It Isn’t Just In MAGA-World

Let’s be honest: believing the people who tell you what you want to hear is a trait shared by all humans–Left, Right and Center. There’s a reason researchers study  confirmation bias–the current terminology for what we used to call “cherry-picking the facts.”

Just one recent example: MAGA folks who are frantic to believe that Joe Biden is just as corrupt as Donald Trump (okay, maybe not quite that corrupt…) have latched onto a report issued by James Comer, a Republican House member determined to find something to support that accusation. Unfortunately, as TNR (among many other media outlets) has reported, there just isn’t anything that we might call “evidence” to support that desired belief.

The House GOP accused Joe Biden and his family on Wednesday of engaging in business with foreign entities—but were unable to provide any actual evidence linking the president to any wrongdoing.

House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer released a 65-page memo detailing a sprawling investigation into Biden and some of his relatives, particularly his son Hunter Biden. Nowhere in the massive document was there a specific allegation of a crime committed by Biden or any of his relatives.

During a press conference explaining the investigation, Comer was asked if he had evidence directly linking Biden to corruption. The Kentucky Republican hemmed and hawed but ultimately admitted he didn’t.

It’s easy enough to see confirmation bias at work when a commenter to this blog “cites” to Comer, a lawmaker who has publicly admitted that he “intuited” misbehavior by the Biden family, despite the fact that even Fox “News” personalities have admitted that there’s no there there. But it isn’t only folks on the Right who engage in confirmation bias–and the strength of that human impulse to cherry-pick is about to get a test on steroids.

Researchers have recently warned about the likely misuse of AI--artificial intelligence–in producing misleading and dishonest political campaigns

Computer engineers and tech-inclined political scientists have warned for years that cheap, powerful artificial intelligence tools would soon allow anyone to create fake images, video and audio that was realistic enough to fool voters and perhaps sway an election.

The synthetic images that emerged were often crude, unconvincing and costly to produce, especially when other kinds of misinformation were so inexpensive and easy to spread on social media. The threat posed by AI and so-called deepfakes always seemed a year or two away.

No more.

Sophisticated generative AI tools can now create cloned human voices and hyper-realistic images, videos and audio in seconds, at minimal cost. When strapped to powerful social media algorithms, this fake and digitally created content can spread far and fast and target highly specific audiences, potentially taking campaign dirty tricks to a new low.

The implications for the 2024 campaigns and elections are as large as they are troubling: Generative AI can not only rapidly produce targeted campaign emails, texts or videos, it also could be used to mislead voters, impersonate candidates and undermine elections on a scale and at a speed not yet seen.

“We’re not prepared for this,” warned A.J. Nash, vice president of intelligence at the cybersecurity firm ZeroFox. “To me, the big leap forward is the audio and video capabilities that have emerged. When you can do that on a large scale, and distribute it on social platforms, well, it’s going to have a major impact.”

Some of the ways in which AI can mislead voters include the production of automated robocall messages that use a (simulated) candidate’s voice and instruct voters to cast their ballots on the wrong date, or phony audio recordings that sound as if a candidate was expressing racist views– AI can easily produce video footage showing someone giving a speech or interview that they never gave. It would be especially simple for AI to fake images designed to look like local news reports making a variety of false claims….The possibilities are endless. And what happens if an international entity — a cybercriminal or a nation state — impersonates someone?

AI-generated political disinformation already has gone viral online ahead of the 2024 election, from a doctored video of Biden appearing to give a speech attacking transgender people to AI-generated images of children supposedly learning satanism in libraries.

If we have trouble now knowing who or what to believe, today’s confusion over what constitutes “fact” and what doesn’t is about to be eclipsed by the coming creation of a world largely invented by digital liars employing tools we’ve never before encountered.

If regulators can’t figure out how to address the dangers inherent in this new technology–and quickly!– artificial intelligence plus confirmation bias may just put the end to whatever remains of America’s rational self-government.

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Who Decides?

I used to tell my students that the Bill of Rights, read as an organic whole, answers a deceptively simple question: who decides? Not “what decision should be made” but who gets to make it? Who chooses the book you read, the God you do–or do not–worship, the person you marry?

The Bill of Rights draws a line between decisions government can properly make and decisions that, in a free society, must be left to the individual. One of the reasons the Dobbs decision was so shocking was that –suddenly–the government was authorized to enter a zone of intimacy from which it had long been banned; as I have often remarked, the question was never “should abortion be legal or illegal”? The question was (and is) who should decide that question in an individual situation?

America’s raging culture war tends to focus on the extent to which our individual rights are protected from government interference. MAGA Republicans insist that government has the right–the duty!–to determine everything from your reading materials to your reproductive decisions. As many former Republicans have noted, the “war on woke” is really a war on the Bill of Rights, and a sharp departure from what used to be GOP orthodoxy.

