Mediaboss Marketing

Illustration: PA Images/Prospect

After Covid-19 was first identified in early January, the tools and techniques of science and medicine were engaged with unprecedented urgency to tackle the biology of the pathogenic coronavirus, the epidemiology of its spread, and possibilities for potential treatments and eventual cure. But in parallel with this energetic search for reliable yet elusive facts and remedies, weve also seen the lightning spread of Covid-19-related falsehoodsa phenomenon the WHO has called the coronavirus infodemic.

There has been a boom in conspiracy theoriesthe idea, for example, that the illness is in fact caused by the 5G network weakening the immune system with radiation. In defiance of the evidence, the US President and his circle have implied that the virus originated in a Chinese laboratory, and the Chinese in turn have encouraged rumours that the Americans brought it to Wuhan. Prominent commentators pursuing political agendas (or merely attention) have rounded on scientific results as if these were just one more opinion they didnt like. The media and politicians have shown themselves pitifully vulnerable to falsehoods that pander to their agendasor even actively willing to create them. Even after several years in which fake news has set the rhythm of insurgencies, elections and referendums, it is remarkable to witness just how contagious the Covid-19 infodemic is proving.

The pandemic underlinesagainthe growing problems in our information ecosystem, this time in a field where falsehood can be (literally) lethal. It is acting as a lens that brings into focus one of the most urgent challenges of our times. We (most of us) will survive the virus, but it is far from clear that democracies can survive the longer-term destabilisation of objective truth. If we want a world where major events can be discussed and debated on a basis of agreed and reliable facts, then we have no choice but to grapple with the epidemiology of misinformation.

Slander on speed

Misinformation is nothing new. Foreigners and minorities have been slandered through historyoften in the context of disease, and sometimes with murderous consequences. But the difference now, Sylvie Briand, director of Infectious Hazards Management at WHOs Health Emergencies Programme, told The Lancet in late February, is that with social media this phenomenon is amplified, it goes faster and further. The huge change in the infrastructure of information, says Amil Khan, a former government specialist who has studied misinformation in conflict zones, affects not just the mechanics but the fundamental principles. While, for most of the modern era, information was filtered, he says, today the filters are seriously eroded. The costs of spreading information through Facebook and Twitter are virtually zero, and the form discourages considered evaluation: on Twitter, no one is interested in your view 24 hours after the event, when youve had time to think it over or check a few facts.

The feedback loops between social and more conventional forms of media further darken the picture. Many media outlets have always ground their axes without much regard for truth, and continue to do so. As the pandemic was building, Fox News insisted that there was no coronavirus threat but just a Democrat plot to unseat Trump. Closer to home, the pandemic has widened the fault lines already opened up by previous arguments: on scientific topics such as climate, for sure, but also on purely political issues, such as Brexit. Some sections of the political commentariat, mostly but not exclusively on the libertarian right, have turned the politicised rejection of science and expert opinion into a career gambit. The Spectators Toby Young, the Mail on Sundays Peter Hitchens and James Delingpole, who has made the leap from pages of the Spectator and Telegraph to Breitbart (the far-right American falsehood factory made notorious by Trumps one-time right-hand man Steve Bannon) have all polemicised against the scientific recommendations for social distancing and lockdown, just as many of them had previously railed against experts on climate change. There have always been media contrarians, but editors in search of social media hitsor of pieces which, in the telling parlance, go viralare ever less inclined to rein in their excesses.

Untruths can jump across national borders just as easily as the coronavirus, and they are heedless of ideological distance too

Meanwhile, conspiracies that grow up in dark corners of the web make it through to the mainstream. When even the affable Eamonn Holmes, presenter of ITVs This Morningprogramme, starts challenging dismissals of the bogus link between the Covid-19 pandemic and the rollout of the 5G network by saying that its very easy to say it is not true because it suits the state narrative, its fair to suspect that something has gone badly wrong.

The pandemic is a disturbingly good vehicle for misinformation. The topic, says data scientist Walter Quattrociocchi of the CaFoscari University of Venice, is polarising, scary, captivating. People are anxious and fearful. And its really easy for everyone to get information that is consistent with their system of belief. Untruths can jump across national borders just as easily as the coronavirus, and they are heedless of ideological distance too: alliances about coronavirus misinformation can very rapidly and sometimes unwittingly be forged between people who otherwise have very different worldviews. Opposition to vaccines, for example, has led to the racism and hate messages of the far-right leaking into groups more normally found discussing yoga and wholefoods.

Falsehood, falsehood everywhere!

To start making sense of this sprawling ecosystem, it can be helpful to distinguish misinformationuntruths typically spread by credulous individualsfrom disinformation, which is designed intentionally to mislead.

