The problem with all this is, these are the organizers - what do the truckers even know about them? They just wanted to show support.
The Kremlin is engaged in a “global influence campaign to destabilize sovereign countries,” including the United States, the U.S. Treasury Department reaffirmed, as it slapped sanctions on four Ukrainians working for the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB). America’s adversaries have leveraged disinformation since the dawn of the nation. In the early years of the American Revolution, the British monarchy circulated pamphlets in the colonies featuring forged excerpts from ostensible letters written by George Washington suggesting he sympathized with the Monarchy and that the new nation was not ready for democracy. Chinese disinformation campaigns blaming the United States for the origin of COVID-19 recall the Cold War’s Operation DENVER, the KGB’s disinformation campaign promoting the conspiracy theory that HIV and AIDS were bioweapons developed by the U.S. government. Pro-Kremlin social media disinformation efforts during European Union elections in 2019 that implied the EU has Nazi origins are not dissimilar from the Soviet and Czechoslovak intelligence services’ Operation NEPTUNE to discredit West German politicians by tying them to Nazis. In fact, Russia is wielding the same cudgel now against Ukraine, casually and repeatedly accusing its leaders or citizens without evidence of being “Nazis,” even in forums such as the U.N. Security Council.
While the Cold War was riddled with spectacular stories of disinformation, in today’s technological and media environment, Russia and China can now scale their disinformation operations and accelerate its spread in the information ecosystems of adversaries. Disinformation also is now a much more visible topic in U.S. political discourse, as policymakers on both sides of the aisle struggle to define the appropriate role of the federal government in preventing and combating foreign disinformation, other than steps that have become increasingly common, such as sanctions against perpetrators.
This is the question taken on recently by two commissions that, while diagnosing the challenge differently, reached a number of similar conclusions about the steps the federal government needs to take. In December, the nonpartisan Cyberspace Solarium Commission (CSC) issued a white paper drafted while we were on staff. (One of us, Robert, was a lead co-author). The CSC diagnoses disinformation as a problem facing free societies everywhere and describes disinformation as a tool used by those with ill intent to manufacture division and inflame tension. In November, the Aspen Institute Commission on Information Disorder released its own report on the topic. It described structural inequality in the United States as the disease and disinformation as a symptom.
But both commissions offered similar recommendations in several realms for how the federal government can begin to tackle this scourge.
Social Media
On the issue of social media, for example, the CSC and Aspen agree that the federal government should push for greater transparency on how social media platforms sort, moderate, and remove content on their platforms. The unique position of platforms in the information ecosystem allots them an outsized opportunity to exert positive influence over the media and information environment. But rather than trying to regulate content on these social media platforms, lawmakers and regulators should endeavor to establish clearer transparency expectations and guidelines for social media companies related to labeling advertisements and paid content, bots, and content created by foreign registered agents. In addition, the two commissions argue that the federal government should work with social media companies so that the American public better understands the various platforms’ policies on content moderation and takedowns.
In addition, both the CSC and the Aspen Commission agree that Congress should take action to ensure that third-party researchers can access data to better understand, identify, and – most importantly – explain foreign disinformation campaigns to the American public. The federal government could support these research efforts through grants to nonprofit centers, such as the Alliance for Securing Democracy’s Hamilton 2.0 dashboard and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.
Finally, both the CSC and the Aspen Commission identify the importance of civic empowerment and education. In keeping with this conviction, the CSC recommends the creation of a bipartisan Civic Education Task Force to enable greater access to civic education resources, and raise public awareness about foreign disinformation. The task force should be tasked with providing civic education resources, including courses and course materials, for the military and civil servants, all while making these materials available to the broader population.
Beyond these shared recommendations, the CSC advocates for some additional approaches to counter foreign disinformation.
Beware of Overreach
In setting out to address the issue, the federal government must recognize its own limitations and ensure it does not overreach. For example, with few exceptions, the ability of the U.S. government to directly intervene in the information ecosystem is rightly constrained by the First Amendment. Meanwhile, since the Tenth Amendment reserves the right of states to make policy in areas not explicitly delegated to the federal government by the Constitution, states and local governments drive education policy and possess greater control over the content taught in schools.