This deviation from that past Republican orthodoxy isn’t limited to the usurpation of individual life decisions. The party has also jettisoned its former support for free markets, as Dana Milbank recently documented.

Can you remember when Republicans still believed in the free market?
It was sometime before Donald Trump started routine attacks on the “globalists” of Goldman Sachs and the leaders of large U.S. corporations; before Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis used tax policy to attack the Walt Disney Co. because it dared to disagree with his “don’t say gay” legislation; before congressional Republicans harassed social media companies and book publishers over alleged “censorship” of their views; before they threatened Delta Air Lines, United Airlines and Major League Baseball over their support for voting rights; before they vowed to use federal resources to retaliate against the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for backing a few Democrats; before Republican governors enacted laws overriding private employers’ coronavirus vaccination policies; and before GOP-led states moved to disrupt interstate commerce to block abortion access and morning-after pills.

This week brought the latest evidence that the former party of laissez-faire capitalism has reimagined itself in the image of a Soviet State Planning Committee. Republican lawmakers are now telling investors which businesses they can and can’t invest in — and which investment criteria they will be permitted to consider.

Republicans have taken the culture war to business, in efforts to prevent asset managers from considering “environmental, social and governance” criteria, or ESG, when making their investments. Milbank quoted Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes’ assertion that there is a “conspiracy” of ESG-minded investors.

He was particularly worried that “asset managers who collectively own significant percentages of utilities’ stock are improperly influencing the operations of those utilities.”

Imagine that! The shareholders who own a company are trying to influence its operations! Will nobody rid us of this capitalist menace?

Twenty-five Red State attorneys general have sued to block a federal regulation that allows retirement-plan investors to consider ESG standards. The rule doesn’t mandate that investors do so. It merely gives them the option.

As one Democratic critic of this interference with business decisions points out, these rules block asset managers from

considering whether a car company “is aligned with market expectations and preparing for the shift to electric vehicles,” whether a pharmaceutical company “has exposure to massive lawsuits because of its role in the opioid epidemic” or whether “health-care companies understaff their operations and jeopardize the safety of patients.. ..ESG is simply additional information that investment professionals use to assess risk and return prospects.”

In our current “through the looking-glass” world, Democrats are defending the free market against Republican support for a planned economy that mandates what businesses have to invest in. Shades of Soviet central planning!

When I first became politically active, I was drawn to principles espoused by the then-Republican Party, especially its recognition that individual liberty requires limiting the power of the state. There were and are good faith arguments about where the line should be drawn in a variety of situations (and widespread misunderstandings of what “limited” government means. “Limited” is not the equivalent of “small”–a limited government respects limits on its authority, not its size.)

A government that can dictate your prayers, your reading materials, your reproductive decisions and your business’s approach to investment isn’t just unAmerican–it’s heading toward Soviet-style totalitarianism or Taliban-style theocracy.

In a genuinely free society, the decisions citizens and businesses make are far less important than who has the right to make them.

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Guess What’s “Inappropriate”

The rule of law.

Many pundits–including yours truly–throw that term around, assuming readers understand its elements. I think most Americans do recognize one of those elements–the principle that no one is above the law, that the rules apply to everyone, very much including Presidents and lawmakers.

There are other principles that are less-well understood, however, and one of them is specificity. If laws are to be obeyed, they must be explicit. They must describe the behaviors being prohibited (or required) clearly, in terms that allow citizens to fully understand them. When courts strike down laws for being unconstitutional, it is often because those measures have been found to be unconstitutionally vague.

That required specificity is among the many, many things that far too many legislators ignore. Texas comes immediately to mind, but the following example is from Ron DeSantis’ Florida–a state that is beginning to resemble Viktor Orban’s Hungary.

As Daily Kos — among others–recently reported:

There are more than 500 entries for Florida in PEN America’s ever-expanding list of books banned in American schools. These include what should be obviously innocuous titles like the “Zen Shorts” series by Jon Muth, which are some of the best children’s books available to parents and teachers. This effort to remove books about Black and LGBTQ+ people and characters from schools and libraries is a part of a larger effort to sanitize our country’s history. Like almost all efforts that pass for conservative “policies” these days, citizens of all ages are widely opposed to the bans….

DeSantis and his team of book-banners also highlighted the need to criminally punish teachers or librarians who give out books people like DeSantis deem pornographic. Mind you, our federal government (and Florida itself) already has laws outlining what is and is not considered pornographic. And there are also laws that prohibit books, images, and videos that sexualize minors…

Judd Legum over at Popular Information has gotten his hands on some of the Florida books that have been banned and the stated reasons they were banned. You would be hard-pressed to figure out how the previous statements above have any bearing on the decisions being made about libraries in the Sunshine State.