State-sanctioned activists are among those creating and spreading the latter. A briefing for the European parliament in April described Moscow and Beijing as driving parallel information campaigns to encourage the idea that European citizens cannot trust their health systems, whereas their authoritarian systems can save the world. Experts suspect that China has adopted the tactics that were honed by the Kremlin during the conflicts in the Crimea and Ukraine from 2014. Other state-on-state fronts in the information war have included the efforts of the American and Chinese states to accuse each other of creating the virus: as well as Trumps accusations about Wuhan labs, we have had Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian encouraging the social-media rumour mill by tweeting on 12th March that It might be the US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan and adding that US owe us an explanation!

The coronavirus pandemic, Khan has written, is becoming a watershed moment for how states tussle on the international stage. Spies, special operations and high-stakes negotiations are no longer the tools of choice. Instead, it has become clear that disinformation, an information manipulation technique born in conflict zones, is becoming increasingly normalised as a political weaponparticularly in times of crisis.

The biggest mistake would be to imagine that there are simply a few malicious or ignorant agents concocting lies or fantasies and feeding them to the unsuspecting public. Political scientists Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren of Clemson University in South Carolina have traced the idea of a Chinese bioweapon to a message from an anonymous conservative American woman. But it seems that this theory, like many others, was received by the Russian state disinformation apparatus, repackaged and fed back into the ecosystem. Foreign actors arent the biggest danger, Linvill and Warren wrote in the Washington Post. We Americans are.

Mis- as distinct from dis-information arises spontaneously and propagates in an information ecosystem where sources and channels of transmission are hard to identify and almost impossible to suppress. Yes, the ecosystem contains lonely trolls and bored conspiracy theorists on laptops in their bedrooms, as well as organised alt-right extremists and anti-vaxxers selling merchandise, and Elon Musk parading bizarre Silicon Valley fantasies. But it also embraces Mumsnet and the local school parents association. It is all of us, retweeting comments and links that pique our interest and flatter our preconceptions and prejudices without bothering to check them out.

Grain of truth

Often, Covid-19 misinformation feeds off existing delusions and conspiracies. Bill Gates wants to control us all andhes funding vaccine research? Well then, he is obviously planning to load the vaccines with microchips to create a worldwide personal surveillance system. Likewise, the delusion that 5G weakens the immune system was already circulating in anti-vaccination communities before the coronavirus outbreak began, but it was a decidedly fringe idea. Now the 5G delusion has taken wide hold, motivating attacks on the networks masts in the UK. At a Hyde Park protest against the lockdown in May, one group chanted both no 5G and no vaccines. As the Russian state misinformation apparatus soon ascertained, fake news works best if it contains a seed of truth: for after all, no one denies that the 5G network was developed in China. Once the crisis took hold, it all seemed to fit together for anyone instinctively inclined to see dark plots lurking behind health problems.

For anti-vaxxers, coronavirus is catnip. Neil Johnson, a complexity theorist at George Washington University in Washington DC, explains: They are right onto this topic, because they think there are going to be mandatory vaccines. For a lot of them, its all about Covid-19 now. Its almost like theyve been waiting for this. It crystallises everything theyve been sayingits almost like a rallying cry.

Johnson, who has previously worked on the structure of terrorist and insurgent networks, has mapped out the detailed network structure of the anti-vax debate online, identifying discussion sites that are pro and anti as well as those that are uncommitted either way. The picture is dispiriting (unless you are an anti-vaxxer): the anti-vaccination message could grow to dominate online discussion in the next decade. It tends to get spread not, like its contrary, with a careful presentation of the facts, but with more engaging emotive content (Do you love your children? Then why would you hurt them?). And it is more diverse: in contrast to the stark medical facts, there are a host of anti-vax narratives to draw you in. Its like going into an ice cream shop, says Johnson. Youll always find a flavour that appeals to you, and online its only one step away. Once a Covid-19 vaccine becomes available (hopefully by around the summer of 2021), widespread opposition to it could significantly depress take-upwith dangers not just for individuals but also for public health.

_________________________________________________________

Read more: Why theres more to the anti-vaxxing narrative than meets the eye

_________________________________________________________

The eagerness to find support for ones narrative leads to some eccentric and disturbing alliances. There was a glimpse of that at the Hyde Park rally, where CND signs mixed with anti-vax messages, and Jeremy Corbyns brother Piers, a climate-change denier, rubbed shoulders with the hard right. In contrast to the apolitical (or even eco-left) leanings of many British anti-vaxxers, in the US opposition to vaccines is now strong among Trump supporters and opposition to the lockdowns is flourishing among rightwing libertarians everywhere. Neil Johnson and his colleagues have shown that the online hate network of the alt-right has become a conduit for Covid-19 misinformation, where wormholes can suck anti-vaxxers into a universe of anti-immigration, anti-semitic and anti-Asian sentiment. Once a generalised distrust of government and mainstream science becomes part of your mix, its likely that it will become infected with traits such as climate-change denialism too.

