson and McClain were involved in a brief but failed effort in August 2021 to hire an Atlanta law firm to help them access voting machines in their hunt for evidence of election fraud. The plan was nixed when Raffensperger’s office warned them that it would be illegal to allow a third party to access election equipment.

Even in counties where election boards weren’t overhauled to favor Republicans, election deniers still had a presence. In Fulton County, home to Atlanta, two election deniers sit on the election board. Boards in the Atlanta metro counties of Cobb, DeKalb, Floyd, and Gwinnett also include skeptics who, while not holding a majority, frequently amplify misinformation about elections. By early 2024, at least 21 election deniers were in place on election boards in nine counties.

As election deniers won seats on election boards, they also gained power in local GOP chapters. In Spalding County, Republicans who refused to go along with Trump’s claims of a stolen election were pushed out of the local party. There and elsewhere, Republicans refused to give campaign funds raised from donors to Gov. Brian Kemp for his unwillingness to toe the line on Trump’s lies about election fraud, said Mary Braun, a Republican in Spalding County who told Mother Jones that Johnson and some local party members had a “vendetta” against her for opposing the false claims spread by her colleagues. (Johnson and other members of the Spalding County election board, along with its election supervisor and county attorney, did not respond to a request for comment.)

Meanwhile, Republican state lawmakers set their sights on perhaps the biggest prize of all, the state election board. In March 2021, the GOP-controlled legislature tucked a provision into a sweeping new voter suppression bill that removed Raffensperger as chair and a voting member of the board, a previously obscure body of appointed officials whose meetings were scantly attended and typically mundane. Raffensperger had become a leading target of election deniers for defending the legitimacy of the 2020 election and refusing Trump’s demand to “find 11,780 votes” to reverse Biden’s victory. In addition to removing Raffensperger, Georgia lawmakers gave the state election board the authority to investigate the secretary of state for his handling of the 2020 investigation—and virtually anything else the board dreamed up. 

“This was punishment for him not obeying the president and revealing that conversation,” Tindall Ghazal, the Democratic member of the board, said of Trump’s infamous phone call to Raffensperger, pressuring him to overturn the 2020 election.

After ousting Raffensperger, influential state Republicans continued to remake the board in Trump’s image by pushing out establishment Republicans and replacing them with election deniers. In 2022, the Georgia GOP used its appointment to place Dr. Janice Johnston on the board. (Each party gets an appointment to the five-member board, both chambers of the legislature pick a member, and the legislature chooses the chair unless it is out of session, in which case the governor appoints the chair.) A former obstetrician, Johnston served as a poll watcher in Fulton County in 2020 alongside Julie Adams, an election denier who currently sits on Fulton’s election board. Johnston began frequently attending Fulton County board meetings after the election, spreading false claims about the 2020 vote count. 

In January 2024, the state Senate appointed Rick Jeffares, a former GOP state senator, to replace a well-regarded conservative election attorney Matthew Mashburn, who had opposed investigating Raffensperger. Jeffares was handpicked by his neighbor, Georgia Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, a fake elector for Trump in 2020, who said Jones urged him to “be strong” on the board. (Jones did not respond to a request for comment.) Jeffares had spread memes on social media questioning the outcome of the 2020 election, including false claims that dead people had voted by mail, and had few obvious qualifications for the job. The owner of three wastewater treatment companies, Jeffares went on to solicit a director position at the Environmental Protection Agency in a second Trump administration through a campaign intermediary while serving in his role on the State Election Board, which Democrats said raised ethical questions about his independence on the board. 

At that point, election deniers were one vote short of a majority on the board. So they began to pressure Edward Lindsey, a lawyer and former Republican member of the state House, who had also voted against bogus investigations into the 2020 outcome, to resign. Lindsey’s term was up in May 2024, but he told Republican House Speaker Jon Burns that he was willing to serve through the election to maintain continuity on the board. 

“I think they want to remove source documents from the election department prior to certification so that all weekend, they can comb through things with their friends and start whatever narrative they want. I don’t use the term ‘conspiracy’ lightly, but this is a conspiracy, full stop.”

At a board meeting in February 2024, Johnston introduced a resolution asking the legislature to repeal no-excuse absentee voting, which MAGA Republicans blamed for Trump’s defeat in 2020, and to limit mail voting to those who were disabled, over 75, or out of town. Lindsey voted against it, blocking the resolution from passing. “We should not as a board, only a few months before the 2024 election…start to limit the ability of people to vote, particularly people who find it most difficult to stand in line because of certain life situations,” he said.

That infuriated Trump, who privately told Georgia Republicans that Lindsey had “got to go,” according to Rolling Stone. Local GOP chapters called on Lindsey to step down. In May 2024, Lindsey voted against referring officials in Fulton County to the attorney general for prosecution over their handling of the 2020 election. Election deniers who packed the state board meeting responded with jeers and carried signs that said, “Time to Go Ed!”

A few weeks after that vote, and just days before Georgia Republicans met for their state convention, the House speaker announced he was replacing Lindsey with Janelle King, a conservative media personality with no election experience who was married to a Republican candidate who lost the 2022 GOP primary for US Senate to Herschel Walker. King tweeted on election night in 2020 that she had “questions!!” about the “vote counting process” and later said on her podcast that she opposed no-excuse absentee voting. 

The MAGA takeover over the board was complete. “I believe when we look back on November 5, 2024, we’re going to say getting to that 3–2 election integrity–minded majority on the state election board made sure that we had the level playing field to win this election,” Georgia Republican Party Chair Josh McKoon said at the party’s convention after King was appointed to the board. 

The takeover of the state board went mostly without notice until August, when Trump praised Johnston, Jeffares, and King during his Atlanta rally, saying they were “on fire” while going on a 10-minute tirade against Kemp for refusing to overturn the 2020 election. Johnston sat in the second row and stood and waved to the crowd when Trump name-checked her. (Johnston, Jeffares, and King declined to comment for this article.)

With mainstream Republicans out of the way, the board’s pro-Trump majority quickly got to work. State election board meetings became election denial symposiums, where conspiracy theorists spoke for hours about their demands for investigations and rule changes. Anyone can introduce a rule to the board, but in recent months, almost all of the new rules proposed have come from the network of election skeptics that includes some of the people who held a prayer vigil at the state Capitol in October. Between September 2022 and May 2024, no new rules were introduced. Since then, election denial activists and officials have introduced 31 rules for the board to consider. Of those, 15 have passed or are under consideration by the board. 

Days after Trump’s August visit to the state, the board passed its first controversial rule change. It came from Adams, the Fulton County election board member who served as a poll watcher with Johnston in 2020 and had refused to certify the state’s May primary election. Adams works with the Tea Party Patriots, which helped organize the “Save America” rally that preceded the January 6 insurrection. She also serves as regional coordinator for the Election Integrity Network founded by Cleta Mitchell, a Trump attorney who worked to overturn the 2020 election and was on the call in which Trump demanded Raffensperger reverse Biden’s victory. Finally, Adams is a member of a state network of activists and officials called the Georgia Election Integrity Coalition. The rule Adams introduced, which was eventually blocked by a state court, could have allowed local officials to refuse to certify election results if a “reasonable inquiry” determined that fraud had occurred. The rule did not spell out what a “reasonable inquiry” entailed, and voting rights advocates warned that it could be used as a pretext by GOP officials not to certify the results if a Democrat won Georgia. 

At another contentious board meeting a few weeks later, Grubbs, the GOP chair of Cobb County, introduced a rule that allowed county election board members to request a virtually unlimited amount of records and documents relating to voting machines and vote tabulation before certifying results—what became known as the “examination” certification rule. The measure, which passed 3–2, was a welcome addition to officials like Adams in Fulton County and David Hancock in Gwinnett County, both of whom had demanded scores of records before refusing to certify results in recent years. 

In abstaining from a vote to certify the results of both a May primary and a runoff election in June 2024, Adams said she had not received election records and documents she wanted to inspect for evidence of fraud. Cathy Woolard, at the time the Democratic chair of the Fulton County board, said Adams had received extensive records and documents related to the collection and tabulation of votes.

“Julie asked for these things with great authority, but she has no idea what she’s looking at,” Woolard told Mother Jones. “When she gets the records, she goes outside in the hallway and calls somebody. I can’t quite figure it out; the only thing I can come up with is, they just want to be right. They want to be right for Trump so they can say, ‘See, I told you guys, you cheated.’ Nothing of the sort happened.” (Adams did not respond to a request for comment.) This has led Democratic officials and voting rights groups to allege that Adams and her fellow election deniers at the local level are coordinating with national Republicans to enact skewed rules that could rig the state for Trump. Adams continues to push for more power to refuse to certify results as part of a lawsuit she filed with the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute. 

“Here’s what I think they really want,” Woolard says. “I think they want to remove source documents from the election department prior to certification so that all weekend, they can comb through things with their friends and start whatever narrative they want. I don’t use the term ‘conspiracy’ lightly, but this is a conspiracy, full stop.” 

