My ability to be neutral as a political journalist depends on the intellectual honesty of the people—and the society—I cover.

But in an era when one side of the political spectrum is not always operating in good faith, and when people in my position are increasingly losing the trust of the audiences we serve, I don’t think neutrality should be the final goal. Instead, perhaps, we should think about neutrality more as a means to an end: uncovering the truth, without fear or favor, and presenting that truth to the public.

The dictionary defines being neutral as, “not aligned with or supporting any side or position in a controversy.” There are certainly aspects of my job where this is core to the work, such as in reporting, where being neutral means asking open-ended questions and dispassionately following facts, wherever they may lead.

Take criminal justice policy, one of the most challenging beats that I have ever covered. When I began reporting on the topic 15 years ago, California was grappling with prisons so crowded that, eventually, the U.S Supreme Court stepped in and ordered the state to reduce the populations.

This record incarceration was the result of a “tough on crime” movement that correlated safety with long prison sentences. But that correlation wasn’t borne out by the facts: People were receiving decades-long sentences for drug possession or property crimes, taking state funding away from schools and other core state services. California also had a very high recidivism rate, meaning most people who were released from prison would quickly return—but it often wasn’t for a new violent crime, rather for a simple violation of their parole rules.

I felt it was crucial to tell this story from all angles—and not just from the perspective of crime victims or law enforcement, who had dominated the discussion during the “tough on crime” era. I wanted to capture the points of view of the people who were incarcerated, and their families and communities who were impacted by their crimes and the punishment meted out. I tried to center my reporting not just on anecdotes but on data and research—even if that research did not comport with widely accepted assumptions and beliefs.

It was not always popular to do so, even with my editors, who were used to relying on conventional sources and well-worn narratives. Now, a decade or so into the reforms sparked by the prison overcrowding crisis—and as we face new challenges around property crimes and drug use—I am digging back into this issue to assess whether the reforms worked, or if they are to blame for the problems so evident in California.

I don’t yet know what I will find. But I do know that my job is to report it, no matter who likes or dislikes the findings.

Eventually, I’ll come to the point in my work when I have to leave neutrality behind and seek objectivity. Once I have answered the questions that I set out to ask, I have to make a call about what I found.

That doesn’t mean taking a side in the political sense. It means taking the side of the truth.

This can be a challenge in itself. It’s particularly hard when you are interviewing someone on live TV or radio, where you must push back against falsehoods in real time. Recently, we had U.S Senate candidate Eric Early, someone who believes that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump, on my radio show.

This is not an intellectually honest argument to make, even if many Americans agree with it: The facts don’t bear out. So, when I am in the studio with Early in that moment, it’s not my job to stay “neutral” and simply listen. It’s my job to question, to push back—and, yes, call out the lies when they are uttered. It doesn’t have to be confrontational or uncivil, but it is key to doing my job responsibly.

This is where objectivity becomes key—the ability to set aside personal feelings or opinions and look at the facts, then make a judgment based on that information. Neutrality alone—the idea of not aligning yourself with one side—doesn’t cut it when you’re faced with someone who is lying, obfuscating, or being intellectually dishonest, even if they believe what they’re saying. But it’s also a mistake to see objectivity in this kind of situation as taking a side, other than the side of the truth.

Because the role of a journalist is to seek, uncover, and broadcast the truth. Without fear or favor. Without my own beliefs getting in the way. Even if, in this moment, it is harder than ever.

The post For Political Journalists, Neutrality Isn’t the Goal appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

You’re a prisoner, held in a dark cave. Your hands are tied behind you and you can only look straight ahead at the cave wall. Your captors keep you occupied by putting objects on it. To pass the time you and your fellow prisoners play games. Who can be the first to shout out the name of the object? Who can correctly guess which object will appear next?

You feel pride when you’re right—because being right about the objects is the only thing of value you have.

One day a fellow prisoner escapes their chains, and looking around the cave, realizes that what you’ve all thought were real objects on the wall were only shadows cast by a fire that’s burning behind you. The escaped prisoner manages to find a ladder, climbs out of the cave, and rushes into the blinding sunlight. As their eyes adjust to the brightness, they realize that the cave isn’t reality at all; it is only a dungeon for the mind.

They decide to go back into the cave to rescue you and your fellow prisoners by telling you the truth about the world as it actually is. But when they try to explain about the shadows and the sunlight and the colorful world outside, you and your fellow prisoners refuse to believe them. When the former prisoner urges you all to come to terms with your delusions and free yourself, you band together and kill them. Rather than follow your liberator out of the cave, you collectively turn your attention back to the shadows.

