Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America

by Christopher Wylie

if you are caught cheating in the Olympics, you get disqualified and lose your medal. There are no discussions of whether the doped athlete “would have won anyway”—the integrity of the sport demands a clean race. But in politics, we do not presume integrity as a necessary prerequisite to our democracy. There are harsher punishments for athletes who cheat in sport than for campaigns that cheat in elections. Though they won by only 3.78 percent, the Brexiteers claimed the entire “will of the people” for themselves––and even when Trump lost the popular vote by 2.1 percent, he too claimed victory. Despite proven cheating, Vote Leave did not have its Brexit medal taken away. No one was disqualified from running in future campaigns, and Vote Leave’s two leaders, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, were both allowed to run for prime minister. Crimes waged against our democracy were not considered by the political class to be “real crime.” Many framed these transgressions as being on par with a parking fine, despite the very real harm we face when our civic institutions can be so easily undermined by criminals and hostile foreign states seeking to wage electoral terrorism on our society. And, of course, the most powerful people in Britain and America took the position that these crimes didn’t even happen—rather, they were a “hoax,” the invention of the bitter opponents they had vanquished. This, in the face of what were once known as “facts” and “reality.”