Inside the Republican false-flag effort to turn off Kamala Harris voters [View all]
Inside the Republican false-flag effort to turn off Kamala Harris voters
A multipronged dark money effort by advisers to Elon Musk targeted liberals, Jews, Muslims and Black voters with ads that were not quite what they seemed.
November 15, 2024
By Michael Scherer and Josh Dawsey
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/11/15/republican-ads-false-flag/
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Muslims in Michigan began seeing pro-Israel ads this fall praising Vice President Kamala Harris for marrying a Jewish man and backing the Jewish state. Jews in Pennsylvania, meanwhile, saw ads from the same group with the opposite message: Harris wanted to stop U.S. arms shipments to Israel.
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Another group promoted “Kamala’s bold progressive agenda” to conservative-leaning Donald Trump voters, while a third filled the phones of young liberals with videos about how Harris had abandoned the progressive dream. Black voters in North Carolina were told Democrats wanted to take away their menthol cigarettes, while working-class White men in the Midwest were warned that Harris would support quotas for minorities and deny them Zyn nicotine pouches.
What voters had no way of knowing at the time was that all of the ads were part of a single, $45 million effort created by political advisers to Tesla founder Elon Musk who had previously worked on the presidential campaign of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), according to a presentation about the group’s efforts obtained by The Washington Post.
The project, funded with anonymous donations, micro-targeted messages across the battleground states, often with ads that appeared to be something they were not — a tactic the organizers sometimes referred to internally as “false positives.”
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