This story is, of course, Plato’s “allegory of the cave” from his book The Republic, written in the second half of the 4th century B.C.E. But it’s also us, today. Our 21st-century cave is our modern media system, where truth is a spectacle controlled by propaganda. Some of us are prisoners, some of us are creating shadows, and some of us are escapees. All of us are vulnerable to manipulation.

In Plato’s allegory we’re supposed to conclude that the deluded prisoners are both victims and villains and that the escaped prisoner is a tragic hero, motivated only by pure knowledge of the truth. But it’s equally plausible to draw different conclusions about the cave and its prisoners.

What if the escaped prisoner didn’t have noble goals? What if they only claimed they’d escaped the cave and can now reveal the “real” truth—but are instead just selling a dangerous, fraudulent fiction? What if, for example, conspiracy clowns, manipulators, or demagogues (or conspiracy clown manipulator demagogues) tell us they’re the hero freed from the cave’s shadows? If you’re imprisoned in the cave, is it better to believe the “truth” of the shadows or the “truth” of the escapee?

How could you tell the difference? The uncomfortable truth is that you can’t. That’s why we’re all equally vulnerable. We ought to beware of the shadows on the wall, but also, we ought to beware of anyone who claims that the shadows are shadows.

Most Americans cannot have direct, first-hand experience with political events, either in our state capitals or in our nation’s capital. If we want to know anything at all about the decisions that affect us, we have to trust some source of news or another. Those sources “cultivate” political reality for us. None of us really know if we’re looking at shadows or if we’re blinded by the sun. We only know what we think we know through the media we consume.

There used to be a consensus around this political reality because there was a common news agenda set via mainstream media organizations. Like the prisoners looking at the cave wall, most of us agreed on a basic set of facts, and we mostly trusted the government and accepted its policies. That consensus was achieved via the “manufacture of consent” model of propaganda, where political and business elites used media to shape our opinions so that we’d passively accept elite decisions.

When we think of propaganda, it’s usually that top-down “manufacture of consent” model. Examples of this model could be 20th-century war films, posters, and leaflets created by the government and disseminated to the masses; patriotic symbols and slogans, and monuments to political leaders; or messaging foreign governments use against their citizens (in schools, in the news), and more recently, against the U.S. and its elections.

But over the last two decades, the rise of the right-wing media ecosystem and participatory media has enabled a new form of propaganda in our public sphere. Called the “manufacture of dissent” model of propaganda, it uses communication as a weapon to attack established institutions, norms, and the government itself. Its major premise is that politics is war and the enemy cheats. Those who produce dissent propaganda circulate endless conspiracy theories, accusations of hypocrisy, ad hominem attacks, and ad baculum threats. It’s the politics of creating fear and turning people into hate-objects.

This “manufacture of dissent” model of propaganda has challenged consensus media’s ability to control our political reality. It screams that the old propaganda is “propaganda,” while claiming that its own twisted messaging is the truth. All of this has led to a historic crisis of distrust in our government institutions, with an entire political agenda built around dismantling government power.

But whether propaganda is manufacturing our consent or our dissent, both are a kind of force imprisoning our minds—and both are fundamentally anti-democratic.

Propaganda, after all, is communication as force; it’s designed for warfare. It uses strategies like fear appeals, disinformation, and conspiracy theories to deny our ability to consent. It erases complexity and nuance, and it encourages groupthink and partisan discord. It asks us to think too much like others on our side while preventing us from thinking with others on their side.

The powerful point to the things that divide us rather than the things we agree on and use those differences as a wedge. Or, even when we can agree on the problems, the way that the powerful frame them prevents us from agreeing on the solutions. We don’t have a common reality that can help us mediate those differences.

In The Republic, Socrates, the narrator, solves this problem by advising the escaped prisoner not to return to the cave at all. The cave-dwellers, who only perceive the world through their senses, would not be able to absorb the bright light of truth, and the newly enlightened former prisoner would look foolish, Socrates thought. Worse, the escaped prisoner would harm themselves by trying to commune with the deluded—after all, they no longer agreed about reality, how could they find common ground?

Plato thought that the enlightened ought to rule over the cave dwellers as philosopher kings, but Plato’s solution won’t work for us in the 21st-century (and it didn’t work for Plato back then either).