The article links to PEN’s report on the multitude of books that have been removed from Florida classrooms and it’s as jaw-dropping as you might imagine. The extensive nature of the list is an artifact of an unconstitutionally vague statute–a truly excellent example of a law that violates the specificity required by the rule of law. That’s because, In Florida, while there may be a few books deemed “pornographic,” most of the books that have been banned are attacked under the “how vague can you get” term “inappropriate.”

Rather obviously, my definition of “inappropriate” and yours may differ substantially.

The linked article suggests that the DeSantis Administration finds books depicting racism in negative terms to be “inappropriate.” For example, the Florida Department of Education announced that it rejected 35% of social studies textbooks submitted to them. One of those–a book for 6th to 8th graders– was evidently rejected for containing the following section:

“New Calls for Social Justice

During the 2000s, one effect of an increase in the use or mobile devices and social media was the spread of images of police violence, sometimes deadly, against Black Americans. The deaths of Black Americans outraged many Americans and led to a crowing awareness of systemic racism that permeated the broader society.

In 2013, a new social and political movement called Black Lives Matter formed to protest violence against Black Americans. The movement called for an end to systemic racism and white supremacy.”

Lest anti-Semites feel neglected by Florida lawmakers’ focus on protecting racism, the state has also rejected education about the Holocaust, finding it “woke.”

Florida’s state education department rejected two new Holocaust-focused textbooks for classroom use, while forcing at least one other textbook to alter a passage about the Hebrew Bible in order to meet state approval…

“Modern Genocides” was rejected in part for its discussion of “special topics” prohibited by the state. The list of such topics includes terms such as “social justice” and “critical race theory,”a phrase that traditionally concerns a method of legal analysis but that Republicans have used pejoratively to refer to discussion of systemic racism in the United States. The department did not clarify which prohibited “special topics” the book included.

Florida evidently considers accurate history and support for civic equality as (equally-vague) “woke” and thus “inappropriate.”

Maybe we should get rid of speed limits and just prohibit “driving too fast.” We can trust the police to decide who’s speeding–right?

Just like we can trust Florida’s current government to decide what’s “inappropriate.”

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Unhealthy, Unwealthy, Unwise

When I was doing research for a former book–my first sabbatical project, back in 2007– I came across data confirming the relationship between individual and social health.  It turns out that countries with strong social safety nets have substantially fewer social ills–not simply less crime, but also less divorce, fewer unwed teenager mothers, etc.

I thought about that research when I read a fascinating article shared by a reader of this blog.The article from Harpers Magazine was written by the son of a doctor who’d practiced for most of his career in Great Britain’s National Health Service–the NHS–and it compared his observations of that system to the reality he encountered after moving to the United States.

When I moved to New York, many things seemed strange. Among them were the crutches I saw discarded on the street, leaning against the hunter-green fences of construction sites or on the steps of the public library where I had an office. It felt like finding evidence of miracles: the lame had risen up and walked. Later I learned that people were often expected to buy such items, rather than being given or lent them by a health provider. Once finished with them, they naturally enough threw them out. I connected this in my mind to the chronically ill people I saw living on the street, many with mobility issues—people who seemed to need care and weren’t getting it, like the woman nodding out on the corner in a wheelchair, or the man wearing nothing but a hospital gown, looking as if he’d been discharged from a psych ward straight into Tompkins Square Park.

As a freelancer, I bought my own insurance—my second-largest expense after rent. Despite spending hundreds of dollars a month, I still had to hand over something called a copay to be seen by a doctor. When I expressed shock at this fact, my American friends laughed bitterly. Step by step, I was initiated into this strange new health culture, so different from the one I was used to. Why did I need permission from the insurance company if my doctor thought a treatment was necessary? This was a medical decision, wasn’t it? In that first year, I went to see a physiotherapist and realized that he was shamelessly upselling me, trying to persuade me to embark on a complicated and expensive course of treatment that I didn’t need. Oddly, this disturbed me most of all. I was used to a system where there was no incentive to do such a thing, and it felt like a breach of trust. Deep inside, I was still the doctor’s kid, conditioned to see medical professionals as benevolent authorities.

I began to hear horror stories: the uninsured woman who slipped in a gym changing room, knocking herself unconscious, then woke up and tried her best to stop the ambulance from coming, as she couldn’t afford the cost; the young musician who’d tried to set his own broken arm using instructions from the internet. Everything seemed absurdly marked up ($1,830 for a pair of orthotic insoles?), and hovering over us all was the threat of medical bankruptcy. It was mind-bending to think that I was one serious illness away from losing my life savings. I contributed to GoFundMe campaigns and began to experience something new, a low-level background anxiety.

