Battling the Big Lie

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Canaries in the Information Coal Mines

My entire career in politics has been on the front lines of this battle. Unfortunately, it has taken me years¹ to fully comprehend what we are up against.

When I started more than twenty years ago, there was order to the communications chaos. The internet was new. Mark Zuckerberg had yet to unleash his relentless greed and invasive algorithms on the world. Most people got their news from the same newsstands and the same coffee spots. On my first major campaign, the 2000 presidential election between Al Gore and George W. Bush, the staff gathered at the end of every day to watch the evening news together. What aired on NBC, ABC, and CBS was our most reliable barometer of how the public was viewing the campaign. If the coverage was good for us, it meant we were winning. If the coverage was bad, we were losing. The Republican campaign engaged in the same exercise at the same time with the same calculus. Voters—Republicans, Democrats, and independents—passed judgment on the candidates based on the same information delivered from the same sources. While America was—as it has always been—quite divided, that division existed as a disagreement over a shared set of facts and a mutual understanding of the challenges.

Fox News was around back then. Internet news sites existed, but they were an ancillary part of politics. When I traveled to staff an event or attend a debate, I neglected my emails for up to a week.² If someone needed me, they would page me, and I would call them back on a pay phone or a landline—the campaign did not issue cell phones to all staff. Our rapid-response operation involved a “tracker,” who would follow Bush around the country to videotape his remarks in the hope of catching the candidate in a gaffe we could exploit in campaign ads. This is still a central part of campaigns, but rapid is a relative term. After capturing Bush on tape, the tracker would have to drive to a FedEx office and overnight the tape back to headquarters, where our research staff would watch it in its entirety—on a VCR! The researchers would then send notes to the communications staff. Our response would come twenty-four to forty-eight hours later.

By 2004, things had changed dramatically. That year, I worked in South Dakota. The goal was to reelect Tom Daschle, the Democratic Senate majority leader and top Republican target. Before the GOP demagogued Nancy Pelosi, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Ilhan Omar, Tom Daschle was Republicans’ enemy number one. Daschle was the face of the Democratic Party and was running for reelection in a red state. South Dakota was rapidly getting redder. A brutal race ensued, with millions of dollars’ worth of negative ads running for well over a year. Republicans saw an opportunity to take out one of their leading antagonists. No Senate leader had lost reelection in a half century. The stakes were high, and the rhetoric was heated. At one point, the campaign manager for John Thune, Daschle’s opponent, got in my face so aggressively that the assembled press thought we were about to come to blows.³ That campaign also marks the first time I encountered disinformation as a political strategy.

Two years before, Tim Johnson, the state’s other Democratic senator, defeated Thune by a margin of 524 votes. Thune had been recruited to run by Karl Rove and George W. Bush. He was a self-proclaimed high school basketball legend⁴ and a rising political star. Republicans could not fathom how their golden boy lost to Johnson, a senator with a relatively low profile, Republicans were unwilling to accept the legitimacy of the election. They blamed two things: voter fraud on the state’s Native American reservations and media bias. During his presidency, Trump ran this 2004 playbook, but he didn’t write it.

South Dakota is a sparsely populated state with a minuscule media footprint.⁵ There are only two media markets and, during that campaign, fewer than a dozen daily newspapers.⁶ The most influential of these outlets was the Sioux Falls Argus Leader. The Argus Leader was the largest newspaper in the state and the only one with the resources to cover politics locally and in Washington. As far back as Tom Daschle’s 1978 election to Congress, South Dakota Republicans were convinced that the Argus Leader was pro-Democrat and pro-Daschle.

With Thune running against Daschle, Republicans planned to neutralize the perceived Democratic advantage in the media. Early in the campaign, a series of blogs covering the race popped up under generic names like South Dakota Politics and Daschle v. Thune. Most of the blogs’ contributors remained anonymous, and their content was a steady stream of anti-Daschle propaganda and accusations of bias against the Argus Leader, its editor, and David Kranz, the state’s leading political columnist. As the campaign went on, these blogs became a larger part of the political conversation. Unprompted, reporters brought them up with me, asking for a response to this accusation or that allegation. It didn’t matter that the blogs were nothing more than the rantings of online activists. Many in South Dakota treated them as part of the legitimate media. The Argus Leader was shaken. Its credibility and integrity were at risk. Its editors had let the conservative blogs bully them into assigning a reporter with near-zero political experience to cover a high-profile campaign. This decision had dramatic implications. Throughout the campaign, the paper responded to the criticism by overcompensating with negative stories about Daschle.