There isn’t an obvious solution, except for people to agree to communicate for the democratic way of life. That means using persuasion instead of propaganda.

Persuasion is a dialogic meeting of minds in which one person asks another person to think like they do, to value the same values, to remember or forget history in the same way. It doesn’t force. It affirms human dignity by inviting. A person who seeks to persuade gives good reasons and formulates arguments in the best way they know how, always affirming that the recipient of the persuasive message has a mind, values, and experiences of their own and may not change their mind.

Unlike the fast, exciting, and entertaining work of propaganda, persuasion is slow, difficult, and unsexy. It doesn’t make good TV or internet content. But until we’re willing to persuade, and are open to being persuaded, we’ll stay in our 21st-century cave, which provides us with a never-ending propaganda spectacle to imprison our minds.

In today’s era of ubiquitous propaganda, the shadows aren’t real, but the sun blinds. We want to know the truth, but it’s hard to know who to trust to tell us the truth. Most of us throw up our hands and give up—avoiding political news altogether—but some of us dig into one version of the truth or the other, motivated by the status and prestige we get as rewards for being right.

There are those of us in the cave smug in the fact that what we believe—what we’re motivated to believe—is actually true. Simultaneously there are those of us standing outside of the cave looking down at the cave dwellers smug in the fact that what we believe—what we’re motivated to believe—is actually true.

One or both of us are wrong, and it’s tearing our nation apart.

The post What Is 21st-Century Truth? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The following day, the so-called Vaccine Revolt began in Rio de Janeiro, then the country’s capital. The popular uprising left at least 30 dead and shook the structures of Brazil’s then-young republic.

The circumstances that led to this unprecedented revolt—a swirl of anti-science arguments, denialism about the benefits of vaccination, and fake news about the effectiveness of the vaccine—are not too distant from what’s happening in Brazil today. As with smallpox in the early 20th century, COVID-19 is now being used politically by fringe groups seeking to destabilize power. The difference this time is that the national government itself is helping to incite the revolt against vaccines and science.

When the Vaccine Revolt began, just 15 years had passed since the proclamation of the republic in 1889. In 1904, democracy remained fragile and excluded much of the population.

Rio de Janeiro itself was also in the midst of an acute process of industrialization, and its public services had not kept pace with the demands of its growing population. That failure had facilitated the proliferation of diseases, including smallpox.

Facing this scenario, Rodrigues Alves, who had assumed the presidency in 1902, adopted radical policies to develop the city and remedy its main deficits. These policies included a broad urban reform that led to the expropriation of several properties inhabited by the lower classes, the prohibition of social and labor activities that he considered incompatible with life in the capital—and the imposition of vaccination, which was the trigger for the revolt of the population.

Vaccination against smallpox wasn’t new. Since at least 1837, there had been an obligation to vaccinate children against the disease (and from 1846 the rule was also valid for adults). But this mandate was not fulfilled in practice, partly because the State could not produce enough vaccine.

But after young sanitary doctor Oswaldo Cruz took over as General Directorate of Public Health, he quickly ensured that Brazil had the capacity to produce enough vaccines to reach the majority of the population. Cruz then convinced the government to reinstate the obligatory vaccination in a way that would be virtually impossible for anyone to escape: only the vaccinated could enroll in schools, buy houses, get travel permits or even sign employment contracts.

In this, Cruz was drawing on expertise and experience. As a younger man, Cruz had studied at the renowned Pasteur Institute in Paris. On his return to Brazil, he had organized the fight against the plague in the city of Santos, São Paulo, and founded, in 1900, the Federal Serum Therapy Institute (now Oswaldo Cruz Institute), a pioneering center for the study of tropical diseases.

Despite Cruz’s credentials, he struggled to counter the uncertainty, doubt, and fear that surrounded the vaccine. Anti-science arguments were waged around the effectiveness of the vaccine and what it could do to a person. There’s an embryo of the modern fake news to the disinformation that was spread—one rumor had it that anyone taking the vaccine would end up looking like a cow.

But it wasn’t just concern around the shot that led to the uprising. Many saw the edict to get vaccinated as an invasion of their individual rights. The moral conservatism of the times also led people to balk at the idea of women being touched without the supervision of fathers or husbands by those administering the vaccination. In addition, large sections of the population, mostly poor, who were not treated as fully empowered citizens, resented being forced to submit to a vaccine they did not understand. Critics of the republic—monarchists, disgruntled factions in the army, and radical opponents of oligarchs linked to powerful coffee plantations—maneuvered to exploit discontent and incite rebellion.

