Domestic Politics

This isn’t a new tactic. Russia and other state-sponsored actors microtargeted communities in the runup to the 2016 election to help push Trump over the finish line (remember the “super-predators” thing?).

That was arguably the most successful enemy action since bin Laden baited the U.S. into self-ruinous lashing out 15 years earlier. But now the calls are coming from inside the house, microtargeting and mass communication are much easier to accomplish with AI tools (conveniently controlled by right-wing oligarchs), and the thoroughly corrupt president Musk purchased is fully onboard with the project.

Sattler says media literacy campaigns won’t work to counter this kind of threat, and there’s no opposition party messaging solution either because Musk isn’t looking to persuade. Instead, he’s using his vast wealth and the regrettably still-influential media platform he purchased to sow chaos, hatred and division so he and his sleazy pals can steal our democracy and loot our treasury, as they’re doing right now.

You can’t out-podcast someone whose goal isn’t persuasion but degradation of the epistemic commons itself. It still places the entire burden of defense on individual persuasion and completely ignores what Musk is actually trying to do. He isn’t trying to win people over. He’s trying to poison enough of the electorate that any result Republicans don’t like can be plausibly contested. Those are different attacks, and they require different defenses…

When someone receives a message precision-engineered around their specific identity and fears, delivered through a channel that appears organic and independent, their media literacy doesn’t protect them. Not because they’re unintelligent, but because that’s how human cognition works under emotional strain. Musk’s team has studied this and is building for it. Every false-flag ad is a spear-phishing email optimized for exactly the psychological moment when critical thinking fails.

Sattler compares media literacy strategies to the mostly ineffective user training companies do to try to stop workers from clicking spear phishing links. He notes that training doesn’t help because sophisticated scammers embed personal information designed expressly to defeat critical thinking skills.

Recognizing that, cybersecurity experts focus instead on making attacks harder for scammers to execute, taking the burden off the potential victims. Sattler proposes something similar to deal with Musk and other scammers in the political arena:

The political equivalent is mandatory, real-time disclosure of the ultimate funding source behind every digital political ad, not the shell nonprofit or the PAC name, but the actual billionaire. You don’t ask voters to do anything. You just make the spoofing structurally harder to run.

That sounds like an excellent solution, but it won’t work in the short term at the federal level because it would require legislation written and passed by people who aren’t benefitting from Musk’s scam, i.e., Democrats, who are currently out of power.

In the meantime, Sattler points to a couple of grassroots actions that have thwarted Musk. One is the Tesla Takedown protests that dented Musk’s car brand and sent him scurrying away from public-facing DOGE activities with his tail between his legs.

The other example was when Wisconsin beat back Musk’s attempt to buy a state Supreme Court seat in 2025. Judge Susan Crawford whupped the Musk-backed candidate by explicitly running against Musk:

Crawford made Musk the opponent, not Schimel, the actual name on the ballot. She ran against the money, against the interference, against the sheer gall of the richest man on earth treating a state judiciary like a personal acquisition. Her campaign wasn’t a fact-check operation or a media literacy seminar. It was a sustained, morally direct counter-attack that named the con loudly and repeatedly until the name stuck.

Musk is already gearing up for another round. He donated tens of millions already to support Republicans in the midterms and has strategized directly with Trump, Vance and Wiles, according to Sattler. So we can definitely expect more fuckery.

But Trump is now deeply unpopular, as is Musk. Sattler suggests that Democrats who are running against Musk-backed Republican opponents (which is all of them, basically) hang Musk around their necks like Crawford did. Sounds like a good plan to me.

Open thread.