Stop the Steal’s Wonky Sibling

A Permission Structure for a Power Grab As Allegra wrote over the weekend, this week stands to be a “uniquely cursed” one: We have the 25th anniversary of September 11. One day earlier, we have the first anniversary of Charlie Kirk being killed. And we have the Republican convention in Dallas — each an opportunity for various elements of the right-wing movement to work themselves into a lather about various perceived enemies, including Muslims, immigrants, and trans people. We are prepared for the media not to cover itself in glory as it handles these topics. Against this backdrop, I wanted to zoom in on one particular, somewhat niche panic gripping the right, that TPM’s Layla A. Jones tried to unwind in great detail last week. Its a kind of nerd corollary to Trump’s claims about the 2020 election — that his victory was snatched from him by shadowy actors. In the case of this similar reactionary conspiracy theory, the shadowy actors worked in the Census Bureau and supposedly stole not a presidency but several seats in Congress. “The 2020 Census was a fraud,” Sen. Jim Banks (R-IN) declared on X last year, one example of the claim. “The Biden admin used a shady ‘privacy’ formula that scrambled the data and miscounted 14 states. It included illegal immigrants and handed Democrats extra seats. Americans deserve a fair count and I’m fighting to fix it.” Around the same time, an influential right-wing X account, @amuse, argued that a specific Census official “decided to use a secret algo to change the number of people living in each city and state in the name of privacy,” declaring that it “cost the GOP 9 sets and $60B.” “Wow,” Elon Musk replied to the claim. None of it, you will not be surprised to learn, is true. Former Census officials and researchers who work with Census data were adamant with Layla: this is not happening. At the center of these claims is a technique used by statisticians who are dealing with large data sets to protect the privacy of individual respondents; it’s called differential privacy. The technique, an online army and a handful of elected officials claim, messed with apportionment, the process through which officials determine, based on population, how many seats each state gets in Congress and in the Electoral College. The fact that differential privacy isn’t even used on the population numbers that underlie apportionment has not done much to dampen enthusiasm for this allegation. Other versions of the conspiracy theory allege differential privacy fuzzed up the data that underlies redistricting. Trump administration Census officials banned the use of differential privacy earlier this year as they push to remake the Census, prompting an outcry among real data scientists. I think part of what this conspiracy theory does, like so many others, is provide a kind of permission structure. If Democrats and their supposed aligned deep state bureaucrats weaponized the Census to accrue undeserved political power, Republicans can be excused for doing the same. And, through efforts to exclude immigrants from apportionment, to add a citizenship question to the Census, and to cease collecting the racial demographic information used to challenge discriminatory voting maps in court, that’s exactly what they are doing. Party That Downplays the Holocaust Wins in Germany The Trump administration’s German allies won big over the weekend. In a Saxony-Anhalt, west of Berlin, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland’s candidate, fragrance salesman Ulrich Siegmund, won a resounding victory at the state level. - Its the party’s second state-level win since 2024, though it has never managed to form a governing coalition. This time it might. Most other German political parties refuse to work with it. It remains to be seen if that “firewall” will continue to hold. - AfD stands out among far-right parties in Europe, of course, because of Germany’s history — and the party’s insistence on downplaying that history. German intelligence has classified the Saxony-Anhalt chapter of the party as “extremist.” - Trump celebrated the results, posting on Truth Social a German graphic showing the election outcome without commentary (amid a spree of AI slop images, including several of maps with New Mexico re-labeled as “New America.”) - The Trump administration has shown considerable support for AfD, with JD Vance endorsing many of its grievances during a speech in Europe in the administration’s early days and meeting with its leader, Alice Weidel, during that same trip. - The Trump administration has also adopted AfD’s policies, most prominently the term “remigration,” which describes expelling immigrants. - Two other German states are set to hold elections later this month, on Sept. 20. Tabs The Department of Justice has again gone to the Supreme Court to ask it to allow it to enact its Postal Service rule for mail-in ballots, which is currently enjoined by lower courts. Plaintiffs’ replies to that request are due tomorrow, after which point the Court may take action. The Trump administration has removed a sign at Arlington Cemetery that critiqued a Confederate Statue that was removed in 2023, the Washington Post reports. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has said the statue will soon be reinstalled. Hunter Biden, amid a sometimes bizarre public reemergence that included an interview with white nationalist Nick Fuentes, has now launched a memecoin, $LAPTOP, that references the outsized attention paid to his laptop. Man of the Hour It’s Corey Lewandowski, who, according to a new investigation in the Wall Street Journal, approached officials in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, offering them side deals to exert influence, while he was effectively running DHS.