The disparate links between pleasant-enough cranks, wont-be-told petrol-heads and racist thugs might appear strange, but they emerge organically in our information ecosystem. No one arranges for that to happen, but there are plenty who are happy to exploit itfor example to spread ideas about the decadent incompetence of the EU and western democracies. What could be a better example of how the dark forces of internationalism (the WHO and UN) aim to control us all than a pandemicperhaps intentionally sown by an engineered virus?that will lead to enforced lockdowns followed by mandatory mass vaccination and surveillance? So state-run misinformation efforts like that of the Kremlin might, Khan says, try to thread a narrative between several communities. If you can get anti-vaxxers and libertarians and alt-right nationalists together, he says, thats when you start getting real heft.

The infodemic devours its children

This, then, is the big story in which the coronavirus infodemic is one more chapter. Pull it all together, and you risk coming over like a conspiracy theorist yourself. But the point is precisely the opposite: with misinformation, no fiendish master-plan is required. This ecosystem is populated with many interacting species, each with its own agenda, which combine in webs of twisted creativity to produce untruths with the power to endure. Stories get refined by consensus, the rough edges smoothed off until they become more credible and, well, contagious. Where the Russian and Chinese agencies (say) have a role, it is simply to amplify the dissent and discontent that is already rife within this ecology.

The manipulations of the Vote Leave campaign are also put in their proper context by this complex picture. Dominic Cummings and his computer whizzes were not agents in some dark Russian-funded plot to undermine British democracy. Rather, they were merely creatures slithering through this dangerous and baffling jungle like all the others, tweaking a few strands in the web of the misinformation ecology for short-term gain, and in the process enmeshing it with mainstream politics. It has now become unremarkable for government ministers to retweet political misinformation from the far-right; faked videos, faux fact-checking websites and misleading political adverts are just a part of electioneering. There is a collective what can we do shrug when Cummings and his Vote Leave computer modeller turn up at the supposedly independent meetings of the Covid-19 scientific advisory body.

But the truth is that this is a play in which our politicians have become bit-part actors with no control of the plot. Some of the awkwardness of the governments fumbling response to the coronavirus crisisits missteps about how to spin the debacle over the EU ventilator scheme, say, or its clumsy manipulation of figuresmight stem from the dawning realisation that, when you actually have to govern, and most of all in a crisis, the growth of misinformation and the erosion of trust in expert advice they have abetted is now their enemy too.

What we have unwittingly createdthe we here including malign state propagandists, manipulative politicians, unscrupulous media, careerist contrarians, and all the rest of us who ever succumb to the temptation of a reflexive retweet is an infosphere within which what passes for reality itself is determined by market mechanisms.Contrarians and Silicon Valley speculators (who have weighed in on the coronavirus, sometimes with fancy-looking graphs but no epidemiological expertise) might have got famous or rich by betting on an undervalued outlier theory, and see no reason not to do so again. You can fail often, they have learnt, if you move fast enoughto do so is almost a badge of honour. But today these reckless mavericks are gambling not with their own reputation or other peoples money, but with other peoples lives.

Climate speeded-up

So how can we fight misinformation? Providing easy access to reliable information clearly has a role: the WHOs department of communications is working in collaboration with Google, Facebook and Twitter to ensure that people searching for coronavirus or Covid-19 are directed first to authoritative public health sites. These social-media platforms already have rules that aim to remove malicious or fallacious content, and some have introduced policies that ban exploitative or misleading Covid-19 advertisements, for example to sell miracle cures or overpriced facemasks. Twitter recently took the unprecedented step of deleting tweets from a head of stateBrazilian president Jair Bolsonarofor promoting unproven cures for Covid-19. (Theres not much that can be done, however, for Trumps surreal suggestions for cures in his White House press conferences).

But such interventions can only go so far. For one thing, bad information doesnt just arise from a deficit of good information: in the Darwinian information ecosystem, they compete. Or, as Johnsons analysis of the anti-vax networks has shown, they might simply colonise different networks, with rather few connections between them, creating a false sense of security. Besides, Quattrociocchi says that when misinformation is kicked off one platform, it often just migrates to one where regulation is more lax. (WhatsApp and Gab, he says, are the current hotspots of coronavirus misinformationalthough the former platform took a small corrective step by making it harder to forward messages many times over.)