“The 2020 election taught us to be ready for every possible permutation of legal argument and also every possible factual scenario. I don’t think that Democrats in Congress were ready for a whole decision tree of different parliamentary objections. The decision tree is a decision forest right now.”

Finally, in late September, just weeks before early voting began, the state election board approved another rule that would have required poll workers to “reconcile” the number of ballots cast on Election Day with the number of voters who checked in at every precinct in the state. This time-consuming task—referred to as a hand count—would have slowed the tallying of returns throughout the state, Raffensperger said. He accused the board of engaging in “activist rulemaking” and, along with Attorney General Chris Carr, also a Republican, said the board was both acting outside of its authority and passing rules that were in direct conflict with Georgia election law. 

The board’s MAGA majority had overstepped the law. Amid a national outcry, its rule changes were blocked by Fulton County judges as early voting began. The Republican National Committee appealed, but the Georgia State Supreme Court declined to reinstate the rules before November. 

Trump supporters throughout Georgia denounced the state Supreme Court’s decision. McKoon, the state GOP chair, called the rules “common sense” on X, claiming they would enhance election security. He blamed “Democrats and their allies” for the court’s ruling, even though the court is composed solely of conservative justices. 

But court rulings can do only so much to restrain a movement that has already shown how far it will go to undermine democratic norms. 

Hancock said in an email that Gwinnett County had passed its own ordinance requiring the release of a lengthy list of documents that he and other election board members could inspect before certifying results in November. 

“Even if the policy is somehow revoked, I will still be looking at these documents,” Hancock vowed in the wake of a judge’s decision that the “examination” certification rule conflicted with Georgia election law. (He did not respond to a request to explain his comments.)

Despite a separate court ruling in October reaffirming that election certification is mandatory for county officials, Tindall Ghazal worries that some counties under the sway of pro-Trump activists could still attempt to refuse to certify results “in a bad-faith way.”

A nightmare scenario in which numerous county election board members refuse to certify results could require Carr, the attorney general, to step in, filing court orders known as writs of mandamus to force officials to certify. Carr has tried to have it both ways when it comes to pro-Trump election deniers, his critics say. He sent a letter to the State Election Board saying many of its rules were illegal, including the hand-counting rule. But an attorney in Carr’s office also defended the state election board in a separate lawsuit over the certification rules that were challenged by Democrats. Moreover, Carr shielded Kemp from responsibility over the board when Democrats alleged ethics violations on the part of Johnston, Jeffares, and King in a lawsuit. In a motion to dismiss the suit, Carr wrote that Kemp didn’t have the authority to consider removing the members. 

“He’s less solid” than Raffensperger, state Sen. Elena Parent, a Democrat, said of Carr. “He’s not an election denier, however, he’s planning to run for governor and has to contend with that base who believes the election was stolen.”

Widespread certification refusals could cause Kemp to miss a crucial federal deadline on December 11. That’s the day Kemp will have to certify slates of presidential electors for whoever wins Georgia’s popular vote. Unlike in 2020, when Trump pressured Raffensperger to “find” the votes he needed to defeat Biden, it could be Kemp, who has backed Trump’s presidential bid despite the abuse he has received from the former president, getting a call from Trump urging him not to certify Harris electors. 

Missing the December 11 deadline is one of the scenarios that might allow congressional Republicans to reject certification of a Harris win—and install Trump regardless of how Americans voted, according to US Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), an election law expert and former member of the congressional January 6 committee. 

“The 2020 election taught us to be ready for every possible permutation of legal argument and also every possible factual scenario,” Raskin said in an interview. “I don’t think that Democrats in Congress were ready for a whole decision tree of different parliamentary objections. The decision tree is a decision forest right now.” If Georgia misses the deadline to certify its electoral votes, depriving either candidate of a majority in the Electoral College, the election would be decided by the House of Representatives, where a majority of House delegations, not a majority of members, choose the winner. Because Republicans control a majority of those delegations, that could allow them to install Trump as president in a disputed election. 

Courts have dulled the Georgia election board’s fangs for the moment. But in the longer term, the threats to fair elections continue. The trio of Johnston, Jeffares, and King appear to be laying the groundwork to potentially take over election administration in Fulton County, the epicenter of past and ongoing election lies. The board could also pressure Georgia’s General Assembly to enact more voter suppression laws or give them the power to certify election results instead of the secretary of state. Recently, Johnston was voted vice chair of the board.

“Despite a judge blocking their unconstitutional rules changes, the MAGA board members continue plotting ways to plunge our election into chaos,” said Max Flugrath of Fair Fight, a progressive voting rights organization. 

Johnston has already sown distrust about the results in Fulton County, questioning the legitimacy of a monitoring team that is overseeing election administration there as part of the county’s punishment for erroneously double-counting ballots in 2020. (About 3,600 ballots were double-counted in Fulton County in 2020 but were found not to have changed the results of the election.) Johnston had proposed her own monitoring team that would oversee elections in Fulton, what Flugrath called an attempt to “force partisan monitors onto the county, with the ultimate goal of undermining confidence in the election, to provide Trump fodder to claim fraud if and when he loses.”

Instead, the county chose a monitoring team that includes Ryan Germany, a former staffer in Raffensperger’s office, who is a frequent target of election deniers because he defended the legitimacy of the 2020 election and debunked conspiracies about ballot counting in Fulton. “Will the Ryan Germany Monitoring Team account for all absentee ballots?” Johnston posted on X.

Perhaps most importantly, the board could amplify disinformation spread by Trump and his MAGA allies, like US Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has falsely claimed that voting machines “switched” votes during the state’s early voting period. In reality, the incident Greene referenced happened as a result of a Republican voter who made an error on her own ballot, but Greene’s post on X went viral nonetheless, garnering nearly 4 million views.

Election deniers at the county level—influenced by the likes of Greene and members of the state board—could use false claims of fraud to refuse certification in defiance of the law, furthering the distrust of the election process that Trump’s movement has weaponized so successfully. 

“The only reason not to to certify is to provide fodder for an election challenge and for the disinformation grist mill,” Tindall Ghazal says. “Disinformation is what led to January 6.” 

Correction: The original version of this story misidentified a member of the prayer circle gathered at the Georgia capitol.

Good news, patriots! American voters have finally found something they can agree about: Their candidate is going to win in November. That’s according to a new survey by Bright Line Watch, a group of researchers who, since 2017, have been tracking the state of American democracy and potential threats to it. The survey finds some hopeful news about Americans’ faith in elections, but it also offers stark warning signs about threats to democracy that could arise if there’s a huge mismatch between voters’ expectations and the ultimate winner of the election.

The new survey asked about 2,700 people how they plan to vote in the presidential election. As with most polls, the results revealed a close race, with 46 percent of respondents saying they’d vote for Trump, while 49 percent will pull the lever for Vice President Kamala Harris. The researchers weren’t interested in only the horse race, though. They wanted to explore likely voters’ expectations for the election outcome. That’s because they have found that, as was the case in 2020, unexpected results tend to drive fraud and malfeasance around elections and mistrust in the integrity of the system.

The survey found that nearly 90 percent of both Republicans and Democrats expect their candidate to prevail in November. Sizable minorities also believe their candidate will win in a blowout. Nearly 40 percent of Republicans and more than a quarter of Democrats believe that their candidate will win by “quite a lot.” That disparity between outcomes and expectations, particularly among the most partisan media consumers, can make voters on the losing side vulnerable to the sorts of misinformation and conspiracy theories spread by Trump and his supporters’ 2020 “Stop the Steal” campaign that laid the groundwork for the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol.

“You can absolutely imagine something similar” happening this year “especially when Trump is telling people ‘we’re going to win unless they steal it,'” says Brendan Nyhan, a Dartmouth College professor of government and a co-director of Bright Line Watch. “He’s playing into this in a way that is obviously dangerous and reckless.”

Despite similar expectations of victory among Democrats, Nyhan says it’s harder to imagine Harris supporters responding the same way MAGA devotees did in 2020. Bright Line surveys show that Democrats tend to be more accepting of election results. Plus, everyone expects Harris to concede if she loses.

Lest you think that Democrats are completely impervious to election misinformation and conspiracy theories, the Bright Line researchers are here to prove you wrong. “Polling shows Democrats are vulnerable,” Nyhan says. For instance, the Bright Line survey found that more than a third of Democratic respondents falsely believe that the assassination attempts on Trump were staged to help his election prospects.

Also recall the 2016 election, Nyhan says, when Hillary Clinton was predicted to win the presidential election. Many Democrats, he says, embraced conspiracy theories to explain Trump’s unexpected victory. Bright Line surveys show that today, Democrats still falsely believe in fairly high numbers—more than 50 percent of those polled—that Russia changed actual votes to swing the 2016 election in favor of Trump. (While Russia did hack computers at the Democratic National Committee and target state election systems in 2016, there is no evidence that Russia electronically tampered with people’s votes.)

