I. When The Sickness Comes Out
Sometimes a system's vulnerabilities aren't visible until they're exploited. Like a seemingly healthy organism that suddenly succumbs to a pathogen that's been quietly multiplying beneath the surface, American democracy has revealed a critical weakness—not in its mechanical processes of vote counting, but in the psychological infrastructure that supports informed decision-making.
The sickness wasn't sudden. It grew in the fertile soil of social media echo chambers, fed by algorithms designed to maximize engagement rather than understanding. It metastasized through networks of influence bought and paid for by actors whose interests align not with democratic principles, but with the exploitation of democratic vulnerabilities.
This pathogen has a clear signature: the systematic dismantling of shared reality through technologically amplified disinformation. And its symptoms are now impossible to ignore.
II. A Pattern of Conspiring Against the United States
We are all experiencing a kind of collective disillusionment about our country right now. Given everything we know about the rise of authoritarians, how could over half of the voting population in America want someone and something like Donald Trump as the president of these United States again? Intelligent critical thinkers are asking rhetorical questions into the social media abyss—questions like Did we forget what happened during his first presidency? and Do you really not understand how tariffs work?
Concerns over Trump returning to our highest office are warranted. He and his enablers and accomplices have gone out of their way to paint a future for our country that has no place for anyone who is not a white-skinned peddler of patriarchal fairy tales and settler colonialism. But it's not just what they say they want to do that warrants our all-hands-on-deck national concern.
We should question the integrity of an election in which one participant has, for the last two election, conspired to undermine the integrity of our elections:
- Found guilty on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records as part of an illegal conspiracy to undermine the integrity of the 2016 election;
- Indicted on 32 felony counts of willful retention of classified documents, as well as conspiracy to obstruct justice, and corruptly concealing documents in a federal investigation;
- Indicted on four charges related to undermining the integrity of the 2020 election: conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding; obstruction of, and attempt to obstruct, an official proceeding; conspiracy against rights.
- Indicted along with 18 co-conspirators on state charges in Georgia related to efforts to overturn the 2020 election (in which four people have already pled guilty). The charges include: Violating the state's Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) act; conspiracy to impersonate a public officer; conspiracy to commit forgery in the first degree; conspiracy to commit false statements and writings.
- Two of his accomplices were charged with conspiracy to commit election fraud, conspiracy to commit computer theft, conspiracy to commit computer invasion of privacy, and conspiracy to defraud the state
In other words, Donald Trump has been criminally indicted on felony charges for conspiracy against the United States related to the 2020 Election results, and was found guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in a conspiracy related to the 2016 Election results.
In the two elections before this year's election, Donald Trump and his accomplices actively engaged in conspiracies against the United States and the American people.
It makes sense, then, to assume that Donald Trump and his accomplices may have actively engaged in conspiracies against the United States and the American people again.
III. Russia (If You're Listening)
Trump's pattern of conspiracy against the United States didn't emerge in isolation. While he was actively undermining American elections in 2016 and 2020, Russia was perfecting its own system of manufactured consent. Putin's trajectory from 2000 to 2024 reads like a masterclass in the gradual suffocation of democratic institutions—one that would eventually intertwine with Trump's assault on American democracy.
The numbers tell a story of increasingly brazen electoral manipulation:
- 1996, Boris Yeltsin wins (54%; 40.2M)
- 2000, Vladimir Putin wins (53.4%; 39.7M)
- 2004, Vladimir Putin wins (71.9%; 49.5M)
- 2008, Dmitry Medvedev wins (71.2%; 52.5M)* (Medvedev appointed Putin as Prime Minister, and most people accept that Putin was running the show behind the scenes)
- 2012, Vladimir Putin wins (64.3%; 45.6M)
- 2018, Vladimir Putin wins (77.5%; 56.4M)
- 2024, Vladimir Putin wins (88.5%; 76.2M)
Researchers have studied these irregularities since 2004 and concluded that much of the data indicates statistically fraudulent reporting. But the true significance of these Russian elections lies not in their fraudulent numbers, but in how they foreshadowed the transformation of American democracy.