Closing off misinformation streams, says Johnson, will require high-tech mapping of the battlefieldthe structures of the various networks on which untruths spread. Once you have identified the wormholes that hook up, say, the anti-vax network to the hate networks of the alt-right, then you can target them for disruption. Manlio De Domenico of the Fondazione Bruno Kessler, a research institute for artificial intelligence in Trento, has set up a Covid-19 infodemic observatory that uses AI to analyse 4.7 million tweets a day referring to the pandemicabout 30 per cent of which they identify as unreliable.

Piers Corbyn, brother of former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, was led away from a protest in Hyde Park on 16th May Photo: Stefan Rousseau/PA Wire/PA Images

Some of the onus to clean up the Covid-19 infosphere is, however, on us all: we need to become more critical consumers (and producers) of information. That may be easier said than done. After all, conspiracy theorists and contrarians (it is not always easy to tell them apart) think that they are already doing this: witness the screeds of analysis some of them conduct to disprove the conclusions of the International Panel on Climate Change. Eamonn Holmes defended his comments about the 5G conspiracy on the grounds that he had an inquiring mind. And advice to read sceptically and critically all too easily morphs into the claim of the former Supreme Court judge and lockdown sceptic, Lord Sumption, that it is the right and duty of every citizen to look and see what the scientists have said and to analyse it for themselves and to draw common sense conclusions. As he exemplifies himself, the likely result of that is cherry-picking to suit ones prejudices. The idea that this complex science can be adjudicated by common sense is ludicrous, even dangerous. Real wisdom, in contrast, lies in identifying and heeding the most trustworthy opinions, while recognising too that even these might incur uncertainties and errors, and that experts wont always agree when the science itself is still evolving.

A free society must of course make room for rightwing libertarianism and leftwing Luddite paranoia. The problem today is that their distorting messages are now apt to become amplified out of proportion. They have just what it takes to become viral memes: simplistic and emotive messages (Youre going to die! Youre living in a police state!) that require no context to do their work. Canny agents of misinformation know how to tailor it to their advantage.

Containing a misinformation epidemic is then also partly a matter of finding the right medicine. Some have suggested the idea of inoculating populations in advance with reliable information, so that false ideas can never get a foothold (although that is surely much harder now there is such widespread distrust of elites). We need agreed and enforceable standards and regulations for social media. We need diagnostic tools to rapidly identify and isolate super-spreaders, and virologists of misinformation who can find and attack its weak spots. And we need to understand why different people have different levels of immunity and susceptibility to bad ideasand to recognise that understanding misinformation, like disease, is in many respects an inescapably sociopolitical affair. As with the Covid-19 pandemic itself, the infodemic depends on how we all behave collectively as well as individually, and demands that we think about the consequences of our own actions on others. We need to understand human collective behaviour in a crisis, says biologist Carl Bergstrom of the University of Washington in Seattle.

It is no only our bodily but also our societal health that is at stake. Democracy struggles, as recent years have shown us, when citizens lack any shared set of facts. What we are witnessing with the coronavirus infodemic has implications way beyond strategies for managing disease pandemics (of which there will be others). The problem has been dimly acknowledged for years now with climate change, but it was happening on too flat a curve to be fully recognised. For Covid-19 those same features hove into view within a matter of weeks, and the deaths, which are expected to occur gradually over many years as climate change worsens, were in this case piling up daily. This is like climate change run very, very fast, says Bergstrom. Lets hope we can learn something from it.

See the original post here:
The epidemiology of misinformation - Prospect

The coronavirus pandemic has been with us for about four months, sickening and killing people and disrupting economies around the world. In all probability, years will elapse before it is finally eradicated.

An equally deadly virus, which mutates across borders and cultures and has caused the deaths of millions of people, has endured for centuries.

It is known as antisemitism, a malicious conspiracy theory that scapegoats Jews for all the ills and troubles that beset societies, from the Black Plague in the 14th century to robber baron capitalism in the 19th century. Its rooted in the idea that Jews are intrinsically evil.

American filmmaker Andrew Goldberg examines this perennial phenomenon in a one hour and twenty minute documentary, Viral: Antisemitism in Four Mutations, which is to be broadcast on the PBS network on Tuesday, May 26 at 9 p.m.

Goldberg examines this enduring form of hatred graphically against the backdrop of rising global antisemitism and anti-Zionism. He starts in the United States, moves on to Hungary, and then investigates its migration into the far left in Britain and into the ranks of Islamic radicalism in France.

There are no shocking disclosures or original observations, just a steady drip of useful information that places the topic in its proper perspective. Viewers who are not up to speed about it will find this film of considerable interest.

