What Happened: July 20, 2021

The Big Story

French President Emmanuel Macron may be among the targets whose phone was hacked into using Pegasus spyware. Phone numbers associated with Macron, as well as those of top officials in his government, were found on a list of more than 50,000 numbers obtained by the French nonprofit Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International.

In a report published Sunday, 17 major worldwide media outlets revealed that software sold by Israeli cyber company NSO Group was used to hack into the phones of journalists, human rights activists, and government officials from around the world. The company’s proprietary spyware allows users who have hacked into a target’s phone to access the GPS data containing their past and current locations, as well as records of their phone calls, texts, and emails, and even the contents of encrypted communications platforms such as Signal and WhatsApp. Once Pegasus users have access to a phone, they can secretly turn on the camera and recording devices.

In accordance with Israeli law, NSO Group only sells its software to military, law enforcement, and intelligence for use in criminal and national security investigations. While the company maintains that it thoroughly screens the human rights records of the 40 unnamed countries purchasing its product, it also acknowledges that it has no control over how its product is used by clients once the sale is made.

Read it here: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/18/revealed-leak-uncovers-global-abuse-of-cyber-surveillance-weapon-nso-group-pegasus

Today’s Back Pages: Inside the Minds of MAGA Voters

The Rest

• Anticipation around the Netflix earnings report expected to come out Tuesday reflects both the company’s massive growth and streaming content’s increasing domination of the entertainment market. In addition to trying to grow its customer base outside the United States, where the company now finds 80% of new users, Netflix has also been attempting to break into the tough-to-crack streaming video-games market. Netflix’s market power means that it, along with its handful of competitors in the content industry (movies and music as distinct commercial art forms are obsolete—it’s all content now), increasingly shapes what kind of culture Americans are exposed to. Here are just two examples from a column in Sunday’s L.A. Times: “Netflix has upended the documentary market by pushing filmmakers toward a less political ‘story first’ approach. Production teams are having to adjust to Netflix’s decision to ban the most popular digital cameras in Hollywood in its productions, which has led to many complaints of blurry cinematography.” 

• Back in January, when the entire country was on edge after the Capitol riots, the major institutional players of the U.S. media joined in hyping up stories of sinister plots by alarmingly named “domestic extremists” such as the Boogaloo boys. Most of that hype was generated by internal FBI documents strategically leaked by the FBI. As it turns out, the most notorious of those plots, to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, was directly shaped by the FBI through 12 informants it had inside the organization. Some of those informants “did more than just passively observe and report,” according to a Buzzfeed news investigation published Tuesday. “Instead, they had a hand in nearly every aspect of the alleged plot, starting with its inception. The extent of their involvement raises questions as to whether there would have even been a conspiracy without them.”
Read it here: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kenbensinger/michigan-kidnapping-gretchen-whitmer-fbi-informant

• Who says BDS can’t bring people together?

I wish those trying to change us had any knowledge of our culture and discourse.

Israeli politicians love BDS, always have. They see a chance to show they’re beating back the bigots who want us gone, with none of the costs of real war. It’s a unifying force in Israeli politics. https://t.co/A5joJyEgKy

— Haviv Rettig Gur (@havivrettiggur) July 20, 2021

• Stock markets across the globe tanked Monday, reaching their lowest point in months due to concerns that the Delta variant of COVID-19 is leading to a resurgence of the pandemic that could bring back lockdowns and other restrictive measures. Hardest hit were “stocks sensitive to the economic recovery,” including “airlines, transport companies, material and chemical stocks … as well as small and midsized companies,” according to the Financial Times.

• A new bill sponsored by a bipartisan group of senators calls for a dramatic expansion of Congress’s role in U.S. foreign policy, along with new authority to roll back executive power over matters of war and national security. The National Security Powers Act, introduced by Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) would repeal all standing war authorizations, including the 1973 War Powers Act that provides the U.S. president with a routine procedure to bypass congressional oversight. In addition, it would defund military operations not explicitly approved by Congress and mandate that authorized operations have specific end dates.

• Peru’s next president is Pedro Castillo. The left-wing former school teacher defeated Keiko Fujimori, daughter of Alberto Fujimori, former president of Peru who held office from 1990 to 2000 and was subsequently arrested and sent to prison for running right-wing death squads.

• Jeff Bezos blasted off Tuesday in the billionaire space race. The former Amazon CEO and richest man alive launched into the skies from West Texas in a spacecraft designed by his company Blue Origin, on a flight designed to generate free PR for the company. The spacecraft reached 75 miles of altitude but did not enter orbit. Space flight, which was once a collective endeavor representing perhaps the greatest adventure on which humanity ever embarked, is now a tourism business run by billionaires catering to millionaires, who go up into space and make the universe feel smaller rather than larger.

• After initially proposing to stay in office longer, Haiti’s interim president, Claude Joseph, has agreed to step down. Joseph assumed power after his embattled predecessor Jovenel Moïse was assassinated earlier this month. Joseph will be replaced by Ariel Henry, a 71-year-old neurosurgeon who was associated with the deeply unpopular Moïse before his death. 

• The 22-year-old who attacked a Chabad synagogue in Poway, California, has avoided the death penalty by pleading guilty to murder Tuesday. On the last day of Passover in 2019, the attacker opened fire on the Chabad with a semiautomatic rifle before an off-duty Border Patrol agent returned fire and chased him away. He is expected to be sentenced to life without parole for the attack, which followed his involvement in anti-Jewish communities online and was carried out to stop Jews’ attempts to “destroy all white people,” he told authorities. Lori Gilbert-Kaye, 60, was killed in the attack, and three people were wounded, including the rabbi and an 8-year-old girl.

