How Israel Used Fake Social Media Accounts to Target Black Democrats

Israel paid for a foreign influence campaign to disseminate pro-Israel propaganda and disinformation to U.S. lawmakers, The New York Times confirmed on Wednesday. The campaign had been flagged and reported on for months across numerous social media platforms, but it was unclear the extent to which the Israeli government was involved in the operation. Turns out, the Israeli government directly commissioned the whole thing—and it was targeting Black Democratic lawmakers in particular.

The influence operation—which seeks to sow criticism of pro-Palestine and campus protests and to bolster support for Israel’s attacks on Gaza—began in October, according to the Times. Meta, Facebook’s parent company, identified the operation last week. Meta described the campaign as “likely AI-generated” with ChatGPT posts from accounts posing as Jewish students, Black Americans, and “concerned citizens,” according to Reuters, and a focus on audiences in the United States and Canada.

The Times reports the campaign is still active on X (formerly Twitter), where fake accounts posing as real Americans spammed pro-Israel propaganda in reply to predominantly Black U.S. lawmakers. The campaign targeted Ritchie Torres, a Democratic representative from New York well known for routinely espousing pro-Israel propaganda, as well as House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. Both, coincidentally, are two of AIPAC’s largest donation recipients: Both Torres’s and Jeffries’s largest donor is AIPAC, while Jeffries is AIPAC’s top recipient.

Israeli-based newspaper Haaretz also reported numerous examples of the fake accounts and included one reply from a ChatGPT-fueled fake account posing as a Black woman in response to U.S. Representative Sydney Kamlager-Dove, who represents California.

“Israel’s role in this is reckless and probably ineffective,” Achiya Schatz, the executive director of Israeli disinformation watchdog FakeReporter, told The New York Times. That Israel “ran an operation that interferes in U.S. politics is extremely irresponsible.”

According to sources involved in the campaign who provided documented evidence to The New York Times, the campaign was commissioned by Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs—a government body largely focused on pushing pro-Israel and pro-Netanyahu talking points to U.S. Jews and advocating for a highly controversial proposed definition of antisemitism. The ministry paid $2 million for the campaign, tapping Israeli political marketing firm Stoic.

The exposure of the government agency behind the influence campaign is almost entirely too convenient: In January, a Tel Aviv University report called to shutter the ministry and fold its initiatives into the offices of the prime minister and the foreign ministry, consolidating power around far-right figureheads Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Affairs Minister Israel Katz.

Judge Aileen Cannon has agreed to Donald Trump’s request for a hearing on whether Jack Smith’s appointment as special counsel in his classified documents case is legal, and she’s allowing parties not involved in the case to take part.

On Tuesday, Cannon granted motions from Trump’s legal team for parties not involved in his classified documents case to participate in an expanded hearing on the legality of Smith’s appointment.

These parties include conservative lawyers Josh Blackman from the Landmark Legal Foundation and Gene Schaerr from Citizens United. The other side will include Matthew Seligman, a legal scholar who thinks that Trump’s motion is “meritless.” None of these parties are otherwise involved in the case. Oral arguments on Smith’s appointment will begin June 21.

It’s an odd long-shot strategy in the case that probably would have been shot down by any other judge, but the Trump-appointed Cannon has made several questionable decisions in the classified documents case that favor the convicted felon and Republican presidential nominee.

Cannon has also agreed to hear Trump’s arguments that the FBI plotted to assassinate him—a completely made-up conspiracy theory. Last week, she blocked a gag order request from special counsel Jack Smith because it was “wholly lacking in substance and professional courtesy.” Last month, she effectively delayed Trump’s case indefinitely to resolve pretrial motions. Even one of Trump’s former lawyers, Ty Cobb, thinks that Cannon is doing a terrible job with the case.

The frequently delayed case has not reflected well on Cannon, a former federal prosecutor and University of Michigan law school graduate. One hearing with a Trump co-defendant devolved into a shouting match, and Cannon seems to misunderstand basic legal proceedings and principles in court, forcing legal counsel to explain them to her as the trial proceeds. Whether her actions are due to ignorance or a deliberate attempt to help Trump, he has made no secret of his appreciation.

Conservatives, those supposed defenders of law and order, are struggling to spin Donald Trump’s felony conviction on 34 counts of falsifying business records in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election. As a result, they’re resorting to a well-practiced reflex: gutter racism.