He launches his investigation with the deadliest antisemitic rampage in American history, the Tree of Life Synagogue attack in Pittsburgh on October 27, 2018 which resulted in the murder of 11 worshippers. The killer, a 46-year-old neo-Nazi, regarded Jews as the children of satan and blamed Jewish organizations for encouraging the immigration of non-whites into the United States.

Rabbi Jeffrey Myers, the synagogues spiritual leader, fatalistically believes that this assault on a Jewish community was inevitable because a small minority of Americans regard Jews as unsavory foreigners. By one estimate, 10 percent to 12 percent of Americans hold strong antisemitic views.

Goldberg also interviews Russell Walker, a retired engineer who ran for a seat in North Carolinas legislature. A white supremacist, he believes that Jews were created to destroy the white Christian nation. Walker lost the election, but 37 percent of the electorate voted for him, a disturbing commentary on public opinion in this southern state.

Bill Clinton, the former president, argues that antisemitism, driven by anxiety and anger, has gone viral on the internet.

Goldberg believes that the Make American Great Again campaign slogan advanced by the current president, Donald Trump, has been leveraged by white nationalists in general and by the alt-right in particular.

Richard Spencer, one of the alt-rights chief ideologues, dismisses the notion that Trump is a white nationalist, but adds, We were connected to Trump on a psychic level.

Trumps critics claim he has tolerated antisemitism by failing to condemn it or by resorting to dog whistles.

In Hungary, whose pro-Nazi collaborationist regime facilitated the murder of more than 400,000 Jews in Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944, Prime Minister Viktor Urban demonizes the Hungarian-born Holocaust survivor and U.S.-based financier George Soros.

Urban and his conservative supporters smear Soros, a liberal, with the unsubstantiated claim that he seeks to destroy Hungary by means of encouraging a massive influx of Muslim migrants. Urban, in his speeches and campaigns, avoids mentioning Jews out of concern of being branded an antisemite, says Goldberg.

Goldberg, in the third part of his film, discusses the travails of the left-of-center Labor Party after its former leader, Jeremy Corbyn, was accused of tolerating antisemitism within its membership and backbenchers.Corbyn, who resigned recently, is portrayed as a politician from the partys far-left fringe who was deeply hostile to Israel and regarded Hezbollah and Hamas as friends.

Several of his critics, including Luciana Berger and Margaret Hodge, resigned from the party in protest over its toleration of anti-Jewish tropes and its pro-Palestinian stance. Blair, the partys ex-leader and former prime minister, concedes it was difficult to disentangle old forms of antisemitism from far-left antisemitic rhetoric during the Corbyn era.

In conclusion, Goldberg travels to France to gauge the relationship between Islamic radicalism and antisemitism. France is an important testing ground due to its large Jewish and Muslim populations.

Goldberg focuses on two French Jews, Jean-Luc Slakmon and Valerie Braham, both of whom were directly affected by a violent incident in a kosher supermarket in Paris on January 9, 2015. On that day, an Islamic extremist and Islamic State sympathizer burst into the store and murdered four Jewish shoppers. Slakmon was traumatized by the event, while Braham lost her husband, Philippe, in the attack.

This was hardly the first crime of its kind committed by French Islamic radicals. In Toulouse, a Jewish day school was attacked, resulting in the deaths of several students and a rabbi, and in Paris, an elderly Jewish woman was killed after being stabbed and thrown from her balcony.

The brother of the Toulouse assailant, whose family emigrated from Algeria, discloses they were raised to hate Jews, who are seen as oppressors due to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Gunther Jikeli, a German scholar affiliated with the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism in Berlin, claims that 75 percent of antisemitic incidents in France are not even reported.

If Jikeli is correct, the problem posed by antisemitism in France runs deeper than most people think.

Read more:
Viral: Antisemitism In Four Mutations | Sheldon Kirshner | The Blogs - The Times of Israel

The Washington Post published a picture of Stacey Abrams wearing a cape this weekend.

You may have seen it, since in certain corners of the conservative news media, this fawning coverage of the becaped former state representative and vice-presidential hopeful was the single most noteworthy piece of news from the weekend.

And Id like to preface the impending rant by saying, for the record, that in the narrowest possible sense, these conservative media critics have a sliver of a point. It is true that the number of glowing profiles given over to a failed gubernatorial candidate and long-shot vice presidential contender is absurd. And yes, it is impossible to imagine a losing Republican candidate being given this sort of treatment.

And yes, its telling that the biggest media outlets are unable to have even a modicum of self-awareness in situations like this. I wish they would stop. (See also: Cuomo, Andrew).

But while the professional media critics, anti-anti-Trumpers, and assorted both-siders were obsessing over the Stacey Abrams Caped Crusader feature, there were some other things happening in the actual real world.

