Revealed: the hacking and disinformation team meddling in elections

[Daily Kos Morning Roundup]( A morning roundup of worthy pundit and news reads, brought to you by Daily Kos. [Click here to read the full web version.]( - [Revealed: the hacking and disinformation team meddling in elections]( Revealed: the hacking and disinformation team meddling in elections, Stephanie Kirchgaessner, Manisha Ganguly, David Pegg, Carole Cadwalladr, and Jason Burke, The Guardian The unit is run by Tal Hanan, a 50-year-old former Israeli special forces operative who now works privately using the pseudonym “Jorge”, and appears to have been working under the radar in elections in various countries for more than two decades. He is being unmasked by an international consortium of journalists. Hanan and his unit, which uses the codename “Team Jorge”, have been exposed by undercover footage and documents leaked to the Guardian. Hanan did not respond to detailed questions about Team Jorge’s activities and methods but said: “I deny any wrongdoing.” [...] Hanan told the undercover reporters that his services, which others describe as “black ops”, were available to intelligence agencies, political campaigns and private companies that wanted to secretly manipulate public opinion. He said they had been used across Africa, South and Central America, the US and Europe. - [Nikki Haley’s blurry presidential ambition]( Nikki Haley’s blurry presidential ambition, Robin Givhan, The Washington Post She doesn’t mention Donald Trump. She doesn’t actually mention the United Nations, either. But these are the two reasons she is able to lay claim to recent foreign policy experience. When she talks about the shooting of nine Black congregants in Charleston’s Mother Emanuel AME Church in 2015 when she was South Carolina’s governor, she doesn’t mention that the shooter described himself as a white supremacist or that she agitated to have the Confederate flag removed from the state’s capitol grounds, which was then seen as a powerfully symbolic act. Instead she shows pictures of herself at a statewide day of prayer and notes that the community “turned away from fear and turned to God,” which does little to explain the hate, history and privilege that was compressed into that tragic moment. She strips her résumé of the details that might help a viewer better understand her political point of view, her cultural perspective, her waxing and waning on Trumpism or even her moral vantage point. She is a glossy headshot framed against a soft-focus backdrop. She is an easy-listening candidate, the one who doesn’t scream about critical race theory or woke politics in her three-minute riff on her qualifications. What did children learn in her state when she was governor? That “it’s a great day in South Carolina.” In this video, she is an ambitious blur. [...] Haley is not focused on differences, which is to say she isn’t focused on other people’s identity and history and lived experiences. She’s not interested in the fact that most Black Americans do not have an immigrant story; they have an enslavement story. Some of them have no story at all because it was never recorded. They’re not trying to rewrite history, but to get it down on paper for the very first time. - [Bad news: Daily Kos revenue is down, and we might not be able to do all we do. Good news: You are a big part of the solution, and small donors have never let us down. Donate $5 TODAY.]( - [President Biden, first lady to screen ‘Till’ at the White House; movie tells Emmett Till story]( President Biden, first lady to screen ‘Till’ at the White House; movie tells Emmett Till story, Lynn Sweet, Chicago Sun-Times They are intending to send a “strong message” during Black History Month about hate crimes when they view “Till,” the powerful story about the lynching of Chicago’s Emmett Till, whose death at age 14 helped spark the modern civil rights movement. The movie, released last year, tells the story about Till’s lynching on Aug. 28, 1955, while visiting family in Mississippi and how and why it became a turning point in civil rights history. In an era before ubiquitous iPhone videos, police body cams and omnipresent street cameras providing evidence of brutality, Till’s mother made a crucial decision that led people to see that Till was a victim of lynching. [...] The Grio’s April Ryan reported that among those invited to the screening are high school students from Chicago and the state of Mississippi. The White House told the Chicago Sun-Times the invitees “include cast of the film, the family of Emmett Till, students, civil rights leaders, historians and families of victims of hate-fueled violence.” - [The Trouble With Sunsets]( The Trouble With Sunsets, Paul Krugman, The New York Times Even in our personal lives, everyone knows that it’s much harder to start doing something good than it is to continue a good routine. I don’t decide every morning whether I