The bloggers, whose identities as GOP activists and Thune supporters eventually emerged, gathered at a conference in Sioux Falls to pass a resolution regarding the Argus Leader. They wrote: “WHEREAS, the Sioux Falls Argus Leader has become a powerful print media monopoly in Southeastern South Dakota; WHEREAS, a pattern of chronic political bias has been uncovered at the Argus Leader; WHEREAS, many stories reported nationally which are critical of US senator Tom Daschle are not reported by the Argus Leader.” The bloggers even developed a partnership with Jeff Gannon, a reporter from an unknown website called Talon News, to publish a series of investigative pieces that came directly from the Thune campaign’s opposition research. It emerged later that Talon News was a conservative front organization and that Gannon was operating under a pseudonym to obscure his past as a paid escort.⁷

This all seemed like small-time mischief. I was annoyed by the secrecy and weaseling of these conservative players, but dismissive of the broader political impact. I believed this was a rare, one-off incident.

I was dead wrong.

One of the blogs “broke” a blockbuster story reminiscent of the sort of absurd, but lethally effective disinformation present in the Trump era. The blog Daschle v. Thune claimed that Daschle had promised to support the return of the Black Hills of South Dakota to the Sioux Nation in exchange for the voter turnout necessary to win the election.

Now, South Dakota has a sordid history of discrimination and demagoguery toward its Native American population. Traditionally, upward of 9 in 10 votes from the Native American reservations located in the state went to Democrats. Painting Democrats as too friendly to the community was a tried-and-true GOP tactic, but there was no evidence to support the outrageous charge.⁸ Though based on specious hearsay and anonymous sources, the charge rocketed through the political community and was picked up by the national conservative press. Future Trump flunkies, like radio host Hugh Hewitt, amplified the boom of disinformation.

My approach to this conspiracy theory came out of the crisis communications playbook of the day: Ignore it lest you give it more oxygen. I did not want to feed the fire. I could not have known that the embers were already hot and primed to burn.

While political junkies and media types checked these blogs several times a day, the public barely knew they existed, and few cared about what they reported. This notion comforted me until I sat down in a dingy conference room in a run-down hotel in Rapid City to watch a focus group of undecided South Dakota voters. I love focus groups. They are far from a perfect tool, but if you watch enough of them, you can get a real feel for how your voters are thinking. These groups usually make you feel a little better about politics. Most voters, you’ll find, live in blissful ignorance of the dumb shit that drives cable TV and gossipy websites like Politico.⁹ I was a bit cocky, and confident that this focus group would validate my belief that these blogs that sucked up so much of my time, that lied and pandered, were inconsequential.

Most of the focus group participants had previously voted for Daschle but were now undecided. When the moderator asked them why they were questioning their previous support for Daschle, one older woman with a classic South Dakota accent and slightly blue hair said, “Well, I love Tom, but I don’t know why he wants to give away the Black Hills.”

Holy shit, I thought. What are the odds that we’ve ended up with one of the tiny handful of blog readers in our focus group?

But then the man sitting next to her chimed in: “I was wondering that, too. Tom has been to my farm, and the Tom I knew would never do that. Washington has changed him.”

Fuck. It was then that I realized Daschle might lose. Something bigger was going on, and I had completely missed it. The old rules didn’t apply anymore.

When Thune narrowly won, the conservative bloggers did a victory lap, patting themselves on the back. They believed they were grassroots journalists taking on the powerful Democratic elite. But that Black Hills story was bullshit. This wasn’t journalism, and it wasn’t grassroots. After the election, it was revealed that two of the bloggers, Jason Van Beek and Jon Lauck, were paid by the Thune campaign for their work taking down Daschle and bludgeoning the local media. This was a campaign stoked by an alternative media ecosystem. It was the first of its kind, but it would not be the last.

I can’t blame this initiative completely for Daschle’s loss. This was a tough year for the Democrats, and South Dakota is a tough state, but I am sure this disinformation played a role. After the election was over, I swore I would never get caught off guard again.