Federal action also is constrained by the appearance of inappropriate government influence over parts of society that are better served by other stakeholders. For example, it would be inappropriate for the government to exercise influence over journalism, which plays a key role in holding authorities accountable. Rather than federal action to bolster journalism, other stakeholders from civil society or private industry are better positioned to lead this aspect of countering disinformation.
With that caveat, the CSC white paper identifies additional steps the U.S. government could take to improve the health of America’s information ecosystem. Where foreign-owned and operated media outlets are concerned, the federal government could do more to improve transparency on ownership without overstepping its bounds and censoring content. Greater transparency would help ensure that Americans are aware of the foreign actors attempting to influence public opinion.
Updating and Expanding FARA
The Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), a law passed in 1938 in response to Nazi propaganda, provides a framework to promote transparency regarding the sources of information available to the American public. However, many of the rules created by the law are antiquated, and FARA must be reformed to ensure that all agents of foreign adversaries, including such media organizations, register. In the last Congress, Representative (and CSC Co-Chair) Mike Gallagher (R-Wisc) proposed the Chinese Communist Party Influence Transparency Act, which would require all Chinese corporations to register under FARA. Congress should look at expanding this effort to include corporations domiciled in other adversaries like Russia and Iran. In addition, Congress should amend the definition of “informational materials,” which registered foreign agents are required to both label as such and report to the Department of Justice, in FARA to make clear that social media and email communications are included. In addition, Congress should provide greater specificity regarding the types of social media and email communications that need to be included in FARA filings to ensure that the Department of Justice adopts a records system that better captures the dynamism and interactiveness of digital media and communications, allowing, for example, for social media posts filed to be maintained along with, for example, comments on or replies to a post, while preserving appropriate privacy protections.
Combating disinformation also requires imposing costs on adversaries responsible for influence operations – what the CSC refers to as a strategy of layered cyber deterrence in the information landscape. For example, the U.S. government should continue to engage in robust “defend forward” operations to dismantle adversary disinformation infrastructure and cause friction in adversary disinformation campaigns, as it did, for example, with the Internet Research Agency around the 2018 midterm election.
Countering adversary disinformation is a challenging policy issue. It gets to the core of individual freedom and liberty and undermines national security and the foundations of America’s democracy. Disinformation weaves adroitly through modern society and networks — only sometimes visible but always threatening. No system of government is perfect. Adversaries of the United States seek to leverage some citizens’ frustration with democratic outcomes and the sometimes slow and messy process by which policies are decided. This does not make autocracy preferable to democracy: The features that make democracies uniquely vulnerable to disinformation perpetrated by adversary nations are precisely the elements worth protecting.
George—was happy to see your name.
As (almost) always, enjoyed what you had to say. I had a lot of agreement.
[...]
Goldberg was not denying the Holocaust or the gravity of the catastrophe that befell Jewish people. The discussion was about a Tennessee school board that had removed from the curriculum Maus, a graphic novel about the Shoah. Goldberg mocked the censors for being more concerned about nudity and bad language than about the reality of genocide.
This is what should really trouble us about Goldberg’s views – that someone who acknowledges the depth of the tragedy and wants to educate people about the Holocaust should so misunderstand it. Goldberg’s comments tell us something about the way we look at racism (and at Jews) in the present. They also tell us something about what we’ve forgotten about racism in the past.
Racism today is viewed primarily through the lens of “whiteness” and of “white privilege”. It is something that white people dish out. And something from which non-whites suffer (unless you’re an Asian-American, in which case you are deemed to be almost white).
Jews today are seen as white and privileged and so incapable of being victims of racism. It’s a perspective that has led some on the left to become blind to antisemitism. It’s also led many, like Goldberg, to deny the relationship between racism and the Holocaust.
So deep does the elision of racism and whiteness run that even the ADL, a leading Jewish organisation, defined racism as “the marginalization and/or oppression of people of color based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges white people”. In the wake of the Goldberg controversy, the ADL changed to an “interim” definition. In a mea culpa blog post, Greenblatt acknowledged that its own understanding of racism had been “so narrow” that it had “alienated many people who did not see their own experience encompassed in this definition, including many in the Jewish community”.