Donald Trump Jr., the 46-year-old self-proclaimed “Meme Wars General” and executive vice president of the Trump Organization, on Monday posted an image of George Floyd on his Instagram.

“Democrats: ‘I don’t know how you can support a felon,’” he wrote on the photo.

“The mental gymnastics here are staggering!!!” Trump Jr. captioned the image. He also posted a version of the photo to his Instagram story.

Trump Jr.’s post, which at the time of writing has been liked more than 240,000 times, seems indicative of a broader conservative talking point in the making. When asked earlier this week about Trump being a convicted felon, Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene responded, “Yeah, so was George Floyd, and everybody—and you all too, the media—worship George Floyd. Democrats worship George Floyd. There were riots burning down the f—ng country over George Floyd.”

It’s unclear whether the disingenuous attempt to compare Floyd, an unarmed Black man murdered by police officers in 2020, to Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, is a coordinated strategic effort by conservatives, but it tracks with the right-wing embrace of racist conspiracy about Floyd’s death and celebration of vigilante violence during the 2020 protests. Conservative abuse of Floyd’s image is by now a yearslong phenomenon. But that doesn’t make Trump Jr.’s post any less shameless or disgusting.

The GOP’s junior ranks are increasingly being staffed by open racists, in what some commentators have called the “groyperfication” of the party. And Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is no exception.

Last week, Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk announced that his organization would be officially partnering with the campaign to get out the vote.

“Breaking right here on this show: Turning Point Action’s ballot chase initiative, and remind you, we are working directly in coordination with the Trump campaign, that’s the new FEC rule and regulation. Charlie, I don’t want to get over my skis there,” Kirk’s podcast co-host, Andrew Kolvet, announced.

“We’re allowed to work in harmony on doors and canvassing, that’s what the law says,” Kirk said.

Turning Point USA has been a force in right-wing media and campus conservative organizing, and has held events at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago compound. But the organization has previously been mostly limited to maintaining a watch list of supposedly subversive leftist professors, encouraging followers to violate Covid-19 masking regulations, and enriching its brass, and has never officially partnered with a campaign.

Kirk, the group’s founder and apparently the Trump campaign’s newest canvasser, is a model of the new student conservativism: He has impugned the character of Martin Luther King Jr. and questioned whether MLK Day should be a federal holiday, implied that affirmative action is allowing unqualified Black pilots to fly planes, and expressed “impatience for American Jews that have put up with the anti-white sentiments the last decade.”

Turning Point USA’s national field director was fired after texting another TPUSA employee, “I HATE BLACK PEOPLE. Like fuck them all.… I hate blacks. End of story.” The organization also has been accused of organizing bus trips to the Capitol on January 6.

The Trump campaign has already proven it will go to any lengths and partner with any group, no matter how unsavory, to gain an edge against Joe Biden. That it’s partnering with bigots such as Kirk, then, isn’t surprising, but it provides a harrowing preview of the future of Republican Party organizing. The fever doesn’t appear to be breaking anytime soon.

Representative Byron Donalds attempted to skewer Democrats, but his tirade dipped into the uncanny valley and ended up looking a lot more like his own party.

During an interview Tuesday on Newsmax, Donalds lamented Dr. Anthony Fauci’s testimony earlier this week in front of a GOP-led subcommittee on the Covid-19 pandemic. Not only did the hearing quickly go off the rails, but Fauci made it through without validating any of the bonkers Republican claims about him. Donalds seemed incensed, but his argument sounded all too familiar.

“We have people in this government, Tony Fauci is a part of that ilk, that truly believe that they are omnipotent, that they are never wrong,” the Florida Republican said. “And when you catch them in their lies, then they try to gaslight you, gaslight the American people, and say, ‘No, no, no, we agreed with you the entire time,’ or, ‘There simply is no evidence to support your conspiratorial claims.’

“These people are gone, they have lost it, so there is no reasoning with them, they simply have to be defeated,” said Donalds, who is reportedly on Donald Trump’s short list of vice presidential contenders.

The inconsistent but dogmatic attitude to which Donalds alluded sounds all too akin to his Republican counterparts, who break their backs daily to stay in Trump’s good graces as he flits between different stances on a number of issues, including immigration, abortion, and of course, criminal justice.

Increasingly, it appears that Republicans are disappointed with the outcome of Fauci’s hearing, as they were pitifully unable to pin their grievances on one man. In front of Congress, Fauci has called the GOP conspiracies about his leadership of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases “seriously distorted.”