The blueprint was hiding in plain sight. Trump's transformation from failed casino operator to political force paralleled his growing financial entanglement with Russian interests:
- In the 1990s, Donald Trump was already a failed businessperson, having bankrupted hotels and casinos multiple times. This repeated nature of his inability to successfully run businesses that are literally designed to take people's money led to United States banks no longer wanting to give him loans.
- In 2004, Trump Hotel and Casino Resorts filed for bankruptcy, pushing Trump's total debt to just shy of $2 billion dollars. But that all turned around, suddenly, with the introduction of Russian money through real estate deals.
- By 2008, Donald Trump Jr. gave an interview with eTurboNews in which he shared how interconnected the Trump business empire was with Russian money, saying, "Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets."
Obama faced off against McCain in 2008, then Romney in 2012. At the same time, Russia was going through an interesting political evolution: Putin, who was constitutionally barred from running for a third term in 2008, was appointed Prime Minister by the person who became president—and then ran for (and won) the Russian presidency for a fourth time in 2012.
The collision course between Russian influence and American democracy became clear in 2012, when concerns about the validity of Russian presidential elections began to surface. The U.S. State Department—then led by Secretary Clinton—stoked allegations of fraud and government resource manipulation favoring Putin. By mid-2016, diplomatic tensions between Clinton and Putin had escalated into promises of "payback," just as cybersecurity researchers were uncovering two alarming trends: technologically illiterate local government leaders adopting Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) machines, and voting software & hardware that was demonstrably vulnerable to foreign influence.
Then came 2016, and with it, the unbelievable: Trump defied all odds and won. In the dizzying aftermath of the Left eating itself alive in post-election analysis, it became clear that one of the significant reasons all the odds were defied was because someone was tipping the scales.
The Senate Intelligence Committee described how it happened in 2018, as part of their first volume of declassified documents that were created as part of their investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election:
At least 18 states had election systems targeted by Russian-affiliated cyber actors in some fashion. Elements of the IC have varying levels of confidence about three additional states, for a possible total of at least 21. In addition, other states saw suspicious or malicious behavior the IC has been unable to attribute to Russia.
Almost all of the states that were targeted observed vulnerability scanning directed at their Secretary of State websites or voter registration infrastructure. Other scans were broader or less specific in their target.
In at least six states, the Russian-affiliated cyber actors went beyond scanning and conducted malicious access attempts on voting-related websites.
In a small number of states, Russian-affiliated cyber actors were able to gain access to restricted elements of election infrastructure. In a small number of states, these cyber actors were in a position to, at a minimum, alter or delete voter registration data; however, they did not appear to be in a position to manipulate individual votes or aggregate vote totals.
Remember that 2018 was halfway through Trump's first presidency—one that was riddled with parts of the government promulgating a serious and growing threat to our institutions by Russian intelligence. That year, the DoJ indicted a dozen Russian intelligence officers for cybersecurity crimes meant to influence the outcome of the 2016 election, and a massive social media psy ops scandal came to light:
The company’s problems stretch back before the revelations about Cambridge Analytica, with investigations into how Russian actors infiltrated Facebook’s platform by placing ads and posts to disrupt the 2016 American presidential election. At the time, Mr. Zuckerberg dismissed the idea of foreign interference on his platform as a “crazy idea.”
Since then, the company has been brought into investigations by law enforcement and Congressional committees on Russian interference, and the company has acknowledged that its platform was used by agents to influence voters.
Do you know who was on the board of Cambridge Analytica, behind the scenes orchestrating a nationwide psychological harvesting and exploitation campaign through social media? Steve Bannon, one of Trump's close advisors and architects of the January 6th insurrection who was indicted in 2022 on charges of money laundering and conspiracy.
Not long after Americans learned about the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Vice reported that election security experts found evidence that refuted long-standing claims about voting machines never connecting to the internet: in ten states across the country, including nine counties in Wisconsin, four counties in Michigan, and seven counties in Florida, election tabulation systems did in fact connect to the internet.
That same year, Voting Village—a consortium of cybersecurity professionals working together with DEFCON, the world's largest public hacking conference—released another report indicating the brittleness of our electronic voting infrastructure:
DRE (“touchscreen”) voting devices cannot be used to conduct reliable or auditable elections in this way, because the stored vote tallies (as well as the ballot display) are under the control of precinct voting machine software that can be maliciously altered (in both theory and practice).
