Friday Round Up! 9/13/24

It was a good week, but we can't get complacent.

I don’t know about you, but I had an extra spring in my step after the presidential debate last week. It’s hard to pick my favorite moment — there were so many. But I think saying straight into the camera that “Donald Trump was fired by 81 million people” followed by the look of utter pity while saying that “clearly he is having a very difficult time processing that” might be up there at the top. What was yours?

Although Harris mopped the floor with Trump, victory in November is going to be an uphill battle. This is partly because of possible issues on the domestic front — including MAGA loyalists who have been placed in state electoral positions, like Georgia’s State Election Board. These folks have the power to potentially muck up or cast doubt on election outcomes, which would set the stage for Trump claiming that any Harris victory is “rigged.” (To be clear, he is going to do that regardless, but having third parties suggesting that there are “voter irregularities” provides the kind of legitimizing propaganda Trump tried to create in the 2020 election with his attempted shakedown of President Zelensky in 2019 and his phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in January 2021.)

On the foreign front, there is no doubt that Trump will receive an assist from his pal Pooty in the Kremlin. Just yesterday, the State Department issued a global advisory, alerting the public that Russia’s overt propaganda arm, RT, possesses cyber capabilities and is engaged in covert information and influence operations and military procurement activities. According to the notice, RT has been attempting to covertly influence elections in Moldova and is also active in Africa, Europe, and Latin America.

The State Department is external facing, so it didn’t mention U.S. elections, but the Justice Department secured convictions last week in its prosecution of four U.S. citizens acting as agents of Russia who were involved in influencing a local Florida election, which I wrote about here. And as I wrote about in last week’s round up, DOJ issued an indictment against two RT employees who were part of a complex social media influence campaign here in the U.S. ahead of the election. These cases suggest that there is much more Russia has in mind for November…I will not be surprised if we see more operations exposed in the coming month and a half.

I did a deeper dive into RT’s U.S. content creation operation for

Joyce Vance

’s Substack — the paywall for that post will be removed on Wednesday, if you are not a paid subscriber and want to check it out. (I’ll link back to it in next week’s round up.) In the meantime, Renato and I discussed whether the influencers in that case were really “victims” in this past week’s pod:

Articles worth reading:

• I have a new class lesson coming up that will explain why the immigrant pet eating hoax persists, despite being fact checked to death, but in the meantime, this NBC piece tracing how the rumor got started is worth a read

Upcoming events:

• Zoom Office Hours, Friday, September 27, 9-10 a.m. We’ll discuss the latest. Zoom link will be sent three hours before the discussion. This will not be recorded.

• Freedom Academy Book Club with Yale Professor Jason Stanley, author of Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future, Date/Time TBA (late October/early November). I’m soooooo excited that my friend and colleague Jason Stanley will be joining us to discuss his new book, which was released just last week! We’ll have this book discussion right before the election, to remind us what’s at stake. The Freedom Academy Book Club discussions are open to all paid subscribers and recordings of the talks are posted afterwards in case you can’t make it live.

  Not sure what the weather is like where you are, but it’s gorgeous here and I’m going to enjoy it while it lasts — have a wonderful weekend!