Of course, Democrats who believe this myth about Russia didn’t storm the Capitol to challenge the election results. The difference, Nyhan says, is that Democratic elites don’t amplify fringe theories the way Republicans do. “There’s been no figure on the Democratic side who’s rejected the norms of democracy in the same way as Trump,” he says.

The Bright Line survey did offer some areas where disinformation has not captured voters’ attention. Attempts by Trump supporters to question Vice President Kamala Harris’ citizenship have persuaded “only” 22 percent of Republicans that she’s ineligible to run for the presidency. That’s a big improvement since Trump’s “birther” campaign against former President Barack Obama helped convince more than 70 percent of Republicans that he was ineligible for office. And the percentage of Republicans who believe Joe Biden was legitimately elected in 2020 has gone up slightly from 33 percent in October 2022 to 38 percent in September this year. Even 23 percent of those who say they are more Trump supporters than Republicans are willing to concede the 2020 election to Biden, compared with 16 percent in October 2022.

GOP voters also seem to have recovered some of their confidence in election integrity, perhaps because they’re so sure that Trump will prevail in November. Nearly 60 percent of the respondents now say they believe their votes will be counted fairly, as opposed to 49 percent who did so two years ago. Nonetheless, Republican voters suffer from a fair amount of cognitive dissonance when it comes to their faith in the electoral system.

“Everyone thinks the fraud is happening somewhere else. There’s not a high degree of internal consistency on these claims.”

Many people who think their own vote for, say, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-Ga.), or the local dog catcher will be fairly counted apparently also believe the national vote will be fully corrupt. According to the Bright Line survey, 80 percent of Republicans believe their state votes will be counted accurately, but that figure falls precipitously when they’re asked about the national vote count. Only 57 percent of Republicans in the survey thought the national election would be fair. “Everyone thinks the fraud is happening somewhere else,” Nyhan says. “There’s not a high degree of internal consistency on these claims, obviously.”

Republican beliefs in widespread voter fraud, however, seem to have diminished since 2022. For instance, GOP respondents to the Bright Line survey were somewhat less likely to believe that voting machine software is changing votes. Independent voters were even less likely to believe it. The Bright Line report doesn’t speculate as to why this might be the case. But there is one possible explanation: the Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit against Fox News, which last year forced Fox to pay nearly $800 million to the company for making false claims about its voting machine software.  

After the settlement, Fox and other right-wing news outlets had to stop their false attacks on the integrity of voting machines. “It took it out of the right-wing information stream from those places,” says Nyhan. Still, he suspects there’s more to the decline than this one lawsuit. He thinks conservative voters are simply hearing less about voter fraud overall, aside from Trump’s oft-repeated claims that illegal immigrants are infiltrating the election system, a fiction that 70 percent of the survey respondents embraced.

Indeed, after four years of consistently attacking the electoral system as fraudulent, Republicans had a problem heading into 2024: how to convince their supporters to cast a ballot after they’d been persuaded by Trump that their votes wouldn’t count? To that end, the Republican National Committee has stopped pressing the voter fraud narrative and spent the last year trying to convince voters that their ballots will be secure, including the mail-in ballots Trump previously claimed were used to steal the 2020 election. The Bright Line Watch numbers suggest that perhaps the campaign is working.

In recent days, a number of news sites that rely heavily on aggregation have posted stories about Minnesota governor and vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, reporting “allegations” that he sexually assaulted a minor while working as a teacher and football coach.

The clearly false claims stem from the prolific work of one man, a Twitter conspiracy peddler who goes by Black Insurrectionist. After previously pushing a lie about a presidential debate “whistleblower,” he’s at it again, and even his clownish mistakes haven’t kept the claims from taking off on Twitter, or being promoted by automated sections of the news ecosystem.

Black Insurrectionist, who tweets under the handle @docnetyoutube, is a self-professed MAGA fan who says he’s based in Dallas. He’s paid for his Twitter account, meaning his visibility is boosted on the site; he’s also followed by a number of people in the MAGA and right-leaning fake news spheres, including Donald Trump Jr., dirty tricks specialist and Trump adviser Roger Stone, Pizzagate promoter Liz Crokin, and conspiracy kingpin Alex Jones.

A screenshot of the email included a cursor, making it obvious he’d written it himself. 

In September, he promoted an obviously fake story about a “whistleblower” at ABC News anonymously claiming the presidential debate hosted by the channel had been biased in favor of Kamala Harris. To back up the claims, he published a purported affidavit by the whistleblower, a poorly formatted and typo-riddled document that, among other things, claimed that Harris had been assured she wouldn’t be questioned about her time as “Attorney General in San Francisco,” a job she never held, as it doesn’t exist. The clumsy story still received immense pickup, including from hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman, who began tweeting at various entities to investigate the claim; Elon Musk also shared some of Ackman’s posts. 

This time, Black Insurrectionist says he received an anonymous email on August 9 from someone claiming they’d been sexually assaulted as a minor by Tim Walz. “I did indeed call the person making the claims,” Black Insurrectionist wrote. “He laid out a story that was very incredulous. I told him he would need to lay everything out in writing for me. In depth and in detail.” Black Insurrectionist included a screenshot of the purported first email; as thousands of people immediately noted, the image had a cursor at the end of the last sentence, making it obvious that he’d written it himself. 

Undaunted, Black Insurrectionist went on to post dozens of tweets outlining the claim, including relaying another written “statement” from the victim claiming that Walz has a “raised scar” on his chest and a “Chinese symbol” tattooed on his thigh. Black Insurrectionist also claimed to have asked the Harris-Walz campaign for comment, writing, “If anything I am saying is not true, they could shoot me down in a hot second.” 

The campaign is unlikely to comment on a weird set of lies spread by a random guy, but Black Insurrectionist’s claims, and his pose of performing journalism, have had their intended effect, with some of his posts being viewed over one million times. Other large accounts on Twitter who have paid for verification have posted versions of the claim, garnering hundreds of thousands of other views and retweets. A search for Tim Walz’s name on the platform’s “For You” tab return verified accounts making the allegations at the very top. 

With the claim taking off on Twitter, it was quickly picked up by purported news sites that rely heavily on aggregating from social media, including the Hindustan Times, a New Delhi newspaper whose web operation often reposts viral rumors vaguely arranged into the form of a news story. Another Indian-based news outlet, Times Now, also reshared the claims; both stories also appeared on MSN.com, a news aggregation site owned by Microsoft with a large audience, since it appears as the internet homepage for many users of their software. Search MSN.com for “Tim Walz,” and you get results from Bing, the Microsoft search engine, collecting of aggregated stories under the heading “Tim Walz Accused Of Inappropriate Relations.”

This is one way a successful fake news story is built: the seeds sown in the ever-more chaotic Twitter, spread across the automated news sectors of the internet, and piped into the homes of potentially millions of people who won’t necessarily read past the headlines. And, as the ABC whistleblower story makes clear, if someone even more prominent—perhaps Twitter’s owner, busy as he is stumping for Donald Trump—reposts the allegations in any form, this smoldering claim could become a full-on wildfire.

MSN acknowledged a request for comment but did not immediately respond to emailed questions. Twitter no longer responds to requests for comment from journalists. 

In recent days, a number of news sites that rely heavily on aggregation have posted stories about Minnesota governor and vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, reporting “allegations” that he sexually assaulted a minor while working as a teacher and football coach.

The clearly false claims stem from the prolific work of one man, a Twitter conspiracy peddler who goes by Black Insurrectionist. After previously pushing a lie about a presidential debate “whistleblower,” he’s at it again, and even his clownish mistakes haven’t kept the claims from taking off on Twitter, or being promoted by automated sections of the news ecosystem.

Black Insurrectionist, who tweets under the handle @docnetyoutube, is a self-professed MAGA fan who says he’s based in Dallas. He’s paid for his Twitter account, meaning his visibility is boosted on the site; he’s also followed by a number of people in the MAGA and right-leaning fake news spheres, including Donald Trump Jr., dirty tricks specialist and Trump adviser Roger Stone, Pizzagate promoter Liz Crokin, and conspiracy kingpin Alex Jones.

A screenshot of the email included a cursor, making it obvious he’d written it himself. 

In September, he promoted an obviously fake story about a “whistleblower” at ABC News anonymously claiming the presidential debate hosted by the channel had been biased in favor of Kamala Harris. To back up the claims, he published a purported affidavit by the whistleblower, a poorly formatted and typo-riddled document that, among other things, claimed that Harris had been assured she wouldn’t be questioned about her time as “Attorney General in San Francisco,” a job she never held, as it doesn’t exist. The clumsy story still received immense pickup, including from hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman, who began tweeting at various entities to investigate the claim; Elon Musk also shared some of Ackman’s posts. 