Once A Notícia published the government’s vaccination plan, thousands of people joined marches in the center of the city. The assembled coalition included everyone from workers to the pro-coup military, who were seeking to take the front and bring the dissatisfied to their side in the following days. By November 13, the conflict had become widespread and violent, with attacks against the police forces. The armed forces were called in to contain the disturbances, and the revolt began to be crushed by force.

A Rio streetcar overturned during the revolt. Courtesy of Public Domain

Ten days later, all the hotspots of resistance had been defeated. In less than two weeks of the Vaccine Revolt at least 30 people died (some sources say 31) and around 100 were wounded. Of the protestors, almost 1,000 were arrested and nearly 500 were deported to the state of Acre, then a federal territory without self-government. (It would be nicknamed the Brazilian Siberia because of the government custom of sending criminals and rebels there.)

Officially, vaccination continued to be mandatory in the aftermath, but the government preferred not to enforce the rule to avoid more public revolt. It would take a new epidemic, a smallpox plague in 1908 that produced social unrest and violence, to convince the population of the benefits of immunization.

More than a century later, another epidemic has reached Brazil, and the winds of revolt are beginning to blow. What is different this time is that the authorities are not thinking about making vaccination compulsory. On the contrary, the far-right government of Jair Bolsonaro is itself inciting a dangerous vaccines denialism while his opponents stage protests demanding a vaccination plan.

Bolsonaro opposes the obligation of vaccination while calling on his supporters to doubt science, not to wear masks and not to maintain any social distance. Since the pandemic’s beginning, the Brazilian president has made disastrous statements, suggesting several times that COVID would only be ‘a little flu.”

If in 1904, the rumor was that the vaccinated would end up looking like cows, today Bolsonaro has declared, without irony, that whoever takes the vaccine against COVID-19 could end up turning into a crocodile.

These lies and misinformation come with their own political objectives—that of pleasing an important portion of the far-right that openly denies scientific advances and clings to conspiracies like QAnon. This approach also lays the ground for a self-coup if Bolsonaro’s government is threatened or fails to win the elections scheduled for 2022. Like in 1904, most of the army today is on the government’s side.

Still, despite the denialism, more than a century of vaccination in Brazil has convinced most people about the need for vaccines and preventions. After initial skepticism, the percentage of Brazilians willing to be vaccinated for COVID-19 has risen, hitting 75 percent in January polling (with only 16 percent saying they would not get the needed shot).

The lack of vaccine doses is the larger problem. Bolsonaro has made it so difficult for Brazilians to access the vaccines that have been produced all around the world that it’s not clear how to vaccinate a population of 213 million.

Brazil’s long history of vaccination shows how societies can evolve, but the current administration is trying to reverse these changes. In an apparent policy involution, 2020 repeats 1904 (and 2021 doesn’t seem to be different), only the actors have switched places.

The anti-science arguments, the denialism about the benefits of vaccination, and the fake news about the effectiveness of the vaccine are all extremely similar to what happened more than 100 years ago, and show the effects of ignorance: unrest due to fear and helplessness, and needless deaths, like those that followed in the 1908 outbreak of smallpox.

The post A Turn-of-the-Century ‘Vaccine Revolt’ in Brazil Carries Seeds of Today appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But first, what exactly is local media these days? California Newsroom managing editor Joanne Griffith, the moderator of today’s Zócalo/Center for Social Innovation event, Can Local Media Restore Trust and Destroy Disinformation?,” opened the discussion with that very question.

A key part of local news is “original reporting,” said American Journalism Project CEO Sarabeth Berman. Her venture philanthropy organization invests in nonprofit, nonpartisan newsrooms; the ultimate goal of those newsrooms, she said, is to get people “the information they need to be able to take informed action, to show up at the ballot box, and engage in their communities.”

Voice Media Ventures founder Paulette Brown-Hinds, who is the publisher of Riverside County, California-based Black Voice News, agreed, adding that she uses “local news” and “community media” interchangeably to describe public information sources that educate their communities—and can be anything from corporate-owned newspapers to community weeklies, and also include local ethnic media.

The internet has not been kind to local news outlets that depended on advertising revenue. In the past two years alone, said Griffith, approximately 300 newspapers closed and 6,000 journalists lost their jobs.

