It's All About The Racism... And Fear

A new poll for ABC News by Ipsos, isn't indicating that the conventions changed anyone's mind about Trump or Biden. Ipsos concluded that among all all Americans who watched at least some of the GOP convention-- about half of the voters-- responses to the RNC are more negative than the DNC. "Slightly more than one in three Americans (37%) approve of what the Republicans said and did at their convention, compared to 59% who disapprove. After the DNC, 53% approved of the Democrats’ message... Biden’s and Trump’s standings, along with their running mates, remains unchanged from after the DNC. Currently, 31% of Americans feel favorable toward Donald Trump, unchanged from last week (32%) and similar to his standing before both conventions (35%). The same is true for Joe Biden: 46% feel favorable, virtually the same as last week (45%). However, more Americans feel positive toward Biden than negative, an improvement from earlier in August. Just over a third of Americans (35%) approve of how Trump is handling the response to the coronavirus, unchanged from the end of July (34%)."

So what's a Republican operative class gonna do? Fear's worked for them in the past... and it's a natch for Trump. And racism... another Trump forte. NBC News had a cute report up late last week about how Twitter is trying to stop a Trump campaign spam operation that pushes messages from fake accounts about Black people abandoning the Democratic Party.

The fake accounts were purported to be run by Black people whose viral tweets received tens of thousands of shares in the past month. One of the accounts, @WentDemToRep, logged over 11,000 retweets on a single tweet that claimed that the user was a lifelong Democrat who was pushed to vote Republican by the Black Lives Matter movement. The tweet was posted shortly after the account was created Tuesday.

The WentDemToRep account quickly tagged two other accounts in a reply, @PeterGammo and @KRon619, which were suspended at the same time Tuesday. The Twitter spokesperson said all three accounts were suspended for spam and, "specifically, artificially manipulative behavior."

Disinformation experts and national security agencies are gearing up for the election, anticipating that social media platforms will continue to be central to foreign and domestic efforts to mislead voters.

The fake accounts, which used the images of Black men for their profile pictures, had five separate posts with at least 10,000 retweets. Recent attempts to co-opt the identities of African Americans to simulate support for President Donald Trump in the run-up to the election have had success online, researchers say.

The profile picture from WentDemToRep was stolen from the Instagram page of Nelis Joustra, a model who worked to get the fake account deleted.

...Brandi Collins-Dexter, a fellow at Color Of Change, an online racial justice nonprofit, said trolls' simulating the identities of African Americans is a coordinated practice that has been a common trope over the last decade for those trying to delegitimize social justice causes.

"The point is to provide ammunition against Black people for policymakers so they can point to things that are being said, allegedly from a Black person's account, to reinforce the idea that Black Lives Matter is a terrorist threat and put them on equal footing as white nationalists in terms of content moderation," Collins-Dexter said.

There is a decades-long history of non-Black actors posing as African Americans on social media. In 2016, Russia's Internet Research Agency "troll farm" targeted Black voters to depress turnout for Hillary Clinton, according to American intelligence agencies and bipartisan House and Senate reports.

Collins-Dexter also noted a coordinated campaign from the extremist website 4chan in April to pose as African Americans on Twitter who had just received COVID-19 stimulus checks. The fake accounts would thank the president for the checks, then brag about using them on alcohol, in "an effort to perpetuate the 'Welfare Queen' myth," Collins-Dexter said.

With Trump encouraging his KKK-like supporters to bring chaos and violence into the streets, in the hope of causing enough fear and backlash to reelect him, Biden barely understands how to push back at all. He seems torn and uncomfortable and might prefer taking a more rote "law and order" stance himself.

Frank Rich is a pretty perceptive observer of contemporary politics and he's come to the conclusion that Trump and his Republicans have decided their best shot at reelection is to just play the racist card-- heavy... and to the exclusion of anything else. Rich wrote that "During a week of police violence and vigilante murder in Wisconsin, in a year of preventable deaths and growing poverty, the Republican convention emphasized loyalty to Donald Trump, casting aside matters of policy and campaign law in favor of grievance. Was the convention just another concession to his outsize ego, part of the strategy to energize the party’s base in the run-up to November, or an attempt to win over undecided voters?" Like many Americans, Rich is worried that Trump could win and worried that if he loses "he would stop at nothing to take an already teetering country down with him."

