Attention to the Unseen

Rolling Stone reports: Of all the strange, conspiratorial, and potentially dangerous theories Donald Trump and his allies came up with in the days after the 2020 election, this was the strangest, the most conspiratorial, the most potentially dangerous. Millions of electronic ballots for Trump had been “deleted,” and hundreds of thousands more had been “switched” to Joe Biden, Trump and his cronies in media, political, and legal circles insisted — thanks to software designed at the behest of Venezuelan dictator…

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Robert Kagan writes: If Nikki Haley is serious about trying to stop Trump […], there is only one way to cut into his mammoth majority, and that is by raising doubts about Trump’s electability. The way to do that is to warn those Republicans still capable of listening that a Trump presidency really does pose a risk to our freedom and democracy and the Constitution. That is what will be required to win over the small percentage of Republicans who…

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Tom Nichols writes: If Donald Trump wins the next election, he will attempt to turn the men and women of the United States armed forces into praetorians loyal not to the Constitution, but only to him. This project will likely be among his administration’s highest priorities. It will not be easy: The overwhelming majority of America’s service people are professionals and patriots. I know this from teaching senior officers for 25 years at the Naval War College. As president, Trump…

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Chris Knight writes: In a world where money talks, we’re often faced with a harsh choice – compromise on a point of principle or find ourselves out of work. One way or another, many of us have been there. To keep body and soul together, one version of ourselves colludes with the prevailing powers while another indignantly resists. In 1955, Chomsky found himself in just such a situation. He had a PhD in linguistics but was unable to get a…

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Wired reports: For months, GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has been dog-whistling to supporters of extremist far-right ideologies and wild conspiracy theories like QAnon. On Wednesday night, at the fourth Republican presidential debate, Ramaswamy went full tilt: After blasting the three other debaters for turning on former president Donald Trump, Ramaswamy argued, without evidence, that the January 6 Capitol riot was an inside job, the 2020 presidential election was stolen, the government had lied about 9/11, and the “deep state”…

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The Guardian reports: Russian spies have been targeting British MPs, peers, civil servants, journalists and others with cyber-hacking since 2015 as part of a concerted attempt to meddle in British politics, a Foreign Office minister has said. Leo Docherty, a minister under David Cameron, told the House of Commons that the Russian federal security service was using “cyber interference” to target politically connected people. He said one Russian group was behind the 2018 hack on the Institute for Statecraft, and…

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Thomas B. Edsall writes: The predictive power of horse-race polling a year from the presidential election is weak at best. The Biden campaign can take some comfort in that. But what recent surveys do reveal is that the coalition that put Joe Biden in the White House in the first place is nowhere near as strong as it was four years ago. These danger signs include fraying support among core constituencies, including young voters, Black voters and Hispanic voters, and…

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David Frum writes: If Trump is elected, it very likely won’t be with a majority of the popular vote. Imagine the scenario: Trump has won the Electoral College with 46 percent of the vote because third-party candidates funded by Republican donors successfully splintered the anti-Trump coalition. Having failed to win the popular vote in each of the past three elections, Trump has become president for the second time. On that thin basis, his supporters would try to execute his schemes…

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