The Morning Dispatch: The GOP Aims to Rally the Base

Happy Tuesday! Don’t Google Jerry Falwell Jr. Don’t Google Jerry Falwell Jr. Don’t Google Jerry Falwell Jr. Don’t Google Jerry Falwell Jr.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• The United States confirmed 37,511 new cases of COVID-19 yesterday, with 5.3 percent of the 706,828 tests reported coming back positive. An additional 451 deaths were attributed to the virus on Monday, bringing the pandemic’s American death toll to 177,248.

• Demonstrations and civil unrest erupted in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Monday night following the Sunday police shooting of a black man, Jacob Blake. Cell phone footage showed Blake being shot multiple times in the back as he walked away from police and opened the door of his car. Three of his children were inside the car at the time of the shooting. Blake is in stable condition in an intensive care unit.

• The Berlin hospital treating Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny released a statement saying Navalny most likely fell ill due to “intoxication through a substance belonging to the group of cholinesterase inhibitors,” which are often found in neurotoxins. Navalny remains in “serious but stable condition.”

• The Republican Party officially renominated President Trump and Vice President Pence to the GOP ticket on Monday as the Republican National Convention got underway.

• The Biden campaign announced endorsements from 27 former Republican members of Congress, including former Sen. Jeff Flake.

• Jerry Falwell Jr., resigned as president of Liberty University on Monday following a Reuters exposé that included accusations that Falwell encouraged extramarital relations between his wife and a Miami pool boy who later became their business partner.

The Two Republican Parties of RNC Night One

The Republican National Convention kicked off on Monday evening, and—in keeping with the RNC’s resolution forgoing a new 2020 party platform—it was mostly an Us vs. Them affair, with keynote speakers working to draw the starkest possible contrast with the Democrats.

Charlie Kirk, the 26-year-old president of Turning Point USA led the charge, and he set the stakes high, with a speech heavy on caricature of his political opposition and apocalyptic descriptions of a future with Democrats in charge. “This election is a decision between preserving America as we know it, and eliminating everything that we love,” he said. “Trump is the bodyguard of Western civilization.” Rep. Matt Gaetz and former prosecutor and Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle continued this theme. Gaetz argued Democrats will “disarm you, empty the prisons, lock you in your home, and invite MS-13 to live next door,” while Guilfoyle—loudly—implored viewers not to let “the Democrats and their socialist comrades … destroy your families, your lives, and your future.”

The first half of night one could best be summarized by the phrase, “They are going to come after you” if Joe Biden wins in November. No speakers encapsulated this ethos like Mark and Patty McCloskey—the St. Louis homeowners who were charged with felonies after they were featured in a series of photographs pointing guns at Black Lives Matter protesters. “What you saw happen to us could just as easily happen to any of you who are watching from quiet neighborhoods around our country,” Patty said.

It was undoubtedly a base play, designed to gin up enthusiasm for Trump among those who approve of the job he’s doing. If the Trump campaign can significantly boost turnout among voters who like the president, he can win.

But if the first half of the night was about juicing turnout, the second was laser-focused on winning back some of the suburban women the party has been bleeding since 2016. After nodding to what she described as the Trump administration’s foreign policy accomplishments—sanctioning North Korea, “ripping up” the Iran nuclear deal, moving the embassy to Jerusalem—former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley spoke to the racial tensions still reverberating across the country. “In much of the Democratic Party, it’s now fashionable to say that America is racist,” she said. “That is a lie. America is not a racist country.”

“This is personal for me,” Haley continued, citing her Indian heritage. “My father wore a turban. My mother wore a sari. I was a brown girl in a black and white world.”

Haley wasn’t the only speaker last night to mention race. Vernon Jones, a self-proclaimed “lifelong Democrat” serving in the Georgia statehouse, said “the Democratic Party does not want black people to leave the mental plantation they’ve had us on for decades.” Kim Klacik, a black Republican running to represent Baltimore in Congress, declared that “the days of blindly supporting the Democrats are coming to the end.”

