Politics

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 is @LeahFeiger. David Gilbert is @DaithaiGilbert. Jesselyn Cook is @JessReports. Write to us at [email protected]. Be sure to subscribe to the WIRED Politics Lab newsletter here.

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 the plan’s most alarming elements—including severely restricting abortion and rolling back the rights of LGBTQ+ people—have already become major talking points in the presidential race.

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 damn time.

Let’s talk about it.

Politics has never been stranger—or more online. WIRED Politics Lab is your guide through the vortex of extremism, conspiracies, and disinformation.

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 watched pundits yap about the Democratic ticket, he felt he had to do something. He had never been politically involved, but he had a popular Swift stan account. Not sure of what to do, he posted on X: “I feel like us U.S. swifties should mass organize and help campaign for Kamala Harris and spread how horrendous project 2025 would be to help get people’s butts down the polls.”

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 these efforts are based on unreliable data and debunked election fraud conspiracies, they threaten to disenfranchise voters by removing legitimate registrations. And as the deadline to file these voter roll challenges approaches next week, experts warn that these groups are already planning out their next moves to stop Democratic voters in swing states.

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, and a couple of white boards.

The entire setup could easily have passed as a startup office, but it wasn’t. This was an election war room.

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 the huge popularity of TikTok among younger audiences to spread their message.

The report from ISD details how hundreds of extremist TikTok accounts are openly posting videos promoting Holocaust denial and the glorification of Hitler and Nazi-era Germany, and suggesting that Nazi ideology is a solution to modern-day issues such as the alleged migrant invasion of Western countries. The accounts also show support for white supremacist mass shooters and livestream-related footage or recreations of these massacres. Many of the accounts use Nazi symbols in their profile pictures or include white supremacist codes in their usernames.

People line up to take their picture next to a cardboard cutout of former President Donald Trump; fist in the air, blood on his face post assassination attempt. Above them a second copy of the cutout rotates atop a tower of bitcoin mining equipment. Superimposed over his clenched hand is a big bitcoin.

Trump is the headliner of the Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville, arguably the most high-profile speaker for the conference since El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele appeared via video in 2021 to announce that he’d make cryptocurrency legal tender in his country.

Former president Donald Trump outlined a plan to turbocharge crypto growth and make the US a crypto mining powerhouse in his keynote address to the 2024 Nashville Bitcoin Conference on Saturday.

Trump announced that if elected, he would create a strategic bitcoin reserve in the US. “It will be the policy of my administration to keep 100 percent of all bitcoin the US government currently holds or acquires in the future … as a core of the strategic national bitcoin stockpile,” he said.

This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

As delegates arrived at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee in mid-July to officially nominate former president Donald Trump as their 2024 candidate, a right-wing policy think tank held an all-day event nearby. The Heritage Foundation, a key sponsor of the convention and a group that has been influencing Republican presidential policy since the 1980s, gathered its supporters to tout Project 2025, a 900-plus-page policy blueprint that seeks to fundamentally restructure the federal government.