The experience of the Voting Village strongly reinforces the widely understood risk that these machines might be compromised under election conditions in practice. The authors strongly endorse the recommendations of the National Academies 2018 consensus report, Securing the Vote, that DRE voting machines, which do not have the capacity for independent auditing, be phased out as quickly as possible.
This is an increasingly urgent matter, especially as foreign state actors (which may be highly motivated to disrupt our elections and which enjoy especially rich resources) are recognized as part of the threat to U.S. election integrity.
By 2020, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) had released an Election Infrastructure Cyber Risk Assessment report, which included the following:
That same year, the 2020 election and the subsequent insurrection against the United States portended where we are today: a nation seemingly unable to hold anti-American activities accountable because of flaws in the way our accountability systems are designed. That someone could incite an insurrection against the United States, be charged with multiple criminal conspiracies—including egregious national security protocol violations—and just stall until they are able to exploit the election system again in four years is a heinous reminder of how brittle our government actually is.
But the vulnerability goes deeper than government systems. Our electoral system, designed for an 18th century republic, has proven dangerously vulnerable to modern psychological warfare. While there was bipartisan agreement that the 2020 election was procedurally secure, the architecture of our democracy offers little defense against the sophisticated manipulation of voters' perceptions and beliefs.
The systematic radicalization of Republican voters has been achieved through digital isolation and targeted disinformation, creating hermetically sealed echo chambers that separate them from alternative perspectives. Within these spaces, the line between truth and authoritarian propaganda becomes increasingly blurred, offering a seductive comfort: the promise that what one feels to be true need never be examined, and that feelings of insecurity and distrust are not only justified but righteous.
As a result, nearly half of America has fallen prey to algorithmic content platforms that reinforce and amplify existing biases. These systems don't just create an angry, uninformed electorate–they forge ideological soldiers whose minds become impervious to logic and reason. Through constant exposure to bias-confirming content and the false agency of social media participation, Americans are conditioned to trade their empathy for empty promises of superiority, embracing others' suffering as validation of their own imagined victimhood.
This vulnerability has not gone unnoticed by America's adversaries. In 2023, the Department of Justice revealed the scope of this threat, charging Russian intelligence officers and their American collaborators with orchestrating disinformation campaigns designed to fracture American unity and compromise our elections.
By 2024, these operations had evolved into sophisticated influence networks: the DoJ uncovered a $10 million Russian operation targeting platforms of social media influencers who specialize in weaponizing male insecurity—a direct exploitation of the psychological vulnerabilities created by algorithmic radicalization. The DoJ also announced that they had seized internet domains that were part of, again, a covert Russian intelligence operation designed to influence the outcome of a U.S. election:
IV. An Asymmetric Attack on American Democracy
America's wealthiest elite have engineered an ecosystem of disinformation that merges fact, fiction, and superstition into a potent psychological weapon. These manufactured echo chambers wrap themselves in the language of 'natural' social hierarchies and dominance, exploiting the very vulnerabilities created by policies that concentrate wealth and power in the hands of their architects.
The Democratic response is and will likely remain fragmented because its coalition is not unified by shared xenophobia or fantasies of dominance and hierarchy. Instead, it must craft nuanced messages that respect its diverse constituents—a disadvantage in an information ecosystem designed to reward simplistic absolutism over complex truth. This asymmetry in our political discourse represents perhaps the greatest threat to our democratic system, one that no amount of election security can address.
The parallels between America and Russia right now are impossible to ignore. In early 2024, Putin secured another term through a Russian election whose statistical impossibilities barely masked its fraudulent nature. But the true horror lies not in the fraud itself, but in how familiar the underlying mechanics feel: the weaponization of media, the cultivation of grievance, the systematic dismantling of truth itself.
An article titled What's Happening in Russia is Not an Election carries an ominous warning for us as we face the road ahead:
This year, more people are casting ballots than ever before in human history, and yet the world is becoming less democratic. That’s because many of those votes are meaningless, registered in sham contests that don’t deserve to be called elections. Russia’s upcoming charade is a classic example of voting without democracy.