This time, Black Insurrectionist says he received an anonymous email on August 9 from someone claiming they’d been sexually assaulted as a minor by Tim Walz. “I did indeed call the person making the claims,” Black Insurrectionist wrote. “He laid out a story that was very incredulous. I told him he would need to lay everything out in writing for me. In depth and in detail.” Black Insurrectionist included a screenshot of the purported first email; as thousands of people immediately noted, the image had a cursor at the end of the last sentence, making it obvious that he’d written it himself. 

Undaunted, Black Insurrectionist went on to post dozens of tweets outlining the claim, including relaying another written “statement” from the victim claiming that Walz has a “raised scar” on his chest and a “Chinese symbol” tattooed on his thigh. Black Insurrectionist also claimed to have asked the Harris-Walz campaign for comment, writing, “If anything I am saying is not true, they could shoot me down in a hot second.” 

The campaign is unlikely to comment on a weird set of lies spread by a random guy, but Black Insurrectionist’s claims, and his pose of performing journalism, have had their intended effect, with some of his posts being viewed over one million times. Other large accounts on Twitter who have paid for verification have posted versions of the claim, garnering hundreds of thousands of other views and retweets. A search for Tim Walz’s name on the platform’s “For You” tab return verified accounts making the allegations at the very top. 

With the claim taking off on Twitter, it was quickly picked up by purported news sites that rely heavily on aggregating from social media, including the Hindustan Times, a New Delhi newspaper whose web operation often reposts viral rumors vaguely arranged into the form of a news story. Another Indian-based news outlet, Times Now, also reshared the claims; both stories also appeared on MSN.com, a news aggregation site owned by Microsoft with a large audience, since it appears as the internet homepage for many users of their software. Search MSN.com for “Tim Walz,” and you get results from Bing, the Microsoft search engine, collecting of aggregated stories under the heading “Tim Walz Accused Of Inappropriate Relations.”

This is one way a successful fake news story is built: the seeds sown in the ever-more chaotic Twitter, spread across the automated news sectors of the internet, and piped into the homes of potentially millions of people who won’t necessarily read past the headlines. And, as the ABC whistleblower story makes clear, if someone even more prominent—perhaps Twitter’s owner, busy as he is stumping for Donald Trump—reposts the allegations in any form, this smoldering claim could become a full-on wildfire.

MSN acknowledged a request for comment but did not immediately respond to emailed questions. Twitter no longer responds to requests for comment from journalists. 

This story is part of an ongoing investigation into disinformation in collaboration with The War Horse, the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Center for Investigative Reporting, which produces Mother Jones and Reveal.

Perhaps nothing illustrates the power of misinformation in the United States better than what happened Monday morning when retired Army Lt. General Michael Flynn hit the send button on a social media post. He shared a video that claimed “weather modification operations” that are “clearly connected” with the Department of Defense were responsible for Hurricane Helene’s “assault” on the Carolinas.

“You have to listen to this clip,” Flynn told his 1.7 million followers on X. “Another ‘conspiracy theory’ about to be exposed for the truth behind weather manipulation?”

Within 15 hours, the post by former President Donald Trump’s onetime national security adviser had more than half a million views. Add that to the 43 million views of alt-right Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s claims late last week that “Yes they can control the weather.”

Now compare that to the post by the Poynter Institute’s PolitiFact immediately debunking the weather modification theory with its most untruthful “Pants on Fire!” rating a day after Helene made landfall: After 10 days, that post had all of 11,400 views—less than 2 percent of Flynn’s audience.

With the storm-battered Southeast bracing for another massive hurricane and the hyperpartisan election just four weeks away, government officials and rescue workers aren’t just battling the elements, they’re fighting against a spiraling misinformation war.

“The combination of the two just makes the misinformation even more drastic,” says Josephine Lukito, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Journalism and Media who studies misinformation. “There’s more misinformation, and people seem to be falling for it more.”

“There’s more misinformation, and people seem to be falling for it more.”

Many of the false narratives involve the military, which is so often at the heart of conspiracy theories—hiding evidence of UFOs at Area 51 or working with Trump to take down a cabal of Satan-worshipping global elites. But the claims circulating in the wake of Helene and the buildup to Hurricane Milton have been more immediate, more personal: The military doesn’t want to help you.

In fact, it may want to harm you.

Almost as soon as Helene made landfall September 26, a narrative started spinning up on social media: The government had botched the response to the storm—on purpose.

While much of the false information focused on the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s response, dark narratives about the military also circulated, spread by far-right influencers and military veterans alike.

In the immediate aftermath of the hurricane, more than 6,000 National Guard members were activated for search and rescue and to help clean up the wreckage. But online, people posted that they hadn’t seen guard members in their neighborhood. In a disaster the size of Helene, rescuers can’t be everywhere at once. But online, posters began to circulate the false idea that maybe the guard wasn’t deployed at all.

And Fort Liberty, the US Army’s largest military base, home to the famed 82nd Airborne Division, is in North Carolina, mere hours from some of the state’s hardest-hit areas. Some conspiratorial posts asked why soldiers from the base weren’t immediately mobilized. Active-duty troops typically do not deploy as first responders to natural disasters.

In the social media ecosphere—on alt-tech platforms like Rumble, Gab, and GETTR, as well as more mainstream sites like X—these questions quickly coalesced into a grab bag of conspiracy theories. The military wasn’t deploying soldiers for hurricane response because the Pentagon decided they would be put to better use in the Middle East or Ukraine instead. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris wanted to prevent red-state voters from casting their ballots—or even wanted them dead. The federal government was planning to seize land in western North Carolina for lucrative lithium mining contracts.

None of that was true.

“If troops are being deployed and [people] don’t necessarily see it in their geographic area, this is a ‘Is this really happening?’-type question,” Lukito says.

“There’s a lot of political actors that can take advantage of that.”

On Saturday, Trump amplified the idea that the military had not responded to the hurricane, claiming at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, that there had been “no helicopters, no rescue” in North Carolina. That is untrue: The North Carolina National Guard says it has rescued hundreds of people and delivered more than a million pounds of supplies, some of it by helicopter.

But even as top FEMA officials and local sheriffs begged residents to sign up for federal emergency aid while beating back misinformation, a new false narrative was gaining traction online: The military had perfected the science of weather control and was now weaponizing it against conservatives.

“We have an inherent distrust of our government,” says Pablo Breuer, board chair of the counter-disinformation nonprofit Disarm Foundation and a career Navy veteran.

“It’s very easy to stir up fear, uncertainty, doubt, and angst by stoking fear that the military is not really there to protect you. They’re there to oppress you.”

“It’s very easy to stir up fear, uncertainty, doubt, and angst by stoking fear that the military is not really there to protect you. They’re there to oppress you.”

An analysis by The War Horse and the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley, of 40 different social media platforms found that two days before Greene’s viral “they can control the weather” post, comments connecting the military to weather manipulation spiked on Gab, a social media platform favored by the far right.

“I’d bet my life it was the US Military using their HAARP Technology manipulating the weather to destroy a large portion of Red States and people before the election,” one user wrote, before moving on to antisemitic tropes. The user’s profile featured pro-Russia, white nationalist content.

It’s not a new idea. HAARP—a research program studying the upper atmosphere based at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and initially funded by the military—has long been fodder for conspiracy theorists. Back in January, right-wing agitator and white nationalist Laura Loomer asked on X whether the “deep state” was using HAARP to control the weather when a blizzard threatened turnout for the Iowa caucus. It was not.

“We all know @NikkiHaley has a lot of friends in the defense industry and Military-industrial complex,” she tweeted.

Posts about geoengineering the weather also spiked on other social media sites after Helene. Some of those posts, particularly on more mainstream platforms, pushed back on misinformation, and social media users quickly added context in X’s Community Notes debunking Greene’s viral post.

But views of Flynn’s and Greene’s “weather manipulation” posts dwarfed the number of views on X, for example, of carefully crafted posts from some notable climate scientists about the deadly confluence of extreme weather.

“The fingerprints of #ClimateChange are all over what has transpired in recent weeks and may yet occur in coming days,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist, posted in a thread Monday.

“There are still thousands of folks in dire need…Helping them is and should remain the primary short-term priority. Yet if we can’t also manage to have the harder conversations regarding natural hazard risk & disasters & climate change in the moments when people are actually paying attention, we’re never going to solve any of the underlying problems.”

Just days before Helene slammed into the state, the Georgia National Guard’s ​​Headquarters Company of the 110th Combat Sustainment Support Battalion prepared for a long-planned nine-month deployment to Poland to support US forces and allies stationed in Europe.

Online, that and other deployments were held up—inaccurately—as proof that the military didn’t want to save American lives.

Images of text messages, ostensibly from National Guard members and active-duty soldiers, began circulating, claiming that troops were ready and willing to deploy to the disaster zone but that “higher ups” weren’t allowing it.