The RNC was so boring Wednesday night that Tucker Carlson cut away early on, ditching the nattering Tennessee congresswoman Marsha Blackburn so he could launch into his now notorious defense of Kyle Rittenhouse’s killing spree in Kenosha: “How shocked are we that 17-year-olds with rifles decided they had to maintain order when no one else would?” At that instant, Carlson, implicitly speaking for Trump, the Republican Party, and its media enforcer, Fox News, crystalized what message mattered most about this convention and what message will matter most in Trump’s campaign over the crucial two months to come. As Trump would define it in a rare moment of focus during his endless drone of an acceptance speech, a vote for Joe Biden is a vote to “give free rein to violent anarchists and agitators and criminals who threaten our citizens.” The corollary, stated directly by Carlson and repeatedly embraced by Trump, is that arms-bearing white Americans can’t be faulted for wanting to take the law into their own hands.

For “anarchists and agitators and criminals,” read “Black people.” This racially tinged “law and order” message is nothing new either for Trump or a GOP that has been pursuing a “Southern strategy” since Richard Nixon codified it half a century ago. As many have noted, Trump is at a logical disadvantage in using it since, unlike Nixon, he is the incumbent president and the disorder he keeps decrying is happening on his watch. But what grabbed my attention on the convention’s sleepy third night was how Trump, on the ropes in summer polling, is nonetheless determined to take that message to a new and even more dangerous level by fomenting racial violence if need be. He will not only continue to boost arms-bearing white vigilantes as he has from Charlottesville to Portland, but, when all else fails, unabashedly pin white criminality on Black Lives Matter protesters.

Literally so. While the unrest in Kenosha was referenced repeatedly on Wednesday night, no one mentioned that the violence was all committed by white men: Rittenhouse, and Rusten Sheskey, the police officer who shot Jacob Blake seven times in the back while his three young sons looked on. Then along came Pence to raise the ante in his closing address. While trying to pound in the fear that Biden will coddle and encourage violent thugs, he brought up the ominous example of an officer who had been “shot and killed during the riots in Oakland, California.” The implication, of course, was that the officer had been killed by black rioters in that “Democratic-run city” when in fact the victim was murdered by a member of the far-right extremist movement known as “boogaloo” boys.

Next to this incendiary strategy, the other manifest sins of the week, though appalling, seem less consequential as we approach the crucial post–Labor Day campaign. They did keep those of us in the press busy. The news media were unstinting in calling out every lie and alternative fact in every speech as well as every violation of the Hatch Act. Full notice was paid to every shameless rhetorical feint and stunt contrived to create an alternative reality in which the coronavirus and mask-wearing are in the past tense, the decimated economy is about to skyrocket, and Trump is a champion of both immigration (even from what he calls “shithole countries”) and health care covering preexisting conditions. But aside from the 42 percent or so who consistently approve of Trump no matter what he or those around him do, most other Americans will see for themselves whether COVID-19 has evaporated or their economic security has improved this fall. Those are realities that Trump, for all his subterfuge, cannot alter. But racial animus is a less tangible and more enduring factor in America’s political fortunes, and it has been a toxic wild card in every modern election.

...Biden had it exactly right when he characterized this plan on Thursday by calling out Trump for “pouring gasoline on the fire” and “rooting for more violence, not less.” That was true from day one of the convention, when the gun-toting St. Louis couple, the McCloskeys, were given a prominent spot in the festivities. The rifle that Mark McCloskey pointed toward Black Lives Matter protesters in St. Louis, an AR-15, was the same that Kyle Rittenhouse fired at protesters in Kenosha the following night.

But it’s not enough for Biden to identify the strategy that is being unleashed to derail him, and it shouldn’t have taken him most of the week to get to the point. He’s in a fight for his and the country’s life. A Democratic campaign that was pitched most of all on targeting Trump’s criminally negligent response to the pandemic must now pivot to combat the most lethal of all American viruses, racism, in its most weaponized strain.