Eliyahu Gasson |opinions editor |

I am tired of hearing people say that we need to return civility to politics. Americans don’t want civility, a fact made evident by the runaway success of former President Donald Trump, who, despite openly calling his political opponents “vermin,” threatening to use the federal government to indict said political opponents and calling the woman he was found to have raped a “whack job,” still enjoys 46.4% support in national polling.

The American people love Trump because he is a storyteller. It doesn’t matter if the tales he tells are true or not. His supporters are looking for something to confirm their biases: That they are good and right, and their enemies (liberals, progressives, immigrants, etc.) are all evil and wrong. Most Americans are children who can’t sleep at night without knowing that they (the “good guys”) will win the righteous crusade their leaders told them they’re fighting.

There is only one way out of the collapse we’re in. We need to put an end to the lies. Access to social media is a privilege, not a right. If influencers and politicians can’t behave themselves, then they don’t deserve access to the platforms they use to spread lies.

A video was shared on the social platform X last week that claimed to be of a former high school student of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. In it, claims were made that Walz sexually abused his former student while under his care.

The video was a deep fake — a piece of propaganda created with artificial intelligence supposedly produced by a notorious Russian-aligned propaganda network called Storm-1516, according to an article published by Wired on Tuesday.

Storm-1516 has also been linked to a number of other propaganda campaigns, including false claims that Vice President Kamala Harris “hit a 13-year-old girl with a car and left the crime scene” in 2011.

The claim that Walz is a pedophile is not new. Attacks on Walz go back to Oct. 5 when John Dougan, a former police officer who now runs a number of pro-Russia websites out of Moscow, appeared on Zak Paine’s “RedPill78,” a QAnon adjacent radio show, with a man named Rick, who claimed to be a foreign exchange student from Kazakhstan who went to Mankato West High School in 2004 when Walz was teaching there. Rick alleged that Walz sexually abused him, and the clip was shared a week later on X by the account “Black Insurrectionist,” which was followed by prominent MAGA conservatives Donald Trump Jr. and former Trump advisor Roger Stone.

The Black Insurrectionist account gained popularity weeks before the post about Walz when it claimed to have been contacted by a whistleblower who said Harris had been provided the questions ahead of the September presidential debate hosted by ABC.

Last week, the Black Insurrectionist account shared screenshots of email correspondence they had with an alleged victim of Walz. Some users pointed out that the screenshots had a text cursor, indicating the emails were being edited at the time they were screenshotted. Others noticed that the date and time format in the emails was inconsistent with how they should be displayed on real emails.

The posts caught the attention of prominent right-wing figures including Candace Owens, a well known conservative podcaster and Kanye West apologist, and Jack Posobiec, one of the original proprietors of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory who has been publicly acknowledged by Trump and who led seminars on voting integrity for the Republican National Committee. The two helped to spread the misinformation to their vast audiences online.

NBC News published an article last week that outlined at least 50 false narratives launched by Storm-1516 since fall of last year. One campaign revolved around a video in which a “whistleblower” falsely claimed that Ukrainian leaders spent American aid on yachts — a lie which was later spread by U.S. Sen. JD Vance, who is now the Republican candidate for vice president.

“Experts fear Storm-1516 and similar groups have the potential to sway public opinion by undermining the credibility of democratic institutions, influencing U.S. policy and diminishing people’s ability to distinguish fact from fiction,” according to the NBC News article.

“… it only takes one person, one influencer with outsized influence, to grab onto a video and amplify it in the United States,” said General Manager of the Microsoft Threat Analysis Center Clint Watts to NBC News.

There needs to be some sort of repercussion for spreading misinformation that hurts this country. There’s little the government can do to directly fight against Storm-1516 and similar groups, but there is something that can be done about the influencers who spread misinformation here at home.

Candace Owens, Jack Posobiec, JD Vance and the many other influential right-wing pundits and politicians who spread misinformation are guilty of election interference — they use lies to sway voters toward their candidate of choice. In doing so, they contribute to the incivility that has plagued American politics since Trump first ran for the Republican Party nomination in 2016 — incivility which has only gotten worse over time.

If you are serious about the need for American politics to return to a more civil dialogue, you would agree that the punishment for spreading lies about the integrity of our nation’s democratic institutions and politicians during an election should be severe.

Once again, if influencers can’t bring themselves to stop spreading misinformation, their right to be an influencer should be stripped away.