But that’s not how disaster response works, Breuer says.

“We have more than enough troops and equipment to be able to do the things that the military is being asked to do overseas and do the things that we want and need to do at home,” Breuer says. “We’re ready and willing to help anyone at any time.”

But he points out that the military cannot just deploy itself into a disaster zone.

Responding to a natural disaster the scale of Helene is a sprawling effort among local, state, and federal resources, as well as private and nonprofit organizations. Any military response is first provided by the National Guard, which is typically mobilized under state—not federal—control. Governors of affected states can request the support of guard units from other states.

As claims about missing guard troops proliferated online, National Guard units already were mobilizing. Before Helene made landfall, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, already had authorized 500 guard members to respond to the storm, quickly adding another thousand troops as the storm battered Georgia. That number has since increased to 2,500.

North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, initially activated more than 350 National Guard members as the storm moved into the Carolinas and steadily increased that number as the scale of devastation became clear.

In total, more than 6,000 guard members from 18 states have mobilized to provide search and rescue and begin the cleanup effort.

In a news conference Friday, Cooper expressed his frustration with the growing tide of misinformation.

“It can hurt our relief efforts,” he said. “It…demoralizes National Guard soldiers who are out here for days and days and people who are working in emergency management who are working around the clock to help people.”

“It can hurt our relief efforts. It…demoralizes National Guard soldiers who are out here for days and days and people who are working in emergency management who are working around the clock to help people.”

Federal troops can also help with disaster recovery, but it’s not their primary mission—and the military typically doesn’t deploy federal troops without a request from a state governor, says DeeDee Bennett Gayle, chair of the emergency management and homeland security department at SUNY Albany. Often, that comes only after an initial assessment of the damage.

Last Wednesday, Biden announced that 1,000 soldiers from Fort Liberty and Fort Campbell in Kentucky were deploying to help with hurricane recovery efforts in North Carolina. On Sunday, the White House mobilized an additional 500 active-duty troops after approving a request from the North Carolina governor.

“We want to make sure that we’re being complementary, not out there doing something on our own,” Maj. General Robert Davis, director of operations for US Northern Command, told WRAL News, stressing that the National Guard and FEMA take the lead in disaster response.

“Even going back as far as Hurricane Andrew in Florida, you see the signs, ‘Where’s the calvary?’” Bennett Gayle told The War Horse. “There’s very few things that you can have the federal government just impose within a state.”

A deluge of misinformation often follows natural disasters, but the timing of this fall’s powerful twin hurricanes is particularly inauspicious.

“Unfortunately, this one is happening just one month out from the election,” says Katherine Keneally, director of threat analysis and prevention at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a nonprofit organization researching and countering extremism. 

In such a hyperpoliticized environment, people look for sources of information they can rely on. Despite overall declining faith in institutions, the military still commands high levels of trust, experts say, and people claiming connections to the military are seen as more credible messengers about the government.

Keneally cautions that it can be difficult to suss out whether somebody actually served—just because their social media profile says they’re a veteran doesn’t mean they are. But getting veterans, or people who claim to be, to amplify messages is a long-standing disinformation tactic.

“They are trying to say, you’re a good patriot, you went to save your country,” Keneally says. “Now look at what’s happening to your country that you swore your life to protect.”

As false narratives about the hurricane response gained traction, people claiming connections to the military were more than happy to offer their “insider take”—from Flynn, who served in the Army for more than 30 years and still draws a military pension, to veterans online claiming they personally knew troops who were prevented from responding to the storm.

But Breuer, who served in the Navy for 22 years, says trusting individual veterans on social media over active-duty military leadership doesn’t make sense.

“The admirals and the generals that are in charge of the military…take an oath to defend and protect the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” Breuer says.

“That includes things like storms.”

This War Horse investigation was reported by Sonner Kehrt, with additional reporting from Anastasia Zolotova Franklin, Catherine Tong, Andrea Richardson, and Alexa Koenig of the UC Berkeley Human Rights Center. The story was fact-checked by Jess Rohan and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar.

This story is part of an ongoing investigation into disinformation in collaboration with The War Horse, the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Center for Investigative Reporting, which produces Mother Jones and Reveal.

Perhaps nothing illustrates the power of misinformation in the United States better than what happened Monday morning when retired Army Lt. General Michael Flynn hit the send button on a social media post. He shared a video that claimed “weather modification operations” that are “clearly connected” with the Department of Defense were responsible for Hurricane Helene’s “assault” on the Carolinas.

“You have to listen to this clip,” Flynn told his 1.7 million followers on X. “Another ‘conspiracy theory’ about to be exposed for the truth behind weather manipulation?”

Within 15 hours, the post by former President Donald Trump’s onetime national security adviser had more than half a million views. Add that to the 43 million views of alt-right Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s claims late last week that “Yes they can control the weather.”

Now compare that to the post by the Poynter Institute’s PolitiFact immediately debunking the weather modification theory with its most untruthful “Pants on Fire!” rating a day after Helene made landfall: After 10 days, that post had all of 11,400 views—less than 2 percent of Flynn’s audience.

With the storm-battered Southeast bracing for another massive hurricane and the hyperpartisan election just four weeks away, government officials and rescue workers aren’t just battling the elements, they’re fighting against a spiraling misinformation war.

“The combination of the two just makes the misinformation even more drastic,” says Josephine Lukito, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Journalism and Media who studies misinformation. “There’s more misinformation, and people seem to be falling for it more.”

“There’s more misinformation, and people seem to be falling for it more.”

Many of the false narratives involve the military, which is so often at the heart of conspiracy theories—hiding evidence of UFOs at Area 51 or working with Trump to take down a cabal of Satan-worshipping global elites. But the claims circulating in the wake of Helene and the buildup to Hurricane Milton have been more immediate, more personal: The military doesn’t want to help you.

In fact, it may want to harm you.

Almost as soon as Helene made landfall September 26, a narrative started spinning up on social media: The government had botched the response to the storm—on purpose.

While much of the false information focused on the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s response, dark narratives about the military also circulated, spread by far-right influencers and military veterans alike.

In the immediate aftermath of the hurricane, more than 6,000 National Guard members were activated for search and rescue and to help clean up the wreckage. But online, people posted that they hadn’t seen guard members in their neighborhood. In a disaster the size of Helene, rescuers can’t be everywhere at once. But online, posters began to circulate the false idea that maybe the guard wasn’t deployed at all.

And Fort Liberty, the US Army’s largest military base, home to the famed 82nd Airborne Division, is in North Carolina, mere hours from some of the state’s hardest-hit areas. Some conspiratorial posts asked why soldiers from the base weren’t immediately mobilized. Active-duty troops typically do not deploy as first responders to natural disasters.

In the social media ecosphere—on alt-tech platforms like Rumble, Gab, and GETTR, as well as more mainstream sites like X—these questions quickly coalesced into a grab bag of conspiracy theories. The military wasn’t deploying soldiers for hurricane response because the Pentagon decided they would be put to better use in the Middle East or Ukraine instead. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris wanted to prevent red-state voters from casting their ballots—or even wanted them dead. The federal government was planning to seize land in western North Carolina for lucrative lithium mining contracts.

None of that was true.

“If troops are being deployed and [people] don’t necessarily see it in their geographic area, this is a ‘Is this really happening?’-type question,” Lukito says.

“There’s a lot of political actors that can take advantage of that.”

On Saturday, Trump amplified the idea that the military had not responded to the hurricane, claiming at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, that there had been “no helicopters, no rescue” in North Carolina. That is untrue: The North Carolina National Guard says it has rescued hundreds of people and delivered more than a million pounds of supplies, some of it by helicopter.

But even as top FEMA officials and local sheriffs begged residents to sign up for federal emergency aid while beating back misinformation, a new false narrative was gaining traction online: The military had perfected the science of weather control and was now weaponizing it against conservatives.

“We have an inherent distrust of our government,” says Pablo Breuer, board chair of the counter-disinformation nonprofit Disarm Foundation and a career Navy veteran.

“It’s very easy to stir up fear, uncertainty, doubt, and angst by stoking fear that the military is not really there to protect you. They’re there to oppress you.”

“It’s very easy to stir up fear, uncertainty, doubt, and angst by stoking fear that the military is not really there to protect you. They’re there to oppress you.”

An analysis by The War Horse and the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley, of 40 different social media platforms found that two days before Greene’s viral “they can control the weather” post, comments connecting the military to weather manipulation spiked on Gab, a social media platform favored by the far right.

“I’d bet my life it was the US Military using their HAARP Technology manipulating the weather to destroy a large portion of Red States and people before the election,” one user wrote, before moving on to antisemitic tropes. The user’s profile featured pro-Russia, white nationalist content.