Flash-forward to 2007. I am living in Chicago and working for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. Obama represented a unique threat to the political order. He challenged Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, among others, for the Democratic nomination. Only a few years removed from the Illinois state senate, Obama rose to the top of the presidential field in an entirely new fashion. With few connections to the party establishment and a sparse Rolodex of the big-money donors, he had not climbed the traditional ladder. Obama’s speech to the 2004 Democratic National Convention turned him into a political rock star overnight. This level of instant celebrity—especially for a politician—was impossible before the age of the internet. Most people missed Obama’s speech, but they were able to watch it later on YouTube and news websites. Links to the video were forwarded via email and embedded in blogs.

The Republican Party, with its sordid history of weaponizing racial grievance, saw both an existential threat and a unique opportunity in Obama’s candidacy. Before Obama formally announced his campaign, Fox News launched the first attack. The network’s morning show, Fox and Friends, has all the accoutrements of a typical news program while being a right-wing clown show. Steve Doocy, one of the hosts, regurgitated an allegation that Obama had been educated in a madrassa when he lived in Indonesia as a child. No evidence was presented to back up the statement. At this point, Brian Kilmeade, one of the cohosts, offered this line: “Maybe he doesn’t consider terrorists the enemy. Well, we’ll see about that.”¹⁰

Unlike in the Daschle campaign, we did not let this charge lie. We weren’t afraid of giving oxygen to the fire. The segment was barely over before the Obama campaign was on the phone raising all sorts of hell with the higher-ups at Fox. We contacted progressive bloggers and others in the media to generate a backlash against Fox and Friends. If anyone on the campaign knew someone at Fox, they were instructed to call them up and yell at them. Fox and Friends eventually gave a lackluster nonapology and retracted the statements.

Later, ABC News sent a reporter to Indonesia to investigate Obama’s school. As it turned out, Fox was wrong. Obama did not attend a terrorist training academy. It was a normal school. Shocking! The ABC report was fine journalism and politically beneficial in putting that particular rumor to bed. However, I was kept awake at night, disturbed that a random conspiracy theory mentioned by a Fox doofus with zero credibility could get a major network to fly across the globe to confirm that conspiracy theory. I had the nagging sense that ABC was disappointed by what they found in Indonesia.

The rest of the 2008 Obama campaign was an ongoing battle against right-wing disinformation and conspiracy theories. Early in the campaign, Paul Tewes, who led our efforts in the critical state of Iowa, called with an alarming report. His field staff were receiving a deluge of calls asking two questions about Obama: Was he Muslim, and was it true that he was born in Kenya? The callers had heard these conspiracy theories from three sources: friends and family who listened to talk radio, friends and family who read conservative news on the internet, and forwarded emails.

The first question is inherently offensive. Whether Obama was Christian, Jewish, or Muslim should have been of no consequence. But for many Democrats, the question was as much about electability in the post-9/11 era as it was about religious bigotry. The second question was an existential threat to the candidacy. If Obama had been born in Kenya, he would have been constitutionally ineligible for the US presidency. This may come as a surprise, but political parties do not want to nominate presidential candidates who cannot serve as president.¹¹ If Iowa Democrats who loved Obama were hearing and consuming these rumors, imagine the impact they were having with independent voters and more conservative Democrats in places like Ohio and Florida. Once again, we leapt into action, creating a website eventually called Fight the Smears. (While launching a website sounds like an outdated response now, at the time, it was seen as innovative.) On it, we posted a copy of Obama’s birth certificate—indisputable evidence that he was born in Hawaii and therefore eligible for the presidency. We wanted to give our supporters the tools to push back on the disinformation. If someone forwarded you an email chain saying Obama wasn’t born in the United States, all you had to do was hit Reply All and attach the birth certificate downloaded from our site. This was rudimentary, but it was the first attempt to fight viral disinformation with viral facts. Among Democrats, at least, we were able quell the furor and win the Iowa caucus.

Later in the campaign, the Republicans tried to “swift boat” Obama. Swift boating refers to the strategy George W. Bush’s campaign used in 2004 to turn John Kerry’s heroic service in Vietnam against him. During that election, a book was released (by a conservative publishing house) titled Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out against John Kerry. The book featured fellow Vietnam veterans who criticized Kerry for his time as an outspoken critic of the war and falsely and maliciously accused him of lying to win his commendations. The Kerry campaign, following the same outdated playbook I had used in 2004, simply ignored the lies. Lacking a vigorous response, the charges stuck. Throughout the campaign, Kerry used his military service as proof that he could protect a country still living in fear of another 9/11. Within weeks, that central pillar of Kerry’s campaign quickly crumbled.

