Inside the belly of the Georgia State Convocation Center Tuesday night, electric over the prospect of a Kamala Harris presidency—or perhaps dead set on wanting to ward off another Trump White House—a crowd that cut across generations erupted into a 10,000-person swag surf. There was no mistaking the pandemonium. In …
Read More »How QAnon Destroys American Families
Q hasn’t posted anything since 2022. But a staggering number of Americans still buy into QAnon, the conspiracy movement steeped in claims that Satan-worshipping pedophiles run the US government. Today on the show, journalist and author Jesselyn Cook on QAnon’s lasting political ramifications and the relationships it destroys. Leah Feiger …
Read More »What Project 2025 Means for Big Tech … and Everyone Else
Anyone who has spent even 15 minutes on TikTok over the past two months will have stumbled across more than one creator talking about Project 2025, a nearly thousand-page policy blueprint from the Heritage Foundation that outlines a radical overhaul of the government under a second Trump administration. Some of …
Read More »Democrats Have Finally Learned the Value of Shitposting
Not even two weeks ago, J.D. Vance promised to boost the campaign’s funding and deliver a hokey, small-town family man who could speak to voters in rural America. Instead, the entire Democratic Party apparatus has taken to calling him weird. Digital strategists, and the entire internet, are saying it's about …
Read More »Meet the Swifties Campaigning for Kamala Harris
In less than a week, Swifties have turned their community into an online election headquarters for US vice president Kamala Harris—and the campaign wants in on the effort. After President Joe Biden announced that he would not seek reelection last week, Emerald Medrano, 22, flipped on the news. As he …
Read More »Election Deniers Are Ramping Up Efforts to Disenfranchise US Voters
For the past six months, election denial groups across the United States have been laser-focused on efforts to purge voter rolls in support of former president Donald Trump’s reelection bid. Using new apps and online tools, they claim their volunteers have filed hundreds of thousands of voter registration challenges. Though …
Read More »How a Secret BJP War Room Mobilized Female Voters to Win the Indian Elections
In April, an unassuming old building in New Delhi’s furniture market housed roughly 30 youngsters. Some were hunched over their laptops crunching data on Excel or analyzing a heat map, while others huddled to discuss strategy. These were engineering graduates, economists, political scientists, and others. There were office chairs, desks, …
Read More »A Senate Bill Would Radically Improve Voting Machine Security
Congress is moving closer to putting US election technology under a stricter cybersecurity microscope. Embedded inside this year’s Intelligence Authorization Act, which funds intelligence agencies like the CIA, is the Strengthening Election Cybersecurity to Uphold Respect for Elections through Independent Testing (SECURE IT) Act, which would require penetration testing of …
Read More »People Are Using Memecoins to Bet on the US Election
On July 13, as word spread that a would-be assassin had narrowly missed killing Donald Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, a trading frenzy began. Within an hour of the shooting, the price of TRUMP, a cryptocurrency inspired by the former president, had jumped up by more than a …
Read More »TikTok Has a Nazi Problem
Neo-Nazis and white supremacists are sharing Hitler-related propaganda and trying to recruit new members on TikTok, according to a new report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) shared exclusively with WIRED. The TikTok algorithm is also promoting this content to new users, researchers found, as extremist communities are leveraging …
Read More »