Politics

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WIRED’s Makena Kelly and Tim Marchman join Leah to discuss the memorable moments, the policies and, of course, the conspiracies that came up in Tuesday’s presidential debate.

Leah Feiger is @LeahFeiger. Makena Kelly is @kellymakena. Tim Marchman is @timmarchman. Write to us at [email protected]. Be sure to subscribe to the WIRED Politics Lab newsletter here.

In the wake of a debate performance that has been widely panned as disastrous, former president Donald Trump and his supporters have tried to explain the evening away by posting conspiracies about a “rigged” event, deeply misogynistic attacks on vice president Kamala Harris, and wild claims about the vice president’s earrings.

Within minutes of the debate ending, a brand-new conspiracy emerged on X, focusing not on the content of what was said but on the earrings that Harris was wearing.

Lawfair, founded by the well-known litigator Adam Mortara, is a boutique right-wing firm currently engaged by the state of Tennessee to provide counsel on a contentious Supreme Court case that could affect the availability of gender-affirming care for transgender minors across the country. Aside from Mortara, the only other lawyer known to have worked or done work for the firm is a project-based contract attorney named Christopher Roach. He no longer does so, after WIRED asked questions about his apparent ties—revealed exclusively in this story for the first time—to online accounts with a long history of posting white supremacist and antisemitic content.

Ahead of Tuesday night’s presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump, Trump is already boosting conspiracies that the event is being “rigged” in favor of Harris.

In recent days, Trump has promoted a number of baseless conspiracies claiming that ABC News, who will host the debate, is essentially colluding with the Harris campaign. But this is just one of numerous conspiracies the former president has been promoting in recent weeks, and his tirades to the press, online, and in fundraising emails hace included baseless allegations about immigrants flooding the country to vote, claims that the election will be fraudulent, and the idea that Harris became the Democratic nominee in a “coup.”

In hundreds of videos since taken down by YouTube, right-wing influencers working for Tenet Media—a company the US Department of Justice alleges was financed and guided by a state-backed Russian news network—showed interest in a highly specific set of topics, according to a WIRED analysis.

Using closed captioning of the videos we downloaded before the videos were removed, we’ve compiled lists of terms frequently mentioned in them, along with a searchable database:

X appears to be working with a well-known Republican consulting group, seemingly to handle the messaging around the social media platform’s suspension in Brazil.

When WIRED emailed X for comment about the rapidly evolving situation in Brazil, a reply came from Michael Abboud, the managing director of the conservative consulting and public relations firm Targeted Victory. According to his LinkedIn, Abboud worked for the State Department in the last year of the Trump administration and as press secretary for former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s campaign.

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A few months ago, everyone was worried about how AI would impact the 2024 election. It seems like some of the angst has dissipated, but political deepfakes—including pornographic images and video—are still everywhere. Today on the show, WIRED reporters Vittoria Elliott and Will Knight talk about what has changed with AI and what we should worry about.

In late August 2023, Ilya Gambashidze was in a conference room at the office of Social Design Agency, a Russian IT company he founded that is based in Moscow, close to the world-renowned Moscow Conservatory. Gambashidze was relatively unknown in Russian politics at the time, but just a month earlier his name had appeared on a Council of the European Union’s list of Russian nationals subjected to sanctions for playing a central role in a sprawling disinformation campaign against Ukraine.

As national legislation on deepfake pornography crawls its way through Congress, states across the country are trying to take matters into their own hands. Thirty-nine states have introduced a hodgepodge of laws designed to deter the creation of nonconsensual deepfakes and punish those who make and share them.

Earlier this year, Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, herself a victim of nonconsensual deepfakes, introduced the Disrupt Explicit Forged Images and Non-Consensual Edits Act, or Defiance Act. If passed, the bill would allow victims of deepfake pornography to sue as long as they could prove the deepfakes had been made without their consent. In June, Republican senator Ted Cruz introduced the Take It Down Act, which would require platforms to remove both revenge porn and nonconsensual deepfake porn.

Are you an election denier who’s just not satisfied with the number of conspiracies about Wi-Fi-connected voting machines or reports about floods of illegal immigrantsstuffing ballots into drop boxes on TikTok or Instagram? Do you pine for a place to share and learn even more? Want to connect with like-minded election deniers?

Well, with just 60 days until the 2024 presidential election, and with efforts to undermine the outcome of the vote already well underway, there’s now an app just for you—and no, it’s not Elon Musk’s X.