Goldberg’s comments illuminate not just the contemporary view of Jews but also the amnesia that exists about the historical use of racial categories. Race has never been simply about black and white. It’s a concept that has been used to deem certain people biologically incapable or unworthy of being equal. Over the past 200 years, not just black or Jewish people, but Irish, Slavs, even the working class have, at various times, been viewed as racially distinct and inferior. Defining a group as a distinct race became a means of justifying the practice of unequal treatment – that is, of racism. Given the controversy over Jimmy Carr’s routine, it’s worth remembering that the Roma were also seen as an inferior race, fit only for extermination. Defining a group as a distinct race became a means of justifying the practice of unequal treatment – that is, of racism. And of genocide, too.
Ironically, given Goldberg’s views, there was a deep relationship between the Nazis’ treatment of Jews and American treatment of black people. Before the Holocaust, the key Nazi edicts that formalised the racial distinction between Aryans and Jews were the 1935 Nuremberg laws. These established that a “citizen is exclusively a national of German blood”, that Jews were not of “German blood” and that marriages and “extramarital intercourse” were forbidden between “Jews and citizens of German or racially related blood”.
In 1934, the Nazi justice minister, Franz Gürtner, convened a special meeting to work out how to formulate a legal distinction between Aryan and Jew. They found their most useful source in America, whose racial concepts both intrigued and excited them. They were intrigued because a nation built on the idea of equality nevertheless was suffused with laws and practices that denied such equality on racial grounds.
And they were excited because US law had managed to circumvent a problem with which the Nazis were wrestling: how to define racial distinctions in law when in science such distinctions seemed impossible to delineate. Nazi leaders, James Q Whitman notes in his book Hitler’s American Model, “regarded America, not without reason, as the innovative world leader in the creation of racist law”.
“The dominant political ideology in the USA,” Herbert Kier wrote in an article in the 1934 National Socialist Handbook for Law and Legislation, was “liberal and democratic”. “With an ideology of that kind, which starts from the fundamental proposition of the equality of everything with a human countenance,” Kier continued, “it is all the more astonishing how extensive race legislation is in the USA.” He listed 30 US states that “forbid mixed marriages between white and colored races” and seemed astounded that races were segregated “even in prisons”.
Heinrich Krieger, the most important Nazi scholar of American law, observed that Americans had created racial distinctions through “artificial line-drawing”. The problem the Nazis were debating – how to deal with “mongrels” or mixed-race individuals – was not an issue in the US. The “one-drop rule” – the belief that one drop of black blood made you unwhite – allowed Americans to create “two population groups: whites and coloreds” and arbitrarily assign people to one or other. Every US state, another lawyer, Roland Freisler, pointed out, had a different definition of what constituted “coloured”. Why, he wondered, should not German law also simply distinguish between Aryans and coloureds? “Every judge,” he reasoned, “would reckon the Jews among the coloureds, even though they look outwardly white.”
The American south was not Nazi Germany, and however brutal the apartheid laws and racial terror that defined the Jim Crow era, it was not the precursor to mass extermination. Nevertheless, in recognising the distinctiveness of the Jewish Holocaust, we should also acknowledge the similarities in the racial ideas that permeated Nazi Germany and other western nations. Not to do so would be as misguided as failing to recognise the racial roots of the Holocaust.
ABC has temporarily suspended Goldberg. It’s difficult to know why. Her comments were ill-considered, but spoken not out of malice but from a common misunderstanding about race. Too many in authority seem more eager to be seen punishing people for saying the wrong thing than in creating the conditions for a public conversation that can provide greater clarity.
There was a sense, on the afternoon of the Capitol insurrection, that violent white American Trumpism had reached its apex. But by the next morning, as Republican politicians and right-wing media figures began rewriting history in real time—claiming antifa actually did it, pretending the insurrectionists merely went on self-guided tours of the building and “took selfies,” portraying the white mobs as victims—it became clear that the previous day’s act of sedition hadn’t been the final spasm of white supremacist anti-democracy but the harbinger of white supremacist anti-democracy to come. And those who support and excuse it are attempting to give the anti-democratic violence of the insurrection a veneer of respectability by dressing it up in the language of election integrity.