Here are some of them:

(1) The president of the United States quote-tweeted an avowed alt-right account that flirts with Holocaust denial,

(2) The president also texted supporters false allegations that he had been illegally spied on by the previous vice president.

(3) The president also fired another independent inspector general without providing cause.

(4) The official American death toll from COVID-19 inched close to 90,000 souls while the president spent his time live tweeting cable TV.

(5) One of the presidents large adult sons grotesquely suggested that Joe Biden is a pedophile.

(6) Another of his large adult sons claimed that the virus was a hoax perpetrated by the left and the media and that it will disappear after the election.

(7) The President sent a tweet encouraging protesters who aggressively shouted down and chased after a random local news reporter with calls of you are the virus, traitor, and enemy of the people. (Note: This was entry number seven because I even forgot about it until after writing the article because Trump does so much insane stuff every day)

But who could find the time to care about any of this when the Washington Post publishes a picture of Stacey Abrams in a cape. #Capegate. What an outrage.

Three and a half years into the Trump experiment, the president is still using chaff to prevent people from zeroing in on any one of his actions. He veers from incident to incidentat any point in U.S. history, any of the above seven items would have been an all-encompassing scandal, a few couldve been career enders. Meanwhile, Trumps defenders run content farms of counter scandals which they litigate and re-litigate and then litigate some more. Which has the effect of paralyzing the mainstream media, which has produced a great deal of good journalism, but has been unable to change its fundamental priorities, which create recency bias, kabuki balance, and an evolutionary imperative for clicks.

The current conservative content farm scandal is Obamagate, in which Trump has fabricated an espionage claim against both his predecessor and general election opponent. This scandal has been a public-private partnership, created both with the tools of the federal government as well as Trumps campaign and its proxies in conservative media.

The very creation of this fake scandal is, as I wrote last week, being largely treated as a sideshow by those who either think it too stupid to be taken seriously or dont understand how the Department of Justice and director of National Intelligence are leveraging government assets in order to aid the presidents reelection campaign.

For those who have not followed it, the tl;dr of what the government is doing is this:

The Department of Justice has deputized U.S. Attorney John Durham to oversee a team of investigators aimed at looking into whether the Russia investigation was actually a Deep State plot. Durham has access to a grand jury and the resources to scour the globe. Meanwhile the acting director of National Intelligence, someone whose main experience for the job was pleasing President Trump with his aggressive trolling of reporters on Twitter, is selectively leaking innocuous intelligence gathering efforts in order to advance this conspiratorial narrative.

These leaks, in turn, are being driven by the Trump campaign. On Saturday the president used the leads from the director of National Intelligence to advance an elaborate lie that accuses his opponent of committing illegal espionage against him.

Just read that sentence again.

The president used the leads from the director of National Intelligence to advance an elaborate lie that accuses his opponent of committing illegal espionage against him.

This is the most outrageous and pernicious lie that a president has levied against his opponent in my lifetime.

And despite the president himself elevating this lie on Saturday, it was not discussed on front pages across the country. Forget front pages, its hard to find any article at all addressing the Presidents insane charges.

Most coverage of the issue is framed around discussing whether or not Obama and Biden did anything wrongthere is literally no evidence to suggest that they didrather than focusing on how the Trump administration is guilty of weaponizing American intelligence agencies for political ends by perpetrating this falsehood.

Drawing historical analogies to Trumps behavior is more or less impossiblethere is no true analog. The best I can do is this: Imagine if, in 2012, President Obama had deputized a U.S. attorney to investigate claims that 9/11 was an inside job perpetrated by the Bush family, while asserting that the GOP engaged in illegal espionage against his campaign because the government was investigating the Tony Rezko scandal. And that he somehow tied Mitt Romney to the fiction, too.

Set aside the fact that this would be Wuhan batshit level crazy that would have caused people to wonder if Obama was even mentally fit for office. There is a 100 percent chance that these actions would have become the all-encompassing scandal for the rest of Obamas administration.

Trumps actions combine the politicization of intelligence, the misuse of tax dollars, and the creation of a phony investigation using the Department of Justice in order to advance the presidents reelection campaign. And thats just the nuts-and-bolts, the stuff you can probe with your hands. The president has also created a propaganda campaign that will lead millions to believe that one party actively spied on the other, further tearing the fabric of our country in ways that wont be repaired for a generation. Or maybe ever.

And if that isnt giving you cause for concern, the president has systematically fired the independent inspectors general overseeing the departments most intertwined with his COVID-19 response and his Obamagate abuses. The fired IGs include the State and Defense Departments, the pandemic response, and the intelligence community. The only person in the Republican Senate majority who seems to give a damn about this is Mitt Romney.