Sen. Tim Scott closed the first night with arguably the best speech of the evening. He shared his personal story (how his family “went from Cotton to Congress in one lifetime”), and his upbeat message stood in stark contrast to the darker themes that preceded him. From the outset, Scott laid out a positive vision for America—a vision untethered to either Donald Trump or the Democrats. “While this election is between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, it is not solely about Donald Trump and Joe Biden,” he said. He discussed his Opportunity Zones legislation, school choice, and the importance of a competitive tax code.

But Scott eventually connected these policies to November’s election, albeit in a more nuanced way than most of the night’s speakers. “I’m going to ask you, the American people, not to look simply at what the candidates say, but to look back at what they’ve done,” he said, citing Trump’s support of these initiatives over the past four years. “In 1994, Biden led the charge on a crime bill that put millions of black Americans behind bars. … When it comes to what Joe Biden says he’ll do, look at his actions. Look at his policies. Look at what he already did and did not do while he’s been in Washington for 47 years.”

Foreign Adversaries Continue to Interfere In U.S. Elections

We wrote a few weeks back about the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment of foreign interference in the upcoming American elections. Russia is once again working to tip the scales for President Trump, per William Evanina, director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, while China and Iran would prefer to see Trump lose.

In a piece for the site, Declan zeroed in on one aspect of this interference: disinformation campaigns. 

Russia’s 2016 efforts in that regard have been widely documented. Kremlin-backed advertisers spent about $100,000 on 3,000 Facebook ads from June 2015 to May 2017 aimed at fanning existing societal tensions and suppressing Democratic voter turnout. But those ads were only a small part of their broader influence operation. Declan talked to half a dozen experts over the past few weeks, looking to find out if we’re better prepared to combat similar efforts this time around. Short answer: They see a political ecosystem simultaneously more cognizant of these threats than it was in 2016 and more susceptible to propaganda campaigns.

What are the differences between Russia and China’s approaches to these campaigns?

“Russia is deliberately blatant and does not fully hide its activities, because a part of what it wants to do is demonstrate that it’s acting with impunity and put forward the idea that the Russian bear isn’t afraid to stand up to the Americans,” said Klon Kitchen, Director of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Technology Policy. “The Chinese strategic posture is much, much more clandestine, narrower in scope, and aware that certain portions of the U.S. government are going to know that they’re doing things, but not so blatant in their work so as to make it obvious to the public at large.”

Are social media companies better equipped to combat foreign disinformation efforts today than they were in 2016?

Undoubtedly. Facebook completely revamped its political advertising process, requiring proof from would-be marketers that they live in the country in which they want to advertise, and introducing a fully transparent advertising archive. It now has 35,000 people working on content moderation (“Our budget [for content review] is bigger today than the whole revenue of the company when we went public in 2012,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in February), and open-source researchers—at Graphika, the Stanford Internet Observatory, the Digital Forensic Research Lab—routinely flag ongoing disinformation campaigns. As a result, Facebook has taken down thousands of fake profiles and accounts linked to foreign adversaries like Russia and Iran over the past few years.

“We’re in a fundamentally different place than we were in 2016,” an official on the Facebook security team told The Dispatch. “We’ve learned significant lessons about how to structure our response to these types of operations, the tactics that we anticipate seeing and that we have seen in these operations, and we’ve built a program that has enabled us to take down a large number of these operations from countries all over the world, both foreign and domestic.”

Twitter has followed a similar path, in some cases going even further than Facebook, like when it banned political advertising entirely late last year. And although disinformation tactics are evolving—Facebook caught and took down dozens of fake accounts being operated by Ghanaians and Nigerians on behalf of Russians back in March—the platforms are much better prepared to combat them this time around.

What other vulnerabilities can adversaries exploit?

Us. Stanford Internet Observatory technical research manager Renee DiResta pointed out that Americans are often doing the heavy lifting for our foes. “When you’re creating your own fake accounts, there’s a vulnerability there. If the platform finds one, oftentimes it can find a lot of the rest of them,” she said. “You have to decide, is it worth the effort of making your own fake accounts when—in a highly polarized society like the U.S. at the moment—you can simply amplify a real American who happens to have that same opinion?”

“There’s an embarrassment of riches for anybody who wants to amplify content that is polarizing,” co-director of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center Nate Persily said. “There is very little that is unique about foreign influence operations right now. They repeat the narratives that are already native to our polarized political environment. They can do some more amplification of those narratives.”