“The spread of disinformation is like the weeds that have grown up in the vacant lot that has been left by the decline of local news,” said Berman. And that decline “has had really dire impacts on our communities, on people, on our democracy.” Voting and civic engagement drop, and polarization increases, when people have less information about their communities, she added.

That is not a coincidence or unintended effect but part of the design of disinformation campaigns. Brown-Hinds and attorney Ann Ravel, the former chair of the Federal Election Commission who now directs a project designed to combat “digital deception,” agreed that bad actors spread falsehoods deliberately and intentionally. Sometimes it’s to disenfranchise political opponents; Brown-Hinds pointed to the successful campaign to deny the mayor of Stockton, California, a second term.

“It’s clear that a lot of the origins of this disinformation actually come from elected officials,” said Ravel. National news media—which feed their 24-hour cycles with “outrage and opinion” are also a major source of false statements, which the internet then multiplies, she said. Often, Ravel pointed out, it’s “the most outrageous information and the most inflammatory information” that’s spread widest and fastest thanks to algorithms and the massive amount of data that companies like Facebook use to target users. Ravel hopes that the federal government might step in to regulate some of this, as they have with campaign financing, to create greater accountability and transparency.

Griffith asked if greater media literacy might also make a difference in helping people sort fact from fiction.

The panelists agreed that we need better media literacy in America—but the facts are no match for an absence of trust. “How do you begin to come to a shared reality? I think that has to start in communities,” said Berman, adding that people tend to trust local news, which is transmitted by journalists who live and write in their communities, more than national news. “You build trust through relationships,” she said.

Brown-Hinds said that the Black press was founded in America approximately 200 years ago not just because the Black community was ignored, but also because it was “demonized and criminalized.” In turn, a central mission of the Black press has been to “combat misinformation” and serve “as vital, trusted messengers.” Recently, she has worked to bring together different outlets across California that serve communities of color to amplify their messaging. Together, this group of approximately 20 news organizations was extremely successful in getting the word out about how to vote safely and securely during the pandemic.

One of the elephants in the room when it comes to combating disinformation, said Griffith, is that many people don’t have the “the time or patience or attention to spare to really look at something and look at it critically.” How, she asked, does local media get around such barriers?

Berman’s American Journalism Project is working with a number of organizations trying new models to reach people, including New York City-based Documented, which serves local news to immigrant populations in part through a WhatsApp channel, and Outlier Media in Detroit, a text-based news platform. These outlets are “meeting people where they are,” she said—where they can “hear from their community and speak back.”

But what can fund and sustain these experiments and their more established, traditional counterparts? Berman and Brown-Hinds agreed that a diverse revenue stream that includes philanthropy, membership, public financing, advertising revenue, and events is necessary for local news organizations to succeed in the current climate.

The funding discussion continued in the audience Q&A session—with questions submitted via live chat—as the panel was asked why there is pushback against government funding for local news.

“People are worried [government funding] is going to have an impact on what is covered,” said Ravel—which she doesn’t think should be a concern. She suggested levying a fee or advertising tax on social media platforms, which have become news aggregators, to go toward local news organizations, and also having governments set aside funds for local and ethnic presses. “Government always has done certain legislation to impact independent companies and the like for the public interest, and that’s what they should be doing now,” she said. “I would advocate for that.”

The panel ended on a decidedly upbeat note, with each speaker offering a way that local media can help combat the problem of disinformation. For Ravel, it’s transparency; for Brown-Hinds, increased philanthropic funding; and for Berman, a new generation of news organizations that have the potential to rebuild our civic infrastructure.

In closing, Griffith exhorted everyone to step up for their local outlets: subscribe, become a monthly member, write a letter to the editor, she said. “Support your local media in any way you can.”

The post Ending the Disinformation Era appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Historical parallels can teach us much about our own fraught social and political present; we’ve seen the dynamics of demagogic politics play out many times, and Trump rose to power in part because of ignorance of these precedents. There are no simple lessons from history, but fixing our broken educational system and remaining grounded in our collective past can help us avoid the mistakes of previous generations and shore up the very edifices of civil society, the rule of law and liberal democracy, that are now at risk.

Those of us who study the history of the 20th century have always been aware of a dual mechanism at work in undermining democracy and in the establishment of authoritarian regimes. The first part is the Big Lie—Hitler’s claim that the Jews caused Germany’s downfall, and Goebbels’s discovery that the bigger the lie and more frequently you repeat it, the more likely it is to be believed. The second is social accommodation—that many, if not most law-abiding and decent citizens, not least civil servants, academics, intellectuals, and white-collar professionals, value their personal careers more than adherence to moral principles, ethical codes, or, when it comes right down to it, the lives of others. But seeing this unfold once more in front of our eyes has been, well, eye-opening.