And for good measure the president elevated an avowed white nationalist and Holocaust denier who proceeded to brag about how Trump is helping him get around deplatforming.

Put all this together with beyond the pale defamation and the COVID lies and the Trump family went exponentially further than any previous president in eroding our norms rhetorical, political, and legal and that was just one weekend.

But hey, dont forget that cape pic.

***

Correction:An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Stacey Abrams is a former state senator, she is a former state representative.

Read the original here:
Trumps Weekend of Scandal Was Hiding in Plain Sight - The Bulwark

We fought two world wars in the 20th Century in defence of liberal values in this country. Then, after 9/11, we fought a series of engagements that attempted to impose those same values in other peoples countries. Now, the handle is turning again and even that recent aberration appears a long time ago. A new strategic epoch seems to indicate that we no longer need to go looking for a fight. Conflict will come to us.

The front line is no longer a nameless hillside in Afghanistan but the firewalls inside the computer systems of the power grid or what masquerades as news on social media. The digital revolution and globalisation have, in combination, dramatically increased the vulnerability of Western societies to severe disruption. We no longer have to speculate what a rupture of the distribution systems of the major supermarkets would look like. The creation of a black market in loo rolls at the start of the pandemic was a darkly comic moment but showed just how quickly the normal conventions of an apparently ordered society can unravel. And that wasnt even the result of a break in supply, but simply human frailty; what if the same systems were subject to a sophisticated and concerted cyber-attack?

Ever mindful that it might have to pick up the pieces, Lloyds Insurance conducted a recent study into the implications of a successful cyber-attack on 50 suppliers of the power grid covering the north east of America. It concluded that 93 million people would be without power immediately and for up to two weeks. During that time, and in the biting cold of a New York winter or the suffocating heat of a Washington summer, the immediate consequences of a blackout would be compounded by the secondary effects of opportunist crime and civil unrest, both of which would test the competence of government.

This is not an abstract, hypothetical threat the massive attack against Estonia in 2007 and the 2017 NotPetya malware attack against a variety of Western companies reveal cyber operations as a weapon of choice in contemporary conflict. And its not just the bad guys who are at it. The Stuxnet attack on the Iranian nuclear programme set the standard for cyber intervention and seemed to leave a trail back to America and Israel.

At the same time, Russian attempts to influence the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election by disinformation and fake news and even the faintly risible Iranian attempt to encourage Scottish separatism using the same methods during the 2014 referendum are a matter of public record. Cyber and information operations are being directed against this country on a daily basis in a form of conflict that is pervasive, insidious, ambivalent and rarely attributable. The attack on the Skripal family in Salisbury breathtaking in both its audacity and incompetence showed that chemical attack could also be part of contemporary conflict. What if, on the back of Covid-19, biological weapons became part of this sinister equation too?

Hittite texts written beyond 1000 BC speak of infiltrating people infected with deadly, communicable disease into rival communities in what is probably the first historical reference to biological warfare. The grotesque idea of using disease as an instrument in conflict has come and gone over the subsequent millennia and it was only in 1990 that Gruinard Island, off the west coast of Scotland, was declared safe after it had been used for experiments with weaponised anthrax in 1942. Today, an objective observer might see a Covid-19 death toll that will eventually run into millions, global economic dislocation and debt levels of individual nations that equate to multiples of GDP. These are conditions only normally associated with large scale conflict and is it entirely irrational for nation states, terrorist groups or even criminal organisations to ponder cause and effect?

In 2011, Dutch virologists working at the Erasmus Centre in Rotterdam caused a mutation of the H5N1 (bird flu) virus. Around the same time, research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison was working on grafting the H5N1 spike gene on to H1N1 swine flu virus. The mortality rate of bird flu is higher than 50 per cent and an animated academic debate ensued about whether both pieces of research should be published or whether the risk of rogue scientists replicating the work was too great. In the event, the research was published in Science and Nature respectively and is now available in the public domain.

So, bad stuff is out there, but the problem has always been in weaponising it in a way that creates mass dissemination, as the failed attempts of the Aum Shinriyko millenialist cult to use anthrax in Tokyo in the 1990s illustrated. Unfortunately, advances in genetic engineering and delivery techniques mean this challenge becomes ever more soluble and a determined programme could probably overcome the technical hurdles. If it did, a biological weapon would have a number of advantages over other forms of anonymised attack: even miniscule quantities can be lethal; symptoms can have delayed onset; and, subsequent waves of infection can manifest beyond the original attack site. The effect would be pervasive, insidious, ambivalent and perhaps unattributable exactly the fingerprints of contemporary conflict.