This kind of interference is more difficult for the platforms to suss out. “If it’s a real American opinion and it gets retweeted by a whole lot of accounts, to what extent are the platforms looking at the dynamics around the amplification piece?” DiResta said. “Once you make something hit critical mass—meaning you get it into the feeds of enough people—there are going to be organic groups of people who similarly hold that opinion and then in turn, retweet the tweet themselves … How do you quantify coordinated activism in such a way as to come up with some sort of lines for what kinds of coordination are acceptable and what kinds of coordination are manipulative?”

Some foreign amplification is less subtle. Just look at the feed of RT (formerly Russia Today), which Twitter officially labeled Russia state-affiliated media a few weeks ago. “Clinton urges Biden to not concede ‘UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES,’ calls for ‘massive legal op’ in case Trump sees narrow win,” read one post on Monday. “Shot SEVEN times in the back by a cop… Is #JacobBlake the next George Floyd?” asked another. “Russian media didn’t create the widespread distrust in the American media establishment that fuels conspiracy theories like QAnon,” a third tweet said. “The likes of CNN did.”

“They’re very good at finding things that are real, and then just using them, reappropriating them,” DiResta continued, referring to the Russians. “It’s [about] creating the perception that this is a large opinion, not a majority opinion, but an opinion that a lot of people have.”

Worth Your Time

• As Republicans kick off a convention that will feature no official party platform, Tim Alberta has a searing piece in Politico Magazine asking a simple question: “What happens when a party gives up on ideas?” Alberta asked several longtime GOP operatives what the Republican Party stands for, and was met with confusion and despair. “I’ve tried to give you an answer and I can’t do it,” polling guru Frank Luntz said. “You can ask it any different way. But I don’t know the answer.” Describing a party that’s become “so obsessed with fighting that it has lost sight of what it’s fighting for,” Alberta argues the GOP has elevated cultural grievance into an organizing principle. “Owning the libs and pissing off the media,” former Paul Ryan aide Brendan Buck told Alberta. “That’s what we believe in now. There’s really not much more to it.”

• In the latest installment in the Washington Post’s Voices from the Pandemic series, the Graveson family tells its harrowing story of surviving the coronavirus. After George and Sherry Graveson both fell ill with mild symptoms, their two teenage sons—Matthew and Timothy—contracted the virus. Runny noses escalated to debilitating pneumonia, and both boys were put on ventilators and ECMO machines. “Everybody keeps saying that what happened to us is a miracle, and I know that’s true,” said Matthew, age 16. “But another part of me is like: Really? You think I’m lucky? Because I don’t always feel lucky.”

Something Mournful

Justin Townes Earle, iconic alt-country singer-songwriter, died last week at the age of 38. His 2014 Tiny Desk Concert is one of our favorites. Rest in peace.

Presented Without Comment

Toeing the Company Line

• Our Advisory Opinions hosts were joined on Monday by Phill Drobnick, head coach of the Olympic curling team, for some discussion about the sport that inspired Sarah’s campaign newsletter, The Sweep. Sarah and David also discuss the partisan skew in absentee voting, the increasing likelihood of another Bush v. Gore-style debacle, and the RNC’s nonexistent platform heading into this week’s convention.

• Jim Capretta provides a state-of-play report on the global race for a COVID vaccine. He details the different kinds of vaccines that different pharmaceutical companies are making, and he provides a thorough report on which companies have entered into deals with which countries.

• Contributor Michael Steel looks at how Trump’s failure to competently respond to the pandemic has created problems for his campaign, and the whole scenario reminds Steel of an old South Park episode involving gnomes and underpants.

Let Us Know

In addition to Russia, China, and Iran, which other countries should have a particularly vested interest in the outcome of November’s election? Humorous answers are not only allowed, they are encouraged.

Reporting by Declan Garvey (@declanpgarvey), Andrew Egger (@EggerDC), Charlotte Lawson (@charlotteUVA), Audrey Fahlberg (@FahlOutBerg), James Sutton (@jamespsuttonsf), and Steve Hayes (@stephenfhayes).