The right wing tried to run an updated, and racist, version of that play against Obama. Jerome Corsi,¹² one of the authors of Kerry’s demise, wrote a book titled The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality. The book was filled with racist false allegations and painted Obama as an anti-American, Black militant Manchurian candidate. Corsi is a well-known nutcase and a shitty writer, but when your campaign is trying to elect a Black man with the middle name “Hussein,” no threat can be ignored.

But we were not going to be swift boated. The Obama campaign acquired a galley copy of Corsi’s book through a publishing industry insider, and our research staff went to work with a line-by-line rebuttal. We packaged the final product as a digital book with the clever¹³ title Unfit for Publication, distributed it to the press, and posted it on the Fight the Smears site. Despite a vigorous book tour that, fittingly, included stops on a white-supremacist radio show and an interview with the final boss of conspiracy theorists, Alex Jones, and with conservative political operatives furiously fanning the flames, Obama Nation was a political dud.

After Obama’s landslide victory, our internet-based communications and rapid-response strategies were hailed as innovations. Democrats had stood on the losing end of the message wars for most of the last thirty years. Now it felt like we had finally cracked the code and could fight back against an emerging strain of GOP disinformation.

We were wrong. We had won the battle but lost the war.

The Big Lie of Birtherism

Less than three years after Obama’s taking office, I stood at the lectern in the White House Briefing Room flanked by White House counsel Bob Bauer, admitting defeat in the most public and humiliating way possible. The purpose of our appearance was to succumb to growing pressure from conspiracy theorists and release Obama’s birth certificate.

Wait, didn’t we do that during the campaign? Wasn’t that one of those innovative rapid-response strategies over which we had almost broken our arms patting ourselves on the back?

Yep.

Publicly releasing the president’s birth certificate had done nothing to solve the problem. The conspiracy theory and the disinformation peddlers changed the terms without blinking an eye. “Sure, Obama released his birth certificate. But why won’t he release the long-form version of the birth certificate? What is he hiding?”¹⁴ This was a truly absurd claim, a distinction without a difference. But Corsi and other trolls, who resided primarily in the dark recesses of the internet, had kept the “birther movement” alive.

It was Donald Trump—at the time a reality television star, faux businessman, and loudmouthed son of Queens who was famous for being famous¹⁵—who brought the conspiracy to the forefront. Trump made his rounds promoting the upcoming season of Celebrity Apprentice, a show in which a B-list celebrity hosts a competition among a group of C- and D-list celebrities for a fake job and real money. During these media appearances, Trump pushed the notion, contrary to all available evidence, that Obama was born in Kenya. A compliant press, addicted to celebrity gossip and conflict, lapped it up and amplified Trump’s false claims with only a modicum of scrutiny. The whole spectacle was great for ratings and clicks, and more media outlets covered it.

This should have been the moment when we realized Trump was a serious presidential competitor. Reporters asked White House spokespeople about it. They shouted ridiculous questions at Obama. There is no dumber, more intellectually lazy question than “Mr. President, what is your response to Donald Trump’s claim that you were born in Kenya?” Alas, many media outlets didn’t send their best or brightest to cover the White House. The whole affair quickly became an annoying distraction. At Obama’s behest, we worked with the state of Hawaii to acquire a copy of the long-form version of the birth certificate released during the campaign. We then scheduled a surprise press conference at which Bauer and I released the birth certificate, explained how we had obtained it, and why Obama had decided to release it. Later that day, Obama went to the Briefing Room to chide the press for covering “carnival barkers.”¹⁶

The press turned on Trump. He became a laughingstock, he was no longer booked for interviews (with the exception of Fox News), and his nascent run for president was abandoned. It wasn’t pretty, but once again, we had struck a blow against a malicious disinformation campaign. The release of the birth certificate dominated the news and put the issue to bed.

Or did it?

An NBC/Survey Monkey poll released in October 2016 found that 72 percent of Republicans doubted whether Obama was born in America. It’s easy to dismiss this finding as another piece of evidence of Republicans losing their collective minds. I get that. But the situation was more nuanced.