Lets go one step further and explore the very boundaries of rational action. Is it inconceivable that a state actor lets call it China for the sake of argument might contemplate a form of biological self-immolation? If it was confident in the ability of its large and compliant population to absorb an epidemic, its ubiquitous security and surveillance apparatus to impose control and with the advantage of foreknowledge, might it seek strategic advantage in creating a pandemic in the certain knowledge that strategic competitors would suffer far more?

It probably is inconceivable but not in the conspiracy-obsessed social media echo chambers that pass for news reportage among the more fevered parts of the American alt-right community. And so this article turns full circle: a piece of thin analysis and opinion feeds a conspiracy debate and adds to the dead weight of fake news that bends our sense of reality. Or, alternatively stated, this is what future conflict might look like.

The implications are profound and beg questions such as: what is now the point of nuclear weapons; how do we deter these forms of attack; and is a defence doctrine built around expeditionary operations and platforms like the Queen Elizabeth class of aircraft carriers remotely relevant to the future?

Continue reading here:
After Covid-19, what is the future of conflict? Part 1 - TheArticle

A picture shows me at a glance what it takes dozens of pages of a book to expound, wrote Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev, in his 1862 classic Fathers and Sons.

But for some pictures, Turgenev might be undershooting the mark. Select snapshots are worthy of hours of reflection; others deserve volumes written about them. One recent photo sums up not just Americas politics in 2020, but its culture over the past decade.

On March 4, a photographer caught Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz wearing a gas mask on the floor of the House of Representatives. In the photo, Gaetz is sitting alone, wearing the mask while scrolling through his phone.

Gaetz later tweeted a photo of himself wearing the gas mask while consulting with a staff member.

At the time, only 130 cases of COVID-19 had been identified in the United States, with 11 Americans having died from the virus.

Despite the warnings of the devastation the coronavirus could cause, Gaetz thought it was hilarious to mock people who were trying to sound the alarm about the virus by wearing a full-face gas mask. After all, this was back before Donald Trump was a wartime president, when he was still downplaying the threat from COVID-19, dismissing the concerns of experts, and insisting that it would all go away on its own. As Gaetzs constituents panicked over the arrival of the deadly virus, their elected representative decided to carry Trumps water by ridiculing the people who were trying to warn the public of the looming danger.

But, as we would soon find out, if idiocy were currency, Jeff Bezos would be Gaetzs butler.

Within days, Gaetzs first constituent died of the disease. Around the same time, Gaetz announced that he had been in contact with an attendee at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference and would be self-quarantining for 14 days.

Gaetz said his gas mask stunt was sincere. Thats difficult to believe. Had he been sincere he would have worn a surgical mask and gloves, not a contraption designed for chemical warfare. And his outlandish behavior over the years suggests that theres no reason to grant him the benefit of the doubt. After all, this is the same guy who invited a holocaust-denying white supremacist alt-right troll to the State of the Union speech. The same guy who attempted to blackmail a witness before Congress in order to try to protect Trump.

And Gaetz is the guy who orchestrated a stunt during a presidential impeachment trial that compromised national security. Remember last October when Gaetz and his fellow Republicans staged a sit-in at a secure hearing facility demanding Republicans be allowed to take part in the hearing even when nearly 1-in-4 House Republicans were actually members of the Intelligence, Oversight or Foreign Affairs committeesall of which were allowed to take part in the impeachment inquiries?

But Gaetz isnt the whole story here. In virus-speak, he is merely a symptom of how we got to a place in American politics where trolling has overtaken expertise and self-promotion has eclipsed competence.

People of the future who look back to the photo will see a political era when acting as a loathsome, self-aggrandizing grifter was the quickest way to earn credibility within ones party. An era when no problems were addressed until they had spiralled out of control and seriousness and expertise were viewed with suspicion and contempt.

You can think of this era as Americas Golden Age of Anti-Knowledge. And soon it will have cost upwards of 100,000 Americans their lives.

To paraphrase Trotsky, you may not be interested in the virus. But the virus is interested in you.

Whatever happens nextwith the pandemic, with Trumpism, with Americawe will always have that photo to remind us of exactly what this time in our lives was like: A time when toadies like Matt Gaetz tried to ignore mass death with sarcasm. A time where we picked the leader of the free world not because we believed he could manage the ship of state in crisis, but because he seemed very forceful when he fired Meat Loaf that one time on his reality show.

News moves quickly these days, with each days ridiculous headlines supplanted by tomorrows even more absurd ones.

But Gaetzs gas mask photo should stay with us for a very long time, an artifact reminding America how one man gleefully lowered himself to match the moment.

Read more here:
A Picture Is Worth 100,000 Lives - The Bulwark