2024 is the Trench Warfare Election

Despite near constant chaos and upheaval, very little has changed

Sep 19, 2024

All right, let’s do this one last time. In the space of four weeks, the incumbent president was dethroned from his nomination and replaced by his running mate, in a behind the scenes coup led by the most powerful person in the party (who still insists on the absurd claim it was an “open primary”). Within that time, the nation witnessed the first of not one but two assassination attempts targeting his opponent, the former president who has faced a thermonuclear level of lawfare in an attempt to seize everything he owns and put him behind bars. Convicted of thirty four felony counts in a bizarre legal theory advanced by partisan opponents, he now faces sentencing post-election — as does the current president’s ne’er do well son, widely expected to receive a presidential pardon despite the White House’s promises to the contrary.

The choices of running mate have been widely viewed as major missed opportunities for both candidates. J.D. Vance contributed a bounce so small it may have been negative, reframing the culture war debate in “single cat lady” terms that made Democrats salivate and Taylor Swift veer left. And the choice of Tim Walz over a stronger rising star like Josh Shapiro has Democrats worried about Pennsylvania, the most important state of the cycle. Walz’s story, so appealing on initial glance, crumbled into pieces in the month since he was chosen — from his lack of combat military service to his tenuous football connection to his lies about the use of IVF. His far-left DFL progressivism paired with a fear of interviews at both the top and bottom of the ticket has left the Kamala Harris campaign reliant on partisan rallies and surrogates in the media — leaving her far underwater with independent voters who remain unsure of what she’ll even do as president.

The second presidential debate, watched by 67 million people, could’ve been a point where Harris laid these concerns to rest. The Democrat-leaning press and commentators were ebullient after her performance, believing it would be a huge boost to the campaign. Instead, the polling averages had at most a one point nudge (in Nate Silver’s average, she went from a 2.2 polling advantage on the day before the debate to 2.9 today). She leads in averages by enough to guarantee another popular vote win, but not by enough to leave any Democrat feeling comfortable about the Electoral College. And her problems with key Democratic groups — lagging Joe Biden among black men and Hispanics in particular — don’t seem to be going away no matter how many new accents she deploys. The “joy” just isn’t there for these voters.

The big news this week is the decision by the Teamsters, representing 1.3 million members, to for the first time in almost a quarter century not endorse the Democratic candidate for president. Independent surveys showed their members solidly supporting Donald Trump over Harris, by 59.6 to 34 percent. The decision not to endorse is really a dodge — their members have a clear tilt toward Trump, and it’s calling into question her campaign’s decision to focus more on the “care economy” than manufacturing and industry, in part because that’s what their candidate is comfortable talking about.

It has been without question the most chaotic presidential election of the modern era, and it’s not over yet. But the battle lines are hardened, and they really haven’t shifted. Americans might be on edge, but they are remarkably consistent in their views, priorities, and attitudes toward both sides. It’s a thin strip of no man’s land that will decide this election, and the people wandering in it right now are torn between two sides that don’t seem interested in speaking to them. They’re too busy trading shots online.

Censorship for Profit

Ashley Rindsberg in Pirate Wires.

The market for identifying, monitoring, and reporting on MDM has caught the attention of venture capital. London-based startup Logically, which “develops advanced AI to fight misinformation at scale,” has raised $37 million over four rounds. Fake news detection company Factmata, whose investors included Biz Stone, Craig Newmark and Mark Cuban, was acquired in 2022 for an undisclosed amount. Clarity, which identifies AI generated deep fakes, raised $16 million earlier this year in a round led by Bessemer Partners and Walden Catalyst. Reken, a startup created by the former head of Google’s product trust and safety “that protects against generative AI threats,” raised $10 million in a round led by Greycroft and FPV Ventures. And ActiveFence, which "empowers Trust & Safety and online security professionals,” has raised $100 million. According to Crunchbase, a group of just 16 misinformation startups have raised a combined upward of $300 million over the past few years alone.
For most of these companies, government is both the first and primary customer. Logically had a number of contracts with the UK government worth a combined $1.3 million, awarded by its National Security Online Information Team (NSOIT), formerly known as the Counter Disinformation Unit. Among the misinformation offenders identified by NSOIT using technology like that provided by Logically was a tweet by Dr. Alex de Figueiredo, a research fellow at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, questioning whether the COVID-19 vaccine is necessary for children. In another instance, NSOIT flagged an interview by a well-known British journalist, Julia Hartley-Brewer, with a caller who was sharing their experience of suffering under Britain’s COVID-19 lockdowns. The purpose of NSOIT, which rebranded last year after public and official criticism, “is to understand disinformation narratives and attempts to artificially manipulate the information environment to ensure that the government understands the scope and reach of harmful mis and disinformation and can take appropriate action.”
According to UK free speech watchdog Big Brother Watch, Logically was found providing reports to the NSOIT on British citizens — including Big Brother Watch’s own executive director — who post content, or even just like posts, deemed objectionable. Logically was also caught reporting Julia Hartley-Brewer to the government for tweeting in 2021 statistics on cancer deaths during the pandemic — statistics supplied by the government’s own Office for National Statistics — since cancer charities had been noting the negative impact of lockdowns on treatment.
“I do think there's a massive boom in the proliferation of these fact checking companies or counter disinformation, AI-based companies,” said Mark Johnson, an advocacy manager at Big Brother Watch, with whom I spoke in late August on Zoom. Johnson’s name was also flagged by a Logically report to NSOIT for tweeting a link to a parliamentary petition opposing vaccine passports.
“They are tapping into a wider kind of trend, which is essentially censoring — the platforms and other big players will say ‘moderating’ — but really censoring speech based on its perceived veracity and accuracy,” he said. “This is a trend that's happening across the western world at the moment.”
In the US, collaboration between for-profit MDM companies and government runs even deeper. In 2021, the Department of Defense awarded a $979 million contract to Peraton to “counter misinformation” on behalf of United States Central Command, the Department of Defense command responsible for the Middle East and Asia. Peraton was formed after its parent, Veritas Capital (which briefly owned Raytheon Aerospace in the early 2000s) acquired an IT services business from Northrop Grumman. In 2018, major social media platforms including Google, Facebook and Twitter began disabling thousands of accounts and pages that had been identified as purveyors of MDM by a company called Fire Eye, which likened itself to “a private-sector intelligence operation.” The analogy cut close to the bone: one of Fire Eyes' backers is IQT, the venture capital firm owned by the CIA tasked with developing innovation for the agency.