It’s not a new idea. HAARP—a research program studying the upper atmosphere based at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and initially funded by the military—has long been fodder for conspiracy theorists. Back in January, right-wing agitator and white nationalist Laura Loomer asked on X whether the “deep state” was using HAARP to control the weather when a blizzard threatened turnout for the Iowa caucus. It was not.

“We all know @NikkiHaley has a lot of friends in the defense industry and Military-industrial complex,” she tweeted.

Posts about geoengineering the weather also spiked on other social media sites after Helene. Some of those posts, particularly on more mainstream platforms, pushed back on misinformation, and social media users quickly added context in X’s Community Notes debunking Greene’s viral post.

But views of Flynn’s and Greene’s “weather manipulation” posts dwarfed the number of views on X, for example, of carefully crafted posts from some notable climate scientists about the deadly confluence of extreme weather.

“The fingerprints of #ClimateChange are all over what has transpired in recent weeks and may yet occur in coming days,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist, posted in a thread Monday.

“There are still thousands of folks in dire need…Helping them is and should remain the primary short-term priority. Yet if we can’t also manage to have the harder conversations regarding natural hazard risk & disasters & climate change in the moments when people are actually paying attention, we’re never going to solve any of the underlying problems.”

Just days before Helene slammed into the state, the Georgia National Guard’s ​​Headquarters Company of the 110th Combat Sustainment Support Battalion prepared for a long-planned nine-month deployment to Poland to support US forces and allies stationed in Europe.

Online, that and other deployments were held up—inaccurately—as proof that the military didn’t want to save American lives.

Images of text messages, ostensibly from National Guard members and active-duty soldiers, began circulating, claiming that troops were ready and willing to deploy to the disaster zone but that “higher ups” weren’t allowing it.

But that’s not how disaster response works, Breuer says.

“We have more than enough troops and equipment to be able to do the things that the military is being asked to do overseas and do the things that we want and need to do at home,” Breuer says. “We’re ready and willing to help anyone at any time.”

But he points out that the military cannot just deploy itself into a disaster zone.

Responding to a natural disaster the scale of Helene is a sprawling effort among local, state, and federal resources, as well as private and nonprofit organizations. Any military response is first provided by the National Guard, which is typically mobilized under state—not federal—control. Governors of affected states can request the support of guard units from other states.

As claims about missing guard troops proliferated online, National Guard units already were mobilizing. Before Helene made landfall, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, already had authorized 500 guard members to respond to the storm, quickly adding another thousand troops as the storm battered Georgia. That number has since increased to 2,500.

North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, initially activated more than 350 National Guard members as the storm moved into the Carolinas and steadily increased that number as the scale of devastation became clear.

In total, more than 6,000 guard members from 18 states have mobilized to provide search and rescue and begin the cleanup effort.

In a news conference Friday, Cooper expressed his frustration with the growing tide of misinformation.

“It can hurt our relief efforts,” he said. “It…demoralizes National Guard soldiers who are out here for days and days and people who are working in emergency management who are working around the clock to help people.”

“It can hurt our relief efforts. It…demoralizes National Guard soldiers who are out here for days and days and people who are working in emergency management who are working around the clock to help people.”

Federal troops can also help with disaster recovery, but it’s not their primary mission—and the military typically doesn’t deploy federal troops without a request from a state governor, says DeeDee Bennett Gayle, chair of the emergency management and homeland security department at SUNY Albany. Often, that comes only after an initial assessment of the damage.

Last Wednesday, Biden announced that 1,000 soldiers from Fort Liberty and Fort Campbell in Kentucky were deploying to help with hurricane recovery efforts in North Carolina. On Sunday, the White House mobilized an additional 500 active-duty troops after approving a request from the North Carolina governor.

“We want to make sure that we’re being complementary, not out there doing something on our own,” Maj. General Robert Davis, director of operations for US Northern Command, told WRAL News, stressing that the National Guard and FEMA take the lead in disaster response.

“Even going back as far as Hurricane Andrew in Florida, you see the signs, ‘Where’s the calvary?’” Bennett Gayle told The War Horse. “There’s very few things that you can have the federal government just impose within a state.”

A deluge of misinformation often follows natural disasters, but the timing of this fall’s powerful twin hurricanes is particularly inauspicious.

“Unfortunately, this one is happening just one month out from the election,” says Katherine Keneally, director of threat analysis and prevention at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a nonprofit organization researching and countering extremism. 

In such a hyperpoliticized environment, people look for sources of information they can rely on. Despite overall declining faith in institutions, the military still commands high levels of trust, experts say, and people claiming connections to the military are seen as more credible messengers about the government.

Keneally cautions that it can be difficult to suss out whether somebody actually served—just because their social media profile says they’re a veteran doesn’t mean they are. But getting veterans, or people who claim to be, to amplify messages is a long-standing disinformation tactic.

“They are trying to say, you’re a good patriot, you went to save your country,” Keneally says. “Now look at what’s happening to your country that you swore your life to protect.”

As false narratives about the hurricane response gained traction, people claiming connections to the military were more than happy to offer their “insider take”—from Flynn, who served in the Army for more than 30 years and still draws a military pension, to veterans online claiming they personally knew troops who were prevented from responding to the storm.

But Breuer, who served in the Navy for 22 years, says trusting individual veterans on social media over active-duty military leadership doesn’t make sense.

“The admirals and the generals that are in charge of the military…take an oath to defend and protect the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” Breuer says.

“That includes things like storms.”

This War Horse investigation was reported by Sonner Kehrt, with additional reporting from Anastasia Zolotova Franklin, Catherine Tong, Andrea Richardson, and Alexa Koenig of the UC Berkeley Human Rights Center. The story was fact-checked by Jess Rohan and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar.

More than a week after Hurricane Helene decimated the rural mountain communities of Western North Carolina, residents are still searching for missing loved ones and grappling with the destruction of their homes and businesses. On social media, meanwhile, powerful accounts are turning the disaster into the latest vehicle for politically coded conspiracy theories about the failures of the Biden administration—and the righteousness of the Trump campaign.

One group that has picked up this narrative is composed of Christian influencers, many of whom are part of the quickly growing New Apostolic Reformation, which I wrote about last week. Followers of NAR believe that God is calling Christians to take dominion over the government. They are led by a loose network of apostles and prophets who claim that God speaks directly to them. Many NAR leaders also believe that former President Donald Trump has been anointed by God to lead the country. In recent weeks, some have claimed that the political left, including the Kamala Harris presidential campaign, is controlled by witchcraft and demonic forces. As Right Wing Watch reported, on October 1, NAR-affiliated pastor Hank Kunneman turned a request for prayer about the hurricane into a prayer that the storm would show Americans that Trump was the better choice for president.

Lance Wallnau, a powerful NAR apostle and self-proclaimed Christian nationalist, recently hosted vice presidential hopeful Sen. JD Vance at a Pennsylvania rally. Wallnau claimed that Vance was supposed to be campaigning in North Carolina, but the gathering storm forced him to divert to Pennsylvania. This demonstrated that an “act of God” had made Vance’s appearance possible.

But now that the devastation from the storm has become apparent, Wallnau seems to have changed his mind about Helene’s divine origins. Wallnau, who is an organizer of the Project 19 election strategy campaign that aims to mobilize Christian voters in 19 key counties in swing states, has been sharing his concerns about the hurricane on X. “Is the government trying to learn how to manipulate weather?” he asked on Sunday. “If they succeeded do you trust them not to use this ability to stop Trump (a threat who says he will expose them and prosecute) from being elected?” The same day he posted, “Does the government have the ability to manipulate hurricanes? Thought it was a crazy conspiracy idea till I read a government report!” (He linked to a report that discussed the government’s failed campaign from 1962 to 1983 to break up hurricanes using silver iodide.)

Sean Feucht, an NAR leader who has been organizing a tour of prayer rallies at Capitol buildings in major US cities, has been posting about how the Federal Emergency Management Agency supposedly bungled its hurricane response. On October 4, he tweeted that FEMA was “inept, corrupt, and broke!” In a video, he assured people in the hardest hit areas, “Help is on the way—not by bureaucrats in DC, but by rednecks, hillbillies, and everyday Americans.”

In recent weeks, Feucht has been urging followers to join the culmination of his tour at a prayer rally at the Capitol in DC. “October 25th we bring the HARP OF DAVID inside the US Capitol,” he tweeted last week, an apparent reference to an Old Testament story in which the warrior David played a harp to soothe a king who was possessed by an evil spirit.

Dutch Sheets, an NAR leader who advanced the stolen election narrative in broadcasts before the January 6 Capitol insurrection, also posted a video to his 349,000 YouTube subscribers criticizing the government’s hurricane response. He quoted an op-ed from the far-right platform Blaze Media alleging that the government couldn’t afford to adequately help hurricane victims because it had spent too much money providing services for undocumented immigrants. (Though that narrative has been debunked, it has gained traction in far-right enclaves of social media.) The silver lining, Sheets said, is that because of Helene, “Millions of Americans have awakened from their stupor. They see the corruption, are aware of the deep state.”