feel like working out; I’ve made morning workouts my baseline, to be canceled only in exceptional circumstances. (For younger readers: Staying in halfway decent shape later in life isn’t easy. Also, you kids, get off my lawn.) In much the same way, the Senate doesn’t have to decide every five years to actively continue these programs that many older Americans deeply rely on. For decades they’ve been our baseline, without the periodic meltdowns engendered by the debt ceiling and other recurring deadlines that require our legislators to actually come together and do something. One of the most famous results in behavioral economics is that workers are far more likely to make use of financially advantageous retirement plans when they must opt out in order not to be enrolled, as opposed to having to opt in, even though the cost of opting in is trivial. So even if politics weren’t a factor, someone who actually wanted to preserve Medicare and Social Security wouldn’t require that Congress opt back in to those programs every five years. - [A massive 7.8 magnitude earthquake has devastated Turkey and Syria: Donate to humanitarian efforts assisting survivors that are in need during this horrific time.]( - ['I just felt completely out of control': Student, whose sister was at Oxford, reflects on MSU shooting]( 'I just felt completely out of control': Student, whose sister was at Oxford, reflects on MSU shooting, Alex Walters, The State News “Both times felt really similar,” [Zoe] Haden said. “Because, both times I was safe, but I knew people who weren't, and I just felt completely out of control.” Haden spent the ensuing hours listening to the police scanner, “terrified” by various unverified reports of shots-fired, bomb-threats, and locations of the shooter or shooters. She knew it was unreliable, that it was mostly untrue, but “at the time, I just needed some sense of control, so I had to listen,” Haden said. Since Oxford, Haden and her sister attempted to regain a sense of agency by getting involved with their local March For Our Lives chapter – a national gun-violence activism organization founded by survivors of the 2018 school shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Haden has since started MSU’s chapter of the organization, Spartan Against Gun Violence. On how the Oxford community has moved on from its mass shooting, if there’s a timeline for when normalcy will resume, Haden said, “it’s impossible honestly to truly heal from something like this.” - [A "weaponization of government" trope explainer]( A "weaponization of government" trope explainer, Don Moynihan, Can We still Govern? The idea of weaponization is not new. You can find the term in past Fox coverage for example. Journalist Matt Gertz (not to be confused with the aforementioned Matt Gaetz), took a look at the prominence of “weaponization” on Fox News. It turns up (for example, Sean Hannity in 2017 saying “we now have proof that intelligence wasn't the only powerful government entity that was weaponized by the Obama Administration”) but is an episodic rather than constant theme. “Weaponization” of course implies a martial aspect. It is similar to the linguistic trick of calling the Biden administration the Biden regime to evoke an illiberal approach to governing. It carries the whiff of a rogue state, implementing Stasi-like operations to suppress dissent. “Federal agencies have a long and sordid history of illegally targeting American citizens to gain political advantage. Government agencies like (but not limited to) the FBI, DHS, and DOJ are actively working to silence and suppress citizens who subscribe to ideas that differ from the regimes” says the Center for Renewing America. You probably have not heard of the Center for Renewing America, but it offers an important insight into both the origins and meaning of the weaponization trope. The Center for Renewing is a Trump aligned think-tank. As best as I can tell, the Center promoted the idea of the weaponization committee in the form it has now taken before anyone else. Last October, characterizing it as a “Church-style” committee, the Center stated: “we call on Members of Congress to assemble a stand-alone committee with broad investigative powers focused on woke and weaponized agencies and personnel within the federal government.” GOP hardliners who opposed Kevin McCarthy’s leadership bid used similar terminology when they successfully demanded, in a December 8th letter, that McCarthy: “Form a “Church Commission”-Style Committee to Target Weaponized Government.” ICYMI: Popular stories from the past week you won't want to miss: - [Guess who’s behind the ‘He Gets Us’ commercials that ran during the Super Bowl?]( - [The obscure, unheralded weapon that won the Battle of Vuhledar]( - [Russia is hitting new records for men and equipment lost as repeated assaults fail]( Want even more Daily Kos? 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