Trumpism is a denial of service attack
How the MAGA right is hacking democracy.
The Washington Post reports on an interesting strategy by Donald Trump’s loyal followers to disrupt the 2022 elections: Bug election offices about the 2020 election.
Supporters of former president Donald Trump have swamped local election offices across the nation in recent weeks with a coordinated campaign of requests for 2020 voting records, in some cases paralyzing preparations for the fall election season.
In nearly two dozen states and scores of counties, election officials are fielding what many describe as an unprecedented wave of public records requests in the final weeks of summer, one they say may be intended to hinder their work and weaken an already strained system. The avalanche of sometimes identically worded requests has forced some to dedicate days to the process of responding even as they scurry to finalize polling locations, mail out absentee ballots and prepare for early voting in October, officials said.
Those officials “believe that those organizing the effort are not out for information but rather are trying to cause chaos as their fall crunchtime approaches, making it more difficult to run smooth elections and giving critics new openings to attack the integrity of election administration in the United States.”
This sounds to me exactly like a denial of service attack, only analog:
A Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack is an attack meant to shut down a machine or network, making it inaccessible to its intended users. DoS attacks accomplish this by flooding the target with traffic, or sending it information that triggers a crash. In both instances, the DoS attack deprives legitimate users (i.e. employees, members, or account holders) of the service or resource they expected.1
In both the election and digital versions, DoS attacks work by letting the system do its job the way it was designed — in this case, by responding to public records requests — but mucking it up by forcing it to do that job in a volume the system isn’t intended to handle.
It’s malicious, to say the least.
There’s another name for this kind of thing, coined by Trump’s ideological henchman Steve Bannon: “Flooding the zone with shit.”
“The Democrats don’t matter,” Bannon told Lewis. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”
That’s the Bannon business model: Flood the zone. Stink up the joint. As Jonathan Rauch once said, citing Bannon’s infamous quote, “This is not about persuasion: This is about disorientation.”
I don’t know if Bannon is behind this latest tactic, but he does have a history of converting online insights and tactics to real-world politics.
And the DoS attack on America’s election offices is of a piece with Bannon’s “flood the zone” philosophy — and it’s also in keeping with Trump himself, who arguably has managed to survive all his many scandals precisely because there’s so many of them.
Before he got kicked off Twitter, Trump managed to compound all this by incessantly throwing out provocation after provocation — sometimes dozens of times a day — to keep the media and his vast audience chasing their tails. It was exhausting. But also … it worked.
Will it work again? I’m not optimistic about democracy’s chances.
AmGreatness watch
I usually post headlines from MAGAite website American Greatness2 to my Twitter account, but I’m adding it as a feature3 to this here Substack. I think it's useful as an insight into the right's id. I'm not sure the editors always believe what they publish -- in fact, I'm pretty sure they don't. But the stuff they put out there is certainly what they are happy to let their audiences believe.
Anyway, there’s a pretty notable theme today, regarding Queen Elizabeth’s death.
This, of course, is a backlash to the backlash — a pair of rants against the Kenyan anti-colonialism that has vocally refused to mourn the late queen or the frankly racist, violent empire that made her its figurehead. What’s interesting about AmGreatness is that it’s a place where the term “self-government” gets thrown around a lot, but when folks of color embrace the concept, it becomes “anti-white.”
Self-government for me, not for thee, I guess.
Top o’ the pops
Emphasis added.
Background for my obsession: A couple of editors were once good friends of mine. We … don’t talk anymore. I grieve that loss, still, and always will. But the reasons for the split are probably obvious.
Let me know if you like this or if you’d rather keep this here Substack simple.