As Hurricane Milton bears down on Florida, Kat Kerr, a prophet based in Jacksonville, is assuring her 118,000 followers on Facebook that she will “take authority” over the storm to protect people in its path. “We are over the weather, not under the weather,” she said (without evidence). “We also command that no tornadoes be formed.”

She made the same claim before Hurricane Helene.

More than a week after Hurricane Helene decimated the rural mountain communities of Western North Carolina, residents are still searching for missing loved ones and grappling with the destruction of their homes and businesses. On social media, meanwhile, powerful accounts are turning the disaster into the latest vehicle for politically coded conspiracy theories about the failures of the Biden administration—and the righteousness of the Trump campaign.

One group that has picked up this narrative is composed of Christian influencers, many of whom are part of the quickly growing New Apostolic Reformation, which I wrote about last week. Followers of NAR believe that God is calling Christians to take dominion over the government. They are led by a loose network of apostles and prophets who claim that God speaks directly to them. Many NAR leaders also believe that former President Donald Trump has been anointed by God to lead the country. In recent weeks, some have claimed that the political left, including the Kamala Harris presidential campaign, is controlled by witchcraft and demonic forces. As Right Wing Watch reported, on October 1, NAR-affiliated pastor Hank Kunneman turned a request for prayer about the hurricane into a prayer that the storm would show Americans that Trump was the better choice for president.

Lance Wallnau, a powerful NAR apostle and self-proclaimed Christian nationalist, recently hosted vice presidential hopeful Sen. JD Vance at a Pennsylvania rally. Wallnau claimed that Vance was supposed to be campaigning in North Carolina, but the gathering storm forced him to divert to Pennsylvania. This demonstrated that an “act of God” had made Vance’s appearance possible.

But now that the devastation from the storm has become apparent, Wallnau seems to have changed his mind about Helene’s divine origins. Wallnau, who is an organizer of the Project 19 election strategy campaign that aims to mobilize Christian voters in 19 key counties in swing states, has been sharing his concerns about the hurricane on X. “Is the government trying to learn how to manipulate weather?” he asked on Sunday. “If they succeeded do you trust them not to use this ability to stop Trump (a threat who says he will expose them and prosecute) from being elected?” The same day he posted, “Does the government have the ability to manipulate hurricanes? Thought it was a crazy conspiracy idea till I read a government report!” (He linked to a report that discussed the government’s failed campaign from 1962 to 1983 to break up hurricanes using silver iodide.)

Sean Feucht, an NAR leader who has been organizing a tour of prayer rallies at Capitol buildings in major US cities, has been posting about how the Federal Emergency Management Agency supposedly bungled its hurricane response. On October 4, he tweeted that FEMA was “inept, corrupt, and broke!” In a video, he assured people in the hardest hit areas, “Help is on the way—not by bureaucrats in DC, but by rednecks, hillbillies, and everyday Americans.”

In recent weeks, Feucht has been urging followers to join the culmination of his tour at a prayer rally at the Capitol in DC. “October 25th we bring the HARP OF DAVID inside the US Capitol,” he tweeted last week, an apparent reference to an Old Testament story in which the warrior David played a harp to soothe a king who was possessed by an evil spirit.

Dutch Sheets, an NAR leader who advanced the stolen election narrative in broadcasts before the January 6 Capitol insurrection, also posted a video to his 349,000 YouTube subscribers criticizing the government’s hurricane response. He quoted an op-ed from the far-right platform Blaze Media alleging that the government couldn’t afford to adequately help hurricane victims because it had spent too much money providing services for undocumented immigrants. (Though that narrative has been debunked, it has gained traction in far-right enclaves of social media.) The silver lining, Sheets said, is that because of Helene, “Millions of Americans have awakened from their stupor. They see the corruption, are aware of the deep state.”

As Hurricane Milton bears down on Florida, Kat Kerr, a prophet based in Jacksonville, is assuring her 118,000 followers on Facebook that she will “take authority” over the storm to protect people in its path. “We are over the weather, not under the weather,” she said (without evidence). “We also command that no tornadoes be formed.”

She made the same claim before Hurricane Helene.

As Donald Trump attempts to return to the White House, he is not operating a political campaign as much as mounting a disinformation campaign.

The rough and tumble of American politics often includes false statements and lies—what once was called spin. Unfortunately, there has always been a degree of tolerance for campaign dissembling. Trump is no stranger to this mundane practice. He freely tosses falsehoods at the electorate. The economy when he was president was the best ever. He did a great job on Covid. The current rate of inflation is the worst in US history. The US has provided more aid to Ukraine than Europe. Every Democrat and legal scholar wanted Roe v. Wade overturned. He was the smartest and most accomplished president the country has ever seen. And so on. It’s absurd braggadocio and a firehose of supposed but untrue facts—spewed to a degree far beyond what previous presidential candidates attempted to get away with.

Yet Trump’s dishonesty goes further than the usual campaign lying. He concocts and promotes utterly false narratives to shape voters’ perceptions of fundamental realities. His campaign is a full-fledged project to pervert how Americans view the nation and the world, an extensive propaganda campaign designed to fire up fears and intensify anxieties that Trump can then exploit to collect votes. And the political media world has yet to come to terms with the fact that Trump is heading a disinformation crusade more likely to be found in an authoritarian state than a vibrant democracy. This is unlike other presidential campaigns in modern American history—other than his own previous efforts.

Throughout the 2024 campaign and those earlier presidential bids, Trump has pitched numerous overlapping phony narratives. His false claim about Springfield, Ohio, has been the most obvious one in recent weeks. He has repeatedly said that this small city has been taken over by illegal migrants. He asserted that “20,000 Haitian immigrants have descended upon the town of 58,000 people, destroying their entire way of life. This was a beautiful community and now it’s horrible.” And, he asserted, these migrants are stealing and eating pets.

“Trump is one of the most successful propagandists in history. He managed to convince tens of millions that he won a national election working not in a domesticated media system or a one-party state but in a fully pluralist media environment in a democracy. No one has ever done that on that scale. Also look at what he’s accomplished with the perception of January 6.”

This absurd and false allegation about legal immigrants—debunked by the Republican mayor and the state’s Republican governor—dovetailed with Trump’s false meta-narrative: The US is being overrun by criminals from abroad who are making the nation unsafe and life a nightmare for citizens across the land.

During his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump said that millions of these thugs are pouring into the United States every month—a vast exaggeration. (Illegal crossings at the US-Mexico border have dramatically decreased this year.) And he has repeatedly depicted this flood of immigrants as coming from prisons and “insane asylums,” which he described as “a mental institution on steroids.” Using racist imagery, he recently declared, “They come from the Congo in Africa. Many people from the Congo. I don’t know what that is, but they come out of jails in the Congo.” As numerous media fact-checks have established, there is no proof that migrants are convicts let loose from prisons; the Trump campaign has not been able to supply reporters evidence to back up this Trump contention. Most recently, Trump maintained that the Biden administration “stole” disaster relief funds and handed the money to illegal migrants rather than use it to assist the victims of Hurricane Helene. Another fabrication.

Not merely peddling a series of lies, Trump is knitting together a full story that is utterly bogus, trying to convince tens of millions of a reality that does not exist: They’re living in a dangerous hellhole in which they’re imperiled by barbarians, who happen to be people of color. And Trump then accuses Harris and President Joe Biden of purposefully orchestrating this purportedly deadly situation and the collapse of America. At a recent campaign stop, Trump presented a nutty conspiracy theory: “I will shut down all entries through Kamala’s migrant phone app. She’s got a phone app. It’s meant for the cartel heads. The cartel heads call the app, and they tell them where to drop the illegal migrants…It’s not even believable.” It’s not true.

The overarching goal of Trump’s disinformation efforts is to persuade voters that they should live in fear—and that only he can save them. At a campaign event in Wisconsin, Trump said of migrants, “They will walk into your kitchen, they’ll cut your throat.” And elsewhere he brayed, “They’re conquering your communities.” He pointed to Aurora, Colorado, “where they’re taking over with AK-47s.” In another campaign speech, he warned it will get worse: “They’re going to take over a lot more than Aurora. They’re going to go through Colorado. They’re going to take over the whole damn state by the time they finish. Unless I become president.” This was another phony story. Crime in Aurora is not driven by migrant gangs. On a different occasion, Trump maintained these beasts were on the rampage across Middle America: “You see how bad it’s getting when you look at what’s going on with migrants attacking villages and cities throughout the Midwest.”

Trump has been depicting all of America as a place of tremendous peril: “You can’t walk across the street to get a loaf of bread. You get shot, you get mugged, you get raped, you get whatever it may be and you’ve seen it and I’ve seen it.” Yet crime rates across the nation are down this year, including for murder.