In the year since the Capitol siege, Republican lawmakers have continued their assault on democracy, not by condoning violent public rampages but via the codification of undemocratic laws. GOP legislators have passed 34 bills that suppress voting in 19 states; undertaken extreme gerrymandering to ensure the maintenance of conservative white political power; killed federal voting rights bills—with help from Democrats Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, unwavering supporters of a filibuster consistently used to oppose multiracial democracy; and in multiple states, are now working to make it perfectly legal to overturn free and fair elections. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Georgia gubernatorial candidate David Perdue have each proposed the creation of law enforcement teams to police elections and, no doubt, to intimidate the kinds of voters who tend not to vote Republican. “History will judge them by their actions,” the old saw goes. But it does not hold here, since GOP legislators have also outlawed the accurate teaching of history in a dozen states.
Elsewhere, members of groups that invaded the Capitol are continuing to deform our politics. But instead of risking negative national attention, many of these groups have decentralized, inserting their members into political issues at the local level. Labeled “patriots” and “martyrs” by establishment Republicans, much of their “political” involvement involves physical intimidation.
Members of the ultraviolent Proud Boys—who have collectively been named in three separate federal lawsuits filed by Capitol Police officers; the NAACP and 10 Democratic members of Congress; and the city of Washington, D.C., all accusing the group of inciting violence on January 6—have been especially active. Previously best known for instigating street fights as long as they outnumber their opponents, Proud Boys members have become regular features at school board meetings and other public meetings across the country, where they turn up as “muscle” for their fellow right-wingers or simply intimidate political opponents. According to local news reports, in July, Proud Boys “carrying guns, bats and body armor” served as “security” for anti-reproductive-justice demonstrators in Salem, Ore. At a Chicago-area school board meeting in November, students who opposed the removal of a graphic novel by a nonbinary author were “jeered” and called “pedophiles” by local Proud Boys in attendance. And Proud Boys told a school board in Orange County, N.C., that, as one member recounted, “someone should tie rocks around our necks and we should throw ourselves in a river.” It seems likely that this sudden burst of local “activism” by the Proud Boys will continue for some time, since the national organization instructed members to “stand down” after the Capitol insurrection. At least three dozen members of the group are facing federal charges for their involvement in that event.
The Proud Boys aren’t the only ones. Last October, members of the Colorado-based militia United American Defense Force who came to a school board meeting to oppose a school’s mask mandates were described as “agitated,” “angry,” “combative,” and “intimidating” by a school administrator and other attendees. A few months before that incident, two people wearing UADF gear showed up at a school board meeting to protest the teaching of what conservatives have consistently mislabeled “critical race theory.” Patriot Prayer, a militia group often linked to the Proud Boys, reportedly played a role in the shutdown of a school in Vancouver, Wash., when its members spread a rumor that students without masks were being arrested and staged a disruptive rally near school grounds.
Members of these groups are also making forays into local electoral politics. In Eatonville, a tiny rural town outside Seattle, members of the Three Percent—a national militia group with multiple members facing indictment for their role in the Capitol breach—now occupy two of the seats on the local five-person school board, one of which was won just before the new year. The Washington Post notes that “the Washington Three Percent claims members in dozens of official posts throughout the state, including a mayor, a county commissioner and at least five school board seats.”
What’s more, spurred on by Trump adviser turned podcast host Steve Bannon and micro-influencers on the QAnon message boards, at least 57 people “who played a role” in the events at the Capitol, “either by attending the Save America rally that preceded the riots, gathering at the Capitol steps or breaching the Capitol itself,” are now candidates for elected office, according to Politico. Of those, at least three (though the number might rise) are being charged for their role on January 6. Certainly, it’s hard to imagine that one or two won’t get elected.
This is what the creep of anti-democracy, long a part of the GOP effort but accelerated by Trump and the Capitol takeover, has brought us. This isn’t just bad for our political process. Each incursion is another tear in the fabric of democracy. And if history offers any sign of what’s ahead, we are nowhere near the end of this assault on democratic norms and principles. What began as an effort by white conservatives to disenfranchise Black voters has now spread so that a far broader spectrum of citizens will also have their voting rights eroded, their children’s schools filled with ahistorical curricula, their legislatures openly indifferent to the will of the majority. And perhaps, once that becomes clearer, more people will realize the immense danger we face, and a more intense effort will be taken to stop it. Here’s hoping that, by then, it won’t be too late.