Two examples from the not-too-distant past illustrate my point, and have direct parallels to and implications for the present. The QAnon conspiracy theory is obsessed with the notion of a cabal of individuals who are both part of a deep state controlling American (or world) politics and an international ring engaged in pedophilia and extracting babies’ blood. One root of this “theory”—and one QAnon believers refer to frequently—stretches back to one of the most destructive forgeries of the 20th century, the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a fabricated book produced in Russia in 1903 and then disseminated throughout Europe and the United States (where Henry Ford was a prominent supporter). According to the text, the Jews were plotting to take over the world. A second, much older root, is the medieval belief in the need of Jews to use the blood of Christian children to produce matzah (unleavened bread) for Passover, which led to an array of blood libel attacks on Jews well into the modern period.

That both so-called theories stood in stark contradiction to reality—the Jews were a powerless and often persecuted minority, and Jewish law strictly forbids the eating of blood—did nothing to weaken their capacity to trigger both terror and violence. The “Protocols” were proven definitively to be a forgery in the early 1920s, yet continued to be used as antisemitic propaganda and incited popular sentiments well into the second half of the 20th century and beyond in Europe and the Middle East. To be sure, in the wake of the Holocaust, the influence of such “theories” greatly diminished, and antisemitism in general appeared no longer respectable.

Yet antisemitism has always thrived on a combination of resentment, ignorance, and superstition, which are also at the root of the current spread of QAnon. Rational and reasonable people would prefer to describe all of these theories as peripheral and ephemeral phenomena. But we should not be complacent about their dangers.

The second phenomenon—social accommodation—is that of individuals with decent, and in some cases even stellar reputations, becoming increasingly besmirched by policies that they might have never pursued under different circumstances. Many members of the Trump administration stayed in their positions long after they had understood that. Some did so, perhaps, because of the mesmerizing effects of power; but others seem to have believed that were they to leave, they would be replaced by those who would make things much worse.

General Jim (Mad Dog) Mattis, for instance, was considered one of the “adults in the room” during his tenure as Trump’s secretary of defense. He resigned in December 2018, but only in June 2020 did he state to the Atlantic that Trump was “the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people,” noting that America was “witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership,” and demanding accountability for “those in office who would make a mockery of our Constitution.” Yet in retrospect there is little doubt that Mattis’s two-year tenure served to legitimize a president whose policies were unravelling America’s alliances with other democracies, associating it with the world’s worst tyrants, and tearing at the seams of its internal social cohesion. In this sense, even as Mattis, and many before him, might have seen himself not as complicit in evil but rather as putting bounds to it, he simultaneously facilitated and legitimized its spread.

This is of course not new; indeed, it is a central conundrum of politics throughout history: the tension between setting limits to power and becoming complicit in its misdeeds. But the 20th century has supplied particularly devastating examples of such ambivalence of goodness, or evil, depending on one’s perspective, most notably under an array of fascist and communist regimes.

One striking example of the consequences of accommodation with evil is the notorious case of Chaim Rumkowski, the head of the Jewish council in the Lodz Ghetto during the Holocaust, to whom the writer Primo Levi dedicated some deeply moving pages in his unforgettable essay “La Zona Grigia” (“The Gray Zone”). Rumkowski wanted to save the Jews in the ghetto by setting them to work for the Germans. But the Germans wanted him to help them round up all those unable to work—the elderly, the sick, and the children—so as to transport them to Auschwitz, where they were gassed. Rumkowski complied, believing that this was the only way to save the rest of the ghetto’s inhabitants, as he explained in his terrifying speech to the community, calling upon parents to “give me your children.” Eventually, everyone, including Rumkowski himself, was gassed. Perhaps he thought he was engaged in a noble mission; perhaps he enjoyed the trappings of relative power as the ephemeral “king of the Jews.” But his memory will always be associated with bringing Jewish children to the Moloch of Nazism.

We should recognize that the spread of disinformation, fabrications, and lies, from which conspiracy theories grow and on which they thrive, depends on ignorance, resentment, and prejudice. Ignorance is the consequence of a failing education system; resentment is the product of a sense of being left behind and of broken promises; prejudice feeds on both, and is the opiate that appears to restore dignity to those who have been deprived of it. When people are given not just hope but also practical ways to improve their own and their children’s circumstances, they become less susceptible to demagogy, hatred, and violence. It is an investment that every society should make for its own sake. Good, affordable schools and jobs bring us all much greater security than nuclear aircraft carriers, and cost much less.

