The GOP and the freedom to corrupt elections

I've been hanging on to this Washington Post article since 30 November; other insanities kept pushing it away from my focus. My procrastination in noting the story was in error — bad judgment, simple as that. Yes, insanities abound, making it impossible for our cynicism to keep up, as philosopher Lily Tomlin observed. Still, I should have commented sooner, and the Post's 30 Nov. piece should have been headline news for more than one day.

Its lede, which borders on the breathtaking: "The U.S. government has stopped warning some social networks [with more to come, most likely] about foreign disinformation campaigns on their platforms, reversing a years-long approach to preventing Russia and other actors from interfering in American politics less than a year before the U.S. presidential elections." 

Specifically, the Biden administration no longer notifies Facebook and Pinterest about "global influence campaigns" packed with political disinformation designed to weaken democracies, foment electoral discord and — the campaigns' main prize — return world authoritarians' favorite imbecile, Donald Trump, to the White House. Russia, Iran, North Korea and China's dictators rather dislike having pro-democracy competence sitting in the Oval Office.

In fact Mr. Biden is simply intolerable to these foreign goons, as he is to this nation's Republican pols. It is of course natural for the opposition party to oppose. What is unnatural in a democratic society, as well as unethical and corrupt, is for the opposition to encourage and legally abet foreign dictators' efforts to undermine America's electoral process and tip the presidential-election advantage to a homegrown dictator.

But that is precisely what Republican pols and an army of ultraconservative legal activists have been up to. Republican lawmakers "have proposed cutting funding for combating foreign disinformation," and together with their litigious conservative allies have pushed a "legal campaign against initiatives established to avoid a repeat of the 2016 election, when Russia manipulated social media in [a successful] attempt to sow chaos and swing the vote for Donald Trump." 

The dual-effort campaign has featured "a barrage of lawsuits [such as Missouri v. Biden] ... and online attacks" on the administration's attempts to weed out foreign disinformation. Combined, wrote the Post, the pro-election-interference campaign is "having a chilling effect on programs intended to combat... election misinformation."  

Mark Warner, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, has characterized it all as "legal warfare by far-right actors." I question its "potentiality" over inevitability, given a major Trump-friendly appeals court ruling so far, nevertheless Warner added that "We are seeing a potential scenario where all the major improvements in identifying, threat-sharing, and public exposure of foreign malign influence activity targeting U.S. elections have been systematically undermined."

That will have been but Phase One. Phase Two will be the systematic destruction of American democracy by domestic actors. The influence of malign foreign powers will no longer be needed. If successful next November, Trump Inc. will exclusively take it from there.