Trump’s effort to manipulate reality encompasses more than fear-mongering on immigration and crime. He regularly portrays America as in economic free fall: “A lot of great things would have happened, but now you have millions and millions of dead people. And you have people dying financially, because they can’t buy bacon; they can’t buy food; they can’t buy groceries; they can’t do anything. And they’re living horribly in our country right now.” While poverty remains an issue, as it always has, and prices for certain goods and services are high, traditional economic indicators show the US economy growing at a healthy clip and stronger than the economies of other Western nations. Still, Trump preaches doom-and-gloom: “Our country is a failing nation. This is a failing nation…We’re failing at everything we’re doing.”

A critical piece of his disinformation strategy is to present Democrats as perverse extremists—and baby-killers. At rallies, he lies to his supporters and says that in states run by Democrats it is okay to kill infants after they are born. There are no states where that is legal. He says that Harris “wants to legalize fentanyl.” No she doesn’t. He claims that schools are conducting gender-affirming medical operations on students without the consent of parents: “Think of it. Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child.” With this especially bizarre and crazy charge, Trump is striving to spark a moral panic: They are coming for your children and surgically altering their genders! There is no known instance of this, and schools don’t even perform such procedures with the consent of parents.

Trump throws many other baseless charges at Harris, some from the worn-out far-right playbook, others fresher. Trump claims that she plans to confiscate all guns if she becomes president and that she “wants to bring back the draft and draft your child and put them in a war.” And there’s the constant barrage of unfounded name-calling. She’s “mentally disabled.” She’s “a communist.” She’s “a fascist.” She is “a radical left person at a level that nobody’s seen.” Trump circulated an AI-generated meme of Harris addressing a communist event. And he exclaimed, “She destroyed San Francisco. She destroyed California as the A.G…She destroyed the state of California.” Fact-check: She did not destroy California.

It’s one bullshit story after another, with the malicious intent of dehumanizing and demonizing his political rivals and large groups of people. When Trump denounced legal migrants at one rally, the audience chanted, “Send them back!” It was a real-life version of the Two Minutes Hate from George Orwell’s 1984. All told, Trump is relentlessly presenting a dark and spurious view of America—even darker and more spurious than previous iterations of the American Carnage message he has hawked—and proclaiming himself the only available savior. He is perpetuating a fraud. His electoral success is dependent on his ability to poison the national discourse and turn his fictions into reality for tens of millions of voters. And he is enthusiastically aided by a right-wing media ecosystem, a conservative movement, and a GOP that all work together to echo and affirm Trump’s deceptions, for that is how residents of MAGA-land attain influence, power, and profit. They must endorse Trump’s deceit or face being excommunicated.

“We live in a world now in which, because of social media and foreign interventions, the truth is always under assault, and that’s bound to seep into political campaigns,” says Larry Diamond, a professor of sociology and political science at Stanford who specializes in studying democracy around the world. “But to have a presidential campaign doing it on this scale—we’ve never seen anything like it. But this is not new for Trump. It’s his persona and mode of operation. In this campaign, it’s getting more chronic and extreme.”

Diamond, author of Ill Winds: Saving Democracy From Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency, points out that politicians routinely attempt to frame races and opponents. The Democrats in 2012 cast Republican Mitt Romney as a corporate raider who only wanted to fire people. The Republicans in 1988 depicted Democrat Michael Dukakis as a soft-on-crime weakling. What Trump does, Diamond notes, is different: “It’s more comprehensive. It’s more systemic. It’s more outrageous. Most of the stuff pulled by previous candidates had some relationship to a real thing. He’s completely making stuff up. It’s not just one or two lies or the twisting of the truth. This is, like that film, everything, everywhere, all at once.”

Trump’s extreme reality-distorting tactics—which he has deployed since he decried “Mexican rapists” when he announced his first presidential campaign in 2015 and which he applied to his 2020 loss and the subsequent insurrectionist riot on January 6—may be relatively new to American politics, but they have obvious comparisons. Benjamin Carter Hett, a history professor at Hunter College and author of The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic, notes that “the individual components” of Trump’s disinformation campaign “are things we have seen before.” He explains: “After Hitler and Stalin, there wasn’t much more to add about the forms of political disinformation, and there is a recognizable lineage to a lot of what Trump and his running mate JD Vance say. I am not the first to note that the eating-the-cats-and-dogs thing is not far from the ‘blood libel,’ and of course saying that if I lose, it will be the Jews’ fault is a hardy perennial. Calling Democrats Communists or Marxists is at least as old as FDR (and very similar to Hitler’s rhetoric as well). It may be that the scale of this is different—the sheer volume of this garbage—and a free media can’t seem to root it out and put a stop to it.”

“Trump is running a disinformation campaign,” confirms Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a New York University history professor who studies authoritarianism. “I also have long sustained that he is running a radicalization campaign, using his rallies since 2015 to change the way people perceive violence, to build his leader cult. It’s unprecedented even among most autocrats on the rise. People like Rodrigo Duterte, the former president of the Philippines, would tell lies about some things or target some subjects, but Trump lies about everything, on the model of the Kremlin (big surprise).”

The author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, Ben-Ghiat adds, “Trump is one of the most successful propagandists in history. He managed to convince tens of millions that he won a national election working not in a domesticated media system or a one-party state but in a fully pluralist media environment in a democracy. No one has ever done that on that scale. Also look at what he’s accomplished with the perception of January 6.”

Trump is not merely heading a campaign fueled by the routine lies of politics. He is endeavoring to use these and other lies to create an alternative reality for millions so they will vote on the basis of a false understanding of the world. “I get asked all the time how to counteract it,” Hett notes, “and I wish I had a better answer than ‘come with the truth and try to teach critical reading skills where and when you can.'” Diamond says, “What frustrates me is that I don’t know how to counter this. If you point out every single lie, it’s all you’ll be reporting. And still people will believe this.”

Trump’s disinformation con, boosted and abetted by a political party, an expansive media infrastructure, and an entire political movement, is a challenge for the United States and a test. Can his all-out war on the truth prevail? That depends on whether other media accurately portrays it, on how the rest of the political system responds to it, and on whether enough voters resist its pull. Trump has gotten far with this campaign, proving that disinformation delivered by the right carnival barker can be highly effective within America. The final vote count—and perhaps what happens afterward—will show if this nation can resolve its political divisions and differences within the realm of reason and rationality.

On Saturday, Elon Musk furthered an ongoing effort in support of Donald Trump: He went onstage to sow misinformation about the integrity of American elections.

At the former president’s campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania—in the same location where Trump narrowly survived an assassination attempt in July—Musk awkwardly took to the stage in a Black MAGA hat and a t-shirt that said “OCCUPY MARS,” jumping up and down on his way to the podium. The right-wing owner of X then falsely told the crowd that “the other side” wants “to take away your right to vote, effectively.”

Musk offered no evidence to back up that claim. (The Republican Party has in fact worked for a long time to disenfranchise voters and rig the voting system in its favor.) He lambasted a new California law that bans local governments from requiring people to present identification to vote. “I still can’t believe that’s real,” Musk said of that law and other voter ID policies in more than a dozen other states. “How are you supposed to have a good, proper election if there’s no ID? It’s just meaningless,” he claimed.

That is highly misleading: As the National Conference of State Legislatures has made clear, states without voter ID laws use other methods, such as signatures on file, to verify voters’ identities. Meanwhile, research shows that strict ID laws do not impact voter fraud—which is very rare in US elections to begin with. What impact such laws do have is reducing turnout among minority voters and deterring them from voting.

This is far from the first time Musk has spread these kinds of falsehoods. As I reported back in August, research from the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that Musk frequently spread false claims that voting is vulnerable to fraud and that Democrats are “importing voters” through illegal immigration—claims that, along with a deepfake of Vice President Kamala Harris that Musk re-posted, racked up a staggering 1.2 billion views.

Musk also repeated in a lengthy screed last week false claims about Democrats recruiting undocumented people to vote. But as my colleague Isabela Dias has reported:

Noncitizen voting is a non-issue, despite Republicans’ best efforts to make it one… a study by the Brennan Center for Justice found that in the 2016 election, election officials in 42 jurisdictions overseeing the tabulation of 23.5 million votes only referred about 30 cases of ‘suspected noncitizen voting’ for investigation or prosecution—or 0.0001 percent of votes.

Musk also repeated his baseless claims on Saturday that Democrats are censuring speech. “Free speech is the bedrock of democracy. And if people don’t know what’s going on, if they don’t know the truth, how can you make an informed vote?” he said. “You must have free speech in order to have democracy.”

Musk’s stated concerns about free speech and truth seem especially strange given that the CCDH report found that Musk’s own social media platform is an engine of disinformation. In August, five secretaries of state warned Musk about Grok, the AI-powered search assistant available to premium X subscribers, after it disseminated false information about Harris being ineligible to appear on the ballots in multiple states.