The predilection of generally decent and at times even idealistic men and women to become complicit in the politics of authoritarianism, and to rationalize the enactment of inhumane, illiberal, undemocratic, and at times illegal policies, is also a consequence of circumstances and upbringing—in this case, of the elites. And so we have to ask ourselves: How is it that those who went to the best educational institutions, studied law, politics, and even history, could facilitate, indeed, actively participate in dismantling political systems based on the notion of a shared humanity and the dignity of the individual?

The great French historian, Marc Bloch, who fought in World War I and was tortured and executed by the Nazis as a member of the Résistance in World War II, tried to understand what happened to French society on the eve of the great collapse of 1940 in his essay “Strange Defeat.” Bloch identified the desire of his own generation to pursue their careers after the catastrophe of 1914-1918 at the expense of building back up their nation as one of the factors at the root of France’s inability to stem the Nazi tide. Bloch echoed his fellow intellectual, Julien Benda, who warned about what he called “The Treason of the Intellectuals” in 1927. Benda lambasted European, and especially French intellectuals, for having abandoned rational thinking and internationalism. Instead, they chose to support integral nationalism—one of the main harbingers of fascism—whose anti-Enlightenment ideology and alleged politics of realism (country first) threatened, in his words, “to situate the good outside the real world.”

To my mind, it is time for this country, too, to undertake a thorough analysis of its own near defeat with the rise to power of Trump and all he represents. It is not enough to focus on the followers of conspiracy theories, the rumor-mongers, the bigots, the violent, and the less educated—though they need our help, too. We need to give account to ourselves as educators, writers, academics, journalists, and, yes, politicians, in order to understand how we too facilitated the rise of this dark wave of prejudice, crudeness, callousness, and inhumanity. This is no time to celebrate but rather to invest in a new ethical, engaged, and, yes, political education, open to the world, literate in history, and compassionate vis-à-vis all of society.

A good place to start would be a revolution in the education system and a struggle against its increasingly segregated, unfair, and unequal structure. Elitist schools produce elitists, and elitists have little stake in equal chances for all; hence we must provide new opportunities for those who have been increasingly denied them since the great opening of American education in the early postwar decades. If we are to prevent the rise of a second, and perhaps more effective version of Trump, it is high time to begin reforming the society that brought him to power and, despite his disastrous record, still won him over 70 million votes.

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With the midterm elections fast approaching, and the American public seething with partisan anger, a Zócalo/Japanese American National Museum event on Friday night raised the question, “Can U.S. Democracy Survive Russian Information Warfare?”

Moderator Warren Olney, host of KCRW’s “To the Point,” put that query to a panel of three experts—Julia Davis, a Ukraine-born film producer and founder of the Russian Media Monitor, which analyzes Russian state media in the broader context of the Kremlin’s propaganda; Asha Rangappa, a former FBI agent and now Senior Lecturer at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs; and Caroline Orr, a Virginia Commonwealth University behavioral scientist who uses open-source information and data analytics to examine how Russia has weaponized social media against the United States.

The short answer, given by all three: “Yes,” America can prevail.

But as the panelists told an overflow crowd at the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy in downtown Los Angeles, the United States is engaged in a new form of combat with Russia that won’t end anytime soon—no matter which political party controls Congress or the White House. Russia’s goal isn’t simply to boost a particular politician, or hand a megaphone to an extremist fringe group, but to undermine America’s core democratic values, institutions, and way of life, the panelists concurred.

“The more chaos there is here, the more it benefits Putin’s agenda,” Davis summarized. For example, she continued, even though evidence is mounting that Russia intervened in 2016 to help elect Donald Trump, the Russians wouldn’t be worried if Trump were to be impeached. Instead, Davis said, they’d be trying to exploit the situation to provoke massive civil discord, even armed unrest.

Orr said that Russian intelligence operatives have a variety of strategies and objectives for making Americans lunge at each other’s throats, even over something as relatively innocuous as whether NFL players should stand during the national anthem. In that situation, Orr said, the Russians are tapping into a preexisting societal problem of racism, and simply amplifying it digitally. “Sometimes [the Russian strategy] is to distract us, sometimes to make us fight, sometimes to make us hopeless,” Orr said.