We Live in an Age of Scams

Alana Semuels in TIME.

That specific kind of grift is known as an impostor scam. A perpetrator reaches out, pretending to be a government official, a bank representative, or a law-enforcement agent. Impostor scams like the one Cotelingham fell victim to were responsible for nearly half of all frauds reported to the FTC in 2023, with about 490,000 people reporting them. Americans said they lost $1.1 billion to impostor scams last year, three times what they lost in 2020.
The success of the impostor scam illuminates another reason criminals are able to bilk Americans today. Our trust in institutions has collapsed, making it easier for scammers to pose as authority figures, says Stacey Wood, a fraud expert and professor at Scripps College in California. “Authority can look very different now,” Wood says. “If someone is skeptical of the U.S. government, they often trust someone else—who can scam them.” …
There were 3,205 reported data breaches impacting around 353 million people in 2023, according to the Identity Theft Resource Center. As a result, many of our Social Security numbers, addresses, phone numbers, or affinity-group memberships are available to resourceful scammers. One California family, who requested anonymity for fear of being bilked again, lost $400,000 when a scammer, armed with one of their Social Security numbers, called Bank of America 16 different times to try to change the password and information on an account, according to the family’s lawyer, Nick Barthel. Fifteen bank representatives refused, but the 16th was duped, according to Barthel, who says the scammer wired the family’s savings out of the account. The bank has not refunded the family, Barthel says. (Bank of America says it cannot comment on pending litigation. Police eventually found the perpetrator, but he was deceased and the money was nowhere to be found.) “This could happen to anybody,” says Barthel. “All the guy needed was the basic information you would get from a data breach.”
This data often finds its way onto messaging apps like Telegram, says Frank McKenna, co-founder of PointPredictive, an AI firm that detects frauds. Cybercriminals can buy and sell tutorials and scripts for scamming people, as well as victims’ personal information. For $500, you can purchase a live scamming class, 25,000 U.S. phone numbers, and instructions for sending spam links, according to a report from the security firm Guard.Io. “Social media platforms like Telegram began to emerge as these hubs of scam knowledge and transfer,” McKenna says. (Telegram CEO Pavel Durov was taken into custody in Paris on Aug. 24 and faces charges stemming from the platform’s alleged role in enabling criminal activity; Durov calls the charges “misguided.”)
Scam syndicates exist all over the world, from Southeast Asia to Mexico to the Middle East, says Marti DeLiema, a professor who studies scams at the University of Minnesota’s School of Social Work. “This is the new mafia,” DeLiema says. The work can be lucrative. A 2024 report by the U.S. Institute of Peace found that transnational criminal networks based in Southeast Asia steal $64 billion annually through scams. In Myanmar, according to the report, there are “scam compounds” where people who have been lured by fake online job ads are held prisoner and forced to make calls to try to swindle Americans.
The rise of artificial intelligence has been a boon for these scammers. A decade ago, you might have been the target of a poorly written email from someone claiming to be a Nigerian prince and asking for money to help them regain access to their wealth. Today, AI helps non-English speakers write more convincing missives. The technology can also be used to copy voices and likenesses to convince people that their family members are in danger. That’s what happened to Fauzia Vandermeer.
Vandermeer, a 51-year-old radiologist who lives in Baltimore, received a call earlier this year from a number she didn’t recognize. She ignored it, but the person called again, so Vandermeer picked up, worried that something had happened to a family member. She heard the sound of her sister’s voice, sobbing and asking for help.
“I was totally freaking out,” Vandermeer remembers. The voice that resembled her sister’s told Vandermeer that she was at a Walmart and had gotten into an accident. Then a man came on the line. He said that Vandermeer’s sister had hit his van, which had kilos of drugs in it, and that he needed to be compensated. Vandermeer was in her car, ready to drive to the Walmart, when the man told her that the matter needed to be dealt with “sensitively,” she says. Suspicious, Vandermeer asked one of her children to try to locate her sister, which they did with the Find My Friend function on their iPhone. Vandermeer’s sister was at home. Vandermeer sidestepped the scam, but says she easily could have been victimized. “To hear a loved one on the phone, crying for help,” she says, “immediately you are kicked into this stress response.”