Nightmare of the National Public Data Breach | Infiltrating the Far Right | Three Cheers for the Military Industrial Complex, and more

Election, court and law enforcement officials who have monitored reports of voter fraud have found no proof of widespread fraud, and they have said that the number of noncitizens who have wrongfully cast ballots is minuscule. It is a crime for noncitizens to attempt to vote in federal elections.
More than a dozen cities and towns, mostly in deep-blue areas, allow foreign nationals to vote in local elections regardless of their immigration status, which state and local leaders say is warranted because unauthorized immigrants pay taxes at levels comparable to those of citizens and strengthen their economies. Many immigrants wait for years to become naturalized and do not register to vote or cast ballots once they do.
That hasn’t stopped Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance from emphasizing the claim in media appearances and campaign events, fueling a conspiracy theory that is central to Mr. Trump’s lie that the last election was stolen from him.

How a Far-Right Takeover of Georgia’s Election Board Could Swing the Election  (Nick Corasaniti, New York Times)
Josh McKoon, the chair of the Georgia Republican Party, boasted at the state convention in late May that he had “very good news.”
Georgia Republicans had just orchestrated a takeover of the state election board, an unelected body that sets voting rules. With this new majority, Republicans could enact an agenda that would help former President Donald J. Trump win in November, Mr. McKoon said.
Since the takeover, the Georgia State Election Board has approved a host of rules on certifications and investigations backed by right-wing election activists who claim, falsely, that the 2020 election was stolen from Mr. Trump. The moves underscore a sharp rightward turn for what is supposed to be an apolitical body and have alarmed Democrats, election officials and even some Republicans.
“Clearly, the Trump allies have learned their lessons from the failure of the attempted coup of 2020, and they’re starting earlier and attempting to burrow more deeply into the most vulnerable pieces of the election system,” said Norm Eisen, a longtime Washington lawyer and chair of the State Democracy Defenders Fund, a nonpartisan election watchdog group.
If there is another chaotic challenge to the election results this November, Georgia is shaping up to be a hot spot, as it was in 2020. Polls show a close race in the state. Trump-aligned election activists there are well organized. Republican county officials have already shown a willingness to adopt practices from the election denial wing of the party. And the state election board will almost certainly be at the center of the dispute.
The right-wing takeover of the Georgia State Election Board is a significant victory for conservative election activists who have spent the past four years looking for ways to influence the electoral infrastructure, with a focus on local institutions.

Secret Service Finds Protecting Trump Is Extraordinarily Challenging  (Josh Dawsey and Carol D. Leonnig, Washington Post)
The series of events in early July illustrates the extraordinary challenges facing the Secret Service as it attempts to protect Trump — a former president running for office again and one of the world’s most recognizable people. He not only holds large-scale campaign rallies — as he plans to do this week — but also routinely hangs out with scores of people at the Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Fla., and his other resorts.
The difficulties have prompted numerous arguments over the past 3½ years between agency officials, Trump and his advisers. His aides grew increasingly angry as many of their requests for additional security were rebuffed by the Secret Service, according to eight people familiar with the events, who like others for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions. They were also enraged that his Secret Service detail and team were not told for 30 minutes as police officials searched for a reported suspicious person at the July 13 rally who turned out to be the gunman, Thomas Matthew Crooks.
Trump aides say they had sometimes been forced to cancel or reschedule events when aides felt the venues were not going to be sufficiently secure. They described repeatedly being denied pleas for more snipers, bomb-sniffing dogs, magnetometers and specialty teams to protect Trump, often because agency higher-ups said extra resources were not available. Trump and his campaign have a close relationship with his security detail.
Secret Service leaders have described the July 13 shooting as a failure, with former director Kimberly Cheatle resigning under pressure after she appeared to blame local police for not better securing the site and falsely claiming the agency never denied Trump detail requests for added security before the shooting. The assassination attempt has raised renewed questions about the Service’s competence that flared a decade ago. On July 13, the Service failed to tackle an obvious risk it has made a top priority since President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963: keeping a gunman on high ground from having a clear shot at the top officials they protect.
Current and former officials also said the agency has never been asked to provide such a heavy layer of protection to a former president and that the levels provided even before the shooting went beyond Secret Service guidelines. Some agency officials have grown frustrated with requests from Trump’s team to schedule events that seem especially challenging to protect, two of the people said.