Olney asked: Why hasn’t the United States been able to fight back more effectively against these threats. Rangappa said Americans have sufficient intelligence capacity for this contest, but also “have one big law that stands in the way of the government doing anything, and that is the First Amendment.” Rangappa, an adamant proponent of free speech, acknowledged that America’s constitutional protections are sometimes at odds with the ability to clamp down on foreign propaganda machines. “The FBI and the First Amendment are two great tastes that do not go great together,” she said.

And sophisticated digital technology has abetted perpetrators’ ability not only to carry out cyberattacks but also to hide behind a wall of anonymity. A key difference between our present age and the Cold War era, Rangappa said, is that today’s technology platforms can put out information much faster, with a much wider reach, and in ways that the United States can counter only in limited ways. One way, she said, is to force Russia propaganda outlets masquerading as journalistic enterprises to register as foreign agents, as RT (formerly Russia Today) and Sputnik recently were required to do.

Moving to specifics, Olney asked the panelists who exactly the Russians are targeting. Davis replied that, since around 2009, the Russians have been identifying people who are feeling disenfranchised, who don’t believe their votes or their voices count, and who are cynical about the state of the U.S. Russia wants to discourage such people from voting and to make them believe that democracy itself is a sham, as it is in Russia.

Asked by Olney why people are vulnerable to this type of misleading information, Orr explained that, for one thing, these messages are narrowly targeted to various segments of the population, for maximum impact.

“We’re all susceptible to believing things that sound good, things that play into beliefs that we already have,” Orr said. “They help us make sense out of things that don’t necessarily make sense,” supply satisfying answers to troubling questions, and soothe us by their sheer simplicity.

But how, Olney persisted, is it possible to build a small platform on Facebook or Twitter into a gigantic, continent-spanning echo chamber of like-minded people?

Orr replied that the Russians launch many trial runs to see what kinds of storylines will get shared repeatedly online. One Russian campaign targeting U.S. veterans has been notably successful because it taps into issues that veterans already care about, she said.

Russian trolls and bots also tend to push out controversial material during the wee morning hours in the United States. Few Americans are using social media between, say, 2 and 4 a.m. But when the East Coast starts waking up a couple hours later, it will be greeted by an inflammatory new hashtag generated in Moscow. More Americans will start wading into the conversation, at which point the Russian perpetrators can quietly melt back, undetected, into the angry online mob they’ve aroused. “It looks completely organic, it looks human-driven,” Orr said of these bot-orchestrated online conflicts.

And it’s not easy to persuade people who’ve fallen for such propaganda that they’ve been duped. “Simply telling somebody… that what they think is incorrect is not an effective way of changing people’s minds,” Orr said. “Part of the reason is, we’re susceptible to believing misinformation because we want to. We don’t want to believe that we’ve been fooled.” What’s more, she said, a lot of Russian propaganda isn’t aimed at convincing you of a particular viewpoint; its more insidious purpose is to convince you that no truth exists. The goal is to make people feel mentally overwhelmed and worn out, so they’ll stop trying to figure out which version of, say, the Syrian civil war to believe, and will give in to cynicism and despair, Orr suggested.

As the conversational mood tone grew darker than a chapter of John le Carré, Olney was moved to observe that, “This is a very disturbing situation!” eliciting uneasy laughter from the audience. Indeed, the panelists emphasized, the American public needs to awaken to the size and scope of the threat—fast. The Russians are weaponizing our most fundamental freedoms, and launching them at our own society and institutions.

“This is warfare, even in peacetime,” Rangappa said. “What I think is really difficult for Americans to understand is to get your mind around a threat that is not visible.”

There are ways to fight back. Responding to a question from the audience, the panelists mentioned Twitter accounts and websites such as Hamilton 68 that monitor Russian propaganda. Educational programs are available to teach young people how to distinguish fact-based journalism from conspiratorial fantasies, the panelists said. Congress also must play a role in hitting back at Putin and his oligarchical allies with tough economic sanctions, the women agreed. “We are in serious peril and we shouldn’t be enriching Putin and his cronies in the process,” Davis said.

The panelists said that, while the U.S. government can take measures and Silicon Valley needs to be held more accountable for granting wide bandwidth to hostile foreign powers, in the end it’s up to us as individual citizens to pay attention to our information sources, protect ourselves, and defend democracy.

“We are the targets of Russian propaganda,” Davis said, “but we are also the solution.”

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