The Back Pages

Two weeks ago The Scroll linked to a viral twitter thread, which I described at the time as providing “an illuminating, if sympathetic, account” of how millions of “non-insane, non-extremist Trump supporters might have come to the conclusion that the 2020 election was stolen” and have lost faith in U.S. institutions. The author of that Twitter thread has now developed it into a full essay, which was originally published by the publication for independent journalists Outside Voices on Glenn Greenwald’s Substack. We are reprinting an excerpt of it here, along with a link at the end to the full article.

I quit Twitter last August. Quit for good. Other than posting links to two new episodes of my podcast, I stayed away for eight months and didn’t regret a thing. Around mid-June I let myself be persuaded that social media engagement was part of having a podcast, so I dipped back in, promising myself I’d avoid being pulled into politics. Things haven’t gone as planned.

The temptation was disguised cleverly as a conversation with a friend’s mother. She was visiting from upstate New York and we got to talking while my buddy was in the house tending to my goddaughter. She’s a hardcore Trumper from a less cynical generation that believes what she hears from sources she trusts. She’d been hounding her son about the stolen election all week, and he’d been trying to disabuse her of various theories involving trucked-in ballots and hacked counting machines. Now she had me cornered and put the question to me: “Do YOU think the election was legit?” So I told her the truth: I don’t know.

By the time my friend had put the baby to bed and rejoined us, we were waist-deep in a discussion about what happened last year, and she was satisfied that I was on her side. “See?!? He (she meant me) knows what’s going on! I’m not crazy. He’s smart, and HE knows!” My friend pulled the Captain Picard facepalm, and said, “Darryl, what the f*ck are you telling her?”

What I told her was some version of the Twitter thread Tucker Carlson read on air Friday night and which President Trump, using my name, then explicitly promoted in his speech to CPAC on Sunday, which has blown my inbox, and my promise to stay away from politics, to smithereens.

I told her I didn’t know much about the ballots, or the voting machines, or some company that she’d heard had ties to Venezuela. I didn’t follow Sidney Powell, or Lin Wood, or the details of the cases proceeding through the system. I think it was around the time Rudy Giuliani chose a landscape and gardening emporium as the location for a press conference on what would have been the greatest political scandal in American history that I made the conscious decision to stop paying attention. Or maybe it was the dripping hair dye, or something about a kraken — it’s all sort of blended together these days.

But I felt for her. She wasn’t the first person with whom I’d had the discussion, and I felt for all of them. I’ve had the discussion often enough that I feel comfortable extracting a general theory about where these people are coming from.

RUSSIAGATE: THE ORIGINAL SIN

Like my friend’s mother, most of them believe some or all of the theories involving fraudulent ballots, voting machines, and the rest. Scratch the surface and you’ll find that they’re not particularly attached to any one of them. The specific theories were almost a kind of synecdoche, a concrete symbol representing a deeply felt, but difficult to describe, sense that whatever happened in 2020, it was not a meaningfully democratic presidential election. The counting delays, the last-minute changes to election procedures, the unprecedented coordinated censorship campaign by Big Tech in defense of Biden were all understood as the culmination of the pan-institutional anti-Trump campaign they’d watched unfold for over four years.

Many of them deny it now, but a lot of 2016 Trump voters were worried during the early stages of the Russia collusion investigation. True, the evidence seemed thin, and the very idea that the US and allied security apparatus would allow Trump to take office if they really thought he might be under Russian blackmail seemed a bit preposterous on its face. But to many conservatives in 2016 and early 2017, it seemed equally preposterous that the institutions they trusted, and even the ones they didn’t, would go all-in on a story if there wasn’t at least something to it. Imagine the consequences for these institutions if it turned out there was nothing to it.

We now know that the FBI and other intelligence agencies conducted covert surveillance against members of the Trump campaign based on evidence manufactured by political operatives working for the Clinton campaign, both before and after the election. We know that those involved with the investigation knew the accusations of collusion were part of a campaign “approved by Hillary Clinton… to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service.” They might have expected such behavior from the Clintons — politics is a violent game and Hillary’s got a lot of scalps on her wall. But many of the people watching this happen were Tea Party types, in spirit if not in actual fact. They give their kids a pocket Constitution for their birthday. They have Yellow Ribbon bumper stickers, and fly the POW/MIA flag under the front-porch Stars and Stripes, and curl their lip at people who talk during the National Anthem at ballgames. They’re the people who believed their institutions when they were told Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. To them, the intel community using fake evidence (including falsified documents) to spy on a presidential campaign is a big deal.

It may surprise many liberals, but most conservative normies actually know the Russia collusion case front and back. A whole ecosystem sprouted up to pore over every new development, and conservatives followed the details as avidly as any follower of liberal conspiracy theorists Seth Abramson or Marcy Wheeler. When the world learned of the infamous meeting between Trump campaign officials and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, it seemed like a problem and many Trump supporters took it seriously. Deep down, even those who rejected the possibility of open collusion worried that one of Trump’s inexperienced family members, or else a sketchy operative glomming onto the campaign, might have done something that, whatever its real gravity, could be successfully framed in a manner to sway a dozen of John McCain’s friends in the Senate.

Read the full essay here: https://outsidevoices.substack.com/p/author-of-the-mega-viral-thread-on