Infiltrating the Far Right  (David D. Kirkpatrick, New Yorker)
Patriot Front has just a few hundred members, and scholars who study the far right say that only about a hundred thousand Americans actively participate in organized white-nationalist groups. But the assault on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021—and the deadly riot in Charlottesville before that—proved that even just a few hundred organized men can spearhead a devastating, history-making mob. Moreover, the far right’s online promotion of the great-replacement theory to countless sympathizers is accumulating an ominous death toll. In the past decade, lone gunmen inspired by far-right propaganda have killed nine Black churchgoers in Charleston (2015), eleven Jewish worshippers in Pittsburgh (2018), twenty-three Walmart shoppers in El Paso (2019), and ten Black residents of Buffalo (2022). Inside Patriot Front and across the far right, these mass murderers are venerated with the title of “saint”—as in “Saint Dylann Roof,” who carried out the Charleston massacre. (Roof’s name was chanted at the Unite the Right rally, in Charlottesville, in 2017.) Cynthia Miller-Idriss, a professor at American University who studies extremist violence and sometimes advises the White House and the F.B.I., told me that Patriot Front’s marches and vandalism—even if they appear merely performative—“are intended to normalize these ideas, to help mobilize other people, to make them think that there’s a groundswell, to inspire violent action. And it’s effective.”
This year’s Presidential campaign drew its first blood with the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump, at a rally in Pennsylvania on July 13th, which resulted in the death of one attendee. F.B.I. officials have said that the shooter apparently maintained a social-media account, active in 2019 and 2020, in which he endorsed political violence and expressed antisemitic and anti-immigrant rhetoric that was “extreme in nature.” The shooting itself, however, does not appear to have been ideologically motivated—before Trump’s rally, the shooter evidently searched for targets in both parties. The F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security have since warned of potential “follow-on or retaliatory acts of violence,” noting that “individuals in some online communities” are threatening or encouraging revenge attacks. Patriot Front’s founder, Thomas Rousseau has portrayed the assassination attempt as a sign that white maga supporters should do more than simply vote for Trump. “You’ve done that twice already and Our People are worse off than we were before,” he wrote on Telegram. “You must organize outside the system with others of Our People. Tribe & Train, build power, start to resist or cease to exist.” (He placed triple parentheses around “system”—a notation that is far-right code for “Jewish.”)
Trump has thrilled white nationalists from the moment he entered national politics—sowing doubt about Barack Obama’s birthplace, denigrating immigrants as criminals and rapists, bemoaning “shithole countries” in Africa and the Caribbean. Rousseau once told a journalist that although he understood why Trump could support white nationalism only indirectly, his rhetoric was nonetheless “encouraging,” adding, “Sometimes he even utters some truth about the Jew.” Trump recently complained to Time that the United States suffers from “a definite anti-white feeling” and “a bias against white,” which he vowed to end if he returned to the White House.
The F.B.I., which has worked to protect Americans from extremist violence since the nineteen-twenties, when it took on the Ku Klux Klan, has warned of a resurgence of the far right. Near the end of Trump’s term in office, the Department of Homeland Security declared for the first time that domestic violent extremists, rather than foreign terrorists, were “the most persistent and lethal threat” to the nation, primarily in the form of “lone offenders and small groups.” Christopher Wray, the F.B.I.’s director, clarified to a congressional committee that the threat was largely from adherents to “some kind of white-supremacist-type ideology.” Then came the storming of the Capitol. President Joe Biden, on his first day in office, commissioned White House staff to draft the first-ever “National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism.” The document, issued in June, 2021, promised “a comprehensive approach to addressing the threat while safeguarding bedrock American civil rights and civil liberties.”

Three Cheers for the Military Industrial Complex  (Arthur Herman, National Interest)
As a crucial presidential election looms, with a world on fire and threats of multiple wars dotting the globe, we need to take stock of where America is and where it needs to go in the coming decades. Accordingly, it is time to celebrate one of the proudest American achievements: its “military-industrial complex.”
Spawned in a time of great distress during World War II, it won the greatest war in history and kept the Cold War from boiling over against a nuclear-armed peer rival, the Soviet Union. For over seventy years, it kept America and the free world stable, secure, and ready to confront any military challenge.
Today, it’s a shell of its former self. Thanks to shrinking funds, a changing industrial picture, and decades of vilification by critics on both the Left and Right, the American military-industrial complex’s decline has made us less safe, less secure, and more vulnerable to our enemies.
The most recent National Defense Strategy (NDS) report reveals that America is barely ready to fight a war against either Russia or China—let alone both. It concludes, “The threats the United States faces are the most serious and most challenging the nation has encountered since 1945.”
It’s the decline of that much-maligned military-industrial complex that’s made the once mighty America so vulnerable. At this current point, the U.S. Navy’s shipbuilding is at its lowest point in twenty-five years. Meanwhile, OSINT sources report that China has shipyards that can build thirteen naval vessels at the same time.
Now, Americans need to recreate a military-industrial complex, one fit for the challenges of the twenty-first century. In the meantime, it’s worth looking back in time to see what the first iteration did right.

US Intelligence Officials Say Iran Is to Blame for Hacks Targeting Trump, Biden-Harris Campaigns  (AP)
U.S. intelligence officials said Monday they were confident that Iran was responsible for the hack of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, casting the cyber intrusion as part of a brazen and broader effort by Tehran to interfere in American politics and potentially shape the outcome of the election. The assessment from the FBI and other federal agencies was the first time the U.S. government has assigned blame for hacks that have raised anew the threat of foreign election interference and underscored how Iran, in addition to more sophisticated adversaries like Russia and China, remains a top concern. Besides breaching the Trump campaign, officials also believe that Iran tried to hack into the presidential campaign of Kamala Harris.