Leah Feiger: Oh my God, I mean, that’s the fear. If you’re listening to this podcast and you feel comfortable going out to vote, go vote. But there’s a different undercurrent right now, and that’s what we’re hearing from NGOs, local activists, election officials, which is it’s very hard to pitch the Get Out to Vote platform when there have been so many threats. All to say, right now, DHS officials have recently said they don’t plan on sending immigration officers en masse to patrol the polls, but everyone’s still scared because Trump has previously said in the past that that’s a possibility, Republicans have previously said in the past that’s a possibility. And so there’s so much conflicting statements. It’s very tense. It’s very tense. It’s something that WIRED’s tracking closely. The whole WIRED politics team is very ready to keep an eye on how all of this unfolds.
Brian Barrett: Do we have any sense of the motivation of the people who are sending these white powder letters? I ask partly because on Sunday, Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson posted an image of an intercepted letter to Threads. Top left-hand corner of the letter says that DSA sent it, the Democratic Socialists of America, with the New York zip code. DSA has denied any involvement. I am not saying … To be clear, I don’t think it was DSA, just to be very, very clear. But it does seem like an attempt to potentially pin it on DSA. Have we seen anything beyond Utah with that? Have we seen any other attempts to use this or leverage this, or is that just sort of an isolated thing, and really who knows?
Leah Feiger: It’s so tough to say. So we haven’t seen that on a larger scale, but for all that the right loves to talk about false-flag operations, this is a literal false flag, and to me is just so clearly a way to encourage … What am I trying to say? And to me, this is clearly such a way to encourage more splits in an already very divided country. And the idea like, “Oh, no, it’s the leftists. They’re trying to stop the election. See, we’ve been calling fraud this whole time. Oh, no, it was the right,” there’s so many different ways to take this, and at the end of the day, it’s about disunity, which is not new for American elections. I know no one likes to talk about Russian involvement or foreign involvement from elections past, but it’s not … That kind of involvement, that kind of disinformation, that kind of harassment, that rarely had to do with very specific motions like sending ICE to the polls. It had to do with encouraging people to hate each other and pretending that there was a bigger divide than there was on a variety of issues. And so I think that we’re seeing this play out again, and of course we are, specifically with these letters and other examples of voter intimidation that are really concerning.