That reference to “low-level anxiety” triggered my recollection of that long-ago research, because it found that individuals’ feelings of personal safety have a marked and important effect on the health of the overall society. People who feel secure in their persons and prospects are less suspicious, more neighborly, and less likely to engage in risky or anti-social behaviors.

Recent unwarranted shootings–the elderly man who shot a teenager who rang his doorbell, the homeowner who responded with a hail of bullets to an unknown car in his driveway–point to the negative aspects of a society in which “low level anxieties” are widespread.

The Harpers article traces the history of America’s health care failure–how we got here. The paragraph that best explains just where “here” is, is the following:

The U.S. health care sector is massive. In 2020, it amounted to 19.7 percent of GDP. In the previous (pre-pandemic) year, that number was 17.6 percent. The United States spends more on health care than any other developed country, and not by a small amount: $12,318 per capita in 2021. In the rest of the developed world the average is under $6,000. What do we get for all this money? Lower life expectancy and higher infant mortality than almost all other developed nations. Despite the huge deployment of resources, the system is, by almost every metric, a dismal failure.

It isn’t just a failure that harms individuals. We Americans pay extra for the social dysfunction.

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Fear Speech

I don’t know whether kids these days still employ that time-honored riposte to verbal insults: sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me!

If that sing-song phrase is no longer heard, it may be because it is abundantly clear that words can hurt. Words can hurt the individuals at whom they are aimed, and they can hurt the culture that tolerates them.

That realization is no reason to abandon the protections of the First Amendment’s Free Speech clause–an abandonment that would give government the right to dictate citizens’ communications–but it does require citizens to be aware of the multitude of ways politicians and special interests use language to motivate behaviors.

Which brings me to a thoughtful column I read a while back in the New York Times.The author began by quoting an unmoderated tweet posted to Twitter, calling for transgender Americans to be “eradicated.” It hadn’t been taken down because it didn’t violate the platform’s rule against hate speech. (The current disaster that is Twitter under Elon Musk isn’t relevant to this particular issue.) Instead, the post was an example of what the essay called “Fear Speech. After quoting other, similar posts, the author wrote:

None of this was censored by the tech platforms because neither Mr. Knowles nor CPAC violated the platforms’ hate speech rules that prohibit direct attacks against people based on who they are. But by allowing such speech to be disseminated on their platforms, the social media companies were doing something that should perhaps concern us even more: They were stoking fear of a marginalized group.

It’s hard to argue against the author’s assertion that fear is currently being weaponized even more than hate by partisans who are looking for votes, and ideologues seeking to spark violence. Commenters to this blog have often made a similar point, noting the political utility of stoking fears–and noting as well that it’s a tactic especially effective with uneducated/uninformed Americans.

Most tech platforms do not shut down false fear-inciting claims such as “Antifa is coming to invade your town” and “Your political enemies are pedophiles coming for your children.” But by allowing lies like these to spread, the platforms are allowing the most perilous types of speech to permeate our society.

Susan Benesch, the executive director of the Dangerous Speech Project, said that genocidal leaders often use fear of a looming threat to prod groups into pre-emptive violence. Those who commit the violence do not need to hate the people they are attacking. They just need to be afraid of the consequences of not attacking.

The author provides examples: the Rwandan genocide in 1994 was preceded by Hutu politicians warning the Hutus that they were about to be exterminated by Tutsis; Nazi propagandists triggered the Holocaust by warning that Jews were planning to annihilate the German people; Serbs engaged in genocide after being warned that fundamentalist Muslims were planning a genocide against them.

Benesch was quoted as saying she was” stunned at how similar this rhetoric is from case to case.”

“It’s as if there’s some horrible school that they all attend.” The key feature of dangerous speech, she argued, is that it persuades “people to perceive other members of a group as a terrible threat. That makes violence seem acceptable, necessary or even virtuous.”

A recent study found that “fear speech” promoted more engagement with a social media platform than hate speech–and that it was much more difficult for algorithms to identify.

There is no easy answer. Calling on social media platforms to police Fear speech runs into some thorny problems. As with so many of the difficult issues we face, our best defense is a thoughtful and civically-knowledgable polity.

In the end, algorithms aren’t going to save us. They can demote fear speech but not erase it. We, the users of the platforms, also have a role to play in challenging fearmongering through‌ counterspeech, in which leaders and bystanders negatively respond to fear-based incitement. The goal of counterspeech is not necessarily to change the views of true believers but rather to provide a counter‌narrative for people watching on the sidelines.

The essay’s bottom line echoes what I used to call my “refrigerator theory of free speech.” If you leave a leftover morsel on a back shelf in your refrigerator, it will eventually start to smell. If you place that same leftover under strong sunlight, it will lose its power to pollute.

A dedicated minority of educated and engaged citizens can–and must– provide that sunlight.

What was that famous Margaret Mead quote? “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

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