I remember seeing that poll make its rounds on Twitter. My first reaction was “This explains why Trump so easily won the nomination.” But as I thought about the implications of the poll, I took a brief¹⁷ respite from my overwhelming confidence in Hillary Clinton’s inevitable victory. Nearly three quarters of Republicans was a much, much larger group than the lunatic fringe of Fox addicts and Breitbart readers. And if this many people could believe something so dumb, what other conspiracy theories could be taking hold?

There is no doubt: our pushback on the birther conspiracy and the traditional media’s aggressive fact-checking required a more forceful approach and better timing. There would always be people who believed the BS, just as there would always be people who believed the moon landing was faked or that Tupac and Biggie were alive and living in the Caribbean. Conspiracy theories are as much a part of the American tradition as baseball, apple pie, and ill-conceived foreign invasions. Obama’s birthplace was not an open question worthy of debate. His birth certificate existed for everyone to see. It had been validated by every available authority. The press spent the Obama years fact-checking every statement to the contrary and informing the public that Obama was born in the United States. It should be impossible to believe otherwise, yet three quarters of one of America’s two political parties were unwilling to accept reality. They were living, and consuming information, in an entirely different dimension. There were two reasons for this: either a large chunk of the American population was not seeing accurate information, or they were so distrustful of the information they were seeing that they dismissed it out of hand.

In those final weeks of ignorant bliss before Trump won, I comforted myself knowing the Obama-era Republican Party was in its death throes. A third consecutive ass-kicking would knock some sense into the party and move it away from delusion and disinformation. Right-wing Republicans convinced themselves that John McCain lost to Obama because he was too moderate. Romney lost because he had the political skills of a duck-billed platypus. Trump was running on the agenda of Fox News. (Sean Hannity even appeared with Trump at a rally, and Fox News honcho Roger Ailes prepped him for debates.¹⁸) In my mind, Trump’s obviously inevitable defeat would empower the Republicans calling for more moderation and less racism.¹⁹

Instead, Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton, the GOP’s most despised foil, became proof that propaganda and disinformation were viable options for winning. Moreover, they were the only way to win.

Politics would never be the same again.

Five years, two impeachments, one insurrection, and a closer-than-expected 2020 election later, Democrats, the press, and the public still haven’t fully reckoned with the Republicans’ plague on the public consciousness. The problems have only worsened.

I have become more and more convinced that if we continue to lose the information wars, Democrats and democracy will be doomed. There will be more Big Lies, more violence, and little progress on climate change or any other progressive priorities.

Since the 2016 elections, Democrats have asked many rhetorical questions about the state of our politics: How does Trump get away with everything? How did he win? Why did he almost win again in 2020, despite four years of corruption and incompetence? Why do Republicans think Biden cheated? Why won’t some people get vaccinated or wear a mask? Why does nothing seem to matter?

I could go on and on, but while these questions feel unanswerable, they aren’t. The answer to all of them is the same: the right-wing disinformation machine. This “MAGA megaphone” is the most powerful force in politics. Up until the moment Democrats have an answer to Fox, Facebook, and the MAGA media, we will always be on the losing side.

Our answers to these questions begin with an understanding of what we are up against.

Footnotes

1 Way too many years.

2 It would be nice to still have this excuse.

3 His name was Dick Wadhams, which explains in part why he went through life with such a bad attitude. If he had gone by “Richard,” he might have had a sunnier disposition.

4 An actual legend would have played his college ball somewhere other than the Bible Institute of Los Angeles (not exactly a powerhouse).

5 It is also so goddamn cold there in winter that its residents need special heaters to keep their car engines from freezing.

6 Far fewer now.

7 Gannon’s past was irrelevant, but his use of a pseudonym was notable because it implied that he obtained his White House press credentials under false pretenses.

8 To be clear, that land was stolen from the Sioux, and they deserve compensation.

9 Not to mention what trends on Twitter, the lowest form of information on the planet (other than what trends on Facebook).

10 Amazingly, these two yahoos are still hosting Fox and Friends despite being quite dumb and very punchable.

11 The GOP, however, had a real habit of nominating people who should not serve.

12 Corsi would reemerge years later as part of the coterie of creeps involved in the Trump campaign’s efforts to work with Russia to defeat Hillary Clinton.

13 Cleverness is in the eye of the beholder.

14 Everything is so damn stupid.

15 Paris Hilton, but less savvy with schlockier eponymous hotels.