The Weirdest Election. Ever
With its wild cast of conspiracy characters led by a Kennedy defending Putin, the 2024 US Presidential Election is bathed in the dark waters of disinformation argues Charles Kriel.
The 2024 US Presidential election will be the weirdest election any of us have experienced in our lifetime. It will also be unnerving for women and minorities, vital to global security, and existential for contemporary democracy.
At least two candidates will stand for their respective parties — a sitting president who would be 83 at his second inauguration, and a former president who might well be imprisoned when he wins office.
On the Republican side, the likely nominee faces 34-and-counting felony charges, his nearest challenger polling 21.3% (at this writing) in a Trump-DeSantis battle to see who can out-fasc the other.
For the Democrats, the sitting, ageing President and his hugely unpopular running mate are equally challenged by a Kennedy polling 20%.
But in this election, weird don’t lie. Neither do the numbers.
Three out of four of the candidates are wild conspiracy theorists. Three out of four say they would lock up their enemies; DeSantis has proven he would. And three out of four view the media, the military and COVID-19 mandates as the enemy.
Looking back, half the leading candidates will probably even have been felons – Robert F Kennedy Jr pleaded guilty to felony heroin possession in 1984, and with Trump conviction is just a matter of time.
God help us if KanYe runs.
But what truly binds DeSantis, Trump and Kennedy together — aside from their serious and serial apologist stances on Putin — is their near fever for the spread of disinformation. And perhaps because of it, all three are embraced by Far Right political operatives, from Steve Bannon to Roger Stone.
Authoritarianism and disinformation work together like a horse and carriage, but how did we get this far? How have we collectively landed in an election where one of the most competent Presidents of modern times finds himself meandering through a maelstrom of his own unpopularity, mixed with a demon of a disinformation assault, driven on both sides by Democrats and Republicans alike?
Before the 2016 campaign, “fake news” had barely made it into the common vocabulary. We spoke of misinformation, but rarely of disinformation, much less malinformation. Mary Wollstonecraft, one of Britain's first great feminist writers, discovered around 1793 the term “les fausse nouvelles” — fake news — used to discredit and dehumanise the so-called enemies of the French Revolutionary Government. Typically, “étrangers” like Wollstonecraft herself.
But Trump brought “fake news” into common English use, just as a shift in mobile phone habits and business models delivered the use case.
Disinformation Warfare and Wagner
In the years running up to the 2016 President election, Web 2.0 – the social web – migrated to mobile, impacting the platforms riding on the internet’s backbone. Up to that point, Facebook's primary source of revenue had been in-app purchases in browser-based games like FarmVille and Mafia Wars authored in Flash by independent developers. But Flash wouldn’t run in mobile operating systems. Thus, the rise of mobile around 2014 significantly shifted users’ habits and caused a decrease in both online gaming, and Facebook's revenues.
The platform pivoted to ads, and by 2016 mobile accounted for 84% of Facebook's ad revenue.
But the move to mobile advertising had notable repercussions. Facebook's newsfeed algorithm was rewritten — and whether intentional or not, it began favouring sensational, divisive, and inaccurate content in order to boost user engagement. The contagion began to spread.
The word “disinformation” probably comes from the Russian “dezinformacija”, said to have been coined by Josef Stalin for the title of a KGB black propaganda department – is there any other colour? Wanting to claim the department had Western origins, he gave it a name he thought sounded French.
Simultaneous to the shifts in Silicon Valley monetization models, Russia under Vladimir Putin was shifting its geopolitical sights and changing its strategy. Where there had been talk of Russia joining NATO not once but twice, now Putin would no longer lean in to Europe, he’d lean on Ukraine instead.
As Putin planned the invasion of Ukraine, another Russian figure began to rise — one unfamiliar to most until last week — the leader of the Wagner Group’s aborted mercenary mutiny, Yevgeny Viktorovich Prigozhin.
Originally a hot dog vendor, Prigozhin gradually rose to prominence, managing a network of businesses, including a catering company that served Kremlin events. Prigozhin made Putin and his impoverished Russia look good to visiting dignitaries. He became known as "Putin's chef,” forging close ties with Putin, himself a one-time taxi driver.
In 2013, the year before he co-founded Wagner, Prigozhin created the Internet Research Agency in Saint Petersburg.
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